Liveleak:

It’s amazing how these motorists don’t even notice the cyclist. There were a number of near misses but in the end they got him.

Car drivers, please keep a eye out for those of us who ride on two wheels and give us a break. Thanks to Dan Frakes on Twitter for the link.

The linked essay makes the case that the music industry is going through an artist-friendly disruption, as evidenced by the business success of Lady Gaga. Drawing parallels to the disruptive rise of Uber, the case is made that this new business model is Beats’ true underlying value and a large part of Apple’s motivation in making this acquisition.

Good read.

In a nutshell, Amazon is sweetening its $99 per year Prime membership by adding a free streaming music component.

The company will expand its Prime membership offerings by adding a stockpile of old and newish music for subscribers to stream on demand. The Prime music service, which is scheduled to launch this June or July, will not include recent releases but instead restrict its catalog to songs and albums that are 6 months old and older, five music industry sources familiar with the company’s plans confirmed to BuzzFeed.

Similar to Prime Instant Video, the on-demand video option available to Prime members, the Prime music service (the official name of which is still unknown) won’t aspire to the full universe of existing content, instead offering a potluck of select songs and albums it has licensed from labels at a discount. That distinguishes it from the prevailing business model of stand-alone streaming competitors like Spotify, Rdio, and Beats Music, all of which have tried to lure customers by promising all of the world’s music with a few precious exceptions.

Interesting. A logical extension of the Prime Instant Video model.

Adrian Perica went to West Point, did some intelligence work, got an MBA from MIT, and made his way to Apple via his experience as an investment banker. He is now Apple’s head of M&A (mergers and acquisitions).

Perica doesn’t get a lot of press, but he played a significant role in the Beats acquisition.

Apple (AAPL) is arguably the most famous company in the world, but its top dealmaker prefers to stay in the shadows. Adrian Perica, a former Goldman Sachs (GS) banker, sometimes holds meetings with executives of companies he’s interested in buying at an unmarked building adjacent to Apple’s Silicon Valley headquarters, according to two people who have negotiated with Apple. Such precautions are warranted: A February report in the San Francisco Chronicle that Perica had hosted Tesla Motors (TSLA) co-founder Elon Musk at Apple’s main campus set off a frenzy of speculation that the iPhone maker was considering buying the carmaker.

Good profile from BusinessWeek.

The Guardian:

Google has launched a webpage where European citizens can request that links to information about them be taken off search results, the first step to comply with a court ruling affirming the “right to be forgotten”.

The company, which processes more than 90% of all web searches in Europe, has made available a webform through which people can submit their requests but has stopped short of specifying when it will remove links that meet the criteria for being taken down.

Google said it had convened a committee of senior executives and independent experts to try and craft a long-term approach to dealing with what is expected to be a barrage of requests from people in the EU.

From the removal request page:

A recent ruling by the Court of Justice of the European Union found that certain users can ask search engines to remove results for queries that include their name where those results are “inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant, or excessive in relation to the purposes for which they were processed.”

In implementing this decision, we will assess each individual request and attempt to balance the privacy rights of the individual with the public’s right to know and distribute information. When evaluating your request, we will look at whether the results include outdated information about you, as well as whether there’s a public interest in the information—for example, information about financial scams, professional malpractice, criminal convictions, or public conduct of government officials.

If you have a removal request, please fill out the form below. Please note that this form is an initial effort. We look forward to working closely with data protection authorities and others over the coming months as we refine our approach.

From the LA Times:

Ballmer, who was chief executive of Microsoft for 14 years, was chosen over competitors that included Los Angeles-based investors Tony Ressler and Bruce Karsh and a group that included David Geffen and executives from the Guggenheim Group, the Chicago-based owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers, according to three individuals familiar with the negotiations.

One of the individuals with knowledge of the negotiations said the Geffen group bid $1.6 billion and Ressler at $1.2 billion.

The Geffen group supposedly included an Apple employee by the name of Jimmy Iovine.

S.B.LattinDesign:

If your kitchen drawers are anything like ours, you never have the right measuring implement for the recipe you’re tackling. Keep this chart on hand, and the next time you find yourself asking “How many…” you’ll know just what to do.

While most of the world has gone metric, there are still a lot (at least here in North America) of measurements that are “Old School”. This would make a handy poster to hang in your kitchen to help with various unit conversions.

The Verge:

Milan-based coachbuilder Carrozzeria Touring has teamed up with Mini’s design team to build a truly spectacular one-off, electric-powered concept roadster that somehow manages to meld the classic British design with sleek Italian looks.

The so-called Mini Touring Superleggera Vision will almost certainly never see the roads in this form, but that doesn’t mean you can’t fall in love with the design.

