The European Union has just agreed on its budget for the years 2014-2020, and it’s the first time that budget has actually been cut. Unfortunately for European broadband projects that were counting on money from a €7 billion ($9.36 billion) central fund, that’s where a huge chunk of the €34 billion in savings came from.
This formed the bulk of the €9.2 billion “digital part” of the Connecting Europe Facility (CEF), a part that got trimmed down to €1 billion in budget negotiations. That remaining billion will now go to a different subsection, to do with nailing down cross-border digital services such as e-procurement and e-invoicing. The whole ambition of using €7 billion in EU funding over the coming seven years to accelerate deployment of fibre-access broadband networks — which was in turn supposed to help businesses take up cloud services – just went bye-bye.
The cut could potentially hit rural areas and small towns the hardest. However, digital agenda commissioner Neelie Kroes, who must be bitterly disappointed as she’s worked on the CEF plans for years, issued a statement in which she said she was still shooting for the goals of having half of Europe surfing at more than 100 Mbps, and the rest on at least 30 Mbps, by 2020:
“It is clear that there can be no support for broadband with a pot of only €1bn, so this funding will be exclusively for digital services. Our 2020 fast broadband targets, agreed by everybody, may be harder to reach but I am not giving up on them. I will keep fighting, and I will support innovations that help roll-out fast broadband to underserved areas.”
Kroes went on to warn that member states would now need to rigidly adhere to her recently-announced 10-point regulatory plan for upgrading Europe’s broadband infrastructure, in order to hit targets:
“National governments will not achieve their own ambitions if they fail to offer this support. And their own support schemes will come under great pressure to serve areas where the market alone will not act.”
European telecoms providers had previously begged the continent’s leaders not to cut the broadband part of the CEF, arguing that such a move would harm the EU’s competitiveness. It should also be noted that the European Parliament still has to approve the budget before it can come into force.
Earlier this week, we heard that the House Intelligence Committee was going to reintroduce CISPA after working with the White House on a revised bill that sufficiently addressed the Obama administration’s concerns. The news of a reworked, and potentially privacy friendly, CISPA was good while it lasted because the bill’s co-sponsors aren’t going to change a thing.
The Hill reports that House Intelligence Chairman Mike Rogers and ranking member Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger said that they will be reintroducing CISPA into the House next week. This new CISPA, however, will not be any different from the old one. You know, the bill that the White House supposedly hates and threatened to veto.
So, why did Ruppersberger say he was working with the White House on CISPA if they didn’t change anything? In a new statement, the Committee says that CISPA was “developed in close consultation with a broad range of private sector companies, trade groups, privacy and civil liberties advocates, and the executive branch.” If this is the same CISPA as before, I have a hard time believing the latter two groups had any kind of say at all in the formation of the bill.
Of course, the White House might be totally behind CISPA this time around. Privacy was a big buzzword last year, and standing in defense of it could have easily net Obama some votes in November. Now that his job is secure for the next four years, his administration might be more open to at least considering controversial bills like CISPA.
Oh, and for those privacy and civil liberties advocates that will undoubtedly come out against CISPA, Chairman Rogers thinks you got it all wrong:
“We’re talking about exchanging packets of information, zeroes and ones, if you will, one hundred millions times a second. So some notion that this is a horrible invasion of content reading is wrong. It is not even close to that.”
The latest Nielsen survey confirms one of the major smartphone trends of 2012: That the Windows Phone operating system showed remarkable strength in India even before the new wave of Nokia (NOK) and HTC (2498) models launched in January. According to Nielsen, Windows Phone grabbed 8% of India’s smartphone market last autumn, far ahead of BlackBerry (BBRY) at 3% and iPhone at 1%.
You know how deciding what to eat with your significant other is usually one of the hardest things to do, even when you’re both hungry? Yes, you do. It’s a ubiquitous non-argument.
Well, here’s that argument, but with drums instead of words.
