firehose

The Apple Watch is on its way. Who’s going to buy it?

Over the past week, Quartz polled 811 US smartphone owners using SurveyMonkey Audience. (Methodology details are below.) And it seems many are waiting to see the watch in person before they decide to buy one.

Low interest

The first Apple Watch will require an iPhone to work, and about half of our survey group already owns one. (For context, comScore says 42% of US smartphone subscribers have iPhones.) Of those, only about 2% said they were extremely likely to buy an Apple Watch in the next 12 months, and another 3% said they were very likely. A total 20% said they were at least somewhat likely. Roughly 80% of iPhone owners said they were not likely to buy an Apple Watch next year.

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The percentage of those unlikely to buy one was even greater for non-iPhone owners, who would also need to acquire iPhones to use Apple Watches. More than 90% said they weren’t likely to get an Apple Watch, and fewer than 1% were extremely likely to buy one.

Too expensive

The most basic Apple Watch will start at $350, with more premium versions (and accessories) adding up from there. Yet most people polled—among those who said they’d be willing to spend any money on the Apple Watch—want to spend less than $200.

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Many wearable devices on the market today—like the Jawbone Up 24, the Fitbit Flex, the Pebble Steel, and the Nike+ FuelBand SE—cost less than $200, so this might be the price consumers are used to seeing for wearable tech. Apple will have to prove its watch is more useful or cooler than other step trackers and smartwatches if it’s going to attract buyers at nearly twice the price of the competition.

Apple, however, has experience here. Consider the iPod, which was only available for $399 when it launched in 2001, and gradually expanded to include less-expensive family members, all the way down to today’s $49 iPod shuffle.

Niche luxury market

The vast majority of those surveyed—over 85%—said they wouldn’t want to spend any money on a luxury version of the Apple Watch. Only about 5% of those who expressed interest in a high-end Apple Watch said they would spend more than $2,000 on it.

Apple’s 18-karat “Edition” watches are rumored to cost around $4,000, putting them in the same price bracket as many Swiss luxury brands like Rolex or Omega (and the Mac Pro computer). That 5% may not be much of a concern for Apple, as Apple’s high-end Editions will likely be more of a prestige product rather than something the company will be banking on for volume. (Swiss watch exports, for context, only account for about 2% of watches produced worldwide, but considerably more in revenue.)

Seeing it to believe it

An overwhelming majority of respondents—roughly three quarters—said they would want to see the Apple Watch in person before they purchased one. (A faithful few—11.2%—said they wouldn’t need to see it in person before taking the plunge.)

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More than half of those interested in buying an Apple Watch said they would first go to an Apple Store to see the watch. Fewer than 3% said they would go to a high-end watch store. This is huge for Apple. With over 400 Apple Stores worldwide and highly trained staff—now under the watch of Burberry’s former CEO—Apple has a physical advantage over competing smartwatch and wearable brands that have to rely on placements in big-box electronics stores.

One question is whether—and how—Apple will change its stores to accommodate the Apple Watch launch. Unlike phones and tablets, trying on watches seems to call for a more peaceful, intimate environment. (Especially when expensive, luxury items are being handled.)

Influencing the influencers

Apple will need good reviews—professional and amateur.

About 40% of those surveyed listed that their friends’ opinion might influence them to buy an Apple Watch. Some 29% said reviewers might influence their decision.

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For contrast, few respondents said that celebrities’ or athletes’ opinions of the Apple Watch would affect their decision. Here, we’d highlight that Apple invited many celebrities to its Watch unveiling in September and hosted a VIP event at Paris Fashion Week. Perhaps Apple knows more about celebrity influence on purchase decisions than individual buyers would care to admit. Recall, also, that its recent acquisition Beats Audio has built a business around celebrity endorsements.

