Lesenswerte Analysen und Hintergrundberichte zu aktuellen Entwicklungen:
- Die Politik ist das größte Problem für die Digitalisierung der deutschen Wirtschaft | Netzökonom
- Special report: How the rise of a mega solar panel farm shows us the future of energy — Tech News and Analysis "While rooftop solar systems deliver less solar power than utility solar farms do these days, down the road that could flip and the collective capacity from rooftop solar systems could become substantially larger. When that happens, it will be a challenge for utilities to move from a centralized clean power system to a distributed one, requiring significant investment in their grids."
- Estimating G+ User Activity: 6.6 million active... - newnetland „dredmorbius“ (on Ello of all things) about Google+ User Activity:
Summary of findings:
There are about 2.2 billion G+ profiles total.Of these, about 9% have any publicly-posted content.
Of those, about 37% have as their most recent activity a YouTube comment, another 8% profile photo changes (45% of all “active” profiles).
Only 6% of profiles which have ever been publicly active have any post activity in 2015 (18 days so far).
Only around half of those, 3% of active profiles, are not YouTube comments.
That is, 0.3% of all G+ profiles, about 6.6 million users, have made public G+ post in 2015. That’s ~367,000 users posting daily if each posts only once (the actual post frequency will vary somewhat).
(via Chris Messina)
- Zero to One summary — Medium Zusammenfassung des Buches.
- How Couchsurfing became the Friendster of the sharing economy - Gigaom
- The Next Big Thing for nxtbgthng — Medium "In general, nxtbgthng will create a framework and infrastructure to put iPads, iPod touches and Apple TVs onto walls and create apps for them. iOS devices can no longer only be used as highly personal gadgets, but are great devices for public contexts like retail spaces, home automation, as communication systems or in offices. We will do App Store apps, create customized versions, make specific enterprise applications and we will also make the foundations of our work modular and available for licensing."
- SoundCloud Launches 'Collection,' Repositions As Music Streaming Destination "This improvement is a small shift for SoundCloud today, but a notable one on their projected path. 2015 is a pivotal year for SoundCloud as they work to close deals with labels and rightholders to launch a paid music service"
- The State of Consumer Technology at the End of... - newnetland The State of Consumer Technology at the End of 2014:
"Microsoft still sells a lot of Windows licenses, and businesses especially still rely on Office. Still, it’s striking how unimportant Microsoft’s defensive move into browsers ended up being, especially when you think about…
Google seems strong, but as I’ve written previously, there is a lot about the company that feels like Microsoft: just as Microsoft jumped into the next epoch at the OS level for defensive reasons, Google too jumped ahead, also at the OS level, and also for defensive reasons. “Free” figured prominently in both strategies, and in the long run, it’s worth considering the possibility that Google’s Android dominance will have as much long term value to the company as Microsoft’s dominance of browsers – i.e., not very much at all. Ultimately, I expect an increasing amount of Google’s energy to go towards taking away what Microsoft has left: Chromebooks versus Windows, and Google Apps versus Office
Facebook is in a unique position: while they were started as an Internet company, they were an exceptionally young one, and have clearly made a successful jump to mobile. Their position in mobile, though, while secure, is by no means dominant, and it’s interesting that they are in fact following the Microsoft/Google playbook: both the WhatsApp and Oculus acquisitions were about securing a stake in the OS for the next epoch”
- Mixcloud Celebrates 5 Years, 6 Million Uploads "over six million shows have been uploaded to the platform by a community of DJs, radio presenters and curators 650,000 strong. 200,000 of those uploads happened in the last month alone, translating into an average of four hours of content being uploaded to the rapidly growing platform every minute."
- Why It Is Time To Make YouTube Look Less Like Spotify And More Like Pandora
- Netflix exec: we want to be everywhere in the world in five years — Tech News and Analysis
- Europe introducing artificial barriers - newnetland Julia Reda, member of the European Parliament for the Pirate Party on the shuttting down of Google News in Spain and the new ancillary copyright law in Spain:
At a time when it has never been easier to deliver data to a huge global audience, a number of countries are introducing artificial barriers to content and to tools that allow its discovery.
