More than three years ago, a proclamation was made (by myself, Mark Thiele and Jan Wiersma) that the data center was dead. Ironically, all three of us come from an IT…
The software wasn't officially released until 1985, but Gates took the wraps off Microsoft's first computer operating system during an event at New York City's Plaza Hotel on Nov. 10, 1983.
We've come a long way since then — three decades later, the Windows ecosystem has gone through about 15 iterations.
Here's a look at how Windows has changed throughout the years.
Windows 1.0 (1985)
Windows 1.0 was officially released in 1985, two years after its introduction to the world. The company initially considered calling it "Interface Manager," but instead called it Windows after the format in which programs were designed.
Windows 2.0 (1987-1990)
The second iteration of Windows launched in 1987, and it introduced desktop icons, expanded memory, and the ability to overlap windows.
Windows 3.0 (1990)
When Windows 3.0 debuted in 1990, it became the most widely used version of the software yet. Microsoft sold 10 million copies of Windows 3.0 in its first two weeks. With Windows 3.0, Microsoft significantly enhanced the software's performance, improved app icons, and added 16 colors to its graphics.
President Obama wants to reclassify the internet as a utility, according to a new statement from the White House. This would allow the Federal Communications Committee to enforce heavier restrictions on it and protect net neutrality.
"The time has come for the FCC to recognize that broadband service is of the same importance and must carry the same obligations as so many of the other vital services do," President Obama wrote in his statement.
President Obama is officially supporting net neutrality, writing that internet service providers should not be allowed to control, or "pick winners and losers" in the online marketplace.
Instead of treating all users equally, ISP's would only be required to offer subscribers a "baseline" level of service. Larger companies would be able to pay more to get faster service.
Here's what the FCC said back in April:
The NPRM [the FCC] will propose ... that broadband providers would be required to offer a baseline level of service to their subscribers, along with the ability to enter into individual negotiations with content providers. In all instances, broadband providers would need to act in a commercially reasonable manner subject to review on a case-by-case basis. Exactly what the baseline level of service would be, the construction of a 'commercially reasonable' standard, and the manner in which disputes would be resolved, are all among the topics on which the FCC will be seeking comment.
President Obama, according to his statement, believes the internet should be reclassified as a utility. This means access should be equal and open to everyone — an idea known as net neutrality.
An open Internet is essential to the American economy, and increasingly to our very way of life. By lowering the cost of launching a new idea, igniting new political movements, and bringing communities closer together, it has been one of the most significant democratizing influences the world has ever known.
“Net neutrality” has been built into the fabric of the Internet since its creation — but it is also a principle that we cannot take for granted. We cannot allow Internet service providers (ISPs) to restrict the best access or to pick winners and losers in the online marketplace for services and ideas. That is why today, I am asking the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to answer the call of almost 4 million public comments, and implement the strongest possible rules to protect net neutrality.
When I was a candidate for this office, I made clear my commitment to a free and open Internet, and my commitment remains as strong as ever. Four years ago, the FCC tried to implement rules that would protect net neutrality with little to no impact on the telecommunications companies that make important investments in our economy. After the rules were challenged, the court reviewing the rules agreed with the FCC that net neutrality was essential for preserving an environment that encourages new investment in the network, new online services and content, and everything else that makes up the Internet as we now know it. Unfortunately, the court ultimately struck down the rules — not because it disagreed with the need to protect net neutrality, but because it believed the FCC had taken the wrong legal approach.
The FCC is an independent agency, and ultimately this decision is theirs alone. I believe the FCC should create a new set of rules protecting net neutrality and ensuring that neither the cable company nor the phone company will be able to act as a gatekeeper, restricting what you can do or see online. The rules I am asking for are simple, common-sense steps that reflect the Internet you and I use every day, and that some ISPs already observe. These bright-line rules include:
No blocking. If a consumer requests access to a website or service, and the content is legal, your ISP should not be permitted to block it. That way, every player — not just those commercially affiliated with an ISP — gets a fair shot at your business.
No throttling. Nor should ISPs be able to intentionally slow down some content or speed up others — through a process often called “throttling” — based on the type of service or your ISP’s preferences.
Increased transparency. The connection between consumers and ISPs — the so-called “last mile” — is not the only place some sites might get special treatment. So, I am also asking the FCC to make full use of the transparency authorities the court recently upheld, and if necessary to apply net neutrality rules to points of interconnection between the ISP and the rest of the Internet.
No paid prioritization. Simply put: No service should be stuck in a “slow lane” because it does not pay a fee. That kind of gatekeeping would undermine the level playing field essential to the Internet’s growth. So, as I have before, I am asking for an explicit ban on paid prioritization and any other restriction that has a similar effect.
If carefully designed, these rules should not create any undue burden for ISPs, and can have clear, monitored exceptions for reasonable network management and for specialized services such as dedicated, mission-critical networks serving a hospital. But combined, these rules mean everything for preserving the Internet’s openness.
The rules also have to reflect the way people use the Internet today, which increasingly means on a mobile device. I believe the FCC should make these rules fully applicable to mobile broadband as well, while recognizing the special challenges that come with managing wireless networks.
To be current, these rules must also build on the lessons of the past. For almost a century, our law has recognized that companies who connect you to the world have special obligations not to exploit the monopoly they enjoy over access in and out of your home or business. That is why a phone call from a customer of one phone company can reliably reach a customer of a different one, and why you will not be penalized solely for calling someone who is using another provider. It is common sense that the same philosophy should guide any service that is based on the transmission of information — whether a phone call, or a packet of data.
So the time has come for the FCC to recognize that broadband service is of the same importance and must carry the same obligations as so many of the other vital services do. To do that, I believe the FCC should reclassify consumer broadband service under Title II of the Telecommunications Act — while at the same time forbearing from rate regulation and other provisions less relevant to broadband services. This is a basic acknowledgment of the services ISPs provide to American homes and businesses, and the straightforward obligations necessary to ensure the network works for everyone — not just one or two companies.
Investment in wired and wireless networks has supported jobs and made America the center of a vibrant ecosystem of digital devices, apps, and platforms that fuel growth and expand opportunity. Importantly, network investment remained strong under the previous net neutrality regime, before it was struck down by the court; in fact, the court agreed that protecting net neutrality helps foster more investment and innovation. If the FCC appropriately forbears from the Title II regulations that are not needed to implement the principles above — principles that most ISPs have followed for years — it will help ensure new rules are consistent with incentives for further investment in the infrastructure of the Internet.
The Internet has been one of the greatest gifts our economy — and our society — has ever known. The FCC was chartered to promote competition, innovation, and investment in our networks. In service of that mission, there is no higher calling than protecting an open, accessible, and free Internet. I thank the Commissioners for having served this cause with distinction and integrity, and I respectfully ask them to adopt the policies I have outlined here, to preserve this technology’s promise for today, and future generations to come.
Within the next several months, your Android phone is about to drastically change.
Google, along with its partners and carriers, is in the process of rolling out its biggest Android update yet, called 5.0 Lollipop. The update is meant to make your Android phone look and feel different thanks to an interface overhaul known as Material Design.
But Material Design is more than just an Android facelift. It's part of Google's strategy to make all devices that run its software feel similar. If the company made anything explicity clear at its recent launch event for its new Nexus devices, it's that Android is going to be everywhere soon enough: on our wrists, on our TV screens, and of course, in our pockets.
Although Lollipop has only launched on a small number of Android devices, it's been in the making for years. Android's Vice President of Engineering Hiroshi Lockheimer, who has been with the Android team since 2006, sat down with Business Insider to talk about how Google prepared for its biggest Android update yet and what's next.
Below is an edited transcript of our conversation.
Business Insider:What makes Lollipop such a massive update for Android?
Hiroshi Lockheimer: It’s not like we planned it to be this way. It just kind of turned out that way. There was a confluence of events. One thing was Material Design, the new user interface. That was a huge effort. It was a complete rethink of how the user interface would feel and it’s a lot more dynamic. So that is a big milestone.
