From the New York Times:
Drawing on messages posted by more than two million people in 84 countries, researchers discovered that the emotional tone of people’s messages followed a similar pattern not only through the day but also through the week and the changing seasons. The new analysis suggests that our moods are driven in part by a shared underlying biological rhythm that transcends culture and environment.
I find this fascinating.
No idea how true this is, but let’s assume it’s true so we can ask a few fun questions:
Would Amazon want Palm for the Patents, or WebOS?
Seems likely that they’d want the patents more than WebOS. They’ve jumped into the Android pool rather head-first with the Fire and their App Store. Hard to see them backing away from that.
On the other hand there are a lot of good reasons to think that a solid mobile device patent portfolio is something that Amazon could use to defend themselves going forward. It’s not like Amazon has been afraid of hoarding patents in the past.
Is this kind of deal still on the table given all of HPs CEO issues?
Will HP still want to sell these assets after yet another CEO change? Will they change corporate directions yet again in the next few weeks? Will they want to hold onto the TouchPad so they can continue selling it at a $400 loss for each unit they sell?
How much would Amazon have to pay for Palm assets?
I think $99 would be a fair HP-quality price for something like this.
Inquiring minds want to know.
From the bottom up:
The new Kindle looks like a great step. The price is so low there doesn’t seem to be any reason to buy anything else. Granted it’s trick pricing (see below) but the price has been slashed substantially no matter how you look at it. A lot of new people are going to own Kindles after this Christmas.
The Kindle Touch looks like a nice upgrade for a current Kindle owner. Personally I hate the non-touch interface, and I’m considering upgrading just for that. X-Ray seems like a great new feature, as does an even lighter device.
The Fire is just about everything one would have expected it to be, but the price is even lower than most people were guessing. Clearly the idea is that you buy an Amazon Fire to read Kindle books, watch Amazon Movies, and listen to your Amazon MP3s. That you can play games on it is just a bonus. If you just want a color Kindle, this is less than half the price of an iPad.
I haven’t read any in-depth reviews yet, but I will be interested to hear about the overall performance of the device. Amazon has built it on Android, but this isn’t your Xoom’s Android. This is Amazon’s totally custom fork, built with their device(s) in mind only. We’ll just have to wait and see how well that works out.
The hidden gem of today’s announcements, in my opinon, is Amazon Silk, the Fire’s web browser. The short summary is that Amazon is complicating the delivery process of websites by injecting themselves as a high-performance proxy with the idea of improving performance of the tablet’s browser. Most likely this is to beef up performance of an otherwise sluggish browsing experience. There are myriad performance, privacy, and security implications that only time will really flesh out, but it’s an interesting move that might yield both better browsing for Fire owners as well as some very interesting data for Amazon to play with.
It’s the day before the Amazon tablet announcement, and really most of it has already been announced, but I thought I’d throw out my thoughts before it’s revealed, mostly for my own fun.
Color Screen Duh.
7” Screen I can’t remember if we have been told the details on this yet or not. Seems rather unlikely to me that they’ll try to make it any bigger. 7” keeps it right near the same size as the current kindle.
Touch Screen Only No physical keyboard. Most likely it’ll have the same stupid Android hardward buttons every other android device has.
Runs Android
No mention of Google anywhere I wouldn’t be surprised if they don’t even say “Android” anywhere. Everything is going to be branded Amazon. The store, the apps, the device. All Amazon.
$299
Available within the next 2 weeks
Extensive battery life You’re going to be able to read all day with this thing.
It’s not an iPad competitor They’re not trying to compete with the iPad, they’re trying to sell more books, movies, tv shows, music. This thing is going to come pre-hooked up with all the CloudDrive, etc. etc. — turn it on and login with your Amazon account. Buy anything you want with a single click.
No matter what happens tomorrow I’m looking forward to seeing a device by a company that knows how to provide a great product.
New York Times reporting:
LOS ANGELES — DreamWorks Animation, the company behind successful movie franchises like “Madagascar” and “Shrek,” said it had completed a deal to pump its films and television specials through Netflix, replacing a less lucrative pact with HBO.
The Netflix accord, which analysts estimate is worth $30 million per picture to DreamWorks over an unspecified period of years, is billed by the companies as the first time a major Hollywood supplier has chosen Web streaming over pay television.
