In terms of challenges, as I mentioned on the March financial results conference call, RIM is going through a significant transformation as we move towards the BlackBerry 10 launch, and our financial performance will continue to be challenging for the next few quarters. The on-going competitive environment is impacting our business in the form of lower volumes and highly competitive pricing dynamics in the marketplace, and we expect our Q1 results to reflect this, and likely result in an operating loss for the quarter.

Fascinating as the chorded keyboard is, its confinement to the ghetto of “crackpot technology” is but a symptom of the underlying disease: <a href="http://www.loper-os.org/?p=316">the total victory of the technological business model which caters primarily to the unskilled</a>.

• Globally, nearly all smartphones and tablets are corporate-liable devices, including most BYOD smartphones. Their purchase price or monthly voice/data services fees of $42 per user on average are paid for, in part or in full, by employers.<br />
• Organisations report plans to buy more Android than iOS corporate tablets in the next 12 months, a warning shot over the bow of iPad current business tablet dominance.<br />
• Microsoft Windows mobile devices barely show on the radar for corporate support and purchase plans. Microsoft and its partners must start addressing businesses and mobile worker needs.<br />
The average replacement cycle for business smartphones has shortened considerably to 1.1 years. RIM, whose smartphones still enjoy solid corporate support, must battle to retain customers who revisit smartphone decisions every year.

Acknowledging that its attempts to market a business-class Android tablet are over, Cisco Systems executives Thursday said the company is halting investments in the fledgling Cius product line.<p>

"[We] will no longer invest in the Cisco Cius tablet," said Marthin DeBeer, senior vice president and general manager of Cisco's Video and Collaboration Group. "Instead, we're going to continue leveraging other people's tablets and move to deploy Jabber, as well as our other software on top of that," DeBeer told CRN.

Our minimum shareholding in B4RN is £100, and that is too much for some people, and we have been asked if we could allow smaller donations. We had a think, and we put a donate button on the site where you can donate anything you like, from a pound or a dollar to a million…<p>
Then, during a conversation with Ken Fallon on a radio podcast the idea of sponsorship was born. The plan so far, is that for a donation of £5 you can sponsor a metre of our fibre duct. In return we put your name on a metre of duct and take a photo of it. Your metre of the B4RN network with your name on it will be buried on a Lancashire upland farm for posterity, and your generosity will enable another metre to be laid in our community network.

Two years ago, Microsoft declared that the future of video on the web would be powered by HTML 5. Today, however, a lot of web video content is still delivered via Adobe Flash technology. So, in a somewhat surprising move, Microsoft is integrating Flash directly into Internet Explorer 10 on Windows 8 and doing so in a way that does not undermine the safety and reliability of the Metro environment.

I have just sent a letter to Eric Schmidt setting out these four points. In this letter, I offer Google the possibility to come up in a matter of weeks with first proposals of remedies to address each of these points.<p>

If Google comes up with an outline of remedies which are capable of addressing our concerns, I will instruct my staff to initiate the discussions in order to finalise a remedies package. This would allow to solve our concerns by means of a commitment decision – pursuant to Article 9 of the EU Antitrust Regulation - instead of having to pursue formal proceedings with a Statement of objections and to adopt a decision imposing fines and remedies.

A sitcom works better on TV than in a newspaper, but a 10,000 word investigative piece about a civic issue works better in a newspaper.<p>

When it arrived the web seemed to fill all of those niches at once. The web was surprisingly good at emulating a TV, a newspaper, a book, or a radio. Which meant that people expected it to answer the questions of each medium, and with the promise of advertising revenue as incentive, web developers set out to provide those answers. As a result, people in the newspaper industry saw the web as a newspaper. People in TV saw the web as TV, and people in book publishing saw it as a weird kind of potential book. But the web is not just some kind of magic all-absorbing meta-medium. It's its own thing. And like other media it has a question that it answers better than any other.

