Monkey Fires Shot!

When I use data abroad I can almost hear the cham­pagne corks pop­ping in the offices of my net­work provider.

It’s called “Control-based Content Pricing,” and the basic idea is dynamic pric­ing of video con­tent, based on the pref­er­ences of the user at any given moment — essen­tially set­ting dif­fer­ent prices for dif­fer­ent func­tions of the TV remote.

This is not sur­pris­ing from the com­pany that’s often referred to as Micro$oft for their track record of putting users last in the pur­suit of profit when it comes to every­thing from user inter­face design to restric­tive pric­ing mod­els and DRM.

Well, some­body bet­ter wish them luck because they’re going to need it. It’s nearly impos­si­ble to start charg­ing for a fea­ture or prod­uct once it’s been given away for free, espe­cially one as creepy and openly user hos­tile as this.

Jobs, as such, are a rel­a­tively new con­cept. People may have always worked, but until the advent of the cor­po­ra­tion in the early Renaissance, most peo­ple just worked for them­selves. They made shoes, plucked chick­ens, or cre­ated value in some way for other peo­ple, who then traded or paid for those goods and ser­vices. By the late Middle Ages, most of Europe was thriv­ing under this arrangement.

The only ones los­ing wealth were the aris­toc­racy, who depended on their titles to extract money from those who worked. And so they invented the char­tered monop­oly. By law, small busi­nesses in most major indus­tries were shut down and peo­ple had to work for offi­cially sanc­tioned cor­po­ra­tions instead. From then on, for most of us, work­ing came to mean get­ting a “job.”

People will always have to work, achieve and cre­ate. In order to sur­vive we must do. However,  jobs and careers are a pretty new con­cept in human his­tory. Someday they will be an old concept.

Technology is enabling indi­vid­u­als to become pow­er­ful pub­lish­ers, cre­ators and dis­trib­u­tors on a per­sonal level. As long as a job is defined as work­ing for some­one else, its days are numbered.

U.S. news­pa­pers lost $10 in print adver­tis­ing rev­enue last year for every $1 they gained online, a deeper loss than in 2010, as com­pe­ti­tion from Internet com­pa­nies increases, a study by Pew Research Center found.

Newspaper rev­enues declined more sharply last year than in 2010 when pub­lish­ers lost $7 in print adver­tis­ing for every $1 gen­er­ated from online out­lets, accord­ing to Pew’s study enti­tled “State of the News Media,” which is pub­lished today.

The bleed­ing accel­er­ates for the dead tree news dis­tri­b­u­tion model as it gets replaced by inter­ac­tive publishing.

Mike Daisey could be con­sid­ered the MC of the recent media drum beat for Apple to audit its man­u­fac­tur­ing facil­i­ties in China (which it did). He has been the most out spo­ken critic of Apple’s ful­fill­ment chain. Granting inter­views with the likes of PBS and The New York Times and per­form­ing a one man show, “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs” all over the U.S. He decries the work­ing plight of Chinese labor man­u­fac­tur­ing gad­gets for Apple et al. He cites meet­ings with Chinese labor­ers that occurred dur­ing in an inves­ti­ga­tory trip to a Foxconn fac­tory in China where Apple con­tracts the man­u­fac­ture of iPhones, iPads and other products.

There’s a big prob­lem with his story, though. He made it up.

His claims seemed fishy to an actual inves­tiga­tive reporter at Marketplace (an American Public Media radio show). So they spoke with Mike’s trans­la­tor who accom­pa­nied him while he was in China and she paints a dif­fer­ent picture.

Take one exam­ple from his mono­logue — it takes place at a meet­ing he had with an ille­gal work­ers union. He meets a group of work­ers who’ve been poi­soned by the neu­ro­toxin N-Hexane while work­ing on the iPhone assem­bly line: “…and all these peo­ple have been exposed,” he says. “Their hands shake uncon­trol­lably. Most of them…can’t even pick up a glass.”

Cathy Lee, Daisey’s trans­la­tor in Shenzhen, was with Daisey at this meet­ing in Shenzhen. I met her in the exact place she took Daisey — the gates of Foxconn. So I asked her: “Did you meet peo­ple who fit this description?”

“No,” she said.

“So there was nobody who said they were poi­soned by hexane?” I continued.

Lee’s answer was the same: “No. Nobody men­tioned the Hexane.”

