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Yo. It seems so simple. So mindless. It’s only slightly less boring than “Hey” or “Hi”, if only because of some perceived aggression or excitement attached to it. But Yo is anything but simple. If you haven’t been following along on Twitter, Yo is the hottest new app that will leave you scratching your head. The entire premise of the app is to send other… Read More
A bipartisan group of Congress members have proposed two amendments to the Fiscal Year 2015 Department of Defense Appropriations Act aimed at reining in government surveillance. The first amendment would ban the funding of government to either demand or request a “backdoor” into products built by technology companies. The second would ban the funding of searches of the data of… Read More 
In a magnificent show of technical ineptitude, today the U.S. Marshals revealed the identities of many anonymous bidders in its $18 million seized Silk Road Bitcoin auction by CC’ing them on an email thread. When one asked a question, the response was sent to 40 of the bidders, many whose names were attached or easily identifiable from their addresses, negating the whole point of the… Read More 
With the introduction of the Firefly and Dynamic Perspective SDKs, mobile app developers who have grown tired of iterating on activities like messaging, photo-sharing, socializing and more now have new ways to differentiate themselves from a growing number of app store competitors. With Amazon’s newly opened up visual recognition technology, developers will not only be able to make… Read More 
What can a company that proposes using drones to deliver goods instantaneously do to impress?
Amazon tried hard with its Fire phone, the first smartphone ever from the e-commerce giant. It sort of succeeds, but the best thing about the phone is the vision of what it could become after a few rounds of refinements and tweaks.
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Amazon’s new Fire smartphone includes a much-discussed feature that enhances depth perception, which makes the image on the screen appear nearly (but not quite) three-dimensional.
Chief Executive Jeff Bezos called the feature “dynamic perspective,” which makes images on a map appear to pop off the screen. He showed off an image of the Empire State Building emerging off a grid. Similarly, the phone produced pop-up-book-like versions of images of a rain forest and other pictures.
Amazon has been working on this technology for four years, he said. The biggest challenge was figuring out the position of the user's head to determine how to project depth on an on-screen image. It solved this problem by embedding four cameras around the edges of the camera's screen and providing illumination with infrared lights, which are capable of working in the dark without blinding the user.
"At the end of all this, we got really good at tracking faces, finding heads," Bezos said.
The Fire smartphone also lets customers use small gestures to control the image on screen — for instance, tilting up or down to scroll a newspaper article (Bezos used a Washington Post article — “I’m not sure why I like this publication,” he quipped). For online shoppers, tilting the phone will cause the image to enlarge on screen — or tilting back will cause it to fade away.
The ability to control the phone by tilting also helped change the “app grid” — the interface people use to access their apps. The apps can be scrolled left to right. Underneath the 3D icon for, say, e-mail, there is a list of the incoming correspondence.
Amazon’s new Fire smartphone will feature advanced image recognition that can use a photo to access media, or look up information about items in the physical world.
This feature is among the ways Amazon is seeking to differentiate its late-to-the-game smartphone from a sea of others in a world dominated by Apple, Google and Samsung. Research firm IDC projected that some 1.2 billion new devices will be shipped this year.
At the Seattle unveiling, Chief Executive Jeff Bezos demonstrated how quickly the feature, dubbed “Firefly,” works. He showed how photos of the cover of a book, a DVD and a bar code were turned into a link to a downloadable song and an episode of the HBO series, “Game of Thrones.” It can also be used to read phone numbers off a sign.
“Firefly recognizes over 100 million items,” Bezos said onstage.
More on Amazon’s Fire Smartphone
The Obama administration dubbed Wednesday as "National Day of Making" in honor of the first Maker Faire held on the White House lawn. Attendance was limited but about 30 projects were shown, including a solar-powered park bench (which charges phones) and a 17-foot robotic giraffe.
“The only thing I asked my staff about is why is there an ‘e’ at the end of ‘faire’? Do we all have to get dressed up or what?” President Obama said during the event. “So I'm just warning you, next year, the ‘e’ may be gone.”
Ina Fried
After months of speculation, Amazon Chief Executive Jeff Bezos announced the long-anticipated Fire smartphone.
