Quick links

Some of what has caught my attention recently:

• Apple captured "a remarkable 50% value share of estimated Q1/11 handset industry operating profits among the top 8 OEMs with only 4.9% global handset unit market share." ([1]). The iPhone generates 50% of Apple's revenue and even more of their profits. To a large extent, the company is the iPhone company. ([2] [3]) But, Gartner predicts iPhone market share will peak in 2011. ([4])
  
  
• Researchers find bugs in payment systems, order free stuff from Buy.com and JR.com. Disturbing that, when they contacted Buy.com to report the problem, Buy.com's accounting systems had the invoice as fully paid even though they never received the cash. ([1])
  
  
• Eric Schmidt says, "The story of innovation has not changed. It has always been a small team of people who have a new idea, typically not understood by people around them and their executives." ([1])
  
  
• Netflix randomly kills machines in its cluster all the time, just to make sure Netflix won't go down when something real kills their machines. Best part, they call this "The Chaos Monkey". ([1] [2])
  
  
• Hello, Amazon, could I borrow 1,250 of your computers for 8 hours? ([1])
  
  
• Felix Salmon says, "Eventually ... ad-serving algorithms will stop being dumb things based on keyword searches, and will start being able to construct a much more well-rounded idea of who we are and what kind of advertising we're likely to be interested in. At that point ... they probably won't feel nearly as creepy or intrusive as they do now. But for the time being, a lot of people are going to continue to get freaked out by these ads, and are going to think that the answer is greater 'online privacy'. When I'm not really convinced that's the problem at all." ([1])
  
  
• Not sure which part of this story I'm more amazed by, that Google offered $10B for Twitter or that Twitter rejected $10B as not enough. ([1])
  
  
• Apple may be crowdsourcing maps using GPS trail data. GPS trails can also be used for local recommendations, route planning, personalized recommendations, and highly targeted deals, coupons, and ads. ([1] [2] [3])
  
  
• Management reorg at Google. Looks like it knocks back the influence of the PMs to me, but your interpretation may differ. ([1] [2])
  
  
• If you use Google Chrome and go to google.com, you're using SPDY to talk to Google's web servers, not HTTP. Aggressive of Google and very cool. ([1] [2])
  
  
• Shopping search engines (like product and travel) should look for good deals in their databases and then help people find good deals ([1])
  
  
• When Apple's MobileMe execs started talking about what the poorly reviewed MobileMe was really supposed to do, Steve Jobs demanded, "So why the f*** doesn't it do that?", then dismissed the executives in charge and appointed new MobileMe leaders. ([1] [2])