Coyote Tracks

ePub standards body proposes new 'lightweight' DRM for ebook platform interoperability →

This is an interesting attempt at fashioning a compromise that gives publishers their DRM teddy bear to hug while trying to address most of the ways DRM could get in the way of non-swashbuckling users. (Although a DRM model that doesn’t suck might be something that anti-DRM activists hate more than DRM that does suck.)

My solution to this for my short story collection ebook, though, was—as the Verge’s Bryan Bishop suggests would be the best response for publishers worried about Amazon’s market dominance in ebooks—to go DRM-free.

Worries mount as Nokia burns through cash →

Josie Cox and Tarmo Virki:

Over the past five quarters, the onetime darling of mobile telecoms has eroded its cash pile by 2.1 billion euros ($2.7 billion)—a rate that would wipe out its entire 4.9 billion euros reserves in a couple years.

“Nokia’s Lumia was an attempt to catch up, but it was simply too little too late,” said Nancy Utterback, credit strategist at Aviva Investors. “I would not rule out the possibility of Nokia being downgraded further. The company is in a negative spiral that will be hard to reverse.”

While I wasn’t right back at the end of 2010 when I asserted that they’d never go with Windows Phone over MeeGo despite all the very real problems MeeGo was having—which were even deeper than I understood—I’m beginning to scratch my head and wonder if maybe I should have been right. The not-quite-MeeGo N9 proved in some ways to be a more interesting phone than the Lumia series, and it also proved to be the only interesting thing Nokia did last year.

It’s quite likely that Elop’s instincts were right and that Nokia did need to move to something like Windows Phone—but I think his instincts may have been wrong in not adapting Android instead. Android 3.x/4.x with a Nokia-built Qt layer would have had all the benefits of Android and made it much easier to port existing Qt-based Symbian and MeeGo apps, keeping Nokia’s developer community from feeling knifed in the back and making it quite reasonable for Nokia to keep releasing “high end” Symbian phones like the N8 as a stopgap through 2011 until they had their shit together. The way things have actually played out, though, the mostly-lost-year of 2011 may well have done the company in.

Science: Coffee Drinkers Live Longer →

I can only hope.

Also, what does science say about rum? Something awesome, I bet.

(Source: newsweek)

The Graph

The NYT’s David Carr writes that audiences are now rarely drawn to live television:

So far in the month of May, our household has watched exactly two minutes and one second of live television. NBC’s broadcast of “the most exciting two minutes in sports,” as the Kentucky Derby is described, was epic, unfurling on the big flat panel we finally bought. But I doubt our spasm of live viewing is enough to keep the television business in business.

Carr is making the assumption that his habits are reflective of a growing trend, citing a study that shows online viewing is up more than 46 percent in the last year. Remember that “up more than 46 percent” could mean a move from, say, 1% to 1.5% of the presumed viewing audience, but Carr’s fundamental point seems to be true: DVRs are everywhere, online viewing is rising, and significantly, the people who have recently entered that coveted 18-to-35 demographic—and who will enter it in the next few years—have effectively grown up in the age of video on demand.

The Oatmeal’s comic about pirating “Game of Thrones” and MG Siegler’s similar article set off a lot of “piracy is whiny entitlement” responses, sometimes thoughtful and sometimes…well, at least amusingly ranty. Here’s the thing, though: whiny entitlement is a valid market signal. It’s full of noise, but people who would have given you money for something if you’d been ready and willing to take it really do matter.

Carr’s article suggests that the writing is on the wall. But it’s not writing on that wall. It’s a graph. One roughly like this:

There’s a falling line indicating the amount of money studios and networks estimate they’ll make by continuing to stick with the distribution channels they have now; there’s a rising line indicating the amount of money they estimate they could make by embracing the Internet wholeheartedly.

Us cord cutters and Internet boosters like to think that studios just don’t Get It. But they do get it. What they get is that until the point those lines cross—whether that’s next year or ten years from now—making that shift costs them more revenue than it gains. Until twenty or thirty times more people stop paying for cable and satellite than do now, it remains in HBO’s best interest to give The Finger to The Oatmeal.

Does Yahoo even know how to be a modern media company? →

Mathew Ingram:

[New Yahoo CEO of the month Ross] Levinsohn seems to think that having a huge number of eyeballs aggregated around Yahoo’s various properties is a sign of success, but that’s arguably not what media companies of any kind ought to be concentrating on right now. Increasingly, advertisers don’t want hundreds of millions of eyeballs to show banner ads to any more — they want targeted reach and they want mobile and they want social, and there aren’t a lot of signs that Yahoo has what they need.

Ingram makes an interesting observation: AOL and Yahoo still both see media as a game “where the player with the most eyeballs wins,” which completely ignores what makes Facebook and Google as good as they are at what they do (and as scary as they are): advertising based on user profiling. Facebook may have a billion users, but what they’re selling to advertisers isn’t their aggregated user base—it’s the ability to target exactly what those users (presumably) want.

