Apple Means Business In Health Sensors

Latest big-name hire is Cercacor's Marcelo Malini Lamego, and he comes with a serious pedigree in health-care sensors:

Lamego is credited with more than 70 patent applications and granted patents related to a number of categories, including sensors and patient monitoring technologies. His profile also notes that he's authored more than 30 peer-reviewed articles relating to topics such as neural networks, power electronics, and adaptive systems.

In particular, Lamego was the lead scientist developing Masimo's "Rainbow Technology" platform, which is a noninvasive monitoring tool that assesses "multiple blood constituents and physiologic parameters that previously required invasive or complicated procedures."

Seriously, when can we stop calling this thing the iWatch? Sounds like calling a tiny pocketable computer platform "iPhone", just because that's the space it takes up in your pocket.

ASCII Art's Prehistory

There's a great article over at The Atlantic, tracing the roots of ASCII art, all the way back to the earliest uses of the typewriter. An aside: In the 1970s, my brother and I were taken along to a big exhibition of up-and-coming technologies for the home, and had our images captured by a low-res black-and-white video camera. I remember we had to sit still for ten seconds for the image to be scanned, and then we watched in awe as an ASCII rendition of the image emerged slowly from a tractor-fed dot matrix printer. That image hung on the wall of my parents' living room for years. I wonder if it's still around somewhere?

The history of ASCII art goes deeper, and much of it is told only in Geocities blog postings, abandoned websites, Google Books, and scattered PDFs across the web.

This post traces a fascinating and mostly lost strand of that history: The way thousands and thousands of people made typewriter art, from amateurs to avant gardists.

What they created is, in some cases, strikingly similar to the ASCII art of the BBS days, but how they thought about what they were doing depended on the times in which they worked.

Graphic Design On The Moon

Gavin Rothery's work on Duncan Jones' debut feature Moon is really quite something, and a great demonstration of how a singular design vision can unify disparate elements, and make an unfamiliar world both believable and recognisable.

After studying 2001: A Space Odyssey in intimate detail, Duncan Jones’s Moon was the logical choice for my second foray into sci-fi typography. As this opening shot illustrates, Moon is a bleak, lonely, and above all beautiful love-letter to classic sci-fi typography and design. It’s also one of my favorite sci-fi films of all time.

GMail Plug-In Streak Snoops Recipient Location

Nothing new here; It's common practice to include tiny images in emails to check whether the email's been read (confirming it's a real address) or to look up IP addresses. The answer, as ever, is to have browsers default to not loading images (I do this on most of my Macs, but it's a pain), or to simply not open mails from untrusted senders. And—as I advised my students this morning regarding sending out unsolicited marketing email—it's becoming a pretty safe bet that anything you sent through as an unsolicited attachment just got deleted right away.

This afternoon, I stumbled across this free Gmail plug-in called Streak. If you send someone an email, Streak will tell you if they opened it, when they opened it, and, most creepily, where they were when they opened it.

How is this possible? Streak doesn't say on their website, but typically email tracking services work in a similar way. They embed a tiny image into the email you've sent. Images in emails aren't actually "in" the emails themselves - they have to be hosted on an external server. When you open the email and your computer asks the external server for the image, your computer pings that server with a request that includes your IP address. Trackers then use that IP address to locate you.

Remembering Tamagotchi

This brings back memories. I actually queued for these the first day they appeared in the UK, and I learned to feed it without looking, so I could secretly tend to it in my pocket at meetings. These days, everyone in the meeting would be openly checking Twitter. That's progress.

If aliens ever visit the earth, they will no doubt puzzle over many of the things that we do. One of the things that they might struggle to understand is the Tamagotchi, a virtual digital pet that was popular with the pre-teen set in the 1990s. This tech toy was incredibly popular, and was the cause of many tears, and much confusion from adults as to why children cared about the death of an animated character.

iTunes Radio Moves Outside US

Australia first, but let's hope the UK is close behind.

SYDNEY—February 11, 2014—Apple® today announced iTunes Radio™ is now available to music fans in Australia. iTunes Radio is a free Internet radio service featuring over 100 stations and an incredible catalog of music from the iTunes Store®, combined with features only iTunes® can deliver. When you tune into iTunes Radio on your iPhone®, iPad®, iPod touch®, Mac®, PC or Apple TV®, you’ll have access to stations inspired by the music you already listen to, Featured Stations curated by Apple and genre-focused stations that are personalized just for you. iTunes Radio evolves based on the music you play and download. The more you use iTunes Radio and iTunes, the more it knows what you like to listen to and the more personalized your experience becomes. iTunes Radio also gives you access to exclusive “First Play” premieres from top selling artists, plus the ability to tag or buy anything you hear with just one click.

