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Boot up: Fuelband dead?, Glass assault, learning from Bill Gates, and more(Guardian Web Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) A burst of 10 links for you to chew over, as picked by the Technology team Nike denies FuelBand shutdown, but layoffs could reveal new cracks in wearables market >> Re/code Nike confirmed a "small number" of layoffs in its digital sports division, but attempted to tamp down a CNET report late Friday that said the company was shuttering the hardware side of its FuelBand team. "The Nike+ FuelBand SE remains an important part of our business," the company said in a statement emailed to Re/code. "We will continue to improve the Nike+ FuelBand App, launch new METALUXE colors, and we will sell and support the Nike+ FuelBand SE for the foreseeable future." How long is that, though? The original story emerged from this comment on Secret. Bonus fact: Tim Cook is on Nike's board. I was assaulted for wearing Google Glass >> Business Insider Kyle Russell: After more than an hour spent working on the story in a coffee shop, I arranged my laptop, camera, and notes in my backpack. Mindlessly, I put on Google Glass instead of squeezing it in with the rest of my things. (In retrospect, I can see how that might not have been the best idea.) The aforementioned colleague and I were on our way to the 16th Street BART station — I'll note that I wasn't using any device at the time — when a person put their hand on my face and yelled, "Glass!" In an instant the person was sprinting away, Google Glass in hand. I ran after, through traffic, to the corner of the opposite block. The person pivoted, shifting their weight to put all of their momentum into an overhand swing. The Google Glass smashed into the ground, and they ran in another direction. But it's a more nuanced writeup than that might suggest. Why consumer tech is so irritatingly incremental >> Juan Pablo Vazquez Sampere - Harvard Business Review In the late 1960s, Michelin introduced the radial tire into the U.S. market. This was no surprise to the top five U.S.-based bias-ply tire manufacturers (Goodyear, Firestone, Uniroyal, B.F. Goodrich, and General Tire). After all, it was hardly a new technology; the first radial tire patents had been filed more than 40 years before. And they'd all seen radial tires take over the European market. But even though radial tires were far superior to bias tires in terms of durability, cost per mile, and safety – and could be sold for an attractively higher price — they presented a challenge to U.S. incumbents. The process used to manufacture them was completely different from the one they used to make bias-ply tires. To produce radials, the U.S. giants basically needed to start their companies all over again — practically nothing of what they knew about producing bias-ply tires could be reused. Another disruption tale, but with lessons. A dozen things I've learned about business from Bill Gates >> 25iq Tren Griffin outlines a few, of which this one stands out: "Being a visionary is trivial. Being a CEO is hard. All you have to do to be a visionary is to give the old 'MIPS to the moon' speech — everything will be everywhere, everything will be converged. Everybody knows that. Which is different from being the CEO of a company and seeing where the profits are." The others are worthwhile too, though. How Americans Die >> Bloomberg Justifiably lauded HTML5 data visualisation. Mozilla location service – the next wave >> Mozilla Cloud Services There are a few reasons that Mozilla is developing a location service. Location in general has become a very important part of how we use the Internet, and the Mobile Internet is becoming an even more critical part of our lives. So it's important for the world to have an open and trustworthy location service. Having an open location service is also critical for some of our key initiatives such as: • The FirefoxOS initiative, which aims to bring user choice and the principles of the open web to mobile phones and the mobile ecosystem. MLS in conjunction with FirefoxOS has the potential to provide location services to the millions of users who are transitioning from a feature phone to a smartphone.• Providing location information to open-source operating systems. There's an Android app if you want to help out. The curious case of the fake Steve Ballmer >> Owen Williams On Twitter [a few days ago], a fake Steve Ballmer quickly gained a lot of followers as people discovered the account. The account tweeted a few times, with a bunch of convincing pictures that hadn't been posted anywhere else online, so many were lead to believe it was real. Quite a bit of sleuthing to reveal the person behind it - who seems to be a serial faker of such things. In praise of unfairness >> Benedict Evans In case it isn't obvious by now, these charts are meant to be unfair - that's the point. Unfair but relevant comparisons are the most interesting and important kinds. An unfair comparison generally means an unfair advantage, and this isn't the Olympics - unfair is good. Customers don't care if a company's advantage is unfair. Investors don't care. Unfair advantages are often the best kind. They are something that flows structurally from the reason why your business is going to change everything - they flow from a technology change you are building on or a change in market dynamics or consumer behaviour that you're riding, and that your competitors cannot address. Disruption is unfair. Mobile's disruption of PCs and the PC internet is entirely unfair - it's the unfairness of differences like the replacement cycle and subsidy model (amongst many others) that makes it possible. In the battle for best smartphone, Apple still beats Samsung >> NYTimes.com Once you're past the opinion of the headline, there's this more farsighted question from Farhad Manjoo: for many people, there will only be a single obvious reason to buy the Galaxy S5 over the iPhone 5S: The Samsung phone has a much bigger screen. Size isn't an objective advantage but rather a matter of preference — some people like big phones and some people like small ones. For the next few months, for big-phone lovers, Samsung's massive size will make it the clear winner. Yet that points to a looming problem for Samsung. News reports and common sense suggest that Apple will almost certainly unveil a bigger iPhone later this year. If you assume that everything else about the iPhone-versus-Galaxy matchup will remain the same after the size increase, it means that Samsung will lose its single greatest advantage over Apple. And what will Samsung do then? The real challenge for Project Ara >> Tech-Thoughts Sameer Singh: the low-end variant of Ara is scheduled to be priced at just $50. This device will include a frame, display, Android OS, low-end application processor, battery and Wi-Fi module. As manufacturers begin moving away from the feature phone market, products like this could hold appeal for low-end users. The real challenge here will be to fashion a go-to-market strategy. Since the product actively discourages replacement purchases, OEMs will have no interest in the category. For now, Google has been attempting to rope in third party developers to build modules, but this could also hold promise for component manufacturers. While modular hardware has the potential to destroy OEM margins, selling directly to consumers could actually boost margins for component vendors. This creates another problem - neither third party hardware developers nor component vendors have the required distribution reach. Therefore, the success of Project Ara will depend on the creation of a "hardware appstore", with a distribution network that can deliver these physical modules. Creating this distribution network will be the real challenge for Google and Project Ara. 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. |