Google said on Saturday that Chinese authorities have approved its $12.5 billion purchase of Motorola Mobility Holdings, the last regulatory hurdle to a deal that would allow the world's No. 1 Internet search engine to develop its own line of smart phones…<p>A main condition of the deal is that the Android system remain free and open for five years, said a source who is familiar with the Chinese approval but not authorized to discuss it.

Today, we’re happy to announce that the Lightbox team is joining Facebook, where we’ll have the opportunity to build amazing products for Facebook’s 500+ million mobile users.</p><p>

This means we’re no longer accepting new signups. If you’re an existing user, you can continue to use Lightbox.com until June 15 and you can download your photos from here.</p><p>

Facebook is not acquiring the company or any of the user data hosted on Lightbox.com. In the coming weeks, we will be open sourcing portions of the code we’ve written for Lightbox and posting them to our Github repository.

You can call Steve Ballmer many things, but you cannot call him the <a href="http://www.forbes.com/sites/adamhartung/2012/05/12/oops-5-ceos-that-should-have-already-been-fired-cisco-ge-walmart-sears-microsoft/3/">"the worst CEO of a large publicly traded American company today"</a> as Forbes's Adam Hartung did in a recent article. It's easy to see Microsoft as a bumbling fool of the tech world, but when you look closely at its business, the company's core competencies, and Ballmer's decisions, a coherent picture begins to form. It's a picture of a company being run from a very rational and respectable set of philosophies.

So here I am at Dell’s huge and very professional summit with founder Michael Dell, top people from Microsoft and Intel, impressive power points, expensive commercials, matching polyester ties and all that jazz, and then the – by Dell chosen – moderator starts to rejoice the lack of women in the room. “The IT business is one of the last frontiers that manages to keep women out. The quota of women to men in your business is sound and healthy” he says. “What are you actually doing here?” he adds to the few women who are actually present in the room. 

Between May 8 and 9, 2012, the Websense® ThreatSeeker® Network detected that the Amnesty International United Kingdom website was compromised. The website was apparently injected with malicious code for these 2 days. During that time, website users risked having sensitive data stolen and perhaps infecting other users in their network. However, the website owners rectified this issue after we advised them about the injection. In early 2009, we discovered this same site was compromised, and in 2010, we reported another injection of an Amnesty International website, this time the Hong Kong site.

One day, maybe, an Adobe engineer will understand that, when the user has to go through a length installation process, the best approach is to let him enter all the required information (password, serial number, etc.) right away, and then — and only then — go through all the lengthy processes that are of no interest to him without asking for any user input, so that he can switch to something else and, you know, actually make valuable use of his time.

Though demand for Nokia’s new Lumia smartphones has been spotty across the globe, the Lumia 900 continues to sell reasonably well in the U.S. Retail checks conducted by Raymond James analyst Tavis McCourt suggest that the device is the second-best-selling device at most AT&T stores, after the iPhone.

With this paradoxical partial decision, the jury has left the case very much in the air, and Google has already moved for a mistrial.</p><p>

On Monday, as the Google-Oracle case entered its fourth week, a jury ruled that Oracle has proven that Google infringed the overall structure, sequence, and organization of copyrighted works of 37 APIs used by the Java platform. In building Android, Google created a new version of the Java platform known as the Dalvik virtual machine, and this mimicked the Java APIs, or application programming interfaces, which are essentially a way for a Java application to talk to the platform.</p><p>

But the jury was unable to reach a decision on whether Google’s Java clone constituted “fair use.” A fair use decision would let Google off the hook.

It's quite clear that Android was being designed to a completely different target before the iPhone was released. What we see here would have fitted in perfectly with the world of Symbian and BlackBerry. This early build of Android is in fact even less capable and mature than the 2004 release of Symbian Series 90 (Hildon), the OS that runs on the Nokia 7700 and 7710 - Nokia's first, and only, pre-iPhone touchscreen smartphones.

