The Verge:

William Gibson famously coined the term “cyberspace,” and gave us a singular vision of the future in early cyberpunk novels Neuromancer, Count Zero, and Mona Lisa Overdrive.During his recent book tour, he took time to talk about writing nonfiction, his love of cities, and his particular view of the present – all delivered in careful, precise words barely tinted with Southern accent.

If you are a science fiction fan, you’ve read and undoubtedly enjoyed Gibson’s work. I once helped him fix his Mac when I lived in Vancouver, BC. and you won’t find a more interesting or gracious guy.

From NASA:

A ‘Blue Marble’ image of the Earth taken from the VIIRS instrument aboard NASA’s most recently launched Earth-observing satellite – Suomi NPP. This composite image uses a number of swaths of the Earth’s surface taken on January 4, 2012.

The “Blue Marble” is one of NASA’s most famous images. There’s a whole Flickr set of NASA photos to check out.

Chris Ziegler for The Verge:

Following up on its December announcement that it would open source the platform — a last-ditch effort to make it viable — HP has gone into detail today on exactly when and how developers will be getting access to webOS code. The company expects the entire open sourcing process to be complete by September, while Enyo, the application framework that debuted on the TouchPad and underpins webOS 3.0, is available as of today along with related developer tools. When open sourcing is complete, the finished product will be known as Open webOS 1.0.

HP’s got a pretty interesting webOS development roadmap planned for this year – the company plans to gut some of webOS’s underpinnings and replace it with a Linux kernel, which will make it easier to get webOS onto a wider variety of hardware.

Ken Segall’s Observatory:

…it was a big blow to Apple when Ron left after 11 stellar years. And it was a big wow for JCPenney when Ron signed on as their new CEO.For many, Ron’s move was a disconnect. Why would someone jump from the world’s coolest retail store to a stodgy department store chain?Well, you’re about to find out. Today is the day that Ron, after less than three months on the job, unveils his plans to turn JCPenney into … well, I wouldn’t want to spoil the surprise.

Johnson is the guy who led Apple’s Retail Store initiative and helped revitalize the company. His first move at JCPenney is described as his “Think Different” moment. I wouldn’t bet against him.

AllThingD:

Asked about his first four months as Apple chief executive, Tim Cook stressed that what he feels most is lucky to be surrounded by his talented colleagues.“You can see our results,” Cook said during a conference call with analysts. “I think the team is doing a fantastic job. We feel really good about where we are.”

That might just be the understatement of the year.

Foss Patents:

The latest hostility is a new lawsuit filed by Motorola Mobility, with green light from Google, in the Southern District of Florida, seeking an injunction against the iPhone 4S and the iCloud over a package of six patents previously asserted against older Apple products in the same court.

Sounds interesting. It lets you create templates on the Web site to use on the iPhone, track clicks and views and schedule emails.

9to5Mac:

Perhaps most enticing, Cook tells all to report to Town Hall tomorrow either in person or via AppleWeb at 10AM PT to discuss ‘some exciting new things going on at Apple’.

CNNMoney:

The Cupertino, Calif.-based company said its fiscal first quarter profit rose to $13 billion, or $13.87 per share, more than double the profit Apple booked a year earlier.It was one of the most profitable quarters ever for any U.S. company, trailing only ExxonMobil’s record-setting $14.8 billion quarter from the fall of 2008, when oil prices were at an all-time high.Apple is sitting on most of those profits. It now has $97.6 billion in cash.

You might want to read that again. Apple, a company many left for dead in 1996, a company who’s share price was less than its cash on hand at one point in the 1990s, a company that once desperately hoped to be bought by Sun Microsystems, just had the second greatest quarter in US financial history. Congratulations to everyone at Apple.

The Verge:

There’s definitely a huge market for used lenses in great condition, at bargain prices. This guide will hopefully arm you with the knowledge and just the right amount of paranoia to separate the gems from the dogs.

In another life, I’m a budding photographer with an incurable case of “lens envy”. This guide is a great read to help you make sure you’re getting the best deal possible.

NetworkWorld:

Adam Lashinsky’s upcoming book, Inside Apple, provides an intriguing look into the inner workings at Apple while examining the management and product development strategies they’ve implemented to create numerous game-changing devices.Now it’s no secret that Apple sweats every last detail when it comes to their products – which if anything, is actually an understatement.To fully grasp how seriously Apple executives sweat the small stuff, consider this: For months, a packaging designer was holed up in this room performing the most mundane of tasks – opening boxes.

Always sweat the small stuff.

Dasient Blog:

The Dasient team is excited to announce that we have been acquired by Twitter! Effective immediately, we will be bringing our technology, tools, and team to the revenue engineering team at Twitter.Dasient has been focused on solving web-scale security problems involving malware and other types of online abuse.

Let’s hope Twitter uses this acquisition to clamp down on the Twitter spam so many of us are subjected to.

Bloomberg:

Verizon Communications Inc, the second-largest U.S. phone company, reported a fourth-quarter loss after booking a pension charge and having higher subsidy costs for rising iPhone sales.While iPhone sales more than doubled from the third quarter to 4.3 million units, total smartphone sales fell short, signaling waning demand for handsets that run on Google Inc.’s Android operating system.

