Category: Tech news

Onswipe, a startup that helps publishers build websites optimized for iPads and other touchscreen devices, is closing out what sounds like a big year. Content published through the Onswipe platform reached 44 million unique visitors over the course of the year, the company says, and it’s now reaching 10 million active users per month on iOS. (Onswipe is also available on Android and Kindle Fire, but they make a very small contribution to the total.)

To put that into perspective, CEO and co-founder Jason Baptiste calculates that Onswipe’s unique iPad visitors in the US (a number that he isn’t releasing) now exceed the 3.2 million iPad uniques for WordPress and Tumblr combined. He based that on Quantcast’s mobile traffic data for WordPress.com and Tumblr — for example, WordPress has a reported 12.5 million mobile uniques in the US, then when you take into account that only 31 percent of that traffic comes from iOS, and only 37 percent of that comes from the iPad, you get 1.4 million uniques from the iPad.

Most of Onswipe’s visits (72 percent) came from the United States, followed by the United Kingdom (6.6 percent), Canada (4.8 percent), and Australia (2.7 percent). Baptiste also said that 61 percent of readers viewed articles in portrait mode, versus 39 percent in landscape. And the most popular article this year was “How to Jump Start a Car,” followed by this news article about New Jersey Governor Chris Christie.

There’s been a lot of talk about what the tablet means for the future of publishing and journalism, most recently around the shutdown of News Corp’s tablet-focused publication The Daily. Not surprisingly for someone who’s focused on browser-based publishing, Baptiste said The Daily’s growth was hindered by its paywall, and even by requiring people to download an app.

“The iPad just now is hitting its stride, but it’s hard to build a media business on a limited audience,” he said.

Ultimately, Baptiste said The Daily’s failure doesn’t change the fact that “the world is certainly shifting from the desktop.” But the issue for tablet publishers may be as much about building a sustainable business as it is about finding an audience. On that front, Baptiste doesn’t have any compelling numbers to share, though he does say that 2013 will be “a very significant revenue year.”

Until now, he said Onswipe has been focused on growing the publisher network and the audience, but that’s changing. There will be a suite of new ad products next year, allowing Onswipe to tell publishers that it’s not just going to improve their mobile presence, but also bring them “large increases in revenue,” Baptiste said. He also pointed out that the company hired its first chief revenue officer, Jared Hand, back in August.

“Other than the vague threat of an Orwellian dystopia, as a society we don’t really know why surveillance is bad,” writes Washington University Law Professor, Neil Richards [PDF]. Today, the United State Senate reauthorized a controversial Obama-supported surveillance law, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 Amendments Act of 2008 (FISA), which permits intelligence agencies to monitor international communications, sometimes without a warrant and little court oversight.

Civil libertarians are up in arms, but in the face of deadly terrorist threats, does government monitoring actually harm people? Richards’ attempts to argue that brazen government spying does, indeed, have real-world harms, including mass self-censorship and blackmail, and supplies moderately compelling evidence that will appeal to those naturally scared of the government.

Without the Senate’s support, FISA’s powers were set to expire at the end of the year. Fierce FISA critic, Senator Ron Wyden (CrunchGov Grade: A), who released a hold he put on the bill in exchange for limited congressional debate, worries that evidence of government overreach means that FISA could lead to more unnecessary spying. The scope of monitoring and the admitted breaches of the 4th Amendment are themselves shrouded in secrecy. Proponents, such as Representative Lamar Smith, (CrunchGov Grade: F) argue that national security concerns are worth the trade-off.

Under the worst-case scenarios, how could spying from democratic governments actually hurt people in a way that would offset the increased risk of terrorism?

Self-Censorship

“Freedom to think as you will and to speak as you think are means indispensable to the discovery and spread of political truth,” wrote Supreme Court legend, Louis Brandeis. However, “surveillance inclines us to the mainstream and the boring,” writes Richards, who argues that the omnipresent threat of government monitoring makes our discussions risk-averse and devoid of important contentious dialog. Certainly in Soviet-era Russia, the very real threat of being hauled off to the icy gulags undercut democratic debate.

There is some evidence that users self-censor in the presence of a watchful eye. In one experimental study, monitored participants were less likely to engage is neutral topics or discuss issues that were incriminating or critical of their colleagues.