The TED Prize’s Charter for Compassion reached Pope Benedict XVII this week. A plaque engraved with the Charter was presented to the Pope on Wednesday in Vatican City by TED’s European director, Bruno Giussani. The meeting, pictured above, took place on the margins of the weekly General Audience, when Giussani could inform the catholic Pontiff of the Charter’s origin, development and aims.
Karen Armstrong makes her TED Prize wish: the Charter for CompassionThe document was imagined by 2008 TED Prize winner, religion scholar Karen Armstrong. (Watch her talk). It was written by the Council of Conscience — a multi-faith, multi-national group made of personalities representing six religions (Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism and Confucianism) with input from thousands of people through an online platform. The Charter is an attempt to define in clear terms the common ground among these religions, the principle they all share: that of Compassion and the “Golden Rule.”
The Charter was unveiled in November 2009 and, with the support of the nonprofit Fetzer Institute, it has been translated into more than 30 languages. The charter is distributed online — and hundreds of events, public readings and discussions have taken place around the Charter with many more planned. Tens of thousands of people have affirmed the charter, and wooden plaques of the text are affixed on many religious buildings around the world. One of these plaques is now at the Vatican.
NASA announced this week that it will host the first-ever Google+ Hangout live from the International Space Station (ISS).
The Hangout will take place from 11 am to 12 pm EST on February 22. The event will allow NASA fans to interact with astronauts both on Earth and aboard the ISS. Astronauts Kevin Ford, Chris Hadfield, and Tom Marshburn will be on-hand to answer questions about life on the ISS.
Since only up to 10 people can “Hangout” at one time (though the event will be open for anyone to watch live), NASA is encouraging its social media fans to submit video questions before the Hangout. During the Hangout “several” of these video questions will be chosen to be aired and answered by the ISS station crew and other astronauts. The videos must be uploaded to YouTube with the tag #askAstro and must be 30 seconds or shorter. The deadline for submitting videos is February 12.
NASA will also take live questions from its social media feeds on Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ during the Hangout. The same hashtag, #askAstro, will be used to identify questions during the Hangout. The agency stated that “unique and original questions” are more likely to be answered.
Though this is the first NASA Hangout from the ISS, it won’t be the last. The agency has stated that it will continue to host Hangouts “with astronauts on the ground and in space, scientists, engineers, and managers on the agency’s missions and milestones.”
The BlackBerry Z10 has launched at a handful of carriers over the past week in Canada, the UAE and the UK. Every one of them is reporting strong demand which isn’t surprising because of how many people have been waiting for the device to launch. The demand is further fuelled by a high aftermarket demand from regions not yet selling the BlackBerry Z10.
Though most of the buyers of the Z10 are early adopters, small-time opportunists are taking advantage of the device not being available in every region. Unlocked Z10s have been showing up on eBay and other online classified ads at a huge premium. Currently an unlocked model has an aftermarket value of over $850, with the seller buying the device out-of-contract for as low as $600.
Reception of the new device and mobile OS have been very warm, I don’t think anyone expected a version 1.0 of any smartphone to be so functional and polished.
A phrase I find myself coming back to again and again when thinking of the survivability of BlackBerry and the health of the platform is “If you build it they will come”. Even with the new OS being particularly easy to port to, many developers still choose to wait for a critical mass of users before putting in the effort.
Some developers might wait to see how many millions of units have shipped by quarter’s end before deciding to support the platform, but others realize that they have built it, the users are there, and they’ll be needing apps.
Monopoly recently gave the internet (more specifically people on Facebook) the opportunity to kick out one of the old, stale pieces and replace it with a cool, hip new piece. Monopoly made one of the new options a cat. The internet loves cats. The internet picked the cat. Monopoly now has a cat piece. End of the most predictable story in history.
Jon Stewart laments the internet’s love for cats – a love that clearly clouded the judgement of otherwise sane people (I guess).
“It’s gotta be the f*cking robot. Are you kidding me?” said Stewart.
