Olympic finishes always look close, but when these fractions of a second are charted in audio, you really conceptualize the nearly nonexistent margin between the top of a podium and the bottom of a scotch bottle. Just listen: [NYTimes]
Today kicks off the bi-hourly shutdowns for anybody still running their free copy of Windows 7 Release Candidate, which will continue until June 1, when the seizures turn the OS into straight crippleware. (Or more specifically, your copy of Windows is marked as non-geniune, locking you out of any feature that requires a legit version of Windows.) [Windows Blog via All About Microsoft]
One of the more straightforward acquisitions Google's made in a while, they've just bought the online image editor Picnick. Given Google's past acquisition strategy—turning Grand Central into Google Voice, Writely into Google Docs—the logical expectation is that it'll get merged into its already excellent Picasa photo managing app. [Picnick]
After what feels like years of concept renders and photos of the hairy David de Rothschild accompanying gushing magazine pieces about his plastic bottle boat, the Plastiki will set sail this month across the Pacific Ocean.
If you'll remember, the boat was constructed using 12,000 plastic 2-liter bottles, which have been pressurized using dry ice powder, making it buoyant enough to carry four people on the 11,000 miles from San Francisco to Sydney. It'll take 100 days they think, with the electricity coming from solar panels, wind turbines and exercise bikes that the four crewmembers will be using.
It's the ultimate eco-warrior ship, with even a small garden growing herbs and veggies included on the 60-foot boat. At least if they sink, they've got an awful lot of bottles to put messages in. [Plastiki via TG Daily]
In today's Remainders: wishful thinking. Nikon fans hope they've stumbled on a viral campaign for new cameras; magazine companies hope their slick new ads will keep you buying magazines; Google CEO Eric Schmidt gets pranked in 1986, and more.
Follow the Signs
Camera geeks are getting excited over some mysterious cards that have been showing up in their mailboxes. First I'll explain what's on the cards and then I'll explain what people are surmising, just because it'll be funnier that way. The first card was all black, with the number "8" on one side inside a burst of yellow, with the words "I am" on the back. The next day, a similar card with the number "7" was mailed out, with the words "I am fun" on the back. Now for the theories: yellow and black being Nikon's colors, people are thinking that this might be some sort of cloak and dagger lead up to the unveiling of Nikon's first micro four thirds camera, or perhaps NIkon's rumored EVIL line of gear. The could be reading into the cards a little too much, but when you extend the daily countdown it ends on March 8, the same day a Nikon press event is scheduled in the UK. At least this rumor has a definite expiration date. [Engadget]
Lifting Spirits
There's only one thing that's better than a cat elevator, and that's a cat elevator that is entirely operated by the cat itself. Though you have to wonder if this type of cat-tech retards the development of their natural abilities to leap from crazy heights and not be injured. Because if anything that's a super power we need to be cultivating, not discouraging. [Neatorama]
DoubtsCast
We'd love for a Mitsumi's new TV-enhancing miracle chip to be real, but we find it very hard to believe that any chip is improving LCD black levels as well as is shown in this photograph. The company claims they hope to commercialize the chip this year, but I wouldn't hold your breath—or hold on to your crappy LCD TV—waiting for it. [CrunchGear]
Punk'd
What was Eric Schmidt up to back in 1986, before he became the overlord of the internet-age empire we know today as Google? Getting pranked by his employees, of course. For April Fools Day '86, his Sun Microsystems underlings put a Volkswagen Beetle in his office, to which the bespectacled Schmidt probably responded by slapping his knee and snorting out a "Gee golly!" In any event, the video is a nice trip back to the mid-80s, a time before pranks were invariably cruel and back when the economy was so good that extra cars were always just kicking waiting to be disassembled and reassembled in someone's office. Ah, sweet nostalgia. [TechCrunch]
Light On Ideas
I love LEDs and I love cool furniture design, but this LED table sort of makes my blood boil. It costs $24,000. It shows just about zero imagination when it comes to implementing the lights. It has to be plugged in at all times. A waste of money, a waste of energy, a waste of LEDs! Did I mention it costs $24,000? Forget that noise, just make your own. [UberGizmo]
Pew Pew
A recent study by the Pew Internet and American Life Project revealed that more Americans get their news from the internet than from print media. No surprise there—if anything it's surprising it didn't happen sooner—and the internet is still behind national and local TV when it comes to how Americans stay up to date, so don't get too worried about the internet subsuming everything in it's path. Not yet anyway. Still, this is one step closer to the future we envision in which Gizmodo is the nation's primary source for all news, gadget and otherwise. (One surprising bit from the study: 21% of internet news-gatherers get their information from a single site. So, seriously, get ready for the Gizmodo News Network.) [Ars Technica]