Is Apple blanket-rejecting iOS apps that make use of Dropbox because of an evil plan to push developers toward iCloud? If you asked this question five days ago, the answer from the Internet at large might have been a resounding "yes!" But days later, as is often the case, details have come out that reveal the answer is probably "no."</p><p>

As it turns out, Dropbox inadvertently put other developers using its SDK in violation of one of Apple's app guidelines, resulting in a string of rejections that looked as if apps using Dropbox were being banned. The Web flew into a fury over what is essentially an annoying but long-standing clause in Apple's guidelines. The problem has now been remedied and the fury has died down.

You'd think they would have spent the time to make sure they got it right, and that they would have focused on radically improving the user interface and experience to bring BlackBerry up to par with Android, iOS, and Windows Phone 7. It is almost impossible to comprehend, but they didn't do that.</p><p>

Instead, they released something uninspired, uninteresting, and unfinished. That no one at RIM had the guts and authority to recognize the seriousness of their situation–the company is literally dying!–and say, “Hey, maybe we should wait until BlackBerry 10 is awesome before we release it,” is an ultimate demonstration of how RIM's culture will lead to its now inevitable demise. This is what happens when the sales people are in charge.

Mobile ads pay very poorly. In my case, ads didn’t even come close to delivering similar value as the $4.99 paid-app sale — I was lucky to get even $1 of value out of an Instapaper Free user. What I’ve heard from other developers and other ad networks suggests that this is pretty close to the industry average.</p><p>

I decided to yield the free market to my competitors and discontinue Instapaper Free over a year ago, and my sales have remained healthy. (In fact, they’ve increased, but it’s difficult to know whether that was the cause.)…</p><p>

This definitely isn’t an Android problem: it’s a user problem. Maybe a significantly larger percentage of Android users insist on free apps than iOS users (it certainly seems that way). But both platforms have much larger demand for free apps than paid apps.

Apple isn’t a silo-ed conglomerate. One reason Apple won’t be Sony is because the organizational structure is completely different. Sony’s business units break down like this: Content (movies and music), games, TVs, consumer electronics, smartphones and financial services. Sony’s problems largely stem from a lack of coordination between its units. Apple is vertically integrated. Colony’s argument would have more merit to me if Apple suddenly started developing movies.

Without knowing them personally, I would look to Apple executives Jon Ive or Scott Forstall to be CEO. From on far they appear to have some of the charisma and outspoken design sense to legitimately lead the company.</p><p>

When Steve Jobs departed, he took three things with him: 1) singular charismatic leadership that bound the company together and elicited extraordinary performance from its people; 2) the ability to take big risks, and 3) an unparalleled ability to envision and design products.  Apple's momentum will carry it for 24-48 months. But without the arrival of a new charismatic leader it will move from being a great company to being a good company, with a commensurate step down in revenue growth and product innovation.

<a href="http://blogs.computerworld.com/19522/apples_hot_itravel_plan_for_the_nfc_iphone_5">Apple's patented solution is an app called 'iTravel</a>'. It's an integrated iPhone app which will let you reserve types of transport, including flights and hotels; acts as a boarding pass; at baggage reclaim and delivers local information for where you end up. It even - at least, the patent filing describes - allows for personal identification. In other words, your iPhone won't just be your wallet, but your passport, too.

Searching all the porn on the Internet might not seem like the most scientifically productive activity, but computational neuroscientists Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam did it anyway.

Twitterbombing is a tactic that forces us to think about <a href="http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/2012/03/28/the-passion-of-mike-daisey-journalism-storytelling-and-the-ethics-of-attention/">the ethics of attention</a>. We may believe that Reese and Athene are engaged in a deeply important cause – does that mean we’re ethically justified in asking someone else to pay attention? What’s the difference between asking a friend for their attention, and someone you don’t know? A public figure versus a media curator, versus someone who simply has a lot of Twitter followers?