There is no equivalent study of government spying or its effect on mass dialog. Certainly there is no shortage of criticism on President Barack Obama’s Facebook page. But, perhaps the effect only applies to government officials with actual knowledge of government malfeasance. Without good evidence on the chilling effects, we’ll let readers decide whether self-censoring behavior extends to government employees.

Blackmail and Coercion

“Information collected surreptitiously can be used for other purposes, whether blackmail or the discrediting of opponents by revealing embarrassing secrets,” Richards writes. Under constant surveillance, governments invariably pick up unintended bits of incriminating evidence. For instance, Richards points to how FISA-surveillance led to the discovery of evidence that a terrorist suspect murdered his own daughter for dating the wrong boy. “Whether these discoveries are important, incidental, or irrelevant, all of them give
greater power to the watcher.”

Perhaps a more compelling example was how the Federal Food and Drug Administration spied on scientists who alleged that the agency was approving dangerous medical devices. According to ABC, only one of the scientists being monitored still works for the FDA. The others were either fired or their contracts were not renewed. Thus, overactive government spying could potentially be used to snuff out important critics.

Richards makes a valiant attempt, but one would think that the over-the-top rhetoric from the Electronic Frontier Foundation and The American Civil Liberties Union would be supported by some jaw-dropping evidence. Instead, it mostly appeals to those who are naturally afraid of the government, and willing to bet that the worst-case scenarios, even without much evidence, will come true.

Civil libertarians aren’t making an unreasonable bet that the government will overstep its authority, but they’re just as reasonable as the many congressmen who voted to authorize the bill for the sake of saving American lives.

[Image Credit: Flicker user aussiegall]

S3 is Amazon’s cloud storage service for developers, but you can also use it to host static web pages on the cheap. Amazon introduced this feature about a year ago and today, it is making it even easier to run basic sites on S3 with the addition of root domain hosting (using Amazon’s Route 53 DNS service) so users can access your site without specifying the “www” in the address and enhanced redirection functionality.

While using S3 without the rest of Amazon’s web services doesn’t allow you to host any complex sites, S3 can be a good choice for hosting basic sites and images. As there are no monthly subscription fees, you only pay Amazon’s relatively low fees for storage and bandwidth. You also don’t have to worry about updating your content management system and plugins.

As for the new features, setting them up is pretty easy. As Amazon notes, you previously needed to use a proxy server to ensure your visitors could access your site without the ‘www’ address (or use a third-party service like wwwizer). “This introduced additional costs, extra work, and another potential point of failure.” Now, you just create a new S3 bucket without the ‘www’ in the host name and choose the new “redirect all requests to another host name” option. The only semi-complicated thing here is that you also have to set this up in Route 53, but Amazon offers a pretty detailed walkthrough that explains how this works, too.

The new redirection rules, Amazon says, ” can be used to smooth things over when you make changes to the logical structure of your site” or to switch pages from static to dynamic hosting as your site grows.

Overall, these are small changes, but if you are looking for an interesting project for the long weekend, consider setting up a blog on S3 (just like Amazon’s CTO Werner Vogels) and start blogging like a hacker.

Lately, it seems that many mobile apps, upon first launch, are stepping users through multi-screen “walkthroughs” where all the features of the app are demonstrated, painstakingly, one-by-one. Worse still, are those overlays of help screens that appear at start up, with the scrawled handwriting, circles and arrows best left on whiteboards – not in user education material.

That’s not to say that apps don’t need to explain their functions to users. But some are taking things too far. Long, step-by-step tutorials are not what users want to see when launching apps. And to be clear, I’m talking about apps here, not games. Mobile games are a different beast, with a slightly different set of rules.

The question, simply put: if a mobile app includes a “walkthrough,” has it already failed? That’s the premise of an article trending on Hacker News, written by Visual and User Interface Designer Max Rudberg. And like many posts with catchy, linkbaiting titles (“If you see a UI walkthrough, they blew it”) people are reacting viscerally to the headline without fully digesting the meat of the article’s content. For what it’s worth, I think Rudberg has a point, even if he’s over-generalized the situation.

Currently the top comment on the Hacker News post, as per usual, is contrary. “This is utter nonsense,” the commenter rebuts. But I don’t think that it is. Sure, you can always pull out examples of apps that actually do require extensive walkthroughs, or you can hedge and say, well, people learn things differently – some people appreciate and need walkthroughs! Or you can talk about how your mom or dad wouldn’t know how to do anything on a mobile phone without a tutorial. Or how there are different types of apps and different types of walkthroughs. And sure, that’s all true. It’s like everything else in life: the issue is not black or white. There’s nuance here.

