Coyote Tracks

Worries mount as Nokia burns through cash

Fri, 18 May 2012 11:02:11 -0700

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

Wed, 16 May 2012 14:09:31 -0700

Science: Coffee Drinkers Live Longer:

I can only hope.

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

The Graph

Tue, 15 May 2012 10:44:45 -0700

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?

Tue, 15 May 2012 09:01:16 -0700

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

Mon, 14 May 2012 14:03:27 -0700

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?

Mon, 14 May 2012 10:58:00 -0700

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

Mon, 14 May 2012 10:29:11 -0700

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

Thu, 10 May 2012 13:22:46 -0700

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..."

Thu, 10 May 2012 13:00:16 -0700

“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

The Arrington Nexus

Wed, 09 May 2012 11:08:43 -0700

Is it just me or does it seem that nearly all of the stories that PandoDaily breaks are stories about the Arrington Nexus?

Sure, they make a lot of other posts. But usually, those aren’t stories. My complaint with TechCrunch a while ago—that a large proportion of their posts read like recycled press releases—is even more true about Pando. A sampling of current headlines: “CloudOn Releases an Android App Bringing Full MS Office Capability to the ‘Other’ Tablets”; “Adaptly’s $10.5M Round Will Buy the Social Marketing Platform a Sales Force”; “Updates to Grocery iQ App Keep Coupons.com Atop the Mobile Couponing Mountain.” (That last one’s second paragraph begins, “If nearly any other company released another coupon-based mobile shopping app it would be less than newsworthy.” Doesn’t that sentence read better when you strike nearly and other from it?)

When Pando does get a headline onto TechMeme it’s nearly always a headline like this one: “Sources Say AOL Seeking Buyers for Engadget and TechCrunch, Arrington ‘Not In The Least Bit Interested’”. EIC Sarah Lacy apparently went straight to Mike to ask if he was interested in buying it back himself (and makes a point of telling us that Arrington required her to quote him in full, so she’d include the “I was Team Pando all the way until Sarah Lacy fired me”), and she’s updated her article at least once with Kara Swisher’s denial of any interest in TechCrunch.

Who does she not appear to have talked to? AOL.

Lacy—and for that matter, Arrington, for all his apparent faults—can definitely do good work, and I’m not part of the “Arrington represents everything wrong with the new media” bandwagon. But asking AOL for a comment about the story “AOL seeking buyers for Engadget and TechCrunch” is not some kind of creaky “old journalism” tenet that the new media shouldn’t make time for, it’s basic fucking common sense. If they don’t meet your deadline, you write the sentence, “We reached out to AOL for comment, and will update this story if they respond.”

Arrington is a headline in this story because Sarah Lacy wants him to be a headline in this story. You can plug any name into it and still works: MG Siegler is, as far as we know, also not in the least bit interested. Neither is Mark Cuban, Tim Cook, Carol Bartz, MC Hammer, Marc Andreessen, Peter Dinklage, or Herman Cain. Yes, Arrington theoretically has more interest in that he’s shown interest in it in the past—but the bottom line is that he’s being brought up because he’s representative of what Lacy seems to think is her real beat: TechCrunch-related drama. The Arrington Nexus. While there’s a lovely story on PandoDaily’s site about the name coming from the Pando Trees, there are times it’s awfully hard not to notice the similarity to pander.

(Although if Tim Armstrong is reading this, he should drop me a line. We can chat.)

Yahoo's board continues making excellent decisions

Fri, 04 May 2012 09:03:28 -0700

Yahoo's board continues making excellent decisions:

Nicholas Carlson, Business Insider:

Yahoo’s new CEO, Scott Thompson, is under fire for telling the SEC and Yahoo’s board that he had a computer science degree from Stonehill College when does not have one. Yahoo’s response was that Thompson’s misleading bio was “an inadvertent mistake.” That is an outrageous and insufficient response. Before he was Yahoo CEO, Thompson was CTO of PayPal. During that time, Thompson used the same bio Yahoo used for him with the SEC.

