April 2011
12 posts
Push Pop Press & "rich media" books →
Wired publishes a short piece on Mike Matas’ new startup: the former Apple engineer and Delicious Monster co-founder and Kimon Tsinteris, another former Apple engineer, are creating a rival to Adobe’s digital publishing platform.
There are a few quibbles I have with the article—headlining the company’s connection to Al Gore (the two were originally contracted to make an...
The rise of "secondary markets"
Sarbanes-Oxley made IPOs difficult, but Wall Street has risen to the occasion by creating “secondary markets”: just like a normal stock market, but trading pre-IPO shares held by private investors and early employees. BusinessWeek reports:
The dynamics of wealth creation in Silicon Valley have fundamentally changed. Transforming private-company stock into cash and generating...
Location tracking followup
Daring Fireball:
…my little-birdie-informed understanding is that consolidated.db acts as a cache for location data, and that historical data should be getting culled but isn’t, either due to a bug or, more likely, an oversight. I.e. someone wrote the code to cache location data but never wrote code to cull non-recent entries from the cache, so that a database that’s meant to...
Don't panic, but look a little nervous
So the big Apple news going around right now is about the “recent” discovery of consolidated.db, a database stored on the phone that seems to track the phone’s location over time. From Christopher Vance:
Every time iAds or an app that uses Location Services pings the GPS service, a new record is created in either the CellLocation or WiFiLocation table respective of what type...
A drink for the Angry Mac Bastards →
…although only those who’ve listened to the podcast for a while will understand why. (As far as I know the drink’s creator isn’t an AMB listener.)
The Honey Badger (shot)
by Camper English
1 part Laphraoig single malt Scotch whisky
1 part Wild Turkey American Honey
Add scotch, then honey liqueur to a shot glass. Say “Honey badger don’t care,” then...
The "Can You Hear Me Now" Guy →
An interesting short piece on one actor’s odd combination of national fame and near-complete anonymity.
McCain and Kerry propose online privacy... →
While I don’t like to engage in political navel-gazing here—Daring Fireball has the “Apple-centric tech blog with left-leaning political links” market cornered—it’s nice to see the occasional reminder that positive things can happen when politicians stop bloviating about how The Other Side wants to Destroy Everything America Stands For. Privacy advocates have...
With Cisco "realigning," what about Umi?
The web has a bunch of stories about Cisco killing Flip, but something that’s mentioned in passing in most of the stories, here from Cisco’s press release:
As part of the company’s comprehensive plan to align its operations, Cisco will […] integrate Cisco umi into the company’s Business TelePresence product line and operate through an enterprise and service...
Creative Suite 5.5 →
From Jim Dalrymple at The Loop:
Calling Creative Suite 5.5 a “mid-cycle product release,” Adobe said it focused on three main areas: Proliferation of Devices; Design and Interactivity; and Monetization.
In announcing this mid-cycle release, Adobe said it was changing the schedule for its major announcements. The company will go from an 18 month development cycle to a 24 month schedule,...
LiveJournal and Russia
In 2005, LiveJournal was bought by Six Apart, the Movable Type guys, as near as I can tell so they could pilfer through its ideas and try to launch a better version called Vox. LJ itself was then sold to SUP in 2008, a Russian media company—it turns out LJ was big in Russia and getting bigger. I wrote an article back then on my own LiveJournal in which I estimated that 30% of the extant...
Andy Rubin weirdly invokes Gene Amdahl →
Amdahl is the gentleman who coined the acronym “FUD,” after he left IBM to start a rival mainframe company and accused IBM salesmen of spreading fear, uncertainty and doubt about his products to keep people from buying them.
The idea of “FUD” has always been tied up with fights against competitors: anti-Apple FUD, anti-Linux FUD, whatever. There’s somebody...
WSJ: Google to Revamp YouTube With 'Channels' →
The interesting bit about this article isn’t in the headline, it’s in this bit:
YouTube is looking to introduce 20 or so “premium channels” that would feature five to 10 hours of professionally-produced original programming a week. It is planning to spend as much as $100M to commission the creation of original content for the premium channels, the people familiar with...