But can we talk about walkthroughs possibly heading into overuse territory?

Lets.

The problem, in a nutshell, is that in too many cases with new apps, the existence of the walkthrough speaks to core issues with the design. It can come across as lazy. Anything more than a couple of basic pointers sends a message to users that this app is complex, it’s complicated, and now I need to hold your hand while you learn to use it.

That feels wrong on some level. This is mobile. It’s meant to be simple. Accessible.

Apps are not enterprise software with hundreds of functions. They’re not bloated Office suites with overstuffed ribbons filled with a dizzying array of choices. They’re not even desktop software, requiring complicated installations and configuration procedures that once had users phoning I.T. support for help. They are apps, and the user generally already knows what they’re for before they installed it.

Maybe the user found it featured in a list, but they didn’t install it blindly. They saw the list, read the title and/or description, looked at screenshots and thought to themselves, “hmm, a camera that lets you add filters to your photos! I’m going to install that!”

And if they didn’t come across the app serendipitously, then they actually performed a specific keyword-based search and the app appeared in the search results where they selected it from among dozens of others. Or maybe they installed in after reading about it on the web, or hearing a friend talk about it.

The point is, the user to some extent already knows what the app is for. They’ve got the basics down already. Where do developers think they’re losing them, exactly? It’s not intuitive which button to tap first? Where specific content is found? How to perform a specific task? Does the app have a cold start problem (it’s social, but you have to add friends first)? For many of these challenges, the solution doesn’t have to be a long walkthrough or messy overlay. It can just be a better design. A better layout. A better sign-up flow.

Look, we grew up on a web were we had to click “Next” and “I agree” and where we had to learn to click an “X” to close all those pop-up ads. Walkthroughs often leave users with similar feelings – they’re the cruft that has to be scraped away before you actually get to use the app.

If the developer thinks a walkthough is still in order, then maybe it can be a screen or two and a few words. That’s still a walkthrough, yes, but a far more tolerable one. Or it can be just some intuitive hints that appear during the app’s use.

At the end of the day, walkthroughs, while sometimes unavoidable, are not the best part about using an app. Using the app is the best part about using the app, and getting there as quickly as possible should be developers’ goal.

Screenshots via Archer Group; mobile tuts

I’ve backed an embarrassing number of Kickstarter projects, almost all of them in the hardware/gadget categories, and I’ve been disappointed more than I’ve been delighted. The Slim wallet by Supr however bucks the trend, delivering a front-pocket wallet that finally and truly deserves the honor of actually being carried in that place.

Minneapolis-based Supr Good Co. initially launched the Slim in August, with a funding goal of just $10,000 and an estimated shipping date of September for their minimalist wallet design, which essentially is just an elastic sheath measuring only 3mm thick. The U.S.-made wallet still boasts classic good looks despite its simplicity, however, thanks to a striking contrast-stitched “X” front-and-center where the two ends of the elastic material used in its construction meet.

Because of the wallet’s simplicity, a reviewer like myself doesn’t need to mince words: this is pretty much a perfect slim wallet for those who want just the basics in a lightweight, convenient package. I carry just four cards and some bills, all of which tuck into the Slim snugly in a way that leaves me confident nothing is going to accidentally fall out or go missing. It manages to be slimmer than the Fossil front pocket wallet it replaces, and a lot lighter, too. I’ve also varied the number of cards I’ve had in there over the past week, and so far, the elastic shows no sign of excess stretch or an inability to return to holding fewer cards securely.

Supr missed their original shipping target by a fair margin, but they were very transparent about their reasons for doing so, and they did also eventually deliver a terrific product. The online shop hasn’t officially opened yet, but you can register your interest for the Slim when it does start to ship to the general public. Kickstarter may not have the security of ordering gadgets from established companies, but when it works, it results in some amazing stuff that you aren’t likely to be able to pick up elsewhere.

Sure, it’s not unlike the New York Post to be sensationalist. But in this case it misinterpreted data to suggest Instagram was hit harder by backlash to its terms of service changes than it actually was. Combined with it being a quiet-ish holiday news week, I am taking a story it published today on a 25 percent drop in Instagram users with a little more than a grain of salt.