Trust is split

When it comes to deciding where to look for information on the Apple Watch, Apple’s own website took a slender lead as the research site of choice. But nearly as many indicated they would look at Amazon during their research. Will Amazon—which still doesn’t officially sell the iPhone—even sell the Apple Watch? (Will there be an Amazon Fire Watch?)

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This suggests most consumers are likely to look for multiple opinions as they weigh whether to purchase an Apple Watch. Apple’s public relations and marketing departments have their work cut out.

Changing behavior?

Purchasing an Apple Watch wouldn’t be a huge change in behavior for many consumers, as many are already watch wearers. (For context, a recent international Morgan Stanley poll found traditional watch ownership at 63%.) About half of our respondents said they regularly wear a watch, with most watch-wearers saying they wear an everyday watch like a Timex or Casio, or a premium brand like a Seiko or Movado watch.

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Comfort will be key. Those polled by Morgan Stanley said comfort was their top purchasing criterion for a wearable device. Almost 60% said they were wearing their device “close to all the time” or “during most waking hours.”

Some details on the methodology behind our poll data: SurveyMonkey surveyed American smartphone owners and calculated a sample size large enough to be statistically significant. We had two groups of respondents—US iPhone users and US non-iPhone smartphone users. The number of respondents required for a statistical significance of 95% with a margin of error of +/- 5% was roughly 400 people per group. We surveyed 811 people, split almost equally between the two smartphone user populations.

Read this next: 2015 is the year of the Apple Watch

INDIE dot VC. Adafruit has not taken any loans or funding, but if we did or if we do – we’ve always admired OATV and we would talk to them first – they invested in Chumby, Instructables, 3D robotics, spark.io, Misfit wearables, Maker Media and more. They have a new experiment called “indie.vc” – check it out, it might be a match.

WHO:
Bootstrappers with ambitions that exceed their cash flow.
Creatives with side projects they’re funding through client work.
Founders that don’t want to sell out their users to attract investors or advertisers.

Read more.

submitted by Zero_Kool_Guy [link] [14 comments]

because-i-have-us:

renirabbit:

yougotkronwalled:

burrayeksa:

Hockey is so fucking entertaining without even meaning to be. 

All these hockey gifs and they didn’t include the best one:

this made me want to watch hockey

that gif above me. is my home team. 

Courtney shared this story from Super Opinionated.

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Courtney shared this story from Super Opinionated.

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Courtney shared this story from Super Opinionated.

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Those of you unfamiliar with hacker culture might need an explanation of "doxing."

The word refers to the practice of publishing personal information about people without their consent. Usually it's things like an address and phone number, but it can also be credit card details, medical information, private e-mails -- ­pretty much anything an assailant can get his hands on.

Doxing is not new; the term dates back to 2001 and the hacker group Anonymous. But it can be incredibly offensive. In 2014, several women were doxed by male gamers trying to intimidate them into keeping silent about sexism in computer games.

Companies can be doxed, too. In 2011, Anonymous doxed the technology firm HBGary Federal. In the past few weeks we've witnessed the ongoing doxing of Sony.

Everyone from political activists to hackers to government leaders has now learned how effective this attack is. Everyone from common individuals to corporate executives to government leaders now fears this will happen to them. And I believe this will change how we think about computing and the Internet.

This essay previously appeared on BetaBoston, who asked about a trend for 2015.

EDITED TO ADD (1/3): Slashdot thread.

Being in low gravity for long periods of time does alter your body’s height or bone density, but it sure won’t stop the hair on your head from growing. That’s why every once in a while the people aboard the International Space Station have to cut their hair themselves, and judging from Italian astronaut Sam Cristoforetti’s livetweets of her own outer space salon session, the process is… pretty messy.