LiveJournal: Russia's unlikely internet giant →

The BBC’s Robert Greenall:

Set up by US developer Brad Fitzpatrick in 1998, as a way to communicate online with his friends, LiveJournal—complete with its mascot “Frank the goat”—may seem at first sight a strange medium for Russia’s new-found political vibrancy. But Russians have made LiveJournal their own, turning what is in the West a relatively obscure and nowadays rather dated platform into a huge, seething mass of political anger, colourful prose and clever repartee.

A great deal of Russian news media seems to show a Soviet propaganda-machine heritage, whether in outright state ownership, as with RIA Novosti, or “merely” deep political and financial ties with the Kremlin, as with RT. However, their Internet came of age in the 1990s, in an unusually liberal political period—and because of that, it evolved in an unusually unrestricted and uncensored way. As the reporter notes in a sidebar, even for oligarchs who’d like to crack down, that door may prove very tough to close.

Is 9to5Mac ever right? →

9to5Mac claims that the “revamped” 15-inch MacBook Pro is coming any moment now, and according to their “trusted sources”:

• It won’t follow the Air’s tapered design, it’ll just be thinner
• It’ll have two Thunderbolt ports, not one
• But it’ll have no FireWire ports
• And it’ll be the first Mac with USB 3
• And it’ll have a retina display

I can’t say definitively that this is all wrong, and hey, I was pretty sure that Nokia wouldn’t ever go to Windows Phone. But there are a few weird claims in here. USB 3? Yes, Intel’s Ivy Bridge adds that for “free” and it’s more than fast enough to take the place of FireWire 800, but Apple could have added that to any other Mac for a fairly trivial cost before and never did—why start now? Professionals in the Mac ecosystem haven’t been buying USB 3 peripherals, they’ve been buying FireWire ones and saving up for Thunderbolt ones. And seriously, why two Thunderbolt ports? Since you can daisy chain Thunderbolt peripherals with no appreciable performance penalty, it’s hard to see the advantage.

The retina display claim is plausible given the speculation that they’ve been heading that way. I wonder whether they could really get a 15.4″ display at 2880×1800 resolution out without raising the hardware price—that’s higher-resolution than the 27″ Thunderbolt Display—but given that they pulled it off with the iPad, they may well be able to here, too.

But, I’d definitely want to bookmark this claim to see how close it comes to whatever Apple really does announce. My impression of 9to5Mac is has been that their track record is pretty abysmal. (Update: the article’s author, Mark Gurman, popped up in comments to list many cases where 9to5Mac got things pretty much right. Or at least cases where he did. All right, well played, sir. I considered changing my headline, but have decided it’s better to leave it, and simply add the note: “Well, I must admit that yes, they are, actually.”)

Updated Markdown services

A while ago I put together a few OS X services to do various Markdown-ish conversions: Markdown to HTML, HTML to Markdown, and “Copy Markdown as RTF,” which would take selected Markdown text and put it on the clipboard as the equivalent rich text.

I’ve updated these to add the one piece that’s clearly missing: “Paste RTF as Markdown,” which does what you’d expect from the name—take rich text on the clipboard and paste it into another document as the equivalent Markdown. In addition, I’ve changed the services to be self-contained, including John Gruber’s Markdown and SmartyPants scripts as part of the package.

Lastly, I’ve added two wrappers for MultiMarkdown to HTML and Copy MultiMarkdown as RTF, which require Fletcher Penney’s MultiMarkdown to be installed in /usr/local/bin.

Note that both of the RTF conversions are in the “stupid pet tricks” category, since neither Gruber nor Penney’s scripts can actually create true RTF—instead, documents are converted to HTML and the HTML is converted to RTF with Apple’s textutil utility. MultiMarkdown documents you’re trying to turn into RTF will likely require some massaging. (That’s engineer-speak for “this will mutilate your work.”)

http://www.ranea.org/markdown_services.html

The mobile payments mess →

Dieter Bohn:

There are a half-dozen legitimate and competing solutions for payment, just as many for digital wallet apps, even more for accepting payments, and innumerable startups, gigantic corporations, banks, carriers, regulators, point-of-sale hardware producers, joint ventures, and merchants all vying for a slice of what could be a very big pie. Somewhere in there is the consumer, who by-and-large is standing on the sidelines watching these entities play their Game of Payment Thrones and waiting to see what solution will actually become ubiquitous enough to actually rely on.

This is a good article on the subject, but I wonder if it’s asking the right question. I suspect most consumers aren’t even aware of this “game” going on right now, and it’d be hard to convince them of the superiority of a “digital wallet” on their smartphone over a physical wallet which, for the foreseeable future, they’re still going to be carrying anyway.

"We’re interested in how we can tap into all these new web services that we don’t have to own."

— Bing’s Stefan Weitz

(Source: theverge.com)