Who among us hasn’t inadvertently claimed a degree in something they didn’t have? C’mon, it’s a common mistake, right? Right?

Yahoo’s board released a statement saying they’ll make “appropriate disclosure” about this after review. Next week, expect Thompson to be let go and Yahoo’s board to conduct a frenzied, intensive search for a replacement, at the conclusion of which they will hire co-CEOs Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis.

Some weeks you can't win

Thu, 03 May 2012 13:39:12 -0700

Some weeks you can't win:

PHP.net, reporting on a newly-discovered security problem in everyone’s favorite web language:

There is a vulnerability in certain CGI-based setups that has gone unnoticed for at least 8 years. […] A request containing “?-s” [in the URL query string] may dump the PHP source code for the page.

This only happens if the query doesn’t have a “=” in the query string and only happens on PHP installations that are run using the CGI interface, which is (probably) very few at this point. It’s not made clear, though, whether this affects PHP installations using the newer FCGI interface that’s used by many non-Apache web servers.

Making a bad week worse, we had a bug in our bug system that toggled the private flag of a bug report to public on a comment to the bug report causing this issue to go public before we had time to test solutions to the level we would like.

Well, you shouldn’t have written your bug tracking system in… oh, never mind.

"If you work at a company where everyone uses a competitor’s product instead of its own, be..."

Thu, 03 May 2012 13:25:43 -0700

“If you work at a company where everyone uses a competitor’s product instead of its own, be very worried.”

- Diego Basch

Mobile payments creeping closer in the US

Thu, 03 May 2012 09:32:55 -0700

Mobile payments creeping closer in the US:

AllThingsD on Boku, the company that’s trying to bring the ability to pay for physical goods through carrier billing—already extant in some other countries—here, effectively making phone companies into transaction processors like Visa, MasterCard and Paypal.

I don’t expect this to “take over” here any time soon, but what’s fascinating is the notion that, as Dan Rowinski wrote, “currency has always been a form of data,” and I would add, always a form of implicit trust. In another generation it’ll be quite possible for people to live their entire lives without ever handling physical money: the leap doesn’t, in this age of online banking and debit cards, seem very big.

The Verge: Dropbox confirms Apple is rejecting apps that use its SDK

Wed, 02 May 2012 11:33:44 -0700

The Verge: Dropbox confirms Apple is rejecting apps that use its SDK:

Bryan Bishop:

The issue is the way Dropbox’s new SDK handles the authorization of third-party apps: it sends users to a page in Safari where they can grant access. However, that same page also allows new users to create accounts, after which they could drill down through Dropbox’s site and upgrade to a paid account.

…and thus, Apple is rejecting them because you’re not allowed to have a link in an iOS app that allows for external purchases to be made unless it’s also available as an in-app purchase.

Federico Viticci writes, “Before we dabble in speculation about Apple wanting to ‘kill Dropbox,’ I suggest we wait.” True enough, and to a degree I understand Apple’s general position here—it’s kind of like letting companies put up ads on WalMart shelves for the sales they’re running at Target. But the rejection of Dropbox-enabled apps shows the flip side of this: prohibiting this kind of linking makes the user experience of certain iOS apps objectively worse. Apple is effectively saying they consider this an acceptable tradeoff.

The Senate counterparts to CISPA

Wed, 02 May 2012 10:27:37 -0700

Here’s an excellent article from the Christian Science Monitor’s Mark Clayton. There are two competing bills:

Lieberman-Collins is the slightly older bill, has support from the White House, and requires “critical infrastructure” companies to meet federal electronic security standards. Some critics think that this is such a high standard that it won’t cover a lot of important networks, and it doesn’t provide any oversight of ISPs or other technology industry companies—only companies whose operations are so important that disrupting them would cause “major damage to the economy, national security, or daily life” or “mass death.” (I would think that would fall under the “major damage to daily life” clause, but whatever.)
John McCain’s competing legislation is backed only by Republican senators and business groups, and according to McCain has “no government monitoring, no government takeover of the Internet, and no government intrusions.” What it does have is—like CISPA—provisions to provide private entities immunity from lawsuits arising from privacy concerns.

