One of the first things I learned from Nancy is collaboration can rarely be tackled in isolation.

If you want to improve collaboration, yes you probably need to get a good platform.

If you want people to use the platform, they need to be persuaded about it’s value. They have to trust the person telling them about its values. They need to want to help one another.

Unsurprisingly, people only want to trust their boss, help each other, and ultimately collaborate if they enjoy their jobs.

If you try to tackle just the platform or motivation to use the platform level, you’re probably going to struggle.

Yes, when you’re learning from Jon he doesn’t want his employees collaborating with Joan’s team because of a longer-term dispute, you can feel like you’re shaving the yak.

But it’s all connected.

If you want your employees (or customers) to collaborate more you ultimately have to find, or help, a segment feel better socially connected, more autonomous and more competent at their work.

A few weeks’ ago we invited Ron Friedman – Author of The Best Place To Work to join us for an exclusive webinar.  It was the most popular webinar we’ve done this year. I hope you like it

(if the video doesn’t show, click here).

In the three previous parts (here, here and here) on the Internet of Things and 3GPP, I’ve described Cat-1, Cat-0 and Cat-M1 devices. In this post we get down to the really interesting development in 3GPP on this topic: Narrow Band Internet of Things (NB-IoT) and Cat-M2 devices.

While the previous developments mainly added a bit here and a bit there to the 3GPP LTE specifications, the NB-IoT Work Item takes a more radical approach. Several approaches were studied in 3GPP and the details for all of them can be found in the 500+ pages 3GPP Technical Report TR 45.820. In September 2015 an agreement was reached and one solution was selected. The details of this decision were documented in the NB-IOT work item description contained in RP-151621.

Very Narrow Channels That Fit In Everywhere

Designed for ultra low cost devices where the modem shall cost less than $5 and where data rates can be very low in exchange for power efficiency and deep in-house coverage, the solution makes a revolutionary break from the mobile broadband approach of LTE: The size of a NB-IoT channel is merely 180 kHz. Compare that to mobile broadband LTE channel bandwidths of 20 MHz or even triple that number of Carrier Aggregation devices that can bundle 3 downlink channels today. Despite this, a NB-IoT channel also uses Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) like LTE’s physical layer, the same sub-carrier spacing, OFDM symbol duration, slot format, slot duration and sub-frame duration as well as the RLC, RRC and MAC protocols standardized for LTE.

Deployment Options and Backwards Compatibility

The 180 kHz are also significant as this allows a number of different deployment scenarios in practice. One option is to deploy one or more NB-IoT channels inside a larger LTE channel. The second option is to use the guard band of a full LTE channel. And finally, the 180 kHz bandwidth allows to replace a GSM channel for a NB-IoT channel. All three deployment scenarios are backwards compatible which means that LTE devices (such as smartphones, tablets, etc. etc.) that do not implement the NB-IoT feature  simply do not see NB-IoT channel inside the main LTE channel or slightly outside in the guard band. Legacy GSM devices also won’t see a NB-IoT carrier if used alongside GSM 180 kHz carriers. Such devices will just see noise where NB-IoT is active.

Tens Of Thousands Of Devices and Low Data Rates

Despite its very little spectrum the new NB-IoT channel and access management procedures are designed to support 50.000 devices per cell. Yes, per cell, you read right, so you can imagine that the amount of data to be transmitted per device per day must be really low. According to Qualcomm throughput for devices on the NB-IoT channel can be up to 500 kbit/s in the downlink and 40 kbit/s in the uplink direction in good signal conditions. Those are theoretical values, however, as many devices have to share a channel and the system was specifically designed to also support very low signal conditions at the expense of throughput. One interesting calculation found in an Ericsson paper on the topic for example shows that transferring a small UDP packet can require up to 7 seconds under very low signal conditions where the system repeats each individual transmission for system access, bandwidth assignment, user data transfer and acknowledgement several dozen times. This gives one an idea of where we stand at the other end of the data rate divide.

The Use Of Tones

In the downlink direction, the channel uses OFDM modulation and several 15 kHz sub-carriers, also referred to as “tones”. In the uplink direction, a mobile device can also use the standard 15 kHz spacing and optionally also 3.75 kHz tones in combination with SC-FDMA modulation (also used in LTE). The 3.75 kHz option has been specified for scenarios in which a device is able to receive data from the network but is unable to make itself heard due to its small antenna, low transmission power, distance, signal conditions, etc. By using a 3.75 kHz instead of a 15 kHz tone, the transmission power can be focused on a narrower channel which significantly improves the link budget and chances to be heard at the base station side. Very low signal conditions are referred to as “extreme coverage” and NB-IoT is specified to still work in radio conditions that are 20 dB worse than those that would still be usable with GSM.

For devices that are optimized for power rather than “extreme coverage” scenarios, power class 5 has been specified which limits the maximum power output of a device to 20 dBm (0.1 Watt). Again, depending on radio conditions and speed requirements, data to and from a device can be transmitted in a single tone or in a 3 or 6 multi-tone arrangement. Due to all things described so far it is clear that the traditional LTE signaling channels are not reusable for NB-IoT. While the basics ideas like random access and assigning transmission opportunities remain the same, the format and location of the channels is new.

Radio Security and Backwards Compatibility

From a radio security point of view, LTE’s authentication and ciphering are used for NB-IoT including SIM cards. Small devices might use embedded SIMs (eSIM) which behave like normal SIM cards today but are much smaller and soldered directly on the circuit board. Not supported is backwards compatibility to LTE, GSM to UMTS so a NB-IoT device has to only support the NB-IoT part of the specification. In practice a device could in theory also implement the circuitry necessary for those standards but re-selections and handover between them would not be supported.

Summary

Compared to all other MTC and IoT improvements made over recent years in the 3GPP specifications this is by far the most comprehensive and far reaching approach to date. By optimizing for power, cost and for low data rates it gives hardware manufacturers something to play with for the next couple of years and offers many opportunities to put a radio into many things without requiring a local hub to pick up transmissions.

Not mentioned in my posts so far but also very important is that the Internet Protocol is used on top of the NB-IoT radio stack. With data rates as low as they are specified and delay as long as 7 seconds as described above the use of TCP might not make a lot of sense in many scenarios and UDP might get a popularity boost from the IoT domain. But IP is IP is IP which means that IoT devices do not require an intermediary to connect to the Internet. And that’s important for those people like me who prefer to have smart devices communicate with them directly rather than requiring something in between to translate higher layers of the protocol stack which is the hand of others.

Intro

Back in January of this year, Mozilla announced a ‘continued commitment’ to, but smaller role in, the Open Badges ecosystem. That was as expected: a couple of years ago Mozilla and the MacArthur Foundation had already spun out a non-profit in the form of the Badge Alliance.

