[LINK] “Indonesians are loving Toronto start-up’s app MavenSay”

Toronto Star technology journalist Radu Mudhar notes the surprising success of Toronto-made app MavenSay in Indonesia, aided by social networks in that country (specifically, prominent Instagram users based in Jakarta).

“Here we are just a group of guys sitting at a startup in Toronto and we woke up one morning realizing that we had this massive spike in Asia,” said Bryan Friedman, one of three of MavenSay’s founders. “We rose to become the No. 1 free iPhone app across all categories in Indonesia. And we sort of sat at the top of the charts for five days, beating out Angry Birds, the Iron Man app, Facebook, Twitter, everyone.”

Friedman, who started the company with his former University of Toronto classmates Mike Wagman and Jesse Dallal, said they were floored when they saw the 15,000 downloads that first day, which continued the following week as well.

MavenSay, built by a seven-person team, had initially focused garnering its users from cities like New York, L.A. and San Francisco. Celebrities, including Samantha and Charlotte Ronson, are sharing their likes. Maple Leaf Joffrey Lupul has recommended the Harbour Sixty Steakhouse, among other things.

Things were going well, said Friedman, but nothing could have prepared them for breakout success half way around the world. Looking back at the data, he chalks it up to some early adopters in Jakarta who had massive Instagram followings. Indonesia is home to an extremely tech savvy culture with high usage of social media platforms. At the end of 2012, Jakarta was the city with the most posted tweets in the world, and was the No. 5 country in the world for Twitter usage.

“We’ve tried to retrace the steps and find the exact person or group of people who started it,” he said. “The night this all started happening we noticed that a couple of these big Instagram users, who had about 16,000 followers each, and one of things you can do is publish your MavenSay profile on Instagram. So they cross-posted their profiles and it just went from there.”

[LINK] “Can BlackBerry move past ‘solid ground’ to recapture past glory?”

CNet’s Roger Cheng evidences very cautious optimism about Blackberry’s future.

BlackBerry was busy Tuesday, offering a smorgasbord of news. There was the device announcement in the form of the budget-friendly BlackBerry Q5. There was the updated BlackBerry Enterprise Server 10.1 for the business-minded. There was the milestone of 120,000 apps available in BlackBerry World. Most surprising was the company’s decision to open up BlackBerry Messenger to multiple platforms, starting with iOS and Android.

All of those announcements are meant to convey a sense of building momentum at BlackBerry. Indeed, over the last several months, the company has launched a brand new platform, worked to repair its wounded reputation, and fleshed out its product portfolio to three products.

“I remember being right here one year ago on this stage,” [CEO Thorsten Heins] said. “This year feels very, very different.”

At the last show — Heins’ first as CEO — critics predicted that he wouldn’t be back on stage this year. The company’s sales were eroding and it began losing money. Its market share almost entirely evaporated, particularly in the U.S., and it didn’t have any new products to show off, aside from a developer test unit. Shareholders were already shell-shocked, having seen most of the value of their investment vanish.

[. . .]

Not everyone is as comfortable with BlackBerry’s prospects. Shares of the company fell 4 percent after its announcements. There’s still little indication of just how well its BlackBerry 10 devices have fared, and the company was conspicuously silent on the matter. There remain questions about whether its injured brands can actually be rehabilitated.

