Could this Apple location patent be a Google killer?

by mrbill

Apple Gets One Last Nuke From Xerox: A Killer Location Patent That Could Toast Facebook, Foursquare, Google, Etc.
[Via Cult of Mac]

Apple has a long history of taking a technology created by Xerox and transforming it into the heart and soul of computing, such as the mouse or the concept of a graphic user interface. Now comes word Apple owns a Xerox patent for location based services. The patent could prompt Apple to sue a wide array of companies, ranging from Android-backer Google to social networking giant Facebook and any others relying on the ability to check users’ location.

Issued Wednesday, the patent actually dates back to 1998, when it was originally filed by Xerox (and received in 2000.) Apple appears to have purchased the patent Dec. 17, 2009. Not only does the patent pre-date many of today’s technology, including Android-based smartphones, GPS receivers, Facebook, Foursquare and more, but the IP is written so generally as to cover a wide swath of devices.

Here is how the the patent describes a “location information system:” A receiver that receives location identification information from at least one site specific object identifying a location.ladd., where at lease one site specific object is a beacon.laddend.; and a transceiver that transmits the location identification information to a distributed network and that receives the location specific information about the specified location from the distributed network based on the location identification information, wherein the location specific information provides information corresponding to the location.

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I would really be surprised if this patent is as applicable as it might seem. Such general patents do not usually hold up when taken to court.

But, Apple must have known this when it bought the patent in 2009. They have some of the best patent attorneys in the world. How much did they spend for this patent? Why would they buy a patent over 10 years after it was submitted? And why did it take so long to issue?

Could be very interesting.

Sometimes the Europeans are ahead of the US

EU Bans Airport X-Ray Scanners Over Health Concerns
[Via Daring Fireball]

Julia Whitty, reporting for Mother Jones:

Citing health concerns, the European Union banned from European airports this week the same kind of X-ray scanners used by TSA in airports across the US. Here’s the EU’s wording:

In order not to risk jeopardising citizens’ health and safety, only security scanners which do not use X-ray technology are added to the list of authorised methods for passenger screening at EU airports.

Must be nice.

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These scanners are going to be a real problem and never should have been used. I wonder how much longer this boondoggle will continue.

Working for no pay is apparently the way to cure unemployment

Britain’s jobless youth told to work without pay for profitable retailers or lose benefits
[Via Boing Boing]

Young unemployed people in the UK are being told to work for up to 30 hours a week in low-skilled retail jobs for big, profitable firms, without any pay and without promise of any job when their “training” period is finished. Workers who refuse this are cut off their “Jobseekers” allowance (how they’re supposed to seek a job while working nearly full-time without any pay is a mystery).

Under the government’s work experience programme young jobseekers are exempted from national minimum wage laws for up to eight weeks and are being offered placements in Tesco, Poundland, Argos, Sainsbury’s and a multitude of other big name businesses.

The Department for Work and Pensions says that if jobseekers “express an interest” in an offer of work experience they must continue to work without pay, after a one-week cooling-off period, or face having their benefits docked.

Young people have told the Guardian that they are doing up to 30 hours a week of unpaid labour and have to be available from 9am to 10pm.

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It’s like something from Alice in Wonderland. In order to keep getting unemployment benefits, they have to work without pay. Sounds great for the corporations – nothing is cheaper than free labor. Well, I guess indentured servitude and slavery are.

MAybe they will be next.

 

Best Commercial for Rube-Goldberg composers

Apple still might create a network separate from wireless carriers

by aussiegall

Steve Jobs wanted Apple to build own cell network for first iPhone

[Via AppleInsider]

Before launching the first iPhone, late Apple co-founder Steve Jobs wanted to replace established mobile carriers by creating a proprietary network specifically for the handset by leveraging an unused license-free spectrum band.

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I’ve written about Apple’s possible use of White-fi to get around the cell carriers. If it wants to reallocate a mobile and TV experience second to none, it needs to really be able to control the price for data transmission. At the moment, that control lies with others – both cell companies and, to a lesser extent, the cable companies.