Clayton writes:

Both the Lieberman-Collins bill and the McCain legislation have received poor reviews from privacy advocates. Lieberman-Collins has some privacy safeguards: It would require companies to anonymize the information they send to the government and use information received back from government only for cybersecurity. “Lieberman-Collins needs some substantial improvements, but overall is better for privacy than is CISPA,” writes Gregory Nojeim, senior counsel at the Center for Democracy and Technology in an e-mail interview.

Of all three bills ostensibly designed to improve the nation’s cybersecurity, only Lieberman’s actually tries to include federal standards for what cybersecurity means. Businesses vastly prefer the two bills—CISPA and McCain’s—that say, in effect, “we won’t require you to actually make your networks more secure, just give us any information we might ask for later and we’ll promise you won’t be sued for it.”

Mozilla breaks the Valley's silence on CISPA

Wed, 02 May 2012 09:41:00 -0700

Mozilla breaks the Valley's silence on CISPA:

Andy Greenberg at Forbes:

Despite the outcry over the privacy violations the revamped bill might allow and even a threatened veto from the White House, tech firms have largely stood behind it—CISPA’s official supporters include Facebook, Microsoft, IBM, Intel, Oracle, and Symantec among others. Mozilla didn’t offer any further comment on its decision to break with that collection of CISPA supporters. But it wouldn’t be the first time Mozilla has taken an outspoken role against controversial legislation.

CISPA has been frequently compared in the tech press to SOPA—sometimes even referred to as “SOPA 2.0”—but it’s actually a very different bill with very different aims and very different problems. An admittedly simplistic take: SOPA essentially gave private enterprise law enforcement powers any time someone invoked “intellectual property” (i believe it required you to look in the mirror and say it three times, and a warrant signed by the Justice Department would appear in your hands in a puff of brimstone), whereas CISPA is essentially about giving private companies immunity for violating privacy laws any time someone invokes “cyberattacks” or “cybercrime” or pretty much any scary word with the prefix “cyber-” tacked on.

Greenberg notes dryly that Google “remains perhaps the only major tech firm that has yet to take a stance on CISPA,” and that while there are two Senate counterparts to CISPA they’re “very different bills.”

TechCrunch: Bing Strips Down Results Page To Make Google Look Like “Search Overload”

Wed, 02 May 2012 09:02:12 -0700

TechCrunch: Bing Strips Down Results Page To Make Google Look Like “Search Overload”:

Josh Constine:

While Google keeps cramming its search results pages full of tools and social content, today Bing confirmed with me the full roll out of a redesigned search results page that completely clears the left sidebar, and replaces the tabbed header with a cleaner set of links. Bing’s Facebook integration is also more subtle now, instead of plastering names and faces beneath Liked results.

Constine quips that Microsoft is trying to win with better design since it can’t match Google’s algorithms, and my experience suggests that Google still does return better results than either Bing or DuckDuckGo. But that isn’t to say the other two return bad results, and of the three, Bing now has both the quickest and leanest results page.

A quick note

Tue, 01 May 2012 09:39:47 -0700

To thank Tumblr for mysteriously wiping out all my customizations except the custom HTML. Yes, I know, don’t complain about free services and all that, but sheesh.

The sun never sets on Cupertino

Mon, 30 Apr 2012 16:36:26 -0700

A new article in the NYT is getting a lot of buzz: “How Apple Sidesteps Billions in Taxes.” Quoting from the piece seems superfluous; if you’ve read the headline, you have a pretty good idea what the article says, just without the details. (In short form, Apple saved about $2.4B last year by having their investment fund subsidiary incorporated in Nevada and having global subsidiaries in Ireland, the Netherlands and the Caribbean.)