I’ve always been a fan of Mini Coopers (even if I’d never buy one) but this one? I’d love be able to buy. Sadly, it’s a one-off. Make sure you watch the very cool video too.

Brilliant story on a real music impresario. A terrific read.

Sad, but like Mike said, it was in that awkward stage where you have to be willing to devote more time and resources to it or shut it down.

One of the best RSS readers ever.

What Beats brings to Apple are guys with very rare skills. People like this aren’t born every day. They’re very rare. They really get music deeply. So we get an infusion in Apple of some great talent.

We get a subscription music service that we believe is the first subscription service that really got it right. They had the insight early on to know how important human curation is. That technology by itself wasn’t enough — that it was the marriage of the two that would really be great and produce a feeling in people that we want to produce. They’ve also built an incredible premium headphone business that’s been tuned by experts and critical ears. We’re fans of that. It’s a reasonable-size business that’s fast-growing.

But mostly, backing up — it’s because we always are future-focused. So it’s not what Apple and Beats are doing today. It’s what we believe pairing the two together can produce for the future.

Talent, music service, and the future.

9to5mac:

Hot on the heels of the announcement that Apple had acquired the Beats Music streaming service for $3 billion to help bolster its own struggling competitor, 9to5Mac has learned that Apple is introducing a new ESPN station for iTunes Radio. The station will include original ESPN programs like SportsCenter All Night, SVP and Russillo, The Herd, and Mike & Mike.

This is big news. Even more importantly:

The ESPN station will also stream the World Cup, making it the first live sporting event to be streamed live through iTunes Radio.

Any way to listen to the World Cup via Pandora?

I do think personal health monitoring devices will become almost universal, and this is certainly a step in that direction, but this seems more like a gadget than a solution, more of a marketing play to establish mindshare than a thought out product ready for the market.

Samsung’s approach is to use light sensors to detect things like heart rate and blood pressure:

The sensors in the band project beams of light into the skin at varying strengths in order to reach tissue near the surface or deeper in. For instance a sensor may aim a beam of light at the strength needed to reach a vein, where it might read pulse rate.

Part of this ecosystem is a cloud platform, called SAMI (Samsung Architecture Multimodal Interaction), used to gather and store user health data. The implications here are large. Who owns that data? Who controls access to it? What about the US HIPAA rules, Title II of which requires the establishment of national standards for electronic health care transactions.

Samsung is treading on the edge of the deep water here. It’ll be interesting to watch this industry evolve, especially if and when Apple steps into the fray.

Last week, we wrote about driverless car testing coming to California’s public roads this September 16th. Part of the approved legislation is this language:

A manufacturer shall not permit any of its autonomous vehicles to be operated on public roads in California when the operator is not seated in the vehicle’s driver seat and either: monitoring its operations and able to take over physical control of the vehicle; or, in physical control of the vehicle.

Google just released a video of their driverless car concept, tested for the first time with people outside of Google. The video is clearly a marketing piece, a bit treacly-sweet for my taste, but worth watching anyway, if only to see how far this project has come.

One thing that struck me was the lack of any form of physical override. No steering wheel, no brake pedal. Obviously, these things won’t be necessary in a driverless car, but it seems to me, this car does not meet the requirement for an operator to be able to “take over physical control of the vehicle”. Just an observation.

Personally, I would love to test drive one of these babies. The whole idea of a self-driving car fascinates me. But I think the path to driverless cars will be bumpy and, until all the bugs are worked out, absolutely requires a steering wheel and brake.

Yesterday was a huge day for Apple, centered around the announcement that Apple was buying Beats.

As that announcement was making its way around the world, Apple Senior VP Eddie Cue and and newly minted Apple employee Jimmy Iovine spent the day at the Code conference, talking Beats, AppleTV, the Steve Jobs legacy, and lots more.

Here’s a link to a liveblog of the talk. Well worth the read. Hat tip to Re/code’s Peter Kafka for an excellent job keeping up with all the action on stage.

There’s a lot of interesting discussion here. One in particular was Eddie Cue talking to Walt Mossberg about Apple TV. Eddie Cue said that the current TV experience sucks.

Walt: But why haven’t you given us a TV that doesn’t suck?

Cue: “TV is a hard problem to solve.” No global standards, lots of rights issues. “It’s a complicated landscape to solve.”

Walt: Is it an issue of wanting to do both hardware and programming?

Cue: I’m not going into details. “The problems aren’t complicated. Solving them is complicated, because there are lots of parties involved.” Music is much easier, because rights are pretty much set at this point. TV isn’t there.

Interesting insight. Both music and TV deal with rights issues. The music business tended toward a centralized rights system. TV did not.

Another part of the discussion I found fascinating is shown in the video below, centered on the question of Apple’s cultural shift now that Steve Jobs is no longer there. Has there been a cultural reset?