Despite past lackluster sales, HTC (2498) apparently just can’t quit its “One” branding. Twitter user Evleaks, who has a very solid history of providing information on yet-to-be-released smartphones, writes today that HTC’s newest flagship smartphone will not be named the M7 but will instead simply be called the HTC One. This seems like a pretty questionable decision on HTC’s part since the company already has several phones with the “One” branding, including the One X and the One S, and the company risks creating confusion by adding yet another One to the mix. What’s more, none of HTC’s One devices have been top sellers and HTC is hoping that its newest flagship smartphone will be a breakout device that will put the company back in competition with rivals Samsung (005930) and LG (066570). Needless to say, simply recycling the “One” brand again may make HTC’s efforts to make its new device stand out more difficult.
Microsoft says it could take a few hours for Spotify to show up in the store — here it is in the online Marketplace — as it rolls out across various regions. Note too that the app requires Windows Phone 8, so older devices running WP 7, 7.5 or 7.8 likely aren’t supported.
Spotify, which boasts 20 million songs, does offer a free trial on the new Windows Phone 8 client. To try the service, you need to create a Spotify account first, then log in on the app. Without a credit card or any other details, that gets you 48 hours of free music. To extend the trial to a full 30 days, Spotify says to follow the email instructions it sends after account creation.
Aside from listening to tunes on Windows Phone 8, you can create and share music playlists, download music for offline playback and explore what your friends are listening to on Spotify, regardless of what mobile or desktop platform they’re using with Spotify.
During the BlackBerry 10 launch event, some of our biggest fans were given the opportunity to experience the BlackBerry Z10 in a real-world demonstration through the streets of New York City. The group visited a series of landmarks where they completed various tasks on their BlackBerry 10 smartphones focusing on the new features.
In true Team BlackBerry form, everyone successfully completed the challenge, and had a blast doing so! But don’t take our word for it – check out a recap of the day:
We took the challenge one step further with the BlackBerry Story Maker films and offered a prize for the best video. We took a long hard look at all the groups’ BlackBerry Story Maker videos from the day, and while it wasn’t an easy decision, check out the winning video and get a glimpse of what’s possible with BlackBerry Story Maker:
This past week, Microsoft launched a new “Scroogled” campaign. In case you don’t recall, the company launched a campaign under that name during the holiday season, calling out Google Shopping for its paid Google Shopping model (a move that has been controversial). This time, Microsoft is using the “Scroogled” brand again to attack a decade-old feature of Google’s Gmail – the one that Google uses to target advertising to users by algorithmically scanning emails.
Are you concerned about Gmail’s ad targeting practices? Do you consider them to be a violation of privacy? What is your opinion of the ads themselves? Share your thoughts in the comments.
We had a conversation about Microsoft’s latest attack on Google with Stefan Weitz, Microsoft’s senior director of Online Services (also one of the more well-known faces of Bing). While Microsoft recently launched a new mail product – Outlook.com – many find the timing of this attack a bit strange, given that Gmail has operated this way since its inception.
“We want to make sure people understand how much of their privacy they are giving up when they use Gmail,” Weitz tells WebProNews. “If people understand they are giving up their privacy and they wish to do so, that’s their choice. But we want to make sure they understand this is going on. What surprised us, even after a decade of this practice, is that over two-thirds of people don’t know what is happening and when they find out, nearly 90% say it should stop. People are saying it doesn’t seem right. It seems creepy. The question users have to ask is: Do you want one company to have that much information about you?”
Google did alter its privacy policies last year, essentially consolidating them into one that spans across its various products, making it easier for the company to use data from one of its services in another.
Of course, Microsoft does scan users’ emails. Just not to serve ads.
“We do not scan the contents of user emails for the purpose of showing ads,” says Weitz. “Like many email providers, Outlook.com scans the content of your email to help protect you and prevent spam, gray mail, phishing scams, viruses, malware, and other dangers and annoyances. It is just like how the postal service sorts and scans mail and packages for dangerous explosive and biohazards. Of course, Outlook.com
“Outlook.com uses other information like user profile information people submit when signing up (age, zip code, gender), but we even give users an option to opt out of personalized ads for free,” he adds. “Gmail doesn’t.”
