Edited by T. Trent Gegax & Woody Leonhard | September 5, 2013 06:00 PDT | 09:00 EDT | 13:00 UTC
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>> WRIST WRAP: Hands-on with Samsung's Galaxy Gear smartwatch, by Caitlin McGarry: "Samsung's smartwatch sounds amazing and looks amazing -- on paper. In the flesh, the Galaxy Gear is a seriously limited gadget that's tethered to a phone and/or tablet that no one owns yet. So much for innovation." TechHive (video starts automatically)
>>>> REVIEW by Sam Grobart: "There is one thing the Gear doesn't seem to have: a purpose. This is true for all smartwatches, which tend to be liked more in theory than in practice." Bloomberg Businessweek
>>>> Qualcomm to ship Toq smartwatch with Mirasol display in Q4, by Agam Shah: "Qualcomm on Wednesday announced its own smartwatch that will have a low-power Mirasol display and be compatible with Android mobile devices...Toq will have a color capacitive touchscreen display, and offer 'days' of battery life." InfoWorld
>>>>Smartwatches are still too dumb, by Josh Ong TNW
>> DEPT OF PYRRHIC VICTORIES: Microsoft wins patent trial against Motorola, awarded $14 million, by Sean Hollister: "[Motorola] failed to comply with fair and reasonable licensing terms when negotiating with Microsoft over the Wi-Fi and H.264 intellectual property. The jury has decided to award $14 million in damages to Microsoft, all of which are related to an injunction against Microsoft's products in Germany." The Verge
** Gartner: Mobility's Impact on Remote Access: Organizations need a strategy for enabling productivity while employees are mobile. Read the free Gartner report to learn why a mix of secure wired, wireless, VPN and VDI technologies is needed to support new use cases for remote and mobile access. Download the report.
>> M&A MADNESS: The inside story of Microsoft's Nokia deal, by Ina Fried: "Ballmer and Smith were walking back to their conference room together. But, in just a moment, he was gone and there was a loud scream, the kind of yell that only comes from the uncommonly strong lungs of the voluble Microsoft leader. The roar startled the Nokia team, who figured that Ballmer had reacted particularly negatively to one of their proposals, while those in Microsoft's conference room had no idea what was going on." AllThingsD
>>>> A bloody Ballmer and stalled discussions on the long road to a Nokia deal, by Nick Wingfield: "Mr. Ballmer and Brad Smith, Microsoft's general counsel, were walking across the law firm's lobby, when Mr. Ballmer -- absorbed in reading a document from Nokia related to the deal -- tripped on a glass coffee table. Letting out a loud shriek, Mr. Ballmer fell to floor, hit his head and began bleeding above his eyebrow. Executives from Nokia sequestered in a conference room elsewhere in the offices were baffled by the sound, wondering whether Mr. Ballmer was reacting badly to a counter-proposal they had made." Same source squealed twice. NY Times
>>>> "It was seemingly Nokia's mapping service which was the single biggest holdup in the deal. That shows just how far the handset business has fallen. 'Leave the maps, take the handsets.'" MG Siegler
>>>> "It's clear that [the brand] 'Nokia' won't be used in future Lumia devices. In fact, it's not even clear that 'Lumia' will be used either." Windows Phone Central
>> JAVA JINX: Oracle's Java security fails, by Brian Krebs: "Faced with an onslaught of malware attacks that leverage vulnerabilities and design weaknesses in Java, Oracle Corp. recently tweaked things so that Java now warns users about the security risks of running Java content. But new research suggests that the integrity and accuracy of these warning messages can be subverted easily in any number of ways, and that Oracle's new security scheme actually punishes Java application developers who adhere to it." Krebs on Security
>>>> Java sandbox improperly allows access to any photo on your computer: Working exploit via Jerry Jongerius, Duckware
>> STAT DU JOUR: Smartphone shipments to hit 1B -- up 40% -- in 2013, by Matt Hamblen: "Sub-$200 smartphones and robust sales of smartphones in emerging countries are driving a rebound in the worldwide mobile phone market this year, IDC said Wednesday. Overall mobile phone growth was flat at 1.2% in 2012, but should grow by 7.3% in 2013, IDC forecast.... Smartphone shipments will reach 1 billion in all of 2013 for the first time, up 40% over 2012. Overall mobile phone shipments should reach 1.8 billion in 2013." Computerworld
