Rexfeng

This slideshow on The Emerging Global Web shows how people in the rest of the world, particularly in countries with emerging economies, use the internet. Talks about things like selling sheep on Instagram, mobile-only internet use, online marketplaces in China like Tmall, a Chinese eBay for services, lifestyle bloggers as retailers, and mobile-only banking and payments.

Veteran indie dev Jeff Vogel puts into words that niggling doubt in the pit of your stomach.

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Steven Frank:

Like everyone else, I wasted a lot of my parents’ quarters playing Dragon’s Lair and lasting for about 2 minutes before losing all five lives. Fortunately, the local grocery store had a Dragon’s Lair cabinet, as well as a couple of other games, so I got many occasions to practice.

One day I was sitting in our apartment reading a video game magazine (nerd!), and in the back was a little section of classified ads. My eye was caught immediately by the words “Beat Space Ace and Dragon’s Lair!” For a few bucks, you could send away for this random guy’s strategy guide, which listed all the moves and when to make them.

Please realize there was no residential internet. We had a computer, but no modem. There was no just going to Google for an FAQ or walkthrough. If you didn’t know the moves, you just didn’t know them, unless you knew someone else who knew them, which of course you didn’t.

What a great story.

Promising to "cure your hangover on your lunch break" The Hangover Club is a new service that will be opening up several "pop up" locations, as well as operating a "hangover bus," in Manhattan beginning next month. Stocked with intravenous hydration administered by licensed nurses, masseuses, an oxygen bar, and "complimentary hair of the dog cocktails," the service also offers delivery of said treatments for those too smashed to leave home. And if the pain of the hangover isn't enough to teach you a lesson, the prices you will pay certainly should.

The as-yet-to-open service's claimed "most popular package" is called the wet lunch and costs $150, although they are offering it for a limited time price of $79. It includes a "level-28 hydra-IV infusion" (whatever that means), a B12 booster and an unspecified "elixir" for pain. There will be five hangover "spa" locations spread through out Soho, the Financial District, and Midtown, and there is a "free membership" offer currently on the table. This might all look more reasonable if you are drunk.
· The Hangover Club [Official Site]

Matt Haughey:

Since we’ve never seen a return to our pre-Fall 2012 traffic levels, I have to assume whatever hidden law we broke we’re still breaking, or that Google sees us as a home for comment spam even though we boot every single one we can find though a series of sophisticated methods, and the whole experience has been frustrating to say the least. At this point, I’m at wits end trying to figure out why our high-quality site, featuring good advice from a dedicated community of real people with a best-in-industry 24-hour moderation staff has seen such big decreases.

On the flip side, I’ll accept that MetaFilter is from “two or three Internets ago”, and perhaps this is Google’s way of saying they’re changing with the times and we’re not. I’m ok with that too, but since Google is a giant black box to outsiders, we’ll never really know.

Depressing news.

Update: Says Marco Arment:

Google owns the ad-driven web: their search brings all of your pageviews, and their ads bring all of your income. You’re just along for the ride, hoping to stay in Google’s good graces — an arbitrary, unreliable, undocumented metric that changes constantly. (Google’s only “open” with the trivial, unprofitable parts of their business. Search and ads are closed, proprietary, and opaque in every possible way.)

This is one reason I’ve never tried to monetize pageviews at Daring Fireball. My goal has always been to increase readers — to reach and appeal to people who want to come here to read what I write, on a daily or at least regular basis. I get thousands of referrals every day from Google, but I don’t try to monetize them. My only hope is for a few of them to like what they see and come back.

I think I can keep writing stuff that people want to read. I don’t know how to write stuff that Google’s ever-changing algorithms will return as highly-placed search results, so I’ve never really tried.

David Streitfeld and Melissa Eddy, reporting for the NYT:

Amazon, under fire in much of the literary community for energetically discouraging customers from buying books from the publisher Hachette, has abruptly escalated the battle.

The retailer began refusing orders late Thursday for coming Hachette books, including J.K. Rowling’s new novel. The paperback edition of Brad Stone’s “The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon” — a book Amazon disliked so much it denounced it — is suddenly listed as “unavailable.”