That Mozilla post included this paragraph:

We will also reconsider the role of the Badge Backpack. Mozilla will continue to host user data in the Backpack, and ensure that data is appropriately protected. But the Backpack was never intended to be the central hub for Open Badges — it was a prototype, and the hope has forever been a more federated and user-controlled model. Getting there will take time: the Backpack houses user data, and privacy and security are paramount to Mozilla. We need to get the next iteration of Backpack just right. We are seeking a capable person to help facilitate this effort and participate in the badges technical community. Of course, we welcome code contributions to the Backpack; a great example is the work done by DigitalMe.

Last month, digitalme subsequently announced they have a contract with Mozilla to work on both the Open Badges backpack and wider technical infrastructure. As Kerri Lemoie pointed out late last year, there’s no-one at Mozilla working on Open Badges right now. However, that’s a feature rather than a bug; the ecosystem in the hands of the community, where it belongs.

Tim Riches, CEO of digitalme, states that their first priority will be to jettison the no-longer-supported Mozilla Persona authentication system used for the Open Badges backpack:To improve user experience across web and mobile devices our first action will be to replace Persona with Passport.js. This will also provide us with the flexibility to enable user to login with other identity providers in the future such as Twitter, Linkedin and Facebook. We will also be improving stability and updating the code base.

In addition, digitalme are looking at how the backpack can be improved from a user point of view:

“We will be reviewing additional requirements for the backpack and technical infrastructure gathered from user research at MozFest supported by The Nominet Trust in the UK, to create a roadmap for further development, working closely with colleagues from Badge Alliance.

Some of the technical work was outlined at the beginning of the year by Nate Otto, Director of the Badge Alliance. On that roadmap is “Federated Backpack Protocol: Near and Long-term Solutions”. As the paragraph from the Mozilla post notes, federation is something that’s been promised for so long — at least the last four years.

Federation is technically complex. In fact, even explaining it is difficult. The example I usually give is around the way email works. When you send an email, you don’t have to think about which provider the recipient uses (e.g. Outlook365, GMail, Fastmail, etc.) as it all just works. Data is moved around the internet leading to the intended person receiving a message from you.

The email analogy breaks down a bit if you push it too hard, but in the Open Badges landscape, the notion of federation is crucial. It allows badge recipients to store their badges wherever they choose. At the moment, we’ve effectively got interoperable silos; there’s no easy way for users to move their badges between platforms elsewhere.

As Nate mentions in another post, building a distributed system is hard not just because of technical considerations, but because it involves co-ordinating multiple people and organisations.

It is much harder to build a distributed ecosystem than a centralized one, but it is in this distributed ecosystem, with foundational players like Mozilla playing a part, that we will build a sustainable and powerful ecosystem of learning recognition that reflects the values of the Web.

 

Tech suggestions

I’m delighted that there’s some very smart and committed people working on the technical side of the Open Badges ecosystem. For example, yesterday’s community call (which unfortunately I couldn’t make) resurrected the ‘tech panel’. One thing that’s really important is to ensure that the *user experience* across the Open Badges ecosystem is unambiguous; people who have earned badges need to know where they’re putting them and why. At the moment, we’ve got three services wrapped up together in badge issuing platforms such as Open Badge Academy:

One step towards federation would be to unpick these three aspects on the ecosystem level. For example, providing an ‘evidence store‘ could be something that all badge platforms buy into. This would help avoid problems around evidence disappearing if a badge provider goes out of business (as Achievery did last year).

A second step towards federation would be for the default (Mozilla/Badge Alliance) badge backpack to act as a conduit to move badges between systems. Every badge issuing platform could/should have a ‘store in backpack’ feature. If we re-interpret the ‘badge backpack’ metaphor as being a place where you securely store (but don’t necessarily display) your badges this would encourage providers to compete on badge display.

The third step towards federation is badge discoverability. Numbers are hard to come by within the Open Badges ecosystem as the specification was explicitly developed to put learners in control. Coupled with Mozilla’s (valid) concerns around security and privacy, it’s difficult both to get statistics around Open Badges and discover relevant badges. Although Credmos is having a go at the latter, more could be done on the ecosystem level. Hopefully this should be solved with the move to Linked Data in version 2.0 of the specification.

Community suggestions

While I’m limited on the technical contributions I can make to the Badge Alliance, something I’m committed to is helping the community move forward in new and interesting ways. Although Nate wrote a community plan back in March, I still think we can do better in helping those new to the ecosystem. Funnelling people into a Slack channel leads to tumbleweeds, by and large. As I mentioned on a recent community call, I’d like to see an instance of Discourse which would build knowledge base and place for the community to interact in more more targeted ways that the blunt instrument that is the Open Badges Google Group.

Something which is, to my mind, greatly missed in the Open Badges ecosystem, is the role that Jade Forester played in curating links and updates for the community via the (now defunct) Open Badges blog. Since she moved on from Mozilla and the Badge Alliance, that weekly pulse has been sorely lacking. I’d like to see some of the advice in the Community Building Guide being followed. In fact, Telescope (the free and Open Source tool it’s written about) might be a good crowdsourced solution.

Finally, I’d like to see a return of working groups. While I know that technically anyone can set one up any time and receive the blessing of the Badge Alliance, we should find ways to either resurrect or create new ones. Open Badges is a little bit too biased towards (U.S.) formal education at the moment.

Conclusion

The Badge Alliance community needs to be more strategic and mindful about how we interact going forwards. The ways that we’ve done things up until now have worked to get us here, but they’re not necessarily what we need to ‘cross the chasm’ and take Open Badges (even more) mainstream.

I’m pleased that Tim Cook is now providing some strategic direction for the Badge Alliance beyond the technical side of things. I’m confident that we can continue to keep up the momentum we’ve generated over the last few years, as well as continue to evolve to meet the needs of users at every point of the technology adoption curve.

Image CC BY-NC Thomas Hawk

Alto’s Adventure, one of my all-time favorite iOS games, is getting a couple fantastic features today. The first is a zen mode that lets you play as long as you want without having to restart when you crash. If you fall, you can simply pick yourself up and resume from right where you are. There also aren’t any collectables, removing all of the potentially stress-inducing aspects of the game. It’s just you snowboarding down the mountain and doing tricks. The new mode is accompanied by a soothing new soundtrack that fits well with the more relaxed feel of zen mode.

Alto’s Adventure also adds the ability to take snapshots of gameplay. Pausing the game by tapping the pause button in the lower left hand corner of the screen lets you enter photo mode.¹ Once paused, you can pinch, zoom, and pan the scene to frame the shot and then take a snapshot that can be shared using the system share sheet.

Zen mode and the new photo feature enhance Alto’s Adventure by making it even easier to soak in the stunning visuals and soundtrack of the game. As much as I like the new features, though, I like that both are neatly tucked away in the interface so neither interferes with the way the original game works.

Version 1.3 of Alto’s Adventure is a free upgrade to existing customers. New customers can purchase Alto’s Adventure for $3.99 on the App Store.

