Nick Bilton, on Google’s "secret" Glass project, at the NYT Bits Blog:

On Wednesday, Google gave people a clearer picture of its secret initiative called Project Glass. The glasses are the company’s first venture into wearable computing. [...]

One person who had used the glasses said: "They let technology get out of your way. If I want to take a picture I don’t have to reach into my pocket and take out my phone; I just press a button at the top of the glasses and that’s it."

The current Glass prototypes look kind of ridiculous, but the vision for this market is massive. Wearable/embedded computing is, obviously, the post-post-PC world. It’s just going to take a very long time to get there. Watch this incredible video Google released today; it’s certainly enticing:

But what’s the point of creating a "secret" laboratory, where "where engineers and scientists are working on robots and...

Last night, after I posted a screenshot of Groupon’s stock price from my iPad, some people asked me which app I was using. It’s actually my favorite iOS app, StockTouch.

After I wake up every morning, I grab my iPad and open StockTouch. The first screen I see is an overview of the top 900 US stocks by market cap, split by sector:

StockTouch Overview

This is an incredibly powerful data visualization; it gives an at-a-glance view of the entire market’s health. It also facilitates quick exploration. Touching a sector zooms in to just those companies:

StockTouch Sector

And touching a stock zooms in to the company overview:

StockTouch Company

The UI is gesture-based, so it’s easy to quickly pan around and get a feel for what is going on with the market at any given interval. You can also change the ordering of the companies in each sector box (I sort by market cap, but you can also sort by percentage change or by comparison against the...

Fascinating answer by Entomologist Matan Shelomi:

Nope. No blood vessels. [...]

Insects have a heart, sometimes, but no arteries or veins. They have an open circulatory system: all their organs just float in a goo called "hemolymph" that is a combination of lymph and blood. Some insects, bees included, have a heart and an aorta (the vessel leading out of the heart) that pumps the blood and gives it some semblance of direction (from the back of the insect to the front), but beyond that there is no circulatory system. The heart floats in the hemolymph along with everything else. No way to stop it from receiving blood flow, because it’s surrounded by it.

2ドル.5 billion.

GRPN

On Friday evening, Groupon revised their very first earnings report to the SEC, reporting that the company’s revenue was actually 3% lower than initially reported, increasing losses by 22ドル.6 million. In the 10-K filed yesterday with the SEC, they admitted to having a "material weakness" in their financial reporting structures:

[...] Management concluded as of December 31, 2011 that our disclosure controls and procedures were not effective at the reasonable assurance level due to a material weakness in our internal control over financial reporting [...]

This is actually the second time Groupon has had to revise its earnings; after their S-1 (the IPO prospectus) was first filed with bizarre accounting procedures, the company was forced to make considerable revisions.

Amazing.

Heroes become super by virtue of their actions. They do great things. They perform heroic acts. And then, when the honor is bestowed upon them by some shared consciousness, they become superheroes. The super- prefix is one that is earned, not given. It is a trophy. No superhero has ever become a superhero by calling himself a superhero.

Villains, however, are different. Because people are assumed to be good by default, villains must consciously decide to deviate into villainy. No villain has ever accidentally become a villain. Villainous acts are performed with the full intention of achieving an end goal that satisfies ego, greed, lust, or the desire for power. Sometimes those goals align with universally positive outcomes, and, though they should always be seen through the lens of skepticism, villains are not bad without exception. Actions that appear evil can often be used to achieve...

N. R. Kleinfield in The New York Times:

On Thursday evening a week ago, Bombay/6 Ave.—unprovoked, and without warning—cut its pizza price to 79 cents. The next morning, 2 Bros. retaliated by moving to 75 cents (its owners felt it was easier to make change from a dollar than at 79 cents). Bombay/6 Ave. matched the 75 cents, and that’s where everything sits.

Clearly, a slice of pizza cannot be sold profitably in Manhattan for 0ドル.75. The price is an unsustainable gesture. Something has to give. It’s going to be fascinating to watch the story unfold.

See also: The term used in biology to describe this evolutionary principle (as it manifests itself in ecosystems) is punctuated equilibrium and the term describing the effect in economics is called the Bertrand Paradox.

RIM has posted its fourth quarter financial results. They’re bad.

Revenue for the fourth quarter of fiscal 2012 was 4ドル.2 billion [ ... ], down 25% from 5ドル.6 billion in the same quarter of fiscal 2011.

A quarter of RIM’s business has been wiped out in just one year. Net income (profit) is even worse (you can ignore the word "GAAP"):

The Company’s GAAP net loss for the fourth quarter of fiscal 2012 was 125ドル million [ ... compared with] GAAP net income of 934ドル million, or 1ドル.78 per share diluted, in the same quarter of fiscal 2011.

That’s a billion dollar swing towards the negative in just one year. It’s hard to comprehend that kind of change, especially considering that RIM hasn’t done much to stop it.

Exodus

In a ridiculously worded sentence, RIM reported that both its CTO and COO are leaving the company:

In addition, David Yach will be retiring from his role as CTO, Software...

Amazon is selling its refurbished Kindle Fire for just 139,ドル a huge discount from the normal price of 199ドル. This large price cut, as we are nearing the middle of Amazon’s second quarter, is suspicious. I find it difficult to believe that Amazon is making any profit at this price point. With the iPad now starting at 399,ドル the Fire is a ridiculous choice for anyone except the most price-conscious.

I’ve had a Fire since it was released a few months ago. While it is the best Android tablet I’ve used, by far, it is still basically piece of junk. The screen is extremely wide, but it is not cinematic; it makes web browsing awkward. Scrolling performance is terrible. Amazon Prime videos, Netflix and Hulu work great, but nothing else on the device does, unfortunately.

If you decide to buy one, use this affiliate link to make me a wealthy man.

Google has been working on its self-driving cars for a couple of years, and they have finally reached a point where they can test with real users. They recorded a video of their first test, with Steve Mahan, a man who has lost more than 95% of his vision in both eyes, making him well beyond legally blind.

This video is a glimpse into the future.

I was skeptical of the ability of cars to drive themselves, but Google seems to be making it entirely possible. In fifty years, I bet we’ll look back and think about how barbaric it was for people drive themselves.

John Seabrook, in The New Yorker, on how top 40 hits are made:

As is usually the case, Eriksen worked "the box"—the computer—using Avid’s Pro Tools editing program, while Hermansen critiqued the playbacks. Small colored rectangles, representing bits of Dean’s vocal, glowed on the computer screen, and Eriksen chopped and rearranged them, his fingers flying over the keys, frequently punching the space bar to listen to a playback, then rearranging some more. The studio’s sixty-four-channel professional mixing board, with its vast array of knobs and lights, which was installed when Roc the Mic Studios was constructed, only five years ago, sat idle, a relic of another age.

Fascinating and extremely well written. Definitely worth the read.