Stories I Found Of Interest (weekly)

• Legendary Guitar Maker C. F. Martin & Co. Expands DNA Marking to Guitar Strings and Protects Brand With Botanical DNA - Yahoo! Finance

  • Botanical DNA can also be used in combination with wireless tracking technologies such as RFID as a way to ensure that those devices are not copied or tampered with. As guitars are botanically DNA-marked in quantity, forensic authentication by our labs, both as a quality control measure and also testing of products already in the field, can prove in time to be a strong anti-counterfeiting platform.

• Reader

  • In a blog post, Robert Scoble said while Samsung will take a big PR hit and lose $1 billion, it was worth it to copy Apple because it vaulted the company ahead of other smartphone rivals. Samsung also sells an array of products that Apple doesn’t and setting up the comparison with Apple worked out well for the entire company, Scoble said.

     

    “It only cost $1 billion to become the #2 most profitable mobile company. Remember how much Microsoft paid for Skype? $8 billion. So, for 1/8th of a Skype Samsung took RIM’s place and kicked HTC’s behind…I bet that RIM wishes it had copied the iPhone a lot sooner than it did. So does Nokia, I bet. Samsung is a much healthier company than any of those BECAUSE it copied the iPhone,” he wrote.

     

  • “The PR upside is that now people associate Samsung’s phone at the same competitive set as Apple’s. I just did a Google search for “Apple phone” and there are multiple Samsung links on the second half of the page. PR win: Any phone Samsung launches will be super hyped — and compared to Apple,” he wrote

• Samsung to fight court ruling in Apple patent dispute - CNN.com

  • Samsung said the verdict should be viewed "as a loss for the American consumer."

  • It will lead to fewer choices, less innovation, and potentially higher prices," the company said in a statement. "It is unfortunate that patent law can be manipulated to give one company a monopoly over rectangles with rounded corners, or technology that is being improved every day by Samsung and other companies.

     

    "Consumers have the right to choices, and they know what they are buying when they purchase Samsung products. This is not the final word in this case or in battles being waged in courts and tribunals around the world, some of which have already rejected many of Apple's claims. Samsung will continue to innovate and offer choices for the consumer."

• Calypso Wireless (fka CLYW): New Fed Court Info. NOTICE of Hearing:Markman Hearing

  • New Fed Court Info. NOTICE of Hearing:Markman Hearing RESET for 9/10/2012 09:00 AM in Mag Ctrm (Marshall) before Magistrate Judge Roy S Payne. (jml) (Entered: 08/24/2012)So we're back to 9am. still same date

• Mitt Romney: What I Learned at Bain Capital - WSJ.com

  • My presidency would make it easier for entrepreneurs and small businesses to get the investment dollars they need to grow, by reducing and simplifying taxes; replacing Obamacare with real health-care reform that contains costs and improves care; and by stemming the flood of new regulations that are tying small businesses in knots
  • Bain Capital helped build a new steel company, Steel Dynamics, which has grown into one of the largest steel producers in America today, holding its own against Chinese producers. The key to its success? State-of-the-art new technology.
  • Here are two lessons from the Steel Dynamics story: First, innovation is essential to the competitiveness of U.S. manufacturing. We are the most innovative, entrepreneurial nation in the world. To maintain that lead, we must give people the skills to succeed.

• 'Wiki Weapon Project' Aims To Create A Gun Anyone Can 3D-Print At Home - Forbes

  • Earlier this month, Wilson and a small group of friends who call themselves “Defense Distributed” launched an initiative they’ve dubbed the “ Wiki Weapon Project.” They’re seeking to raise $20,000 to design and release blueprints for a plastic gun anyone can create with an open-source 3D printer known as the RepRap that can be bought for less than $1,000.

• How Big Is Facebook’s Data? 2.5 Billion Pieces Of Content And 500+ Terabytes Ingested Every Day | TechCrunch

  • Facebook revealed some big, big stats on big data to a few reporters at its HQ today, including that its system processes 2.5 billion pieces of content and 500+ terabytes of data each day. It’s pulling in 2.7 billion Like actions and 300 million photos per day, and it scans roughly 105 terabytes of data each half hour.
  • VP of Engineering Jay Parikh explained why this is so important to Facebook: “Big data really is about having insights and making an impact on your business. If you aren’t taking advantage of the data you’re collecting, then you just have a pile of data, you don’t have big data.” By processing data within minutes, Facebook can rollout out new products, understand user reactions, and modify designs in near real-time

• Destiny Media Announces Public Prototype of Disruptive Streaming Video Technology - MarketWatch

  • By contrast, Clipstream® content is only  encoded once, eliminating transcoding altogethe

• PayPal Trumps Square's Deal With Starbucks by Partnering With Discover - Tricia Duryee - Commerce - AllThingsD

  • Under a new partnership being announced with Discover, PayPal is super-sizing the number of U.S. merchant locations it will be accepted at — more than seven million.
  • In ranking the two deals, Ken Paterson, VP of Research at Mercator Advisory Group, says he would guess that PayPal’s deal is potentially larger. ”It could bring PayPal to the majority of card-accepting merchants across the country

• Intellectual Ventures spins out satellite broadband antenna company, with Bill Gates as investor - GeekWire

  • Bill Gates is among the investors putting a total of $12 million into a new Seattle-area company, Kymeta, that plans to produce high-tech antennas to make it easier to establish a broadband connection between satellites and moving vehicles such as cars, airplanes and boats.