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@stoweboyd:

All lying in politics is not created equal–Thomas Friedman https://t.co/ks8C0FqHlZ

— Stowe Boyd (@stoweboyd) June 1, 2016

@stoweboyd:

Caterina Fake reminds us that champerty, 3rd party financing of lawsuits, was illegal https://t.co/jIZBcbNpZV #thiel http://pic.twitter.com/UVnT2WRfAS

— Stowe Boyd (@stoweboyd) June 1, 2016

When Prince’s first greatest hits collection was released, Prince made private comments as a guide for the liner notes. Later briefly posted on his website thedawn.com in 1996, Prince’s comments have been lost for the last 20 years, but now provide a rare first-person insight into how he saw some of his most famous songs.

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In 1993, just as Prince had changed his name and began wrangling with his record contract, he agreed to his first-ever collection of greatest hits, released as a 3-disc set, The Hits/The B-sides. Prince’s longtime manager Alan Leeds wrote the liner notes for the box set; already an industry legend for his work with James Brown, Leeds had won a Grammy for his extraordinary work on the liner notes for Startime, the definitive James Brown box set released in 1991.

But Leeds’ notes on Prince’s work included a number of mentions of anecdotes and inspirations that Leeds couldn’t have been privy to first-hand, and a few that only Prince himself could have known. When liner notes for The Hits were posted on thedawn.com three years later, fans were shocked to see that, rather than simply replicating Leeds’ writing, the notes on the site were clearly Prince’s own thoughts. The notes omit many tracks, include mention of songs that weren’t included in the box set at all, and include what appear to be editorial suggestions for Leeds.

Prince often refers to himself as “PRN” (Prince Rogers Nelson) throughout. This was likely both reflective of his longtime habit of trying to issue his pronouncements as coming from a larger, vague collective rather than just himself, and the fact that the notes were likely captured as recited to an assistant. However, it could also have been a deliberate stylistic choice in reference to his then-recent name change; at the time this was published, his public position was that “Prince” was dead.

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Update: Alan Leeds himself has weighed in, on Reginald Hudlin’s Facebook page, saying he hadn’t known these notes were ever posted online, but confirming that he did use these comments from Prince to inform his work.

Interesting — I’d never seen this before and wasn’t aware P had posted these comments. For the record, I had volunteered to Warner Bros. to help assemble and sequence the 3 CDs. However, they were stuck on “their” sequence — I never knew for sure if Prince liked or was involved in the sequencing. I believe it was put together by WB’sr in-house catalogue maven, my friend Gregg Geller and I doubt he had much dialogue with Prince. However, Prince did call me to write the notes. I told him it was an honor but only if he’d answer a few questions so I could add some background that wasn’t common knowledge among fans. He agreed but asked me not to write like an interview. So I simply incorporated some of his “revelations” into my notes. When I sent him the finished notes, he called to say “thanks, nice job” and that was it. He surprisingly did zero editing. It’s wonderful to hear directly from Alan on the role these notes played in his incredible work.

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LINER NOTES

“I WANNA BE YOUR LOVER” -

originally recorded as a demo 4 Patrice Rushen’s album. PRN had a mad crush on her at the time and the song is about her.

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“HEAD” -

was only used as a concert tune. This song was picked as Lisa Coleman’s initiation into the band. Gayle Chapman quit because the material of the Dirty Mind period got 2 strong 4 her. Prince figured if Lisa could sing the lyrics to head she could handle anything. The song as a demo as was all the Dirty Mind LP.

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“DO ME BABY” -

the 1st time Prince turned the control room into a bedroom. Candles were lit, chiffon veils were hung and all the doors were locked.

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“Controversy” -

write about the first time U heard reflective notes

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“LITTLE RED CORVETTE” -

after another marathon all-night recording session PRN wrote this in the front seat of Lisa’s pink car (brand of car can be gotten from her) whom PRN drove when she was in LA. PRN always considered the song a dream because it was written between 3 or 4 catnaps and he was never fully awake.

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“DIRTY MIND” -

Dr. Fink came up with the original keyboard line which PRN heard and wrote lyrics 2 that same night. PRN and Dr. Fink came 2 rehearsal the next day proud of their creation. The band flipped when they heard it. The centerpiece was in place.

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“WHEN DOVES CRY” -

originally recorded with bass, backing 2 sets of keys and guitar. Frustrated with the mix, PRN sat discouraged in the studio (Sunset Sound). Jill Jones came 2 visit, saw the long face and asked what was wrong. PRN was said to have said, “if had my way the song would sound like this.” He then shoved down the bulk of the instrument faders and left up only the drums and the xylophone, when the voices began to sing the chorus. Jill then asked PRN why he thought he couldn’t have his way with the mix. There was no reply. Everyone who passed by the studio was enthralled by the strange sound coming out of Studio 3 that day. The next time Jill heard the song it was on the radio and it was bassless and stark. PRN had his way.

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“KISS” -

PRN after recording this shelved it because he thought it 2 strange a production 4 human consumption. It was included in the Parade album was an afterthought. PRN thought it never quite worked on that album. Every time he plays it live he changes the arrangement. Probably still feels the same about the public’s acceptance of the sound. It concert it’s never sounded like the record.

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“U GOT THE LOOK” -

a friend of PRN used 2 jump up and dance whenever Robert Palmer’s “Addicted to Love” came on. As a test this song was recorded to find out of the friend would dance 2 a similar groove or just chill because it wasn’t a hit. Sure enough the friend didn’t like the song until it was in the Top 10.

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“SEXY M.F.” -

the song that made PRN abandon computers just before he retired. Proof that nothing beats the feel of a live band of funky M.F.’s.

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“CREAM” -

PRN wrote this standing in a mirror.

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“DAMN U” -

one of the songs PRN is most proud of; he adores it. Used to play it live even fore it was released. Through the years this has been the indication of his feelings about a new composition.

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“I FEEL 4 U” -

another demo written 4 the Patrice Rushen project. PRN tended 2 write more Top 40 when writing 4 other artists.

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“WHEN U WERE MINE” -

written in a hotel room in North Carolina on the Rick James tour. This was not a happy period. PRN didn’t want to do this tour but he needed the exposure cuz his record was breaking R&B first. He was ready 2 headline his own tour but had 2 wait.

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“UPTOWN” -

a favorite concert number during this period. The anthem 4 all the freaks and funkateers of the Dirty Mind generation. Vocal recorded in one take, no punching in after PRN in his 16 trackhome studio set up the song on the board, plugged in the mic, and left his leather coat on the chair. He went to get pumped at a movie and when it was over walked straight into the studio, donned the leather coat, and sang it straight out. He didn’t listen 2 it until the next day and then began finishing it.