Beep Turns Regular Speakers Into A Sonos Replacement

Handy, and very pretty, though available only in the US at the moment. I personally have an Airport Express hanging off my bedroom amplifier, and the Apple TV does the same thing for my living room AV Amp, but I could happily put one of these somewhere.

Make all your speakers wireless.

Beep connects to your speakers, receivers, and docks. Which speakers?

Beep sets up in seconds. Just plug it in, connect via cable to your speakers, and enter your Wi-Fi password using the Beep app for iOS or Android.

Beeps play synchronized music throughout your home.

The Crazy Rise Of Flappy Bird, In Review Numbers

Great analysis by @zachwill. Thanks to Benedict Evans for the link.

January 22nd Dong Nguyen was probably extremely excited about the couple months worth of revenue his marketing experiment had pulled off. With the recurring in-game ads and 800 reviews in a single day, Flappy Bird was beyond a success. Mission accomplished.

February 1st Dong Nguyen, on the other hand, must have questioned if the world had lost its mind.

On February 1st, reviews exploded to 800 in a single hour. 6,500 iTunes App Store reviews in a single day. February 1st is the day Dong Nguyen woke up, stretched, checked email, checked Twitter, checked iTunes, and witnessed millions of downloads happening.

Culture Eats Strategy For Breakfast

JLG gets it precisely right: To really prosper, Microsoft's new CEO needs to change Microsoft's culture. The question is whether he can, and whether he realises that it needs changing.

Microsoft has succeeded, in the past, by straddling the old and the new: The company is masterful at introducing new features without breaking older software. In Microsoft’s unspoken, subconscious culture, the new can only be defined as an extension of the existing, so when it finally decided they it needed a tablet (another one after the Tablet PC failure), the Redmond company set out to build a better device that would also function as a laptop. The best of both worlds.

Microsoft has been a master of evolution, of building an enormous platform on successive layers of the older ones. In the medium term evolution wins, but in the long term the old is swept away almost entirely by the new.

Creativity Can Be Learned, And Taught

Excellent NYT article on how creativity aligned to critical thinking can being taught. I've grown sick of hearing words like 'talent' thrown around, as if some individuals are creative and others not. We teach our students—and ourselves—to think and act more creatively every day.

Critical thinking has long been regarded as the essential skill for success, but it’s not enough, says Dr. Puccio. Creativity moves beyond mere synthesis and evaluation and is, he says, “the higher order skill.” This has not been a sudden development. Nearly 20 years ago “creating” replaced “evaluation” at the top of Bloom’s Taxonomy of learning objectives. In 2010 “creativity” was the factor most crucial for success found in an I.B.M. survey of 1,500 chief executives in 33 industries. These days “creative” is the most used buzzword in LinkedIn profiles two years running.

Traditional academic disciplines still matter, but as content knowledge evolves at lightning speed, educators are talking more and more about “process skills,” strategies to reframe challenges and extrapolate and transform information, and to accept and deal with ambiguity.

Thanks to @CliveSC for the heads-up on the article.

Fedrigoni Paper Replaces Leather For Leica

Interesting. While this is a high-end, limited edition product, I wonder what other applications we might see a paper like this used for? Shoes? Wallets? 

We won’t pass judgement on the looks of the camera — inevitably some will find it gorgeous while others will think otherwise — but Leica is certainly proud of their creation. They used specially treated paper called ‘Constellation Jade’ that they claim is better than even the best leathers. It’s acetone resistant, abrasion resistant and can withstand temperatures between -40 and 158°F.

Flappy Bird Flies Into The Sunset

Curious turn of events, but I can understand Nguyen's reaction. What I can't understand is how people managed to clock up scores higher than single digits, let alone up in the thousands. 

TechCrunch interviewed Nguyen via email a week ago, after Flappy Bird took off (it’s still the number one free app in both Apple’s App Store and in Google Play). He said that he’s the only creator at his game studio .GEARS , and he seemed to be as surprised by Flappy Bird’s popularity as anyone else, telling us, “I have no resources to do anything else beside uploading the game.”

How Much Would An iPhone Have Cost In 1991?

A staggering amount, is the answer.

​>In 1991, a gigabyte of hard disk storage cost around $10,000, perhaps a touch less. (Today, it costs around four cents ($0.04).) Back in 1991, a gigabyte of flash memory, which is what the iPhone uses, would have cost something like $45,000, or more. (Today, it’s around 55 cents ($0.55).)