Apple, and others like Microsoft, can not fully create the digital world with others acting as gatekeeppers.

So, I do think we will here about some sort of alternate wireless network to transmit data for digital devices. I think it is likely that it might be a consortium of digital companies that works this out.

But I do think that we will see something because the needs and incentives for mobile digital devices is much different than for cell phones. The old paradigm for providing data will change very rapidly in the next few years.

And I expect Apple to be part of it.

I pretty much have to agree with E D Kain on Paterno’s firing

Firing Joe Paterno Was the Right Decision
[Via American Times]

Angry students at Penn State took to the streets after the Penn State Board of Trustees fired legendary head football coach Joe Paterno. Paterno’s fall from grace came after the Board decided he had not done enough to stop former assistant coach, Jerry Sandusky, from sexually assaulting young boys over a period of fifteen years.

But the Board did the right thing in firing Paterno and University President, Graham Spanier. Paterno did not report allegations of sexual assault to the police or make sure that those reports were acted on by university officials. He was the patriarch of a prestigious football program, and what his assistant coaches did was his responsibility for better or worse. Yet he failed to act.

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Leaders who spend too much time protecting the institution instead of its members often find that this comes back to destroy them. This has happened with almost every human institution – in politics, sports and religion.

A leader needs to get out in front of this, take proactive approaches and work hard against the institution’s normal approach towards protecting itself – sweep scandal under the rug.

I expect these firings not to be the last. I expect we will find out that members of the Board knew and did nothing.

Sweeping things like this under the rug not only almost never works, it destroys any possible trust the institution may need to move forward. Now, who really trusts what even the Board says?

We are not done yet.

Google+ feels way too much like a work in progress

Scoble wishes he had never heard of Google+’s brand pages.
[Via Dave Winer's linkblog feed]

Scoble wishes he had never heard of Google+’s brand pages.

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One thing with Apple – they really try to ship something that feels like a completed product.

Google always seems to ship rings that are in permanent beta. Never quite fully thought out or implemented. Scoble documents how they have set up Google+ for businesses that does not actually help businesses or their customers.

The graph to show next time denialists say global warming has stopped

How Can It Be Warming When It’s (Almost) Always Cooling?
[Via Climate Progress]

The Koch-funded Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Study (BEST) verified three things we already knew:

1. Recent global warming has been “on the high end.”
   
2. It’s accelerating.
3. The data won’t stop the deniers and their media allies from spreading disinformation, including the myth that it has stopped warming.

Figure 1: BEST land-only surface temperature data (green) with linear trends applied to the timeframes 1973 to 1980, 1980 to 1988, 1988 to 1995, 1995 to 2001, 1998 to 2005, 2002 to 2010 (blue), and 1973 to 2010 (red).

Dana of Skeptical Science has a good post on the denier’s latest spin, “Going Down the Up Escalator,” reposted below.

One of the most common misunderstandings amongst climate “skeptics” is the difference between short-term noise and long-term signal.  In fact, “it hasn’t warmed since 1998” is ninth on the list of most-used climate myths, and “it’s cooling” is fifth.

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Because of normal climate oscillations, which sometimes add to the heating trend and sometimes subtract, looking at approximately decade long trends – or shorter – in pretty meaningless. They cherry pick the times warming appears slower due to these weather oscillations but ignore the times when it heats faster.

The data set above was actual;y created by some skeptical scientists. Their conclusions is that the globe is warming. And their work has separated out the true scientific skeptics from the denialists.

Because the denialists continue to attack the work of the skeptical scientists with almost exactly the same arguments they used earlier against all climate researchers.

For someone living in a Cargo Cult World, the narrative is always more important than the data. To a scientist, the data determines the narrative.

