Rolandt

A question you probably didn’t even know to ask.  From FastCompany:

Stepping in-line with fellow sub-brands Fido and Koodo, Virgin Mobile is now offering wireless home phone services, but unlike its competitors it’s offering the service both on a month-to-month basis and on a two-year contract.

Though the change is not yet updated on Virgin’s website, an internal document sourced by MobileSyrup shows that Bell’s budget carrier will stock its ZTE home phone adapter at $39.99 outright, approximately the same price as Fido and Koodo, but will provide the option for customers to get the adapter for $0 down on a two-year contract.

In either instance, the monthly cost is $20, which is the same as Koodo for both new and existing customers. The difference, however, is that Koodo offers Canada-wide calling, while Virgin, for an unspecified ‘limited time’ is also offering unlimited calling to the U.S.

In comparison, Fido offers plans at $18 per month for unlimited Canada-wide calling (or $13 in Quebec, Manitoba and Saskatchewan) and $20 for unlimited Canada and U.S. calling for existing customers, while new customers must pay $30 per month for Canada-wide calling.

As for additional features that can be added monthly, Virgin is offering unlimited China and Hong Kong calling for $15 per month and 1000 minutes to India per month for $20.

Koodo’s add-ons run $10 for unlimited calling to the U.S., $15 for unlimited calling to China and Hong Kong and $20 for 1000 minutes to India, while Fido offers $5 for 200 minutes to Europe, $5 for for 200 minutes to India, China, South Korea and Singapore.

Koodo began offering wireless home phone services in early June 2016, serving Ontario, Quebec and Atlantic provinces. Meanwhile, Fido began offering wireless home phone services in 2013.

Related reading: Koodo customers in Ontario and Atlantic provinces can now purchase a wireless home phone

Google’s monthly updated chart showing the distribution of the Android operating system reveals Marshmallow is now powering 15.2 percent of devices. This number is an increase from 13.3 percent in July.

Following similar trends from previous months, Lollipop has continued its dominance by being on 35.5 percent of devices, which is an increase from four weeks ago from 35.1 percent. KitKat, which was released in October of 2013, dropped in usage to 29.2 percent from 30.1 percent of Android devices.

4.X Jelly Bean is still prominent but also continued its drop by a percentage point to be found on 16.7 percent of Android devices. Froyo, Gingerbread, and Ice Cream Sandwich are still being used somewhere around the world and active on just 3.4 percent of devices, which dropped by 0.6 percent from June.

New Nexus devices are en route, currently known as the HTC Nexus ‘Sailfish’ and ‘Marlin,’ which are tipped to run Android 7.0 Nougat. In addition, LG has confirmed it will be releasing the V20 running Android Nougat in Q3.

mkalus shared this story .

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Putin the Thug is a political-military-industrial-complex dream candidate. Expect him to feature heavily in the next administration's foreign policy.

Pogue’s Basics: Opening up a new tab

Suppose one day you decide to surf the web, it could happen!

By now I hope you know the trick of clicking a link that it opens up a new tab.  It’s great when you have a list of search results and you can go through them one at a time, to find the one that you are looking for.

On the mac, you do that by holding down the command key and clicking the link.

On Windows, do you that holding down the control key. So far, so good.

The thing is, when you open up a new tab like that, does it appear in front of your list or behind your list? Turns out in most browsers that is up to you.

In Safari you go into preferences and just change this setting here.

But what if you use Chrome?

In Chrome, when you control or command the link, the tab always opens behind the page you are already on.

Here’s my trick.

If you would like that to open in front in stead, go to the chrome extensions page by clicking the Windows drop down menu and click “Extensions.”  Download the free extension called “tab activate.“

From now on, when you control or command click a link, the new tab will open in front of the list you started from. When you are done looking it over,  you just close that tab and your original list is just waiting for you.

Your welcome.

Hope Reese, Tech Republic, Aug 07, 2016

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The real "smart person's guide" is probably an academic paper or two, not a light web read from Tech Republic, but this will probably do. "It uses a branch of AI called machine learning, which can include approaches like deep neural networks and reinforcement learning to make predictions. This can rely on massive data sets, sometimes manual data labeling— but sometimes not."

[Link] [Comment]

Michael Barber, Pearson, Aug 07, 2016

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If it were really a revolution there would be new people in charge after the dust settles rather than the same old gang. But there's no suggestion of this in this blog post from Pearson. For example: "How we can recruit the art and science of delivering change at the system level to the goal of making available – to all students – the type of learning that Charlie Leadbeater has recently beautifully described (112 page PDF)?" This model still depicts them as working in jobs for the usual crowd and for the usual purposes, but just working at these jobs differently. Or this: "How can we ensure there is a much needed Renaissance in Assessment that will allow us to measure the full set of skills and capabilities that learners need to secure, and thrive, in a job?"