In some cases, even the pages promoting the books have disappeared.

John Moltz: “Time for more ebook sanctions against Apple.”

Internet mega-retailer Amazon is trying, mob-style, to pressure Hachette for better terms on ebooks by disappearing the publisher's book from amazon.com.

The retailer began refusing orders late Thursday for coming Hachette books, including J.K. Rowling's new novel. The paperback edition of Brad Stone's "The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon" -- a book Amazon disliked so much it denounced it -- is suddenly listed as "unavailable."

In some cases, even the pages promoting the books have disappeared. Anne Rivers Siddons's new novel, "The Girls of August," coming in July, no longer has a page for the physical book or even the Kindle edition. Only the audio edition is still being sold (for more than $60). Otherwise it is as if it did not exist.

No question about it: this sucks on Amazon's part and demonstrates the degree to which the company's top priority isn't customer service. Better customer service in this case would be to offer these books for sale. I noticed another less nefarious instance of this the other day: because Amazon is offering a streaming version of The Lego Movie (which presumably has a high profit margin), they are not currently taking pre-orders of the The Lego Movie Blu-ray (out on June 17), even though Barnes and Noble has it for pre-order and Amazon has no problem offering for pre-order a Blu-ray of The Nutty Professor that isn't out until September. I guess it makes sense to drive sales to the high-margin streaming offering but not letting people pre-order what is likely to be a very popular Blu-ray is baffling.

Anyway, if this trend continues, I'd look for Amazon to start more aggressively promoting the Kindle editions of books, to the point of manipulating available inventory as with Hachette. That is, if they're not doing it already.

Tags: Amazon   books   business   Hachette

If you look at the Washington Monument in Google Maps, the monument's shadow follows the motion of the Sun throughout the day.

The utility of this feature is unclear, but that is some impressive attention to detail. (via @sippey, @kennethn, @chrisfahey)

Tags: Google   Google Maps   maps

Martha Stewart loves her iPad, and apparently she's picked up a sweet new toy for it. Stewart says that she's recently become taken with Parrot's AR.Drone 2.0, a lightweight copter that's controlled using smartphone and tablet apps. She wrote a short blurb about it in the May issue of her magazine, according to Yahoo, and she spoke with Vanity Fair about taking it for a spin around her farm earlier this week. "It flies all over my farm and takes pictures," she says. "It takes wonderful aerial photographs."

Stewart hasn't taken the drone inside her home for fear that it'll bang into something, and she tells Vanity Fair that she keeps it up fairly high too to avoid scaring her animals. "You can control the altitude, you can control the...

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Rick Merritt, reporting for the EE Times:

On a quarterly earnings call, HP chief executive Meg Whitman took a hammering from Wall Street analysts, clearly surprised by the magnitude of the numbers. Whitman announced her turnaround plan in May 2012 estimating layoffs of 27,000. The numbers were later boosted to 29,000, then 34,000 and now are estimated at a total 50,000.

Analysts asked if Whitman had lost confidence in HP’s ability to grow revenues.

“This has nothing to do with our confidence in business, it’s about opportunities to make this company better,” Whitman said. “I’ve done a number of turnarounds — not at this scale — but you see more opportunities the deeper you get in,” she said.

She’s right about one thing: she’s in deep.

When is the last time HP had a single interesting product?

As any tourist who's visited Japan will know, free Wi-Fi access is a lot less prevalent than in much of the Western world — a quirk of the country's rapid adoption of mobile broadband. That's changed a little in the past year or two, with Starbucks, convenience stores, and others rolling out various services, and according to a Nikkei report the government is planning to launch its own Wi-Fi system aimed at tourists.

Visitors to the country will reportedly be able to get an access ID by downloading a smartphone app or showing their passport at tourist spots or airports, which will let them use free Wi-Fi at train stations and other locations. A similar service is already in operation by telco NTT East, but the new initiative could unify...

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On sale now, sort of.

These are tough times for America's most famous Sriracha. While Huy Fong founder David Tran — the guy who makes the green-capped, rooster-emblazoned bottle you see everywhere — continues his long municipal headache in Irwindale, California, his competitors are looking to strike with their own versions. The latest, and perhaps most threatening, is Tabasco. In fact, the hot-sauce giant has already launched its brand of Sriracha, but for some reason, the company appears to be keeping it a secret.

