Google Glass: not welcome in some restaurants. Photograph: Jens Kalaene/DPA/CorbisA burst of 8 links for you to chew over, as picked by the Technology team
Globally, mobile-broadband penetration will reach 32% by end 2014 – almost double the penetration rate just three years earlier (2011) and four times as high as five years earlier (2009).
In developed countries, mobile-broadband penetration will reach 84%, a level four times as high as in developing countries (21%)
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Mobile broadband remains the fastest growing market segment, with continuous double-digit growth rates in 2014. Mobile broadband is growing fastest in developing countries, where 2013/2014 growth rates are expected to be twice as high as in developed countries (26% compared with 11.5%).By end 2014, the number of mobile-broadband subscriptions will reach 2.3 billion globally, almost 5 times as many as just six years earlier (in 2008).
PDF, with fascinating detail. In 2005 there were 1bn total internet users worldwide; by the end of this year it will be 3bn total.
On Tuesday, the Korea Times took it all back. Samsung was agreeable to settlement talks, it reported, but not Apple. "Apple resists settlement with Samsung" was the headline on an early version of the story.
The final version went further: "Apple rejects deal with Samsung."
Only trouble is, there never was a deal.
Nor were there any settlement talks, as the two companies' joint submission to U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh court makes clear.
They couldn't even agree on the preconditions to begin talks (called ADR, or "alternative dispute resolution" - alternative to court cases, that is.)
Colonel Khalid Nasser Al Razooqi, General Director of Smart Services at Dubai Police, gave Gulf News a demonstration of how Google Glass would be used by the force.
Dubai Police's Smart Services teams have created two applications to be used by their officers. "One will allow them to take photos of traffic violations from the Glass, which will go instantly into our system, and the other application helps identify wanted cars."
Taking photos using Dubai Police's Google Glass' program is simple. The officer just needs to tap the side of the glass and the photo, in addition to the exact location, time and date is automatically sent to the system.
As for determining whether a car is wanted or not, Col Al Razooqi said that all the officer needs to do is look at number plates and the Glass will cross-reference the plates with the traffic department's wanted vehicles database and alert him if any vehicle is wanted.
Both programs were developed by an in-house team from the Dubai Police smart services.
Mark Mulligan:
Right now Spotify's paid subscriber count looks firmly locked in that early adopter segment. If growth rates sustain at this level it will be late 2016 before we see the 20 million mark hit.
Free however is booming: Spotify's free user count though is showing dynamic growth. In fact it is following the right trajectory for a technology breaking through. What's more the growth is uncannily similar to that of Pandora during the same stage of its growth (see figure below). In fact by its 66th month Pandora had 39m active users, while Spotify now has 40m, also after 66 months. If Spotify's free and paid user bases continue to grow at their current rates the currently impressive 3-to-1 free-to-paid ratio will widen markedly. Free is where the action is. Just ask potential Twitter suitor Soundcloud with its 250m active users or YouTube with its 1 billion active users.
Mary Jo Foley:
The external competitor on which [VP of Surface Computing Panos] Panay and his team have their sights set is Apple, as the premium prices and specs for the Pro 3 made clear. Microsoft is gunning to replace the MacBook Air and the iPad with the Surface Pro 3. But I'd argue there's another competitor at which Microsoft is taking aim with the new devices: High-end Windows ultrabooks like the Acer Aspire S-7 I purchased recently.
The intended audience for the new Surfaces are "consumer first, and premium," Panay stressed. He said Microsoft expects the product to do well with students and others interested in notetaking, but that the company isn't positioning the Pro 3 as a business device. (Update: That's because Microsoft is making the assumption that consumers increasingly are bringing devices to work. Of course, if a business wanted to order thousands of Surface Pro 3s for its users, Microsoft would be happy to fulfill that order.)
…when [another] diner came in [to Feast, a restaurant on Third Avenue, NY] wearing Google Glass, management asked her to take them off before dining. She refused, and left the restaurant.
"We try to give everyone the best experience possible and she didn't get that," Feast management admitted to us.
On April 20, the diner wrote a post about what happened, which apparently angered some of her 3,000-plus Google+ followers.
Around this time the spate of reviews arrived on Google. Feast looked into this, and discovered that all of the one stars are from people who commented on the diner's original Google+ post. The negative reviews include lines such as: "Ignorant bigots and hateful. Perhaps being illegally discriminate too. The food is irrelevant as the service is less than poor." The reviewer lives in Phoenix.
Anonymous Google.com search on Feast Third Avenue: top result shows Google reviews, average 3.1/5 (300 reviews). Second result: Yelp review: 4.0/5 (145 reviews). Note though that scores of five-star reviews were added after the Grieve blogpost appeared last week, specifically to hit back at the one-star ones. Before that Glassing, there had been 8 reviews, average 4.75. That seems more reasonable in all senses.
For comparison: Bing search on "feast third avenue review": first result has no review, second result Urbanspoon with 89%; third result Opentable (4.2/5).
Of course, most people will see the Google+ reviews - which have top position because they're on Google+, not because of the number of reviews. (They were top when there were fewer than Yelp, on Friday.)
Amazon, under fire in much of the literary community for energetically discouraging customers from buying books from the publisher Hachette, has abruptly escalated the battle.
The retailer began refusing orders late Thursday for coming Hachette books, including J.K. Rowling's new novel. The paperback edition of Brad Stone's "The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon" — a book Amazon disliked so much it denounced it — is suddenly listed as "unavailable."
In some cases, even the pages promoting the books have disappeared. Anne Rivers Siddons's new novel, "The Girls of August," coming in July, no longer has a page for the physical book or even the Kindle edition. Only the audio edition is still being sold (for more than $60). Otherwise it is as if it did not exist.
Thank goodness the US has an ebooks antitrust monitor in place to take firm action. Doesn't it?
James is Ampp3d's new Tinder profile. We used him to log onto the app so we could browse through 1,000 pictures from 200 Tinderers. Here's what we found.
Men will say yes to anything. A third of men swiped "right" or "LIKE" to James, our cookie monster profile picture. Even though he was called James. And they were looking for women.
Women are much more picky. ZERO women "swiped right". 100% NOPE. Sorry James.
Bad news for the survival of the cookie monster species. Unless they have their own dating app.
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