New Year, time for a haircut. Setting up shop at “Chez Terry”. Anno nuovo, ora di tagliare i capelli da “Chez Terry”. pic.twitter.com/7yDpYhRKMA

— Sam Cristoforetti (@AstroSamantha) January 1, 2015

First of course I washed my hair. Per prima cosa naturalmente lo shampoo. pic.twitter.com/5UPhipv03h — Sam Cristoforetti (@AstroSamantha) January 1, 2015

Washing your hair with no gravity is also a bit of a process unto itself, as Karen Nyberg demonstrated to us in 2013 when she was aboard the ISS with Expedition 36/37. 

And here goes the first hair into the vacuum cleaner! E i primi capelli se ne vanno nell’aspirapolvere! @AstroTerry pic.twitter.com/6dN4GPqHEi — Sam Cristoforetti (@AstroSamantha) January 1, 2015

 

While master @AstroTerry cuts, apprentice @AntonAstrey is at the vacuum cleaner. Apprendista Anton all’aspirapolvere. pic.twitter.com/CWhJcnawSf — Sam Cristoforetti (@AstroSamantha) January 1, 2015

That’s NASA astronaut Terry W. Virts and Russian cosmonaut Anton Shkaplerov actually doing the cutting…and vaccuming. Gosh, and you thought it got messy at your local barber’s.

Voila’. I think @AstroTerry‘s preflight training paid off, right? Risultato finale: grazie Terry, cliente soddisfatta pic.twitter.com/3ms08XuUtV — Sam Cristoforetti (@AstroSamantha) January 1, 2015

Watch, they’ll all probably still be picking little bits of hair out of their clothing for the next two or three days. Hey, just like we do back on Earth!

(via Phil Plait, picture via Sam Cristoforetti on Twitter)

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thegreensanitarium:

riverdogproductions:

newworldorganization:

drifterscave:

doitsundere:

anal0g2:

asvpyeezy:

kanye sleeping.

shhhh

Kanye Rest

in his Kanye Nest

when he wakes up he’s going to be his kanye best

This is the tale of Kanye West, who is snuggled in his Kanye Nest, having himself a Kanye Rest, for he must be at his Kanye Best, before he’s off on a Kanye Quest, where he’ll be put to the Kanye Test, in hopes to retrieve the Kanye Chest that is distinctly marked with the Kanye Crest, He shall return to the Kanye Nest and have himself a Kanye Fest, where he will welcome many Kanye Guests, but first he must be rid of Kanye Pests, before he can put on his Kanye Vest and dance at the party with such Kanye Zest.

did you just

Two snaps up in a circle!

justinaireland:

Me, basically every day.

cineplexmovies:

"I’ve got a couple of pieces of gold from the dragon’s lair and a few little silly models of Gandalf with bobbling heads. I don’t quite know where they are — sometimes they end up on the same shelf, and then sometimes they get put away, and then sometimes they get hung up on the Christmas tree."

— Sir Ian McKellen, ever the baffled charmer, on The Hobbit (x)

Marissa Mayer faces a tough technical challenge in turning around Yahoo as a business. But critics say some of her biggest mistakes have been on the management side. A main issue, according to an excerpt from journalist Nicholas Carlson’s upcoming book on her tenure, is her adoption of stacked or forced ranking.

Mayer’s system—called Quarterly Performance Reviews or “QPRs,” and adapted from similar approaches at other tech companies—requires managers to rate their reports on meeting their goals from one (“misses”) to five (“greatly exceeds”), and for at least some percentage of them to be in the bottom buckets, regardless of whether any truly “missed,” according to Carlson’s account. Compensation, and even continued employment can depend on these scores. Mayer has repeatedly rejected this assertion, according to the account. (We reached out to Yahoo for comment and will update this when we get one.)

Carlson describes a company that’s seeing the theoretical and psychological problems with stack ranking in action. It has created increased competition, demotivated workers, hurt teamwork, and led to ratings based on arbitrary opinions instead of real performance differences. And even managers are miserable because they’re forced to give people ratings they don’t believe in.

