Walt Mossberg:

As a gadget-lover, this makes me a little sad. But, as a tech believer, it’s tremendously exciting. I won’t be reviewing all the new stuff anymore, but you can bet I’ll be closely watching this next turn of the wheel.

Thanks for reading. Mossberg out.

Fortunately, Mossberg is on Twitter.

Farhad Manjoo:

Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft and Alphabet, the parent company of Google, are not just the largest technology companies in the world. As I’ve argued repeatedly in my column, they are also becoming the most powerful companies of any kind, essentially inescapable for any consumer or business that wants to participate in the modern world. But which of the Frightful Five is most unavoidable? I ponder the question in my column this week.

Amazon: I have only one book on my Kindle app. I’m sure I can have an iBooks alternative for it. For online shopping in India, sure there are great deals on Amazon, but I can always use Flipkart or Paytm. I’d rather miss the simplicity and the utilitarian look of Amazon.

Facebook: Even if I dislike using WhatsApp, I’m hanging on to it for other people to contact me in an easier way. I use Instagram for myself to sometimes see how my photos look with filters. I also like to use it for myself as a showcase of my most favorite photos. No Facebook.

Microsoft: I depend on Windows at work, and I use a Windows PC for my personal use since I can’t afford a Mac right now. Office is helpful, but I can’t say it’s indispensable. Also, there are a couple people whom I can contact only on Skype. Skype is great for screen sharing.

Apple: I had great admiration for Nokia until they became irrelevant and faded out. Apple has taken that place with iPhone. Great aesthetics overall, and great hardware and software. There’s truly no other phone that I can choose other than an iPhone for modern-day usage.

Alphabet: My career, to a good extent, exists because of Google. Google search, Gmail, Docs, Sheets, YouTube, Maps, Photos are the ones that create a catastrophe to me if they don’t exist today.

Interesting initiative I came across today, by Pinboard’s Maciej Cegłowski. Here’s something from the security-measure-checklist that caught my eye:

You must use an iPhone. Android phones are not safe for journalists to use.

[…]

Don’t use Dropbox or Evernote.

[…]

Avoid SMS (regular text messages) or iMessage for private messaging. If you use Facebook Messenger, make sure to turn on private conversations.

Farhad Manjoo, The New York Times:

Well, sometimes. Often in India, you open the Uber app, press a button, and then — nothing. The app selects a driver, but the driver does nothing. His car’s icon just sits there, unmoving.

This is something of a cultural mystery. “Drivers in India take forever to start, and we are still trying to figure out why,” said Apurva Dalal, Uber’s head of engineering in Bangalore. “We’ve tried to do research on it, but we don’t know why it happens.”

One reason may be the drivers: Many are unaccustomed to smartphones and may not trust the digital notification that comes in over the app. Most Uber rides in India involve riders phoning drivers to confirm that the ride is for real.

From my experience, here’s why this happens. Uber drivers can cancel the trips only a very limited number of times in a week, I’m told. Cancelling trips could be bad for their performance review/incentives.

Once a trip has been assigned to a driver, if the driver doesn’t know where the customer wants to head, and the driver does nothing, well, this could be labelled as a “cultural mystery”.

But many times, Uber drivers trick riders to tell their destination by calling. Because drivers can know the destination only after starting the trip. Once they know it, the drivers may feel that the destination is too far for them, or the destination might not be in the way they’re headed, or the taking the trip simply may not be beneficial to them in terms of fare/incentives. In such cases, the drivers request the customers to cancel the trip. Sometimes, it could be too late for the customers to cancel the trip since it costs them to cancel five minutes after the trip has been assigned. Then, customers wait for the driver to cancel the trip, and that almost never happens as something more than just money is at stake for the drivers. Sometimes, the drivers don’t even request customers to cancel, or tell them that they cannot take the trip.

In either cases, the car’s icon simply sits there and the customers who need a take a ride immediately are left infuriated.

Neil Cybart:

It’s not inferior software, weak storytelling, or even a longer upgrade cycle. Instead, the iPad’s problem has been the iPad mini.

Apple:

The new App Accelerator provides a unique opportunity to get inspired by learning about the latest advances in Apple platforms directly from Apple experts in Bengaluru, India. We’ll show you how to take advantage of the powerful capabilities in iOS, watchOS, tvOS, and macOS—so you can create your most innovative apps yet.

[…]

India has one of the most vibrant and exciting iOS developer communities, with tens of thousands of developers who have already created nearly 100,000 apps for the App Store worldwide. The App Accelerator will help you fast-track your apps so you can become part of this thriving app economy.

Also: NDTV Gadgets360’s Kunal Dua spoke to Phil Schiller about this.