In a previous article, we looked at what Google says about privacy in Gmail. Google’s PR has been sending around this comment:
“Advertising keeps Google and many of the websites and services Google offers free of charge. We work hard to make sure that ads are safe, unobtrusive and relevant. No humans read your email or Google Account information in order to show you advertisements or related information. An automated algorithm — similar to that used for features like Priority Inbox or spam filtering — determines which ads are shown.”
You can read a much lengthier set of relevant comments from the company from an old help center article in that article.
It should be noted that Google has fired employees in the past after they were caught (in separate incidents) spying on user emails and chats. You can take that two ways: 1. It has happened before. 2. Google does not tolerate such behavior. Presumably, these incidents had nothing to do with ad targeting.
Microsoft’s new Scroogled ads almost make Google’s ad targeting relevance seem like the subject of the attack in some parts. See the dead cat example in this one:
“Who wants a free pet exam coupon when the family cat has been put down?” the ad asks.
“First, it’s important to keep in mind that Google’s practice of earning money by reading personal e-mails is not exclusive to Gmail users,” says Weitz. “This also impacts those who don’t have a Gmail account. If you use another email provider but you send an email to someone else’s Gmail account, Google goes through that too. That’s why we’re also asking consumers to sign the petition on Scroogled.com and tell Google to stop going through their emails to sell ads.”
“Second, Outlook.com is committed to protecting users’ privacy and offers users the experience they’re seeking in their email provider,” he continues. “Last, I’m not sure how making their targeting even more exact is going to make the 90% of Americans who say it should stop any happier.”
In case you’re wondering if Microsoft has ever targeted ads based on email message content, Weitz says, “We have never targeted ads based on the content of email messages. Our privacy policy is very clear on this. The bottom-line is we don’t eavesdrop on private communications. We still have ads in Outlook, but the difference is we don’t scan your mail to sell those ads. We think we can still make revenue to pay for the service even if the ads are not directly targeted or related to the private communications that you have. And we give users the option to opt-out, which is a big difference from Gmail.”
Microsoft told us during the original holiday themed Scroogled campaign that the name “Scroogled” was about “Scrooge” (as opposed to “getting screwed by Google” or something along those lines). We could buy it at the time, given the holiday context. Bing even went out of its way to make A Christmas Carol references in its announcement of the campaign. Now that we’re into February, it’s starting to feel a little more like “screwed by Google”.
“You can interpret it however you would like, but Outlook.com’s ‘Don’t Get Scroogled’ campaign is purely about prioritizing privacy and making people informed,” says Weitz. “When polled, over two-thirds are unaware that Google reads their e-mails to make money from targeted ads. ‘Don’t Get Scroogled’ is simply a national consumer awareness campaign to educate Americans about Google’s practice of going through the contents of personal Gmail email messages to sell and target ads. That, and the term has entered the lexicon to generally refer to unseemly practices by Google.”
On a different note, given the rivalry between Google and Microsoft and Microsoft’s relationship with Yahoo, many are wondering what Microsoft thinks about the newly announced deal between Google and Yahoo for contextual ads.
“I’d say I wonder how Google is using the content [of] your private communications in Gmail to serve ads in other places,” says Weitz on the subject.
“We’ll have more to say about new ad products in the future but it’s important to note that they are just that – new ad types,” he says. “As we always do, we will clearly highlight when something is an ad versus organic.”
Fourth in a series.Editor, with one, two, three introductions behind, Robert X. Cringely’s serialized version of 1991 classic Accidental Empires begins.
Years ago, when you were a kid and I was a kid, something changed in America. One moment we were players of baseball, voters, readers of books, makers of dinner, arguers. And a second later, and for every other second since then, we were all just shoppers.
Shopping is what we do; it’s entertainment. Consumers are what we are; we go shopping for fun. Nearly all of our energy goes into buying — thinking about what we would like to buy or earning money to pay for what we have already bought.