Basically, it notes that figures from AppData demonstrate that Instagram lost 4 million daily active users — nearly a 25 percent drop to 12.4 million from 16.4 million — between December 19 and December 26. And as the NYP terms it, people are walking away in a “rage against rules.” The Post blames the decline on Instagram’s new, more commercially-minded terms of service — which it rolled back on December 21, i.e., in the middle of its DAU plummet, in response to public outcry.

To balance out that one-sided view, here are some further observations that give a slightly bigger picture about what is going on:

– Yes, AppData notes that Instagram lost 4 million DAUs over the holiday period, as based on Facebook logins via the app. But it’s also seen some gains (according to the same data): weekly active users in that period are up by 1 million (currently at 28.5 million), and monthly active users are up by 1.1 million (currently at 43 million). DAUs also seem to be up a bit since Christmas, and they are now down by only 3.5 million over the last seven days.

– AppData doesn’t show an app’s full user count or even a representative sample. In this case it shows users who connected their Instagram accounts to Facebook and either logged in with their Facebook credentials, searched for their Facebook friends, or shared to Facebook. That leaves out tons of users who use Instagram independently. The decline in Instagram usage may have been more pronounced amongst Facebook-connected users as they may have been exposed to more viral backlash to the TOS change via the news feed.

– There are other photo apps that have seen fluctuations in DAUs and MAUs in the last week. Look at Hipstamatic, or Snapseed, or Flickr, whose well-timed launches made some people wonder whether it could replace Instagram.

– The NYP story compares this to last Thanksgiving, which was rich pickins for Instagram. Then it celebrated record postings as people rushed to snap their turkey, stuffing, and cranberry sauce. But this time around, the Christmas “Poke” effect may be at work:

As Josh pointed out in reference to stories of how another photo app from Facebook, Poke, is slipping after an initial burst of interest, people who would have received new iOS devices will be downloading essential apps this week rather than the second wave of nice-to-have apps. The same could apply to apps like Instagram — not just on iOS but Android as well.

– A week and a half ago, we published some data looking at whether Instagram traffic had dropped off as a result of the removal of preview “Cards” on Twitter. The answer: Yes, referral traffic went down from Twitter, but Instagram traffic overall appeared to be holding up, at least at that point.

In that post, I noted that any decline could have to do with Twitter, but could also be related to the hullabaloo over terms of service; or even a newer version of the app that is getting worse ratings than older versions. The same applies here.

In short, there are a number of reasons for a decline in daily active users at Instagram (some alarming, some seasonal). Yes, it may be that people are voting with their fingers, and if that’s the case it will likely be something that Facebook and Instagram will have to consider as they think of how to make money with the app. But to directly relate it to an already overblown situation smells off.

(And yes, I’ve reached out to Instagram, Kevin Systrom and AppData for further clarification. Happy Holidays.)

Update: Instagram itself has now sent us the following statement:
“This data is inaccurate. We continue to see strong and steady growth in both registered and active users of Instagram.”

[Additional reporting by Josh Constine]

Roamz, a local search startup for web and mobile, is today showing off one of the first implementations of the new Google Maps iOS SDK in its new iPad app, due out after the holidays. The Maps iOS SDK, which was released at the time of the Google Maps iOS app launch earlier this month, allows mobile developers who use maps inside their apps to use Google Maps instead of Apple’s implementation.

The SDK also includes support for both 2D and 3D views, so users can tilt and rotate the map using gestures inside the app. And Roamz has put these 3D maps to clever use. The company, which sources real-time posts from Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare and Instagram to help users find nearby businesses and other places of interest, is using the Google Maps 3D angle and is then layering the social content on top of the buildings.

“Where we want to get to is a ‘Street View’ for social,” explains Roamz’ founder Jonathan Barouch. “You’re walking in New York and you’ll see the social kind of popping out of the buildings. There’s no other 3D mapping that we’re aware of that we could use. We were waiting for this to come out,” he adds.

To be clear, the 3D mapping via Google Maps will launch first in the company’s iPad application before it arrives in the iPhone version. Barouch says that while the iPhone app is more targeted towards helping people find things nearby (generally within a one-mile radius), the iPad app will be more about discovery. The company started off as a tool for serendipitous discovery before shifting its focus earlier this year to user intent. That is, now if a user wants to find some good coffee shops nearby, they can just type that in the Roamz mobile application.