 

Ananya Bhattacharya writing for Quartz:

Ex-Googler Punit Soni left Flipkart in April 2016 and last May, Snapdeal lost its chief product officer, Anand Chandrasekaran, another prized Silicon Valley hire, less than a year after he was hired. Zomato’s Namita Gupta, who made the move from Facebook in 2014, also didn’t last a year at the restaurant listing startup.

Last week, Nishant Rao, the former LinkedIn India head who has also worked at the company’s Mountain View campus, put an end to his stint at Chennai-based customer support software startup Freshdesk.

[…]

“I have talked to almost everyone who has left or is in the process of leaving, and I see two main reasons for these exits: first, most of them didn’t get the right ecosystem within the company, and second, many of those who came from the (San Francisco) Bay Area didn’t realise the cultural difference they would face in the new roles,” Soni told Quartz last year.

And while these physical hardships could have been put up with, the fickle foundations of many Indian startups meant that the compensation of steep salaries wouldn’t last very long.

Federico Viticci:

There’s nothing else on iOS like Workflow, which deftly walked the fine line between absurd innovation and Apple rejections with a bold vision and technical prowess. Workflow embraced the limitations of iOS and turned them into strengths, resulting in a power-user app with no competition.

I absolutely cannot wait to see Workflow integrated into iOS.

Horace Dediu:

The iPad exhibits a four year decrease in overall volumes.

[…]

Perhaps the iPad will not return to rapid growth, or perhaps it will. But the more likely possibility is that the iPad will level out maintaining steady levels and, perhaps, grow slightly. This flat rather than up/down trajectory is unusual in devices but it isn’t when you look at the Mac. And isn’t the goal of the iPad to become a computer? If so then perhaps Mission Accomplished.

Casey Newton, writing for The Verge:

One question I often ask myself is: what happens when Instagram adds text posts? Given how many Instagram posts are screenshots of text already, it seems inevitable — and, if you’re Twitter, a dangerous prospect to consider.

With its bundle under assault, Twitter has attempted to build a new advertising business around live video. But lately that has only served to illustrate how much the company’s old business has fallen apart. It’s a truism among the service’s biggest fans that Twitter is irreplaceable. But the truth is that it’s already being replaced.

Hemanth Kumar C. R. writing for The News Minute:

The cult-status that Pawan Kalyan’s next four films – Tholi Prema, Thammudu, Badri and Kushi – achieved among the youth at the turn of the new millennium is the stuff of legends.

Unique Identification Authority of India:

In a comprehensive clarification with regard to misinformation in some news items and articles appearing in various print and social media during the last few days alleging breach of Aadhaar data, misuse of biometrics, breach of privacy, and creation of parallel databases etc., UIDAI said that it has carefully gone into these reports and would like to emphasise that there has been no breach to UIDAI database of Aadhaar in any manner whatsoever and personal data of individuals held by UIDAI is fully safe and secure.

[​…]

UIDAI uses one of world’s most advanced encryption technologies in transmission and storage of data. As a result, during the last 7 seven years, there has been no report of breach or leak of residents’ data out of UIDAI, the statement adds.

Ookla, the company behind the speedtest.net web service:

To  determine  Speedtest  mobile  award  winners,  we  use  test  results  from  “modern
devices”  to  aid  in  the  analysis  of  a  mobile  user’s  typical  speeds.  “Modern
devices”  results  include  all  mobile  tests,  regardless  of  connection  technology
used,  as  long  as  the  test  was  taken  on  a  device  identified  as  being  capable  of
achieving  the  fastest  speeds  available  in  a  given  country.

And:

Ookla  is  pleased  to  announce  that  Airtel  is  the  winner  of  Speedtest  by  Ookla’s
Fastest  Mobile  Carrier  Award  in  India.  The  award  certifies  that  Airtel  achieved  the
fastest  mobile  network  speeds  in  India  from  consumer  initiated  speedtest  results
in  Q3  and  Q4  of  2016.

 

Thomas Pesquet, European Space Agency astronaut, posting from the International Space Station.

Amazon:

The dashboard not changing color is related to S3 issue. See the banner at the top of the dashboard for updates.

Funny and ironic.

Mozilla acquires save-for-later service Pocket.

Mozilla’s Denelle Dixon-Thayer:

As our first strategic acquisition, Pocket contributes to our strategy by growing our mobile presence and providing people everywhere with powerful tools to discover and access high quality web content, on their terms, independent of platform or content silo.

Pocket will join Mozilla’s product portfolio as a new product line alongside the Firefox web browsers with a focus on promoting the discovery and accessibility of high quality web content. (Here’s a link to their blog post on the acquisition).