We invented credit cards, suburban shopping malls, and day care just to make our consumerism more efficient. We sent our wives, husbands, children, and grandparents out to work, just to pay for all the stuff we wanted — needed — to buy. We invented a thousand colors of eye shadow and more than 400 different models of automobiles, and forced every garage band in America to make a recording of “Louie Louie”, just so we’d have enough goods to choose between to fill what free time remained. And when, as Americans are wont to do, we surprised ourselves by coming up with a few extra dollars and a few extra hours to spare, we invented entirely new classes of consumer products to satisfy our addiction. Why else would anyone spend $19.95 to buy an Abdomenizer exercise machine?
I blame it all on the personal computer.
Think about it for a moment. Personal computers came along in the late 1970s and by the mid-1980s had invaded every office and infected many homes. In addition to being the ultimate item of conspicuous consumption for those of us who don’t collect fine art, PCs killed the office typewriter, made most secretaries obsolete, and made it possible for a 27-year-old M.B.A. with a PC, a spreadsheet program and three pieces of questionable data to talk his bosses into looting the company pension plan and doing a leveraged buy-out.
Without personal computers, there would have been — could have been — no Michael Milkens or Ivan Boeskys. Without personal computers, there would have been no supply-side economics. But, with the development of personal computers, for the first time in history, a single person could gather together and get a shaky handle on enough data to cure a disease or destroy a career. Personal computers made it possible for businesses to move further and faster than they ever had before, creating untold wealth that we had to spend on something, so we all became shoppers.
Personal computers both created the longest continuous peacetime economic expansion in U.S. history and ended it.
Along the way, personal computers themselves turned into a very big business. In 1990, $70 billion worth of personal computer hardware and software were sold worldwide. After automobiles, energy production, and illegal drugs, personal computers are the largest manufacturing industry in the world and one of the great success stories for American business.
The IPO of solar installer SolarCity — one of the only successful IPOs to come out of the cleantech and clean energy sectors in 2012 — was so touch and go that in the 11th hour the team decided to shelve the IPO and at one point even booked tickets to fly back to San Francisco from New York, according to SolarCity CEO Lyndon Rive during a talk at the Cleantech Investor Summit on Thursday.
Rive said that it was only after they booked their tickets to go home that they ended up confirming with two institutional investors that the investors wouldn’t sell if they saw weakness in the stock on the debut day. After that, it was “game on,” said Rive.
Late 2012 was a difficult time to go public for a solar company, to say the least. Dozens of solar manufacturing companies had gone bankrupt over the year, due to rock bottom solar cell prices. Even though SolarCity is an installer and financier, and not a manufacturer, Wall Street was hesitant to support any type of solar IPO. As a result, during SolarCity’s roadshow it had to reprice its estimated IPO price range from $13 to $15 per share down to $8 per share.
SolarCity actually had a term sheet ready for a private round valuing the company at $8 per share, said Rive in his talk. The company was ready to raise money privately if it couldn’t get the valuation it wanted when going public. And even though it had a private round that matched their eventual IPO price, if it went public and the stock tanked from $8 down to $5 in IPO morning trading, “it would have devastated the company,” said Rive.
But SolarCity went for it and took a chance. It helped that the company’s current investors, Elon Musk, DBL Investors and DFJ, agreed to buy a bunch of shares in the offering. On the morning of the debut, SolarCity’s shares soared 40 percent in morning trading.
Though, SolarCity was the exception last year. Rive told the audience of cleantech investors and entrepreneurs that for any of the cleantech companies looking to go public in 2013, be forewarned: “it’s not easy.”
Windows Phone 8 has faced an uphill climb since it launched late last year. One of the many obstacles on its way to greatness was a lack of quality apps, but that’s been slowly changing.
Microsoft announced that popular music streaming service Spotify has finally launched on Windows Phone 8. Just like its apps on other devices, Spotify for Windows 8 will bring a premium music streaming experience to users for $9.99 a month.
Unlike its app for other devices, Spotify has received a noticeable redesign for Windows 8 to fit in with the design theme seen across all Windows 8 products. It now sports a clean design that’s only marred by a putrid yellow background. Here’s hoping you can change the colors.