We also switched our runtime, which is kind of a technical thing. But from an end user’s perspective, the benefit of that is very tied to Material Design. The new runtime is a lot smoother in terms of how it schedules tasks. So the user interface is going to feel a lot smoother and more fluid. You won’t see the stutters you used to see. So we did that in conjunction to make sure all these new animations that we’re doing in Material Design are much more fluid.
There’s also in the silicon industry, there’s a move to move from 32 bit to 64 bit, so we had that support also. So all these things are adding up together and made for a really big release. The other thing I would say that’s part of the Material Design change, it’s not just the operating system that changed. A lot of the applications that we build, for instance, have been updated to adhere to the material design guidelines.
This is one of the reasons why we did something a little bit different this year by having a developer preview of Android at Google I/O in June. It’s the first time since we launched that we did that, and we did that for a reason because we knew this would be a big release and we wanted to give developers a lot of runway to get their apps updated. It's a pretty exciting time.
BI: What made you decide that this is the right time to totally change the Android interface?
HL: Well, it’s been a multi year process. One of the things we do at Google in general, but also at the Android team, is iterate. Focusing on the user interface has been an area we knew we wanted to iterate on for a long time. We did the first major UI overhaul with Gingerbread and Honeycomb back in those days and we’ve been planning for something like Material Design since then. It took a while to get the designs right. We wanted to perfect it.
This won’t be the last time we’ll do a major UI overhaul. We’ll let things sit for a while, and we want to mature Material on all these different form factors too.
BI: There’s been some management change throughout Android over the years. Sundar Pichai has been in charge of Android for the past year-and-a-half now. What has that been like compared to working under former Android boss Andy Rubin?
HL: They’re different leaders, obviously, with different personalities. When [Andy] left, we made an announcement about the departure. He talked about, and I think the quote was something along the lines of, “He’s an entrepreneur at heart, he just wants to go back to his roots as an entrepreneur.” Meaning he wanted to focus on early stage projects.
Andy had been doing that before [Google acquired Android]. Android has been around for a while. This is our 12th release. This is our sixth device. And we have a billion plus customers out there running software on their devices. So it’s a different kind of project now. I wouldn’t call it a startup, even though it’s kind of corny to say it, but it still does feel very much like a startup. We act that way internally and the team is a lot smaller than you would think.
BI: And how small is that?
HL: You’d be surprised. Relative to the billion plus people out there, it’s actually a small number of people who are working really hard and as a tight-knit group to keep this operating system going.
We do that intentionally because that’s our way of staying nimble and doing things quickly. Going back to your question, it was a personal decision on Andy, too, to focus on what he wanted to do, which is really small, beginning of a project type of thing. Not a billion person kind of product.
And Sundar’s absolutely fantastic at that stuff. It’s been great. And hopefully you’ll feel the results are good. I guess this is the first year after Sundar took over in terms of products, so this is kind of the result of that.
BI: So would you say this Lollipop release is the result of Android under Sundar’s leadership?
HL: Yeah, absolutely. Kit Kat [the last version of Android] sort of started with Andy but finished with Sundar. Lollipop started with Sundar and finished with Sundar. So that’s absolutely been a big part of this. And as I said in terms of the team, we’ve been a cohesive team for a long time, the team has stuck together. We all work really nicely with Sundar. So it’s been great.
BI: I want to go back to the early days when you guys first started working with Android after Google first acquired it. Not just the operating system itself, but inside Google the team has gotten so big. Did you guys expect it to explode like this?
HL: When I joined we were about 20 people. Obviously we’re bigger now in terms of a team. And things have changed a lot. Back in 2006, maybe I should have been dreaming bigger. Larry Page would have told me I should’ve because that’s just how he is. But I didn’t expect this to happen.
We knew we were onto something. We wanted to build a fully-featured operating system and give it away for free and no one had done that before. So I think our trick was, and I mean that in a good way, our secret ingredient was building a fully featured operating system, and actually building a product. This is kind of why we did Nexus devices.
And over the years the basic recipe has been the same. We build software. We open source it. We make it available to all these manufacturers out there. And back in the early days it was HTC. Then HTC and Motorola. Then HTC, Motorola, and Samsung. People joining and building their own products on top. And that’s how we got to the scale we’re at now. And then with this year, one of our explicit goals was to then take that and expand this platform into other factors like TV.
LE: You have obviously tried a lot of different things with Android over the past several years in terms of user interface and features. What do you think worked and what didn’t? Did you ever try anything and then think, "This wasn’t the most useful feature, we shouldn’t have spent so much time on it."
HL: That’s a good question. It’s a little inside baseball type of question, isn’t it? Most things are actually getting used quite a bit. Its not easy for us to be like, oh, well that’s not getting used at all. Cut it. We’ve really been focusing on iterating on features we’ve released and if we feel they haven’t been perfected yet we’ll take the effort to perfect them. An example in Lollipop is Face Unlock.
LE: Right, so how is Face Unlock different in Android Lollipop?
HL: I think that’s a perfect example. We launched Face Unlock in Ice Cream Sandwich and with the way it worked, there was a little bit of a lag. You needed to align the camera with your face, and it needed to process. It was a good idea, but the execution took too long in practice to use it.
And what we’ve done in Lollipop actually is enabled this feature to start looking for your face before you even get to that screen to fix lighting and things like that. So it actually acts a lot quicker and the latency is lower, and it just makes the feature so much more useful.
That’s the type of thing I’m saying is how we work on features. We’ll release something, and I think there’s always a nugget of good, but sometimes it takes the second iteration or the second round to really perfect it. And that’s been our model for a while.
BI: Having a lot of variety is great for the consumer and it’s great for Android. But does it ever hurt Google as a phone maker? Samsung is huge and it's the most popular phone maker next to Apple. Does that ever hurt you guys when you’re trying to push Nexus devices out?
HL: I don’t think so. We’re not trying to compete with Samsung or HTC or LG. We’re not competing with ourselves. The main reason we do Nexus is to show, internally, for ourselves, without doing it in the abstract. That’s the worst kind of software to build — you kind of throw some software over the fence and hope someone ships it.
We work with partners but we really treat these devices as our own during development. And then, yeah, we release it to the public who buys it. And of course we’re happy if a lot of people buy it, but it’s also good for us if they end up buying a Samsung or HTC device. That’s fine too. It’s a win win for us. We don’t really see it as we’re trying to take share away from someone else.
BI: You work with so many different companies on Android devices. I’m sure that creates some fragmentation and issues here and there. Is there anything Google is doing to make things more seamless across devices? Because I could pick up a Samsung phone and it would look totally different from a Motorola phone, and the Motorola phones might get the update to Lollipop first, and that probably creates frustration for some people.
HL: In many ways it’s by design. We knew from day one when we built the operating system that it wasn’t going to be about one company. It wasn’t going to be just about Google or HTC. It was always about a big ecosystem, a bunch of companies, there was an alliance of companies behind it. And it’s grown more since then.
So the software itself was designed in such a way to handle, for instance, different screen sizes. It wasn’t an afterthought. And in many ways, in the early days, I think there were growing pains as we adjusted and application developers adjusted to that model. But now I think we’re reaping the benefits. It is about celebrating the diversity of devices. It’s not one size fits all.
Amazon surprised everyone on Thursday when it introduced its voice-controlled speaker, called Echo.
Like Siri or Google Now, Amazon Echo can answer questions, play music, create alarms and reminders, and give you information about the news or the weather. But it's all hands-free, so you can address the Echo from anywhere in the room and it can hear your requests.
Of course, people quickly started having fun with Amazon's new futuristic toy. Most notably, YouTube user Barry Mannifold made a few "modifications" to Amazon's introductory video and shared his work with the reddit community. It quickly racked up 1.2 million views in less than a day on the Web.
The video is actually quite brilliant. Mind you, Mannifold's parody includes one word that's NSFW, so if you have young kids or coworkers around, maybe throw on a pair of headphones.