Nate (Pocket CEO/Founder):

Pocket will continue on as a wholly-owned, independent subsidiary of Mozilla Corporation. We’ll be staying in our office, and our name will still be on the wall. Our team isn’t changing and our existing roadmap has been reinforced and is clearer than ever.

Checks out the usage of “their” from Mozilla’s announcement.

Pocket’s competitor Instapaper was recently acquired by Pinterest. The only two major save-for-later services are no longer stand-alone. Pocket still has a working business model, but Instapaper doesn’t.

I started with Pocket, then moved on to Instapaper. I like the simplicity and rawness of Instapaper more. These days I use Instapaper rarely as I flag articles through Pinboard. By the time I get back to the saved articles on Pinboard, the number of articles I want to read are far less.

Update:

Pinboard’s Maciej Cegłowski reflecting on my point of merger of independent bookmarking services with bigger companies:

Bookmarking is a niche service where 1-2 devs can do really well. Not startup territory.

Tom Warren, The Verge:

Nokia has sold 126 million of its original 3310 phone since it was first introduced back in September, 2000. It was a time before the iPhone, and Nokia ruled with popular handsets that let you play simple games like Snake. Now the 3310 is making a nostalgic return in the form of a more modern variant, thanks to Nokia-branded phone maker HMD. Like its predecessor, it will still be called the Nokia 3310, but this time it’s running Nokia’s Series 30+ software, with a 2.4-inch QVGA display, a 2-megapixel camera, and even a microSD slot.

It could have been a truly nostalgic return if it had a monochrome graphic display.

The first one after my year-long subscription ended with the Black Ice Quarterly Edition.

A nice little bonus I miss: the “After Hours Utility Tool” key chain bottle opener.

Computer Show is back after a long time. I wish they do more videos.

Sangeetha Devi Dundoo writing for The Hindu:

When the frenzy around the number 150 dies down and if the superstar is willing to look beyond formulaic fare, there’s a worthwhile actor in him still waiting to be tapped.

Nailed it.

Jason Snell:

Not having cords to flap around or get caught is definitely a freeing experience.

The only complaint about my EarPods is that the earbuds fall out because the wires are often tugged.

In a long time, AirPods are a thing I truly desire to possess.

Paytm’s blog has moved from WordPress to Medium. I think it’s a clever decision.

I haven’t seen many brands who have utilized Medium properly in India. WordPress is more ubiquitous here, with its templates for blogs not very appropriate.

For brands, Medium does not offer much. But the little package it offers definitely has all the necessary features for new-age company blogs: simple flat interface with Georgia typeface that make the articles read like stories, easy-to-use blogging engine, HTTPS by default (for free) and integrated social networks for better discoverability.

With Medium, you get free hosting and it’s reasonable that you see Medium’s branding (logo on the top) even with custom domains.

I think brands don’t always have to spend time and resources on building a blog. With its design, Medium seems to have considered this nexus between brands and blogging platform is important and hence provided an effective solution.

I agree with Marco Arment’s opinion that individuals don’t have to depend on free platforms like Medium and could actually invest time building their own blog. But for businesses and some times publications, I feel Medium is a great option. The Slack blog and Backchannel are a couple fine examples I know.

Medium’s platform is really useful for a company’s blog when the company’s root domain is a an application/utility, like Paytm. So that the blog doesn’t have to feel native to the application’s interface and being familiar at the same time.

The match between Paytm and Medium is perfect because their UX team uses a lot of white space. From what I have been following up, Paytm has always stayed up to date with technological implementations on its website, app or the blog.  Ahead from the competition.

Here’s Paytm CEO Vijay Shekhar Sharma’s comment on the competition:

We never talk about our competitors because what we are doing is never related to what they’re up to.

Even though Paytm says it doesn’t like to look at its competitors, its blog is effective compared to the blogs of FreeCharge, Mobikwik, Citrus Pay and Ola Money (recharge and wallet); Amazon, Flipkart and Snapdeal (shopping). Visiting most of these (WordPress) blogs which indulge with all sorts of crap is just an awful experience.

When compared to WordPress, setting up a Medium is largely simple. You don’t have to look at choosing and customising themes. WordPress is simply not ready-made.

Currently, the Paytm blog is not too noisy with only important updates being published. They are not even sharing their supposedly entertaining video ads. After the announcement of demonetization, Paytm went all guns blazing. As a solution in the time of cash crunch in the country, more people want to know about Paytm’s new announcements. Medium is being at the forefront helping them to do this effectively.

I wish to see brands and publications to implement Medium for announcements and stories.