We’ve just seen two spectacular stories of how employee dismissals can go dramatically awry in the era of social media.
First, Applebee’s waitress Chelsea Welch was fired for posting a photo on Reddit that showed a customer receipt inscribed with a anti-tipping (but pro-religion) message: “I give God 10%. Why do you get 18?” Between the original Reddit post, Welch’s subsequent article for The Guardian, and a flurry of on- and offline coverage, Applebee’s found itself at the center of a firestorm that gave everyone from labor organizers to social media evangelists something to fret about.
The very next day, we were treated to a first-person account of a mass HMV layoff, as the company’s Online Marketing and Social Media Planner live tweeted her own firing… from the company’s own Twitter account. While it only took 20 minutes for a senior manager to realize what was happening and shut off the tweets, that was long enough to garner HMV global headlines for its lack of foresight.
While one might reasonably debate who was at fault in each of these cases, it’s hard to argue that either situation was good news for the employer. Not only did the companies face tough questions about their termination decisions; they were called out for creating a “a mini-PR disaster” (in the case of HMV) and a “PR nightmare” in the case of Applebee’s.
Welcome to the challenges of HR in the social media age. It’s no longer enough to pile your freshly-dismissed employees’ belongings into a banker’s box and march them out of the building; you’d have to banish their phones and jam their Wi-Fi access if you want to guarantee that their stories will stay offline.
Since that’s neither a viable nor desirable solution, it’s time to face up to the new reality: by potentially exposing any dismissal to public scrutiny, social media makes your customers and the public into de facto stakeholders in your internal HR policies and processes.
That means that companies need to consider both their HR policies and their social media policies in light of the very real possibility that any termination or workplace dispute may become very public very fast. This is doubly true in the case of any dismissal that’s occasioned by a social media misstep, or that involves an employee with a significant social media presence.
But there’s no changing a hard truth about business: sometimes, you have to let people go. Here are five ways you can social-proof your company against backlash from dismissals or disputes:
1. Even if you have a large team working on your social media presence, consolidate management of your social media accounts so that as few people as possible hold the password for your public presences. Use a social media management tool that provides gated access to your social media accounts, so that you can cut off any one employee’s access to all your social accounts by severing their access to your system. Make sure that any social media account passwords are held by at least two people (and recorded in a secure company database), and that they are tied to a corporate (rather than personal or independent) email account, so that in a worst-case scenario, your IT department can get access to all passwords.
2. Set explicit policies for which kinds of online violations are grounds for termination, and be sure that your employees are actually acquainted with these policies. Do note that the legal and regulatory landscape around corporate social media policies is evolving fast, so you will need to consider not only what kinds of policies you’d like, but which policies are likely to be upheld if you face legal action. Just as important, consider which policies might be deemed reasonable by your customers or the general public, in the event that a dismissal became an online cause célèbre.
3. Treat the dismissal of any employee with a significant social media following the way you would treat the dismissal of a senior executive: as an internal matter for which you need an external communications plan. No, you don’t need to convene the board or draft a 12-point game plan every time you lay off an employee with more than 25 Twitter followers. But you should have a generic communications plan that you have on standby in case any layoff gets social media coverage, as well as a protocol for identifying, escalating and addressing any HR story that gathers momentum online.
4. Make sure your social media monitoring covers HR keywords. Particularly if you have a band with a higher volume of social media mentions than you can completely review, set up and monitor searches on your company name plus keywords like “hired”, “fired”, “interviewed,” or “layoff”. Tracking these mentions constantly and thoroughly will not only ensure you notice when a departing employee turns into an issue; it can help you identify those would-be employees who post ill-advised tweets on their way out of the interview.
5. Manage your GlassDoor reputation as carefully as your Yelp profile. Lots of companies put a lot of attention into their customer-facing social media presences, but pay little or not attention to employee- or recruit-facing sites. But reviews on GlassDoor, which claims to offer a peek inside companies’ walls and compensation, can influence would-be applicants and even third party observers. Keep an eye on what your current and past employees say about you on these sites, not only as an early warning system for your PR team, but as an even more crucial source of intelligence on employee satisfaction.