It is also a bet by Jeffrey Katzenberg, the animation studio’s chief executive, that consumers in the near future will not distinguish between the two. “We are really starting to see a long-term road map of where the industry is headed,” Mr. Katzenberg said in an interview. “This is a game-changing deal.”
Who’s next?
Update: But it doesn’t start until 2013? That’s pretty lame.
The writing is on the wall and it says, “DVDs are dead.”
The DVD business is expensive to operate, requires loads of employees to get the job done, and relies on the USPS, which is going to have fewer delivery days and higher rates in the future.
By rebranding the DVD side of the business they afford themselves the opportunity to sell it off in the near future. When DVDs only arrive 3 days a week because the USPS drops it’s delivery days, people will say, “Netflix wouldn’t have done this.” When prices go up 200% because postage rates continue to skyrocket, people will say, “Netflix wouldn’t have done this.” When workers are laid off and DVDs take longer and longer to turn around and more and more mistakes happen people will say, “Netflix wouldn’t have done this.”
But of course they would have had to, because DVDs are a desperate, dying business.
Dish Network, after buying Blockbuster’s assets, is going to get into the same game. Let’s see how that’s working out 12 months from now.
Still, Netflix is taking a big gamble — they’re betting the company on their ability to make some killer content deals to keep people happy with their streaming service. If they can’t pull this off then Netflix is toast, finished, done for. But at least this way they have a chance.
The bird was already doused with gasoline. Yes, they lit the match. Now we all stare at the ashes waiting to see if anything happens.
I am terrible at attempting to estimate how long a programming task will take. I’ve learned to take my instinct and at least double it, but often I’m still off by an order of magnitude (usually low, sometimes high).
Sometimes my estimates are wrong because the client changes the nature of the task half-way through. Sometimes my estimates are wrong because I get sick or there’s a family emergency in the middle of the project. But almost always the reason that my estimates are so awful is because ** I’m creating something that has never existed before. **Sure, a button similar to this one exists in another app somewhere. And that ability to download a file like this isn’t unique. But never before in the history of man kind have they been put together in just this way.
Moreover, the natural state of software is failure. **Normally**, something is going wrong. The version of the library you tested against isn’t the same one the user has. The user’s network connection suddenly dropped in the middle of trying to read that file. The battery died while the user preference were being saved. The user thought it would be fun to edit the save game file *just to see what would happen.*And since the natural state of software is failure, most of the programmer’s efforts must go into protection and prevention. No where is this more evident than in networking code. By it’s nature networking is unreliable and fault tolerant. That’s what makes it so robust. An overtaxed router can just drop some packets in order to make sure some others get delivered. Usually those are your packets.
Every time you read from the network, you must assume that your data will not arrive, or will arrive in a corrupt state. Every time you write data to the network, it’s just as bad.
And what makes all this failure especially hard is that the user doesn’t care how hard it is. The user doesn’t know what a packet is, and certainly doesn’t know why if one router dropped it another can’t just pick it up off the floor, dust it off, and send it on it’s way.
The user does not care, but neither should she care. She just wants it to work. So when those downloads fail, she expects them to pick right back up where they were when we comes back. When her file fails to save over the network she doesn’t want to know about “Error 112: Unexpected socket timeout” — she wants you to save that file, never mind how.
And this is why software is hard. As Dick Cheney might say, there are myriad unknown unknowns. It’s hard to find the needle in the haystack. It’s harder to find a needle in the haystack at night. But it doesn’t get really hard until you have to find all the needles in all the haystacks in the warehouse. At night. And tomorrow the kindergarten class is coming to play in the hay, so all those needles you miss…
Great article here about the Google v Skyhook lawsuit. Tons of interesting information about the relationship between Google and Android Handset makers.
Plenty of others will write about the heavy-handed approach that Google is taking with handset makers, and how it doesn’t feel very “open” for a company that touts it’s openness that over and over.
What I want to talk about is an interesting technical explanation for the problems Google was having, and potentially part of their motivation for throwing down the hammer on Motorola.
A central point that Google kept making in these documents is the concern about contaminating their own location database with information from Skyhook. Here’s why I think their concern is legitimate.
Any modern smartphone uses typically 3 different methods (or a combination of these) to determine your location:
This differs between CDMA and GSM, but the basic idea is that the cell phone can know where the cell towers that it’s taking to are, and use those locations to determine it’s approximate position.