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“1999” -

was meant 2 be a group vocal. Lisa, Dez, and Prince actually sang the whole song every line. When Prince mixed it he made the decision 2 split up the lines. That’s why the melody keeps changing. Jill Jones 1st big vocal assignment. She does the ad libs on the vamp. Prince loved her voice. Vocally he said she was a ‘cliffdiver.’

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“LET’S GO CRAZY” & “PURPLE RAIN” -

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“POP LIFE” -

the jam in the ‘hood.

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“ADORE” -

inspired by Patti LaBelle & Luther Vandross who Prince was digging at the time. Patti - “if only u knew”…

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“SIGN O’ THE TIMES” -

written, recorded, and mixed in one day.

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“ALPHABET STREET”

Prince always called this an ‘aural cartoon.’ Recorded during the LoveSexy period.

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“BATDANCE” -

originally a 12” 4 the song “200 BALLOONS.” This song with every sample just grew and grew. Listening 2 “200 BALLOONS” Prince commented “this sounds like it came from BATDANCE - not the other way around.”

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“DIAMONDS AND PEARLS” -

written as a duet with Rosie Gaines. Prince vowed never 2 performs it with anyone else. As much as Prince wanted Rosie 2 go solo he hated the fact that he wouldn’t be able 2 peform one of his most prized possessions, Diamonds and Pearls, until they were 2gether again. Prince has called Rosie one of the greatest singers of all time. He most likens her 2 Ella Fitzgerald. Range, speed, and styling. Rosie’s got it all.

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“7” -

Jevetta Steele asked Prince 4 an explanation of this song. He only smiled.

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Reply to this post

 

 

 

 

 

This deal is really about Office in China.

• Microsoft and Xiaomi have struck a deal where Xiaomi will take ownership of 1,500 of Microsoft’s patents and Xiaomi will pre-install Office on all of its handsets.
• I suspect that these patents are almost exclusively wireless patents which, with Microsoft’s precipitous decline in smartphones and the sale of its feature phone business to Foxconn, are now worth very little to Microsoft.
• Historically, it has been important for a handset maker to have a patent portfolio so that it has something to negotiate with when other patent holders assert their patents against its phones.
• I think that this is less of an issue these days, as recent interventions by the White House (see here) have weakened the threat of patent infringement, but it is still important to have something.
• Xiaomi is stagnant in its home market and so has been looking overseas to try and find desperately needed growth.
• It has already opened up India and Brazil and I suspect that this deal heralds its attempt to get into the developed markets of Europe and North America.
• This is not a new development for Xiaomi and I still fear that revenues may fall by as much as 10% this year (see here).
• However, for Microsoft this represents an opportunity to do something about the rampant piracy that blights its products in China.
• I have long been of the opinion that Office is by far the most valuable asset that Microsoft owns and, because of that, I suspect that Microsoft virtually gave the patents away in return for this pre-installation deal.
• This arrangement would also suit Xiaomi very well as has very little cash to spend on investments (see here).
• Usage of Office in China is high but not many pay for it and with the rise of mobile, there is an opportunity to convert a portion of this usage over to Office 365.
• On devices with a screen size of less than 10”, the basic version of Office 365, which offers simple editing, is free and being pre-installed on Xiaomi handsets will ensure that it is at least present in the Chinese market.
• China is predominantly a mobile first market where users do far more with their phones than in developed markets meaning that there is a good chance that those that use Office illegally today will begin to use the free version of Office 365.
• This will create a funnel of free users that may eventually decide that that there is value in paying $9.99 per user per month to use Office 365 rather than a pirated, older version of Office.
• RFM calculates that there are 94m Xiaomi device users in China which should hit 150m by mid-2018 meaning that Office will be present on a meaningful number of devices in China fairly quickly.
• This is all upside for Microsoft and even a very low conversion rate will improve revenue and profitability which has come in exchange for a portfolio of patents that Microsoft does not really need anymore.
• This is unlikely to help Xiaomi to recover its fortunes in 2016 and I still think that Xiaomi is worth closer to $5bn rather than $45bn.
• I still see upside in Microsoft and this deal is yet another sign of how much things have changed for the better in Redmond.

Karen Quinn Fung 馮皓珍 @counti8
Today’s fashion forecast calls for fully lined university blue with green and grey cord, and black.

Joel Spolsky, Joel on Software, Jun 04, 2016

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So this looks interesting. "HyperDev  is going to be the fastest way to bang out code and get it running on the internet. We want to eliminate 100% of the complicated administrative details around getting code up and running on a website." I've set up a very simple page here. It took me a couple minutes. But I think I could spend a lot of time with this - already someone has coded a Skype Bot  for it. Note that this is a beta release and that there are going tl be interruptions in service.

[Link] [Comment]

When I teach writing, people always ask me “What about SEO?” (That’s “search engine optimization”). If you’re thinking about SEO, please stop, because you should be out to maximize readers, not traffic. Don’t even think about SEO until your writing is nearly done. What is SEO? According to the experts at Search Engine Land: SEO … Continue reading Why SEO should be an afterthought →

The post Why SEO should be an afterthought appeared first on without bullshit.

Hello, SUMO Nation!

We have a document to share with you, and we’re also sharing its entirety with you below (if you are allergic to shared documents).

It explains what has happened during and after the launch of Firefox 46 and Firefox for iOS 4.0 on the SUMO front – so you can see how much work was done by everyone in the community in those busy days.

If you have questions, as always, go to our forums and fire away!

Without further ado, here is the…

SUMO Release Report: Firefox 46 and Firefox for iOS 4.0

Knowledge Base and Localization

Articles Created and Updated

Article	Voted “helpful” (English/US only)	Global views
Desktop (April 28-May 16)
Firefox 46 Crashes at startup on OSx	38%	1483
Add-on signing in Firefox	75%	53
Android (April 28-May 16)
Firefox is no longer be supported on this version of Android	73%	1818
Open links in the background for later viewing with Firefox for Android	76-85%	2372
Add-on signing in Firefox for Android	70-73%	6455

Localization Coverage

Article	% of top 10 locales it is localized into	% of top 20 locales it is localized into
Desktop (April 28-May 16)
Firefox 46 Crashes at startup on OSx	80%*	50%*
Add-on signing in Firefox	100%	100%
Android (April 28-May 16)
Firefox is no longer be supported on this version of Android	40%*	25%*
Open links in the background for later viewing with Firefox for Android	100%	65%*
Add-on signing in Firefox for Android	100%	65%*

• Our l10n tool at the moment does not surface the latest content (focusing on the most frequently visited one), so we rely on 1:1 communications to inform contributors about new launch articles. This may lead to lower rates of l10n initially after a launch.
• In the top 20 locales, the bottom half includes 8 that are under localized due to lack of active l10n community members. We are working on addressing this in the coming months through community efforts (e.g. for Turkish and Arabic).
• Two of the top 20 locales are from the Nordics (Swedish, Finnish), where English is widely spoken, which impacts community interest in localizing content into their native languages.