And as a means of comparison, here's Amazon's actual introduction to Echo:
Mayday PAC, the Silicon Valley-funded “Super PAC to end all Super PACs” offered a defense Friday of its efforts to make campaign finance reform a major campaign issue even though most of its candidates lost Tuesday.
Mayday’s leadership argued they showed politicians that voters care about getting big money out of politics and, in a controversial fight with powerful Michigan Republican Fred Upton, could make a difference — mostly by making Upton spend money he might not have otherwise had to spend if Mayday hadn’t bought $2.15 million in TV ads trashing him.
Mayday raised about $10.6 million and lost six of eight races.
The two Mayday candidates who won — conservative North Carolina Rep. Walter Jones and Arizona Democrat Ruben Gallaga, a former state lawmaker – both did it mostly without Mayday’s help. In both races, the candidates faced tough primary challengers, but Mayday didn’t get involved in either race until shortly before voters went to the polls.
“2014 was our opening move in the fight. In 2016, armed with the progress and lessons from this cycle, our reform movement will be even stronger,” Mayday PAC co-founder Larry Lessig wrote in a memo to supporters.
Larry Lessig
In a separate Tumblr post Saturday morning, Lessig sounded a bit despondent and noted that “first and obviously, we did not win. Even the one race we did win Tuesday, we did not win. (Walter Jones was going to win regardless of what we did.)”
Not surprisingly, the Harvard Law professor got a tad upset earlier in the week after Politico wrote a story about his PAC’s election results entitled “How to Waste $10 Million.”
Moving forward, the real question is whether some of Mayday’s wealthy finance and Silicon Valley supporters will be willing to chip in millions more given Mayday’s losing record.
Mayday reported collecting more than 60,000 small-dollar donations but the bulk of its funding came from a smaller, wealthier group of backers, including investor Sean Parker, former Stride Rite president Arnold Hiatt and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman.
Lessig laid out the PAC’s lessons learned in a memo Friday. Mayday had previously declined to talk about its defeats other than say it would “report back when we know something meaningful.” Here’s an excerpt:
“This election taught us some important lessons, and highlighted one important constraint.
First, reform is important, but partisan loyalty is more important when voters see control of a legislative chamber at stake: The data demonstrate that we could make the issue of corruption salient to voters, and thereby move the approval ratings and positive and negatives of candidates on the basis of reform. But especially in the current partisan environment, that movement was not enough to resist strong partisan voting.
Second, it is easier to win voters in safe seats than in partisan battle ground seats: Following from the first lesson, we saw a significant difference in the willingness of both Republicans and Democrats to support the issue of reform in safe, rather than divided, seats. Though we didn’t have enough opportunities in primaries to prove this point, the data suggest that it is much easier to rally both Democratic and Republican voters to reform, when the voters don’t perceive their decision as affecting the ultimate likelihood of their party’s candidates to prevail in the general election. Put differently, if partisanship doesn’t matter — because the seat is a safe seat anyway — voters are more willing to be moved on the basis of reform.
Third, transparency has its costs: MAYDAY.US committed to full transparency about its donors (over $200). That commitment was costly. Because our large contributors were known, it was easier for at least one powerful incumbent to leverage his power against our contributors.
Fourth, reform requires a candidate: We were proud of the candidates we supported, but the strongest races were with candidates willing to openly and vigorously champion the issue we pressed. This is a difficult challenge, given the unwillingness of most media to even raise the issue. In the New Hampshire Senate Primary, for example, even though our candidate was the only Republican running for Senate _in the nation _who had made campaign funding an issue, not a single question in the one debate asked candidates about this issue. Victory will require Zephyr-Teachout-like candidates passionate on the issue, and a willingness among candidates to force the issue into the campaign.
Fifth, victory is not the only motivator: We entered the races we did to win, but we obviously recognized with at least some of the races we entered that victory wasn’t likely. But our objective is to create an incentive sufficient to motivate a majority in Congress to get on the right side of reform. In the four biggest races we entered, our intervention was a significant tax on our opponent, forcing him to spend significantly to neutralize the effect of our campaign. The threat of that tax will motivate other candidates to avoid the risk of a similar fight.
Sixth, and finally, bandwidth is limited: However difficult it was to persuade voters, it was just as difficult to get the media to understand the strategy of our campaign. The simple binary framing of electoral politics makes is hard to demonstrate the effect of interventions within the margin. In 2012, for example, Karl Rove had a powerful impact on American politics, even if he won no elections, because his interventions restricted the options of candidates on the other side. Yet this truth is hard to convey in a framework were the only measure of success is whether a candidate has won or lost.”
For years, Apple has dominated the $45 billion app business with its App Store. Android has always been the second-best place for apps.
Facebook, however, has a plan that could change all that. This hastily scrawled diagram on a whiteboard in its London office represents that plan, and it ought to scare the folks at Apple who work to maintain the primacy of iOS among app developers. (We explain the diagram below.)
iPhone and iPad users are generally more lucrative than Android people for apps, in terms of download fees and in-app payments. So the best apps are developed first for Apple's iOS mobile operating system. Only if they are successful do companies produce an Android version, often months or years later. Even then, Android apps tend to be copies of the original iOS app, with all the flaws and compromises that implies.
The dominance of iOS creates a bizarre distortion in the app market: Apple only has a 12% share of mobile users; 80% of users are on Android. Yet the 4-to-1 majority is treated as second class in the app world. It can actually be difficult to hire Android developers because staff only want to work on iOS. And you can be hugely successful as an app creator, even if the vast majority of phone users have no contact with your product.
At Facebook in Europe, however, executives think that Apple's iOS dominance might be about to weaken.
We spoke to Facebook's Europe, Middle East, and Africa platform director Julien Codorniou recently and were surprised when he told us that the trend he was seeing favored Android. Revenue generation on Android is catching up to iOS, and more developers — particularly for game developers — are going Android-first, especially in Europe.
Facebook is hoping to take advantage of this via its Parse app development platform, which Codorniou believes virtually erases the two-step iOS/Android development process, letting companies release new apps on both platforms simultaneously.
Erasing a key selling point for the iPhone.
That would actually be good for Apple in the sense that a robust, growing app market only increases Apple's App Store revenues. But it would be also bad for Apple because if apps are released at the same time on Android it erases one of the key selling points of the iPhone: That users who want the cool new apps must be Apple users in order to get them.
As we discussed the app market, Codorniou drew the above diagram on a whiteboard on the eighth floor of Facebook's cavernous London offices. We have annotated it here so you can see what's going on.
Essentially, app developers would make two separate apps — one for iOS and then, later, one for Android. They needed a lot of operations to support them, like servers. Facebook's Parse platform replaces that: It lets companies build, store, and serve apps directly from the Parse cloud. All developers have to do is create an iOS client, an Android client, and even a Windows Phone client, and publish them as needed.
Once the apps are in the Apple App Store and the Google Play store, then developers can use Facebook's various marketing products — mobile app install ads, engagement ads, and the Facebook Audience Network — to promote them.
The inequality statement at the bottom of the diagram, "CPI < LTV", indicates what developers are aiming for: As long as the Cost Per Install (the marketing investment it took to persuade you to download an app) is less than the Long Term Value of new downloads, users, and in-app payments, then the company should keep spending on more ads on Facebook. If the cost is greater than the value, the companies are advised to halt what they are doing and think again.
More than 270,000 apps are using the system, up from 100,000 the year before. (For scale, both Apple's App store and Google Play have greater than 1 million apps available. So Facebook is partnering with a significant chunk of the market.)
"We see more people being Android-first because of the size of the market."
But does the Parse platform compete with Apple or Google?
"I would say no," Cordoniou says, "we can make you big on Facebook.com, on the web, on iOS, on Android, on Windows phone, on any new platform coming up that we support. The main value of proposition of Facebook is the fact that it’s cross-platform."
They still have to build separate clients of course, that isn't going away. But are they more likely to continue to build the Apple one first?