What happens when recording artists start sueing to get their fair shar of digital revenue

Fight The Power: Chuck D Sues Universal Music For Hundreds Of Millions In Unpaid Royalties
[Via Techdirt]

When Eminem’s publisher won its lawsuit with Universal Music over how to account for iTunes royalties, we expected a flood of similar litigation, possibly enough to seriously cripple the world’s largest record label. Universal Music insisted that Eminem’s deal was unique and the case was specific only to that, but so far, we’re seeing more and more musicians understanding the implications of the ruling, and filing similar lawsuits. If you don’t recall, the battle came down to the simple question of whether or not an iTunes sale was a sale or if it was a license. Amusingly, in almost all other legal contexts, Universal Music claims that when you “buy” a song at iTunes it’s just a license. But that proved to be UMG’s undoing here — because many of its old contracts had extremely different terms for royalties on “sales” and “licenses.”

Now, there’s a good reason for this. Historically, sales were of things like CDs, where Universal had relatively higher production, storage and distribution costs. So for “sales” (of CDs), the royalty to the musician was lower. “Licenses” generally referred to things like licensing a song for a movie or TV commercial. There, labels were willing to share higher royalties with the artist, and for good reason. The costs to the label of such a license were minimal, and licensing was always a relatively small part of the business.

But, of course, iTunes makes for a weird situation. The labels want to pretend it’s the same thing as selling a CD, and thus they’ve been paying the lower royalty rate. But, in other legal contexts they keep claiming that downloading a song from iTunes is not really a “sale” but merely a “license.” Thus, the basic legal claim from musicians is that for iTunes sales, they deserve the much higher royalty rate (usually closer to 50%, rather than 10% for sales). The court in the Eminem/FBT case said that iTunes songs were licenses… and thus the higher rates applied.

As we noted, when others started suing, this could lead to somewhere around $2 billion that the labels may need to pay out to artists, and the artists are noticing.

The latest to file suit is is Chuck D of Public Enemy, claiming that Universal owes him hundreds of millions of dollars.

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What a surprise. When it suit shame it is a sale. When it doesn’t they call it a license. Except when they call it a license, they owe artists more money.

Hoisted by their own petard. Read the rest of the post to see just how outrageous their ‘deductions’ are before they calculate the royalty.

The artists gets $80 for every 1000 songs sold – by the company’s calculation based on a sale. Based on a license, they owe over $315.

Looks like the media companies rip everyone off. But they continue to act like they are the victims.

Why I do not watch TV news anymore – Conan O’Brien does a gay wedding rake joke

Same Talking, Different Heads: How Not To Localize News
[Via Techdirt]

If you haven’t seen this short clip of a bunch of local TV newscasters all saying the exact same line about Conan O’Brien’s officiating a same-sex marriage on stage in New York City during a show this week, it’s really worth watching just for the mind-numbingly bizarre reaction you have to seeing so many newscasters all repeat the exact line: “Conan O’Brien may be about to push the envelope on late night television.” Or, as O’Brien notes, watch as they each put “their own spin” on the news:

Honestly, it’s hard not to watch that and think that all of the newscasters didn’t receive the identical script. While the phrase is a common one, it’s not that common that it would lead so many newscasters to all use the identical phrasing. It’s possible these are all news affiliates from a single company, who were sent a basic script — but, once again, this seems to highlight the growing irrelevance/ridiculousness of TV news these days. If you’re just going to have 50 different newscasters all read the identical script, why not just have a single newscaster do it, and air it directly on all those other stations.

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The rake joke from the Simpsons Cape Feare episode is a classic of comedy. Extend the initial joke past the point of being unfunny until it is funny again.

Conan, who used to work on the Simpsons, presents the rake joke as satire, demonstrating the absolutely brainless nature of local news. There must be a central producer of the news, sending out the material to huge numbers of news programs to fill in their time.

They do not even put any effort into reframing the piece because that would cost money for writers. No writers, no camera people – yep, many of the cameras are robotically run from the production booth – and only some good looking newsreaders.

Much better to get the news via more interesting, better written and more newsworthy online sources.