The partner program was based on script redirects from huge numbers of legitimate websites all over the world. Around the end of February/early March 2012, tens of thousands of sites powered by WordPress were compromised. How this happened is unclear. The main theories are that bloggers were using vulnerable versions of WordPress or they had installed the ToolsPack plugin. Websense put the number of affected sites at 30,000 , while other companies say the figure could be as high as 100,000. Approximately 85% of the compromised blogs are located in the US.</p><p>

Code was injected into the main pages when the blogs were hacked. As a result, when any of the compromised sites were visited, a partner program TDS was contacted. Depending on the operating system and browser version, the browser then performed a hidden redirect to sites in the rr.nu domain zone that had the appropriate set of exploits installed on them to carry out an infection.

I was told to prepare a five-minute speech, so apart from speaking of the reality musicians are facing, I spent days reading the actual [ACTA] agreement, different points of views on it, as well as looking into the different issues it deals with, to make sure I knew what was being discussed. I'd heard from the Pirate Party as well as some other action groups that it would impede freedom of speech so naturally I was concerned – after all, musicians rely on freedom of expression, as do journalists. I was surprised to find that Acta would do nothing of the sort. In fact, it wouldn't change any existent laws in the EU.</p><p>

It soon became clear that my preparations were in vain.

As an independent analyst and blogger, I will express only my own opinions, which cannot be attributed to any one of my diversity of clients. I often say things none of them would agree with. That said, as a believer in transparency I would like to inform you that Oracle has very recently become a consulting client of mine. We intend to work together for the long haul on mostly competition-related topics including, for one example, FRAND licensing terms.</p><p>

We've known each other ever since I vocally opposed Oracle's acquisition of Sun Microsystems (not because of Java), but that's history as I fully respect the European Commission's clearance decision and the subsequent closing of the deal.

The surprise revelation that Oracle considered buying RIMM and Palm as a way to enter the smartphone business already seems like a window to another era. The recent travails of Palm, LG,  HTC and RIM may have effectively closed the door on any major M&A moves in the industry.</p><p>

The difficulty of buying and integrating a mobile handset vendor started becoming obvious way back in the mists of time, when Philips and Lucent tried merging their mobile phone operations. The result was a $2.5 B platinum turkey that has by now been mercifully forgotten. Most of the resulting phones were so clunky only a Dutchman could love them – pale imitations of vintage Ericsson models.

The most enduring front in the battle over code may end up over something even more foundational than an operating system. Up next are software languages and APIs, the raw material from which our digital edifices are built. Arguments continued this week in the case of Oracle v Google, in which Oracle claims that the Sun programming language is itself copyrighted, as are the ways in which software can be written to expect to run in some version of Java. If Oracle wins, projects like GNU will be in danger: simply rewriting Unix from scratch as GNU wouldn't free the Platonic programming language behind Unix of copyright limitations. If a language itself can be copyrighted – and Oracle and Google, in otherwise solemn briefing, engage on whether Game of Thrones's Dothraki or Avatar's Na'vi can be so protected – then anyone speaking or writing in Dothraki or Na'vi would have to answer to those works' creators.

It's sort of like high school is repeating itself. We have an isolated population, and within it we've got the cool kids making life (real life, this time) difficult, frustrating and miserable for people who don't deserve to be walked all over.</p><p>
Consider for a moment that while you might love binge drinking – and listen, I've done my share in the past... so I know it can be a blast – not everyone is into it, and it has nothing to do with code.

Even assuming the distribution itself isn't causing problems, a surprising amount of software has yet to be ported to the Pi's ARM11 instruction set architecture. At present, it's impossible to view Flash content, the only version of Firefox available is the archaic 3.6.3 version, and getting Java to work is an exercise in futility.</p><p>
For now, a modicum of Linux know-how is a prerequisite for Pi use.</p><p>

As increasing numbers of developers and hackers get their hands on the boards, however, this will change. We've already heard that Oracle is being drafted in to create a Pi-centric Java VM while Adobe is rumoured to be looking into the possibility of porting an existing ARM build of its Flash Player to the Pi.</p><p>

In short, the Pi promises much - but the software just isn't there yet. For end-users hoping to get going with their new Pis straight out of the box, it could prove a problem - but improved software is on the horizon, and developers from user-friendly and lightweight distributions like Puppy Linux are already working to get their systems up and running on the devices.