[Link] [Comment]

Apple refreshed over 100 of its emoji with iOS 10 beta 4, which was released earlier today. Some of the highlights include:

• gender-diverse emoji, including female athletes and professionals;
• a new rainbow flag;
• new family options; and
• a water pistol.

In addition to the new emoji, Apple redesigned many of its existing emoji. For instance, ‘grinning face with smiling eyes’ no longer looks like someone gritting their teeth. Many other emoji received a subtler update as a result of a new shading gradient.

Existing emoji were updated too.

It appears as though Apple is not quite finished with its emoji refresh because some of the approved Unicode 9 emoji, including the much anticipated bacon emoji, are not part of the iOS 10 beta 4 release.

Currently, the new, updated emoji are only available as part of the iOS 10 developer beta.

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Girls Who Code students develop paper prototypes during their New York Times field trip. Sarah Bures/The New York Times

A sea of excited young female faces. A crowded room of high school students fidgeting and waiting expectantly. Taking selfies and snaps from the moment they entered the room. But this is not a gaggle of adolescent fans waiting for a Zayn Malik concert to begin. These are young, ambitious girls exploring the possibility of joining the ever-expanding tech industry.

The New York Times Technology department, in partnership with Girls Who Code, hosted “The New York Times: Reporting Online and Around the World.” The July 28 event gave the 90 10th and 11th grade participants a glimpse into the inner workings of the newsroom, the technology group, and the product development teams of one of the best known newspapers in the world. The girls were shown the roles that technology, innovation and collaboration play in our multiplatform organization.

“We are thrilled to welcome Girls Who Code and the next generation of female tech leaders at The Times,” said Erin Grau, Vice president of operations at The Times and co-chair of the Women’s Network. ”We are so inspired by the work of Girls Who Code, an organization who shares our commitment to closing the gender gap in technology.”

Girls Who Code is a national non-profit organization that encourages girls to get into coding and development. Many of the 15- to 17-year olds were already passionate about going to college to study computer science. They were enthused by the program but complained that their schools either don’t offer any programming or computer orientated classes or if they do, that they tend to be male dominated. Development and coding wasn’t considered a future option until Girls Who Code came into their lives. One girl went as far as to say “coding is easy, you just need to know the language and practice.” This is the kind of confidence that programs like Girls Who Code were set up to instill.

Carrie Price, one of the coordinators of the event and a software engineer at The Times, credited her confidence and determination to pursue a career within the tech sector to a similarly early exposure to coding and development.

“Working with a program like Girls Who Code is awesome because we are getting an opportunity to be a little part of these girls’ summers,” she said. “The Girls Who Code program is doing a great job in instilling confidence in these girls really early on.”

Carrie hoped that meeting successful female employees, “doing these things in real life”, would convince the girls that jobs in programming and coding are plausible options in the future.

Teachers in the Girls Who Code program, such as Zoe Bachman, were universally impressed by the girls’ passion, hard work and commitment to the program. Zoe only started coding later in her career. Computer science wasn’t “cool” when she was at school. She returned to college to learn coding and development in order to teach kids the skills needed in the media and arts industries. But she says there still “needs to be a lot of changes in the tech industry” in terms of diversity. This is why Zoe wanted to work for Girls Who Code: “Their mission fits really well into my vision of diversifying the field.” The program introduces “a new image of what a programmer is.”

Software developers Carrie Price, Alex Ording, and Jean Kim welcomed the girls to The Times and then Erin described the mission, history and structure of the newspaper. She outlined the evolving relationship between the newsroom, business and Technology departments. After a short video, Erin quizzed the girls with trivia about The Times, underlining the “boots on the ground reporting” and the determination to “get the story first and get the story right.” The girls were taken aback to discover that The Times produces a Harry Potter book worth of stories every day: and the equivalent of the complete works of Shakespeare every week.

Erin described her own journey to The Times. After majoring in journalism and writing for television, she joined the newspaper industry. She described how she’d been told early on that the only measure of performance should be “did you make The Times a better place?” Erin encouraged the girls to “plan rich lives” and emphasized that when planning your career it is essential to know that “you can do multiple things, not just one.” The girls could code during the day and do yoga at night. Erin was as excited about the girls’ futures as they were by the inspirational vision that she presented of opportunity and equality for women in the workplace. One of the teachers observed that Erin was just the sort of role model needed by the girls.

After a tour of the building, where the newsroom and the “cool” Pulitzer Hall were the highlights, the students heard from Chief Technology Officer Nick Rockwell. He spoke about his job, and answered a few questions from the girls.

Three women from the Digital department — Elena Gianni, Rebecca Lai and Shirwah Tam — described their roles in Design (design is “not just about what things look like but much more about how things work”), in the Newsroom (astonishing the girls when she ended her talk by creating a basic website in front of their eyes), and as a software engineer on the Cooking team, respectively. The speeches underlined the crucial importance of collaboration and teamwork. The key message was to “just go out and do it.”