I pressed Cathy to con­firm other key details that Daisey reported. Did the guards have guns when you came here with Mike Daisey? With each ques­tion I got the same answer from Lee. “No,” or “This is not true.”

It goes on and on like this. Mike has other sto­ries about dis­fig­ured work­ers who’s eyes lit up at see­ing one of the devices turn on for the first time. He also fre­quently speaks about under­age work­ers and bunk beds stacked to the ceiling.

It was all bullshit.

Mike Daisey addressed this issue to Ira Glass of This American Life — an excel­lent radio show out of Chicago that’s doing an entire Retraction show about the Mike Daisey fiasco ear­lier today:

Daisey apol­o­gized to Ira Glass for not telling the truth to him and his listeners.

“Look. I’m not going to say that I didn’t take a few short­cuts in my pas­sion to be heard. But I stand behind the work,” Daisey said. “My mis­take, the mis­take I truly regret, is that I had it on your show as jour­nal­ism. And it’s not jour­nal­ism. It’s theater.”

Actually, Mike, it’s libel.*

*I am not a lawyer. This post is theater.

In this era of “Jersey Shore” antics and “Girls Gone Wild,” where bikini tops van­ish like unat­tended wal­lets, it would seem nat­ural to assume that this gen­er­a­tion of col­lege stu­dent has out­done the spring break hordes of decades past on the carousal meter.

But today’s spring break­ers — at least some of them — say they have been tamed, in part, not by par­ents or col­leges or the fed-up cities they invade, but by the hand-held giz­mos they hold dear­est and the fear of being betrayed by an unsa­vory, unsanc­tioned photo or video pop­ping up on Facebook or YouTube.

Some real-world fall­out of our new social media-powered vol­un­tary sur­veil­lance soci­ety. As bar­ri­ers for shar­ing infor­ma­tion fall, dis­tance no longer affords a buffer from respon­si­bil­ity of our own actions.

It’s worth the wait: 4.1 is awe­some. The head­lin­ing fea­ture is the new selec­tion of six beau­ti­ful, pro­fes­sional fonts designed for max­i­mum leg­i­bil­ity and long-form reading.

It’s in final test­ing now and I’m sub­mit­ting it to Apple this weekend.

I’m really excited for this update. I use Instapaper a  a lot. If you do a lot of online read­ing you should grab a copy.

“A cou­ple of things were very clear to us when we started work­ing on Borderlands, and a few things took a few tests for us to really under­stand,” Armstrong explained. “There are rules that we’ve come to inter­pret as key things we need to fol­low, things like: Testers try to speak in fact, but they speak in emotion.”

That sounds like seman­tics, but it’s a very impor­tant dis­tinc­tion. For any num­ber of rea­sons, be it per­sonal bias, pre­dis­po­si­tion towards a par­tic­u­lar fran­chise or whether or not the test sub­ject is hung over, the tester’s feed­back could be applic­a­ble to them­selves, rather than the game being tested.

This is a must-read for any­one design­ing, build­ing or cre­at­ing some­thing for some­one else.

via ignore the code

Every time you use a shonky icon on the web, a kit­ten cries. Make sure all your icons align to that grid nicely

Here’s the actual size: http://d.pr/Cnxy and here’s the PSD: http://d.pr/zbp4

Hundreds of lit­tle things like this add up to sep­a­rate pro­fes­sional design­ers from “my cousin who’s good at Photoshop”.

How can this pos­si­bly be a draw­back? And since Adobe killed mobile Flash last year, how could any­one in their right mind expect any prod­uct would sup­port it.

Still no bug­gie whip.

PayPal’s new in-store don­gle is lit­er­ally the tri­an­gle to Square’s, well, Square. Just like the rest, the tri­an­gu­lar add-on just plugs into the head­phone jack on your smart­phone. Merchants can then accept pay­ments by swip­ing cards with the thumb-sized card reader, or — and this is a high­light — sim­ply use the smartphone’s cam­era to scan credit cards (pow­ered by Card​.io), scan checks, etc. This saves mer­chants from hav­ing to type in credit card num­bers at the point of sale. They can just invoice directly from the mobile app, or, nat­u­rally, accept PayPal. It even has “a lit­tle wing” that pulls down right over the top to sta­bi­lize the card reader as mer­chants swipe.