But the iPad app isn’t trying to return Roamz to its “serendipitous discovery” roots – instead, it’s just about exploring a little further out. “It’s more about discovery – for travel. It’s awesome,” says Barouch. “If I’m going to Paris, and I don’t really know what I’m looking for, but I want to collect a bunch of places and things to do, it’s really powerful. It’s not serendipity, it’s [about telling you] these are roughly some of the places you would be interested in and these are some of the reasons.”

Barouch notes that Facebook, too, moved into local search recently with the launch of Nearby. “But I don’t think anyone’s really figured out local yet – everyone’s coming at it from different angles,” he says.

Since the iPad app isn’t yet live, we asked Barouch to put together a little demo so others can also see the Google Maps SDK in action. That video is below.

What can’t the Raspberry Pi do? Well, it definitely can operate as an AirPlay receiver for Apple’s Wi-Fi audio streaming protocol, it turns out. Cambridge engineering student Jordan Burgess managed to convert one of the $25 open computers into an AirPlay receiver along the lines of Apple’s AirPort Express, using open source software, a USB Wi-Fi adapter, an SD card, a micro USB cable and the Pi itself.

The process for setting up the Pi once you have all the hardware ingredients is fairly simple, especially if you’re comfortable working with Terminal and with the basics of installing an operating system onto the Raspberry Pi. Still, this isn’t for users who aren’t comfortable outside of their computer’s standard GUI. But if you’ve got the time and the skills, you can save a fair amount using this version vs. others. Burgess estimates that the total build cost is around £30 ($48 U.S.), vs. $100 for the Apple TV or AirPort Express. Speakers with the tech built-in also cost well in excess of that on average.

There are some caveats, however, and the biggest may turn off audio quality enthusiasts hoping to set some of these up and running in their own homes. Burgess notes that the Raspberry Pi lacks a good digital-to-analog converter (DAC), meaning that you’ll get background noise and distortion when you plug the Pi directly into the 3.5mm output of a set of speakers. A USB sound card is a possible fix for this limitation, however, and some home theater receivers act as DACs if you’re using it as a way to add AirPlay functionality cheaply to your existing living or media room setup.

With a few more refinements to help increase audio quality, this could be a cheap way to help wire an entire house for sound, Sonos-style, so long as you’re already committed to using Apple devices and iTunes.

With over 5 million Twitter followers, UK actor/author Stephen Fry is the closest thing we get to an “Ashton Kutcher”, given that he has a big following and occasionally takes an interest in tech startups (sometimes a financial interest). But his choices are hit and miss. One was a startup which allowed you to put virtual post-it notes on websites… But his picks have improved and recently Yplan, a VC-backed startup with real execution credentials, benefitted from his largesse. Like HotelTonight, YPlan [iTunes link] is a way to book events (like plays, shows and concerts) via iOS mobile with literally a couple of clicks. And it’s going to come in handy for New Year’s Eve and other holiday events in the UK capital.

Founded by Viktoras Jucikas and Rytis Vitkauskas, YPlan provides handpicked London highlights and an ability to then book them, drawing on a team with experience at Time Out, toptable, Songkick and lastminute.com.

The smartphone app has already garnered $1.7 million (£1.06 million) from Wellington Partners and Octopus Investments and is very much part of this new wave of “effortless transactions” on mobile. Taxi apps like Uber and Hailo in London are educating user to the idea of a simple app, with credit card details plugged in, that can literally make your life easier.

In the U.S., there is WillCall, currently only available in SF. It’s a talented, small team and does web/mobile and general ticketing, but tends to focus on gigs and theatre rather than YPlan’s full range of events. There is also ScoreBIG, but it focuses only on sports.

Of course, YPlan’s ‘competitors’ are myriad. Time Out, for one. But the latter is an editorial business, not transactional, and mobile and bookings are an after-thought. Ticketmaster stops selling tickets online 24-48hrs before a show starts, so it’s not set up for the last-minute ticket market which is pretty big in a city like London. It’s also not really a mobile business. And whereas Groupon is focused on 50%+ discounts, their mobile offering has been stillborn.

YPlan’s other backers include Lastminute.com co-founder Brent Hoberman, Sherry Coutu (advisory board member at LinkedIn), Songkick’s Peter Read and Andy Philips of booking.com, Tom Hulme (IDEO), Gi Fernando (Techlightenment) and Robert Linney (Chemical Brothers) and Baltcap, a VC fund directed at the Baltic region.