The girls then got a chance to put the skills they had been learning at Girls Who Code to the test. They divided into small groups and carried out a paper prototyping activity, designing an app that gives recipe recommendations from NYT Cooking. Carrie Price hoped the activity would give “the girls time to brainstorm, think critically, think about a problem with different constraints”.

The girls sketched their app designs on a piece of paper and gave them some great titles: “Slice, Slice Baby,” “Quizine” and “We Can Get You Out of a Pickle”. Carrie said she hoped the girls would come away being able to “look at programming from a different perspective, thinking more holistically about software design and what goes into it from beginning to end.”

At the end of the day, the girls were tired but reassured that coding and development is undoubtedly a plausible option for their future: “If I don’t do it as a job, then I will definitely do it as a hobby.”

There is a real skills gap in the technology industry. There’s simply not enough talent coming in. Nick Rockwell described the problem in terms of the failure of the education system, particularly at the high school level, to encourage both boys and girls towards careers in technology. Events like this are helping to rectify this by exposing girls to the job possibilities in the tech industry and giving them a chance to talk to role models.

The New York Times strives to fill the skills gap and increase the number of women working in its Technology group through its Diversity in Digital task force, who are currently in the process of drafting various policies to improve the workplace environment. Carolyn Price believes that this task force has done a great job at “figuring out where the core problems are and trying to address those problems, particularly around recruitment, environment and advancement.”

Erin summed up with two key secrets for success: “outwork everyone” and “build relationships.” She reassured the girls that “you are going to be scared of a lot of things, just do it!”

Angelica Hill is a summer intern in Operations. She will return to Queen Mary University of London in the fall as an English Literature major.

The Galaxy Note 7 is the first smartphone from Samsung to feature and iris scanner, and Samsung’s President of Mobile Division, DJ Koh hopes that it is definitely not the last. The president, in fact, is hoping to bring the technology to their mid-range smartphones its price reduces. Continue reading →

While it might be further west than our pilot project, this picture shows the multiple modes of transportation used on Bloor street historically. 

Ride on

A retrospective on the battle for bike lanes on Bloor

by senior contributing editor Albert Koehl

“I don’t think we’ve discussed bike lanes on Bloor before,” suggested Councillor Stephen Holyday in defence of his motion to delay a 2.4 km pilot bike lane on Bloor St. Several councillors worried that the pilot would lead to bike lane “creep” and come to include other sections of Bloor and Danforth Ave. Despite the concerns, Toronto City Council, after a lengthy debate, voted 38-3 on May 4, 2016 to approve the pilot.

Bloor has been a popular cycling route for virtually as long as the modern bicycle, originally known as the Safety, has been around. In the late 1880s, cyclists on Bloor had to contend with poor road conditions, then horse cars starting in 1890, followed by electric streetcars in 1893, and automobiles from the early 1900s. The completion of the Bloor Viaduct in 1918 enhanced Bloor as an east-west route, while the growing dominance of cars made the route ever more perilous for cyclists. With the revival of utilitarian cycling, especially in the early 1970s, it wasn’t long before the safety concerns of cyclists on Bloor again came to the fore. A May 1972 Toronto Star editorial characterized Bloor and Yonge streets as a cyclist’s “killing ground.”

In 1976, not long after the Arab Oil Embargo and cancellation of the Spadina Expressway, the city hired consulting firm Barton-Aschman to study on-street cycling routes. The Bloor ‘Corridor’ was identified as one of the city’s premier cycling areas with Bloor itself scoring highly on study metrics, including, lamentably, the city’s highest cycling collision rate.

The consultant ultimately rejected Bloor in favour of Harbord/Hoskin-Wellesley not because the latter was better for cyclists, but (implicitly) because cyclists on Harbord would be better for motorists on Bloor. The consultant also concluded that the loss of parking on Bloor would harm merchants, although this appears to have been an assumption masquerading as a conclusion. (A 2009 report by TCAT found that only 10% of shoppers on what is now the pilot stretch of Bloor arrived by car.) It took years before the Harbord route got bike lanes while the gap at Queen’s Park between Hoskin and Wellesley wasn’t actually closed, despite the consultant’s recommendation, until 2014!

Motorists actually had another prime, and exclusive, east-west alternative to Bloor after the Gardiner Expressway was completed in 1964. The completion of the Bloor Subway in 1966, opened up more space on Bloor. The subway also meant that cyclists no longer had to deal with streetcar tracks on Bloor. On Harbord, cyclists to this day are forced into an awkward dance with buses at passenger stops.