- Facebook now has 4 products with more users than... - newnetland Good point by Kurt Wagner regarding Instagrams 300 million monthly users:
Also, Facebook now has four products with more users than Twitter (284M): FB (1.35B) WhatsApp (600M) Messenger (500M) Instagram (300M)
- Politico & Axel Springer buy European Voice,... - newnetland Politico & Axel Springer buy European Voice, rebrand it as Politico in spring 2015:
POLITICO & Axel Springer Announce Joint Acquisition of European Voice - POLITICO Press Release:
POLITICO and Axel Springer, the owners of the POLITICO joint venture in Europe, announced today that they have acquired EUROPEAN VOICE and will rebrand the respected Brussels publication as POLITICO in the spring of 2015.
Bad news for Europe. Axel Springer, a big German publisher of among others the popular tabloid ‘Bild’, is the leading force behind the ‘Leistungsschutzrecht’. That is an ancillary copyright intended to make Google pay press publishers for showing snippets in search results and on Google News and got introduced last year.
Axel Springer is very aggressive in every imaginable way. (except for the innovative kind) Due to the popularity of Bild they have a lot of power in Germany. Expect them to try to influence the EU to very hardly regulate Google and other US tech giants.
It will be interesting to see wether Politico will allow that kind of instrumentalisation of the publication. The relationship could easily become contengious over this. Because while Politico does this to extend its business, Axel Springer does it to extend its power in the EU.
- Apple should review App Review - newnetland Apple wants to enrich iOS by giving apps more ways to interact and present themselves on the platform. Extensions, the widgets, the new file approach. But this, this or this shows that Apple is quite unsure how to approach this change in their control of iOS. Or, to be more precise, they seem to want to expand the platform possibilities but at the same time keep control of the direction(s) all this is going in.
The ‘today view‘ is for ‚viewing‘ what is going on ’today’. No matter that you can do more, that developers did more and that users wanted more. Or that Apple did not explicitly say you can not do way more than that.
The problem is not that Apple doesn’t seem to want the richness that is possible, for whatever reason. The problem lies, as John Siracusa articulated very well on the recent episode of ATP, with the fact that Apple seems to be unable to articulate beforehand what exactly they allow developers to do and what direction it is they expect all this to go. This leads to invested time and energy by developers that now got wasted. ‚They‘ -big and small third-party-developers- don’t forget that. New features on iOS will not be as exploited as they could be going forward. That is unfortunate for the platform. (and hence everyone involved; Apple, devs, users)
Apple won’t loose developers other this. The current mobile platforms are different enough to not have this kind of repercussions. But iOS is loosing potential apps. The tension between Apple as the platform provider and its developers should go down not up.
It will be interesting to watch how Apple will handle this going forward. iOS will become more and more complex and richer with possibilities with the arrival of the Apple Watch and the integration of Smart Home devices and more.
They can not expect to keep a close eye on every corner of their emerging super platform. The future of iOS is just too complex (and so the needed guidelines). And App Review doesn’t look right now like it can scale well. If they still try they might seriously hinder innovation on iOS.
- Epic’s Unreal game engine is the premier game... - newnetland “Epic’s Unreal game engine is the premier game development software for professional game studios. And starting last year, anyone can get access to their software (previously $100,000 per license) for a measly $20/month, plus 5% gross sales. On the surface, this seems insane and unsustainable considering the hundreds of man-years that go into its development. Epic isn’t crazy, they just remembered the cardinal rule of professional tool building: your customers use your product to make money. So instead of charging a massive up-front fee, they encourage customers to explore their toolset and build whatever they want. If you make a hit game, Epic makes their money. This approach is proving effective for Epic, particularly in next-gen consoles where it’s been difficult for indie game developers to make inroads.” - Professional App Pricing
- 10 Corporations Control Almost Everything You Buy - Business Insider Das Bild zeigt die Folge von Distribution im stationären Handel. Wer Hunderte Produkte herstellt, kann besser über Regalpositionen verhandeln. Oder die Position ist gleich egal, weil das ganze Regal voll mit den eigenen Pseudokonkurrenz-Produkten ist. Die Regallosigkeit des Internets ändert das natürlich zwangsläufig.