• Destiny Media Announces Public Prototype of Disruptive Streaming Video Technology - Yahoo! Finance

  • new disruptive video technology is available to view at http://www.dsny.com/g2 .
  • Clipstream® G2 is a new cross platform streaming video format which will play directly, without a player plug-in, on smart phones, desktop and laptop computers, tablets, e-readers and any other device with a standards compliant browser.  Once encoded into G2, the files and web page code are uploaded onto any brand of web server. This simple, standards based approach makes it easier to protect and secure content, enables nearly 100% of the viewers to stream the video and reaches many times as many viewers with the same infrastructure and bandwidth as other solutions
  • By contrast, Clipstream® content is only encoded once, eliminating transcoding altogether.
  • This recycling of streams can have a tremendous impact on cost and reliability.  In 2012, Accustream research estimated that $3 billion per year is spent on outsourcing hosting to content delivery networks. 

• HTML5: Don't Believe the Hype Cycle

  • Every company that makes a browser has been hard at work to support HTML5 capabilities. That includes Google Chrome, Apple Safari, Microsoft Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox as well as smaller browser makers like Dolphin and Opera. Facebook has become a big supporter of HTML5

• Mobile phone companies can predict future movements of users by building a profile of their lifestyle | Mail Online

  • Scientists have found a way of predicting an individual's future movements by analysing information their mobile phone
  • They compared data from one individual and their closest social network to  predict a person’s future location based on places and areas visited in  the past and the frequency of contact between those studied,
  • In terms of marketing it means that advertising agencies will be able to target individuals with personalised advertisements using information about where the person has been and where he or she might be going.

• Market Currents - Real-time stock market news updates - Seeking Alpha

  •   Doctors might soon be "prescribing" smartphone apps as well as pills, with insurance companies already demonstrating a willingness to pick up the tab. A handful of apps even have FDA approval as medical devices, including DiabetesManager system from WellDoc and an ultrasound product from MobiSante

• Disruptions: The Next Wave for the Wristwatch - NYTimes.com

  • Companies like Apple, Nike and Sony, along with dozens of start-ups, hope to strap a device on your wrist.
  • The new wrist devices won’t replace smartphones, but rather connect to them. Most will continue the basic task of telling the time, while eliminating the need to dig a smartphone out of your pocket or purse.
  • It is the extension of the phone that is appealing. “The wrist becomes a remote screen where you now have the ability to control your phone with a number of different applications,

• Niall Ferguson on Why Barack Obama Needs to Go - Newsweek and The Daily Beast

  • Meanwhile, since 2008, a staggering 3.6 million Americans have been added to Social Security’s disability insurance program. This is one of many ways unemployment is being concealed
  • Only in the Obama Administration......can we have the two people most responsible for our tax code, Timothy Geithner, the head of the Treasury Department and Charles Rangel who once ran the Ways and Means Committee, BOTH turn out to be tax cheats who are in favor of higher taxes.
  • Which begs the question...are YOU a Maker or a Taker?

• Merchants and Shoppers Sour on Daily Deal Sites Like Groupon - NYTimes.com

  • In the last six months of 2011, 798 daily deal sites shut down, according to Daily Deal Media, which researches the industry
  • It devalues your product,

• Payment Data Is More Valuable Than Payment Fees | TechCrunch

  • But a broader opportunity exists: using the data of payments to build a more valuable, more defensible business model, one not dependent on fees. The result will revolutionize offline commerce and online advertising.
  • But basic “acceptance of credit cards” is becoming a commodity where prices will keep going down
  • It comes down to something rather simple: Connecting the bank accounts of buyers and sellers will never be as valuable nor defensible as connecting buyers and sellers.
  • In an increasingly cashless society, the answer is pretty clear: the payment infrastructure. Tracking that purchase back to the originating source (Google? Yelp? Patch? etc) is known as “closing the loop” and will revolutionize offline commerce and advertising alike.

• Google Files New Patent Lawsuit Against Apple, Seeks To Block iPhone, iPad & Mac Imports To U.S. | TechCrunch

  • Google’s Motorola unit just filed a new patent-infringement lawsuit against Apple with the U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC) in Washington. According to this report, Motorola’s complaint seeks to block Apple from importing the iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch and “various Apple computers.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.