» Problems to solve: Many developers make their Android apps for free (and rely on in-app ads to pay the bills) not because they want to make them free, but because the payment process is so convoluted that many people don’t feel like going through it. Also, a major problem that developers have which iPhone developers don’t have to deal with at all is the fracturing of the platform – there are dozens of phones on the market with tiny but important quirks.
Starting a company like Digg is less like building a traditional tech company (think Apple or HP) and more like launching a TV show. And perhaps, like TV shows, these companies are ephemeral in nature. People flock in for a while, then get bored and move on.
Newsweek scribe Daniel Lyons • Offering an interesting perspective on the decline of Digg, which he suggests may have been as much about the change of its audience as a failure of Digg to keep up. The TV show metaphor is actually a very good one. While not every company will fall prey to changing seasons, Web 2.0 companies are particularly apt to them due to their socially-oriented business models. Lyons suggestion at the end is most telling: “The big lesson of Digg may be simply this: if someone offers you a ridiculous amount of money for a company that wasn’t that hard to build, don’t think twice. Take the money and run.” source
From a hacker’s perspective, releasing this was a good idea. Firesheep is a Firefox plugin that allows you to spy on people’s cookies from within a wi-fi network, effectively allowing you to log into other people’s accounts without knowing their passwords. Great, this will get people to work on this very significant issue and force HTTPS connections. But the problem is, you’ve released an exploit that makes it easy for people to spy on anyone, something that anyone can use. And most of those people will not have the idealistic ethics of the creator of this program. Yes, you’ll get Facebook to use HTTPS, even though it’ll cost them money. But you’ve enabled script kiddies to read personal information at coffee shops everywhere. Not everyone is a hacker. Not everyone is going to appreciate the existence of this. They’ll just feel violated. source
That sound you hear is the sound of some clever company attempting to sell an overpriced phone with a pen and a pad of paper as something innovative. Move along.
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We work hard at Google to earn your trust, and we’re acutely aware that we failed badly here.
Google Senior VP of Engineering and Research Alan Eustace • Revealing what the company did in the wake of Google Street View’s accidental wi-fi snooping in Europe. (Lots of training, lots of policy changes.) He also admitted, though, that (while most of what they grabbed were data fragments) the company did in fact grab entire e-mails and other private information. “We are mortified by what happened,” Eustace writes, but says that they hope that the policy changes will prevent it from happening again. source
93.2
millionnumber of users Verizon has, after gaining nearly a million subscribers last quarter
92.8
millionnumber of users AT&T has, after gaining nearly THREE MILLION subscribers in the same period source
» Insurmountable no more? After Verizon acquired Alltel back in 2008, they were far ahead of AT&T user-wise. But then the iPhone 4 launch happened. Well, so much for that.
That’s right, he checked in to Foursquare while he was in space. IN SPACEEEEE. While we’re total trend-followers, we’re probably not going to do this today. source
Over the last few days, we’ve gotten a few e-mails from the online video site Newsy. (Hey guys!) Newsy is a pretty interesting news startup which has a partnership with the smart kids at the University of Missouri. (Read up on the school’s journalism program – which, if you ask us, is how J-Schools should work.) In a lot of ways, Newsy is sort of the video version of SFB – it splices together lots of disparate elements to give you a brief, detailed overview of a full story. (They probably have more startup capital than us, but we’ll let that one go. Heh.) In the clip above, they offer tons of new context with the gay Cub Scout leader who was forced to give up his leadership program. The guy at the center of all this knows how to sell popcorn. And he’s thinking of filing a lawsuit against the organization. We learned all that just from watching the video! Newsy’s pretty cool. source
If nothing else, Apple’s updated MacBook Air models are easy on the eyes. So we’re just going to link you to Boing Boing, which has some very sexy photos of these new computers. It’s like reading an issue of Penthouse (RIP Bob Guccione), except with computers. source