The mid-level iPhone 5S has 32 GB of flash memory. Thirty-two GB, multiplied by $45,000, equals $1.44 million.

And that's just the storage. It's astonishing just how far we've come in a little over twenty years, and it demonstrates how difficult it is to make predictions for the next few decades.

Phillip Seymour Hoffman's Final Hunger Games Scenes Will Be Digital

We talked about this a little on this week's It's Alive! podcast. It's going to be heart breaking to watch. 

When Phillip Seymour Hoffman died last weekend, he apparently only had one scene left in The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part II left to shoot — but it was a major one. So major, it seems, that Lionsgate will be forced to digitally recreate the actor for it.

Steve Wozniak's Ridiculous Plan For Apple

I didn't link to Steve Wozniak's comments yesterday because I didn't know what to make of them. I honestly couldn't tell if he was (a) joking, (b) testing out an interesting radical idea, or (c) insane. Now I think I'm with Bloomberg's Joshua Brustein: "It's just silly".

“There’s nothing that would keep Apple out of the Android market as a secondary phone market,” Wozniak said in an article posted on Wired.com Thursday. “We could compete very well. People like the precious looks of stylings and manufacturing that we do in our product compared to the other Android offerings. We could play in two arenas at the same time.”

Non-Retina iPad Mini May Still Be Selling Well

Sounds counter-intuitive to those of us who fell in love with retina displays and had been aching for retina in the mini since its introduction, but it makes sense that regular folks just look at the £250 price tag of the original mini and snap it up. It demonstrates that there's still a ton of demand for an iPad–any iPad–under $300, despite the massive competition from higher-specified Android tablets well below the price. 

Any analysis of Apple's long-term tablet market share prospects that doesn't take the whole platform into account isn't worth paying attention to.

Sales of the non-Retina iPad mini may have nearly matched those of its higher-resolution sibling over the holidays as consumers chose the more diminutive tablet in equal proportions to Apple's full-size slates, according to a Friday report.

Talking Zombies

Some of you may have noticed that the It's Alive! podcast returned from the grave a couple of weeks ago, and it really hits its stride this week with guest zombie expert CJ Monk. I was happy to be in the studio for this one. It's up now on Futurilla Radio.

How Hollywood SFX AI Ended Up On Your iPhone

Clumsy Ninja is remarkably engaging, and it's fascinating to read how it had its genesis in building AI-powered synthetic actors for Hollywood blockbusters:

The decade-plus effort that resulted in the believable joys of Clumsy Ninja started, curiously, in a land of pure fantasy. In January 2004, WIRED covered an ambitious startup that was using AI to create digital stunt doubles for Peter Jackson’s The Return of the King. That young company was NaturalMotion, recently founded by former Oxford researchers Torsten Reil and Colm Massey.

Today, Reil says the plan was always to apply the technology to games, but at that point, the videogame world wasn’t quite ready. “The consoles back then weren’t fast enough,” he explained in a visit to the WIRED office last month. “We always wanted to do all of this in real time.”

Amazon's Time Travel Drones Deliver TV Shows Before They're Made

So they're advertising Season 8 of Doctor Who before it's even done, and some wonderful people have reviewed it from the future.

I ordered this DVD next week, and was delighted to find it had arrived by Christmas 2007. Capaldi absolutely nails the role, and Steven Moffat plays an eerily frightening Valeyard, even if the casting choice seems a little dubious. The return of Davros was handled superbly, the series arc was remarkably well-plotted, and the Kandyman's comeback was as terrifically shot as Series 12's "Vengeance of that Seaweed-looking Thing from that episode Pertwee or someone probably did" (a stand-out gem in a series which generally seemed as though they'd just stopped trying). 5/5, would definitely Capaldi again.

Happy Tenth Birthday Basecamp

I've been a big user of Basecamp on and off over the years, and while it's not right for any of my current projects I wouldn't be surprised to find myself back there in the future. So, happy birthday Basecamp, and a million thanks to the 37 Signals team for the myriad ways that pretty much all of their software has helped me out over the years.

Back then, we relied on email for everything. Email’s great for many things. But it’s not great for long-running projects. Things get lost, people get left out of conversations, there’s nowhere to go to see what’s left to do. Know what I mean?

So we started looking for a project management tool. We needed something to help us communicate ideas, organize the work to be done, and present work to stakeholders. Simple as that.

Update: 37 Signals is now Basecamp.

We're changing our name. 37signals is now Basecamp. "37signals" goes into the history books. From now on, we are Basecamp. Basecamp the company, Basecamp the product. We're one and the same.

Bold move. I'll be sad to see Highrise go, but let's hope it gets rebuilt in the core product.