You might think that a major product launch like this would normally be accompanied by a big media rollout, but apart from some talk on an LSU message board thread and a brief shout-out on Vice, there's been almost no mention of Tabasco's Sriracha. In fact, it seems the only place you can even buy it is on the company's official "country store." (At $4.99 for a 15-ounce bottle, or 33 cents an ounce, it's about twice as expensive as Huy Fong Sriracha.)

So what's going on? Why keep things so hush-hush? We asked reps for Tabasco, who wrote back this boilerplate email:

Tabasco Sriracha Sauce is a limited edition product, currently only available through the Tabasco Country Store. As McIlhenny Company develops new products and innovations, occasionally they are shared with fans through the Country Store. 

Tabasco Sriracha Sauce is made with red peppers and has the slightly sweet and garlicky taste of a traditional sriracha sauce with the signature Tabasco Sauce balance of vinegar.

But rumors from Avery Island suggest the reality is that Tabasco simply isn't yet pleased with the product or the packaging, at least not enough for a national rollout. We've heard that might happen in early 2015, but Tabasco officials are, predictably, staying quiet about that.

It makes you wonder why the company would release this product at all. It could be to capitalize on Tran's current problems, or maybe the company really does just want to offer it to fans first. Either way, if and when Tabasco goes big with its Sriracha, the implications for the Thai hot-sauce industry could be huge: Tabasco, which is still a family-run business, is in 166 countries — where it routinely outsells the spicy competition, including local brands. It doesn't matter that connoisseurs may dismiss the brand's acrid, vinegary taste — the company's unparalleled distribution means that, once it's really released, Tabasco-branded Sriracha could quite easily become the world's most-consumed version of the sauce on the entire planet.

Read more posts by Hugh Merwin

Filed Under: burn sauce, avery island, david tran, huy fong foods, sriracha, tabasco

California's legislators are taking self-driving cars seriously, having already instated regulations that forbid humans from falling asleep behind the wheel of autonomous vehicles. And the Golden State must think the future is pretty near; it will...

Since 2009, when Facebook introduced the ability to post statuses and photos publicly for the whole world to see, posting publicly has been the default. Today, Facebook is changing the default privacy settings for new users to "Friends only." This means that when anyone signs up for Facebook, their posts will by default only be viewable by people they've added as friends. To many of us, the distinction might be obvious, but Facebook is today taking a few more steps to make sure that even its longest-standing users know exactly who they're posting to.

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Apple plans to address a notorious iMessage bug that prevents people who switch from an iPhone to some other phone from receiving certain text messages, reports Recode. The issue has existed for pretty much as long as iMessage has, but it recently came to attention again after Lifehacker's Adam Pash wrote about it on his blog and, separately, a lawsuit was filed in California over the issue, seeking class-action status. The bug can cause iPhone users to continue sending iMessages — rather than text messages — to their contacts who have switched away from iPhones, meaning that person will never receive it.

There have been convoluted ways to resolve the issue in the past, but now a statement from Apple suggests that a proper solution...

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Google fired a shot across the bow of big ISPs like Comcast and Verizon yesterday, stating in a blog post from its Fiber division that it would never charge a content company like Netflix fees for a direct interconnection with its network. This positions Google squarely behind Reed Hastings, who has argued that such interconnect fees are an unfair toll being charged by internet gatekeepers and that the FCC should ban them as part of an expanded definition of net neutrality. The public display of allegiance from Google, siding with Netflix against the ISPs, is part of the larger battle heating up as the FCC debates the future of its open internet rules.

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Starting today, Steam's in-home streaming tool is available to all users. The feature — which has been available in beta form since early this year — lets you connect two computers on the same network using your Steam account, and then play games remotely on one of them. "Steam In-Home Streaming allows you to play your PC games on lower-end computers such as a laptop or home theater PC, or a computer running another operating system such as OS X, SteamOS, or Linux," the company explains. During the beta we found that the feature was both simple to set up and offered some fantastic streaming quality, though it wasn't without its drawbacks — namely a stuttering frame rate when your connection is poor. The streaming feature is free,...