Given that the rating outlook is negative, there is currently limited potential for an upgrade of Nokia's ratings. However, a rating upgrade to Baa2 could be triggered by (i) the Windows devices rivaling the market positions of the Android-based leaders, (ii) by group revenues starting to grow again and operating margin (1.0% Moody's adjusted for 2011) reaching high single digit percent, while (iii) maintaining a net cash position (about EUR3.1bn Moody's adjusted per end of 2011). For an outlook stabilization, (i) the Lumia family of devices needs to prove traction by gaining substantial market share and returning the Smart Devices segment to non-IFRS operating profit, (ii) the Mobile Phones segment should at least stabilize its sales volumes and return to a double-digit contribution margin, and (iii) cash consumption fall to marginal levels.

At least one shareholder advisory firm, Philadelphia-based <a href="http://www.egan-jones.com/">Egan-Jones</a>, has come out strongly in opposition to the plan. "We strongly oppose governance structures, such as currently exists at Google and as proposed, in which the holders of one class of common stock have voting rights with fewer votes per share," the firm said. </p>
<p>Also on the record in opposition? CalSTRS, the $145 billion California State Teachers' Retirement System, which owns $400 million worth of Google shares, <a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/04/14/net-us-google-idUSBRE83B1GJ20120414">told Reuters</a> that it's not happy about the proposal and intends to let Google know about it.

It's time for Mac users to wake up and smell the coffee. Mac malware is becoming a genuine issue, and cannot be ignored any longer.</p><p>

Sophos products, including our free Mac anti-virus for home users, detect the Trojan horse as OSX/Sabpab-A.</p><p>

Of course, those users who had already protected their computers with Sophos products were already defended against the Java vulnerability.

Having noticed the Google CEO’s fondness for using variations of “exciting” and “excited” when discussing his company’s products and businesses, we at AllThingsD had a bit of fun with the transcripts from his recent earnings calls.</p><p>
Since Page reassumed the CEO role last year, he hit an all-time high of 16 mentions of “excited” on last year’s third-quarter call. His company’s performance made him both “incredibly excited” and “amazingly excited.”

This is a battle that appears to be bleeding beyond the major labels.  We've seen the markings of a broader artist and industry backlash, and now, there's this.  The sharpest attack on Grooveshark is now coming from TuneCore CEO Jeff Price, an artist champion who spends most of this time fighting against the majors.  Yet on Friday, Price tore into the company for failing to compensate his artists and blatantly exploiting legal loopholes.  In fact, Price is now urging his massive indie and DIY community to boycott the company, and directly contact Grooveshark advertisers to pressure change.

My key problem with the proposal is that it’s being pushed through without common shareholders being given the opportunity to object. I would be OK with it if it was being voted on a one-share, one-vote basis. But instead, Google’s Troika has decided that having ten times the votes of any other shareholder isn’t good enough for them, and that what they really want is a whole new class of shareholders — including new employees — who have no votes in the company at all.

An <a href="http://www.iadb.org/en/research-and-data/publication-details,3169.html?pub_id=IDB-WP-304">evaluation</a> of the laptop programme by the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) found that the children receiving the computers did not show any improvement in maths or reading. Nor did it find evidence that access to a laptop increased motivation, or time devoted to homework or reading. The report applauded the government for providing much-needed hardware: less than a quarter of Peruvian households had a computer in 2010. But it now needs to improve teacher-training and the curriculum, said Julian Cristia of the IDB. Above all, the classroom environment needs to change.

