tech

A Killer, Sustainable, Industry Saving Music Service Is Possible – hypebot

A Killer, Sustainable, Industry Saving Music Service Is Possible – hypebot:

You would be amazed what you can build with $10 million dollars in funding when you don’t have to give $8 million of it to the major labels in advances. Spotify, Pandora and countless other services could have, long ago, built tons of these features and value-driving tools if their money wasn’t first poured into the labels, and then their focus placed on scraping by a meager living creating minimal value for car manufacturers and fast food joints.

[It’s all messed up. Kinda like the social networks. The model is simply wrong.]

Dear Mark Zuckerberg

Dear Mark Zuckerberg:

Mark, I know for a fact that my experience was not an isolated incident. Several other startup founders & Facebook employees have told me that what I experienced was part of a systematic M&A “formula”. Your team doesn’t seem to understand that being “good negotiators” vs implying that you will destroy someone’s business built on your “open platform” are not the same thing. I know all about intimidation-based negotiation tactics: I experienced them for years while dealing with the music industry. Bad-faith negotiations are inexcusable, and I didn’t want to believe your company would stoop this low. My mistake.

In a lot of ways, I got what I deserved. I have come to the conclusion that I took this foolhardy risk because the Twitter “platform” was even more of a joke than the Facebook “platform”. As someone that wants to build quality social software, software that doesn’t force users to re-create their friends list, or not use oAuth, etc., I have to endure huge platform risk. Personally speaking, I am resolved to never write another line of code for rotten-to-the-core “platforms” like Facebook or Twitter. Lesson learned.

Mark, I don’t believe that the humans working at Facebook or Twitter want to do the wrong thing. The problem is, employees at Facebook and Twitter are watching your stock price fall, and that is causing them to freak out. Your company, and Twitter, have demonstrably proven that they are willing to screw with users and 3rd-party developer ecosystems, all in the name of ad-revenue. Once you start down the slippery-slope of messing with developers and users, I don’t have any confidence you will stop.

I believe that future social platforms will behave more like infrastructure, and less like media companies. I believe that a number of smaller, interoperable social platforms with a clear, sustainable business models will usurp you. These future companies will be valued at a small fraction of what Facebook and Twitter currently are. I think that is OK. Platforms are judged by the value generated by their ecosystem, not by the value the platforms directly capture.

[Amazing how rotten, how fast.]

Source: Dalton Caldwell

Playing in Gatekeeper’s sandbox

Playing in Gatekeeper’s sandbox:

Here’s why this concerns me a little: I’ve argued in the past that the kind of “open” we should really care about is open data. It shouldn’t matter whether I’m using Emacs or BBEdit or Byword for text, GIMP or Photoshop or Acorn to edit a PNG file, Alpine or Postbox to access mail on IMAP servers. If all of your meaningful data is open, you seriously reduce the friction inherent in switching applications or even computing platforms.

As neat as iCloud is, I’m concerned that it adds friction that a solution like Dropbox doesn’t. It may make “power user” tasks just within the Apple ecosystem a little more difficult—and it makes moving between ecosystems a lot more difficult. Suppose that I want to keep my Air and my iPad but replace my iPhone with whatever the next Nexus phone is? (Look, you never know.) If everything on the Air and the iPad starts adopting iCloud as the One True Sync Solution, doing this in 2014 might be a lot tougher than it is in 2012.

[Worrisome indeed. But it’s a question of motive, and this game is still being played.]

Source: Coyote Tracks

Microsoft: “Metro” out, “Windows 8-style UI” in, amid rumors of a trademark dispute

Microsoft: “Metro” out, “Windows 8-style UI” in, amid rumors of a trademark dispute:

I’m not saying I love Apple’s approach to these kind of disputes. But this is folding like a stack of cards, and then declaring that you actually folded like a stack of something else foldable, just in case “cards” are trademarked.

[I simply loved how he put this.]

Source: Coyote Tracks

Black Hat hacker gains access to 4 million hotel rooms with Arduino microcontroller | ExtremeTech

Black Hat hacker gains access to 4 million hotel rooms with Arduino microcontroller | ExtremeTech:

The best bit: By playing this 32-bit code back to the lock… it opens. According to Brocious, it takes just 200 milliseconds to read the sitecode and open the lock. “I plug it in, power it up, and the lock opens,” Brocious says. His current implementation doesn’t work with every lock, and he doesn’t intend to take his work any further, but his slides and research paper make it very clear that Onity locks, rather ironically, lack even the most basic security.