Print Rules
Five huge print publishers—Time and Conde Nast among them—have banded together on a $90 million crusade to remind us why magazines rock so much and why we should shell out $3, $4, $5, $6 a month to buy them. "We surf the Internet. We swim in magazines," reads one of the campaign's ads that's going to run in ESPN The Magazine. Sure, whatever, we might be swimming in magazines, but the magazines themselves are drowning. Drowning so bad that they don't know which way is up and it seems like a good idea to throw tens of millions of dollars into a lame ad campaign. Drowning so bad that they think it's a good idea to try to put their customers' internet consumption and magazine consumption at odds when they could be working on models that combined the two and made everyone happy. Drowning so bad that they're trying to convince people that growing 11% over the last 12 years since Google came on the scene is some kind of great accomplishment. Just make sure the New Yorker looks really good on the iPad and we'll forget this campaign ever happened, OK? [WSJ]
Screen Shots Fired
Some fat-fingered Dell employee accidentally made a typo when entering a new Ubuntu netbook into the system, resulting in this price of $100,278. That's not what I want to talk about. What I want to talk about is this particular type of fuck-up—the accidental astronomical price—and if we will find anything quite so amusing. I've heard some people say that the Aristocrats is the funniest joke ever told, but surely the accidental astronomical price is better. Knock knock. Who's there? A hundred thousand dollar. A hundred thousand dollar what? A hundred thousand dollar netbook from Dell. Oh that's good! OK, maybe that's going too far—I like a good goofy pricing error now and again—but the internet is treasure trove of typos. Maybe it's time for us to branch out. [CrunchGear]
You're probably relatively confident in your various machines' integrity against hackers. Repeat Pwn2Own hacking competition victor Charlie Miller would like you to know that you're wrong—especially if you have Flash.
In an interview with OneITSecurity, Miller picks off questions about hacking and security with just enough ease and nonchalance to make me queasy. Like, you know how Mac OS exploits are supposed to be tougher to root out than Windows exploits? Not quite! And they're both vulnerable:
Windows 7 is slightly more difficult because it has full ASLR (address space layout randomization) and a smaller attack surface (for example, no Java or Flash by default). Windows used to be much harder because it had full ASLR and DEP (data execution prevention). But recently, a talk at Black Hat DC showed how to get around these protections in a browser in Windows.
And obviously, Linux is fortress, right? Again:
No, Linux is no harder, in fact probably easier, although some of this is dependent on the particular flavor of Linux you're talking about. The organizers don't choose to use Linux because not that many people use it on the desktop. The other thing is, the vulnerabilities are in the browsers, and mostly, the same browsers that run on Linux, run on Windows.
And within a given operating system, surely you can ensure immunity from exploits by choosing a secure browser like Firefox. Surely. No? GUUUGHHH.
[The safest browser is] Chrome or IE8 on Windows 7 with no Flash installed. There probably isn't enough difference between the browsers to get worked up about. The main thing is not to install Flash!
So the guy who consistently prevails Pwn2Own, a competition where hackers demonstrate exploits for sport, says that Flash, which is installed on about 98% of computers on the internet, unifies all browsers in insecurity, and that IE8, an Internet Explorer browser, in case you're having trouble unfolding that acronym, now ranks among the safest in its category. The slightly better news is, despite inherent insecurities that he doesn't bother to elaborate on, mobile smartphone platforms are relatively secure as compared to their desktop counterparts. So there's that.
The full interview is definitely worth a read, even for the tech disinclined—it's a good reminder that you (and you!) can never completely avoid online security threats. So, stay on your toes, and look out for... something? [OneITSecurity via Crunchgear]
I don't know who has the pockets and the space to install Hydrofloors—mechanically operated tiles that sink into the ground slowly, revealing a swimming pool already full of water—but I want to meet them. Watch them in action:
According to the manufacturer, the system is "nearly invisible" and you can adjust the depth of the swimming pool to any depth just by using a control panel. I wonder if my downstairs neighbor will mind it if I install one. [Hydrofloors via Notcot]
After years of Mini DVI and Mini DisplayPort, will Apple really give us HDMI? A bucketful of rumors from AppleInisider say HDMI is replacing DVI in the next Mac minis, and reveals a long lost audio/video Mini DisplayPort adapter.