Support Forum Threads

Solved top viewed threads

• Unable to launch Firefox 46 in RHEL 6.6 – Solved
• Recently updated firefox and now print margins are metric, how do I reset to inches? – Solved
• Please update flash

Unsolved top viewed threads

• “This browser does not support video playback.” Video playback Error on Twitter: Windows 10 – 80 views
• Work around – Linux tool tipcolor contrast
• Great malware troubleshooting – Adware keeps Taking Over Firefox, Firefox@helper2

Bugs Created from Forum threads

• MMNk Malware crashing in iOS
  • 14 threads: Search tag bug1262787
  • Bug 1262787 – OS X startup crash in mmhk@0xd8e5 in Firefox 46 (with Premier Opinion malware)
• Blank Page loading issue in firefox 46:
  • SUMO Threads
  • Bug 1268922 – Users report Firefox stopped loading pages after the 46 update
• Hitman pro Alert crash:
  • SUMO Thread – Firefox crashes
  • Bug 1268025 – startup crashes by HitmanPro Alert after the firefox 46 update
• Firefox no longer starting on older hardware, as well as SSE2:
  • SUMO Thread – Firefox 48.0* ceasing updates for computers without SSE2 support?
  • Bug 1266791 – Couldn’t load XPCOM
• Issue where Kaspersky did not properly decode facebook
  • SUMO Forum Threads
  • Bug 1271875 – Kaspersky AV strips `Content-Encoding: br` header from responses (resulting in “garbled” Facebook brotli encoded pages)

Social Support Highlights

Top 5 Contributors	Replies
Andrew Truong	70
Jhonatas Rodrigues Machado	17
Noah Y	15
Swarnava Sengupta	4
Magno Reis	2

• Jhonatas started contributing later in release, but has been doing a lot of great work since he joined SUMO.

Trending issues

These topics are categorized by our social support team when they submit a response to a user.
“Not Working” is an easy categorization, but doesn’t give us much information. As time goes on we will work to refine the buckets that seem too general.

Dave Winer has a great blog post, Your human-size life which covers wealth, success, happiness, and Peter Thiel. Hat tip: Toni.

Building a Network of People

In a previous post, I gave an overview of the five general areas I focus on in my role as Founder and Executive Chair of Mozilla. The first of the five areas is the traditional “Chair of the Board” role. Here I’ll give a bit of detail about one initiative I’m currently working on in this area.

In the overview post, I gave the following description of this part of my role:

I work on mission focus, governance, development and operation of the Board and the selection, support and evaluation of the most senior executives. […]Less traditionally, this portion of my role includes an ongoing activity I call “weaving all aspects of Mozilla into a whole.” Mozilla is an organizationally complex mixture of communities, legal entities and programs. Unifying this into “one Mozilla” is important.”

My current focus chairing the Board is on building a network of people who can help us identify and recruit potential Board level contributors and senior advisors. I view this as a multi-year development program. There are a few reasons for this:

1. Mozilla is an unusual organization and it takes a while to understand us.
2. We intend to increase diversity across a number of axis, from gender to geography.

A conscious effort to expand the set of people who interact with and from whom Board level candidates might come is critical. So while we are looking to expand each of the Mozilla Foundation and Mozilla Corporation Boards in 2016, the goal here is much longer-term and broader.

This work is also part of the development of the Mozilla Leadership Network (MLN), a new initiative being developed by the Mozilla Foundation team. The idea underpinning the Mozilla Leadership Network is that Mozilla is most effective when many people feel connected to us and feel Mozilla gives extra impact to their actions on behalf of an open Internet. The MLN seeks to provide these connection points. We hope the MLN will include a wide range of people, from students figuring out their path in life to accomplished professionals and recognized thought leaders.

Both Mozilla and I have a long history of connecting with individual contributors and with local and regional communities. This year I’ve added this additional focus on senior advisors and potential Board level contributors. This is an ongoing process. So far I’ve had three or four brainstorming sessions focused on expanding the network of people we might want to get to know. From this point, we do some information gathering to get to know more about people we now have pointers to. Then we start to get to know people, to see (a) who has a good feel for the open Internet, Mozilla, or the kinds of initiatives we’re focused on; and (b) who has both interest and time to engage with Mozilla more.

I’ve had detailed conversations with nine of the people we’ve identified, sometimes multiple times and hours. Of these, approximately 75% are women and two third are located outside the US, representing our interest in increasing our diversity along multiple axis.

These conversations are not about “do you want to be a board member?”. They are pretty detailed explorations of a person’s sense of the Open Internet, Mozilla’s role, our initiatives, challenges and opportunities. The conversations are invitations to engage with Mozilla at any level and explorations of how appealing our current initiatives might be.

In the next week or so I’ll do a follow up post about the Board search in particular.

The Mozilla communities are part of what I love most about Mozilla. I remain deeply involved with our current communities through the work of the Participation team. This new focus broadens the possibilities. The number of people who look to Mozilla to help build an Internet that is open and accessible is both motivating and inspiring.

Update 06/02/16: Alto’s Adventure’s Zen Mode update is now available on iOS.

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Toronto-based Snowman’s Alto’s Adventure already offers players a relaxing mobile gaming experience, but thanks to a new “Zen Mode,” one of the best mobile titles on Android and iOS is about to get significantly more calming.

Zen mode removes scores from Alto’s Adventure and allows players to continue collecting llamas even after crashing, leaving pure enjoyment as the only task left to complete. This removes the pressure that stems from attempting to complete the game’s various goals and nailing that coveted triple backflip.

Along with the inability to permanently crash, this new mode also features a more relaxing soundtrack and a photo taking tool that lets players zoom in a snap screenshots of the games beautiful scenery.

The update is set to release on June 2nd for all iOS users. Harry Nesbitt, the game’s lead developer, as well as Ryan Cash, Snowman’s founder, say that the update will also make its way to Android “soon.”

Alto’s Adventure is available on iOS and Android.

Related reading: Alto’s Adventure review: Mobile gaming at its best

Two related Gastown items:

First: the City of Vancouver wants to talk about the proposed redesign of this historic place — Blood Alley Square and Trounce Alley.  The design work will be by Enns Gauthier (consultants).

•   Wednesday June 1, 2016  4-7 pm
• Saturday  June 4, 2016  11 am – 2 pm.

Location:  Blood Alley Square

 

Second: Westbank Projects and Henriquez Partners Architects are seeking approval for a new 11-storey structure around 33 West Cordova. Thanks to Kenneth Chan at VanCity Buzz (and to Ian for the tip).

There will be a total of 214 rental units in the 163,000-square-foot redevelopment, including 80 social housing units and 134 secured market rental units.

On the ground level, a number of retail and restaurant units are planned, including a wine bar, with frontages on both Cordova Street and Blood Alley, which will receive a new southern frontage as a result of the project.

A large cabaret and entertainment venue in the underground level could provide much-needed additional foot traffic into Blood Alley, where the entrance into the venue is located.

