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Boot up: HTC sues Apple, Facebook flashes 'double in first-half revenue to $1.6bn', and more

Plus Asymo looks at why Carol Bartz got the axe, and Twitter renews deal with Bing as China renews Google deal
HTC phones
Android phone maker HTC will 'vigorously fight' a patent claim by Apple. Photograph: Patrick Lin/AFP/Getty Images


Google Hands HTC Patents to Use Against Apple >> Bloomberg

And so it goes on: "Asia's second-biggest smartphone maker, is using nine patents bought from Google Inc. (GOOG) last week to pursue new infringement claims against Apple Inc."

Why Carol Bartz was fired >> Asymco

Customarily astringent analysis: "as Yahoo's traditional raw material has commoditized, so has its user behavior data. The patterns that are emerging from the data are 'unactionable' by advertisers. There is little insight that can be gained from data on patterns of reading generic news. People are differentiated through their reading of niche sites and that data does not reside with Yahoo!
"Thus customers (advertisers) have felt that the product (user behavior from reading licensed content) is commoditized. There is much more value in looking at patterns in Facebook or search. But those rich fields of data are under the control of competitors.
"This is the core problem with Yahoo's business and it's been a problem for a long time. The question for a CEO should be how to fix this. The remedy is not better administration but either a change in the core business or innovation in terms of content sourcing (away from big media and toward blogs and niche media.)"

Yahoo's dying, Jim.

Exclusive: Facebook first-half revenue roughly doubles >> Reuters

Intriguing. Has Facebook been flashing its financials ahead of IPO? Reuters: "Facebook's revenue rose to $1.6 billion in 2011's first half, a source with knowledge of its financials told Reuters.


Golden Cyberfetters: Paul Krugman on Bitcoin >>

"In effect, Bitcoin has created its own private gold standard world, in which the money supply is fixed rather than subject to increase via the printing press."So how's it going? The dollar value of that cybercurrency has fluctuated sharply, but overall it has soared. So buying into Bitcoin has, at least so far, been a good investment."But does that make the experiment a success? Um, no. What we want from a monetary system isn't to make people holding money rich; we want it to facilitate transactions and make the economy as a whole rich. And that's not at all what is happening in Bitcoin."Bear in mind that dollar prices have been relatively stable over the past few years - yes, some deflation in 2008-2009, then some inflation as commodity prices rebounded, but overall consumer prices are only slightly higher than they were three years ago. What that means is that if you measure prices in Bitcoins, they have plunged; the Bitcoin economy has in effect experienced massive deflation."

Windows Phone 7 apps, stats and future >> Tim Anderson's ITWriting

"Justin Angel, a former Microsoft employee who worked on Silverlight, has posted his analysis of the 24,505 apps he found in the Windows Phone 7 marketplace, exploiting a loophole that lets you get the download links. A few highlights:
"o 97% of the apps are not obfuscated, meaning that it is trivial (with easily available tools) to decompile the source.
"o 90% are Silverlight vs 10% XNA. This is not so much an indicator of the popularity of the two frameworks, but more an indicator of how many apps are graphic-rich games rather than some other kind of utility. Of course if you are making a very simple app, Silverlight is easier than XNA, so that may be a factor too.

"o 99% are C# vs 1% Visual Basic and a smattering of F#. A fascinating stat that makes me wonder what is the future of Visual Basic."

Far better than the Silverlight-addled post, which forces its own UI on your browser. Jings.

Twitter renews deal with Bing; Google deal remains MIA >> Search Engine Land

Danny Sullivan: "At the very least, you'd expect Google at this point to relaunch Google Realtime Search with content from Google+ as a replacement. Not being able to search through content on Google's own social network, from a company that specializes in search, is pretty absurd.
"Google Realtime Search wasn't just Twitter search, and the ability to use Google to search through content on other social networks got axed when Google closed it. So bring it back, even if it comes back without Twitter -- and get moving on that Google+ search feature.
"As for Bing, search without Twitter isn't old news. It's old, old news. Bing's had a deal with Twitter since October 2009, and that deal hasn't really seemed to do much to attract visitors over to Bing."

Can anyone think of anything that *would* attract visitors over to Bing, aside from Google's servers all dying? (And even then..)

node knockout heatwave >> The Universe of Discord

"This weekend I took part in node knockout along with Peteris Krumins, David Wee, and Josh Holbrook on team replicants.
"Our entry, heatwave, uses node-heatmap to draw a heatmap over your code in realtime to show the parts that are most active as the code executes.
"Heatwave accomplishes this trick using bunker to add hooks around every expression. When these hooks get called, the heatmap gets updated!"


What the iPad changes >> James Whatley

James Whatley didn't think the iPad had much utility. But he observed his behaviour once he got one.

Motorola Droid Bionic hands on: the good, the bad, and the grainy >> Gizmodo

Brent Rose: "It's the thinnest LTE phone yet. Its curves, angles and tapering minimize extra bulk, and it feels smaller than it is--which it isn't, because it's got a 4.3-inch screen. The back is plastic, but it's too thin for my liking, and I would have preferred metal.
The software side is a mixed bag of "Hey, that's cool!" with "Arrgh, please kill me!" On the cool side it has some robust security features, including onboard and SD storage encryption, remote wipe--why isn't this a standard part of Android yet?--and tons of control for your IT admin. Your office really has no excuse to not to let you use this phone. On the bad side, there is just a ton of bloatware on this. I'm not a fan of the MotoBLUR overlay, even if they're not calling it that anymore. That aside, they cram it will so much extraneous software it's ridiculous. Do you need Citrix or VZ Navigator? No, you probably don't. Can you get rid of it without rooting it? No.... (Oh, by the way kids, the bootloader is locked.)"

Enterprise likes RIM's new BlackBerrys; consumers, not so much >> AllThingsD

"Checks conducted by Canaccord analyst T. Michael Walkley indicate strong initial upgrade sales for RIM's new BlackBerry OS 7 smartphones, particularly the Bold 9900 at Verizon. But demand for it appears to be concentrated among business users.

"'With the Bold 9900 the first compelling new BlackBerry in nearly two years for Verizon customers, we were encouraged that our checks indicated Verizon's large BlackBerry enterprise base appears to have strong demand for the first BlackBerry OS 7 device on Verizon's network,' Walkley writes.

Yay BlackBerry!

"'However, our more consumer-centric retail store checks indicated smartphone consumers continue to overwhelmingly choose the iPhone 4 or new Android smartphones versus the $250 Bold 9900.'"

Oh BlackBerry. Remember, there are more consumers than businesses, and replacement markets aren't growth.

iPhone 5: First Test Photo? >> Pocketnow

So the EXIF data suggests the image, which identifies itself as coming from an iPhone 4, was cut down from a bigger-than-iPhone 4 camera (8MP rather than 5MP).

OK. But: "Now you may recall that we were recently tripped up by an image that seemed to have been captured by an unannounced iPad, but was actually taken by an iPhone and then uploaded by an iPad running software that altered the EXIF data. We suppose that a similar scenario is also possible here, but there's one compelling piece of evidence which suggests that this is indeed a genuine iPhone 5 photo: it was supposedly shot by an Apple engineer eating his lunch at work."

Umm, OK.

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