"We see more people being Android-first because of the size of the market," Codorniou says. "The Parse technology is like Unity in gaming. [Unity is a game development platform on which you can create games for a multitude of different systems.] You build on Unity, you’re almost de facto on iOS and on Android. You see a lot of cross-platform tools, this is why we have an amazing partnership with Unity on top of Parse and on top of Facebook Canvas, because if you build on Unity, you can build on iOS, Android, and Facebook at the same time. You see a lot of games like that being developed by Russian developers."
"It’s easier to update your app on Android."
Android-first, really?
"People look at the numbers. They want downloads, installs. They know that the monetization is catching up on Android. Of course iOS is the better platform when it comes to monetization, but it’s easier to update your app on Android. There are many people on an Android phone. ... The world you described [in which Apple is dominant] was true a year ago, but I see that things are changing."
"The vision we have with Parse and with the platform in general is to accelerate the time to market. It should not take you six months to develop from iOS to Android."
"There is a pattern coming from Eastern Europe. The Russian developers develop on Android first because of a big audience, and it maybe being easier to develop. They liked the fact that they could submit a new version of the app every day. [With Apple, you have to get each new version of the app approved before it hits the App Store. There is no version approval for Android.] This is a trend that I see and I think it is going to accelerate."
Codorniou has a team of evangelists, spreading the word, too: "As of today, I have four guys from my team in Paris talking to Android developers about the greatness of Parse, Facebook login, app links, app events, all of these things we introduced at f8. It’s a very important bet for us."
Time will tell, of course. The App Store is currently generating perhaps $10 billion in annual revenue for iOS developers, and Google Play is generating $5 billion. It could take a long time to shift that momentum in such a way that developers become incentivized to go Android-first or even Android-equal.
But if it were to happen, Facebook wants developers to know it has just the system to help with that.
Homes around the world are going to become smarter and more connected over the next five years.
Overall, a fair number of mainstream consumers still don't fully understand what connected-home devices are and how they work. However, adoption and awareness is still high for such a new category. We expect the devices to become more prevalent in the next two years, when growth will peak.
In a recent report on the connected home, BI Intelligence takes a closer look at this market, and forecasts shipments and revenue growth for connected-home devices over the next five years. We also examine current consumer sentiment about these new devices, the potential opportunities and barriers the Internet of Things will face on its way to mainstream adoption, and the leading companies currently in the market.
Connected-home device shipments will grow at a compound annual rate of 67% over the next five years, much faster than smartphone or tablet device growth, and hit 1.8 billion units shipped in 2019, according to BI Intelligence estimates. Connected-home devices include all smart appliances (washers, dryers, refrigerators, etc.), safety and security systems (internet-connected sensors, monitors, cameras, and alarm systems), and energy equipment like smart thermostats and smart lighting.
It shouldn't be too surprising that one of the wealthiest people in the world also has an insanely extravagant home.
It took Gates seven years and $63 million to build his Medina, Washington estate, named Xanadu 2.0 after the fictional home of "Citizen Kane"'s Charles Foster Kane.
At 66,000 square feet, the home is absolutely massive, and it's filled with high-tech details.
We've rounded up some of Xanadu 2.0's most over-the-top features here.
He reportedly pays around $1 million in property taxes each year.
2. Half a million board-feet of lumber was needed to complete the project.
The house was built with 500-year-old Douglas fir trees. 300 construction workers labored on the home — 100 of whom were electricians.
3. A high-tech sensor system helps guests monitor a room's climate and lighting.
When guests arrive, they're given a pin that interacts with sensors located all over the house. Guests enter their temperature and lighting preferences so that the settings change as they move throughout the home. Speakers hidden behind wallpaper allows music to follow you from room to room.
4. The house uses its natural surroundings to reduce heat loss.
Xanadu 2.0 is an "earth-sheltered" house, meaning that it's built into its surroundings to regulate temperature more efficiently.
5. You can change the artwork on the walls with just the touch of a button.
$80,000 worth of computer screens are situated around the house. Anyone can make the screens display their favorite paintings or photographs, which are stored on storage devices worth $150,000.
6. The pool also has its own underwater music system.
The 60-foot pool is located in its own separate, 3,900-square-foot building. People in the pool could swim underneath a glass wall to come up to a terrace area on the outside.
There's also a locker room with four showers and two baths.
7. There's a trampoline room with a 20-foot ceiling.
No word on how big the trampoline itself is, but we can imagine it would be a fun alternative to your standard exercise routine.
The exercise facilities total 2,500 square feet and also include a sauna, steam room, and separate men's and women's locker rooms.
8. An enormous reception hall could accommodate up to 200 guests.
The 2,300-square-foot hall could seat up to 150 people for a dinner party, or 200 people standing up at a cocktail event. A six-foot-wide limestone fireplace dominates one wall, while another wall has a 22-foot-wide video screen.
9. The house has 24 bathrooms, 10 of which are full baths.
Those bathrooms would definitely be useful if Gates were throwing such a big party. Otherwise, it seems a little over-the-top.
10. There's a total of six kitchens.
They're situated at different parts of the house so staff can be ready for any event.
11. An enormous library houses a manuscript Gates paid more than $30 million for.
The 2,100-square-foot library has a domed roof and two secret bookcases, including one that reveals a hidden bar. On the ceiling you'll find a quote from "The Great Gatsby" that reads: "He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it."
The library is home to the Codex Leicester, a 16-century Leonardo da Vinci manuscript that Gates bought at auction for $30.8 million in 1994.
12. The home theatre can accommodate 20 guests in plush seats.
It's designed in an Art Deco style, with comfortable arm chairs, couches, and even a popcorn machine for snacking.
13. An existing home was removed by barge to make room for a separate activities building.
The 900-square-foot building sits next to Gates' sport court, putting green, and boat docks.
14. The guest house is just as high-tech as the main house.
According to US News, the 1,900-square-foot guest house was the first building to be completed on the property. The house — which has its own bedroom and bathroom — was meant to be a test of the technology that would eventually be used in the main house.
Gates wrote much of "The Road Ahead" here.
15. All together, Gates' garages can accommodate up to 23 cars.
There are several different garages located at different points around the property. The most interesting one, however, is an underground cave made out of concrete and stainless steel. That garage alone can park 10 cars. Some of the concrete was purposely broken to give it a rough, "deconstructivist" look.
16. Gates has a favorite tree, and it's monitored electronically 24 hours a day.
He reportedly became fond of a 40-year-old maple tree that grew close to the home's driveway. It's monitored by computer, and if at any point it becomes too dry, water is automatically pumped into it.
17. An artificial stream is kept stocked with fish.
The stream and wetland estuary were created to solve any problems with runoff that the property's large walls might have created. The water is kept stocked with salmon and sea-run cutthroat trout.
18. The sand on Gates' beach is imported from the Caribbean.
The lakefront shore contains sand that's delivered in large quantities by a barge from St. Lucia each year.
19. Someone once paid $35,000 just to tour it.
Microsoft holds an auction each year, where employees donate products and services to be bid on. Proceeds go to the company's charitable fund.
Gates has donated private tours of Xanadu 2.0 in the past. According to the Puget Sound Business Journal, a Microsoft employee once won the tour with a bid of $35,000.
Installing solar panels. Anyone with enough roof space will be leaving the grid within the decade for solar power. And in most cases they won’t be leaving just one grid, they will be leaving two. That’s because solar is going to become, to put a new spin on an old phrase, “too cheap to have […]
After reviewing Jabra Evolve 80 headset last week, Plantronics makes a come back this week with the BackBeat Pro. While the Evolve 80 is somewhat of a blended consumer/UC headset the BackBeat Pro as the name implies is all about music with UC a far second. Although the focus of the BackBeat Pro is the consumer market its worthy of a review because it does have some great features. It may not have UC specific features but with tradeoffs in other areas it still makes a great headset.
In reviewing the BackBeat Pro I went and had a look at some other reviews on the Plantronics website. I was not surprised that it rated pretty highly among consumers because of two reasons:
The battery life for a Bluetooth device is nothing but amazing. After the initial charge and heavy music use I have yet to recharge the device. Its supposed to have up to 24 hours of continuous music streaming and I don’t doubt this claim one bit. I have used it on and off over a number of days and it has held it charge and performed well paired with my MacBook pro.