Those competing with Apple have to advertise every new device and computer as being substantially different enough to justify a quicker upgrade cycle. If Apple makes $400 from a low-end MacBook Air that might be in use for five years, and Dell makes $50 (after paying Microsoft for Windows) for a low-end laptop, how quickly does Dell need to sell that person another device? During those five years, Apple might get $29 two or three times for updates to Mac OS X; Dell gets nothing from any Windows upgrades. Apple may also now reap additional dollars from Mac App Store purchases, too. Dell? Nothing.

for starters, it’s not a coupon company nor a marketing company. At its core, Groupon’s U.S. business is a receivables factoring business, as I wrote last year. They give loans to small businesses at a very steep rate (the price of the discount plus Groupon’s commission). They get the money to fund these loans from credit card companies such as Chase Paymentech. Groupon is essentially a sub-prime lender that does zero risk assessment. And as word continues to spread about what a terrible deal running a Groupon is for many categories of businesses, the ones that will choose to run Groupons are the ones that are the most desperate. For U.S. based businesses, the only time I can definitely recommend running a Groupon is if it is otherwise going to go out of business.

This was highlighted by the <a href="http://thenextweb.com/apps/2012/03/27/hugely-popular-ios-game-temple-run-is-now-available-for-android/">recent release of Temple Run</a> on the Android platform. A previously (very) successful game on iOS, it was brought over to Android in order to take advantage of the huge number of devices that run the OS. And it has already hit <a href="http://thenextweb.com/mobile/2012/03/30/temple-run-gets-a-lot-of-google-play-1-million-android-app-downloads-in-3-days/">1 million downloads</a> in just 3 days, good, even for a free app. But very quickly, the developers of the app discovered the pitfalls of fragmentation

In my opinion, Year 8 is too late. We need to start teaching digital literacy and coding as a part of the curriculum in Year 5, when most children's maths is strong enough. The curriculum has fostered a familiarity with computing and computers and the young minds are ready to start learning programming languages. Indeed primary school children are creative, excited and less likely to have developed associations, good or bad, with certain subjects.

We are inviting people from outside The National Archives to work with us, to apply changes to the legislation in the database. Quality is maintained through our editorial practice and a stringent process of review. It is an exciting time as private sector companies are now investing, employing people to work with us to bring the database up to date and to maintain it.

LG, that South Korean conglomerate that has mostly spent the last few years fading into Samsung’s shadow, has just announced that it has begun mass production of the world’s first flexible, plastic e-ink display. This is opposed to the hard, heavy, prone-to-cracking glass-laminate e-ink displays found in devices such as the Kindle and Nook.

I’m very excited about the prospects for the BlackBerry 10 platform, which is on track for the latter part of calendar 2012. Notwithstanding these strengths and opportunities, the business challenges we face over the next several quarters are significant and I am taking the necessary steps to address them.

After he read our article about his process of spamming Pinterest through thousands of bot accounts, Steve, who declined to give his last name, contacted us with an offer to clarify some of his methods. He proved his identity by providing a screenshot of his Amazon Affiliate account—the same final-fantas07 that we discussed in the aforementioned article. 

We were shocked by some of the facts Steve shared. For instance, he makes $1000 a day, and out of his thousands of spambots, Pinterest has only deleted one.

Clarke and his staff built the site by instinct. “I didn’t look at that many Web sites for design ideas,” he told me. Formally, they stuck with what they knew, developing a publishing system that allows them to put together the home page with the glue-pot flexibility of a newspaper, rather than having to slot stories into a template. The home page is hectic, with hundreds of stories competing for the reader’s attention. It is unusually long—literally, like a scroll—as are its headlines. (Both tactics help to bolster its search-engine rankings.) It uses far more pictures, and in larger sizes, than its competitors. “The site breaks all so-called ‘usability rules,’ ” Clarke said. “It’s user-friendly for normal people, not for internet fanatics.”

You need not fear heat blisters when handling the new iPad. Apple's new tablet is neither a burn risk, nor even particularly hot in the grand scheme of competing devices.

We know because we tested the iPad against five other tablets.