The device features a 4.7-inch screen, to fit snugly in the hand, a 2.2-gigahertz processor and 2 gigabytes of RAM for storage and image stabilization. But the announcement that generated the most applause at today’s press event in Seattle was unlimited photo storage for Fire smartphone buyers on Amazon’s cloud.
Bezos argues that this device builds on Amazon’s hardware expertise — referencing the Kindle e-reader and the Fire tablet and set-top box — and its Prime ecosystem of content. He said customers have been asking for a phone for years.
“Inside Amazon, we ask a different question,” Bezos said. “We ask how would it be different?”
Amazon wades into a market dominated by Apple and Samsung. Together, these two players command about 46 percent of all mobile phones sold globally last year, according to Yankee Group. The retail giant will seek to differentiate its device through novel features, such as its hands-free scrolling.
Sashkin/Shutterstock
Federal regulators uncovered unexpected Internet congestion during an annual study of download speeds, similar to what some Netflix subscribers have been complaining about in recent months.
Federal Communications Commission officials said they'd release raw data today from broadband tests conducted annually to measure how well Internet providers are offering advertised speeds.
Last week, FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler said the agency has obtained information from Netflix, Comcast and Verizon about their ongoing traffic-related disputes.
FCC officials said they're continuing to gather traffic data about what's happening in the middle mile of the Internet, as broadband providers and content companies exchange traffic. A senior FCC official said the agency hasn't drawn any conclusions from the data collected during the annual study but it is looking into the issue. The agency expects to release more data collected about network congestion issues by the end of the year.
The agency omitted data from users who were experiencing lower-than-expected speeds due to clogged interconnection points because the annual survey is focused on average network performance.
A few people were seeing significant slowdowns, but the "majority of consumers accessing services through the many interconnection points within a service provider's network would likely not be severely impacted by this situation," the agency said in its report.
Other findings from the report:
Actual Download Speeds Are Pretty Close to Advertised
Almost all Internet providers are now providing download speeds that are equal to what they've advertised, the FCC found, saying actual download speeds were about 97 percent of advertised speeds during peak usage hours on average.
However, there was some variation on the consistency of download speeds. Cablevision delivered at least 100 percent of advertised speed to 80 percent of the subscribers who are part of the FCC's measurement panel about 80 percent of the time. But about a third of Internet operators provided only about 60 percent of advertised speed to 80 percent of customers 80 percent of the time.
Cable Internet Speeds Continue to Kill DSL
Download speeds from most Internet providers improved from the previous year, the agency found, except for companies offering DSL.
Frontier's advertised DSL speed was five megabits per second in 2013 while Windstream's was 3 Mbps. Overall, the average advertised Internet speed was 21.2 Mbps in 2013, compared to 15.6 Mbps the year before, the FCC found.
DSL providers are constrained from offering higher Internet speeds because of technological limitations. Qwest/Centurylink was the only DSL provider that increased its download speeds significantly over the year.
Nevertheless, Qwest/Centurylink, Verizon, Frontier and Windstream all failed to provide at least 90 percent of advertised speeds during peak usage hours, the FCC found. A senior FCC official said the companies will be receiving a letter from the agency asking for details about how they plan to improve their service.
Asa Mathat
As promised, we’re posting the full videos of interviews from the recent Code Conference.
A new video of one of the many stellar speakers for the event, which took place three weeks ago in Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif., will go up every day. (You can see a compilation video of the speakers here.)
Today, we give you Dropbox co-founder and CEO Drew Houston, who talked about a lot of things, including the NSA’s surveillance program (where he noted “they don't send a muffin basket” when spying starts), Silicon Valley’s “bro” culture, and how to stay competitive with all the big companies like Google, Apple and Amazon aiming directly at Dropbox’s innovative storage business.
Here’s the full video of the Houston interview with Liz Gannes and Walt Mossberg:
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That Tesla founder Elon Musk has been investing in artificial intelligence research is hardly surprising. But his rationale for making those investments might be. Musk, an early investor in AI firm DeepMind (acquired by Google), recently invested in Vicarious, a company trying to build a “computer that thinks like a person.” He did so not because he’s looking for a big return, but because he worries about killer robots. “I like to just keep an eye on what’s going on with artificial intelligence,” Musk told CNBC. “I think there is potentially a dangerous outcome there … I mean, there have been movies about this, you know, like ‘Terminator.’ … In the movie ‘Terminator’ … they didn’t expect, you know, some sort of Terminator-like outcome. It is sort of like the Monty Python thing: Nobody expects the Spanish inquisition.”
Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer: “Art is advertising and advertising is art.”
T-Mobile CEO John Legere: “Amazon doesn’t know what they just signed up for. Remember the Facebook phone?… When #big (@ATT) and #bigger (@Amazon) get together, the industry feels a whole lot smaller. … Exclusivity sucks for customers. Exclusivity on AT&T sucks for the industry.”
Apple made the iMac a little more affordable Wednesday, adding an entry-level offering to its all-in-one desktop computer line-up. The new machine starts at $1,099 — $200 less than the entry-level model that preceded it. But that downward shift in price comes at a cost — a slower 1.4GHz Intel Core i5 processor, the same chip Apple uses in its MacBook Airs.
BlackBerry users will soon have access to apps like Netflix and Minecraft — without having to sideload them onto their devices. Today, BlackBerry announced plans to license the entire Amazon Appstore for BlackBerry 10 handsets. So when the BlackBerry 10.3 operating system debuts this fall, the 240,000 apps the Amazon Appstore offers for Android-powered phones will be available to BlackBerry users as well. “I do not have to spend time, energy and money [to develop the consumer apps Amazon offers],” BlackBerry CEO John Chen told The Wall Street Journal. “Given I want to financially turn around the company and focus on the enterprise space, this is perfect for us.”
Google has been slapped with another antitrust complaint overseas, this time for using its market dominance to kill off rivals to its Google Play app marketplace. In a complaint lodged with the European Commission, Portuguese app store Aptoide argues that Google has purposely undermined third-party Android app markets. Said Aptoide CEO Paulo Trezentos, “Aptoide is the world's largest independent App Store for Android phones, but we are struggling to grow, even to survive, in the face of Google systematically setting up obstacles for users to install third-party App Stores in the Android platform and blocking competition in their Google Play store.”
Remember the first dot-com bubble, when putative companies would raise money via IPO, then spend the money telling people that they existed? Here we go again: Bitpay, a bitcoin processing company that recently raised $30 million from Richard Branson and Jerry Yang, will spend money attaching itself to a college bowl game. Good-bye, Beef O'Brady's Bowl — hello, Bitcoin St. Petersburg Bowl, at least through 2016.
Kevin Roose, New York: “… When everything is disruptive, nothing is. Which is exactly why it might be time to kill the word disruption altogether.”
Marc Andreessen: “This is probably a good time to say that I don't believe robots will eat all the jobs. … Robots and AI are not nearly as powerful and sophisticated as I think people are starting to fear. … There are enormous gaps between what we want them to do, and what they can do.”
Alex Payne: “You seem to think everyone's worried about robots. But what everyone's worried about is you, Marc. Not just you, but people like you. Robots aren't at the levers of financial and political influence today, but folks like you sure are. People are scared of so much wealth and control being in so few hands.”
Kanye West: “There would have been no Beats deal without the Samsung deal [with JayZ]. It showed the No. 1 company the importance of connecting with culture … Apple was so profound at making great products in great design language. And yet they found themselves culturally susceptible to another brand whose products weren’t necessarily as great at that time. Samsung used culture as a way to get into the conversation. And that’s why the Apple/Beats deal makes sense.”
Brad Stone, Bloomberg Businessweek: “One group at [Amazon's] Lab126 … is working on a device that projects a computer image onto any surface. A second is developing a wireless speaker that responds to voice commands. Apparently there are many more. Lab126 insiders whisper about a credit-card reading device similar to Square, which could help propel Amazon's fledgling payments business, plus a remarkably thin upcoming version of the Kindle Paperwhite, code-named Ice Wine.”
Street Fighter: Church Edition and ArnoldC, a programming language based on the one-liners of Arnold Schwarzenegger.
ClearChannel’s iheartradio has 50 million registered users, not active users as I reported Tuesday.
Thanks for reading. Got a tip or a comment? Reach me at John@recode.net, @johnpaczkowski. Subscribe to the Code/red newsletter here.
The Code Conference was at the center of the tech world last month, with Google’s new driverless cars, Apple’s $3 billion acquisition of Beats and frank discussions with many of the biggest names in tech.