Apple’s history in music began with selling Macs to musicians. That remains important to us today, but we also bring music to hundreds of millions of customers with iTunes, which is at the forefront of the digital music revolution. Music holds a special place in our hearts at Apple, and we know that we can make an even bigger contribution to something that is so important to our society. That’s why we have kept investing in music and why we’re bringing together these extraordinary teams — so we can continue to create the most innovative music products and services in the world.

“The whole idea of MacTech Conference is to allow members of the Apple community to meet and exchange ideas,” says Edward Marczak, Conference Chair and Executive Editor of MacTech Magazine. “This will be spurred on by presentations from some of the best and well-known experts in the community.”

This is the conference’s 5th year.

That’s an incredible performance.

Keep in mind, there are two big events next week. First and foremost, there’s WWDC. But let’s not forget about the 7-way stock split that kicks in next week. Perhaps both of these things are already built-in to this run-up, perhaps not. Time will tell.

If there’s one thing I pulled from this map, it’s how incredibly expensive it is to live in California.

Amazon is pathetic in this respect. The company always comes out with statements about how many Kindles they sold, but provide nothing to back it up. The press is partly responsible for letting them get away with it, but you can’t claim that news coverage is unfair if you’re not willing to comment.

Kirk McElhearn walks through the various steps of optimizing the position of your computer speakers. Much of this was new to me, good stuff to know for anyone with any kind of speakers, whether they be for a computer, TV, or for your home recording studio.

Wikipedia is an incredible resource. The problem is, many people treat it as gospel.

The open-access nature has “raised concern” among doctors about its reliability, as it is the sixth most popular site on the internet, the US authors of the research, published in the Journal of the American Osteopathic Association with the guide of joint pain treatment croydon, said.

Up to 70% of physicians and medical students use the tool, they say.

If Wikipedia was regularly vetted for mistakes, or had editing limited to trusted experts in specific fields, this might not be a problem.

They printed off the articles on 25 April 2012 to analyse, and discovered that 90% of the entries made statements that contradicted latest medical research.

To be fair, this doesn’t mean that 90% of the information is wrong. It means that there are a lot of errors mixed in with the good info. And let’s not forget that even the professionals get it wrong sometimes.

Point is, recognize that before you have a full-blown panic attack over something you read in Wikipedia, you might want to check with your doctor first.

Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg kicked off the annual Code Conference by interviewing Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. I found the interview both fascinating and revealing. Fascinating because of the tidbits that Swisher and Mossberg crowbarred out of Nadella, and revealing in that I really didn’t get a sense of vision from Nadella. To me, he had a great opportunity to lay out his grand vision for his company, to pontificate a bit, but instead, he looked clenched, close-mouthed, and a bit uncomfortable. See the video below for the highlights.

I also enjoyed this article about Gwyneth Paltrow’s speech at Code.

Her topic — which she had talked about with Re/code earlier, as well — was the “objectification and dehumanization” of anonymous Internet comments. Or, she said, how it feels to be “a person in the culture that people want to harm.”

“We can momentarily anesthetize ourselves by focusing on someone else’s life, get a nice hot shot of schadenfreude and keep going, but how does this serve us?”

Yesterday, we posted about the wave of Find My iPhone ransom hacks reported in Australia. From the post:

There is conjecture that the hackers have access to some recently stolen eBay passwords and that the victims have the same password on both eBay and for their Apple ID. Regardless of whether this is true or not, this is a pointed example of why you should not reuse passwords.

This morning, Apple made a statement that lent some credence to the password reuse theory:

Apple takes security very seriously and iCloud was not compromised during this incident. Impacted users should change their Apple ID password as soon as possible and avoid using the same user name and password for multiple services. Any users who need additional help can contact AppleCare or visit their local Apple Retail Store.

Also, the ransom attack affected customers in New Zealand, Canada and the US, as well as in Australia.

AMC, perhaps best known for shows like Breaking Bad, Mad Men, and The Walking Dead, has a new show about to hit the small screen. Halt and Catch Fire is a very loose adaptation of the founding of Compaq Computer, the first company to truly reverse engineer the IBM PC.

The pilot is available online and premieres this weekend.

But this post is really about the true story of a daring group of Texas Instruments employees who decided to take on IBM, at the time a hulking corporate behemoth that was as big a player as there was in the fledgling tech universe, with the hottest product as well.

Follow the link and you can listen to the story, told by Brian McCullough on the excellent Internet History Podcast, or read through the narrative, if that’s more your thing. An exciting tale, well told.

Maybe it’s just me, but I always like seeing what new blogging tools are available. Like a lot of things in technology, sometimes it’s the fresh faces that do things right.

Take a listen to the samples and you’ll see how important microphone choice and placement is to your sound.