[BLOG] Some Monday links

• Budding Sociology Dan Hirschman describes income inequality in the United States in the post-Second World War era in multiple charts, coming to the conclusion that since the 1980s income growth has been stagnant for all but the superrich.
• The Burgh Diaspora’s Jim Russell warns Toronto that education won’t necessarily translate into economic growth, looking at the Oregon city of Portland’s high level of education but equally high level of under-employment.
• Eastern Approaches deals with the impact of Pope Francis on the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church.
• Geocurrents’ Asya Pereltsvaig examines another split group of Judaism, the Karaites, taking particular interest in the Turkic-speaking Crimean Karaim.
• Joe. My. God takes another look at the same-sex marriage situation in Vietnam. Apparently there will no longer be fines levied for unauthorized marriage ceremonies, and a same-sex marriage law will come up in the country’s parliament next year.
• At Lawyers, Guns and Money, Erik Loomis criticizes gun fetishism among the left.
• Science fiction writer Peter Watts points out that claims a sort of mechanical telepathy was demonstrated in a pair of widely-separated rats were overstated.
• The Power and the Money’s Noel Maurer describes how, as Mexican wages are surpassed by Chinese wages, Mexico is starting to accumulate more manufacturing jobs but not better-paid manufacturing jobs.
• Registan’s Joshua Foust speculates as to why Kazakhstan has a good reputation internationally despite its domestic autocracy.
• The Search’s David Riecks notes how social networking systems like Facebook can strip useful metadata from photos posted online.
• Torontoist’s Carly Maga describes how Toronto has become a destination of choice for American poker players after a crackdown two years ago.

[LINK] “Facebook and the solitary practice of friendship”

Liam Heneghan’s 3 Quarks Daily essay on the impact of Facebook on friendships provides a thoughtful and original critique. By making it easier to maintain relationships and reducing the surprise factor, does Facebook preclude especially intimate friendships?

A helpful way to frame and address the issue of Facebook’s ability to seemingly add and subtract from friendship simultaneously is by means of Albert Borgmann’s “device paradigm”. Borgmann is a German born American philosopher, who teaches at the University of Montana. In his classic critique of modern technology, Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life (1984) Borgmann investigates a “debilitating tendency” of our modern technological lives, represented in the manner in which technology makes promises and subsequently erodes the quality of life in attempting to make good on its promises. Technology, Borgmann says, promises to place nature and culture under our control and it does so by means of devices that make goods and services effortlessly available to us. The characteristic feature of devices is that they perform their tasks immediately, and without making much in the way of demand upon us in return. Emblematic devices for Borgmann include television sets, automobiles and so forth. Facebook and other social media tools seem to fit the bill (though there is some squabbling it seems in the secondary literature about what counts as a device and what does not). Expressed in Borgmannesque terms the Facebook is a device that makes our friends available to us whenever we choose. Space and time all but disappear. Thus I can conjure up my pals over my morning tea or by means of a Facebook app on phone as I commute to work. It’s easy, ubiquitous, effortless.

So, why might any of this be a problem?

The problem is that the device, in general, supplants a richer engagement with things. To use one of Borgmann’s own examples when a wood-burning stove is replaced by heat supplied by a coal-fired central plant and piped into our homes a rich involvement with the world of the thing is lost. The stove is more than a mere appliance – it provides a focus for the home, a hearth. To select and chop the wood and to learn the knack of lighting and maintaining the stove requires a social engagement than one does not get by flipping a switch. The family gathers around it. In terms of this model, Facebook in its capacity to make friends appear by glancing at our screens, and in its reduction of social civilities to the mere deploying of “like” buttons and so on, unburdens us of many of the responsibilities of friendship. It is fair to say that, over the years, I have traveled less to Ireland to see my parents and siblings than I might have, because they remain available to me on Facebook and Skype. But instant availability comes at the cost of a flattening. A poke from friend or family on Facebook has never been, I suspect, as gratifying as an embrace in the flesh. Gone also is the satisfaction of arriving at the journey’s end – the door opening, the smell of rashers of bacon on the pan in the kitchen within, being prepared for the prodigal son’s return.

Now most people maintain a mixed strategy: inter-mingling the virtual and the physical aspects of their friendships. I have coined the term “phriendship” to refer to those intimate relationships that call primarily for real-world physical encounters. Clearly we need to maintain both phriendships and friendships. However, perhaps even the best of phriendships becomes a little deracinated by our virtual commitments. When one finally get together, the process of catching is now a little diluted. That trimmed beard no longer a surprise, nor are the graying temples, the chronicles of births, deaths. Entertainments and misfortunes have already been shared. There is simply less work to do – when we next meet up the routine tasks of friendship have been attended to in tiny byte-sized pieces.