There’s no set of policies or practices that make employee dismissals into happy occasions. But with the right protocols in place, you can avoid being the next HMV or Applebee’s. That means not only averting PR disasters, but helping employees make smart choices about using social media so that they can stay on the team — and by becoming the kind of tuned-in, engaged employer they want to keep working for.
According to one of the original interface designers at Apple the question of his former company creating an iWatch is “when” not “if.” In a long and detailed post on his personal blog this week, interface designer Bruce Tognazzini laid out his case for it. He’s no longer with Apple, but as an early employee he seems to have a good sense of how Apple designers think, and he sees numerous possibilities for such a device and how it might work with Apple’s current products.
“The iWatch will fill a gaping hole in the Apple ecosystem,” he wrote on his Ask Tog blog. “It will facilitate and coordinate not only the activities of all the other computers and devices we use, but a wide array of devices to come. Like other breakthrough Apple products, it’s value will be underestimated at launch, then grow to have a profound impact on our lives and Apple’s fortunes.”
There are already smart watches out there for early adopters. But Apple always goes for the mainstream. The case Tognazzini makes is that for all the apparent drawbacks to getting regular people to wear and use a smart watch, Apple already holds the answers. For example:
No one wants to recharge a watch: Apple has a patent on a wireless recharging method.
Clunkiness can be solved with another patented method Apple has for curved glass displays.
And thanks to Siri, there’s not need for excess buttons to scroll through menus on a small screen.
He also has some very interesting ideas regarding how Apple could use its own iWatch: as a way to remove the need for passwords when using other Apple devices, like a Mac or an iPhone; to make mobile payments possible with an NFC chip-equipped iWatch; to improve its maps with altitude and pressure information sensed on the watch; and as a method of crowdsourcing more accurate weather information.
That’s just a taste; there’s much more and you should read his whole post. As Tognazzini points out, he doesn’t have any insider information and has no idea when Apple could be ready with such a device. But his perspective is smart and while many others are waiting with bated breath for a new television to show Apple’s still got some innovation up its sleeve, Tognazzini’s thought very far ahead of how Apple could make the smartwatch one of its most revolutionary devices yet.
The past few months have been a bit rough for Apple. Samsung attacked the company in a series of amusing ads that portrayed a line of people waiting to buy iPhone as losers. While the ads never specifically mentioned Apple, the implications were certainly clear enough. Combine those attacks with declining stock prices and other nagging battles, such as those in court, and you have a recipe for tough times.
While Samsung largely lets its rival be in the latest ads, Amazon picks up the slack — and, unlike Samsung, is quite clear. The 30-second second clip compares the new Amazon Kindle Fire HD 8.9-inch against Apple iPad with Retina Display and lets the viewer know that, while both devices show “stunning HD”, there is a major difference. Then it proceeds to place the devices side-by-side and let you know that, while you may not be able to tell the difference in the screens, “your wallet definitely can”.
The last part of the ad continues to display the devices in split-screen, but with the prices — $499 versus $299. Amazon clearly hopes this is the lasting image for viewers as the commercial ends.
The question: Is it enough to sway the Apple lover? The two devices are clearly comparable, but the operating systems are vastly different, as are the prices. Likely this may help those on the fence make up their minds, but the battle will rage on and come down to the platform each individual is more comfortable with using. What do you think?
Bahia Shehab’s latest work on the streets of Cairo memorialize 51 children killed in a school bus crash. In this image, three brothers have a conversation. Child 1: “They still didn’t get the lesson.” Child 2: “NO.” Child 3: “It’s OK, repetition is the best teacher.”
On November 17, 2012, in a village in Assuit-Egypt, a train crashed into a school bus killing 51 children. These kinds of accidents have always been brushed aside as random acts of chance. The minister of transportation resigned as a result, and the families of the children were compensated financially. There was a huge public outcry … but eventually these children were forgotten.
