Plus Samsung gets overly heavy, Secret Plumber's social error, reasons to use Microsoft Word, and more
A burst of 10 links for you to chew over, as picked by the Technology team
*Amicus Brief >> Bob Kohn*
Like all others, Kohn was required to limit his amicus curiae legal brief on what he thought about the US Department of Justice's antitrust case against Apple to five pages. So he did it in comic book form. (It all hinges on "low prices" against "efficient prices".)
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*Intellectual property and competition policy >> EUROPA - PRESS RELEASES*
Joaquin Almunia, the EC's antitrust chief:
Patent holders should not seek injunctions based on SEPs [standards-essential patents] against companies that are willing to enter a licence on FRAND [fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory] terms.
As many of you will know, Samsung has offered commitments to address our competition concerns in relation to its use of injunctions.
Samsung essentially proposes not to enjoin companies which are willing to have the dispute settled by a court or arbitrator.
We have market-tested these commitments and will take account of the feedback when we discuss with Samsung possible improvements to their commitments in the coming weeks.
In other words, Samsung's offer to hold off for five years from abusing its SEP powers by seeking injunctions against willing licencees wasn't sufficient.
--------------------
*Snapchat active users exceed 30 million >> Business Insider*
One source with insight into the company's figures told us the following:
• Snapchat has about 60m total installs, making it larger than Instagram when it sold to Facebook for $1bn.
• Of those 60m installs, Snapchat has about 30m monthly active users.
• 55% of monthly active users use Snapchat daily. That's 16.5m people.
We checked with another source who wouldn't give exact numbers, but said the absolute figures (60 million installs and 30 million monthly active users) are "much too low."
Quite a lot of users, really.
--------------------
*Samsung tries to silence user whose S4 caught fire; it doesn't go over well >> Neowin*
Oh Samsung, you tried to have a YouTube video pulled after it showed a Galaxy S4 that caught fire while charging but this is about to blow up in your PR and legal teams face after you sent a 'hush' document to the user.
Here's the deal, YouTube user GhostlyRich posted a video on YouTube in early December that showed that his Samsung Galaxy S4 caught fire while charging. While the battery did not explode (thankfully) you can clearly see the charging port is burnt. To no surprise, a burnt charging point rendered the device useless and seeing that the Phone is still under warranty, you would think Samsung would simply exchange the device and make good with the consumer to fix the issue.
Wrong. What Samsung has done, foolishly, is sent the user a document saying that they will exchange his defective device only after he pulls his initial video from YouTube. If Samsung was unaware of how the internet works, it's about to find out that trying to quiet the user will result in a black eye for the company.
Original video: 45,000 views. Demand letter: 277,000 views. (Thanks @ClarkeViper for the link.)
--------------------
*China Mobile to accept iPhone orders this week >> WSJ Digits blog*
A phone call to a China Mobile customer representative confirmed that customers can preorder iPhones from the site starting Thursday.
"Customers can begin to preorder for our new 4G services from Dec. 12 through the company's website and some dedicated branches in Shanghai. But we will only start providing commercial 4G services after Dec. 18," the customer services operator said.
China Mobile is preparing a pricing plan for new iPhones but the company hasn't informed the customer services team of the details yet, the representative said.
--------------------
*The Secret Plumber – Edinburgh's worst tradesman or just a very naughty boy? >> Ed Uncovered*
Everything's in there, from the rude initial response to the "Oh, my phone was stolen and hacked!".
--------------------
*Siri, Topsy, and the web – context is everything >> getwired.com*
Wes Miller:
Many people have said Topsy was acquired to enhance advertising or iTunes content. Both are tangentially right. But ads have never appeared to be a primary focus for Apple – which makes sense, because the customer they build their hardware, software, and services for usually isn't a fan of ads. That said, the analytics from Topsy Pro could well wind up integrated into iAds. We'll see in time. As for content discovery? Sure, that'll happen too, and people will buy content as a result of their searches. But I don't believe that this is what this acquisition was about.
People expect Siri to be able to answer their queries, and if it can't, they disengage from the service, and potentially from Apple's platform, if they don't find that it just works the way they expect. That's why I believe Topsy has everything to do with Siri, and that's where the team will end up, and how we'll see the technology demonstrated at WWDC next summer.
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*"The human condition" (GIF)*
Queueing theory: in practice.
--------------------
*Using the iPad Air as my main machine >> euansemple.com*
Euan Semple:
It is now a couple of weeks that I have been using my new iPad Air as my main computer - and I have to say I am loving it. This has come as something of a surprise to me. I have been a hard core Mac user for many years and have got a lot of pleasure from building up workflows, macros, keyboard shortcuts etc and frankly played my Mac like a musical instrument. I also didn't get along with the first iPad.
First of many, or an outlier?
--------------------
*CMAP: "Why do you use Microsoft Word?">> Charlie's Diary*
Charlie Stross:
I try to avoid Microsoft Word like the plague, but I have my limits. For me, the requirement that finally made me crack and throw money at the Beast of Redmond was the need (in mid-2012) to edit, revise, and indeed redraft the first six books of the Merchant Princes series into three omnibus volumes in twelve weeks. There was no slack time in the proposed production cycle for those books: they were to come out at one month intervals in the UK in the spring and early summer of 2013.
Rather like floppy disks in the Federal Reserve, Word and Excel are likely to survive any change in broader computing because they're baked in to so many businesses' workflows.