In 1992, a report by city consultant Marshall Macklin and Monaghan recommended a Bloor-Danforth bikeway “from city limit to city limit”, to serve as an east-west spine for the nascent cycling network. Bloor-Danforth had been identified as the city’s most popular cycling route. The report provided both short and long term implementation timeframes. Phase III, the final phase for Bloor-Danforth, was to be compIeted in 1993.

The 2001 Bike Plan, Shifting Gears (approved three years after municipal amalgamation) promised to have in place by 2011 a total of 500 km of on-street bike lanes, including the 35 km already in place. Bloor-Danforth was excluded in the plan although the door was left open for future changes.

In 2007, the City undertook a feasibility study for a Bloor-Danforth bikewayfrom Royal York Rd. to Victoria Park Ave. The study was to assess motor traffic and parking impacts and develop bikeway design options. In May 2009, shortly before the release of the study, Councillor Adrian Heaps, chair of the Cycling Committee told the media that bike lanes could be in place on parts of Danforth before the end of the year subject to design work, public consultation, and a vote a Council that Heaps was confident would succeed.

Heaps’ optimistic statement was quickly converted, for reasons never publicly articulated, into an announcement that a consultant would be hired to complete, among other things, a comprehensive ‘traffic’ analysis for Bloor-Danforth. This analysis soon became a plan to do a $500,000 environmental assessment (EA), which later came to be treated as a legal pre-condition for bike lanes, despite the obvious farce of studying the adverse environmental effects of a bicycle lane.

The EA was cancelled shortly after Mayor Rob Ford came to office in 2010. Shifting Gears, having achieved 17% of its objective, came to an end in 2012. The EA, albeit for a more limited section of Bloor, was revived by Bloor area councillors in October 2013. This EA never got off the ground and was later abandoned (ostensibly because of changes to the provincial EA Act).

The pilot project was first proposed to Bloor councillors and to public works in October 2013 by Bells on Bloor, Cycle Toronto, and others. With a new City Council in place in December 2014, and support from six local residents’ associations, Councillors Joe Cressy and Mike Layton championed the pilot initiative, while the new Cycling Manager, Jacquelyn Gulati brought new energy to the project from within City Hall.

For their part, cyclists continued riding along Bloor in ever-increasing numbers,despite the long-standing absence of dedicated road space. A count by city staff found that the pilot section of Bloor had among the highest cycling numbers for roads, including roads with bike lanes, in Toronto --- averaging 3,350 cyclists per day in August 2015.

At the council meeting of May 4, Holyday, perhaps on hearing guffaws (followed by laughter) from the public gallery quickly added: “At least not since I’ve been here.” (He was elected 18 months earlier.) And for the councillors worried that the 2.4 km pilot might lead to bike lanes across Bloor-Danforth … well yes, that’s always been the idea.

Albert Koehl is an environmental lawyer and a founder of Bells on Bloor.

Joe Cressy rides his bike along a car-filled Bloor. 

Related on the dandyBLOG:

Bike Spotting: Mike Layton on Bloor Bike Lanes

Bike Spotting: Talking Bloor Street Bike Lanes

City Cyclist at it again: Bike Lanes on Bloor

Vision Zero supported by public works but little love for Bloor bike lanes

 

Apple’s Shot on iPhone ad campaign has been around on billboards, in magazines, and on television since 2015. The campaign has featured both still photography and videos shot by customers on the iPhones, usually highlighting a specific feature of the iPhone camera or a specific theme, like Mother’s Day.

Today, Apple released a new Shot on iPhone television ad called ‘The Human Family,’ which according to Fast Company will air during the opening ceremony of the Olympics in Rio, Brazil on Friday. The ad features photographs and video taken by iPhone users of people from around the world with narration by poet Maya Angelou, who reads a version of her poem ‘The Human Family’ backed by a piano piece called ‘I Already Am a Great Matriarch’ by Rob Simonsen from the score of the Zach Braff movie ’Wish I Was Here’.

→ Source: youtu.be

The iPad Pro makes the best case yet for an iPad as a laptop substitute and power-user productivity tool, but you’ll get a lot more out of it with a real keyboard to type on. After testing every keyboard case we could get our hands on for both iPad Pro sizes we haven’t yet found a great one—there still aren’t many available. But if you need one now, we think Apple’s own Smart Keyboard for 12.9-inch iPad Pro and Smart Keyboard for 9.7-inch iPad Pro are the best currently available because they offer a pretty good typing experience in a slim and relatively light package that’s easy to put on and take off.

Photo by Greg Rakozy. All images courtesy Unsplash

A 100% free use photo-sharing site has is now the second-fastest growing photography website ever made (the first is Instagram). Unsplash, by creative marketing agency, Crew Labs, is a website that only publishes pictures licensed under Creative Commons Zero, meaning users are free to “copy, modify, distribute and use the photos,” for free, without the permission of the owner, according to the Unsplash licensing statement.  