This really clever and looks well imple­mented (I haven’t used it yet.). I must say that I have been root­ing for Square since I first heard about them. Everyone likes the lit­tle guy and the credit card pay­ments indus­try (any­thing in the finan­cial indus­try, really) seems ripe for some shake up.

I’m glad Paypal’s fight­ing back against Square, though. It’s always good to see com­pe­ti­tion through inno­va­tion rather than lit­i­ga­tion (I’m look­ing at you, Honeywell.)

Will video game con­soles be made irrel­e­vant by iPads the way point and shoots have been killed by smart phones?

Point and shoot cam­era sales are plum­met­ing. They’re squeezed at the top by DSLR’s that are get­ting cheaper and bet­ter. They’re  squeezed at the bot­tom by smart phone cam­eras that offer more flex­i­bil­ity with shar­ing and photo manip­u­la­tion directly from the device. A sim­i­lar storm is brew­ing for gam­ing con­soles like Playstation 3 and Xbox 360.

There was an eye-opening arti­cle on how the iPad is being regarded amongst the video gam­ing industry’s busi­ness elite in Reuters last Friday:

“It is quite easy to imag­ine a world where an iPad is more pow­er­ful than a home con­sole, where it wire­lessly talks to your TV and wire­lessly talks to your con­troller and becomes your new con­sole,” [Mike] Capps said in an interview.

Meanwhile, the indus­try is brac­ing for change. Frank Gibeau, pres­i­dent of Electronic Arts’ Labels (EA.O), who over­sees the company’s biggest games such as “Battlefield 3″ and “Star Wars: The Old Republic,” said the com­pany is eye­ing Apple’s moves closely.

“When the iPad gets to the pro­cess­ing power that’s equal to an Xbox 360 and it con­nects to a tele­vi­sion, that’s no big deal to us. We’ll put the game through the iPad and have it dis­play through the tele­vi­sion.” Gibeau said.

Mike Capps is the pres­i­dent of Epic Games, mak­ers of a lit­tle title you may have heard of called Gears of War. Electronic Arts is the 800lb gorilla Microsoft Google of the gam­ing indus­try. If these guys are talk­ing about turn­ing the iPad into a gam­ing con­sole; Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo bet­ter be listening.

The new iPad has bet­ter screen res­o­lu­tion and more mem­ory than Microsoft’s Xbox 360 and Sony’s PlayStation 3:

Console pric­ing was taken from the most pop­u­lar model sold by Amazon​.com as of writ­ing. The new iPad (3^rd gen­er­a­tion) pric­ing is from their entry level model, which I assume will be their best seller – but there are no sales num­bers yet.

The new iPad is  in good com­pany when it comes to hard­ware specs and pric­ing, even best­ing the con­soles in a cou­ple crit­i­cal areas. iPad proces­sor speed is still slow by com­par­i­son. Although if we return to our point and shoot cam­era anal­ogy, the iPhone cam­era also lack in specs com­pared to most point and shoots, but the iPhone 4 is the most pop­u­lar cam­era on Flickr.

The iPad costs more than the cur­rent gen­er­a­tion con­soles, but iPads are in the same ball park and are even cheaper when you option up some of the con­soles. The next gen con­soles on the hori­zon will also be more expen­sive and much closer to price par­ity with the iPad.

There’s also a nasty chicken and egg prob­lem with game plat­form devel­op­ment that insu­lates the cur­rent con­tenders from dis­rup­tion. It takes a huge mar­ket to per­suade devel­op­ers it’s worth their time and money to bring the AAA Games to the party. (AAA Games are those like the Call of Duty and Grand Theft Auto series’ that cost tens of mil­lions in pro­duc­tion.) The iPad plat­form has a huge installed user base already, so they bypass this road block to con­sole gam­ing entirely.

Sales num­bers from Reuters and Wikipedia.

In terms of sales and mar­ket share, the iPad has a ways to go to match Nintendo’s num­bers, but it’s already right there with Xbox and Playstation. iPad sales growth is also still accel­er­at­ing. The current;y avail­able con­soles are in their twi­light and gamers are look­ing to the hori­zon for the next gen­er­a­tion of con­soles. Of course by the time they come out, there will be a new iPad, and Apple will have another 50 mil­lion or so in sales under its belt.