[LINK] “Google Reader’s demise not end-all”

The San Francisco Chronicle‘s James Temple doesn’t think that the impending demise of Google Reader will doom RSS feeds, but also doesn’t think RSS feeds are that relevant.

Eric Goldman, law professor at Santa Clara University, [. . .] argued that this blow to RSS, which feeds you news directly instead of forcing you to seek it out, enhances the troubling tendency of people to gravitate to Internet echo chambers, where they encounter only voices and opinions that support their own.

“Without an RSS reader as reliable and efficient as Google Reader, my information flows will be lower-volume, slower, more heavily intermediated by third-party algorithms, and – as the dystopians predicted – less diverse,” he wrote.

I agree with Goldman that this is a dangerous trend that’s already created a far more polarized society, where each side of debates now feels entitled not just to their own opinion, but their own set of facts.

But I don’t think the death of one product or even one technology would notably worsen this.

For starters, RSS may or may not be in that much trouble. There are already plenty of popular products that use it, like Flipboard, Feedly and Pulse, and probably some more on the way.

That alone addresses a big part of this.

But ultimately I think RSS matters a lot less in the age of social media, as anyone can follow their favorite writers and publications directly on Twitter and, to some degree, Facebook.

Goldman addressed this, saying he believes social media simply doesn’t work as well for news: “I already use it extensively as a complement to RSS, but it’s scattershot and much slower to read.”

But I actually think it’s better. I dropped Google Reader long ago as I found it far easier – and much more entertaining – to use Twitter as my news feed. In addition to seeing what my favorite writers post, I immediately spot breaking and trending stories by people I never knew to follow. I also get to interact with them, posing questions or posting counterpoints.

[BRIEF NOTE] On the impending death of Google Reader

Last night on Facebook, I learned from Simon Bisson that I’d have to switch from the RSS reader I’ve used for the past few years, Google Reader, because Google is closing Google Reader down. I’ve set up an account on Feedly, which promises to become wholly separate from Google Reader after that service closes down on the 1st of July. Wired’s Mat Honan argued this was inevitable, notwithstanding Google Reader’s popularity with its users.

While RSS has maybe seen its heyday come and go, Google Reader was notable not only for its features, but for the active community it fostered for which Reader wasn’t just another tool. Sure it was revolutionary in terms of function, but moreover it was beloved.

Reader grew out of Blogger. In the summer of 2004, Jason Shellen — who had come to Google with the Blogger acquisition — was working on Google’s Atom specification. He asked a Blogger engineer Chris Wetherell if it would be possible to build an in-browser XML-parser to make sense of all these feeds. This little tool became Google Reader. Shellen liked the product, but couldn’t get the go-ahead from Google to launch it under its social program, so he took it to Marissa Mayer, who was running Google’s consumer web services. Mayer gave Reader the green-light–provided the team would strip out its social features.

It debuted as a formal Google Labs product in 2005. It developed a number of novel features, like the ability to detect what you had read on a per-item basis. And by 2007, it outgrew Labs and emerged as its own product (via a post from its marketing manager Kevin Systrom, who would go on to found Instagram). And yet slowly, social crept back in.

Reader gave users the ability to friend, follow and share stories with others. It let readers share stories with each other, and comment on them too. It became a place not just to read new stories, but to share and discuss them with friends. It was a discovery tool and a salon all in one.

However, Google removed the ability to natively share and replaced it with a Google + sharing option in 2011. That was effectively the end of the Reader community, many members of which publicly lamented the loss.

And now, the entire product is going away for good. This wasn’t exactly unforeseen. Reader had long been basically ignored, its updates were few and far between. Last month, when many users started reporting problems, Google simply ignored the issue for several days before even commenting on it. The end of Reader has been in plain sight for some time.

Techcrunch’s Drew Olanoff, meanwhile, seems to think that RSS was bound to fall as better technologies like Twitter and Facebook developed.

