Reuters: Facebook Inc is in advanced talks to acquire Israeli mobile satellite navigation start-up Waze for $800 million to $1 billion, business daily Calcalist reported on Thursday. Due diligence is underway after a term sheet was signed, Calcalist said, adding that talks began six months ago. Waze uses satellite signals from members’ smartphones to generate […]
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What LinkedIn is Good For
Ben Evans is annoyed with LinkedIn: LinkedIn fails to hit absolutely basic product features that should have been in there 5 years ago, both on mobile and desktop. Instead, the core features get buried under successive layers of mediocre non-core products, the latest being a flood of me-too news aggregation that’s creeping through the product […]
Change for Change’s Sake
iPhone OS was, but for copy-and-paste, a perfect OS (bear with me here – assume this is true). It handled every function the iPhone was expected to do in an incredibly elegant and polished way, and it’s not an accident that much of the core functionality has gone unchanged for six years. The tech press […]
The Humpty Dumpty PC
This has been making the rounds on Twitter (the picture was first posted on the Facebook page of W&CIE): It’s a powerful image, and accurate. Interestingly, though, the iPad and other appliance-like devices have actually had the opposite effect on non-mobile-phone computing. Many of the activities one used to do on a general-purpose personal computer […]
The Week in Review – April 28-May 4, 2013
The Week In Review is a weekly digest of what I found interesting in tech over the last week. It consists of the story of the week, a summary of stratechery articles and links, a huge collection of links that I found noteworthy (plus commentary), and my favorite tweets of the week. I post this […]
HTC Stalls
HTC’s 1Q earnings were, as expected, terrible. From The Next Web: The Taiwanese company reported net income after tax of $2.88 million (NT$85 million) on $1.45 billion (NT$42.8 billion) in total sales for the first quarter of 2013. That’s in line with the unaudited results for 1Q 2013 HTC announced in April. HTC’s gross margin […]
Thorsten Heins Is Not an Idiot, But He May Be a Fool
Thorsten Heins, in an interview with Bloomberg: “In five years I don’t think there’ll be a reason to have a tablet anymore,” Heins said in an interview yesterday at the Milken Institute conference in Los Angeles. “Maybe a big screen in your workspace, but not a tablet as such. Tablets themselves are not a good […]
If Not for Android, Where Would Google Be?
John Gruber responded to yesterday’s piece about an alternate reality where Android didn’t exist and Apple gained 70% market share with piece called If Not for Android, Where Would the iPhone Be?: But with today’s piece, we have a first: one where I disagree with Thompson’s conclusions. I don’t think the iPhone’s market share or […]
Apple Rejects Google Now; EU to Investigate
Google today announced via their blog that they are filing a complaint with the Justice Department and EU regarding Apple’s recent rejection of Google Now for iOS. “It’s clear that Apple is leveraging its OS monopoly to ensure Siri is the leading personal assistant software,” said Kent Walker, Senior Vice President and General Counsel at […]
The Week in Review – April 21-27, 2013
It was AAPL earnings week, and analysis of the company dominated both the tech scene and stratechery. What has struck me in the analysis is the almost total disconnect between Wall Street and the blogosphere, to the detriment of everyone trying to understand the company and its prospects. Bloggers and industry observers are deeply familiar […]