Wonderful use of data and speculation to determine that the next Revolutionary User Interface is here

Revolutionary User Interfaces
[Via asymco]

A few years ago, around the middle of the last decade, the mobile phone market was characterized by the rivalry between a few established vendors. These were Nokia, Samsung, LG, Motorola and Sony Ericsson. These incumbent companies had a broad portfolio of devices including smartphones and feature phones and basic phones. Many also sold networking equipment and were deeply engaged with their customers, network operators.

There was also a set of entrants who offered only smartphones.  They were quirky. HTC was a a prominent “ODM” or original design manufacturer who built phones for companies who added their brands and sold and supported the product. HTC made phones and PDAs for operator brands and for some large PC companies. It also began to sell phones under its own brand. RIM was also offering products that had evolved from pagers into email appliances with added voice capabilities. But RIM’s products were not very good as phones. Voice was so poorly integrated that many people carried both a BlackBerry and a voice phone. Then there was Palm with something called a Treo which promised many things but did not quite deliver.

In 2007 something happened which changed the industry. It took a few years to even realize it was happening but by the time it was obvious, it had changed to such a degree that huge companies found themselves in financial distress. This chart illustrates the effect.

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Please read the whole article. I thought it would be another “Apple is disrupting the whole industry” article again but it is so much more.

It is attempting to show that the really disruptive aspects of our digital world come from new ways of interacting with the technology. From the mouse to the click wheel to touch, each device added to our ability to interact with technology and disrupted the  industries that were not using that interface.

The phone industry was killed by the addition of touch.

Could the entire technology industry be disrupted by Siri? The author makes a good case. I agree.

Siri-type ways of interacting with a digital device have been a dream since Star Trek. Now Apple can put it in everything.

And no one has anything similar that is as robust. Could TV be what Apple disrupts next?

Amazon continues to disrupt the book industry

by shutterhacks

Kindle Library Launches for Amazon Prime Members
[Via American Times]

With the launch of a new library service, Amazon is changing the e-book market forever.

If you happen to own a Kindle and if you belong to Amazon’s Prime service, you’re in luck. Not only will the $79/year service get you free 2-day shipping and access to thousands of streaming movies and television shows at Amazon Video, now you’ll be able to borrow e-books from the new Kindle library service Amazon is offering.

While the original launch of the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library is limited to around 5,000 titles, and while none of the top US publishers is participating yet, the move represents the first step in a shift toward subscription-based, rather than purchase-based, e-reading.

Kindle owners – you need the device, not just an app – can borrow one book at a time per month and hold on to that book until they want to borrow a second one.

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I’ve had Prime since the beginning because we buy a lot of stuff from Amazon and getting quicker delivery seemed a good price to pay.

My wife got a Kindle for her birthday. Now she can check out a book to read as an added bonus. And take as long to read it as possible.

There may not be a great choice right now but it is also likely that she’ll read books that she might not have paid for just to check out.

And may find some authors that she wold like to read more from and pay for.

This has the chance of being a win-win for everyone – except maybe the book publishers whose business models are still stuck in the 1950s.

Alas, my days of Infinity Blade are over because all it does is crash

I may never see him again

Infinity Blade was my favorite game on my original iPad. It was a great way to spend 10 minutes or so, stop and the continue at another time.

It operates right at the limit of what the RAM of the first  iPad can deal with. It would sometimes crash, sending me back to the home screen. But a quick shut down and restart flushed out whatever was causing the problem and I was good to go.

But not since I upgraded to iOS5. The game crashed hard right in the middle of the bottom level where I place the Infinity Blade in its receptacle.

And now nothing will allow the game to play. Shutting down and restarting – it crashes at the startup screen. Turn off Wi-fi – it crashes at the startup screen.

Reload from my backup – it crashes at the startup screen. Nothing works.

All that is apparently left is to delete the app and reload it back on the iPad. But then I will lose all my saved games. The things I spent months accomplishing – gone.