The sound quality for a Bluetooth device is fantastic. My 90’s hair and speed metal collection never sounded so good.I am listening to Metallica Master of Puppets as I write this blog post on them. The Active Noise Cancellation is also excellent. I can honestly say my wife has never had a harder time trying to get my attention when I am in my office with these babies on. I thought using Bluetooth may have caused audio quality issues but that is far from reality. They worked the same either plugged in with the 3.5mm cable or over Bluetooth.
The headset also comes nicely packaged with a nice storage case. It’s a pretty significant investment of around $250 for a headset so its nice that it comes with a case to protect it. There is also has a USB cable and a standard 3.5mm cable. The USB cable is only for charging and updating the device. I like the fact you can update the device software and turn features on and off with it. A Mac version of the update software would go a long way. Especially considering the popularity of Apple devices among the devices target audience age group which is probably the 30 and under.
Another area the Plantronics has done a nice job is in the use sensor capabilities. As an example when I put the device down it automatically pauses my music or when I pick it up it answers a call when paired with a cell phone. Its great to see headset manufactures thinking about the end user experience. Even software updates on this device were pretty simple. The Plantronics website did a good job of guiding me through the process to get the latest software on my device.
There are a lot of positives about this device and so far I have only found one major detractor. There are basically no UC focused features. Yes, it will work with your favorite softphone application to make calls because it has a microphone but that’s basically about it.Most advanced call control features are not there. Although Mac compatibility will vary by softphone anyway depending on API availability, Windows it’s a big miss. In comparison to the Evolve 80 which has really thought through the UC experience the BackBeat Pro really misses in this area. In saying that people might be attracted to the Bluetooth capability and over look the lack of UC features and just make do with what it has to offer. Hopefully this might be something Plantronics expands on down the road with a software update.
The big positives for the BackBeat Pro are sound quality, Bluetooth with NFC, ANC, Use Sensors and battery life. The only negatives are from a UC perspective with the lack of integration into your favorite Windows or Mac UC application. Despite the BackBeat Pro’s tradeoffs its still a great headset that I have enjoyed using, now back to Metallica…
Master Master of puppets I'm pulling your strings Twisting your mind and smashing your dreams ……
Apple just raised $3.5 billion (€2.88 billion) via Europe's bond markets.
But the real benefit Apple got from raising that debt in Europe: a great interest rate.
In a note to clients following Apple's debt raise, analysts at RBC Capital Markets wrote that Apple's "borrowing cost on this raise is lower than US government bonds."
Bond yields reflect, most simply, the risk that investors are being compensated for by lending an entity money. A lower yield implies a lower chance that a company will default or fail to pay back lenders, and a higher yield a higher chance of default.
On eight-year notes issued in Europe, Apple's bonds will yield 1.082%, while 12-year notes will yield 1.671%.
US 10-year Treasury yields are currently at about 2.35%.
When companies raise debt, it is typically benchmarked off whatever local government bonds are yielding. All around the world government yields are low, but European bond yields are among the lowest in the world (except for Japan).
And so while Apple just launched the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus and the company is expected to launch Apple Watch next year, the company also finds ways to innovate financially.
RBC also notes that because Apple is a US-based entity, the company will "receive the proceeds in the US and will likely use a swap to convert the euros to [dollars]," which the firms sees as most likely giving Apple no repatriation issues. (When a company repatriates cash from overseas to the US, it pays taxes on it. Usually large ones.)
As Business Insider's Jay Yarow quipped after news first broke that Apple would raise debt in Europe:
Microsoft is quickly learning that adding more Office users for free may be more useful than gaining fewer Office users at a cost: Office 365 subscriptions are no longer required for…
We can now text, tweet, iMessage, Facebook message, Skype and even leave one another disappearing messages. But old-fashioned email isn’t going away. It’s still a vital part of how we communicate.
That’s not to say email is flawless — far from it.
We mark items as “unread” so we will remember to deal with them later, then forget. We receive too much meaningless email and don’t know how to sort it. We try different methods for organizing our email, then even those methods become work, so we give up on them.
For the past week, I relied on a new app from Google to handle nearly all of my personal email. It’s called Inbox, and it works on Android, iOS and in the Web browser on your desktop. It’s so new that you can only get access to it if you receive an invitation (write to inbox@google.com to get one), and it doesn’t yet work on business accounts.
Inbox solves a lot of common email issues. It also throws in some cool extra features that are so useful that you’ll wonder how you survived email without them.
Below, I’ve outlined the ways that Inbox cured my email ailments, or as I call them, emailments.
Emailment: I mark an email as “unread” with plans to reply to it later, then forget all about it.
Inbox Medicine: Swipe right to left on a message or click the clock icon to snooze emails until you can respond. These messages will reappear in your inbox whenever you tell them to — like later that same day, the next day or another week.
You can even set emails to show up again when you’re in another place. Inbox can know, for example, that you don’t want to see an email again until you’re at home, where you can actually measure the size of the coffee table that you want to replace, or talk to the spouse who has to okay a suggested dinner party. When you get to your house, Inbox will automatically display that email in your notifications, which show up on the phone’s lock screen. These geolocation smarts also work with more vague locations, like grocery stores. If you got an email with recipe ingredients, you could snooze it to appear again when you arrive at the grocery store. Google Maps ties in with Inbox to know more about your location and what’s nearby.
Emailment: Email is too slow — especially on smartphones. I often need to manually refresh my inbox, waiting too long to get messages.
Inbox Medicine: I was seriously impressed by the speed of Inbox. I received messages using Inbox much faster than email messages I got in Apple Mail. It was even slightly faster than using the Gmail app. I only wished that Inbox could work for my work email, too.
Emailment: Too much of my email isn’t sorted in ways that make sense. I don’t have the time or inclination to work on it manually, so I keep wading through messages that don’t matter to get to the messages that do matter.
Inbox Medicine: Inbox automatically creates “Bundles” of emails for messages that are similar, like Finance, Purchases and Travel. This makes email feel more manageable and less cluttered. Bundles also give you a fast way of dealing with a bunch of email at once.
While I’m on the topic of going clutter-free, I should point out how Inbox uses images to represent various types of emails, like a cartoon of a dining table to represent a reservation, and photos of cities where you’ll arrive on flights, to represent plane tickets.
Emailment: I write reminders to myself, but these aren’t integrated with email. They’re in places like iOS Notes or even physical Post-its stuck to my phone. They often get lost in the shuffle.
Inbox Medicine: Write yourself Reminders in Inbox. These can be set to snooze until certain times or places, just like snoozing emails.
Emailment: I want to save an email in a spot where I don’t misplace it, but my system feels flawed.
Inbox Medicine: Tap the pin icon to pin certain emails to a clean screen where these select few emails can be more easily handled. When you’re done with them, swipe right or click the check mark (this works in the main section of Inbox, too).
Lest you think I’m drinking too much of the Inbox Kool-Aid, let me tick off some things that annoy me about it. For starters, Inbox buries the CC and BCC options in composed emails, forcing you to hunt around and find a tiny arrow that, when pressed, reveals these lines. Most people would never find this option. Since Inbox learns your email behavior as you use it, it should also learn that if someone uses CC often, the CC line should automatically appear when that person composes emails.
Second, Inbox on the desktop replaces Google Talk with Google+ Hangouts, which really bugs me. Instead of simply listing all of your friends who are online at any given time, Hangouts shows you a list starting with the people you’ve talked to most recently. This means that even if someone is offline, you see that person’s name. But these names are only visible when you click on an icon. And the large font and layout of Hangouts in Inbox forces you to scroll too much; it’s not as functional as good old Google Talk.
Finally, since Inbox doesn’t yet work with Gmail for business, you’ll probably have to switch back and forth between it and your other email apps. This gets annoying.
