Plus HTC v Samsung's displays, Turkey throttling social web?, Twitter moves, and more
A man shows off his new PC. (Caption: Microsoft.) Photograph: Kimberly White/Reuters
A quick burst of 8 links for you to chew over, as picked by the Technology team
The future is killer devices connected to amazing cloud services >> The Official Microsoft Blog
Frank X Shaw, head of Microsoft PR, was at the ATD11 conference:
On one hand, looking around the conference, there were iPads and other tablets as far as the eye could see. On the other hand, (as I noted in a tweet), most of the people around me were using their iPads exactly as they would a laptop - physical keyboard attached, typing away, connected to a network of some kind, creating a document or tweet or blog or article. In that context, it's hard to distinguish between a tablet and a notebook or laptop. The form factors are different, but let's be clear, each is a PC.
Later after dinner, a group of us (including Walt) were talking, and I was trying to make the point that we're getting hung up on semantics in an unnecessary way and probably are more in agreement than not. I actually think the PC is alive and well and thriving, it just comes in tons of different form factors. Many of those form factors are more mobile, and look different from the traditional desktop PC, but the same core idea drives it - personal in nature, used for work and for play, runs applications, connected to a network... etc.
We should include iPads and other tablets in PC numbers? Okey-doke. Also read his points about the smartphone market - and where the Xbox sits in the discussion about Apple TV and Google TV.
Thanks a million >> Microsoft Office blog
in just over 100 days, you've made Office 365 Home Premium a hit with more than 1 million subscribers, putting it on pace with some of the most popular services around.
Slightly cheating to put Office 365 on a par with startups like Instagram (which still got to 1m faster), Hulu and Spotify; Office has a huge base already on an older version, which none of those other startups did. Which makes Instagram (especially), Dropbox et al on the chart look even more impressive.
In Denmark, online tracking of citizens is an unwieldy failure >> TechPresident
Half a decade after Denmark passed a law mandating that telecommunication companies retain and store their customers' personal data for up to one year, local advocacy groups and the telecom industry are pushing for immediate changes to the legislation. The practice of keeping records of private citizens' Internet use is an unjustifiable invasion of privacy, they say. The police, meanwhile, have concluded that requiring telecoms to store Internet subscriber data has not helped them track criminals, which was the the ostensible purpose of the practice. But the Danish government still wants to postpone an evaluation of the law for another two years...
Session logging has caused serious practical problems," the ministry's staffers write in the report. "The implementation of session logging proved to be unusable to the police; this became clear the first time they tried to use [the data] as part of a criminal investigation."
In the UK this proposal is being called the "Snooper's Charter". Denmark has a population of just over 5m - compared to the UK's 60m or so.
HTC learns lesson from Samsung display supply row >> Focus Taiwan
Jack Tong, president of HTC North Asia, recalled that when the HTC Desire was launched in the first quarter of 2010, the phone was using an active-matrix organic light-emitting diode (AMOLED) display supplied by Samsung.
But once the HTC Desire was welcomed by global consumers and telecom operators at the time, Samsung "strategically declined" to supply its AMOLED displays to the smartphone maker, Tong said at a local forum on mobile broadband.
"We found that key component supply can be used as a competitive weapon," he said.
Wonder what proportion of HTC components now come from Samsung. (Via Androidbeat.)
As anti-government protests erupt in Istanbul, Facebook and Twitter appear suddenly throttled >> TechCrunch
Mike Butcher:
A massive anti-government protest in Istanbul, prompted after days of unrest were sparked by plans to redevelop one of the last remaining central public parks, appears to have led to a throttling of social media both in the city and across Turkey. TechCrunch has independently verified via a number of sources that both Facebook and Twitter have been almost impossible to access from inside Istanbul, and other parts of Turkey. There are also anecdotal reports of authorities switching off access in a localised manner around Taksim Square where thousands of people are demonstrating.
Complaints of Twitter throttling (against hashtags) have been made for a long time against the Turkish government.