 

	mkalus shared this story from Consumerist:
	So... when the AI becomes sentient, then what? An AI psychologist?

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Sometimes it’s a bad thing when a robot gets invented to do a human job. And other times, it can be a relief, because the job was really terrible for any human to do. And that’s the tactic Facebook is taking with content moderation now, getting its AI to identify and “quarantine” offensive content before any human has to.

As TechCrunch reports, Facebook has recently hit a major milestone in their AI training: software now report more offensive photos on the massive global platform than humans do, and that’s big.

When the internet was entirely made of text, content moderation was one thing. Mods could more often than not take the “sticks and stones” approach and delete or disemvowel nasty vitriol as needed. But now we’re in the multimedia era, and content moderation means shifting through piles of truly horrific HD video and images to determine just how horrific they are.

That means moderating content can be a really awful job. Imagine content so bad you actually flag it for someone to remove — now imagine having your full-time job to be staring at all that content, eight hours a day.

Hate speech, threats, child pornography, and animal cruelty add up; it takes a toll on any human worker. Even writers who only have to moderate comments to their articles (as opposed to a whole site like Facebook) can get badly burned out by the constant swarm of images.

So! Enter the AI. Using tech to filter is nothing new, but it’s a lot easier for a machine to identify a character string that spells a naughty word than it is to correctly identify the contents of an image or video. At least, it has been.

Facebook, though, has access to a lot of data. A LOT of data. And they can use all that data, and all their computing power, to make their software smarter. So they are. In fact, AI is the major cornerstone of Facebook’s entire current ten-year plan.

Facebook’s AI, Facebook’s Director of Engineering for Applied Machine Learning, Joaquin Candela, explained to TechCrunch, is doing everything from audio-captioning images for visually impaired users to individually ranking items in your news feed for you. And now, with video hosting and live streaming being major parts of the Facebook experience, the AI is getting smarter about video, too.

Facebook wants their AI to be able to automatically tag users in videos through facial recognition, the same way they do in still images. Along with that, they’ve built a system for automatically categorizing video by topic, so that all the cat videos can present themselves to you on cue.

Creepy? Yeah, probably. But it does come with a silver lining: if you’ve got a machine that can automatically recognize and categorize content, that also means it can flag the really problematic stuff. “One thing that is interesting is that today we have more offensive photos being reported by AI algorithms than by people,” Candela told TechCrunch. “The higher we push that to 100 percent, the fewer offensive photos have actually been seen by a human.”

With a platform Facebook’s size, that’s a simply staggering number of images. Globally, 400,000 new posts are published every minute (that’s about 576 million per day) and another 180 million comments are left on public pages (about 259.2 billion, daily). That is, in the aggregate, a crapton of data. You need robots for volume alone — and if it spares some human eyes, so much the better.

Another Facebook developer told TechCrunch that the same tech is in use, or going to be in use, across every Facebook property. Instagram already uses it, WhatsApp uses parts, and they’re working on ways to get more of it into Oculus (where terrible content would not just be a thing you see, but a thing you experience).

They’re also sharing outside of Facebook. Developers told TechCrunch that the tech giant has held meetings with Netflix, Google, Uber, Twitter, and others to share their AI applications and discuss design details. Is it altruistic? Sure, as much as taking over the world by getting all the competition to use your tools ever is.

But Facebook says it’s more than that. “I personally believe it’s not a win-lose situation, it’s a win-win situation. If we improve the state of AI in the world,” the developer told them, “we will definitely eventually benefit. But I don’t see people nickel and diming it.”

Facebook spares humans by fighting offensive photos with AI [TechCrunch]

James Bligh (occasional Price Tags author) writes in the Architecture section of Vancouver Is Awesome about a concept for the city.

In 2013 Trevor Vilac, a local Building Science Technologist, proposed a new type of building which, through vertical hydroponics, could reintroduce farming into the city. The benefits include reducing transportation distances, increasing availability of produce, exposing younger generations to the agriculture industry, and revolutionizing the farm-to-table movement. Trevor describes the project below:

TV: The Growing Machine is an industrial and educational building focusing on urban agriculture. The Growing Machine combines industry with public amenities by integrating elements such as a vertical hydroponic garden, classrooms integrated to the garden, research labs, and a farmer’s market on the ground floor. The intentions of this project are to define urban agriculture as a new industrial typology, and to combine agriculture, sustainability, and education into a holistic experience.

I have been using AI technology on projects since the 1980's (first using mostly symbolic AI, then neural networks and machine learning) and in addition to the exponentially growing progress the other thing that strikes me is how a once small AI developers community has grown by perhaps almost three orders of magnitude in the number of people working in the field. As the new conventional wisdom goes AI services will be like cloud computing services and power: ubiquitous.

As AI systems decide what medical care people get, who gets mortgages and at what interest rates, the ranking of employees in large organizations, nation states automatically determining who is a threat to their power base or public safety, control of driverless cars, maintain detailed information on everyone and drive their purchasing decisions, etc., having some transparency in algorithms and software implementation is crucial.

Notice how I put "Libre Software" in the title, not "Open Source." While business friendly permissive licenses like Apache 2 and MIT are appropriate for many types of projects, Libre Software licenses like the GPL3 and AGPL3 will ensure that the public commons of AI algorithms and software implementation stays open and transparent.

What about corporations maintaining their proprietary intellectual property for AI? I am sensitive to this issue but I still argue that the combination of a commons of Libre open source AI software with proprietary server infrastructure and proprietary data sources should be sufficient to protect corporations' investments and competitive advantages.

mkalus shared this story from Colossal.

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Digital artist and animator Carl Burton creates quick atmospheric GIFs that blend elements of science fiction and surrealism. Glittering illuminated tentacles appear to twist through the dark while neon lasers emerge from deep pools of water. Much of what you see here represents Burton’s personal experiments, but the NYC-based creative also lends his illustrative style to images for long-form publications around the web. He works primarily with Cinema 4D, Photoshop, and After Effects, spending several hours or even days on a single GIF depending on its complexity. You can see more of his work on Tumblr. (via This Isn’t Happiness)

Mike Horne, aka Recantha, co-organises the Cambridge Raspberry Jam and Pi Wars, not to mention some amazing parties. He also makes things, most recently this excellent Pi-powered music box. It probably isn’t what you thought of when you read the words “music box”.

Raspberry Pi Music Box

A Raspberry Pi 2 with a whole load of buttons and plenty of Adafruit boards from makersify.com playing synthesized sounds via a FluidSynth Python library. Code at: https://github.com/recantha/musicbox

As you’ll know if you’re a regular reader of this blog, we’ve a particular soft spot for musical instruments that use a Raspberry Pi, and The Music Box is a lovely example. Inside that eBay-tacular wooden box is a Pi 2, an Adafruit Perma-Proto HAT, and a lot of wiring that Mike can no longer get a decent still picture of because, as with many of the best hacks, it’ll all spill out if he opens the lid too far (but you can see a bit of it in the video). Seven of the coloured buttons on the lid form a keyboard designed to fit Mike’s hand; the square one in the middle turns power to the instrument on and off, and the three potentiometers control volume, choice of instrumental sound effect, and the pitch of the music box’s range. A pair of buttons on the side of the box allow you to shut down or reboot the Pi.

