Marketing (il)logic

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Sometimes, one wonders if marketing people have any grasp of elementary logic. Consider this quote from a report headlined “Many Windows 8 Tablets Will Sport a Keyboard.”

Samsung showed off the latest version of its Slate tablet, a grayish device with a bright touch screen measuring 11.6 inches at the diagonal. It comes with a pressure-sensing stylus called the S-Pen, and will sell with an optional detachable keyboard that uses magnets and latching hardware to stay in place. Unlike most of the devices shown at the event, the Slate had a price and release date: it will be available October 26, the same day Windows 8 launches, for $749 with the keyboard and $649 without.

Allison Kohn, public relations manager for Samsung Electronics America, said the company decided to pair the tablet with a keyboard to help users carry around fewer gadgets. “It simplifies your lifestyle, being able to consolidate your devices,” she said.

So: Samsung provides 1 tablet + 1 keyboard in order to “consolidate” the lives of people who currently carry 1 iPad?

A quarter of US adults now have a tablet computer

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Wow! How things change. From the PEW Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ).

Over the last year, tablet ownership has steadily increased from 11% of U.S. adults in July of 2011 to 18% in January of 2012, according to PEJ data. Currently, 22% own a tablet and another 3% regularly use a tablet owned by someone else in the home. This number is very close to new data, released here for the first time, conducted in a separate survey by the Pew Internet & American Life Project on July 16 through August 7 2012 that found 25% of all U.S. adults have a tablet computer.

And over half of those tablets are iPads.

The spy in your pocket

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Intriguing (and scary) research paper entitled “PlaceRaider: Virtual Theft in Physical Spaces with Smartphones”. Abstract reads:

As smartphones become more pervasive, they are increasingly targeted by malware. At the same time, each new generation of smartphone features increasingly powerful onboard sensor suites. A new strain of sensor malware has been developing that leverages these sensors to steal information from the physical environment (e.g., researchers have recently demonstrated how malware can listen for spoken credit card numbers through the microphone, or feel keystroke vibrations using the accelerometer). Yet the possibilities of what malware can see through a camera have been understudied. This paper introduces a novel visual malware called PlaceRaider, which allows remote attackers to engage in remote reconnaissance and what we call virtual theft. Through completely opportunistic use of the camera on the phone and other sensors, PlaceRaider constructs rich, three dimensional models of indoor environments. Remote burglars can thus download the physical space, study the environment carefully, and steal virtual objects from the environment (such as financial documents, information on computer monitors, and personally identifiable information). Through two human subject studies we demonstrate the effectiveness of using mobile devices as powerful surveillance and virtual theft platforms, and we suggest several possible defenses against visual malware.

PetaPixel has a useful summary of the essence of the idea:

The app, designed by Robert Templeman of the US Naval Surface Warfare Center and scientists at Indiana University, can run secretly in the background of any smartphone running Android 2.3 (after an unsuspecting “victim” launches the app, of course). It makes decisions on when to surreptitiously snap photos based on things like time, location, and orientation.

Useless images (ones that are too blurry or dark) are filtered out, while the rest are beamed to a central server, which creates virtual 3D spaces based on the content of the images. These 3D spaces can then be browsed by the person behind the malicious “hack”.

The whole thing isn’t just conceptual: the scientists actually gave infected phones to 20 oblivious test subjects, who were asked to use the devices like they normally would in office environments. The results were pretty crazy: 3D models were successfully obtained from every one of the 20 subjects, and it was easier to glean sensitive information from the 3D models than from the original photos.

What Tim Cook needs to learn from the Maps fiasco

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Horse sense from Jean-Louis Gassee about Apple’s $30B Maps fiasco.

This is more than piling on, or crying over spilled maps. We might want to think what this whole doing the right thing — only when caught — says about Apple’s senior management.

First, the technical side. Software always ships with fresh bugs, some known, some not. In this case, it’s hard to believe the Maps team didn’t know about some of the most annoying warts. Did someone or some ones deliberately underplay known problems? Or did the team not know. And if so, why? Too broad a net to cast and catch the bugs? Too much secrecy before the launch? (But Maps were demoed at the June WWDC.)

Second, the marketing organization. This is where messages are crafted, products are positioned, claims are wordsmithed. Just like engineers are leery of marketeers manhandling their precious creations, marketing people tend to take engineers’ claims of crystalline purity with, at best, polite cynicism. One is left to wonder how such a hot issue, Apple Maps vs. Google Maps, wasn’t handled with more care — before the blowup. And why, with inevitable comparisons between an infant product and a mature, world-class one, the marketing message was so lackadaisically bombastic.

And last, the CEO. Was trust in his team misplaced, abused? Were the kind of checks that make Apple’s supply chain work so well also applied to the Maps product, or was some ill side-effect of team spirit at play, preventing the much-needed bad news to reach the top?

We don’t need to know. But Apple execs do if they want the difficult birth of Apple Maps to be written in history as a wake-up call that put the top team back on track. I don’t want to think about the alternative.

Spot on. The first thought that occurred to me when the story first broke is that this wouldn’t have happened if Steve Jobs had been around. Why? Because the Maps team would have been too frightened to try to pull the wool over his eyes: and they would have known that it would have been futile even to try it on. So maybe the problem is that Tim Cook isn’t a fanatic, just a very competent ‘normal’ CEO?

Inequality and life-expectancy

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Interesting observation by Paul Krugman in today’s NYT.

Consider, in particular, the proposal to raise the Social Security retirement age, supposedly to reflect rising life expectancy. This is an idea Washington loves — but it’s also totally at odds with the reality of an America in which rising inequality is reflected not just in the quality of life but in its duration. For while average life expectancy has indeed risen, that increase is confined to the relatively well-off and well-educated — the very people who need Social Security least. Meanwhile, life expectancy is actually falling for a substantial part of the nation.

wonder if it applies to the UK also?

Google’s self-guided car isn’t just about automobiles

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This morning’s Observer column.

At the ceremony in Mountain View, Google’s co-founder, Sergey Brin, announced the company’s intention to bring autonomous vehicles to the market in five years. In a pre-emptive attack on critics, he pointed out that autonomous vehicles would be significantly safer than human-controlled ones. That seems plausible to me: 40,000 people are killed every year in road accidents in the US and many, if not most, of those are caused by human error. “This has the power to change lives,” Brin said. “Too many people are underserved by the current transport system. They are blind, or too young to drive, or too old, or intoxicated.” He also argued that manual operation of cars was inefficient: autonomous vehicles could make better use of the road and reduce the size of car parks by fitting into smaller areas than humans could get them into.

Ignore the evangelism for a moment and think about what Google has achieved. Its engineers have demonstrated that with smart software and an array of sensors, a machine can perform a task of sophistication and complexity most of us assumed would always require the capabilities of humans. And that means our assumptions about what machines can and cannot do are urgently in need of updating.

This isn’t just about cars, by the way…

Are We Getting Smarter?

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My review of James Flynn’s new book – from the Guardian.

Not many academics have a phenomenon named after them, and when it happens they’re mostly hard scientists. In physics there’s the Bose-Einstein Condensate, for example, and the Josephson Effect. Eponymous phenomena are much rarer in the social sciences, for the obvious reason that consensus is harder to reach: the social world doesn’t provide the unambiguous yardstick of a meter reading. All of which makes James Flynn such an interesting exception to the rule, as even in the argumentative world of psychology, the “Flynn Effect” is recognised as an accepted fact…