Kim Dotcom doesn’t do things small. The man behind the Megaupload empire is about to launch his next service dubbed simply Mega. But don’t expect a simple press event in a hotel conference room. Nope, on January 20, 2013, exactly one year after his over-the-top takedown, Dotcom is hosting the Mega launch event at his sprawling New Zealand estate — effectively giving the finger to the RIAA, MPAA, and the shady US Justice Department.

Members of the media who like to be at the press conference of the EPIC Mega launch at the Dotcom Mansion pls register: mega.co.nz/press/

—
Kim Dotcom (@KimDotcom) December 27, 2012

Dotcom has promised to return bigger than ever after a ridiculous show of force involving New Zealand’s special police and the U.S. Justice Department. He has teased parts of the upcoming Mega service several times. It’s unclear if Mega will reach the sheer numbers of its predecessor, Megaupload, but a massive, extravagant launch event is the best way to give the service a pop right out of the gate.

Kim Dotcom’s comfortable lifestyle was revealed in the early hours following the police’s raid. Pics quickly emerged showing Dotcom’s fleet of pricey cars (hello, AMGs) getting hauled from his estate. And yes, in the second pic, those are life size giraffe statues. CNET provided more details, listing the expensive items seized from his house including 16 Mercedes-Benz, a Rolls-Royce Drop Head Coupe, and plenty of top-notch electronic toys. Simply put, Kim Dotcom knows how to live.

And he knows how to grow a service, too.

Before its sudden shutdown, Megaupload was one of the top sites on the Internet, with some reports stating it consumed 4 percent of all Internet traffic. Megaupload was mega popular. Dotcom has promised the new service will build upon the previous version but he stated in a tweet it will be “powered by legality and protected by the law.”

Expect a press conference like no other. You know me. I can't do small.

—
Kim Dotcom (@KimDotcom) December 27, 2012

Mega is set to launch next month on January 20th. Details are still light for the service and its launch event but Dotcom will likely drop more hints and teasers prior to the festivities.

[pic via Wired]

Apple worked closely with Frogdesign during the eighties, creating Apple’s early design language and charting the visual path of Apple computers from the Apple IIc to the Macintosh. Frogdesign founder Hartmut Esslinger’s fingerprints are all over those early, iconic designs, and in a new book called Design Forward, he reveals some concepts for Apple computers and tablets that never made it to market, but that would seem perfectly at home in evolutionary charts depicting the design history of the iPad, iMac and other modern Apple products.

Esslinger’s designs show off a tablet-type device called the “macphone” from 1984, which boasts a corded handset for calling as well as a stylus-based touchscreen for handwritten text entry and a software keyboard, which in some ways resembles the early Newton Apple tablet. Another, the “tablet mac” from 1982, depicts a more simple slate, which can support a corded keyboard for text entry and an external floppy disk drive that’s actually much bulkier than the device itself. These designs show that Apple was thinking about ways to make the computer a tablet long before it introduced the iPad in 2010.

There are also computers inspired by Sony, a company whose industrial design tastes Steve Jobs famously admired, as well as a concept called the “baby mac” from 1985 that has all the hallmarks of later iMacs in a package with a tilting base and low profile keyboard. Some of these concepts are a little more far out, like a two-screen workstation with a tower in the middle, but overall, it’s clear from these designs that Esslinger and Frogdesign didn’t just define the early Apple aesthetic, but also set the stage for later innovations to come.

Click to view slideshow.

Check out the full gallery over at Designboom for more.

RIM responded to Nokia’s request to have its devices removed from sale following a patent decision in the Finnish company’s favor by working out a settlement, and now we’re beginning to get a sense of the specific terms of said arrangement. AllThingsD has uncovered an SEC filing that details RIM’s first lump-sum payments, which amounts to €50 million (or around $65 million). Following that initial exchange, RIM will have to make royalty payments on the sale of each device.

Nokia and RIM announced their new patent license agreement on December 21, sharing only that it would settle all patent litigation between the two telecommunications companies, and that it would include both a one-time payment (the $65 million alluded to in the new SEC documents) and ongoing payments from RIM to Nokia. Specific details were said to be confidential at the time, though Jeffries analyst Peter Misek told AllThingsD in the weeks leading up to the eventual settlement that the royalty rate RIM was likely to pay was somewhere in the $2 to $5 range per handset sold.

If those numbers are accurate, RIM could come close to essentially paying out roughly the same as the $65 million lump sum per year to Nokia in royalty fees. That may seem steep, especially for a beleaguered company like RIM, but it is actually in line with the payment structure Nokia has extracted from companies who settled past patent litigation with broad licensing agreements, including Apple.