The new Mac mini, according to AppleInsider, will ditch its old DVI port for HDMI, which'll sit next to the Mini DP port. The reason Apple's interested in HDMI is that it delivers audio along with video over a single port, unlike the current MiniDP spec. The catch, though, is that these new Mac minis use Nvidia's MCP89 chipset, meaning they'll likely be Core 2 Duo machines still—not yet getting the upgrade to Core i3/i5/i7.
In terms of other Macs, the audio/video problem still exists, so what Apple had cooked up to go with those Blu-ray players that never happened in the latest iMacs is a proprietary DisplayPort-to-HDMI adapter that carried audio and video through a customized Mini DisplayPort. We might see this revised Mini DP port in the next MacBook revision though, and the adapter that goes with it.
The updated Mini DisplayPort with audio sounds like the most logical option for Apple, rather than backtracking to HDMI after purposely shunning it. Just give me one port that carries both audio and video—I don't care what you call it—and some way to plug it into another display or plug other stuff into the Mac, and I'll be happy. [AppleInsider]
Sure, you could just sit tight and wait until mega ISO camera sensors give all of our cameras flawless night vision, but what if you have a Micro Four Thirds camera right now? Then this lens will do just fine.
Noktor's HyperPrime 50mm has something I've only seen one other time in a consumer lens: an aperture diameter larger than its focal length. In performance terms, this means that the lens lets in twice as much light as an already dead-fast ƒ1.4 lens, letting you crank down your camera's ISO settings to capture a cleaner picture. In photographic terms, this means that you'll only be able to focus on a paper-thin plane, giving your photos—assuming you're focusing on something close by—an extreme depth of field effect.
The lens ships in April for $750, but given the extraordinary aperture size, reasonably high price and relatively unknown manufacturer, and full manual operation—that's right, no auto focus—it's probably best for you Micro Four Thirdsers to wait until this thing proves its prowess. [Noktor via DPReview via Wired]
Panasonic is going to be rolling out production of Li-ion batteries that use a silicon alloy anode soon, according to Nikkei. The result? A whopping 30% increase in capacity. Panasonic's not the only company working on the technology, but they're the first to yield any kind of spec detail.
The Si-alloy batteries are expected to retain at least 80% capacity even after 500 charge/recharge cycles, and will be available commercially starting in 2012. The first target: notebooks, although the bigger fish appears to be vehicles. Don't get to excited about the impact on electric cars, though: given the additional weight associated with Si-alloys, it'll be some time before we see one of these bad boys in a Volt. [Nikkei via Engadget]
An analyst is reporting that "an unspecified production problem at the iPad's manufacturer, Hon Hai Precision, will likely limit the launch region to the US and the number of units available to roughly 300K."
Analysts make poofy, speculative claims that we ignore all the time, but Canccord Adams' Peter Misek here is reporting that there is an actual "unspecified production problem" happening at Foxconn (the prettier name for Taiwanese manufacturer Hon Hai Precision) resulting in a "manufacturing bottleneck." Of course, it's possible he's still wrong, and a million iPads will flow freely later this month (ooo, is it March already?).
But a high-demand, low-supply launch wouldn't be the worst thing in the world either. It certainly wouldn't be unprecedented; Christ knows, Amazon and Nintendo that strategy milked it for years. [AppleInsider]
There is great clusterfuckassery going on right now on the PlayStation Network, affecting fat PS3s. Sony is working on it and they hope to "resolve the problem within the next 24 hours." Updated
We hope to resolve this problem within the next 24 hours. In the meantime, if you have a model other than the new slim PS3, we advise that you do not use your PS3 system, as doing so may result in errors in some functionality, such as recording obtained trophies, and not being able to restore certain data.
The latest thin PS3 model doesn't have this problem, but if you have a fat PS3, here's what you are facing if you turn it on:
• The date of the PS3 system may be re-set to Jan 1, 2000.
• When the user tries to sign in to the PlayStation Network, the following message appears on the screen; "An error has occurred. You have been signed out of PlayStation Network (8001050F)".
• When the user tries to launch a game, the following error message appears on the screen and the trophy data may disappear; "Failed to install trophies. Please exit your game."