>> CALLING THE TOP: Usmanov's Mail.ru sells rest of Facebook stake, by Ilya Khrennikov: "Billionaire Alisher Usmanov reduced his holding in Facebook Inc. (FB) as his Russian Internet company sold a stake for more than $525 million, taking advantage of a 57 percent jump in the stock's price this year." Bloomberg
>> DEMOTIVATIONAL POSTER: US-owned iPhone factory accused of labor abuses in China, by Amar Toor: "China Labor Watch (CLW) today released another excoriating report on working conditions at an Apple supplier in China, taking aim at a US-owned company that is reportedly manufacturing the rumored 'low-cost' iPhone. CLW's report, published Thursday, cites several 'ethical and legal labor violations' at a factory owned by Jabil Circuit, a relatively little-known company based in St. Petersburg, Florida." The Verge
>> MONEY TROUBLE: 'Hash Hunters' Web service cracks password hashes for bitcoins, by Jeremy Kirk: "Large data breaches over the years have yielded millions of hashes, many of which have been converted to their original password... The highest reward posted on Hash Hunters is 1.585 Bitcoins for an MD5 hash, which would be about $209." PCWorld
>> NOT THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS: Topsy lets you search every tweet ever sent, by Ellis Hamburger: "Social analytics firm Topsy today announced the launch of its new search engine for tweets. The company claims to have indexed every one of the 425 billion tweets sent since Twitter launched in 2006, so it's simple to instantly trace the origins of #FollowFridays, or check out the public's reaction to Obama's election." The Verge
>> SAVING FACE: Privacy groups ask FTC to oppose Facebook's policy changes, by John Ribeiro: "Six privacy groups have asked the U.S. Federal Trade Commission to strike down proposed changes to Facebook's policies, as they violate a 2011 settlement with the agency over user privacy. 'The changes will allow Facebook to routinely use the images and names of Facebook users for commercial advertising without consent,' the groups wrote." PC World
>> BIG PICTURE: Why cards are the future of the Web, by Paul Adams: "We are currently witnessing a re-architecture of the web, away from pages and destinations, towards completely personalised experiences built on an aggregation of many individual pieces of content. Content being broken down into individual components and re-aggregated is the result of the rise of mobile technologies, billions of screens of all shapes and sizes, and unprecedented access to data from all kinds of sources through APIs and SDKs." Inside Intercom
>> CACHE WARFARE: Azure and AWS get updated caching services, by Joab Jackson: "The competition between Microsoft's Windows Azure and AWS (Amazon Web Services) has moved to the caching layer: Both companies updated their caching services this week. Caching services can improve response times for applications by delivering frequently consulted data and functionality from a server's working memory, or RAM, without calling it up from a slower hard drive." InfoWorld
>> MONEY SHOT: SwiftKey, the clairvoyant keyboard, raises $17.6 million, by Karsten Strauss: "The SwiftKey algorithm predicts your next words, corrects spelling, traces your finger placement on the screen, detects what language you are typing and snaps to it (60 languages are available), and learns a user's individual texting quirks. For instance, if you tend to hit the key just to the left of the one you want to, the app will learn that about you." Forbes
>> HARDWARE HYPE: Samsung announces the Galaxy Note 10.1 tablet, by Florence Ion TechHive
>>>> Samsung announces another huge phone with the Galaxy Note 3 TechHive
>> #FLAIL: Toshiba's 8-inch Windows 8.1 tablet is another weak attempt to match the iPad mini, by Tom Warren: The Verge
>> CLOUD KIT: How to run your own mail server, VPN, "cloud" GitHub
>> YAWN: Yahoo's new logo Kathy Savitt
>> DEPARTURE LOUNGE: Requiem for C Uncle Bob (Martin)
>> L'SHANAH TOVAH 5774: Sound the shofar, we're on AishVideo
>> TWEET O' THE DAY: "If global warming causes sealevels to rise, do we have to start doing all calculations with floating points?" @mikko
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FEED ME, SEYMOUR: Comments? Questions? Tips? Shoot mail to Trent or Woody. Follow @gegax or @woodyleonhard.
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