But the details of this accident that circulated on social networks were still very vivid in my mind. A video of a regretful father who, when asked the last thing he said to his son before he got on the bus, cried bitterly and said that he hit his son so that he would not miss the bus. Another video showed a girl, only nine years of age — one of the survivors — saying calmly on TV to the government, “You are all dogs.” A note circulated commenting on the price paid by the government to each family and comparing it to other more expensive items, like an iPhone or the front light of a Mercedes Benz. The image of the children wrapped in their shrouds. The cries of the mothers who lost 2 or 3 or 4 children in that accident — one of them has been admitted to a psychiatric ward. And finally a list of the dead children’s names.
In this image, the girl says: “I went to heaven and they are all going to hell.” It’s on the burnt building of the ex-ruling National Party in Downtown Cairo.
All the other details were very painful to me, but the list of names just locked the deal in my head. I wanted to paint these children. To me these children were killed by a corrupt system of governance. We started a revolution so that accidents like this would not happen again. I wanted to bring the children back to life.
I collected the names of the children and grouped them into boys, girls and families. I wanted to paint the sisters and brothers who died together — so that they could come to life again on the streets of Cairo, together. I painted each child walking on a train railway. They are painted in black but their wishes and dreams are painted in color.
This girl says: “I wish I grew up to be a princess.” The green plate reads: “Land owned by Princess Nora al-Saud, Giza-Cairo.”
On the 25th of January, 2013, I started painting the children of Assuit on the walls of Cairo. Some of them appear alone to ask a question, like “ I wish I grew up to be a princess” or “ I could have grown up to be a policeman or a scientist.” A sister calms her brother with a lullaby near a bus stop. The lullaby reads, “Mother is on the way” and her brother asks her, “Soon?” A little girl states that she has died and gone to heaven but they (meaning the responsible ones) are all going to hell. But my favorite is on a barrier wall in downtown Cairo. I painted 8 children playing hide and seek.
Child 1: Khalawees (Are you done? Did you hide?)
Child 2: Not yet.
Child 3: Has the revolution succeeded?
Child 4: Not yet.
Child 5: Did we get the rights of the martyrs?
Child 6: Not yet.
Child 7: Has Egypt become heaven on Earth?
Child 8: Not yet.
The first wall Shehab sprayed in front of the Ministry of Interior, with her series “A thousand times No.”
This barrier wall has a very special story for me. It was the first wall I ever covered with my “A thousand times No” series on February 15, 2012. Another group of artists came on March 15 and painted the street perspective with a very special character, Hanzala, added to the wall as part of a campaign called “There are no walls.” The artists painted the street and pretended that there was no wall — they danced and they sang.
This same wall, painted by other artists to look as if it weren’t there.
When I came back on January 25, even though artists pretended that there was no wall, the walls were still there. So I decided to add the children with Hanzala, with their questions and their dreams.
The children of Assuit will keep appearing on the streets of Cairo, as the conscience of an ongoing revolution, so that we all remember why we went down to the streets and why are we still going down to the streets until today.
In dialogue with the other artists, who put only Hanzala on the street, Shehab painted eight children on the wall.
In the Northeastern United States, there is only one thing the mind today: snow. Weather.com, responsible for naming the coming blizzard, warns that winter storm Nemo will be “crippling.” The New York Times reports that it may bring the heaviest snowfall in a century to many areas. Meanwhile, Buzzfeed is showing images of the storm from space.
What should you do if you get snowed in, with an internet connection? Watch these TED Talks to get in the arctic spirit:
The cut could potentially hit rural areas and small towns the hardest. However, digital agenda commissioner Neelie Kroes, who must be bitterly disappointed as she’s worked on the CEF plans for years, issued a statement in which she said she was still shooting for the goals of having half of Europe surfing at more than 100 Mbps, and the rest on at least 30 Mbps, by 2020:
The TED Prize’s 
Karen Armstrong makes her TED Prize wish: the Charter for Compassion
In the Northeastern United States, there is only one thing the mind today: snow. Weather.com, responsible for 