Dissatisfaction came to a head when Mayer agreed to answer anonymous questions in a public meeting for the company’s employees. Here’s the most popular of the many that complained about the QPR process, as voted by employees:

I was forced to give an employee an occasionally misses, [and] was very uncomfortable with it. Now I have to have a discussion about it when I have my QPR meetings. I feel so uncomfortable because in order to meet the bell curve, I have to tell the employee that they missed when I truly don’t believe it to be the case. I understand we want to weed out mis-hires/people not meeting their goals, but this practice is concerning. I don’t want to lose the person mentally. How do we justify?

And another response that received more than one thousand votes:

Based on my experience, I don’t feel like the process was done correctly nor was I treated fairly. My former manager did not provide feedback or guidance, other than to say that higher-ups decided the numbers and he had no input. Considering how important these ratings are, can we have a legitimate appeals process?”

Both sentiments reflect the core problem with stacked ranking. That human and team performance doesn’t always naturally fit in “buckets” or a curve.

Holding people accountable for their goals and performance is essential. And Yahoo has improved its culture, ability to retain employees, and desirability as an employer under Mayer.

But forcing a distribution ends up making it more arbitrary, rather than more rigorous.

But where else are you supposed to park your TARDIS, Florida? On the street?

Just before Christmas, Pinellas County resident and Doctor Who enthusiast LeAnn Moder received a note from her town’s local homeowners association informing her that the replica TARDIS she currently has sitting in her driveway—which has been a hit at local conventions for over a year and recently featured as a backdrop in Moder’s wedding photos—is in violation of Parrish, Florida’s standards.

“In an effort to improve the overall appearance of Lexington HOA and to enhance properties values throughout, the Association continually surveys properties in the community for compliance with existing deed restrictions and standards,” the note reads, “It has come to the attention of the Association that you have a blue call box that needs [sic] removed.”

Given that Doctor Who is the BBC’s biggest selling show and makes millions of dollars a year in merchandise and ad revenue, I’d like to think that having a TARDIS in your neighborhood would enhance your property value considerably. But okay, Lexington homeowners. You do you.

According to the letter Moder has 15 days to comply with their request, but she appears to be taking the violation in stride and might even host a movie in her driveway soon just to annoy the Association further. “I maintain this is a mode of transportation, therefore I have every right to park it in my driveway,” she wrote when she posted an image of the letter to a local  “TARDIS Riders” Facebook Group.

Moder also noted that they received a second notice about the weeds in their flower beds, in case you were wondering just how pedantic and fussy this organization is exactly. Seriously, all the weird things that happen in Florida and this is what finally causes a neighborhood to intervene? Well, all right then. Good luck fighting off Daleks with nothing but your Manatee mailboxes.

(via Nerd Bastards)

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And the first reactions people had to become greener and smarter.

After Mark Chanko was hit by a truck in Manhattan and taken to a hospital, no one in his family gave "NY Med," the real-life medical series, permission to film his treatment or to broadcast the moments leading up to his death.

Japanese game shows generally ask people to do things that are physically impossible. Nobody actually expects them to do them, and they are entirely ridiculous so it's really just about laughing while seeing how close the people can come before failing.

But once again, Lionel Messi has proven to be the exception. They gave him a bar 18 meters in the air and asked him to kick the ball over it on the volley and continue juggling the ball when it came down.

What? How? No.

THAT IS A TASK AND GAME BUILT TO ENSURE HE FAILS.

And that concludes Lionel Messi Is An Alien, episode 394.

Prior to the 1976 Copyright Act (which became effective in 1978), the maximum copyright term was 56 years — an initial term of 28 years, renewable for another 28 years. Works published in 1958 would enter the public domain on January 1, 2015, where they would be “free as the air to common use.” Under current copyright law, we’ll have to wait until 2054.