This American Life: Intellectual Ventures got 90% of ongoing profits even after selling patent >> GeekWire
Intellectual Ventures struck a deal to receive 90% of the ongoing profits from a patent that it sold to a mysterious company called Oasis Research -- which then used the patent to sue 16 tech companies, reaching large settlements with many of them.
That's according to a follow-up piece airing this weekend on This American Life, the public radio program that first dug into Intellectual Ventures' dealings as part of a larger exploration of the patent system in 2011. The size of that "back-end" cut is one of the revelations in the new piece.
The patent in question was used to in a lawsuit against 16 companies. Intellectual Ventures is the company run by ex-Microsoftie Nathan Myhrvold. There have long been suspicions that it's behind, and benefits from, lawsuits by small "non-practising entities" - aka patent trolls. This is the first time this has been confirmed. And when one targeted company finally took the case all the way to a jury trial, the patent was found invalid. But that didn't help companies which had already signed up to pay in earlier settlements.
TweetDeck founder Iain Dodsworth leaves Twitter to start something new, The Guardian's Bulusu now PM >> The Next Web
Dodsworth's timing comes more than a month after Twitter announced that TweetDeck's AIR, Android, and iPhone apps would be killed off -- meaning that it would be removed from their respective app stores and cease to exist. Users with TweetDeck for Mac and PC will still be able to use the app though.
To manage its TweetDeck product, Twitter's Engineering Manager Tom Woolway announced that the company has hired The Guardian's Sharath Bulusu. Previously, Bulusu was the Group Product Manager at the publication leading its Content Platforms team.
Not so anonymous: Bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox tightens identity requirement >> Forbes
Since the crypto-currency Bitcoin hit the limelight, many libertarians and privacy advocates have heralded it as anonymous, digital cash. But the world's biggest Bitcoin exchange-and the US regulators breathing down its neck-see things differently.
On Thursday Mt. Gox announced that it would begin requiring "verification" for all accounts seeking to deposit or withdraw currencies other than Bitcoin, a measure that means users would need to submit government identification and a utility bill or information about the company they work for to trade Bitcoins for traditional money, in effect ending anonymous use of the service.
A man shows off his new PC. (Caption: Microsoft.) Photograph: Kimberly White/Reuters
A quick burst of 8 links for you to chew over, as picked by the Technology team
The future is killer devices connected to amazing cloud services >> The Official Microsoft Blog
Frank X Shaw, head of Microsoft PR, was at the ATD11 conference:
On one hand, looking around the conference, there were iPads and other tablets as far as the eye could see. On the other hand, (as I noted in a tweet), most of the people around me were using their iPads exactly as they would a laptop - physical keyboard attached, typing away, connected to a network of some kind, creating a document or tweet or blog or article. In that context, it's hard to distinguish between a tablet and a notebook or laptop. The form factors are different, but let's be clear, each is a PC.
Later after dinner, a group of us (including Walt) were talking, and I was trying to make the point that we're getting hung up on semantics in an unnecessary way and probably are more in agreement than not. I actually think the PC is alive and well and thriving, it just comes in tons of different form factors. Many of those form factors are more mobile, and look different from the traditional desktop PC, but the same core idea drives it - personal in nature, used for work and for play, runs applications, connected to a network... etc.
We should include iPads and other tablets in PC numbers? Okey-doke. Also read his points about the smartphone market - and where the Xbox sits in the discussion about Apple TV and Google TV.
Thanks a million >> Microsoft Office blog
in just over 100 days, you've made Office 365 Home Premium a hit with more than 1 million subscribers, putting it on pace with some of the most popular services around.
Slightly cheating to put Office 365 on a par with startups like Instagram (which still got to 1m faster), Hulu and Spotify; Office has a huge base already on an older version, which none of those other startups did. Which makes Instagram (especially), Dropbox et al on the chart look even more impressive.