Unsplash started as a Tumblr page with a pretty straightforward concept: the site would curate a selection of 10 images every 10 days and post them on the grounds that each photograph they published was licensed under creative commons zero. Admittedly, it was a sort of ploy to keep Crew Labs afloat—“A marketing budget? Please. We were just trying to keep the lights on,” writes Unsplash CEO Mikael Cho in a blog post—but it's a good one. 

Photo by Jeremy Thomas

After two years of up and running by itself, Unsplash had stirred up so much activity that Crew Labs had to assemble a full time team to run it. According to Crew Labs/Unsplash co-founder, Luke Chesser, the website brings in more than 700 million photo views and 7.5 million downloads every month.

The page operates on the assumption that a lot of independent artists and musicians rely on, which is that if you give the public your creative work for free, it will gain more exposure. Making your artwork easily accessible and allowing third party users to repurpose it into their own projects, gives your art more reach, spreading through the masses faster.

Photo by Will Van Wingerden

“After appearing on Unsplash, photos will appear in all sorts of random places — on billboards, Apple Stores, Buzzfeed articles, websites, apps, Twitter accounts — left, right, and center,” Chesser tells The Creators Project.

Everyone who posts to Unsplash decides on their own whether or not they want to post their photo into the public domain so that it can be remixed and used by the community. If they post, they obviously see more value in Unsplash than in keeping that photo on their hard drive or on another site like Flickr. Chesser says, “We don't go around asking photographers to post their work to Unsplash. We don't have a page saying 'post to Unsplash and you'll get x views,' or 'post to Unsplash and you'll get y freelance clients.'"

Photo by Paul Earle

Chesser explains, “I think no one can deny that there are big shifts around the digital culture and photography. Creative Commons-licensed works in general have definitely become more mainstream as the awareness has grown—possibly out of response to the convoluted copyright and trademark laws that don't really seem to fit well with the internet era.” See—and use—more images from Unsplash below:

Photo by Samuel Zeller

Photo by Paul Earle

Photo by Denys Nevozhai

Photo by Todd Diemer

Photo by Nasa

Check out the Unsplash website.

Related:

Is This Photo-Sharing App Better Than Instagram?

How One Parking Lot Photograph Conquered The Internet

[Exclusive] New Doc 'Brave New Camera' Explores How Smartphone Photography Is Changing the World

As far as I know, this was the first time I was targeted personally by an attempted identity theft. The scammer did very many things very right and nearly got me to give up my account details. Maybe if I’d read the email before looking at the SMS (in which the strange address was a bit more prominent), they would’ve gotten me.

Scary story. iPhone gets stolen. Thief tries to steal Apple ID as well.

More >

Casey is right. I have already deleted Snapchat. And my Instagram is here >

Jack Levine, on painting as a realist in the 1950s, a time of abstract expressionism and art as social commentary:

The difficulty is for me to be affirmative. I'm a little inhibited, as you have noticed, by not being against any of these people. The spirit of denunciation is more in the spirit of our time: sensation brought to an extreme.

Levine might just as well have been talking about today's social and political climate. Especially if he had had a Facebook or Twitter account.

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(This passage comes from Conversations with Artists. These entries also draw passages from it: [ 07/19 | 07/27 | 07/31 ]. This is my last entry drawn from the book, at least for now.)

Ian – Memo to Vancouver: Whenever someone says that nothing can be done to make Vancouver more affordable … they’re wrong.

Rent control laws in the city of Paris are doing exactly what they were designed to do. That’s what France’s Minister for Housing, Emmanuelle Cosse, has been saying in recent celebratory interviews to the French media. …

 

From Scot:

Customers can tell you a lot about how and why they use your products and where they fall short. Yet so many product managers fail to make the most of customer interviews by asking probing, insightful questions. As a result, they receive shallow, rote, and rather wasteful answers. Open-ended questions often lead to more thoughtful responses and encourage the person being asked to give a narrative...

Source

After a tumultuous multi-year stretch that included massive unit sales declines, declining average selling prices (ASPs), and deteriorating margin trends, the iPad business has turned a corner. The combination of improving upgrade fundamentals, less severe iPad mini sales declines, and a stronger iPad lineup with the iPad Pro and accompanying accessories have positioned the iPad category that much closer to stabilization. The worst is likely over.  

The iPad's Early Potential

The iPad shot out of the gate like a rocket in 2010, instantly becoming the best-selling new Apple product in history. Considering that the iPad was an entirely new category positioned between an iPhone and MacBook, many were caught off guard by how consumers embraced the new form factor. As seen in Exhibit 1, initial iPad sales were nearly three times as strong as initial iPhone sales. Consensus even began to think the iPad would end up outselling the iPhone over time. Needless to say, iPad optimism was riding high. In just 10 quarters on the market, Apple sold 100 million iPads. It took Apple 16 quarters to hit the same milestone with iPhone.