The idea of RSS was one that never quite gripped with normal Internet users. Sure, for us geeks who absolutely love consuming as much information as possible, RSS is a wonderland. When Google launched Reader in 2005, I can remember surfing to all of my favorite sites and looking for that little RSS logo, clicking on it and subscribing to the feed. So easy, so awesome to “us,” and so not easy or awesome to anyone else on the planet.

[. . .]

In essence, Twitter is a big RSS reader, allowing you to “follow” the people sharing content that you’d like to consume. That simple concept of following gripped, but subscribing to feeds simply did not, at least how Google Reader and other popular readers let you do it.

[. . .]

There is a pretty sizable pocket of people like us who are upset at Reader’s demise, but since none of us could ever explain what RSS was – why someone should use Google Reader and how to advance a boringly old technology – it’s dying. Nobody cares that Google Reader is dying, because nobody cared enough to keep it alive. The funny thing about technology is that apps and sites pick up traction after early adopters get to it first. It’s these geeks that brought apps like Instagram to the masses, calling it fantastic and amazing.

Nobody ever did that for RSS or Google Reader, so this is what happens. The sad day for Google Reader came a long time ago, such as the fact that I haven’t logged into it for three years. The only reason why I logged in today was to grab these screenshots.

Thanks to Twitter, Flipboard and Facebook, I have more content than I can shake a stick at. I don’t want to read every single thing that WIRED writes, I want to read the things that people I know think are awesome. Google Reader never did that for me, so it must go.

I disagree. I like to read a lot of things that other people on my Facebook and Twitter feeds don’t like to read. Here’s hoping Feedly lasts; I like a diversity of news sources.

[LINK] “Facebook to unveil ‘new look’ for News Feed”

I’m half-curious but mostly concerned about the latest change scheduled to occur with Facebook’s news feed, described by the Associated Press, via CBC as being a big change, whatever it is, since Facebook apparently hasn’t provided any details about what this change will involve.

Amid chatter of “Facebook fatigue,” real or imagined, the world’s biggest social networking company is getting ready to unveil a new version of News Feed, the flow of status updates, photos and advertisements its users see on the site.

Facebook Inc. is hosting an event at its Menlo Park, Calif., headquarters at 10 a.m. PT on Thursday to show off “a new look for News Feed.”

The company offered no other details on what the changes will be in an invitation sent to journalists and bloggers. It will be Facebook’s second staged event at its headquarters since the company’s May initial public offering. The company unveiled a search feature at the first one in January.

If past site changes are any indication, the News Feed tweaks may take some getting used to and will likely lead to user grumbles.

[LINK] “Brains of rats connected allowing them to share information via internet”

The Guardian‘s Ian Sample reports on a rather remarkable new technological development. The paper’s title is “A Brain-to-Brain Interface for Real-Time Sharing of Sensorimotor Information”, but I’ve seen people on Facebook talking about rat telepathy, too.

Scientists have connected the brains of a pair of animals and allowed them to share sensory information in a major step towards what the researchers call the world’s first “organic computer”.

The US team fitted two rats with devices called brain-to-brain interfaces that let the animals collaborate on simple tasks to earn rewards, such as a drink of water.

[. . .]

Led by Miguel Nicolelis, a pioneer of devices that allow paralysed people to control computers and robotic arms with their thoughts, the researchers say their latest work may enable multiple brains to be hooked up to share information.

[. . .]

The scientists first demonstrated that rats can share, and act on, each other’s sensory information by electrically connecting their brains via tiny grids of electrodes that reach into the motor cortex, the brain region that processes movement.

The rats were trained to press a lever when a light went on above it. When they performed the task correctly, they got a drink of water. To test the animals’ ability to share brain information, they put the rats in two separate compartments. Only one compartment had a light that came on above the lever. When the rat pressed the lever, an electronic version of its brain activity was sent directly to the other rat’s brain. In trials, the second rat responded correctly to the imported brain signals 70% of the time by pressing the lever.