Google’s engineers have learned a lot about handling email in Gmail over the past decade, and they obviously put this to good use in Inbox. It’s an email cure for almost all that ails you.
The old web is a weird, wild, and wonderful place.
That's why Tim Katlic created the site 404PageFound to uncover and keep track of websites from the early 90s and mid-2000s that are still live online today.
"I had this fascination with Web 1.0 and how quirky it really is, especially in light of how fancy websites are now," Katlic, only 28 himself, told Business Insider. "At the same time, the old internet wasn't really that different: Everyone was just trying to be heard back then as well."
Katlic's been running the site since 2009. By 2013, 118 of the original 583 sites he featured had been removed.
"It makes you take for granted how fickle a lot of these things are," he says. "Someone will shut down a server and a site will go offline. In a way, it’s sad. The person shutting off the server probably doesn’t know about what half the content on there is. These sites are just sort of floating out there, and that's why I wanted to document them before they're forgotten."
The "Welcome To Netscape" webpage still lives on online:
Here's a website from the early 90s dedicated to sporks:
That's not even the only ode to sporks still alive and well on the web. "I've found that there were very few references to cats back then," Katlic says. Clearly, cats are the new spork.
The company finally unveiled its first hardware product on Wednesday. It's called Onyx.
Jesse Robbins, cofounder and CEO of OnBeep, dropped by Business Insider's offices in New York City last week to give us the first-ever demo of the Onyx, which he says was inspired by the real-time communicators used in "Star Trek," as well as his own experiences as a volunteer firefighter. Greg Albrecht, OnBeep’s CTO, also has experience as an EMT and emergency manager.
“Every great moment in humanity has depended on people working together in real-time, letting them focus on the problems they’re trying to achieve, and not having to futz with something that takes them out of that moment,” Robbins told us.
That's where the Onyx comes in.
The device is a small, black, lightweight circular piece of durable plastic with an LED ring around the center button, which is the main interface of the device. You push the button, wait for the beep, and start talking.
In a group, Onyx can support up to 15 people with their own Onyx devices — but you can create as many groups as you want. You manage your groups directly through OnBeep's companion app, which is free for iOS and Android devices, and connects to your phone via Bluetooth. OnBeep ensured Onyx was not limited to Bluetooth 4.0, as to not exclude any older devices.
As a wearable device, you can clip the Onyx onto clothing, straps or bags, but it's also small enough to simply throw in your pocket.
"The clip is where we spent most of the time on this product, in terms of getting that right," Robbins told us. "Most wearable radio systems is they’re really not designed for women. They accentuate masculine design desires. So Sylvia Wu, who designed this clip wanted to make it so it wouldn’t pull a shirt or a blouse down if it’s attached, and it couldn’t mar a fabric — the design target was one of her purses. What we built was something that really works well, you can clip it to a belt or a shirt or a heavy duty bag. It also works with people that wear finer finishes or lighter weight fabrics or things that might get harmed by something like an alligator clip."
Equal attention was given to the shape and feel of the Onyx itself. Robbins explained to us the design ethos:
Onyx reflects the first product that we’re making, and it’s an element: a very pure, very straightforward, very beautiful element. And the circle shape is intended to reflect all the different ways in which people connect — circle of friends, etc. — and it’s the easiest thing for humans to identify. The thing we recognize first is the eyes, and we wanted to go with the shape and the design element that reflected that, that allows you to stay connected. We’ve had a number of iterations on the core shapes we’ve explored. We’ve explored seven different elemental designs, and everyone came back with was this was the friendliest, most universally appealing shape and form factor. Too much smaller and it’s hard to press, like if it’s on a table, or it kind of gets lost. Much wider and it’s too big.
Robbins says he could've made the Onyx smaller but that would've sacrificed the audio quality and intelligibility of the device. Audio quality is paramount, Robbins says, especially when you're in a noisy environment or outside. He wanted the sound to be strong enough to "just work," so Onyx wouldn't take you out of the moment.
"If you want to have sound propagate you need a speaker box of a certain size, so the largest thing in this device is actually the speaker box, and that’s so you can hear it outside," Robbins told us. "That design element was pretty fundamental for us."
The Onyx comes with a rechargeable lithium-ion battery, which lasts about 12 hours with active use. Robbins says the Onyx isn't really geared toward one particular demographic, but that "every person we've talked to tends to find a use."
Even in the company's promo video for Onyx (shown above), Robbins says his team never told the family in the ad how to use the Onyx, but once they saw Robbins and his coworkers communicating with each other to coordinate the commercial, they said, "Oh, those are awesome! Can we get some?"
"They got it immediately," Robbins said.
OnBeep will be selling the Onyx directly to consumers, through its website. The official roll out will happen later this year, but the company is opening up for preorders starting today. For a limited time, Onyx will be available for $99, but you can also buy two (one for you, one for a friend) for $195.
"We're starting by focusing on doing a few things really right," Robbins told us. "The app will get richer and the interface will get richer. Right now we're focusing on getting this as great as we possibly can."
Will people buy smartwatches? What is it about smartwatches that interest them?
A global survey BI Intelligence conducted among Business Insider readers during October 2014 illustrates what consumers are looking for in a smartwatch, and whether they intend to purchase one. We generated over 2,000 responses from Business Insider readers, who tend to be young, affluent professionals — ostensibly the target market for a smartwatch.
The smartwatch only appeals to a minority of possible purchasers. Of 1,678 respondents who said they planned to buy a new phone in the next six months, just one-fifth said they are interested in buying a smartwatch to pair with their phone.
Apple has done a better job than competitors selling the smartwatch. Prospective iPhone buyers were significantly more interested in a companion watch than likely Android purchasers. About 31% of those who said they would buy an iPhone in the next six months plan to buy a smartwatch, more than double the proportion among those buying Android phones.
These are the top use cases among likely purchasers: Almost 40% of nearly 400 likely smartwatch buyers told us that the most important benefit of the device is its ability to funnel phone notifications, information, and other content if users happen to be away from their smartphone. Another one-fourth of our respondents said they already wear a watch and the added functionality of a connected watch appeals to them. Health- and fitness-tracking was another popular reason.
But there is no killer app, and hence most people don't see the point. Overall a majority of people still don't see the point of these devices. This is the reason 51% of those uninterested in smartwatches gave us for why they wouldn't buy the device. At a distant second, 13% of respondents said they just didn't like wearing a watch. Until consumers see a clear reason why smartwatches will improve their lives and productivity, the smartwatch category will remain small.
Of course, the next six months could bring about new applications for smartwatches generally and the Apple Watch in particular, but the data shows that the smartwatch still has a long way to go before it is seen as an essential consumer electronics device.
When Zappos announced late last year that it would eliminate titles and traditional managers from its company, some were skeptical about whether the online shoe retailer could pull it off.
But the company tells Business Insider that 80% of its 1,500 employees are now working under Holacracy, a relatively new organizational philosophy meant to offer workers more flexibility by replacing traditional job titles with a fluctuating number of roles that each employee is assigned.
Rather than being accountable to a single boss in a traditional hierarchy, each employee reports to the other people in their "circles." Each circle has an organizational goal to achieve, and each role that people fill within the circle is a task necessary for accomplishing that goal.
Of course Holacracy has not made Zappos a company entirely without hierarchy. The creation of new roles in a circle is left to a singular person known as the "lead link," and many circles contain subcircles that they oversee.
For instance, Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh is the lead link on the company's broadest circle, the 10-member internal board, which is tasked with fulfilling the company's overall purpose.
John Bunch, the Zappos employee tasked with running the company's transition to Holacracy, tells Business Insider that Hsieh's power is different under Holacracy.
However, Bunch declines to say whether Hsieh's sway has increased or decreased at the company he joined as CEO in 2000 and sold to Amazon 9 years later for $1.2 billion.
Hsieh holds "many, many, many roles" across the company, Bunch says, including being the "department expert" in a circle devoted to teaching other businesses about Zappos' famously quirky corporate culture.
