We’ve previously covered the drawn-out battle between EchoStar and TiVo over EchoStar’s DVR technology, which TiVo claims infringes its patents. The merits of the patent dispute are, as with most, Byzantine, but a jury has found that EchoStar has indeed infringed TiVo’s patents, and appeals courts have affirmed that finding. The key point [...]

AppMakr Transforms App Store Landscape, Enables Anyone To Make Their Own iPhone App. Gagan Biyani raves about AppMakr, a product that allows anyone to make a simple RSS-based iPhone app for $199. The company will even submit the app to the App Store. (So, for instance, Biyani put together an app that aggregates [...]

JZ has recently pondered the iPad in a column in the Financial Times. Some excerpts of his thoughts…
First, he begins with a quick history of the subtle but massive shift between the Apple II and the iPhone:
In 1977, a 21-year-old Steve Jobs unveiled something the world had never seen before: a ready-to-program personal computer. [...]

The Extraordinaries Haiti Earthquake Support Center. A followup post on the Extraordinaries’ efforts to use ubiquitous human computing to help find missing people after the Haiti earthquake — a positive vision inspired by JZ’s nightmare scenario of crowdsourced secret police work. Did they succeed? “Yes and no”—but, as they detail, there’s obvious potential [...]

In talks about ubicomp, JZ gives an example of a worst-case scenario involving ubicomp platforms. He imagines that the Iranian government could use Amazon Mechanical Turk to identify dissidents, simply by posting pictures of protestors and ID-card pictures of the adults in the country, then asking Turkers to match protestor pictures to ID-card pictures. [...]

As we knew would happen sooner or later, a dangerous malicious app has apparently made its way into Android’s Market. The app is said to “create[] a shell of mobile banking apps” and collect users’ personal information. It’s been removed; no word on how many users, if any, were actually affected.
Offhand, I can’t think [...]

Flurry: App Store Sees Record Breaking Christmas. Great article collecting sales and market share numbers for the App Store and Android Market. Quick summary: App Store grew 51% (!) from November to December, Android Market 22%; App Store has 13x as many downloads as Android Market (apparently not everyone is as concerned about [...]

Our worries about ubiquitous human computing*—summarized in this earlier post—fall into two broad categories. First, there are potential bad effects on the workers, since traditional labor-law protections may not apply in cyberspace. Second, there are potential bad effects on the world. One example that JZ has given in talks is that lobbyists [...]

As Phones Do More, They Become Targets of Hacking. The NY Times observes that as computing — and especially commerce — moves onto mobile devices, security threats are growing. “It feels a lot like it did in 1999 in desktop security … People are using the mobile Web and downloading applications more than ever [...]

Apple’s Game-Changer, Downloading Now. Long NY Times article on Apple’s App Store and how it’s changed the model of what a smartphone should be. The good parts of the article: interesting data (100K apps for the iPhone, 14K for Android, 500 (!) for PalmOS; $1B a year in iPhone app sales), some valuable [...]