- My Computer Language is Better than Yours "Not a single developer I talked to for this piece felt strongly that the new wave of programming languages represents a competitive power play on the part of the companies sponsoring them. Instead, they point out, every new language begins as an obsessional seed in the brain of an individual or small group: This has always bugged me. We can do better. Anyway, it takes patience and effort to learn a new coding language; developers choose carefully. Says Payne: “What I look for more when picking a new language is the other people who are flocking to that language — because those are the people you’re going to be dependent on for libraries, for documentation. You want to know if you’re moving into the right town, I guess.”"
- Anhörung im Bundestag: Experten zerpflücken das Leistungsschutzrecht - Golem.de ""Katastrophe, Schmerzpunkt, völliger Quatsch": Urheberrechtsexperten fordern einhellig die Abschaffung des Leistungsschutzrechts. Aber auch auf vielen anderen Gebieten sehen sie Reformbedarf."
- Charted
- Netzneutralität oder: Wie eine Debatte richtig falsch läuft | Falk Steiner
- The Cable Model and The Internet Model
- Making Makers Mainstream
- SE Android: In Lollipop wird das Rooten schwer - Golem.de "SE Linux in Android ist nicht neu. Seit 2012 wird das von Linux übernommene Sicherheitsframework speziell an Android angepasst und trägt sogar einen eigenen Namen: Security Enhancements für Android. Maßgeblich an der Entwicklung beteiligt ist unter anderem die NSA, die auch das ursprüngliche SE Linux entwickelt hat. Später wurde es von Red Hat weiterentwickelt und bereits 2003 offiziell in den Linux-Kernel integriert. Nicht alle Linux-Distributionen setzen es aber ein. Es gibt ähnliche Frameworks, etwa Apparmor, das von Canonical in Ubuntu verwendet wird."
- Non-Microsoft Nokia launches Android N1 tablet with Foxconn — Tech News and Analysis "The industrial design for the N1 came from Nokia, but the company is no longer in the manufacturing business and has licensed that design — along with its Z Launcher and various intellectual property — to Chinese manufacturer Foxconn, which rather interestingly will handle distribution and sales and customer care, and will even be responsible for liabilities and warranty costs."
- The Nexus 10, Lollipop, and the problem with big Android tablets | Ars Technica "The Nexus 10 actually runs Lollipop just fine—it's still an attractive-looking OS and performance is as good as it was in KitKat. It's just that there aren't many reasons to use an Android tablet with a screen this large, and if Google isn't willing to make its redesigned OS and apps work great on these big widescreen tablets, why should other developers bother?"
- The $9 Billion Witness: Meet JPMorgan Chase's Worst Nightmare | Rolling Stone
- Breitbandausbau: Wie viele Nutzer unter einer lahmen Internetanbindung leiden - Golem.de "Massiv gestiegen ist demnach die Zahl derjenigen, die für die schlechte Internetversorgung die Regierung verantwortlich machen. Für 48 Prozent der Befragten zählt schnelles Internet inzwischen zur staatlichen Grundversorgung, ähnlich wie Strom oder ein Telefonanschluss. Vor einem Jahr waren es 40 Prozent, die dem Internet eine derart elementare Rolle zuschrieben."
- Facebook IQ | Real Life. Real Insight. Real Action.
- gloveler-Blog » Blog Archive Zweckentfremdungsverbot für Wohnraum - gelbe Karte für Privatvermieter - gloveler-Blog "Dabei geht es dem Dehoga, dem Lobbyverband der Hotelindustrie, nicht um bezahlbare Mieten; Hoteliers sehen vielmehr ihren Profit bedroht, da immer mehr Menschen privat übernachten. „Damit geht der Hotellerie rund ein Viertel der jährlich rund 370 Millionen Übernachtungen in Deutschland verloren“, beschwert sich Willy Weiland [9], Präsident des Dehoga."
- I’m Terrified of My New TV: Why I’m Scared to Turn This Thing On — And You’d Be, Too
- Zalando veröffentlicht Liste der Kursmanipulationen im ersten Börsenmonat | Exciting Commerce "Interessant zu sehen, wie der Kurs am ersten Tag hochgehalten wurde, um den Börsengang von Rocket Internet nicht zu gefährden."