And while employees no longer have titles internally, Bunch says they have what Zappos calls "#titles" to explain what they do all day to people outside the company.
Thus far, Bunch says the company is on pace to meet its goal of having all of its employees operating under Holacracy by the end of the year.
In his mind, one of the biggest challenges posed by the new system has been teaching employees not only what Holacracy is but how to use it, a process he compares to teaching 1,500 people how to speak a new language.
The organizational philosophy, created in 2009 by software developer Brian Robertson, is characterized by a series of governance meetings in which circle members iron out "tensions," the issues that are preventing the circle from running as smoothly as possible.
"I think you hear a spectrum of reactions," Bunch says when asked what his employees are saying about the transition. "Each employee is on their own personal journey in terms of learning what Holacracy is all about, and learning how to use it, and discovering if they think this is the right system."
Still, it's unclear how much the company has functionally changed since it began its transition at the end of last year.
Bunch says that several areas of the company have used Holacracy to make necessary changes to how they approach certain organizational challenges, but he declines to say which changes were made or which areas of the company were behind them.
Additionally, Bunch says a lot of the company's hiring, firing, and salary decisions are made the same way they were a year ago, but that over time, the company will evolve those systems to make them more in line with Holacracy.
"I don't want to paint a rose-colored picture where I say everything is up and running and we've reached our highest potential, but we have seen some bright spots," Bunch says.
Ultimately, he hopes the move to Holacracy will pay off by helping the company better realize its goals of openness and excellent internal communication, and that the looser organizational structure will allow employees to push the company into areas it has not previously ventured into.
"One of the markers of success for Holacracy would be to look back in five years and say, 'Wow I would never have envisioned Zappos taking on that area, and look at them, they're having success with it,'" Bunch says.
Google has added a new Google Now SEARCH_ACTION intent that gives Android developers the ability to enable the use of Google voice search in their apps.
Google’s mobile operating system updates usually hit the company’s own Nexus reference gadgets first, then make their way out to other devices. Depending on your device and carrier, that delay could be excruciatingly long. (Older devices may never see the 5.0 update at all.)
Assuming you do eventually get your Lollipop, you'll be rewarded with a slew of changes designed to enhance the Android “experience” and make it more intuitive. Here's a peek at some of the new features in store for you.
1. New Homescreen Look
Google dubs its overhauled mobile interface "Material Design," and the changes are apparent right away. Homescreen icons got flatter, and the navigational icons along the bottom are simple geometric shapes—triangle for back, circle for home and square for the new app switcher/notification function.
Critics may note that Apple delved into flatter design first, beginning with last year's launch of iOS 7—a move that ditched its 3D-realistic (and somewhat cheesy) skeuomorphic design. But really, both of these tech giants trail number-three mobile platform Windows Phone. Oddly enough, it was Microsoft's Modern (née Metro) interface that first made it hip to be flat.
Here, Android Lollipop manages to be colorful without going into carnival clown territory.
2. An App Drawer That’s Easy On The Eyes
The apps aren’t just flatter. They're actually easier on the eyes, as they look like they were printed on paper. This nuance is most obvious in the app drawer.
3. More Consistency Across Android Gizmos
Google designed the new software to look and act more consistent across different Android devices, regardless of screen size—from smartphones and watches, to tablets and TVs.
4. Welcome, Google Fit
Google Fit—Android’s answer to Apple's HealthKit—pulls in fitness data from different step-tracking and other health apps into one bucket. It also lets smartwatches running Android Wear software and Lollipop-powered gadgets work like interlocking pieces.
It's a cyclical relationship: Android Wear watches take smartphone alerts and puts them on your wrist; Google Fit pulls the data from your watch—specifically, from its sensors—and puts it on your phone, along with fitness data from other apps.
5. Materially Designed Widgets
Like versions of Android before it, Lollipop also boasts widgets—those homescreen tiles that display emails, tweets, stock prices, or the song you're currently playing, all without opening any apps. Widgets for Google's own apps now feature the Material Design aesthetic, creating a uniform feel.
6. Transitions
Never wonder again if the buttons at the bottom received your input. Google now offers a handy visual, which kicks in when you tap the “soft buttons,” letting you know that the device registered that touch.
It's part of a broader push to make activities feel more fluid. Indeed, Lollipop offers several built-in activity transitions, so users don't feel jarred going from one app or one state to another.
Google offers animated motions—some simple, some more elaborate—as shared visual elements that work across activities.
7. A Gmail Makeover
Gmail’s redesign under Lollipop brought in more colors, but somehow pulled it off without looking too gaudy or cluttered. It fits in with the universally “flat” design language extending across the whole phone.
8. Chrome Tabs Sit With Other Recent Apps
Lollipop’s approach to tabbed browsing puts running Chrome tabs in a vertical line along with other recent apps. Previously, users only saw one screen that represented Chrome (or other apps), and they'd have to choose it, then another button to pick a specific browser tab.
9. Prioritized Notifications
Want some notifications, but not others? Under Settings > Sound & notification > Interruptions, users can set priority interruptions for events and reminders, calls and messages. You can also prioritize alerts
With these tweaks, you can make sure that, say, calls from your phone’s contacts are considered more important than other calls.
Notifications, of course, are still available by swiping down from the top of the screen.
10. New Keyboard
There's something corny or clichéd about Android going beyond borders and boundaries ... but in the case of the keyboard, it’s literally true. There are no lines to separate the keys now, which is another creative choice.
Other changes include handier Quick Settings, available in one long, fluid swipe down from the top of the screen alongside notifications, a redesigned phone dialer (which also loses its border between keys), and—in a change that parents should love—the ability to set up multiple user profiles for a single device.
We look forward to digging more into Lollipop after spending some more time with it. In the meantime, if any features stand out for you as the best or worst of the new update, let us know in the comments.
Now that Android 5.0 is officially available on the Nexus 6 and Nexus 9, Google's hardware partners are starting to get the code and prepare software updates. When will your device…
Xiaomi, the so-called "Apple of China," has been on a roll recently. But even after shipping 18 million handsets in the last quarter, achieving a whopping year-over-year growth of 239% during that period, the Chinese tech company has been unseated from its spot as the third-biggest smartphone maker in the world by Lenovo, which just completed its acquisition of Motorola Mobility last Thursday.
According to IDC data charted for us by BI Intelligence, Lenovo is now the third-biggest smartphone maker in the world, after Apple and Samsung. Before the Motorola acquisition cleared, Lenovo had achieved 38% year-over-year growth thanks to expansion in China and other emerging markets, shipping more smartphones in the first three quarters of 2014 than it did in all of 2013 (46 million vs. 45.5 million units, respectively). But now that Lenovo has acquired Motorola, the company has better leverage in the US; Liu Jun, the president of Lenovo Mobile Business Group, says he expects the company to sell more than 100 million mobile devices in the coming year.
Starwood hotels, which operates W Hotels, Aloft, and Element, unveiled SPG Keyless on Monday, a function of their app that allows guests to skip the front desk entirely and head straight to their room. The SPG app is also available for Android.
Using the iPhone's Bluetooth connection, the app promises a smooth, keyless entry experience.
No more losing your room key.
The keyless entry system will roll out in 10 hotels on Nov. 5, in locations like Beijing, New York, and Doha. Starwood hopes to have keyless entry running with 150 hotels by early 2015.
Starwood Hotels CEO Frits van Paasschen suggested the new technology would reduce friction for consumers:
“Not only does SPG Keyless alleviate a perennial pain point for travelers, but it also transforms the first interaction with our guests from one that is transactional to something more personal. This is just the beginning, because through mobile we have the opportunity to marry high tech and high touch to transform the hotel experience in many exciting ways.”
SPG — which stands for Starwood Preferred Guest — is essentially a customer loyalty program. Although it exists as a standalone app now, we wouldn't be surprised to see SPG incorporated into the Apple Pay/Passbook experience in the future.
Starwood isn't the only hotelier getting in on the keyless entry action, either.
