iPhone
Baudrillard and Babes at the Consumer Electronics Show
The surreal magic of the annual gadget extravaganza in Las Vegas
It shouldn’t have come as much of a surprise that I’d meet a sales rep who referenced Jean Baudrillard.It was a couple of days into the Consumer Electronics Show, the gargantuan annual gathering of the gadget industry. I was idly taking notes as salesladies lured men onto a set of vibrating exercise machines, their fat jiggling, while an Asian man in a fedora and round sunglasses danced on one of them to “Gangnam Style.” A shaggy-haired off-duty software sales rep named Will Ryan asked what I was writing. READ MORE >>
There's a War in Cyberspace over Icons vs. Text
In the physical world, icons are always telling us what to do. No smoking on the airplane. Beware of the road crew ahead. Crap here if you’re a man, and there if you’re a woman. There’s even an icon that says, essentially, “Yes, when I die in a car wreck, you may take my organs and put them in another human body.” And these icons, for the most part, tell us these things without so much as a word. They’re feats of human efficiency: Why force someone to read tedious text when the image of a crossed-out cigarette will do?The digital world, however, is a different story. On the Internet, warnings and directions are often much more complex. How can an icon summarize, for instance, whether to allow Facebook to share your user history or to allow your iPhone to know where you are at all times? You’ll probably understand a website’s terms of service better if you sit down to read them, but you probably don’t have the time or patience for that, instead signing away vast swaths of your personal information without a second thought.The White House thinks this is a problem. Last February, it promulgated a Privacy Bill of Rights decreeing that consumers shall get a clearer idea of what, exactly, a mobile app does with your data (California, meanwhile, has already made its own rules). The app industry, desperate to avoid clunky regulations from Congress, promised to work with privacy advocates to come up with their own standard practice for privacy notifications. Get all the players in a room, the thinking went, and they should be able to hash out an approach that works for everybody. READ MORE >>
Silicon Valley Needs to Stop Fighting and Sign a Free-Trade Agreement
The most dramatic trade war in the world today isn’t being waged between nations, but in cyberspace. And instead of tariffs on, say, grain or cars, the barrier is blocked apps. READ MORE >>
Id of the Senate: How Twitter Unleashed Chuck Grassley
On Monday, while the world was ending on the East Coast, Apple announced some news of its own back in Cupertino: Two key executives had been booted and their duties re-allocated to others, in the company's biggest shakeup since 1997. READ MORE >>
Michael Saylor, The Id of Web 2.0
On a recent Friday morning, Michael Saylor appeared before a think-tank audience to cheerfully predict the end of the world. Newspapers and televisions? Obsolete in a smartphone-enhanced future. Banks and wallets? Ditto. Textbooks? About to “dematerialize.” Also doomed: Algebra teachers. READ MORE >>
Apple's latest earnings are in, and they're characteristically whopping: With a big bump from the iPhone 5, the world's most valuable company has brought in $156.5 billion this year. That's more than Facebook, Google, and Microsoft combined. READ MORE >>
Apple and the Specter of Decline
Things look good for Apple right now. Last month, it won its big lawsuit, collecting $1 billion in damages from Samsung for infringing various patents. The iPhone 5 is selling well. And today, it heads to federal court to begin the process of gaining an actual ban on the importation and sale of Samsung’s “contraband” phones. READ MORE >>