Re/code’s next conference is in October, focused on the world of mobile. It’s our venue for bringing together the rising stars and topics in technology. (You should also catch the Code/Media evening in September in New York.)
YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki, WhatsApp CEO Jan Koum, T-Mobile CEO John Legere and Skype founder Niklas Zennstrom will all be speaking at Code/Mobile.
Today we’re adding to the line-up the co-founders of Instagram, Mike Krieger and Kevin Systrom; YouTube star and entrepreneur Michelle Phan; Motorola Mobility head honcho Rick Osterloh; Rakuten CEO Hiroshi Mikitani; and Virgin America CEO David Cush and Gogo CEO Michael Small.
We expect Code/Mobile to sell out, so if you want to join us, sign up now.
Now let’s talk about how excited we are about this line-up.
Krieger and Systrom, who continue to lead the hugely popular app at Facebook, will make a rare joint appearance to talk about the original mobile-first star, how it has grown and where it is headed.
The Instagram story didn’t end when Facebook neutralized the threat of losing its stronghold in photos. Instagram has only become more relevant; it now has more than 200 million monthly active users who share an average of 60 million photos per day, with 20 billion total photos shared on Instagram as of April.
Meanwhile, as one of the most popular creators on YouTube, Phan’s make-up tutorial videos have been seen more than 1 billion times. She now has her own make-up line, lifestyle video network, beauty blogger conference and book deal.
We’re particularly interested in hearing about Phan’s leap into the intersection of commerce, content and community with Ipsy, a make-up subscription service that is hugely popular with her young fan base.
Next, newly minted Motorola Mobility President and COO Rick Osterloh has a lot on his plate. First off, the handset unit is in the process of transitioning from Google to Lenovo.
Motorola is also still in the midst of an effort to return to past glory. While the smartphone field is crowded and dominated by Samsung and Apple, Motorola has tried to find a niche bringing premium phones at budget prices, most notably with the Moto G and with the recently introduced Moto E smartphones. Moto is also working on the Moto 360, an Android-powered smart watch.
Also joining us is Hiroshi (Mickey) Mikitani, the founder, chairman and CEO of Rakuten, the Japanese e-commerce giant.
Mikitani is a savvy international observer of and participant in technology, having aggressively picked off upstarts from around the world for acquisitions and investments, including video site Viki, messaging app Viber and social discovery site Pinterest.
Last but not least, if there’s anything people like more than surfing and texting on the ground, it’s doing so from the air. Connectivity, once a novelty, is now seen as essential for airline travelers.
With physical limits on bandwidth and social limits on things like talking and Skyping, we’ll talk to Small and Cush, two pioneers in the space, about how they weigh which technologies to support and when.
We'll have more speakers to announce this summer; in the meantime, you can follow the Code/Mobile conversation #codemobile. See you soon.
My mom is a bit of an artist but, unfortunately, I didn’t inherit any of her creative skills. That was made abundantly clear this week when I tested Adobe’s new Ink and Slide digital pen and ruler for the iPad.
This is the first hardware product for Adobe, which is best known for its suite of creative software like Photoshop and InDesign. Available today in the U.S., and sold as a set for $200, Ink and Slide are designed to work with two new apps, Adobe Sketch and Adobe Line. Sketch is made for free-form drawing, while Line allows for more precise line-based drafting. Both are free, but to unlock some of the extra features of the app, you’ll need an Adobe Creative Cloud account, which starts at $50 per month for an individual plan.
To be clear, Adobe Ink and Slide are geared more toward the creative professional and serious artist, rather than the casual doodler. Though I had fun playing with it over the past couple of weeks, I don’t draw enough to want to spend that much money on a stylus and ruler, not to mention the Creative Cloud subscription. If you’re more of a recreational artist, there are definitely cheaper styli and art apps, like ArtRage ($4.99).
[Sorry. This video cannot be displayed in this feed. View your video here.]But I can see Ink and Slide being potentially useful tools for their intended audience. The fine point of the Ink pen offers much more precision than some of the other styli on the market. The guidelines and templates provided by the Slide ruler are incredibly helpful. And the Creative Cloud connection means you can access more colors from Adobe’s Kuler app, copy/paste items from the Clipboard, and share and get feedback from the Behance online portfolio community.
