It’s not often that a company gets its start by giving away 100% of its intellectual property and encouraging potential customers to manufacture the company’s products on their own. But that’s exactly how AtFAB, a tiny, two-person furniture startup based in Lexington, Kentucky, first germinated.
Today—on his 30th birthday, no less—Edward Snowden was charged with espionage by the United States for leaking information about government surveillance programs. It’s a crime punishable by death, though it’s rare that a prosecutor seeks the maximum penalty.
Sony, the one high-end electronics company that seems constitutionally incapable of compelling innovation, has a chance to redeem itself on June 26. That’s the day, the company’s Twitter feed is not so subtly hinting, that Sony will show the public the next edition of its SmartWatch, at the Mobile Asia Expo in Shanghai. (And yes, camel-cased “SmartWatch” is its official name.)
The world’s tallest building might be the sort of place you wouldn’t want to live. Sure, Sky City One, which will rise from an empty field in Changsha, China, will be a miracle of efficient construction that will be built in only 90 days, resist magnitude-9 earthquakes, and save energy just by allowing its residents to travel less. But as with all design compromises, those superlatives come at a price. In this case, it could be livability.
Facebook is going to get us all watching television ads again.
Companies that protect your privacy with software are seeing a boon to their businesses following revelations that America’s internet giants have been turned into appendages of its surveillance state.
You can’t 3D print money, but Stratasys just did the next best thing in buying MakerBot, the one company with the potential to disrupt Stratasys’s 3D-printing business.
You can now add “spymaster” to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’s various titles. On Friday June 14, a US Government Accountability Office (GAO) report elaborated on previous reports that Amazon had won a $600 million contract to build a “private cloud” for the CIA. (The GAO report was generated when IBM, which had been competing for the contract, protested that it had lost unfairly.)
When the Financial Times reported that the world’s number three manufacturer of smartphones, China’s Huawei, might consider acquiring Nokia, that icon of the mobile phone revolution that has fallen on hard times, it was a bit of a head-scratcher. Why would a company making Android smartphones want to acquire the wreckage of the business it’s disrupting? It would be like Henry Ford using proceeds from the Model T to buy a buggy whip company.
Kickstarter just narrowly averted what would have been the biggest definitive fraud in the crowdfunding site’s history. It shut down the Kobe Red project, which promised to deliver mouthwatering beef jerky made from Japanese cows fed on 100% organic feed and treated to beer and massages (we’re not making this up)—just an hour before scammers would have successfully made off with $120,309 from the project’s 3,252 backers.
Google’s Android mobile operating system, which powers the majority of smartphones on the planet, may be about to go on a crash diet that will shrink it to a size it hasn’t been since 2010. The results could be a leaner, faster mobile operating system that reinvigorates older Android phones and helps Google push even further into emerging markets. How so? By allowing device manufacturers to put the latest version of Android on smartphones that cost $100 or less.
Fans of phones with bigger screens may soon have cause to rejoice. (Judging by sales of Samsung’s surprise hit phablet, the Galaxy Note, there are more than ten million of those fans worldwide.) Reuters is reporting that Apple is in discussion with suppliers to source 4.7 inch and/or 5.7 inch screens for forthcoming iPhones, putting Apple in direct competition the Galaxy Note. Call it an iPhablet. For reference, the original iPhone had a screen just 3.5 inches diagonally, which Steve Jobs once called the “perfect” size for consumers.
If there’s one thing hip hop has taught us, it’s that sometimes your heroes have to die before you can assume the mantle of their greatness.
It’s a tough time to be a hard-core gamer. Veterans of the gaming industry are declaring that we are in the midst of the death of “console gaming” itself—i.e. the end of those set-top boxes made by Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo that have long been the staples of video gaming. Sales of video games have been in a tailspin for the past four years, and in April sales of both software and consoles were down 25% from a year earlier.
“Trendsetter” isn’t a word often used to describe Microsoft these days, but for once it’s apt. First Google, and now Apple, have revealed that they are following Microsoft’s “Windows Everywhere” vision into a future of personal computing where desktop operating systems look and function like, and are fully integrated with, mobile operating systems. And, oh yeah, mobile OSes will become more powerful and desktop-like as well.
Americans are crazy for tablets, say the results of Pew Internet & American Life project’s just-released annual survey of tablet PC ownership. There aren’t many boldface surprises in this report, but the details are interesting. For example, unlike smart phones, which are mostly popular with young people, people who own tablets like the iPad and Google’s Nexus 10 tend to be age 35-44, which means that companies aiming their mobile strategy at that demographic should focus on large screen sizes.
Google CEO Larry Page just said in a blog post that Google has never heard of a program called “PRISM,” and that the US government does not have “direct access” to Google’s servers, as alleged by recent media reports. Assuming that the PowerPoint slides published yesterday by the Guardian and Washington Post and purporting to be from the US National Security Agency aren’t simply fake, how then is it possible that the NSA has broad access to Google’s data without Google ever giving it up?
A biologist who specializes in statistics has calculated that when the NSA’s alleged broad dragnet of Facebook, Google and other sites turns up a potential terrorist, there’s only a 1 in 10,102 chance that he or she is an actual terrorist. And that’s using very conservative estimates for the accuracy of the NSA’s terrorist-identifying software used in its PRISM spying program, which means that US spies could be reading the contents of hundreds of thousands of Facebook, Gmail, Skype and Apple iMessage accounts in order to find a needle in a haystack.
If the Guardian and Washington Post are correct, the US government has direct access to the servers of Google, Facebook, Yahoo, AOL, Skype and Apple, and is pulling data from them which is then filtered for “foreignness.” It’s a program allegedly designed to look for terrorists who are using these services, but because of the nature of the wide net being cast, it’s very likely that it’s turning up orders of magnitude more false positives than real terrorists.
The Washington Post is reporting that a ”horrified” career intelligence office has provided slides detailing a secret US government spying program in which the US National Security Agency (NSA) and the FBI allegedly have direct access to the servers of Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, AOL, Skype, YouTube and Apple. (Update: NBC says it has confirmed PRISM’s existence with anonymous sources, but “a government official says it is a data collection program rather than a data mining program.” Which may be so, though if one collects data, one can always mine it afterwards at one’s leisure.)
Kara Swisher of AllThingsD has just made a convincing case that Yahoo is at least thinking about acquiring Foursquare, the location-based social network. Swisher has her own reasons for believing a deal could at least be on the table—including the fact that Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer is such a big fan of Foursquare that she tried to acquire it when she was at Google.
Apple is still making tons of money on its phones, but not for long, says mobile analyst Sameer Singh. Why? Samsung and other makers of Android smartphones are getting better at creating “good enough” devices, which is making consumers more price sensitive.
The White House today introduced an executive order intended to combat “patent trolling,” in which companies buy up patents and use them to sue “infringing” companies that actually make things. Patent trolling is essentially a tax on innovation, and tech giants like Google hate it so much that they partner with other tech giants to create portfolios of patents they use solely to defend themselves against patent trolls.
Kickstarter has been described as the Home Shopping Network for geeks—picture an online version of the Sharper Image catalog and an investment platform for tech startups having a baby. But this is the wrong way to think about Kickstarter, because the site’s founders have actually shied away from tech to take Kickstarter back to its roots: a fundraising platform for all forms of creativity, but mostly in the arts.