One hun­dred mil­lion or more iPad own­ers by the end of 2012 means the iPad has the exact same advan­tage as the smart phone over the point and shoot – which is that a lot of peo­ple already have one. If a tech savvy con­sumer house­hold has an iPad with AAA Games that they can view on their TV over Air Play while using the device itself, an acces­sory or an iPhone as the con­troller, whither the con­sole pur­chase? It’s an excit­ing thought for the hun­dreds of mil­lions will­ing to buy into Apple’s eco system.

Like smart phones and point and shoots, iPads can com­pete or best the con­soles on hard­ware specs while absolutely whip­ping them on plat­form flex­i­bil­ity and porta­bil­ity. I don’t know the con­sole equiv­a­lent of on-device photo edit­ing  — but between app, acces­sory and periph­eral sup­port for iPad, the con­soles have their work cut out for them (Kinect was a good start, Playstation Move was not).

The other side of our metaphor here is DSLRs that are drop­ping in price and expand­ing func­tion­al­ity. Just like hard­core pho­tog­ra­phers are going to skip the point and shoot, so too will hard­core gamers skip the con­sole and go to more and more pow­er­ful PC’s will the quickly grow­ing main­stream gamers with an iPad will have no need for a con­sole. I don’t know as much about PC gam­ing as I do iPads and con­soles, so I’ll leave it at that. (I play Starcraft on my Mac, but it’s a set up that would get me laughed out of most PC gam­ing circles.)

New con­soles are on the hori­zon and they’re going to be beasts when it comes to per­for­mance. Xbox live keeps get­ting bet­ter and better.

The main­stream tablet iPad mar­ket is still very young, but the new iPads are truly amaz­ing when it comes to specs, price point and plat­form flex­i­bil­ity. You can also bet that Apple has a few more tricks up their sleeves when it comes to iPad lineup in the years to come.

As with most tech pro­jec­tions there are few cer­tain­ties, but the cur­rent state of affairs points to accel­er­at­ing change in the gam­ing mar­ket in gen­eral. The only thing absolutely cer­tain is that it’s a great time to be a gamer.

The FBI can’t get into a pimp’s Android phone — so it wants Google to hand over the keys.

In addi­tion to access­ing the phone, agents also want Google to turn over e-mail searches, Web searches, GPS track­ing data, web­sites vis­ited, and text mes­sages. A fed­eral judge has agreed. Hopefully, dig­i­tal devices can make life hard out there for a pimp — but the case also reminds us just how much data smart­phones gen­er­ate on even innocu­ous users.

Have they tried strik­ing the lock screen with the back of their hand?

A cou­ple of our top clients asked us to use Drupal or WordPress (based on their own tech­ni­cal require­ments or pref­er­ences), so right now we have more in-house expe­ri­ence with WordPress and Drupal. Our job is to be flex­i­ble and to help our clients do their jobs bet­ter. While we’re able to guide the folks who don’t have a pref­er­ence, our job is not to evan­ge­lize one tech­nol­ogy over another.

So, rather than attempt to con­vince you that one CMS is best, I’ll share some data that com­pares WordPress to Drupal and Joomla in order to under­stand how and why WordPress got the crown.

Lots of pretty graphs show­ing WordPress’ impres­sive mar­ket share in the bat­tle of open source CMS’s. (Spoiler Alert: WordPress wins because it’s easy to use.)

GIFs are one of the old­est image for­mats used on the web. Throughout
their his­tory, they have served a huge vari­ety of pur­poses, from
func­tional to enter­tain­ment. Now, 25 years after the first GIF was
cre­ated, they are expe­ri­enc­ing an explo­sion of inter­est and inno­va­tion
that is push­ing them into the ter­rain of art. In this episode of Off
Book, we chart their his­tory, explore the hotbed of GIF cre­ativ­ity on
Tumblr, and talk to two teams of GIF artists who are evolv­ing the form
into pow­er­ful new visual experiences.

This video is a great slice of web cul­ture you won’t find in any other medium. A must watch for any card-carrying geek.

via zefrank

In an acknowl­edg­ment of the real­i­ties of the dig­i­tal age — and of com­pe­ti­tion from the Web site Wikipedia — Encyclopaedia Britannica will focus pri­mar­ily on its online ency­clo­pe­dias and edu­ca­tional cur­ricu­lum for schools. The last print ver­sion is the 32-volume 2010 edi­tion, which weighs 129 pounds and includes new entries on global warm­ing and the Human Genome Project.

Digital beats paper.