So, I have to come to terms with the fact that all my work is lost and probably will not be recovered.

Perhaps I can ask for a new iPad2 for Christmas. Maybe the game will recover from the crash on an iPad with more memory?

Apple showed us the future in 1987 and pretty much hit it dead on

Why Microsoft’s Vision of the Future Is Dead on Arrival
[Via Daring Fireball]

John Pavlus:

What “future of” tech/design videos need is a little less Minority Report and a little more Alien. Director Ridley Scott famously told his production designers to make Alien’s spaceship and costumes look roughed-up, slightly messy, and above all, lived in. Otherwise, it just isn’t believable enough to see yourself in — which is a design problem that both horror movies and corporate promos need to solve. Microsoft’s film is probably going viral as we speak, but imagine how much more reach it would have if it dared to depict a guy stuck in a meeting that sucked, or using his smartphone in an airport that was full of noisy assholes and long lines, or searching his touchscreen-enabled smart refrigerator for a quick meal because his kids are bouncing off the walls and he’s bone-tired from a long day at work?

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Watch Microsoft’s vision or Blackberry’s vision. You see lots of manual interaction with screens of some sort in a very clean world of happy people. Living in all new spaces with new types of rooms that are all so spic and span.

And just nondescript shades of white and gray. No real living colors.

They are so wonderful that they simply do not looked lived in. There is no personality, just  clean lines and sharp edges. Everyone uses the same OS apparently with the same font and colors. There is little human interaction at all. The vast amount of time is spent interacting with the devices around them.

In fact, I do not think there is a single scene in which here is not some sort of digital interaction.

All these amazing things happen in a world that seems quite different than ours. It actually does not seem lived in. Ridley Scott was correct.

I’m not sure I want to live in such a world but if I did, it would require buying a huge number of new things, completely redesigning buildings and living structures. It would need a whole new us.

Now look at Apple’s vision of the future from 1987.

It has real humans doing really human things in an environment that is actually quite normal. It shows a room that is highly personalized and people with definite personalities. Not some sharp-edged simulacrum of a person but real people with real problems interacting with both real people and data.

It shows people actually talking with each other. It uses touch, speech, AI, video all to make slides and other media.

It shows a tool that makes their life easier, not a whole new ‘World of Tomorrow.’ That is the real problem I have with the other visions.

Its all about the dramatic. Little about the pragmatic. Their view is about the fiction. Apple’s was about the reality.

And note the dates. From the video, it is obvious that the time period is 2011. With the release of Siri – now with a female voice rather than an bow-tied man – Apple actually has all the pieces shown. Its view of the future was surprisingly accurate, even though this was done 10 years before Jobs returned to Apple.

Touch, speech recognition, Face Time, graphing, cloud based networking, etc. And the reality is that the real device is smaller than shown.

Google Reader becomes less useful

Farewell Google Reader – We’ll Miss You – Forbes
[Via Forbes]

Word on the street is Google Reader’s social functions, its funky community of shares and comments, and the archives of these interactions, will all be flushed down the memory hole tomorrow.

I check my Reader every day and it’s always a minute or two before I realize that these people I’m following, these comment threads I’ve become accustomed to, these excellent finds – will all be gone.

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Google messed with Search, to its detriment in my opinion. It is messing with its Maps, now charging perhaps $10,000 for a license to put tMaps on a website.

And Now Google Reader is messed around with. I think Google’s focus on social sharing to compete with Facebook will harm it. It is competing head to head with way too many companies – Apple with regard to mobile devices, Facebook for Social sites, Microsoft on Search.

Can gmail be far behind?

I just do not believe it will be able to keep its eyes on the prize in so many different areas. We can see this in the problems each area has. Google is starting to fall into the same sort of trap others have of trying to be all things to everyone in all the cutting edge areas.

I simply do not trust Google like I used to. They are becoming more and more interested in doing things for their own purposes rather than making my life better. They are focussing on copying others, becoming the second to market in areas rather than the best.