- "In several months of reporting on Uber, I have... - newnetland “
"In several months of reporting on Uber, I have yet to come across a single driver earning the equivalent of $90,766 a year. Those I’ve spoken with report that they gross around $1,000 a week after commission and sales tax—but before gas and other expenses—for annual income closer to $50,000. And despite broadcasting the $90,766 figure far and wide, Uber has so far proved unable to produce one driver earning that amount."
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- Uber driver salary: The ride-sharing company says its drivers make great money, but its math just doesn’t add up.
- App (S)teuer - brand eins online "Der Axel-Springer-Verlag hat bereits reagiert und alle kostenlosen digitalen Ausgaben für seine Printabonnenten eingestellt. Der »Spiegel« nimmt pro digitaler Ergänzung wieder einen Aufpreis von 50 Cent von seinen Abonnenten. Einige Buchverlage haben ihre E-Book-inside-Programme gestoppt. Auch zahlreiche Schulbücher werden künftig ohne digitale Version angeboten werden."
- Ubering While Black — Matter — Medium "But we also agree that the quality of our lives improved tremendously once we found a workaround to dealing with rude and racist cab drivers. There’s an “emotional cost” to those kinds of interactions, she said, and “Uber offers the path of least resistance.”"
- Markua
- Next Lock Screen Adapts Notifications and Shortcuts to Where You Are Microsoft baut einen Lockscreen für Android. Und es sieht interessant aus.
- Daring Fireball: The iPad Air 2 (And a Few Cursory Words Regarding the iPad Mini 3) "In short, I don’t think performance is any longer a reason to buy a MacBook Air instead of an iPad Air. The choice comes down to form factor and personal preference."
- The End Of Apps As We Know Them - Inside Intercom "It may be very likely that the primary interface for interacting with apps will not be the app itself. The app is primarily a publishing tool. The number one way people use your app is through this notification layer, or aggregated card stream. Not by opening the app itself.
In a world where notifications are full experiences in and of themselves, the screen of app icons makes less and less sense. Apps as destinations makes less and less sense. Why open the Facebook app when you can get the content as a notification and take action — like something, comment on something — right there at the notification or OS level."
- The Laborers Who Keep Dick Pics and Beheadings Out of Your Facebook Feed | WIRED "So companies like Facebook and Twitter rely on an army of workers employed to soak up the worst of humanity in order to protect the rest of us. And there are legions of them—a vast, invisible pool of human labor. Hemanshu Nigam, the former chief security officer of MySpace who now runs online safety consultancy SSP Blue, estimates that the number of content moderators scrubbing the world’s social media sites, mobile apps, and cloud storage services runs to “well over 100,000”—that is, about twice the total head count of Google and nearly 14 times that of Facebook."
- Amazon is doing the world a favor by crushing book publishers - Vox "After all, imagine a world in which publishers were good at marketing books. Then it would be almost trivial for Hachette to get what it wants out of Amazon. It could just not sell its books on Amazon! Unlike in the old days when it might have been inconvenient for someone who lived in a town with a Borders but no Barnes & Noble to go get a book that Borders didn't sell, it's trivially easy to click on some non-Amazon website to order a book. But you do need a customer who actually wants to buy the book."
- This study finds that social media use reduces political polarization instead of increasing it » Nieman Journalism Lab "Social media encourages connections between people with weak ties — not just your best friends, for instance, but also your high school classmates, that guy you met on a business trip who friended you, and the local guy you heard was funny on Twitter. Those people tend to be “more politically heterogeneous than citizens’ immediate personal networks,” which exposes you to more perspectives, not fewer."
- Digital Ad Revenue Hits $23 Billion In First Half Of 2014 10/21/2014 "The report, prepared by PwC US, estimates that search revenue rose 4% to $9.1 billion compared with the first half of the year in 2013. Mobile revenue rose 76% to $5.3 billion. Mobile search contributed $2.7 billion, mobile display contributed $2.5 billion, and other mobile media contributed $103 million."
- Daring Fireball: Apple Q4 2014 Quarterly Results "Year over year, iPhone sales were up (39M from 34M), iPad sales down (12M from 14M), and Mac sales were way up (5.5M from 4.5M)."