Sure, the new iPad, like all electronics hardware, heats up when pushed to its limits. This is just a matter of physics. Processors, batteries and back-lit displays generate heat under load.

Consumer Reports proved this when it <a href="http://news.consumerreports.org/electronics/2012/03/our-test-finds-new-ipad-hits-116-degrees-while-running-games.html">recorded a temperature of 116 degrees</a> Fahrenheit on the back of the new iPad – this after plugging the tablet into a wall socket and playing a demanding 3-D game, <em>Infinity Blade 2</em>, for 45 minutes. This little stunt spurred a lot of online chatter, but it didn't explain whether the new iPad's heat generation is above and beyond that of other tablets on the market.

So Wired decided to investigate.

I somehow acquired two copies of Machiavelli’s “The Prince”. What I want to convey to you is that I have a deep and abiding love for books. That is why I must burn them.

Every time I find an ebook copy of a book I have on my shelf, the ebook version is downloaded – redundantly backed up – and placed in my Calibre library. The physical book is burned.

I'm incredibly conflicted, because as much as I love the do-anything computer …

I'm not sure that many people in the world truly need a general purpose computer that can do anything and install any kind of software. Simply meeting the core needs of browsing the web and email and maybe a few other basic things covers a lot of people.

I believe the kitchen-sink-itis baked into the general purpose computing foundations of PCs, Macs, and Unix make them fundamentally incompatible with our brave new Post PC world. Updates. Toolbars. Service Packs. Settings. Anti-virus. Filesystems. Control panels. All the stuff you hate when your Mom calls you for tech support? It's deeply embedded into of the culture and design of every single general purpose computer. Doing potentially "anything" comes at a steep cost in complexity.

Very, very small PCs – the kind you could fit in your pocket – are starting to have the same amount of computing grunt as a high end desktop PC of, say, 5 years ago. And that was plenty, even back then, for a relatively inefficient general purpose operating system.

In our reporting, as “Inside Foxconn” detailed, we found a group of workers who have complaints, but complaints not starkly different from those of workers in any other company. The biggest gripe, which surprised us somewhat, is that they don’t get enough overtime. They wanted to work more, to get more money.
Less than a year later, I went back again with another colleague.

We went inside the same Longhua campus in Shenzhen, which required Foxconn’s approval, and chatted with workers. We stood outside the gates (possibly the same gates where Daisey claimed he found underage workers), with Foxconn unaware we were there. We wandered farther into the local neighborhood shopping strip, among the bubble-tea stands and food vendors, where the young workers went on dates and caught up with friends. These weren’t Daisey-esque scenes of woe and horror.

Rather than forced labor and sweatshop conditions, workers told of homesickness and the desire to earn more money-two impulses that seemed to drive each other for workers planning to go home once they’d earned enough.

Plagiarizing someone's idea because you don't like their person is spiteful and spite has been the justifying tone behind a lot of Dustin [Curtis]'s critics. Yes Dustin came off as an arrogant ass and I think he will learn from this experience. But does that really justify ripping of the dude's idea and hard work and then sharing it with the world? Absolutely not. If the community accepts copying and re-distributing ideas because someone doesn't like the person who originally built it, that would be chaos. Anyone could use that as an excuse to reproduce anyone else's work.

First, we know that the phones started arriving at AT&T stores over the last two days and that employee training on the Windows Phone OS (and this specific hardware) will take place on March 26th, April 6th and 7th at those outlets.

Next is the big news: AT&T has designated the Nokia Lumia 900 for 'Company Use' meaning all Front Seller employees are eligible to receive the phone at no cost. The trade off is though is that employees have to turn in their current 'Company Use' phones, namely the iPhone and certain Android devices.

Draw Something was first launched on OMGPOP's website five years ago. It remained there, as a relatively obscure game, without much usage. Six weeks ago, it was ported to iOS. Today, the company is worth $180m.

So we recorded and setup detailed notifications for every email bounce, to make sure that we are always aware of what’s happening (thanks Mailgun!). And we soon started to see patterns.

