[ ABOVE: Image from Today ]
In spring a young man’s thoughts lightly turn to thoughts of … yes, love. But love of a different kind: tech love, specifically the biannual release of new Apple products.
Apple is the Donald Trump of tech companies – the least little bit of activity, much less a center-stage performance by CEO Tim Cook, sucks all the air out of the room and sends the tech press breathlessly pounding out stories about what new products will be. “Will it be smaller, lighter, faster, or will they move the headphone jack?”
Last week, however, the most notable thing about the Apple product announcement was how blasé it was. A smaller iPad Pro, a smaller iPhone, some cosmetic updates to the Apple Watch and a new iOS update. Zzzzzzzzzzzz.
Apple turns 40 today, though, and even though last week’s event was a bit of a ho-hummer, it doesn’t change the fact that we are a different world today because Apple showed us a life we never imagined we would have and we bought it and bought into it.
Happy Birthday, Apple. Let’s see if the earth moves for us this summer at the next product launch.
In the meantime, some other stories struggled for attention last week while the tech world focused on Apple. Here are a few nuggets.
You will find more statistics at Statista
Twitter at 10: Still a loveable loser
Twitter, the still-a-superhero sidekick in the dynamic duo of social media – Facebook and Twitter – also had a birthday, turning 10 last week. Still cool, still relevant and, yes, still losing money. That seems hard to believe, but despite the 305 million active monthly users claimed by Twitter, the efforts to turn those thumbs into revenue have not paid off.
Sponsored tweets, partnerships and efforts to attract more revenue from businesses seeking a higher profile for their tweets have not broken through. Unlike Facebook, which is able to really ratchet down how much reach can be achieved “organically,” forcing businesses to invest in paid campaigns to make any significant gains, Twitter either can’t or won’t take similar steps.
Twitter, however, is a social media platform with a conscience, while perhaps not a solid bottom line, and the world needs it. Throughout the third world, the tumultuous Arab Spring, and the attendant refugee crisis, Twitter has been a critical communication method. It has given voice to political movements, been indispensible in capturing global events and showing their true face and connecting users around the world.
In fact, although we may define Twitter by the Kanye Wests and Donald Trumps of the Twitterverse, the U.S. made up only 24 percent of Twitter users; the rest is a global audience. And Twitter is still outmatched by Instagram, which has 400 million active monthly users.
A burner credit card for the rest of us
Do you cross your fingers every time you enter a credit card number on a website? Do you sign up for subscriptions and forget about them until they auto renew? Privacy could be for you. It’s a new startup with a promising idea.
Privacy is a browser extension (Google Chrome or Firefox so far) that generates a brand new credit card number for each transaction you make on the web. You connect your bank account or Visa card to the Privacy service. The company discusses its security measures to protect your financial transactions and stored data in painful detail here: privacy.com/security. And the service is free to the consumer; the company receives a percentage of the transaction fees.
An encryption from the other side
We’re very worried about breaking encryption used by terrorists and cyber criminals, but let’s take a moment – as The Los Alamos National Laboratory has – to consider the reasons why we need encryption. It’s simple: cybercriminals and hackers are eating our lunch to the tune of $400 million in global losses last year, and a projected $90 trillion by 2030.
At Los Alamos, they’ve taken steps toward developing a tiny device the size of a fruit chew that would sit on a motherboard and use a quantum random number generator to encrypt all transactions. The science behind random number generation is a field all to itself and the key is in the randomness of the numbers. The quantum generator being developed and now miniaturized by Los Alamos would be the only one of its kind in the world, to generate truly random numbers the increase encryption security to a level potentially truly unbreakable. There’s a reason why I put this item at the end — so I don’t have too much room to get in trouble by trying to explain it. But for the science geeks, you can read more about it here: http://tcrn.ch/1Sd5386.