Exhibit 1: iPad and iPhone Unit Sales Post Launch

The Turning Point and Dark Days

In November 2012, just two and a half years after launching the original iPad, Apple unveiled the lower-cost 7.9-inch iPad mini. The goal was simple: Prevent Android competitors from gaining traction under the iPad's price umbrella. Apple did not want to see a repeat of the 1990s all over again. This time it would be in the tablet space where Android would become the new Windows. 

While the iPad mini was well received with many in the press calling it the "real" iPad, the device ended up representing a turning point for the iPad business. After what appeared to be a very successful 1Q13 holiday season for the iPad thanks to the mini, Apple reported its first decline in iPad unit sales just two quarters later. Since then, the iPad business has experienced a brutal three-year stretch. 

The iPad's dark days had arrived. Heading into 2015, the iPad line consisting of iPad mini and iPad Air looked dated and out of place within Apple's evolving product line. This led many to conclude that the tablet may simply be a less attractive product category going forward in a world dominated by large-screen smartphones. In addition, iPad marketing just didn't seem to contain much of a punch. Many of the iPad use cases profiled could be handled just as well, if not better, with an iPhone. Unsurprisingly, iPad expectations turned remarkably low.

In 2013, Apple sold 71M iPads. Apple's 3Q16 marked the 10th consecutive quarter of iPad sales declines. Apple is now on track to report 46M iPad unit sales in FY16. As shown in Exhibit 2, this significant 35% drop in sales, spread out over number of years, has given the iPad a very ominous sales trajectory. 

Exhibit 2: iPad and iPhone Unit Sales Trajectories Post Launch

iPad Problems

There have been a number of factors put forth to explain the iPad's troubles. I suspect much of the iPad's difficult stretch over the past three years has been due to two overarching reasons:

1) Peak iPad Mini. As shown in Exhibit 3, the iPad mini form factor has experienced a more significant sales decline than its larger 9.7-inch sibling. According to my estimates, the iPad mini is responsible for approximately 70% of the iPad's overall sales decline since 2013.

The iPad mini form factor bore all of the competitive headwinds associated with larger screen smartphones, much more so than its 9.7-inch screen iPad sibling. I suspect the iPad mini initially benefited from interest in and curiosity for an iOS device that was bigger than the 3.5-inch and 4-inch iPhones at the time but smaller than the 9.7-inch iPad 2 and 3. Meanwhile, the iPad mini's low price and feature set positioned basic video consumption as a leading use case. This distinction meant that the iPad mini upgrade cycle was basically a myth. When an iPad is used for nothing more than video watching, there is little to no incentive to upgrade. 

Exhibit 3: 7.9-Inch iPad vs. 9.7-Inch iPad Unit Sales (TTM)

2) Longer Upgrade Cycle for 9.7-inch iPad. If 70% of the iPad's decline is due to the iPad mini, the remaining 30% relates to 9.7-inch iPad owners holding on to their iPads for more than two or three years. The iPad upgrade cycle is more like four to five years. The iPad 2, released in 2011, still represents 15% of iPads in use today. This elongated upgrade cycle meant that the 9.7-inch iPad would not follow in the steps of the iPhone, a device that saw sales benefit from a very short two-year upgrade cycle for years. Apple continued to do fine selling iPads to new customers. However, the lack of iPad upgraders meant it was that much harder for Apple to report year-over-year iPad sales growth. 

Signs of Improvement

Just as it seems like people have completely written off the iPad business for good, signs are beginning to appear that point to improving iPad fundamentals. In fact, I suspect the iPad's dark days are already over.  

Better Upgrade Fundamentals. The average age of iPads in use now exceeds three and a half years, as shown in Exhibit 4. This is one of the best developments for the iPad business in years. At the current rate, the iPad business is close to hitting its natural upgrade cycle cadence, likely in mid-2017 to early 2018. I estimate there are approximately 225 million iPad users out in the wild. Assuming the average iPad upgrade cycle extends out to five years, this means that Apple would have approximately 45M iPad unit sales per year just due to existing iPad owners upgrading their devices. Meanwhile, Apple is on track to report annual iPad sales of 45M units for 2016. This number includes both iPad upgraders and customers new to iPad. This suggests that Apple's iPad business is very close to approaching a natural sales run rate at which the combination of upgrades and sales to new users will lead to roughly flat sales growth year-over-year. 

Exhibit 4: Average Age of iPads in Use

One announcement from WWDC provided much credibility to the theory that the iPad upgrade cycle will top out around five years. iOS 10 will not be compatible with the original iPad, iPad 2, iPad 3, and iPad mini, iPad models that are six, five, four, and four years old, respectively. This means there will be approximately 65M iPads that will not get the latest iOS release. That is a very significant number of iPads. While it's wrong to conclude owners of those iPad models will rush out and buy a new iPad as a result of not getting iOS 10, it does provide a few clues as to how Apple is thinking about an iPad's useful life before turning into an inferior experience: between four and five years. 