Google has been used for many ends, but in the hands of researcher Viridiana Rios, the search engine has become a tool to fight Mexican drug cartels and help the government organize to prevent violence. Rios is a researcher at Harvard University who recently published a paper about a tool she created to track publicly available cartel data and how it can inform Mexican security officials’ work.

Rios is one of a number of Mexicans applying technology in different ways to combat narco violence and insecurity in their country. TechCrunch spoke to Rios, as well as data scientist Diego Valle-Jones and the co-founders of a crowdsourced safety app, Ret.io. Each is working on projects that may not end the drug war but will illuminate and aid parties caught in the middle of it, said University of Texas at El Paso political science professor Tony Payan.

There are three basic ways that people in Mexico are using technology as a result of the drug war and resulting insecurity, Payan tells TechCrunch.

First, there’s data mapping to figure out what cartels are operating in certain territories, for example. Secondly, there’s social media in use that helps people protect themselves from dangerous people or places, he said. Finally, media blackouts about drug-related incidents began occurring when journalists were being killed for writing about them, so technology steps in as a way to circumvent the lack of reporting.

When it comes to data mapping, Rios, the Harvard researcher, said she first felt inspired to create a tool to filter publicly available Google data about drug cartels when she was working as an advisor to the National Security Council in Mexico. One problem Mexican law enforcement faces is not the lack of data, she said, but the overwhelming amounts of it, thus, being able to search and categorize it efficiently is immensely helpful.

“If we are able to track and understand the way [cartels] move from one municipality to another, this is crucial information for the Mexican government to design policies,” she said, noting that her algorithm uncovered some interesting data, such as some places to see different cartels operating in tandem without spikes in violence, and some municipalities where cartels operate that don’t have any drug-related murders.

“That’s very telling for policy, there may be other ways to achieve low violence,” Rios said.

In the social media component, Mario Romero Zavala and José Antonio Bolio co-founded Ret.io three years ago to help everyday people avoid police harassment at checkpoints. Since then, the Twitter-based service has grown to a website and iPhone app, as well as every state in Mexico. Although the service was not set up specifically to fight narcos, Romero Zavala said there are corollary effects, such as shootings and roadblocks, that people are able to avoid because of Ret.io.

While Bolio is willing to admit that, since the website sees more than 100,000 monthly visitors and has more than 27,000 Twitter followers across Mexico, some folks “stay out of trouble” thanks to Ret.io, he’s hesitant to say the service is fighting the drug war.

“Being able to use tools to stay well informed and safe is our responsibility and our right,” Bolio told TechCrunch.

And when it comes to media blackouts, one blogger has handily stepped in to critique the Mexican government’s version of the drug war.

Diego Valle-Jones is a data scientist who blogs about different drug war-related data sets on his website, especially critiquing government-provided data. He said he began his work in 2009 when he realized that there was no accompanying data to match the escalating violence in Mexico. He sees his work as a way to ameliorate the worrisome numbers he ticks off so easily: 96,000 homicides (from 2007 to 2011), deaths of unknown intent at 5,600 in 2011.

“By sharing my data and code everyone benefits,” he said. “Other people who want to conduct research on the drug war don’t have to start from zero.”

Professor Payan is quick to point out the failures of technology in combating something as tangible as a drug war, though. While many creative people are inventing ways to help everyday people protect themselves, it’s part of a larger way in which the world — even the narcos themselves — are communicating using electronic media. But because technology exists outside of direct government control, the Mexican government is more culpable in public eyes. That’s democratic accountability, Payan said.

Even the technologists themselves are wary of the role tech projects can play in allaying violence. Romero Zavala called technology the “wrong place” to look for a solution to the war on drugs. And Valle-Jones agreed, noting that although social media has been a great solution to media blackouts, there are serious tech-adoption barriers in Mexico. Tech is great, but it’s not an easy solution.

“I think it is naive to think that, by itself, technology can solve the drug war,” he said.

[Image via Ms. Phoenix]

The patents war between Samsung Electronics and Ericsson rolls on. The Korean electronics company has announced that it filed a complaint last week against the Swedish telecom manufacturer with the U.S. International Trade Commission, requesting a U.S. import and sales on some Ericsson products. This latest action comes one month after Ericsson sued Samsung in the U.S. for patent infringement,and requested an ITC U.S. import ban on Samsung products.