You’ll find all Mike’s code for The Music Box on GitHub, so you can adapt it for your own creations. He writes,

The software is a mixture of GPIO Zero, standard Python and the pyFluidSynth library which communicates with FluidSynth, a synthesiser that plays sound fonts. I loaded thirty-two different sound fonts and it will be easy enough to add more as I can just drop them into the folder and the software will automatically load them… GPIO Zero is the hero here, with its built-in multi-threaded event handlers and MCP3008 support.

Read more on Mike’s blog, and tell us about your own favourite musical hacks – your own, or someone else’s – in the comments!

The post Recantha’s Raspberry Pi music box appeared first on Raspberry Pi.

Top-paying jobs aren’t easy to come by in the City of Vancouver, which partly explains its spiralling unaffordability. But there are at least 75,000 tireless workers here who last year made the incredible average rate of C$126 per hour.

I’ve given Lifeproof a lot of love over the years because I’ve always liked their products and this review will be no different. So if you just want to know if I like it or not then YES go buy your Fre case.

I’ve had the Lifeproof Fre for a month or 2 now and have really come to enjoy it. I usually do not put such a bulky case on my phones but as summer is coming I wanted to write about a waterproof case. AT&T was nice enough to furnish me with this and boy has it useful. I’m a semi outdoorsy kind of guy so since I got the case and put it on my phone I’ve taken it sailing (got it wet), kayaking (dropped it in sand and water) and to the beach (it was in my trunks and got wet and my hands were sandy using it). As you can see I like water related activities so I’m really looking forward to the summer.

This Fre case has come a long way since it’s predecessor for the iPhone 6 was released. That case was great except for 1 thing, it’s charging port was to small to fit anything besides Apple chargers. The new iPhone 6S case has solved that for the most part. All but 1 of my charging cables now fit through the port.

The Fre case feels great in the hand and isn’t slippery at all. I have no problem hearing people through the case and they can hear me back whether it’s on speaker phone or regular talking mode. I like the look of the case though that never changes from year to year.

My only wish is that they would include a spot to attach a leash, lanyard, string or whatever else you may call it.

All in all, go buy one for the summer, it’s $80 of insurance that your $700 phone won’t get ruined.

I’m currently working on the Vaani project at Mozilla, and part of my work on that allows me to do some exploration around the topic of speech recognition and speech assistants. After looking at some of the commercial offerings available, I thought that if we were going to do some kind of add-on API, we’d be best off aping the Amazon Alexa skills JS API. Amazon Echo appears to be doing quite well and people have written a number of skills with their API. There isn’t really any alternative right now, but I actually happen to think their API is quite well thought out and concise, and maps well to the sort of data structures you need to do reliable speech recognition.

So skipping forward a bit, I decided to prototype with Node.js and some existing open source projects to implement an offline version of the Alexa skills JS API. Today it’s gotten to the point where it’s actually usable (for certain values of usable) and I’ve just spent the last 5 minutes asking it to tell me Knock-Knock jokes, so rather than waste any more time on that, I thought I’d write this about it instead. If you want to try it out, check out this repository and run npm install in the usual way. You’ll need pocketsphinx installed for that to succeed (install sphinxbase and pocketsphinx from github), and you’ll need espeak installed and some skills for it to do anything interesting, so check out the Alexa sample skills and sym-link the ‘samples‘ directory as a directory called ‘skills‘ in your ferris checkout directory. After that, just run the included example file with node and talk to it via your default recording device (hint: say ‘launch wise guy‘).

Hopefully someone else finds this useful – I’ll be using this as a base to prototype further voice experiments, and I’ll likely be extending the Alexa API further in non-standard ways. What was quite neat about all this was just how easy it all was. The Alexa API is extremely well documented, Node.js is also extremely well documented and just as easy to use, and there are tons of libraries (of varying quality…) to do what you need to do. The only real stumbling block was pocketsphinx’s lack of documentation (there’s no documentation at all for the Node bindings and the C API documentation is pretty sparse, to say the least), but thankfully other members of my team are much more familiar with this codebase than I am and I could lean on them for support.

I’m reasonably impressed with the state of lightweight open source voice recognition. This is easily good enough to be useful if you can limit the scope of what you need to recognise, and I find the Alexa API is a great way of doing that. I’d be interested to know how close the internal implementation is to how I’ve gone about it if anyone has that insider knowledge.

Now you see that evil will always triumph, because good is dumb.

– Dark Helmet

Evildoers live longer and feel better.

– Myself

My writing has recently prompted an anonymous commenter to declare that people like me are what's wrong with the world. Oh joy! – finally, after all these years of doing evil, some recognition! Excited, I decided to share one of my battle-tested evil tips, which never ever failed evil me.

Don't work on "easy" things

An easy thing is a heads they win, tails you lose situation. Failing at easy things is shameful; succeeding is unremarkable. Much better to work on hard things – heads you win, tails they lose. Failure is unfortunate but expected; success makes you a hero.

Treat this seriously, because it snowballs. The guy working on the "hard" thing gets a lot of help and resources, making it easier to succeed – and easier to move on to the next "hard" thing. The guy doing the "easy" tasks gets no help, so it's harder to succeed.

Quotation marks all over the place, because of course what counts is perception, not how hard or easy it really is. The worst thing to work on is the hard one that's perceived as easy – the hard "easy" thing. The best thing is the easy "hard" one. My years-long preference for low-level programming results, in part, from its reputation of a very hard field, when in practice, it takes a little knowledge and a lot of discipline – but not any outstanding skills.

(Why then do many people fear low-level programming? Only because of how hard it bites you the first few times. People who felt that pain and recoiled respect those who've moved past it and reached productivity. Now you know why people take shit from the likes of Ken Thompson and Linus Torvalds, and then beg for more.)

The point where this gets really evil is not when a heroic doer of hard things decides to behave like a Torvalds. That's more stupid than evil. You'll get away with being a Torvalds, but it always costs some goodwill and hence, ultimately, money. So the goal-oriented evildoer always tries to be on their best behavior.

No, the point where this gets really evil is when you let them fail. When they come to you thinking that it's easy, and you know it's actually very hard, and you turn them down, and you let them fail a few times, and you wait until they come back with a readjusted attitude - that's evil.

Here, the evildoer needs to strike a delicate balance, keeping in mind The Evildoer's Golden Rule:

• You can only sustain that much do-gooding; however,
• Your environment can only take that much evildoing, and you need your environment.