An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from BGR: What's every incumbent ISP's worst nightmare? If we had to guess, it looks something like the filing that Google just made with the Federal Communications Commission. As The Wall Street Journal reports, Google this week told the FCC that reclassifying broadband providers under Title II of the Telecommunications Act would have a big side benefit for Google Fiber because it would give Google Fiber the same access to utility poles and other key infrastructure currently enjoyed by Comcast, AT&T and other big-name ISPs.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ryan North & Erica Henderson's "The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl" #1 gives the nuttiest, most upbeat superhero in the world a new Marvel ongoing series.

Let’s be real: there’s a lot to unpack about FOX’s Gotham, and most of it ain’t good. Leaving aside Donal Logue’s long-suffering Bullock and Robin Lord Taylor’s delightfully sinister Penguin, Gotham is a mess of paint-by-numbers plotlines and unsubtle winks to the Bat-canon. Many of these aspects of the show had some potential, but nearly all were squandered—and none more so than the sad tale of Barbara Kean, the latest in a long line of bisexual characters thrown under the bus by network TV.

Even if you watched all of Gotham‘s ten episodes thus far—and I’ll readily forgive you if you didn’t—it’s easy to overlook Barbara (played by Erin Richards), or even forget her entirely. She’s one of the least important characters on the show, even though she’s engaged to Jim Gordon, Our Hero. Barbara makes an appearance roughly every 1.5 episodes, sticks around for five or ten minutes max, and then vanishes into the aether until the writers need a little more romantic tension. She receives little characterization, other than her status as a rich art dealer and her shameful affection for marijuana—oh yeah, and she’s bisexual.

To the show’s credit, at least Jim doesn’t call off the engagement when he finds out Barbara used to date Renee Montoya. But that’s small potatoes next to the crime it does commit: falling into the Cheating Bisexual trope. Spoilers for the show you didn’t watch this season: at the end of the ninth episode, Barbara has fled Gotham with Renee, sharing an implicitly postcoital kiss while poor clueless Jim calls Barbara’s cell phone.

Look. I’m a big fan of seeing my sexuality represented in mainstream media. Arrow‘s Sarah Lance/Nyssa al Ghul romance thrilled me to bits, as did (more spoilers) Legend of Korra‘s big reveal that Korra and Asami became a couple in its finale. Bisexuality is getting harder and harder to erase from pop culture, and that’s excellent news for queer kids and adults everywhere.

But that doesn’t mean that all representation is good. Barbara, in cheating on Jim with her old flame, isn’t just a traumatized woman seeking solace (although she certainly is that as well). She’s a walking example of society’s most hurtful stereotypes about —that we’re confused about what we really want, and thus incapable of holding down a monogamous relationship.

What makes this all the more infuriating is that in Batman: Year One, the book upon which so much of Gotham is based, Jim and Barbara’s roles are reversed: Jim develops feelings for his coworker, Detective Essen, which in later stories leads to his and Barbara’s divorce. Gotham instead chooses its expendable female character to bear the burden of infidelity. After all, who could ever root for a flawed protagonist?

I’m not saying that all queer characters should be flawless, or even be good people. Arrow’s Nyssa certainly isn’t, nor is NBC’s maybe-bi version of John Constantine. (Hell, Barbara’s dalliance is far more palatable overall than her straight-up idiocy in the previous episode.) What I am saying is that a queer character’s sexuality shouldn’t be a reason to shame them. Let’s put a moratorium on the easy sexual clichés, at least until pop culture becomes less toxically queerphobic.

And while we’re at it, how about giving Babs a few more lines?

You can find more of Sam’s work at SamRiedel.com.

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Times of India

AirAsia plane may have touched down on water safely: Experts Times of India JAKARTA/LONDON: The pilot of the crashed AirAsia plane may have pulled off the perfect emergency landing before it sank in the choppy waters of the Java Sea killing all the 162 people aboard, a media report said on Thursday. Experts believe that the ... and more »

HONG KONG—Two Hong Kong teenagers may be taken from their families for participating in pro-democracy protests that overtook the city for more than two months. At court hearings later this month, judges will decide whether to approve requests by police to remove a 14-year-old girl and a 14-year-old boy, detained separately, from their parents’ custody.

