Facebook’s face recognition strategy may be just the ticket
Facebook has started rolling out face-recognition technology into its services. As you are notified that you may be in a picture rather than automatically tagged, it seems they’ve launched it in a reasonable way. As seems to happen for any change to Facebook, people are up in arms about it1. Tim O’Reilly makes a great point:
When it comes to privacy, putting our head in the sand about what’s already possible with data mining and machine learning (and what will become even more possible with every passing year) is short-sighted. Unless we’re prepared to ban face recognition technology outright, having it available in consumer-facing services is a good way to get society to face up to the way we live now. Then the real work begins, to ask what new social norms we need to establish for the world as it is, rather than as it used to be.
Apple Reverses Course On In-App Subscriptions
Big news for newspaper, magazine and other publishers. I’m sure there’s been some interesting discussions between Apple and the big publishers on this.
Apple has quietly changed its guidelines on the pricing of In-App Subscriptions on the App Store. There are no longer any requirements that a subscription be the “same price or less than it is offered outside the app”. There are no longer any guidelines about price at all. Apple also removed the requirement that external subscriptions must be also offered as an in-app purchase.
Going through the whole list, surprisingly few really. But oh so bad.
Full-screen Dashboard: Dashboard now behaves like a full-screen app, always available to the left of your desktop, so all your widgets are just a swipe away.
Big, ugly widgets—one of my least favourite features of any operating system—move out of their hotkey ghetto. I hope you can turn this off, or it’ll be even more annoying than the iPhone’s omnipresent Spotlight screen.
WorldWideWeb wide-area hypertext app available
From the newsgroup archives. On Tuesday, 20th August 1991 at 7am, Tim Berners-Lee announces the world wide web in a typically understated yet slightly hyperbolic fashion.
This project is experimental and of course comes without any warranty whatsoever. However, it could start a revolution in information access. We are currently using WWW for user support at CERN. We would be very interested in comments from anyone trying WWW, and especially those making other data available, as part of a truly world-wide web.
Groupon’s Business is Decaying in its Established Markets
With GroupOn’s IPO fast approaching, it’s worth considering whether they are a wise investment.
The following is an in-depth analysis of Groupon’s business in one of its oldest markets, Boston, by the folks at daily deal aggregator Yipit.
The entire piece is worth reading, but for the TL;DR crowd, here is the breakdown. Groupon’s costs to acquire customers is skyrocketing, while its revenue per customer is plummeting. Along with shrinking margins and a lower number of Groupon’s sold per deal, Yipit sees serious warning signs in the company’s financials.