This is an interesting piece, and I don’t want to downplay the significance of it. It leads to a lot of questions that are as much philosophical as economic. Is it unethical for a corporation to dodge taxes like that? If it is, isn’t it just as unethical for an individual to do so? What about the case that taxation itself is unethical, whether for individuals, businesses or both?

Yet what’s most interesting about it is how it falls in line with other reporting/campaigning recently, from conditions at factories in China doing contract work for American companies to how “green” companies are in their production lines, components, and even power generation. All these stories, without exception, are about industry-wide conditions: nearly all high-tech products are being made in China (and many by Foxconn); nearly all technology companies use a lot of power and produce a lot of tough-to-recycle stuff with production methods that are often dangerous; nearly all profitable companies, especially “globalized” ones, spend a lot of resources trying to find ways to lower their taxes.

Even though the stories eventually mention everyone else, they’re always headlined—and frequently pitched—as if they’re all about Apple.

This steams up Apple fans and analysts. “Reporters are just doing this to drive up page hits,” they rail. “They’re holding Apple to a higher standard than everyone else.” Fans can, of course, be reliably counted on to get outraged about such things, and detractors are sure to pop up in comments expounding about how Apple never does anything innovative and stole everything from Xerox and Steve Jobs was a terrible person and Apple fans are morons distracted by shiny shiny things and real computer users would never own one and hey let’s say “iSheep” because nobody’s ever heard that before and it’ll make us look so witty and thoughtful.

So: yes, this certainly does bring in zillions of page views and publishers damn well know that’s going to happen. And yes, it certainly is focusing the spotlight on Apple when it’s hardly just them doing whatever supposedly nefarious things we’re decrying.

But is it wrong to hold Apple up to a higher standard?

Apple is, at this point, the largest and most profitable technology company in history. Their profits and revenue are growing at rates which no company their size in the history of corporations has ever achieved. And they’ve arguably defined the face of computing since the mid-’80s, by continually establishing precedents that the rest of the market follows. One could make a good case that Apple has become, with the possible exception of the East India Company, the most successful company the world has ever seen.

This doesn’t excuse reporters, critics and activists from being genuinely lazy. A lot of what Greenpeace and labor activists beat up on Apple for is data that’s coming from Apple’s own published audits, a level of transparency that very few other companies even aspire to. I doubt they intend to be signaling that if you slam the door in their face they’ll give you a pass, but that’s exactly what they’re doing. And there are a lot of unsubstantiated tropes that have entered “common wisdom,” like how Apple never gives to charity. (Apple simply doesn’t trumpet how much they give to charity, which is probably just as well: they could be giving away more than most businesses make in a year and still look penurious.)

But defenders of the East India Company couldn’t really say, “Well, everybody else is doing what they do, so give ’em a break.” In fact, nobody else was doing what they did. The analogy only goes so far—Apple isn’t, as far as we know, maintaining their own private navies and establishing colonial fiefdoms abroad—but the point is that in many significant ways there isn’t anyone else doing what Apple is doing. There never has been. Apple has become the most successful company in the world by manifestly not conducting business as usual. And everything they do—from the way they market and design their products to, yes, the way they conduct business with their suppliers—sets precedents that are very likely to be with us for decades.

The silver lining here is that—whether or not they’re getting the credit they deserve for it—Apple seems to be setting precedents in transparency about their processes, too. Kind of ironic for a company that’s so legendarily secretive, but there it is. For the foreseeable future, Apple will keep telling us about their factories in China, how green they are, and how many jobs they bring to the United States so stop whining about taxes already darnit—and they’ll keep having more spotlights on them than anyone else when it comes to just what’s going on with their factories in China, how green they are, and just how much tax they really are paying darnit. This is probably the way it must be when a company is what Apple has become—and maybe it should be.