People would misspell their email addresses and be unaware of it, resulting in a delivery failure and a lost user. And it got even more interesting - most of these invalid email addresses were a result of a misspelled domain; “hotmail.con”, “gnail.com”, “yajoo.com”. A clear opportunity for improvement.

Why Twitter?

Apple does software and hardware really well; they do the integration between the two outstandingly. But they haven’t really done Social particularly well. In fact, Apple may be the only Tech company without a Twitter account. Go ahead, check out <a href="http://twitter.com/apple">@Apple</a> – 0 Tweets / 0 Following / 6067 Followers. Sure, iTunes software is terrific, but the “Ping” social network simply never caught on. Twitter automagically makes Apple a defacto player in social.

Apple’s biggest competitors over the next decade are not HP or Dell or even Microsoft – they are more likely to be Google and Facebook. Which leads us back to Social Networking and that leads to Twitter.

Generally when I talk to developers about legislation, their first reaction is to say, 'easy, use github'. Then I explain how legislation works, and the enormity and complexity begins to dawn.

Legislation (at least UK legislation) is uniquely difficult content to work with. There really is nothing else like it.

Following the <a href="http://apple.slashdot.org/story/11/12/28/145201/apple-fined-by-italy-for-misleading-customers-about-warranty-terms">recent Italian case</a>. Apple is now being sued by the Belgian consumer association <a href="http://www.test-achats.be/pratiques-du-commerce/apple-viole-la-loi-sur-la-garantie-s757113.htm">Test-Achats</a> (french/dutch website) for not applying the EU consumer protection laws by <a href="http://thenextweb.com/apple/2012/03/19/apple-under-fire-from-11-eu-consumer-organisations-over-misleading-applecare-warranties/">only giving 1 year warranty on its products</a>. At the same time, Apple is not only refusing to give the mandatory 2 years warranty but is also selling the additional year of warranty with its Applecare products. If the consumer association wins its case, Apple could be <a href="http://www.europolitics.info/sectorial-policies/beuc-denounces-apple-s-practices-art329284-12.html">forced to refund Applecare contracts to its Belgian customers</a> while providing the additional year of warranty for free."

The Guardian published quite a good <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/mar/14/free-data-francis-maude">article</a> on Wednesday in relation to a public <a href="http://www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/news/open-data-innovation-community-francis-maude-speech">announcement</a> on Open Data by Francis Maude, and we wrote a response highlighting some issues the Guardian missed.

 While the advances since 2006 are undeniable, the comment above shows there is a long way to go. The new Public Data Group that will amalgamate OS, Land Registry and some other data providers will perpetuate the monopoly model while giving away minor data concessions. The issue here is the basic core public data infrastructure (mapping, stats, etc.) required for every other service and open data project. This is the "too difficult" box that could hamper innovation beyond some college project apps.

Even as the UK government seems keener than ever to promote the technology sector as an engine of much needed growth – especially startups – there’s a programme right under its nose which has been running for years which needs help, and now. Young Rewired State has been running annually on very low funding for a while.

So, just how big is the battery?  The new iPad clocks in at 42.5 watt-hours, which works out to 11,666 mAh. That is a solid 70% boost to capacity over the iPad 2′s 25 watt-hour,  6,944 mAh battery.  The new iPad maintains the established 10-hour lifespan standard, and even if you’re active over LTE rather than Wi-Fi, you’re still getting a very respectable 9 hours of life. 

To put that in context, an iPad 2 with with this new battery, if such a device existed, would probably last close to 17 hours on Wi-Fi.

How does this shape up versus other LTE tablets? Well, Samsung claims the LTE-enabled Galaxy Tab 10.1 has 12 hours of continuous usage with a 7000 mAh battery, while AT&T claims just as much with HTC Jetstream and its 7,300 mAh battery. Of course, these are dealing 1280 x 800 screens, which are bound to be way less taxing on lifetime, but it’s still a considerable difference.