Less Severe iPad Mini Headwinds. With the iPad mini contributing to 70% of the iPad's overall sales decline in recent years, there is evidence that the period of massive iPad mini sales declines is coming to an end. Given current iPad mini sales, there is simply less room for the device to register the same kind of sale declines seen in the past. Accordingly, overall iPad sales will benefit from no longer having a massive iPad mini sales headwind. For example, in 3Q16, the iPad mini likely represented less than 20% of total quarterly iPad sales. While I remain confident that we have seen Peak iPad Mini, I do not expect iPad mini sales to go to zero. The device represents one of the low-cost entry-level devices for the iOS ecosystem, which will appeal to millions of consumers each year. 

Stronger iPad Lineup. The 9.7-inch and 12.9-inch iPad Pro and accompanying Apple Pencil and Smart Keyboard accessories represent the iPad's future. One consequence of iPhones becoming larger and MacBooks becoming smaller was that the old iPad line felt stale and out of place. Apple needed to shift its iPad strategy to the high-end, as detailed in my article, "Finding iPad's Future," from August 2015. This would be the opposite of the iPad strategy kicked off with the iPad mini at the end of 2012. Not only do the Pros serve as the first genuine iPads worth upgrading to for existing 9.7-inch iPad users, but they also give Apple a much better story to tell in terms of marketing. Apple's latest iPad commercial demonstrates this as Apple is explaining the iPad in a whole new way. The iPad is no longer the product that exists between a smartphone and laptop. Instead, the iPad is a computer. 

iPad Sales Stabilization Is Near

As a very early sign that all of these positive developments are coming together, Apple just reported the best quarter for iPad unit sales growth in 10 quarters, highlighted in Exhibit 5. The 9.7-inch iPad Pro launch certainly played its role. While sales are still declining, on a revenue basis, the iPad business registered its first year-over-year increase in 10 quarters. This is the clearest sign in years that iPad is approaching stabilization.

Exhibit 5: iPad Unit Sales Growth

Even though iPad sales declines will likely continue for a few more quarters, the probability that the iPad business will see significant sales declines from current levels has been reduced. Meanwhile, ASP and margin trends look to have long-term tailwinds as well. Looking ahead, the 40M sales milestone is the leading candidate for a natural sales run rate for the iPad business. This means that iPad sales would have to fall another 10% before reaching that level. To put that decline in perspective, Mac sales have declined more than 10% for the past two quarters. While the days of strong 30-40% unit sales growth will likely never make a return with iPad, it's clear that the iPad will soon enter a new stabilization phase. The dark days for the iPad are over. 

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This week on News 1130 radio in Vancouver, I spoke about these tech topics for Wired Wednesday with Ben Wilson:

• The Cronzy pen can draw in any color it sees in the real world (source)
• Smart shoes track your golf swing & postures (source)
• Superbook turns your smartphone into a laptop (source)

The post Wired Wednesday: Color-mixing pen, Smart golf shoes & turn your smartphone into a laptop appeared first on johnbiehler.com.

Joonas Kiminki got his iPhone stolen in Italy last month. After a couple of weeks, he received an email saying that the device had been found. The email turned out to be a well-designed, meticulous phishing attempt:

What strikes me the most is that everything seemed very “right” and professional. The email and the website content looked great, my phone really was an iPhone 6 and they even got the timezone right in the email.

The email raised no alerts on any email client I use, including Google Inbox, mail.google.com and Apple Mail. No web browser, mobile or desktop, show any alarms on the fake site. Google.com knows virtually nothing about the site, the email address or the (probably fake) US phone number the SMS was from. Very well done.

This is exactly what happened to my mother last week. Her iPhone was stolen in Italy in June, and after a month she received an email and SMS (in Italian) telling her that the iPhone had been located. Fortunately, she called me before entering her Apple ID credentials (she was about to).

Clearly, a criminal organization in Italy has set up an entire system to scam owners of stolen iPhones. I'm surprised that both Apple and Google are failing to recognize these email messages as spam.

→ Source: hackernoon.com

First rumored by Bloomberg last week, Apple has updated its Apple Store app to include personalized product recommendations that use customers’ buying history to make suggestions. Contrary to rumors, the recommendations are not part of a separate ‘For You’ tab in the Apple Store app. Instead, product recommendations and local Apple Store events are included under the app’s ‘Discover’ tab. In addition, Apple has unified the Apple Store iPhone and iPad apps into a single Universal app that is available to download free from the App Store.

→ Source: itunes.apple.com

One of the more exciting features included in Samsung’s recently revealed Note 7 is its iris scanning technology, which allows users to log into their phone just by looking at it.

