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Boot up: Twitter tweaks?, the Kickstarter elite, no dual-OS Huawei, and more(Guardian Web Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) A burst of 9 links for you to chew over, as picked by the Technology team Twitter hints rhat @-replies and hashtags are about to be streamlined >> Buzzfeed What will Twitter look like in a year? Two years? A lot less like itself. At least that's the impression Vivian Schiller, head of news at Twitter, gave addressing the crowd two days ago at the Newspaper Association of America's mediaXchange conference in Denver. During her talk, Schiller called at-replies and hashtags "arcane" and hinted that Twitter might soon move them into the background of the service. "Streamlined" isn't the same as "phased out". But to the average person, the grammar of Twitter is arcane. Kickstarter, Neil Young, Veronica Mars: How hard-core fans drive the entertainment business >> Slate Jon Nathanson: crowdfunding isn't catering to the mainstream crowd. When 3 million of us pledged $480 million to Kickstarter projects in 2013, we didn't establish any new industries or shake up any old ones. Instead, we identified ourselves as the early adopters: the hardcores, the überfans. We're the kind of people who, in absence of Kickstarter, would have bought the special edition of a Veronica Mars DVD or paid extra for better seats at a Neil Young concert. We're the kind of people who download all the value-added content in our favorite video games. When something's labeled "collectible," we're the ones collecting it. US digital video benchmark, Q4 2013 >> Adobe Systems Note that this is a PDF. Data points: • Smartphones overtook tablets for online video streaming in December 2012, and usage is up 86% year-over-year.• The introduction of Xbox One and PS4 have streaming from gaming consoles on the rise, up 365% year-over-year.>br />• Sports video streaming is up 640% year-over-year.• Over one fourth of video streams on large annual and bi-annual sporting events come from mobile devices. Mobile is really taking off for online viewing from web sites (which is what this measures). The comparative amounts for (Windows) PCs and Macs is surprising, as is that for Android v PC. Huawei backtracks, won't release a dual-OS Android, Windows Phone smartphone >> FierceWireless Huawei said it has no plans to release a dual-OS smartphone running Microsoft's Windows Phone and Google's Android, contradicting earlier statements from a Huawei executive. "Huawei Consumer Business Group adopts an open approach towards mobile operating systems to provide a range of choices for consumers," the company said in a statement to FierceWireless. "However, most of our products are based on Android OS, [and] at this stage there are no plans to launch a dual-OS smartphone in the near future." No Acer dual-boot PC, no Huawei dual-boot phone. Any others? (And a dual-boot phone made even less sense than a dual-boot PC.) Why should I care about wearables? >> Tech.pinions Ben Bajarin: I'm as early an adopter as they come. I have about every health and fitness wearable on the market. However, if you ran into me on the street today I wouldn't have a single one on me. Why? I simply don't find them valuable. The question I keep circling back to is, "Why I should care about these products?" When I first started using them it was novel to see how many steps I had taken or how much sleep I had the night before. But after a few days the novelty wore off. The data was simply not useful or actionable. There was no value in the data. This is Healthbook, Apple's major first step into health & fitness tracking >> 9to5Mac Mark Gurman: Healthbook's user interface is largely inspired by the iPhone's existing Passbook application. Versions of Healthbook in testing are capable of tracking several different health and fitness data points. Each category of functionality is a card in the Healthbook. Cards are distinguished by a colour, and the tabs can be arranged to fit user preferences. As can be seen in the above images, Healthbook has sections that can track data pertaining to bloodwork, heart rate, hydration, blood pressure, physical activity, nutrition, blood sugar, sleep, respiratory rate, oxygen saturation, and weight. Hard to see that this would be the full usefulness of a wearable Apple thingamajig, because those are directly useful for comparatively few people. Bad batteries, free of charge >> Onespacemedia Thomas Rumbold: I need to know why battery life on a mobile device that fundamentally needs to power itself isn't a priority. I need to know why I can't use my phone for one day without it turning into an expensive paperweight. I actually own a Nexus 4, which I think is an excellent phone - but the battery life is terrible. And let's be absolutely clear - this is not an isolated case. You know what else the battery life is awful on? Every model of iPhone. All of the Samsung S series. The recent HTC devices. BlackBerry devices are marginally better (and come with the rather brilliant facility of using removable batteries - so you can keep a couple spare and just swap them out when they die), but their situation is sort of complex and expensive at the moment. Do you know what the battery life was amazing on? My 2001 era Nokia 5110. Eleven days of battery life. And yes, he is aware that the modern smartphone can do more than that Nokia. This is BlackBerry's unreleased 'Cyclone' streaming box >> Engadget In 2011, BlackBerry was rumoured to be developing a media box to compete against the likes of Roku and Apple TV. While that device never made it to market, it looks like the company did manufacture some units, as proven by pictures posted on the CrackBerry forums. These photos were taken by user "isaac708," who claims he got 10 BlackBerry Cyclones (the device's code name) inside a box full of server stuff from a RIM liquidator. If only BlackBerry had gone ahead with this, it could have... lost a pile more money. Inside DuckDuckGo, Google's tiniest, fiercest competitor >>Co.Labs John Paul Titlow: Stepping inside DuckDuckGo's headquarters in Paoli, Pennsylvania, it's hard to imagine that its two modest, sparsely occupied floors could be used to launch an insurgency against one of the biggest tech companies on the planet. But they are--sort of. Most of DuckDuckGo's 20 or so employees work remotely. Doug Brown, a front-end dev specialist, lives in Toronto, making the trip to the small Philadelphia suburb periodically. The company's newest hire, a developer named Jag Talon, started working for the company from the Philippines before his family relocated to New Jersey last year. When we visited their office in January, fewer than a dozen people roamed the halls. This, we were told, was more than usual. DuckDuckGo is still microscopic in comparison to Google, but the part on how it manages remote working is illuminating. You can follow Guardian Technology's linkbucket on Pinboard To suggest a link, either add it below or tag it with @gdntech on the free Delicious service. (c) 2014 Guardian Newspapers Limited. |