• When the user tries to set the time and date of the system via the Internet, the following message appears on the screen; "The current date and time could not be obtained. (8001050F)"
• Users are not able to play back certain rental video downloaded from the PlayStation Store before the expiration date.
Update: According to some readers, Netflix doesn't work either.
Update 2: Some readers report everything is back to normal.
Keep watching for updates. [Sony]
He may have plastic boobs saggier than Dame Judi Dench, but as Wired points out, this RoboThespian "shows more acting range than some Hollywood stars." The British robot has been programmed to show off a variety of acting abilities.
His creators, Engineered Arts, have made him completely self-supporting, with his torso capable of bending and turning, his arms able to move about, and even basic facial gestures performed. He is powered by compressed air, with the control system sitting in his torso along with the air valves that help him move.
The best bit however is that he can be fully-programmed to perform a script on cue, translating text to speech in English, Spanish, Germany, French and even Mandarin Chinese.
Seen in the videos below is the third version of RoboThespian, the most advanced so far—but also the coolest robot you've never heard of. [RoboThespian via Wired]
Assassin's Creed II is one of the best console games of 2009. And now, Ubisoft has released a top-down multiplayer version of it for the iPhone/iPod touch, free for two days.
The game, which is to the console version of ACII what the original Grand Theft Auto is to GTAIV, features a top-down viewpoint. The goal is to seek out fellow assassins who you're playing over WiFi and...assassinate them. You sneak around by blending in with civilians.
Sound fun? Well, it's free for now but bumps up to $2.99 after 48 hours, so get on it! [iTunes Link]
The silicon inside 90 percent of ereaders out there is made by Freescale, and their new chip, the i.MX508—based on a ARM Cortex A8 (sorta like the iPad!)—will make them cheaper, and page turns 4x faster.
The chip's a custom SoC that integrates the functions from multiple chips into one—specifically, the E-Ink hardware display controller—along with that Cortex A8, which gives the readers enough juice to turn pages in half a second, versus the two seconds that's typical now. As the first chip expressly designed for ereaders, it also strips out unnecessary features, so the net result for the ereader is that it's $30 cheaper a unit. Freescale wagers that with the cost savings, it could drive ereaders to under $150 by the end of the year. (Though that in part depends on how much the E-Ink displays themselves are going to continue to cost.)
An E-Ink reader that costs $150 would definitely look more attractive as a dedicated long-reading device against an iPad that does lots of things on top of reading—and has those fancy digital magazines—than the ones that more like $260 today. Then again, Amazon's working on a full-color multitouch Kindle with Wi-Fi, if that tells you anything about the future of E-Ink readers. In the meantime, I'm all for cheaper. [Freescale via Bloomberg via Digital Daily]
Your Technotronic playlist aside, running on a treadmill is inherently boring because you are stuck in a room running on the same platform. But what if you could switch things up and simulate actual, real world topography?
The NordicTrack x7i Interactive Incline Trainer, $2,000, is loaded with Wi-Fi to interface with iFit Live, a fitness database that pulls actual trail and marathon routes from Google Maps (which, though not supported in the limited official workout library at this time, should really include Google Moon).
The corresponding information shifts your incline dynamically (40-degree incline, 6-degree decline), plus you get to see a bird's eye view that allows you to track progress through your practice environment, or you can even take a look from the ground level through Google Street View.
Now, if only the NordicTrack x7i weren't a treadmill, we'd really be on to something. [NordicTrack via PopSci]
Sports Illustrated photographer David Klutho is wielding two Nikon D700s bolted together like a double-neck guitar at the Olympics, except his rig is designed to take 3D photos, not bust out sweet guitar solos. [Russ Beinder/Flickr]
People rarely talk about iPhone app piracy, but when they do, it sounds devastating: 90% piracy rates, $450 million in lost sales, etc. Here's the truth: App Store piracy isn't a big deal—and it never will be.
With these shockingly high reports comes the general air that developers are being marauded and pillaged by Viking hordes and that Apple isn't doing enough to stop it. This resonates! Developers don't control much about the App Store, so if the entire app protection system has been cracked—which it has—you'd expect the looting to be wholesale; the impact on developers to be immediate and devastating; and the problem to be grave indeed.
And yet the piracy issue seems to be dying. The story behind the lack of a story, it turns out, is that iPhone piracy is nowhere near as serious as many people say it is, and that before long, it may not be a problem at all.