--------------------
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. Reported by guardian.co.uk 2 days ago.
A burst of 10 links for you to chew over, as picked by the Technology team
*Amicus Brief >> Bob Kohn*
Like all others, Kohn was required to limit his amicus curiae legal brief on what he thought about the US Department of Justice's antitrust case against Apple to five pages. So he did it in comic book form. (It all hinges on "low prices" against "efficient prices".)
--------------------
*Intellectual property and competition policy >> EUROPA - PRESS RELEASES*
Joaquin Almunia, the EC's antitrust chief:
Patent holders should not seek injunctions based on SEPs [standards-essential patents] against companies that are willing to enter a licence on FRAND [fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory] terms.
As many of you will know, Samsung has offered commitments to address our competition concerns in relation to its use of injunctions.
Samsung essentially proposes not to enjoin companies which are willing to have the dispute settled by a court or arbitrator.
We have market-tested these commitments and will take account of the feedback when we discuss with Samsung possible improvements to their commitments in the coming weeks.
In other words, Samsung's offer to hold off for five years from abusing its SEP powers by seeking injunctions against willing licencees wasn't sufficient.
--------------------
*Snapchat active users exceed 30 million >> Business Insider*
One source with insight into the company's figures told us the following:
• Snapchat has about 60m total installs, making it larger than Instagram when it sold to Facebook for $1bn.
• Of those 60m installs, Snapchat has about 30m monthly active users.
• 55% of monthly active users use Snapchat daily. That's 16.5m people.
We checked with another source who wouldn't give exact numbers, but said the absolute figures (60 million installs and 30 million monthly active users) are "much too low."
Quite a lot of users, really.
--------------------
*Samsung tries to silence user whose S4 caught fire; it doesn't go over well >> Neowin*
Oh Samsung, you tried to have a YouTube video pulled after it showed a Galaxy S4 that caught fire while charging but this is about to blow up in your PR and legal teams face after you sent a 'hush' document to the user.
Here's the deal, YouTube user GhostlyRich posted a video on YouTube in early December that showed that his Samsung Galaxy S4 caught fire while charging. While the battery did not explode (thankfully) you can clearly see the charging port is burnt. To no surprise, a burnt charging point rendered the device useless and seeing that the Phone is still under warranty, you would think Samsung would simply exchange the device and make good with the consumer to fix the issue.
Wrong. What Samsung has done, foolishly, is sent the user a document saying that they will exchange his defective device only after he pulls his initial video from YouTube. If Samsung was unaware of how the internet works, it's about to find out that trying to quiet the user will result in a black eye for the company.
Original video: 45,000 views. Demand letter: 277,000 views. (Thanks @ClarkeViper for the link.)
--------------------
*China Mobile to accept iPhone orders this week >> WSJ Digits blog*
A phone call to a China Mobile customer representative confirmed that customers can preorder iPhones from the site starting Thursday.
"Customers can begin to preorder for our new 4G services from Dec. 12 through the company's website and some dedicated branches in Shanghai. But we will only start providing commercial 4G services after Dec. 18," the customer services operator said.
China Mobile is preparing a pricing plan for new iPhones but the company hasn't informed the customer services team of the details yet, the representative said.
--------------------
*The Secret Plumber – Edinburgh's worst tradesman or just a very naughty boy? >> Ed Uncovered*
Everything's in there, from the rude initial response to the "Oh, my phone was stolen and hacked!".
--------------------
*Siri, Topsy, and the web – context is everything >> getwired.com*
Wes Miller:
Many people have said Topsy was acquired to enhance advertising or iTunes content. Both are tangentially right. But ads have never appeared to be a primary focus for Apple – which makes sense, because the customer they build their hardware, software, and services for usually isn't a fan of ads. That said, the analytics from Topsy Pro could well wind up integrated into iAds. We'll see in time. As for content discovery? Sure, that'll happen too, and people will buy content as a result of their searches. But I don't believe that this is what this acquisition was about.
People expect Siri to be able to answer their queries, and if it can't, they disengage from the service, and potentially from Apple's platform, if they don't find that it just works the way they expect. That's why I believe Topsy has everything to do with Siri, and that's where the team will end up, and how we'll see the technology demonstrated at WWDC next summer.
--------------------
*"The human condition" (GIF)*
Queueing theory: in practice.
--------------------
*Using the iPad Air as my main machine >> euansemple.com*
Euan Semple:
It is now a couple of weeks that I have been using my new iPad Air as my main computer - and I have to say I am loving it. This has come as something of a surprise to me. I have been a hard core Mac user for many years and have got a lot of pleasure from building up workflows, macros, keyboard shortcuts etc and frankly played my Mac like a musical instrument. I also didn't get along with the first iPad.
First of many, or an outlier?
--------------------
*CMAP: "Why do you use Microsoft Word?">> Charlie's Diary*
Charlie Stross:
I try to avoid Microsoft Word like the plague, but I have my limits. For me, the requirement that finally made me crack and throw money at the Beast of Redmond was the need (in mid-2012) to edit, revise, and indeed redraft the first six books of the Merchant Princes series into three omnibus volumes in twelve weeks. There was no slack time in the proposed production cycle for those books: they were to come out at one month intervals in the UK in the spring and early summer of 2013.
Rather like floppy disks in the Federal Reserve, Word and Excel are likely to survive any change in broader computing because they're baked in to so many businesses' workflows.
--------------------
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. Reported by guardian.co.uk 2 days ago.