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The FBI and several other federal law enforcement agencies will begin taking video recordings of statements by most suspects in their custody, reversing a longstanding bureau policy that largely prohibited all recordings, reports The Arizona Republic. The policy change, which was leaked by the Republic, was made by the Department of Justice and applies to the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), the United States Marshals Service, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives as well. The policy establishes "a presumption" that recordings will be made of individuals taken into custody, though that can be waived for national security matters of if the subject refuses, according to NPR.

The recordings will have a major...

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Rolfe Winkler, reporting for the WSJ:

In a December letter to the Securities and Exchange Commission, which was disclosed Tuesday, the search giant said that it could be serving ads and other content on “refrigerators, car dashboards, thermostats, glasses, and watches, to name just a few possibilities.”

Google made the statement to help justify why it shouldn’t disclose revenue generated from mobile devices, a figure the SEC had requested and that companies like Facebook and Twitter both disclose. Google argued that it doesn’t make sense to break out mobile revenue since the definition of mobile will “continue to evolve” as more “smart” devices roll out.

“Our expectation is that users will be using our services and viewing our ads on an increasingly wide diversity of devices in the future,” the company said in the filing.

What a depressing, oppressive view of the future.

We've seen many things built in Minecraft, but not all of them are functional. This Stargate actually spins, encodes chevrons, and most importantly, has a big watery explosion after the critical "Chevron 7 locked!"

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Available now at all full-service Umami Burger locations.

Acclaimed chef and occasional commencement speaker José Andrés is the latest guest chef to have a custom design go into production at Umami Burger. The José Andrés Burger, which went on sale yesterday, has a patty made of ground pork and cured ham, and is topped with piquillo pepper confit, caramelized onion, and big slice of Manchego. It costs $15, with $1 of each purchase donated to World Central Kitchen, Andrés's humanitarian organization focused on finding solutions for hunger and poverty. The chef announced earlier this year that he's headed into the fast-food business next, so maybe consider this a warm-up. [Related]

Read more posts by Riddley Gemperlein-Schirm

Filed Under: andresburger, jose andres, umami burger

The state Attorney General's office announced today that Airbnb has agreed to hand over records regarding their 15,000 hosts in New York State. The AG's office initially subpoenaed those records last October, but the company appealed on the grounds that it needed to protect the anonymity of its registered hosts. [ more › ]

Num Pang is going to be there.

Slated to launch in May, Hudson Eats had some construction-related delays, but the 600-seat, 35,000-square-foot food court is now back on track to open in Battery Park City June 3. A total of 14 restaurants, including Num Pang Sandwich Shop, Umami Burger, Sprinkles Cupcakes, Mighty Quinn's Barbeque, Dos Toros Taqueria, Blue Ribbon Sushi Bar, and Nolita's wood-fired bagel hot spot Black Seed are on the lineup. In 2015, a French Market, Le District, offering outdoor dining and selling everything from fresh cheeses to pastries, will open. Parm, the second location of Torrisi's Italian-American restaurant, and Amada, acclaimed Philadelphia chef and James Beard winner Jose Garces's first New York restaurant are also slated to open then. [DNAinfo, Related]

Read more posts by Riddley Gemperlein-Schirm

Filed Under: coming soon,

Each year, the Neural Correlate Society holds a contest among experts on perception and visual illusions. The top ten entries get selected by a panel, and the three best are then picked in an international gathering that I imagine as some sort of wizards convention. Here are are the winners.

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Filed under: Plants/Manufacturing, Honda

We may mention Honda around here mostly for its cars, but the Japanese industrial giant makes a whole lot more than that. The company builds motorcycles, ATVs, marine engines, power equipment and - soon enough - jet airplanes.

Honda has been working on its first private jet since before 2006, and after a good eight years or so of prototype testing, began building its first production version a bit over a year ago. And now it's almost ready for delivery.

The first production HondaJet is nearing completion and has had its GE Honda HF120 jet engines installed, after which it will conduct initial ground tests before taking its first flight this summer. The jet is painted in a new shade of pearl green with a gold stripe, added to the color catalog alongside the silver, red, yellow and blue options.

