Christopher Mims

The gumshoes at Apple-focused blog 9to5Mac dug deep into job listings and public documents to discover that Apple’s new manufacturing facility in Arizona will be producing sapphire, the hardest natural material after diamond. Based on some creative, perhaps even wishful, parsing of those documents, pundits are jumping to all sorts of conclusions—for example that Apple might make the screen in the rumored iWatchout of sapphire.

Well this is unexpected. Google is selling Motorola, the iconic handset maker it bought for $12.5 billion in May of 2012, to Chinese PC maker Lenovo for $2.91 billion. Google CEO Larry Page has penned a short note about the sale, but he doesn’t get into details. Here’s why the deal makes sense.

Yahoo has plenty to say about the expected 6% decline in its display advertising revenue, but nothing at all to say about its $1 billion acquisition of Tumblr last year, justified at the time as a grab for a younger audience. Well, except for this bit, which points investors to the official Yahoo corporate blog:

January 25 marked the 40th anniversary of the world’s most iconic role-playing games, Dungeons and Dragons. Even if you’ve never known the pleasure of wiling away an afternoon bashing Orcs with your 4d6 warhammer, odds are you or someone you know has internalized the mechanics of Dungeons and Dragons, either by actually rolling its unique polyhedral dice or, for younger players, through one of the countless video games that use its system of experience points, items and talent classifications.

How can one characterize the post-PC age? This graph of the growth of iPad sales, created by mobile analyst Horace Dediu, compared to relatively stagnant growth in sales of Apple’s Macintosh personal computers, shows that when someone wants an internet-connected device that can perform everyday computing functions, increasingly that device is a tablet. Apple just released its earnings, and while the company missed expectations on iPhone sales, it sold more iPads than expected—26 million versus 24 million. Quartz’s Zach Seward has taken to grouping all of these devices—including the large phones that are a segment of the tablet market—under the term “glass-covered internet machines.”

Apple’s earnings are out. For a company that is dependent on a single product for the bulk of its revenue, there’s some bad news.

There’s a problem with today’s voice recognition systems: They’re just too slow. Anyone who has waited in frustration while Siri or Google’s Voice Search “thinks” about even the simplest commands knows what I’m talking about.

Microsoft’s results for the fourth quarter are certainly surprising. Revenue? Up $3 billion year-over-year.

It’s been a tough few years for Logitech. The high watermark in sales of PC accessories for the iconic computer mouse and keyboard maker was way back in the last quarter of 2007. So what’s behind the company’s surprisingly strong most recent quarter?

Data science—the “science” of gathering and parsing the enormous flood of data pouring into America’s more technologically-adept firms—is so hot that even US president Barack Obama has declared it an educational priority. The Harvard Business Review called data science “the sexiest job of the 21st century” (paywall). Startups are producing so much data they’ve become “frantic” to find more data scientists, making salaries on the order of $300,000 a year not unreasonable.

Good morning, Quartz readers!

Acura’s promotion to allow people to eavesdrop on the goings on at the Sundance film festival might look familiar to you. That’s because the last time you saw this visual identity, it was atop a slide deck outlining the US National Security Agency’s domestic internet spying program:

Connected cars have a problem—most of the things that they are supposed to enable, like browsing Facebook while you roar down the autobahn—are illegal. And the ways they were supposed to enable this—for example, touch screens—are disliked by drivers, who still prefer good old-fashioned knobs. Whoever can solve these design challenges without increasing roadway deaths or cheesing off purchasers of new cars could transform how we interact not only with cars, but also everything else in our environment that might benefit from a less obtrusive interface.

Here’s the good news in Intel’s just-released fourth quarter earnings: The hard times for the PC market, still the biggest consumer of the microchips Intel makes, may finally be over. While Intel’s earnings per share were down 11% year-over-year in 2013, they were up 6% this quarter compared to the same quarter last year.

Between December 23 and January 6, more than 100,000 internet-connected smart “things,” including media players, smart televisions and at least one refrigerator, were part of a network of computers used to send 750,000 spam emails. So says a study just released by enterprise security company Proofpoint. This is the first time anyone in the security industry has proved that devices that are part of the internet of things are being used just as PCs have been for decades—as part of “zombie” networks of computers used to do everything from sending spam to mining bitcoin.

There’s a famous scene in the 1976 film Network in which a disgruntled television newscaster rants about what’s wrong with the American public—including the assertion that fewer than 3% of Americans read a book in the past year. Network is satire, of course, but the persistent cultural myth this line represents turns out to be wildly inaccurate.

Jakarta, Indonesia is the “world’s tweet capital,” reports Reuters, where anyone with more than 2,000 followers can get paid at least $21 to tweet during rush hour, when most Indonesians are stuck in traffic and (apparently) glued to their mobiles.

Nest is a company that makes smart smoke detectors and smart thermostats. That’s neat, but that gadget business alone is not worth $3.2 billion, the price Google just paid for Nest. There are a bunch of reasons Google was willing to give Nest’s investors a 20x return on their investment, including its pool of talent. But the full scope of the most important reason of all has been absent from most of press coverage.

Nest, maker of internet connected gizmos for the smart home, is a good fit for Google in many ways. But that Google just paid $3.2 billion for a company that has only two products—a thermostat and a smoke detector—seems a bit much. Why the super high valuation? It could be that Google perceives Nest as a way to insinuate itself into what could some day be the trillion dollar market for the internet of things, or a way onto the coming “smart grid.“

Imagine trying to compose an email on a keyboard just a tad bigger than a postage stamp. Nuance, whose technology powers speech-recognition systems like Apple’s Siri, thinks it has this problem licked—and it doesn’t involve voice recognition.

Making a computer understand voice commands is tough—just ask Google, which has put some of its best engineers against the problem, or Apple, which is locked in an arms race with Google for king of the voice-control hill. But now Nuance, the company that currently powers Apple’s Siri voice assistant, is offering to any consumer electronics manufacturer who wants to buy a license, access to its own cloud-based voice-control system. This means everything from your smart thermostat to your car could soon be accepting voice commands, whether or not a gadget from Google or Apple is involved.

Programmer Zachary Taylor just debuted Bitlegal, a site that makes it easy to see how closely regulated bitcoin is in your country. It just went live, so the information is a bit patchy, but a pattern already leaps out: Countries that don’t do much to control their currencies (in green) could care less about bitcoin, at least for now. Others, like China and Thailand (in yellow and red) are heavily regulating the alternative cryptocurrency.

A doomsday scenario that has long been dismissed by bitcoin’s biggest boosters is now a clear and present danger. At 3am ET this morning, a single bitcoin mining collective known as Ghash.io reached 45% of the computing power of all global bitcoin miners, just six points short of the 51% that would be required to break bitcoin by arbitrarily manipulating the record of future transactions upon which it rests. The result could be, at minimum, “double spending” of existing bitcoins, which would render the currency effectively unusable.

In a survey released today, Gallup has identified the one thing American millennials are wedded to: their smartphones.