Hilton Worldwide announced today that they plan to introduce keyless entry into their hotels — which include Hilton Hotels & Resorts, Waldorf Astoria Hotels & Resorts, Conrad Hotels & Resorts and Canopy by Hilton — in "late spring" 2015.
Creating good public policy in the communications realm is never easy, as regulators constantly are balancing. But it does seem as though “balancing” has become more precarious recently. Consider the whole matter of what to do about the legacy copper network, the “transition to Internet Protocol networks” and support for legacy services.
To be sure, the Federal Communications Commission has multiple goals. For example, the FCC says its mission includes “promoting competition, innovation and investment in broadband services and facilities, and “supporting the nation's economy by ensuring an appropriate competitive framework for the unfolding of the communications revolution.”
To some extent, of course, the goals of promoting competition and promoting investment are contradictory. As both U.S. and European regulators have discovered, promoting competition by expanding wholesale access to incumbent facilities often succeeds quite well.
But that same success also discourages further investment in facilities, since the owner of the scarce access network automatically enables robust competition when it invests in next generation facilities.
Likewise, the transition to the next generation of broadband networks would seem to require creating and maintaining incentives for facilities investment, balanced with the goal of promoting competition.
Sometimes that translates into rules that specifically require maintaining legacy facilities and services, even if that conflicts with the goal of supporting next generation network investment.
Ironically, we now see support both for expanded optical fiber access to support gigabit networks, and talk of preserving the life of copper networks to preserve competition.
The problem, of course, is that the copper network and legacy services are serving fewer and fewer customers, meaning the costs of serving each remaining customer are growing. at the same time the legacy services are being replaced by next generation services.
It isn’t easy, all might agree. But neither are matters helped when waffling occurs, as tough as firm policies might be. Granted, there are constituencies for keeping the copper network, and legacy services, alive.
But few seem to think it would be better if Internet service providers slowed their migration to fiber access networks, slowed the rate of speed increases or put obstacles in the way of faster Ethernet and IP services.
It is a balancing act, to be sure. But some methods of protecting competition actually are harmful to the goals of expedited investment in next generation infrastructure.
Making matters worse are asymmetrical regulatory frameworks that do not treat all providers of access and other services the same way.
The biggest U.S. high speed service providers (and Internet access is the strategic service) are AT&T, Verizon, Comcast and Time Warner Cable. But they play under different rules.
In fact, in terms of subscriber share, Comcast is the biggest, followed by AT&T, then Time Warner Cable, then Verizon, according to Leichtman Research Group.
True, Comcast and Time Warner Cable are not yet in the mobile business. But that will come, meaning all the largest telcos and cable companies will compete across the full range of anchor products and customer segments.
And one might also argue that asymmetrical financial returns--that underpin investment--now flow to app providers and device providers in the ecosystem, not to access providers.
Granted, it is not the business of the FCC to oversee the financial health of the device and app industries that all agree contribute to the nation’s economy. On the other hand, if there were obvious shifts in business model that directly affected the health of all contestants in the access business, one would think that would inform decision making.
In Europe, communications regulators have discovered that decades of successful promotion of competition have also lead to decades of lessened investment, and that the “pro-competition” policies are directly related to those outcomes.
It’s a balance; a tough balance. But both investment and competition must be supported.
Google just updated its calendar app for Android phones and tablets, and the new version both looks beautiful and will make it easier for you to stay on top of your busy schedule.
One of the coolest thing about the update is that it will automatically grab dates, times, and locations from your email and turn them into Events in your calendar — no more copy and pasting necessary. For example, if you get an email receipt from buying concert tickets, Google will add that concert to your calendar.
Ditto for flight information:
Google will also let you pull information from your address book so that it is easier to add attendees to an event invite. It will learn your preferences and schedule overtime so if you always go for a run with your friend Peter in Central Park, Google will suggest that when you start typing "Run."
The whole look of Calendar has gotten more beautiful and visual-heavy, too. The new "Schedule View" will include photos and maps of the places you're going and illustrations that fit the event (think martini glasses if you add an event that you're going out for drinks with someone):
The new calendar experience will work on Android phones running 4.1 and higher, and Google is also working on a version for iPhone.
Advertisers have lots of clever ways to use consumers' online browsing behavior to target digital advertising at them. Now they are going to be able to mine the comments people leave on websites in order to serve them contextual ads, based on the stuff they have been talking about and other people's comments they have been voting on.
The San Francisco-based company is partnering WPP's programmatic ad platform Xaxis to let brands place ads against Disqus comments. The ads, which will be labeled as "sponsored," will be shown at the top of comment threads. They can feature text, images, video and can be discussed to a particular audience, the topic being discussed, or both.
Publishers, advertisers, and Disqus will not receive any personally identifiable information about the users brands are targeting. Instead Disqus will create anonymous profiles, with its general manager of advertising David Fleck telling Adweek: "We have the largest and deepest audience profiles on the web."
From the brand perspective, comment threads will be closely monitored to ensure ads are not delivered against any topics deemed "unsafe."
Disqus would not confirm to Adweek which publishers will be the first to carry the ads.
Digital payments company Circle has just released a Bitcoin mobile app for iOS and Android.
Starting Monday, the app can be used to make payments, send or receive money, and convert money between Bitcoin and USD. The app is only available in the United States right now, but as CEO Jeremy Allaire indicates in the announcement, a global release will follow.
"We’re particularly excited about our Android release… because Android is becoming an important platform for finance on a worldwide basis,” he wrote. “Low-cost Android phones are coming to markets like India, Indonesia, and Africa, where the vast majority of users don’t have bank accounts, and where digital currency services could become a critical new utility.”
The cryptocurrency Bitcoin has been both lauded and panned for its pseudonymity, which keeps it from being a realistic currency alternative for those who are not tech savvy. Existing Bitcoin wallets sacrifice convenience for security, and if passwords are lost or forgotten, they can never be recovered. Not ideal for your life’s savings.
Circle’s native app may help to remedy some of these more high-tech edges of Bitcoin. For instance, the app uses multi-factor authentication and app-specific pin codes for easy access. Also, its iOS app will enable the use of password-retainer program 1Password, so people won’t need to remember a password.
Flu season has arrived and all eyes will be turning to Google's Flu prediction tool, which warns where the flu will hit next by watching people's internet searches.
Google Flu was hailed as the shining example of how big data could be put to use for the public good when Google first launched it in 2008.
And it worked well back then. Google compared its predictions against the cases that the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) confirmed and its predictions were pretty darn close.
But something went horribly wrong over the past two years, with Google over predicting the number of flu cases by 75% to 95%, the Wall Street Journal reports.
The flu season was bad last year, but nearly not as bad as Google thought it would be.
When the flu hit, the media wrote stories about the flu and then people to jumped on Google and start searching about the flu. That caused Google Flu to predict huge outbreaks of the flu which caused the media to write even more stories about the flu, using the Google Flu prediction engine as a source ... and so on.
Google also made another mistake with the tool. It only looked at the year-earlier CDC data once. As the CDC started reporting actual cases, Google didn't keep using the CDC data to check the accuracy of its predictions.
Google says it has updated the tool and will now be using actual CDC data all season long.
LE: Right, so how is Face Unlock different in Android Lollipop?
As we discussed the app market, Codorniou drew the above diagram on a whiteboard on the eighth floor of Facebook's cavernous London offices. We have annotated it here so you can see what's going on.
But does the Parse platform compete with Apple or Google?
"The vision we have with Parse and with the platform in general is to accelerate the time to market. It should not take you six months to develop from iOS to Android."
After reviewing Jabra Evolve 80 headset last week, Plantronics makes a come back this week with the BackBeat Pro. While the Evolve 80 is somewhat of a blended consumer/UC headset the BackBeat Pro as the name implies is all about music with UC a far second. Although the focus of the BackBeat Pro is the consumer market its worthy of a review because it does have some great features. It may not have UC specific features but with tradeoffs in other areas it still makes a great headset.
The old web is a weird, wild, and wonderful place. 
.jpg)
.jpg)
.png)
