- Inside Apple (Amazon) — If Apple is Silicon Valley’s answer to Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory, then author Adam Lashinsky provides readers with a golden ticket to step inside. In this primer on leadership and innovation, the author will introduce readers to concepts like the “DRI” (Apple’s practice of assigning a Directly Responsible Individual to every task) and the Top 100 (an annual ritual in which 100 up-and-coming executives are tapped a la Skull & Bones for a secret retreat with company founder Steve Jobs). Hopefully it can provide a better template for successful executive behaviour than “be an arsehole who has opinions about design” which seems to be all that many have taken from the life and works of Steve Jobs. (via BoingBoing)
- Microsoft Buys Netscape Patents from AOL (Slashgear) — when your employer says “we need you to file for a patent on this, just so we can build up our defensive arsenal”, bear this in mind: you can never know that the defensive portfolio won’t be bought by an aggressive competitor in the future. I’m not sure that we can all sleep sound knowing that Microsoft owns autofill and SSL.
- Open Data and The Gulf Oil Spill (Ars Technica) — competing interests meant uncoordinated data collection, reporting distorted research by omitting caveats on preliminary work and findings, and talking openly about what you’re doing can jeopardise your chance of publication in many journals. I found data collection stories particularly horrifying. (via Pete Warden)
- Smart Meter Hacks — Liston and Weber have developed a prototype of a tool and software program that lets anyone access the memory of a vulnerable smart meter device and intercept the credentials used to administer it. Weber said the toolkit relies in part on a device called an optical probe, which can be made for about $150 in parts, or purchased off the Internet for roughly $300. “This is a well-known and common issue, one that we’ve warning people about for three years now, where some of these smart meter devices implement unencrypted memory,” Weber said. “If you know where and how to look for it, you can gather the security code from the device, because it passes them unencrypted from one component of the device to another.” Also notable for the fantastic line: “What you’re hearing is the sound of [a] paradigm shifting without a clutch,” Former said.
"apple" entries
Publishing News: Dropping DRM may be too little, too late
Removing DRM may not save publishing, first sale doctrine goes to the Supreme Court, and Apple wants its day in court.
It may be too late for the removal of DRM to make a difference for publishers, a textbook case heads to the Supreme Court, and Apple heads to court to seek validation.
Commerce Weekly: Facebook’s shopping spree continues
Facebook buys Tagtile, Calacanis predicts Apple disruption, and three surveys look at the state of mobile money.
Facebook buys into e-commerce, Jason Calacanis opines on Apple's entry into mobile payments, and survey results look good for mobile commerce. (Commerce Weekly is produced as part of a partnership between O'Reilly and PayPal.)
Commerce Weekly: Facebook's shopping spree continues
Facebook buys Tagtile, Calacanis predicts Apple disruption, and three surveys look at the state of mobile money.
Facebook buys into e-commerce, Jason Calacanis opines on Apple's entry into mobile payments, and survey results look good for mobile commerce. (Commerce Weekly is produced as part of a partnership between O'Reilly and PayPal.)
The anchor on ebook prices is gone. Now we'll see where they float
Don Linn on the DOJ's lawsuit and the shifting ebook landscape.
Don Linn, president at Firebrand Associates, shares insights into the DOJ lawsuit and offers his take on what lies ahead for publishers and readers.
Publishing News: DoJ lawsuit is great news for Amazon
The DoJ sues Apple and five major publishers, Yahoo files patents to put ads in ebooks, and B&N one-ups Amazon.
Amazon does a happy dance as five of the Big Six publishers and Apple are sued by the DoJ. Elsewhere, Yahoo looks to increase revenues with ebook ads, and B&N lights up its Nook.
Commerce Weekly: Bump taps mobile payments
Bump gets powered by PayPal and the payments world waits for Apple.
Bump enlists PayPal's help in tapping mobile payments. Also, a columnist wonders when Apple will save the mobile payment space. (Commerce Weekly is produced as part of a partnership between O'Reilly and PayPal.)
Four short links: 11 April 2012
Inside Apple, Microsoft Acquires Netscape Patents, Open Science, and Smart Meters
Commerce Weekly: Google Wallet vs Isis is coming soon
Preparing for the mobile wallet wars and in-app purchases continue to rise.
Mobile wallets are in their infancy, yet pundits are already handicapping future showdowns. Also, in-app purchases show increasing promise as mobile revenue streams. (Commerce Weekly is produced as part of a partnership between O'Reilly and PayPal.)
Four short links: 19 March 2012
The Quantified Professor, Bus Monitor, Arduino Confessor, and Ethics of Deceit
- Examining His Own Body (Science Now) — Stanford prof. has sequenced his DNA and is now getting massively Quantified Self on his metabolism, infections, etc. This caught my eye: George Church, who has pioneered DNA sequencing technology and runs the Personal Genome Project* at Harvard Medical School in Boston that enrolls people willing to share genomic and medical information similar to what’s presented in the Cell report, says some might critique Snyder’s self-exam as merely anecdotal. “But one response is that it is the perfect counterpoint to correlative studies which lump together thousands of cases versus controls with relatively much less attention to individual idiosyncrasies,” Church says. “I think that N=1 causal analyses will be increasingly important.”
- Bus Arrival Monitor (John Graham-Cumming) — hacked a toy doubledecker bus with LED display feeding bus arrival info from the Transport for London API via a modded Linksys WRT router.
- Arduino Tool That Connects Each Board to Its Own Source (Ideo) — If you create something with Arduino and put it out into the world, there is no well-established link to the source. If you personally made the device, the source can get lost over time. If you didn’t create it, you could have a tough time tracking the source down. You have the physical device, why can’t it tell you where it’s code lives? I made a tool for Arduino called “Upload-And-Retrieve-Source” that for the most part solves this problem. (via Chris Spurgeon)
- Mike Daisey is a Liar and So Am I — I linked to the original This American Life story, so now I’m linking to the best commentary on their retraction of the story. This is an excellent piece on the ubiquity and ethics of Daiseyesque means-justifies-the-end for-a-good-cause deceit.
Commerce Weekly: PayPal's Here service takes on Square
PayPal launches a card reader, AmEx teams with Twitter, and the smartphone tipping point is mere months away.
PayPal introduces its own credit card reader, AmEx asks you to tweet it out, and Asymco visualizes the smartphone market. (Commerce Weekly is produced as part of a partnership between O'Reilly and PayPal.)