The complaint was filed last Friday, according to Samsung. The company said in a statement that “we have sought to negotiate with Ericsson in good faith. However, Ericsson has proven unwilling to continue such negotiations by making unreasonable claims, which it is now trying to enforce in court.”

Last month’s lawsuit by Ericsson against Samsung followed almost two years of negotiations to renew a FRAND (an acronym for “fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory”) patent licensing agreement between the two companies. Twenty-four patents were involved in the ligitation and Ericsson said at the time that “the dispute concerns both Ericsson’s patented technology that is essential to several telecommunications and networking standards used by Samsung’s products as well as other of Ericsson’s patented inventions that are frequently implemented in wireless and consumer electronics products.”

Ericsson added that after Samsung licensed the patents in 2001 and 2007 the Swedish company extended an offer to renew the license for a third time, but Samsung refused to agree to the terms. In response, Samsung complained that the royalty rates Ericsson asked for the patents were “excessive.”

Ericsson’s profitability has taken a big hit this year, forcing it to rely increasingly on its patents for income. As noted on Foss Patents:

“While the two companies are no longer competing in the wireless gadgets market, Samsung is now also building a telecommunications infrastructure business. Samsung’s foray into Ericsson’s market is much less talked about than its Galaxy phones and tablets, but it’s starting to show results. For example, in August 2012, Samsung announced an LTE infrastructure deal with a UK carrier named Three, which it described as its “first commercial mobile network roll-out in Europe”, Ericsson’s home continent. I’m sure that at this point no one in the industry would underestimate Samsung’s ability to become a significant player, if not the leader, in a new segment of the overall market for telecommunications hardware. This certainly adds a more strategic dimension to the Ericsson-Samsung dispute.”

Google Now may be one of Google’s most underrated new products of 2012, but I think it will turn out to be Google’s killer mobile product in the long run. It’s the one tool that brings together virtually everything Google knows about you and where you are and then turn all of this information into a useful dashboard on your phone. No other Google product (with the possible exception of some of its advertising services) draws up such a wealth of data about you.

Chances are, you are already familiar with what Google Now looks like from a user’s perspective, but here’s a quick primer for those who are not: Google Now is a standard feature of Android Jelly Bean and up. It’s an easily accessible screen that shows you information about your daily commute (because it learns where you go every day and makes an educated guess as to where ‘home’ and ‘work’ are for you), appointments, local weather, upcoming flight and hotel reservations (assuming you give it access to scan your Gmail account) and how your favorite team did last night (it learns that from your search behavior). It also notices when you are not at home and shows you how long it’ll take you to get back to your house, or, if you are travelling, presents you with a list of nearby attractions you may be interested in, the value of the local currency, the time back home and easy access to Google Translate.

Google added a bit of functionality to Now over the last few months, but this is really just the beginning. In the long run, I think, Google Now has the potential to become the central hub for almost everything you do on an Android device (and it looks like Google is bringing Now to the browser, too). Nowhere else does Google bring all of its knowledge about you and the world around you together as concisely as with Google Now. The idea here, Google said when it introduced Now, is to search on your behalf before you even know what you want and to show you relevant information about the world around you that would otherwise take quite a while to find and would usually mean using a number of different apps or searches to find.

All of that is pretty interesting – or very creepy, depending on how you look at it – but it only scratches the surface of Google’s vision of what mobile computing could look like in the coming years. With Project Glass, the company has laid this vision out at the beginning of the year and if all goes well, the first “Explorer” editions of Google Glass should find their way to third-party developers in early 2013.

So what’s the connections with Google Now? Project Glass is essentially Google Now plus augmented reality and wearable computing. Out of all of the Google Glass features you see in the video above, the only really important one that isn’t implemented in Google Now yet is location sharing with your friends. That’s obviously not a major technical problem anymore, but my feeling is Google is holding back from adding something like this to Now for the time being to avoid making users feel queasy about the privacy implications of the service.

Beyond Google Now, the company also recently launched projects like Field Trip and the conspiracy-themed augmented-reality game Ingress. Both of these projects came out of the company’s Niantic Labs and would, of course, work great on Google Glass, too.

Of course, the only feature of Glass we’ve really seen in action so far is its ability to take videos and photos, but the vision is clearly larger than this – and the key features of Google’s goggles will surely resemble Google Now in some form or another.