In an interview with SamMobile, D.J. Koh, president of Samsung’s Mobile division, said his company plans to bring the technology to its mid-range devices when the tech behind it becomes more affordable. He also went on to claim that part of why the Note 7 is priced so high is because of the included scanner.

While I didn’t get to go hands-on with the iris scanner during Samsung’s recent Unpacked event in New York, if the feature works as well as the company says it does, it could change the way we log into our phones.

Samsung isn’t the first tech company to include an iris scanner in one of its devices. Microsoft’s Windows Hello login service actually very similarly to Samsung’s recently revealed iris scanner technology.

Nice update to Google's custom keyboard for iOS released today on the App Store:

Gboard is already available in English across the U.S., Europe, Canada and Australia. Starting today, Gboard is ready to start sending GIFs, searches, emojis and more for our friends who speak French, German, Italian, Portuguese (Brazil and Portugal) and Spanish (Spain).

Gboard's emoji search is the best way to search for any emoji I've tried on iOS. iOS 10's predictive emoji suggestions aren't even close to the Gboard's emoji features. I was hoping iOS 10 would have proper emoji search – maybe next year.

But I'm surprised that Google hasn't shipped an actual multilingual keyboard to type in two languages simultaneously. You have to switch between international layouts inside Gboard – just like in Apple's current keyboard for iOS 9. By contrast, iOS 10's upcoming multilingual keyboard is downright amazing, and I can't go back to keyboards without multilingual support now.

→ Source: itunes.apple.com

@stoweboyd:

I will be trying the new Dropbox Paper as a content-centric work management solution for a few days: expect a write-up by next week.

— Stowe Boyd (@stoweboyd) August 4, 2016

It’s believed that Google is hard at work on releasing two new HTC-made Nexus-branded smartphones. And features for the upcoming handsets keep trickling out. Continue reading →

Let’s jump right in:

From The Sun:

When finished, it will be nine kilometres of wide, smooth-surfaced path flanked by gravel and trees, blessed with perfect sight lines and ideal for swift riding. But it’s far from everyone’s idea of what a green space should look like — even a temporary one. It’s also well out of step with current trends in landscape architecture, experts say. Though there are competing philosophies over parkland, wilder environments — rather than manicured spaces — are in vogue.

Mark Battersby lives a few blocks from the greenway, which the city bought from the Canadian Pacific Railway a few months ago. When the city began to pour asphalt where the railway tracks once lay, the image that came to Battersby’s mind was of “a bike freeway.”

“We had in mind something that would be much more attractive to walkers and children,” he said.

Battersby, displeased with what he saw, produced a simple video slide show using before and after photos of the greenway:

Maureen Ryan, who also lives near the greenway, shares their concern. Ryan does want to see cyclists in the corridor, but on a crushed-stone surface rather than a paved path, to limit cycling speeds.

“We had a beautiful, beautiful green space,” said Ryan, who is a member of a coalition calling itself the Concerned Residents and Corridor User Group. “What we would like is a surface for bikes and wheelchairs that is, in fact, green.”

 

It’s definitely the shock of the new:

And it’s another no-win for the City, no matter what they do or don’t.  

Do something too quick, and there’s usual criticism of fait accompli.   (So ironic, since the default criticism of government is usually its lassitude.)  Propose an extensive consultation process, and the criticism is that City Hall is disingenuous.

Do nothing, and there would be complaints about its inaccessibility for the disabled (and look what they achieved with TransLink’s faregates).  Do the absolute minimum and the criticism would be the failure to meet minimum standards.  Do something too expensive, and the criticism would be spending too much on something explicitly meant to be temporary.

The easiest criticism is the lack of consultation.  For those who believe ‘consultation’ means only process, not outcome, it’s an effective delaying mechanism to retain the status quo.  For those who want change, consultation can be used to reject every alternative than the one they want.  The perfect is the enemy of the merely good.

If Kits Point is the precedent, then once again, long-time residents of a certain age will be fighting to keep things pretty much the same.  Only this time, the City was clear that Arbutus is a transportation corridor, and any design has to be for All Ages and Abilities.  For the moment, that’s what we’re getting.

Toronto Mayor John Tory has announced the “Rail Deck Park”, 21 acres of downtown public space to be built above existing rail yards. This in an area of expanding population with little public space. “I believe that creating a new downtown park is the best thing that we can do for future generations,” he said. “Not just any park, a big park, a bold park.”

Thanks to UrbanToronto.ca:  By decking over the existing Union Station Rail Corridor, the tracks below could remain operational while the space above would be reclaimed for public use. For the CityPlace, King Spadina, and Fort York neighbourhoods that straddle either side of the rail corridor, the park would provide both a vital communal space and a link to others part of Downtown. For the geographically sequestered CityPlace in particular, an improved connection with the more established urban environments to the north could be a significant boon.

Thanks to Brent Toderian and James Bligh for the links.