It's tough to talk about iPhone app piracy without tacitly endorsing it. The mere mention of DRM cracking methods and application sources is—or rather, was—enough to send people looking, and presumably, stealing. But look at the piracy subscene today reveals that, like the jailbreak scene it's a part of, it's just not the same as it used to be.
Kicking off your career in app theft isn't too hard, and it'll only take a few minutes of Googling to get the full instructions. Still, I'll keep this as abstract as possible. Here's how you do it:
• Jailbreak your iPhone or iPod
• Open Cydia, the jailbreak equivalent of the App Store, and add a particular download source that isn't part of the default lineup
• Download two apps: One that lets you crack apps you've purchased for the benefit of others; and another that lets you install cracked applications yourself
• Download cracked apps to your heart's content, from various sources around the internet
At the peak, there were sites that aggregated huge numbers of download links together into an easily browsable website, which meant that once your phone was cracked, you could tap through these websites like you'd browse the App Store—links to the latest apps were plentiful, and you could snag that game you just read about on Gizmodo within a day or so, tops.
The most popular of these sites, called Appulo.us, disappeared just last month, leaving pirates without a centralized resource for apps. Soon, torrent sites and carbon copied link-dumps picked up the slack, at least for people dedicated and savvy enough to find them. So, yeah, piracy is alive, to be sure. But how serious is it?
I wanted to find out how bad piracy was, so I went straight to the developers. I started with the types of apps I thought would be least vulnerable, just to set a baseline: Productivity apps. The verdict? Yes! Piracy happens!
"Roughly 10% of our paid app users are coming from piracy." That's Guy Goldstein, CEO of PageOnce, the company behind Personal Assistant, a top-selling organizational app. This is pretty stunning, if you think about it. Personal Assistant is available in a fairly full-featured free version, and as useful as it is, it's not the most glamourous of apps—it's a utility, not a flashy game. The paid version tracks a little high for a productivity app, at $7, but not matter how you slice it, Personal Assistant isn't the most obvious target for piracy. Nor, apparently, is it a serious victim: "Although i think piracy is generally bad and negatively effects companies, for us it's not big issue—our business model is based on purchasing, but also advertising. The more users we have, the better." Right, so piracy is happening here, but it doesn't really matter. Let's move onto the people who you'd really expect to be getting ripped off.
I contacted TomTom, whose navigation apps start above $50. They were cagey. Cagey and brief:
TomTom takes piracy very seriously. Per corporate policy, we do not disclose information about our ongoing efforts to disrupt software theft.
So I moved on to their direct competitor, Navigon, whose MobileNavigator North America app runs $90:
Navigon is well aware of hacked iPhone Apps. As with any other software, it is only a question of time when applications are being hacked and distributed illegally. There's no security mechanism available to prevent this 100%. Since hacking of additional application functions, which are available through Apple's In App Purchase mechanism, is more difficult, this helps to better secure Apps from software piracy. Our legal department is watching this very thoroughly and Navigon will fight piracy with all legal means.
Less cagey, and more ragey. But this is an official position—a conversation with a Navigon rep left me with the impression that while they don't condone piracy, obviously, it wasn't exactly the Issue of the Day. Ripe targets that they are, nav companies don't seem to be losing sleep over this. Which leaves the game developers.
What apps are more pirateable than games? They're shiny, they're extremely popular, and they're often expensive. Surely the EAs and Gamelofts of the world are the hardest hit, right?
On record, they basically clammed up. Off the record, though, they were a bit more free. A rep from one of the largest studios—you've probably played one of their games if you have an iPhone—told me "It happens, but I don't think it's that big of an issue." I couldn't coax out any specific stats, but in relation to total sales, piracy figures are "small."
In fact, it was hard to come by hard piracy figures from any major developers, but one thing is certain: The occasionally reported 50%+ piracy rates are rare among major developers. And overwhelmingly, major devs are underwhelmed by the problem. So, where are all the pirates?
Peter Farago, a VP at iPhone analytics firm Flurry—the guys who spotted the iPad in their logs days before it was announced—track roughly one out of every five apps purchased from the App Store, and their software runs deep: Though it doesn't collect individualized personal data, it can tell if a device running a tracked app is jailbroken or not. In other words, Flurry knows exactly how many of the millions of devices its tracked apps are installed on are jailbroken. Take a guess.
It's... as low as you might expect. Lower, even.
"Under 10% of the iPhone installed base is jailbroken."