Remarkably, the communication between the rats was two-way. If the receiving rat failed at the task, the first rat was not rewarded with a drink, and appeared to change its behaviour to make the task easier for its partner. In further experiments, the rats collaborated in a task that required them to distinguish between narrow and wide openings using their whiskers.

In the final test, the scientists connected rats on different continents and beamed their brain activity back and forth over the internet. “Even though the animals were on different continents, with the resulting noisy transmission and signal delays, they could still communicate,” said Miguel Pais-Vieira, the first author of the study, in a statement. “This tells us that we could create a workable network of animal brains distributed in many different locations.”

[LINK] “Pastoral Uruguay Yields a Crop of Digital Yetis and Adventures”

Noel, do you have any insights on the situation described in this New York Times article?

For a start-up that has a hit video game for the iPhone, the new loft-style offices of Ironhide Game Studio are exactly what one would expect — a newly hired staff labors feverishly on software updates not far from a pinball machine and custom-built monster arcade cabinet intended for letting off steam.

But the company, a success in the fiercely competitive field of video game development, stands out from other high-tech ventures in one respect: its unconventional location, which frequently confuses people abroad. “They politely ask, ‘Where is Uruguay?’ ” said Álvaro Azofra, one of the three founders of Ironhide, the company behind Kingdom Rush, a lucratively popular game in the United States that involves a cartoonish kingdom under attack by marauding yetis and ogres.

Squeezed between Brazil and Argentina and long dependent on commodities exports, Uruguay may be better known for its flocks of sheep and herds of cattle. But attention is now shifting to the country’s growing constellation of start-ups that are engineering video games for computers and hand-held devices.

Developers point to a variety of reasons that Uruguay has been able to compete with South America’s larger economies, whether the creativity of its engineers and commercial artists or its relatively relaxed immigration rules and extensive use of computers in schools.

[. . .]

Gaming studios have also emerged in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil’s two largest cities, but developers there complain of byzantine tax regulations and labor rules that make hiring employees costlier than in some rich industrialized countries. In Argentina, dozens of game-developing start-ups have been founded in Buenos Aires.

But while Argentina has traditionally had more companies in the industry, some of the momentum is seen shifting across the border to Uruguay as Argentine ventures struggle with abrupt changes in economic policy, including the tightening of currency controls that have complicated operations for exporters.

[BLOG] Some Monday links

• At Geocurrents, Asya Pereltsvaig takes on the provocative, if apparently ill-founded, thesis that Ashkenazic Jews trace their ancestry to the medieval Khazars of the Russian steppe by taking a look at the structure of the Yiddish language.
• Language Hat claims that, with the advent of electronic communications which make them difficult to insert into text, diacritical marks are endangered in the Polish language. A campaign has been launched.
• At Lawyers, Guns and Money, Erik Loomis links to an essay by feminist and historian Ruth Rosen wherein she states–basically–that early feminists didn’t think about campaigning against violence against women in the 1970s because violence against women was taken for granted as inevitable.
• British journalist Mark Simpson unearths a vintage article about Napster and the Internet and free culture from 2001 that’s still relevant today.
• Marginal Revolution’s Tyler Cowen links approvingly to a book, Cuisine, Colonialism and Cold War: Food in Twentieth Century Korea by Katarzyna J. Cwiertka, that examines “Korean-Japanese relations, the early history of Korean industrialization, and the rise of industrial food, as well as the evolution of Korean food in recent times”. It does look interesting.
• Naked Anthropologist Laura Agustín takes a look at the ways in which the sex industry of New York City’s Times Square was an integral part of the neighbourhood, in photos and posters.
• Torontoist notes that City Council has just declared Toronto a sanctuary city, guaranteeing undocumented residents access to municipal services. More on this later.
• Eugene Volokh in a couple of posts (1, 2) starts speculating whether or not indigenous peoples in the New World would have seen European migrants as illegal immigrants and starts to head in problematic directions. Again, more later.
• John Scalzi at Whatever shares his love of libraries.
• Window on Eurasia’s Paul Goble notes, via various sources, that Chechen refugees in the European Union are facing forced returns to their ever-problematic homeland.