Because of the subsidies the carriers pay to Apple, higher sales of the iPhone mean more upfront costs but, in theory, more profits long term.

Declan McCullagh for CNet:

American citizens can be ordered to decrypt their PGP-scrambled hard drives for police to peruse for incriminating files, a federal judge in Colorado ruled today in what could become a precedent-setting case.Judge Robert Blackburn ordered a Peyton, Colo., woman to decrypt the hard drive of a Toshiba laptop computer no later than February 21–or face the consequences including contempt of court.

Blackburn says that the Fifth Amendment – the right to avoid self-incrimination – doesn’t apply, and cited a 1789 act to bolster his position. My best is that we haven’t heard the last of this.

Jean-Louis Gassée’s Monday Note:

What’s the use of offering more than 500,000 wares if customers can’t find their way through the gigantic bazaar?…the iPhone has sold in ever larger numbers (we’ll soon see if the December quarter number crossed the 30 million units line, and by how much) and with more than 18 billion downloads, the App Store is an unmitigated success. If this is what “broken” looks like, why fix it? And how?

Hard to argue the App Store is “broken” but the kind of additional curation Gassée argues for might be welcome to many.

Freakonomics:

Supporters of stronger intellectual property enforcement argue online piracy is a huge problem, one which costs the U.S. economy between $200 and $250 billion per year, and is responsible for the loss of 750,000 American jobs. These numbers seem truly dire: a $250 billion per year loss would be almost $800 for every man, woman, and child in America. And 750,000 jobs – that’s twice the number of those employed in the entire motion picture industry in 2010.The good news is that the numbers are wrong.

Read the article to see why the Freakonomics guys believe that.

Greg Bensinger for the Wall Street Journal:

T-Mobile USA and AT&T filed a request with the Federal Communications Commission for approval of the transfer of $1 billion in wireless airwaves AT&T promised as a result of the failure of its $39 billion bid to take over its smaller rival.

T-Mobile also gets $3 billion in cash; its consolation prize for having the acquisition deal with AT&T fall through. T-Mobile has said in the past its limited spectrum has hampered its growth, so agreement with AT&T should help.

(Hat tip: Engadget)

AllThingsD:

Within days of its debut, Apple’s iBooks textbook store had already racked up a significant number of downloads.According to Global Equities Research, which monitors Apple’s iBook sales via a proprietary tracking system it doesn’t much care to discuss, more than 350,000 textbooks were downloaded from the company’s iBooks Store within the first three days of availability.…There were some 90,000 downloads of iBooks Author, Apple’s free textbook-creation tool, during the same time.

As usual, these numbers should be taken with a little salt – Global Equities Research doesn’t disclose how they came about the number and many downloads may be from those of us long past the days when we needed, used or bought textbooks.

Mobile Nations:

Birkley (sic) Breathed’s Bloom County was my two favorite comic strips growing up, and now it’s starting to become available in iBooks. From Bill the Cat’s run for president to Milo’s skewering of Senator Bedfellow to Oliver’s landing the space shuttle to Opus’… everything, it delighted me on a daily basis.

If you are as much of a Bloom County fan as I am, you probably already went and grabbed this from iBooks. But get the free samples first and check them out. You may not be crazy with the way the strips are presented.

Remember the story from earlier this month of the “iPhone that stopped the “New York Philharmonic”? It has happened again but with much more amusing results.

Slovakian musician Lukáš Kmit was play a solo on his viola in a synagogue in Presov, Slovakia when a ringing phone brought his performance to a screeching halt. But, unlike the New York Philharmonic, he quickly started again – but with a twist.

Watch the video to see how he reacted.

The Pew Research Center:

The share of adults in the United States who own tablet computers nearly doubled from 10% to 19% between mid-December and early January and the same surge in growth also applied to e-book readers, which also jumped from 10% to 19% over the same time period.The number of Americans owning at least one of these digital reading devices jumped from 18% in December to 29% in January.These findings are striking because they come after a period from mid-2011 into the autumn in which there was not much change in the ownership of tablets and e-book readers.

The introduction and pricing of devices like Amazon’s latest line of Kindles certainly helped spike those numbers but Apple’s Q1 2012 Earnings Call tomorrow will likely show a uptick in iPad sales over the same time frame too.

Peter Kafka for AllThingsD:

Research In Motion isn’t broken, so no need to break it up. But it needs better internal focus, and better external focus, too. That’s the takeaway from new RIM CEO Thorsten Heins, who told analysts this morning that he thinks the company is in pretty good shape, all things considered.

RIM stock dropped sharply following his analyst call, which tells you what Wall Street thinks of Heins’ plan.

Meet Apollo, the first professional, high-resolution computer audio interface that delivers the sound, feel, and flow of analog recording. This 18 x 24 FireWire/Thunderbolt – ready interface combines genuine UA analog design with class-leading 24-bit/192 kHz sound quality and onboard Realtime UAD Processing.

New York Times:

Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis, who made the BlackBerry a leading business tool but then presided over its precipitous decline, said they would step down on Monday as co-chairmen and co-chief executives of Research in Motion.

BWHAHAHAHAHA!