That said, the products also suffer many of the pitfalls of first-generation devices. I experienced some weird behavior when using the Slide. I also thought that the apps weren’t always intuitive, and were somewhat limited in capability. Adobe admits that the world of hardware is new to it, and that this is just the beginning, so you might want to hold out until the next update or model comes out.
The Adobe Ink and Slide currently work with the fourth-generation iPad, iPad Air, iPad mini and iPad mini with Retina display. The accessories almost look like they might have been made by Apple itself, and that’s not by accident.
Knowing that many of its customers use Mac computers, Adobe wanted to create something that would match Apple’s aesthetics, so it partnered with a company called Adonit, which makes other styli for the iPhone and iPad, to work on the design and manufacturing.
Made from aluminum and plastic, Ink has a twisted triangular shape ending in a fine-tip point. There’s a multifunction button near the base of the pen that can be used to power on the device and call up a menu of options in Sketch and Line. At the top is an LED indicator that glows different colors depending on the pen’s status.
I was a bit skeptical about the angular shape, and was afraid that I would constantly hit the button by accident, but that wasn’t the case. The pen was quite comfortable to hold, and felt solid and balanced in my hand.
Meanwhile, the Slide ruler almost looks like a skinnier, longer iPod. It has two “feet” on the bottom, with capacitive touch points built in. So, while you need to connect Ink to your iPad via Bluetooth (a quick and simple process of holding the pen to a specific point in the apps), all you have to do in order to use the Slide is press the ruler to the iPad’s display. A button on top allows you to cycle through the various selection of guidelines you see on the screen.
In the Sketch app, you’ll find a toolbar along the top of the screen that gives you access to your different brushes/pens, colors, Creative Cloud and more. I started off with a simple drawing of Homer Simpson, and then cheated a bit by importing a picture of an orchid I took with the iPad Air’s camera, and tracing the outline with the Ink pen.
The pen is pressure sensitive, so you can press down harder for thicker lines or darker colors. Most of the time, the iPad registered all of the Ink’s strokes, but there were a few occasions that it didn’t. This wasn’t as frustrating as the fact that I couldn’t adjust the width of the brushes or eraser.
There were many times that I wanted to color something in, but the available tips were either too wide and I’d go over the lines, or they were so fine that it would take forever to color everything in.
I had the same problem when trying to erase things, but at least you can undo your last move by swiping two fingers to the left. By holding down three fingers, you can also sweep right or left to move through your entire drawing history for a sketch.
Strangely, there is an option in Line to adjust the width and opacity of your different brushes, but I only found this out through trial and error. Adobe offers a tutorial when you first launch both apps, but it only covers the basics.
In Line, I planned out my dream living room overlooking the ocean, and created a sketch of a skateboarder in the park using some of the built-in stamps. The latter are preloaded outlines of various objects like trees, people and Herman Miller chairs that you can quickly add to your sketches by lining them up with the Slide ruler and then double-tapping the screen.
They added nice touches to my sketches, and using the Slide ruler made it really easy to draw straight lines and circles. But sometimes the guidelines or stamps would disappear off the screen, so I would have to lift and place the ruler down again to resurface them. Also, it’s difficult to add objects near the edge of the screen, and you can’t rotate them, either.
In addition to my testing, I solicited the opinion of a friend, an artist who works for a well-known mobile gaming company. He liked that the Ink pen provided a precision that other styli didn’t, and made it easy to see marks as he made them. However, he agreed that the user interface wasn’t always intuitive. For example, he didn’t realize than an icon that looks like a timer in the color menu would bring up his entire color history. Also, as an artist, he found the tools in Sketch to be very basic.
To be fair, Adobe said it didn’t want to recreate Photoshop or Illustrator with its Sketch and Line apps, and it is exploring adding more features like integration with its desktop apps.
Adobe says the Ink’s battery can handle a full day of drawing, and it comes with a carrying case that doubles as a charger when connected to a power source via microUSB cable. Though this combo accessory is nice, it would be great to have a single carrying case for both the Ink and Slide.
With Ink and Slide, Adobe has built a nice start to offering artists digital tools for creating art on the go. But some improvements to the apps’ UI and additional features could make it better.