In Denmark, online tracking of citizens is an unwieldy failure >> TechPresident
Half a decade after Denmark passed a law mandating that telecommunication companies retain and store their customers' personal data for up to one year, local advocacy groups and the telecom industry are pushing for immediate changes to the legislation. The practice of keeping records of private citizens' Internet use is an unjustifiable invasion of privacy, they say. The police, meanwhile, have concluded that requiring telecoms to store Internet subscriber data has not helped them track criminals, which was the the ostensible purpose of the practice. But the Danish government still wants to postpone an evaluation of the law for another two years...
Session logging has caused serious practical problems," the ministry's staffers write in the report. "The implementation of session logging proved to be unusable to the police; this became clear the first time they tried to use [the data] as part of a criminal investigation."
In the UK this proposal is being called the "Snooper's Charter". Denmark has a population of just over 5m - compared to the UK's 60m or so.
HTC learns lesson from Samsung display supply row >> Focus Taiwan
Jack Tong, president of HTC North Asia, recalled that when the HTC Desire was launched in the first quarter of 2010, the phone was using an active-matrix organic light-emitting diode (AMOLED) display supplied by Samsung.
But once the HTC Desire was welcomed by global consumers and telecom operators at the time, Samsung "strategically declined" to supply its AMOLED displays to the smartphone maker, Tong said at a local forum on mobile broadband.
"We found that key component supply can be used as a competitive weapon," he said.
Wonder what proportion of HTC components now come from Samsung. (Via Androidbeat.)
As anti-government protests erupt in Istanbul, Facebook and Twitter appear suddenly throttled >> TechCrunch
Mike Butcher:
A massive anti-government protest in Istanbul, prompted after days of unrest were sparked by plans to redevelop one of the last remaining central public parks, appears to have led to a throttling of social media both in the city and across Turkey. TechCrunch has independently verified via a number of sources that both Facebook and Twitter have been almost impossible to access from inside Istanbul, and other parts of Turkey. There are also anecdotal reports of authorities switching off access in a localised manner around Taksim Square where thousands of people are demonstrating.
Complaints of Twitter throttling (against hashtags) have been made for a long time against the Turkish government.
This American Life: Intellectual Ventures got 90% of ongoing profits even after selling patent >> GeekWire
Intellectual Ventures struck a deal to receive 90% of the ongoing profits from a patent that it sold to a mysterious company called Oasis Research -- which then used the patent to sue 16 tech companies, reaching large settlements with many of them.
That's according to a follow-up piece airing this weekend on This American Life, the public radio program that first dug into Intellectual Ventures' dealings as part of a larger exploration of the patent system in 2011. The size of that "back-end" cut is one of the revelations in the new piece.
The patent in question was used to in a lawsuit against 16 companies. Intellectual Ventures is the company run by ex-Microsoftie Nathan Myhrvold. There have long been suspicions that it's behind, and benefits from, lawsuits by small "non-practising entities" - aka patent trolls. This is the first time this has been confirmed. And when one targeted company finally took the case all the way to a jury trial, the patent was found invalid. But that didn't help companies which had already signed up to pay in earlier settlements.
TweetDeck founder Iain Dodsworth leaves Twitter to start something new, The Guardian's Bulusu now PM >> The Next Web
Dodsworth's timing comes more than a month after Twitter announced that TweetDeck's AIR, Android, and iPhone apps would be killed off -- meaning that it would be removed from their respective app stores and cease to exist. Users with TweetDeck for Mac and PC will still be able to use the app though.
To manage its TweetDeck product, Twitter's Engineering Manager Tom Woolway announced that the company has hired The Guardian's Sharath Bulusu. Previously, Bulusu was the Group Product Manager at the publication leading its Content Platforms team.
Not so anonymous: Bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox tightens identity requirement >> Forbes
Since the crypto-currency Bitcoin hit the limelight, many libertarians and privacy advocates have heralded it as anonymous, digital cash. But the world's biggest Bitcoin exchange-and the US regulators breathing down its neck-see things differently.
On Thursday Mt. Gox announced that it would begin requiring "verification" for all accounts seeking to deposit or withdraw currencies other than Bitcoin, a measure that means users would need to submit government identification and a utility bill or information about the company they work for to trade Bitcoins for traditional money, in effect ending anonymous use of the service.
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