- Microsoft: We’ve Always Had Freemium, It’s Called Piracy "“Well, we’ve always had freemium. Sometimes our freemium was called piracy,” Nadella reveals."
- Twitter’s “peace offering” to developers is meaningless – Marco.org "Twitter is never happy being Twitter, and it seems at times that its leadership doesn’t realize or doesn’t value what makes it so great. (Ever wonder why there’s so much leadership turnover?) And they’re now under the financial pressures of being a high-profile public company. It’s a powder keg."
- The iPad’s Future "And liberation from the password or, more important, from lazy security, isn’t limited to IT-controlled environments. I hear from normal humans that they love the Apple Pay + Touch ID combination for their online shopping, an activity that was previously more convenient on a conventional PC."
- How Facebook and Google Now Dominate Media Distribution
- Amazon: it’s not the power, it’s the lost focus "My point is this. First, this is not the sort of customer service we get from evil monopolies. Second, it is the sort of customer service we get from a company that always puts its customers first. What a shame, therefore, that in the dispute with Hachette, Amazon has chosen another path — away from relentlessness. That’s why we should be upset not appealing to issues of antitrust concerns."
- Drafts 4 Review – MacStories Drafts 4 ist ein schönes Beispiel für das, was auf iOS 8 jetzt möglich geworden ist.
- The new anti-censorship tool in China: Evernote
- The News According To Nuzzel
- This new “Apple SIM” could legitimately disrupt the wireless industry - Quartz "A more compelling, user-friendly scenario might see your phone number and crucial services—messaging, voicemail, etc.—tied to your Apple SIM, and a vibrant marketplace where carriers compete for your business. This is already sort of what Apple is about to offer for the iPad." Nicht auf der Bühne erwähnt, weil das noch nichts ist, was in einer öffentlichen Debatte zu sehr Aufmerksamkeit erhalten darf. Keine guten Nachrichten für Mobilfunkanbieter. Sehr gute Nachrichten für alle anderen.
- CC gegen CC: Auftragskomponisten gegen Creative Commons in der ARD | netzpolitik.org "In einem Punkt haben die Briefschreiber des Composers Club Recht: CC-Lizenzen dürfen nicht zu Vergütungs-Dumping genutzt werden. Statt diesbezüglich eine Klarstellung einzufordern, ergeht sich das Schreiben aber in einer endlosen Liste an Halb- und Unwahrheiten. Wie sonst auch von Seiten der Urheberrechtslobby wird mit Vorliebe gegen Forderungen argumentiert, die niemand erhoben hat."
- Friedenspreis für Lanier: Auf einen “Blender” reingefallen? | Daniel Bröckerhoff "Auch in den Filmen der Kollegen von Tagesthemen und Heute Journal fehlt die Kritik an Lanier. Das ist für öffentlich-rechtliche Nachrichten mindestens bedauerlich, wenn nicht ein schwaches Bild.
Genau wie in der FAZ, der Deutschen Welle, auf den HR-Sonderseiten zur Frankfurter Buchmesse, bei der WELT: Kein Wort über die Kritik, die bereits vor 4 Monaten von vielen Seiten geäußert wurde.
Dass es auch anders geht, zeigt DRadio Kultur, in dem es Christoph Kappes interviewte, der mit Sascha Lobo gerade ein neues Buch-Portal gegründet hat. Im Gespräch sagt er: “Lanier ist nicht das, was man ihm nachsagt” und man zeige eine “Unkenntnis des Preisträgers, den man ausgewählt hat”."
- Yannick Haan - Apocalypse Now! (und warum die Digitalisierung nicht das Ende der Welt bedeutet) "Wenn sich aber eine politische Debatte komplett von der Realität von Millionen von Menschen entfernt, dann wird sie im besten Fall nicht mehr wahrgenommen. Im schlimmsten Fall führt sie zu weiterer Politikverdrossenheit. Anstatt pseudo-intellektuellen Autoren immer und immer zuzuhören und ihre Worte zu wiederholen wird es Zeit endlich mal wieder den Millionen Menschen zuzuhören die das Internet alltäglich nutzen und die Digitalisierung wirklich formen."
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