[Simple. Onity never considered that as part of the security. What a mess.]

iTunes U Enrolment and Apple IDs

iTunes U Enrolment and Apple IDs:

Anyway, at first glance it seems that you absolutely need individual Apple IDs to enrol students in a course now. I’ve always been keen on handing over as much IT autonomy to the student as possible, and that’s where I think we should all be aiming, but changing your AppleID structures is a once-a-year thing to do and no small matter. Is there a workaround in the meantime?

It turns out that there is: to create a course that students can subscribe to without entering AppleID credentials, you have to:

Create the course in Course Manager – this creates a private course with an enrolment roster.

Submit the course to the person who controls your institution’s iTunes U Public Site Manager

Have them ‘hide’ the course in PSM.

This creates a course which has a direct URL for subscription (it’s referred to as the ‘Audit URL’ in iTunes U) but which does not require Apple ID credentials to subscribe to.

This isn’t an ideal solution as it requires coordination between all the course authors at an institution and the person running the Public Site Manager. Still, it works for now and the future is ever more clearly heading towards individual Apple IDs for individual students. That’s where I’m recommending all new 1:1s start their thinking but, still, always the two stumbling blocks of no Volume Purchase and COPPA’s lower limit of 13-years-old for an iTunes account. I hope we can get these things ironed out soon.

Source: Fraser Speirs

The 2012 ADE Institute

The 2012 ADE Institute:

Personally, I’m looking to iTunes U. My project for the next three years is to lead a transition to using iTunes U across the whole of our school. Initially, we will adopt it for assignments and content distribution. Next year, as the new National 4/5 exams come in, we will be redesigning our courses on the assumption that this kind of technology is available to us. Further down the road, I hope to use iTunes U to expand the range of courses available to our students and, once that model is proven, make those courses available to schools across Scotland.

The second trend I picked up on was the continuing shift towards total student autonomy in IT. The shift to mobile is eliminating the need for dedicated computer space in schools. The shift to iOS is eliminating the need for dedicated server hardware, home directory infrastructures and backup systems. On iOS pupils can genuinely administer their own devices in a secure and stable fashion, eliminating a broad range of tech support oversight functions.

The final step is to eliminate the network. I had several conversations about the difficulty of scaling school networks beyond the 300-400 device range into the multiple thousands of devices in larger schools. Several people observed to me that mobile networks are designed to scale to those numbers without issue. The shift towards LTE cellular networking – which is typically faster than the broadband in a school – is starting to look like an interesting option for schools that cannot provision or scale their networks to multiple thousands of devices.

Imagine, in 5-7 years having gone from the complexity of laying ethernet in fixed locations in schools, building broadband, deploying servers and switches all over the school to the simplicity handing out an iPad and a SIM card and getting on with the learning.

[Interesting. So far, my experience with using an iPad for “work” is a mixed bag. I can code, I can write, I can communicate. But sometimes I do all that stuff in rapid succession, and need awareness of them all. OK, so maybe a laptop is the correct tool, and that’s fine. But I will continue to explore what the office of the future looks like, and am heartened that such great strides are being made in the field of education, and am looking for ways to incorporate the same type of thinking into our office.]

Source: Fraser Speirs

More on Sparrow and talent acquisitions

More on Sparrow and talent acquisitions:

Don’t blame Sparrow. Blame the terrible market for email clients.

[So why is there such a terrible market for email clients. I admit I’ve come to loath email, because a generation of folks have been taught to abuse and misuse it. Still, you’d think that there’s enough of a market, even with the “meh” if default options. I enjoyed Sparrow for the iPhone because it let me separate work email from everything else in a really easy fashion. Ah well.]

Source: Marco.org

The End of Not Knowing

The End of Not Knowing:

Without even really thinking about it, I slid open my iPhone that was mounted on the dashboard playing music. I fired up the TomTom app, picked my destination. In a couple of seconds, the phone beeped to show that the obstruction was 1.1 miles from my current position and that the delay to my journey would be approximately four minutes.

It’s not that GPS navigation systems with live traffic data are particularly new; it was just the contrast between my experience and the frustrated, anxious driver in the next lane that made me think about this. It felt like I had a sixth sense: data.

[I know that feeling and I agree. Also, the phones have quickly gotten better at this stuff than the gear installed in your car. The auto designers ought to be building iPad holders and such into the dashboard, and connectivity for GPS/Cell antennas etc. There’d be a far greater return for the car owner, and you could still charge a hefty amount for it…]

Source: Fraser Speirs