According to Patricia Ho, a human rights lawyer representing the boy, the move appears to be aimed at scaring the parents of young protesters who are trying to continue the mission of the Umbrella Movement. “It is quite shocking. If a parent allowed their child to go participate in protests, and then it could be said they are neglecting the child, it would certainly impose more fear,” Ho told Quartz.

Such applications, which can be made by police, social welfare workers, or Hong Kong courts, are usually reserved for cases when children face severe harm, such as being abandoned or involved in prostitution or drug trafficking. The current case seems retributive, Ho says. Authorities told the teenage boy upon his arrest in November during the dismantling of a protest site in Kowloon, “We’re going to lock you up in a boy’s home,” according to Ho.

In both cases, the police say that parents are failing to exercise proper guardianship over their children. The boy is at home ahead of his hearing on Jan. 12th, according to Ho. The girl was detained earlier this month for using chalk to draw flowers on a staircase once plastered with post-it notes of support for the protests. After spending two nights in a children’s home she was sent home to her father this week, ahead of a hearing on Jan. 19th. She told the Ming Pao, a Hong Kong-based Chinese-language publication yesterday that she has “no regrets” about participating in the protests.

The care and protection order that police have applied for includes a range of outcomes other than taking the child from his or her home, including a forced curfew or visits from a social worker. Already, protesters and children’s rights groups are rallying behind them. Ho said, “If [the boy] is taken away, it would be outcry.”

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The numbers: The number of births in Japan is estimated to be just 1.001 million in 2014, the lowest on record for the fourth consecutive year. The number of deaths in the same period is thought to be 1.269 million, for a net population loss of 268,000.

The takeaway: That makes 2014 the third year running that Japan has suffered a net loss in its population, as the country’s demographics tilt further toward old age. Earlier last year the government said that 15% of its population was elderly, and 40% of Japanese are projected to be over 65 by the year 2060.

What’s interesting: Prime minister Shinzo Abe has made fixing Japan’s declining birth rate a primary objective, but he faces several tough obstacles. Encouraging more women to have children involves creating a work culture that supports mothers in work, and Japan’s corporate culture favors men and emphasizes working long hours (paywall).

And despite Abe’s attempts to encourage women to “have it all”—meaning a career and a kid, or maybe two—his own party hasn’t gotten the message. Abe’s own finance minister recently told audiences on the campaign trail that Japan’s demographic problem was caused by people “not having children,” a comment widely considered to be a criticism of women, rather than the culture that makes it difficult for them to juggle work and family.

trans-dyke:

ctrayn:

So according to the movie Back to the Future Part II, by the year of our lord 2015 there are supposed to be 19 movies in the Jaws franchise.  As of January 2014, there are only 4.  I personally see this as an enormous travesty, which is why I’m calling on the internet to rectify this grievous mistake.

I challenge the geek community, the web community, the YouTube community, the film community, the time travel community, the hypothetical Jaws community, and the local community college to answer my call and create 15 new JAWS feature-length movies before October 21st, 2015.

According to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, American Film Institute, and British Film Institute, a feature film has to be at least 40 minutes long.  So even if your film is 40 straight minutes of a rubber shark floating quietly in a bathtub, it still fulfills what I am asking of you in the challenge, and it is still probably a more entertaining watch than Jaws: the Revenge.

So grab your camera phones, a bucket, and that inflatable shark you bought at the dollar store, because it’s showtime.  Live-action, stop-motion, puppets, pencil animation, CG, piss on film- it doesn’t matter how you create the movie!  Just go and make the 2015 of Back to the Future II a reality.

Signal boost, if you please!

I would piss my pants if someone did the 19th one in the same style as in bttf2. It’s so easily possible now too. omfgg

hot shots part deux (1968)