Just to make this clear, a company that at any given time is tracking five out of the top ten most downloaded apps in the App Store is detecting a jailbreak rate of under 10%. Less than one out of ten, and often significantly less. The figure tends to bottom out at just above 5% after every time Apple issues a software upgrade, slowly creeping back up to previous levels as the Dev Team and the like issue updates to the jailbreak software. Bear in mind, jailbreaking is a prerequisite for app piracy, but not every jailbreaker is running even one pirated app. Start peeling off the people who jailbreak just to enable multitasking or Wi-Fi tethering, or to skin their iPhone, or just to see what all the fuss is about, and "under 10%" starts to looks even slimmer.
Given the state of jailbreaking, I find these numbers easy to believe. Back in 2007, before there was an App Store, jailbreaking was as easy as opening a website in Mobile Safari. Today, it's a bit more difficult, and depending on which iPhone you have, sometimes impossible. (Sorry, late model 3GSers!) And Farago says it's always under siege: "There's a cycle that exists, but basically, it's this kind of thing that happens—every time there's an OS swap, it goes away for a while," dipping by "a few percent" before creeping back up to previous levels.
Now, I don't want to play down these numbers, because even a tiny percentage of a user base as large as the iPhone's is enough to throw a developers' pirated/paid stats out of whack—this can happen, and cases in which pirated downloads exceed paid downloads have been documented—but such stats are misleading. Without even having to speculate about what percentage of pirates would have otherwise purchased the app, they represent a small portion of the app-buying population. In such small numbers, jailbreakers simply can't screw a developer over, except in those rare cases in which the developer has to pay significant continuing costs to deliver data and services once an app is installed. Even then, Flurry finds that pirated apps are often launched just a handful of times after they're downloaded.
With the App Store offering most—though not all—of what the jailbreak scene used to provide, cracking your phone, going through the trouble of ducking regular upgrades and enduring the constant fear of rendering your phones permanently useless just isn't that attractive anymore. To be a pirate right now, you really have to want to be a pirate. This isn't Napster. This is Usenet. And pirates aren't potential customers. They're pirates.
At first I found many developers' silence on the issue curious. But after talking to a few, and finding out the scale of the problem, it makes sense: An app developer has nothing to gain by taking their fight public—Apple is clearly aware of the issue, and it's not like you can somehow convince hardcore pirates to start paying for all the dozens of apps they steal, because they were never going to buy them in the first place. To these people they're literally just free samples, and are most frequently treated as such. Developers do have something to lose, be it investor confidence (a lot of studios are heavily funded by VCs, who probably don't want to hear about any theft problems), a relationship with Apple (who would most likely prefer that developers discussed app DRM cracking and piracy privately), or the goodwill of the public, who aren't usually going to feel sympathy for a company anyway.
Most importantly, if developers do have a problem with piracy—say that, like PageOnce, they found themselves prominently featured on one of the more popular pirated app repositories—they can do something about it.
When an app is cracked, that is to say that its DRM has been stripped, and the app has been reduced to an unprotect .IPA file, ready for sideloading through a jailbreak utility. But in the middle of 2009, Apple introduced a system by which app developers could sell services or add-ons from within their apps. This was good way for paid apps to extend their profitability, and the in-app purchases were effectively unpirateable.
Then, in October, Apple changed the rules: In-app purchases were allowed in free applications as well, meaning that developers could provide free trial apps that could be upgraded to full versions by way of in-app purchases. Popular apps could consolidate their free and paid versions into one app, and on the way, make piracy all but impossible. After all, what's the point in cracking and bootlegging an app anyone can get for free?
Apple even says as much (albeit with no lack of redundancy): "Using In App Purchase in your app can also help combat some of the problems of software piracy by allowing you to verify In App Purchases."
Ngmoco took their fight against piracy public last year, quoting impressively high unauthorized download figures during new apps' first days in the app store. Today, nearly their entire product lineup is based on on the in-app upgrade model. And even after the transition, Ngmoco insists that piracy wasn't the motivating factor in their switch. In an interview with TouchArcade, it was the massively high download rates for free apps, vs paid apps, that lured Ngmoco toward in-app purchases. The elimination of piracy was a pleasant side effect, at best.
The moral of the story for developers? If you think you have a problem with piracy, you probably don't. If you still think you have a problem with piracy, you can stamp it out. Simple as that.