Honda Aircraft has 1,000 employees already working on eight more jets in various stages of production, set to be completed and delivered right after the plane achieves FAA type certification next year.

Continue reading First production HondaJet nearly completed

First production HondaJet nearly completed originally appeared on Autoblog on Tue, 20 May 2014 14:29:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Game Oven, announcing the postponement of the Android version of a new game:

In the Vine above are 7 devices all running the same compass app (ironically named Steady Compass) on Android. Yet, all compasses indicate that North is somewhere else. Unfortunately, this has nothing to do with electromagnetic fields confusing the compass; it has everything to do with the diversity of hardware inside these devices.

We have been developing Bounden for Android alongside its development on iOS, and have tested the game on a number of devices. It was only a week ago that we started expanding our list of test devices, after we quickly discovered that:

(a) some devices had ‘broken’ gyroscopes that didn’t work on all axis,
(b) that some devices were faking gyroscopes by mixing and matching the accelerometer data with compass data, or
(c) that some devices did not have a gyroscope at all.

Curious, I grabbed a handful of iOS devices laying around my house — iPad Mini and iPad Mini with Retina Display; iPhones 3GS, 4, 4S, 5, and 5S — and tried a similar comparison.

Rene Ritchie followed up with Heathrow officials regarding Samsung’s claimed rebranding of Terminal 5:

“Heathrow Terminal 5’s signage and passenger wayfinding has not changed,” a Heathrow spokesperson told iMore. “Samsung have rented advertising space in Terminal 5 with a tongue-in-cheek campaign using the line: ‘Terminal Samsung Galaxy S5’.”

Samsung hasn’t taken over any signage or branding at Terminal 5 but are simply renting existing advertising placements in the terminal, those that are available to anyone.

Great copywriting too.

The happy couple.

In a stunning, surprise move, the guy who told his girlfriend he would propose to her only after she made him 300 outstanding sandwiches has popped the question, even though the official counter is only at 257. Our long sandwich nightmare — hers, too — is actually far from over: The fiancé is going to make sure she finishes the job she set out to do, in a move that's definitely going to set the stage for the ultradreary third act of the romantic dramedy that's invariably getting made about this whole ordeal, just as soon as the book comes out. [The Cut, Related]

Read more posts by Hugh Merwin

Filed Under: wedding bells, 300 sandwiches, bread and butter, sandwiches, stephanie smith

As the weather clears up, we tend to break out our list of items well-suited for summer. Namely, we like to cruise in drop-tops and play top-down shooters once the sun is out and the temperature rises, and a recent PlayStation Blog post noted that...

Cornpocalypse 2030.

A new report published by Oxfam International projects that the rapidly escalating effects of climate change will result in your bowl of cornflakes costing 30 percent more by 2030, and that's not including inflation. In addition to corn, the price of basic rice and wheat crops may also double in 15 years, the report says, affecting everything from General Mills' Kix to Kellogg's Frosted Flakes, which really isn't so grrrreat.

Coffee, of course, will also get more expensive. Tim Gore, one of the report's authors, explains that in Guatemala, rising temperatures have already exacerbated the spread of coffee rust, a rogue fungus that recently obliterated up to 40 percent of Guatemala's harvests. Everyone — from Starbucks to the specialty shops — is affected.

Oxfam's report also calls out the "Big 10" — food and drink companies not only not doing enough to prevent climate change, but those, taken together, would effectively rank as the 25th most polluting country in the world. That's more greenhouse gases than Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, and Iceland produces combined. Kellogg's and General Mills are two of the biggest offenders, along with Coca-Cola, Nestle, and PepsiCo. In a statement, Kellogg's responded to the report by saying it has made commitments to reduce greenhouse gases, as well as use less water in its manufacturing processes, and elsewhere is working on switching to a more sustainable source of palm oil.

These Breakfast Cereals Will Get a Lot More Expensive Thanks to Global Warming [Mother Jones]
Emissions from 10 Food and Drinks Companies 'Higher Than Nordics' [Guardian]

Read more posts by Riddley Gemperlein-Schirm

Filed Under: cereal killers, cereal, climate change