Here's the rule applied to our situation:

• Working on the hard "easy" thing – all trouble, no credit – is going to be terrible for you. You'll get a taste of a do-gooder's short, miserable life.
• However, if this thing is so important that a failure would endanger the org, maybe you should be the do-gooder and save them from their misconceptions at your own expense. Maybe. And maybe not. Be sure to think about it.

The upshot is, sometimes the evildoer gets to be the do-gooder, but you should know that it's hazardous to your health.

Making easy things into hard ones: the postponing gambit

Sometimes you can't weasel out of doing something "easy." An interesting gambit for these cases is to postpone the easy thing until it becomes urgent. This accomplishes two things at a time:

• Urgent things automatically become harder, a person in a hurry more important. The later it's done, the easier it is to get help (while retaining the status of "the" hero in the center of it all who made it happen.)
• Under time pressure, the scope shrinks, making the formerly "easy" and now officially "hard" thing genuinely easier. This is particularly useful for the really disgusting, but unavoidable work.

But it is a gambit, because postponing things until they become urgent is openly evil. (Avoiding easy things is not – why, it's patriotic and heroic to look for the harder work!) To get away with postponing, you need an excuse:

• other supposedly urgent work;
• whoever needing this thing not having reminded you;
• or even you having sincerely underestimated the difficulty and hence, regrettably, having postponed it too much – you're so sorry. (This last excuse has the drawback of you having to admit an error. But to the extent that urgency will make the scope smaller, the error will become smaller, too.)

One thing you want to prevent is people learning to remind you earlier. The way to accomplish it is being very nice when they come late. If people feel punished for reminding too late, they'll come earlier next time, and in a vengeful mood, so with more needless tasks. But if they're late and you eagerly "try to do the best under the circumstances", not only do you put yourself under the spotlight as a patriotic hero, you move the forgetful culprit out of the spotlight. So they'll form a rosy memory of the incident, and not learn the value of coming earlier – precisely what we want.

One thing making the postponing gambit relatively safe is that management is shocked by the very thought of people playing it, as can be seen in the following real-life conversation:

Babbling management consultant: A lot of organizations have a problem where they only work on urgent things at the expense of important, but less urgent ones.

Low-ranking evildoer manager (in a momentary lapse of reason): Why, of course! I actually postpone things to get priority around here.

Higher-ranking manager (in disbelief): You aren't serious, of course.

Low-ranking evildoer (apparently still out to lunch): I am.

Higher-ranking manager (firmly): I know you aren't.

Low-ranking evildoer finally shuts his mouth.

See? Sometimes they won't believe it if you say to their face. So they're unlikely to suspect you. (Do people reporting to me play the postponing gambit? Sometimes they do, and I don't resent them for it; their priorities aren't mine. But at the worst case, you should expect a lot of resentment – it's practically high treason – so you should have plausible deniability.)

Conclusion

To a very large extent, your productivity is a result of what you choose to work on. Keep things perceived as easy out of that list. When you can't, postponing an "easy" thing can make it both "harder" and smaller.

Happy evildoing, and follow me on Twitter!

 

The former police department HQ at 312 Main St. (at Hastings) is slowly evolving into something unique. This 100,000 sq. ft. 1950’s-era building is owned by the City of Vancouver. Development is led by the VanCity Community Foundation and CoV.

 

Don Alexander in the Tyee traces the people, groups, money and plans — and especially the contribution of Bob Williams (*).  Some of the resulting community-serving design is based on ideas from the Toronto Social Innovation Centre.

The outcome now taking shape — what is officially called 312 Main: Vancouver’s Social and Economic Innovation Centre — represents something of a compromise between the desires of city hall, which wanted purely a tech incubator, and the social justice driven vision of Bob Williams and his allies at VanCity credit union, where Williams was until very recently a board member, and the Jim Green Foundation, which Williams chairs. . . After extensive consultation with the neighbourhood and with First Nations, a plan and a design were developed by two First Nations architects, Nancy Mackin and Patrick Stewart. On the main floor, there will be a Coast Salish-style longhouse built into the existing structure that nests inside rather than obliterates what was already there.

312 MAIN STREET BY THE NUMBERS

18,000 sq. ft. of coworking space
55,000 sq. ft. of leased areas
1 commercial kitchen and coffee shop
10,000 sq. ft. of artist studios and maker spaces
5,000 sq. ft. of performance and event space
4 large meeting rooms
200 bike lockers, showers, and changing areas
Everywhere: free Wifi and computer access for community members

Bob Williams:  former city councillor, MLA and cabinet minister in the Dave Barrett government, and a major force at VanCity Credit Union for over 30 years. More HERE.

Tech consumers won’t see Google build its own smartphones anytime in the near future, according to company CEO Sundar Pichai.

“Our plan is still to work with OEMs to make phones,” said Pichai in an interview with legendary tech reporter Walt Mossberg during Re/code‘s annual Code Conference.

Disappointing news, I know, but what Pichai did promise is that his company will “be more opinionated about the design of the phones.”

The executive also said Google would do what was needed to “push the devices forward,” saying, “You’ll see us hopefully add more features on top of Android on Nexus phones.”

Pichai didn’t provide explicit details on how his company plans to accomplish that lofty goal, especially with so many disparate OEMs contributing to the Android ecosystem, but based on his responses to Mossberg’s questions, the plan is to develop and showcase best practices for upcoming mobile technologies.

We’ve already seen Google do this in a way. For instance, when Google unveiled the Nexus 5X and 6P last fall, the company spent a lot of its presentation talking up the benefits of Nexus Imprint, its new fingerprint authentication platform. Since the release of those two devices and the newest version of the company’s mobile operating system, almost all Android OEMs have adopted Marshmallow’s stock fingerprint authentication API, unifying what was once a mess of custom implementations into a single user experience that’s the same across every Android device.

So while we may never see a Google-made Nexus device, the good news is we’ll likely see the company do something interesting with its next pair of Nexus devices.

You can watch Mossberg’s entire chat with Pichai on The Verge.

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has admitted his company stopped selling Apple TVs and Google Chromecasts in October 2015 because Amazon Prime Video, the company’s video streaming app, was not available on those devices. He also said Amazon was not  offered “acceptable business terms” by Google and Apple.

At Recode’s Code Conference, Bezos first said that “private business discussions should stay private,” but then added the following statement.

“[W]hen we sell those devices, we want our player – our Prime Video player – to be on the device, and we want it to be on the device with acceptable business terms. You can always get the player on the device. The question is, can you get it on there with acceptable business terms?”

In an email sent to marketplace sellers in October, Amazon stated: “Over the last three years, Prime Video has become an important part of Prime. It’s important that the streaming media players we sell interact well with Prime Video in order to avoid customer confusion.”

Related reading: Amazon job postings hint Canadian Echo launch might be coming

Image credit: Flickr – Steve Jurvetson