In-app purchases change the way developers market and sell their apps, and just as much, the way we consume them. Downloading a single app and then purchasing expansions for it is a superficially different procedure than downloading a free trial followed by a full app, or just taking a risk on a full app in the first place. But the way in which your transaction happens is different, too.
When you buy an iPhone app, it can be synced to multiple devices, as long as said devices are authorized on your iPhone account—the cap here if five, but that's enough to share amongst your family or friends, or to enable an easy transition from an old iPhone to a new one. In-app purchases, however, don't work the same way, at all. Here's what Apple says about syncing in-app purchases across devices:
• Consumable products must be purchased each time the user needs that item. For example, one-time services are commonly implemented as consumable products.
• Nonconsumable products are purchased only once by a particular user. Once a nonconsumable product is purchased, it is provided to all devices associated with that user's iTunes account. Store Kit provides built-in support to restore nonconsumable products on multiple devices.
• Subscriptions share attributes of consumable and nonconsumable products. Like a consumable product, a subscription may be purchased multiple times; this allows you to implement your own renewal mechanism in your application. However, subscriptions must be provided on all devices associated with a user. In App Purchase expects subscriptions to be delivered through an external server that you provide. You must provide the infrastructure to deliver subscriptions to multiple devices.
Problem is, this isn't how it works right now. In-app goods are sold on a strict per-device basis, because the only user information available to developers is the device identifier, not the account identifier. As it stands, when you buy something by way of an in-app purchase, it applies to your phone only, and not all the registered devices—iPhones and iPod Touches—on your iTunes account. Maybe that's no big deal now, but when the iPad arrives, this might become a problem.
App piracy today may not be a massive factor in the App Store economy, but it would be wrong to characterize it as nothing. It does exist, and to a developer who makes money selling apps, even one illegally downloaded app is one too many. Still, looking forward, this issue is clearing up almost completely:
• iPhone app piracy is already low, and isn't on the rise in any meaningful way
• The latest iPhone 3GS has proven very difficult to jailbreak, and Apple seems to be actively thwarting efforts with each baseband/software release
• In-app purchasing is coming of age, and effectively eliminates piracy
If you want to call the iPhone pirate a species, he would be an endangered one; if you want to call the jailbreak scene a subculture, it would be passé; if you want to call app piracy a problem, it would be more nuisance than crisis.
Apple's pending extermination of piracy is great news for developers, but for users, it'll come at a cost. And for want of an example as to why, this post couldn't come at a better time, with Apple purging "offensive" apps from its official store—increasingly be the only place for iPhone owners to download apps. If Apple wants to be the only provider of apps (and they do!) then they need to be held to a high standard of transparency and consistency, which—trust us—they're nowhere near meeting.
You know that webOS 1.4 update for Pre, Pixi, Pre Plus and Pixi Plus that we've been talking about since January? The one with video recording and Flash 10 beta and some other stuff? It's live. [Palm]
Well, that didn't take long. Already analysts are crawling out of the woodwork to put the seemingly miraculous Bloom Box fuel cell in its place as yet another energy saving technology that won't perform as advertised.
This week it was IDC Energy Insights analyst Sam Jaffe, who said that while the fuel cell developed by Bloom Energy CEO K.R Sridhar and his team was definitely "not bogus," it just doesn't differentiate itself well enough from already available fuel cell technologies—especially as it pertains to price.
And the device's supposedly unique "fuel-switching" ability? Not unique at all, Jaffe claimed on his Energy Insight blog, in a post titled "Four Things Bloom Energy Forgot to Tell the World":
"Any high-temperature fuel cell should be able to do that. The fact that it's solid oxide and it's primarily ceramic opens up the possibility of making it much more cheaply, but every start-up in the energy field has an expensive product that they claim one day will be cheap. There is no reason to believe that Bloom has the ability to make it that much more cheaply. I'm pretty pessimistic about it."
Indeed. Further...fueling Jaffe's pessimism is the belief that a Bloom Box isn't really all that green if you're comparing it to the way we traditionally get power from the grid. At a cost of $7-$8/watt, he contends, the miracle box is no less expensive than photovoltaics that have been purchased at a rate of 100 kW at a time.
Another miracle energy tech bites the dust? Unless Bloom Energy can curb costs and green things up a bit, the answer for now is "maybe." Unless the unicorns get involved, anyway.
Still confused about fuel cells and the Bloom Box? Be sure to check out our regular Giz Explains column on this very topic! [IDC via CNET]