This method, made popular by Skyhook, uses your wifi antenna to “see” which wifi access points are visible, and at what signal strength. That data is sent to the wifi location database (Skyhook or Google) and a location is returned. This location is approximate, and relies on the service provider collecting massive amounts of data with GPS and wifi antennas, typically by driving around or using cell phones as data collection devices.
By using a GPS receiver in the phone, the phone can get it’s exact location on earth, typically within a few meters.
There are lots of reason to pick one method over another. The most common is battery requirements. Using a cell tower uses the least battery because that radio is always on anyway. You don’t have to use extra power. Wifi is used because it’s faster to get a location and typically uses less power than GPS. It’s also typically more accurate than cell tower triangulation (much more so on CDMA). Finally, GPS will always give you the most accurate location, but it uses the most battery power, takes the longest time to get a location (usually), and doesn’t work well (if at all) if you don’t have a clear view of the sky.
The problem that Google seems to have had with Motorola using Skyhook in their phones is that the Skyhook locations were being reported as a GPS location by the phone.
Now, it’s important to realize that Google uses their phones as a wifi location database collection tool (well documented in the lawsuit documentation, above). Here’s how that process works:
The problem that Google was having was that the phone could think that it had a GPS fix when in fact all it had was a Skyhook location approximation. This means that Google would be populating it’s own wifi location database with Skyhook locations. This would be both potentially inaccurate and potentially lawsuit inducing if Skyhook thought that it was intentional or through fairly obvious negligence.
You can argue about whether or not Google should be building it’s database through all these Android phones or not. But it seems pretty clear that from a technical perspective there were some good reasons to not let Skyhook be used in this way. Whether they decided to throw down the hammer on Motorola about this was based on this technical reason or more nefarious intents someone else will have to decide.
Either way I wouldn’t be surprised if future versions of Android ship with Skyhook’s wifi location service built in, but without sending that data back to Google and instead working in tandem with Google’s own location database building desires.
It’s become common to compare iOS and Android to Apple v Microsoft of the 1980s-1990s. As the theory goes, Android is going to come from behind and stomp on the once dominant iOS platform, becoming the One Phone To Rule Them All.
Google, however, seems to have slightly different ambitions.
Gloria Sin, writing for ZDNet:
Imagine if your fridge could automatically ping you on your phone that you need to pick up more milk the next time you go grocery shopping. How about if the lighting and music is synced perfectly with your video game to make the experience even more immersive as demoed on stage? Consumers in the future will be able to purchase an Android @ Home receiver to do just that: to communicate with your Android-enabled appliances, and download apps to control those devices through your tablet or other mobile device.
It seems to me that Google doesn’t want Android to be the new Windows. Rather, Google wants Android to be the Intel of software. Know those “Intel Inside” stickers on every laptop and desktop PC out there? Imagine the same thing, but on your fridge, with a green robot.
Already Android isn’t really a Phone OS, or even a Phone and Tablet OS. Rather, it’s a loose platform that allows Google to widen the pool of potential advertising recipients and gather ever more data to sell to ever more advertisers. Every phone manufacturer has enough modifications to the basic stock Android builds that it’s a very different experience phone to phone. Phone to tablet to phone is even more diverse. The one consistent factor is that you’ll see AdMob (read: Google) ads in most of your apps.
Now imagine if Google could gather data not just from phones and laptops and TV sets, but from refrigerators, cars, toasters and electric boxes. If your Android powered mirror could just see your face in the morning it would know how strong your coffee should be, and maybe offer you a special deal on 5-hour energy.
Google doesn’t want to be Microsoft. They don’t want to have a unified experience across a wide range of commodity hardware. Maybe that’s because trying to get the mobile industry to move to commodity hardware is crazy hard, if not impossible. That’s not a bad reason. But I think it’s even deeper than that. Google doesn’t want to be Microsoft because they don’t just want to be on every PC, or every Phone, or every Tablet. Google wants to be on everything that runs on electricity.
From an interview with Esquire:
And now that we are supposedly entering the next crisis of masculinity — this time the world doesn’t need men because we can’t listen, we can’t sit still in kindergarten, and so all society will shortly be a massive gynocracy in which men’s primary role will be as the problem children of successful mothers and wives — we need Eastwood more than ever. Whatever else has changed over the past fifty years, self-mastery and control over our lives are still what we want more than anything.
Eastwood is not a perfect personification of masculinity, but he is a striking example of modeling self-control and restraint in a world full of machoism and excess. I need to go watch Unforgiven again.