Yahoo's $1.1 billion acquisition of Tumblr is already being hailed as a brilliant move, securing a younger Internet demographic and a fertile field for native advertising, an innovative business model where content from brands lives side by side with users' contributions.

In buying Tumblr, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer made a nod to the company's past missteps in promising to "not screw it up."

But in one crucial way, she already has.

That $1.1 billion is a lot of shareholder cash. And so Yahoo is promising investors that Tumblr will contribute to the bottom line next year. An understandable promise—but it's the wrong strategy for Yahoo and for Tumblr.

A Different Strategy

Instead, Mayer should follow the lead of Amazon's Jeff Bezos and Google's Larry Page, who have shown that they're willing to lose money for years on projects like Amazon Prime and YouTube, and build Tumblr into a lasting asset.

Yes, Yahoo has a big salesforce. And yes, Tumblr has a large audience. And yes, the idea of encouraging marketers to first create Tumblr sites and then pay to distribute their posts throughout Tumblr makes sense on paper.

But Tumblr still has a lot of growth ahead of it, particularly on mobile, where the landscape for ads is less well-formed.

Instead of trying to juice revenues in the short term, Mayer should be using all of Yahoo's assets to help Tumblr grow—to make it far and away the most popular way to create content for the Web.

One way to do this is to move Yahoo's media properties away from their clunky, homegrown content-management systems and onto Tumblr.

Another is to use all those salespeople to encourage their clients to start posting interesting material on Tumblr. Before they use Tumblr for advertising, marketers need to understand its quirky, distinctive culture. And the only way to do that is to dive in as participants.

Tumblr Needs Long-Term Goals, Not Short-Term Thinking

Mayer should declare that she's not going to focus on monetizing Tumblr until it hits some big number—say, 500 million monthly users. At that point, marketers will be clamoring to get in, and Yahoo can dictate the terms of their access in a way that won't turn those users off.

Look at how Facebook bought Instagram for $1 billion last year, then left it alone. From the time the deal was announced to its closure, Instagram's user base tripled, and continues to grow. In short order, it surpassed Twitter in mobile users. No one's worried about how much money Facebook will make off Instagram. Instead, investors are relieved that Facebook staved off a potential threat and kept it out of competitors' hands.

What Tumblr doesn't need is short-term pressure to deliver a lot of results to advertisers and to investors. As a startup, it had to start making money. As part of Yahoo, it has the luxury of long-term thinking. Or it should—if only Mayer hadn't promised otherwise.

It's great that Mayer has brought an urgency to Yahoo. The Tumblr deal happened in a short time frame—reportedly just six weeks. But now Mayer should be thinking about what Tumblr—and Yahoo—will look like in six years.

If Google had its way, everyone in the world would be on the Internet, using Google services. To bring that goal to fruition, Google is reportedly working to build cellular networks in Africa and Southeast Asia to help bring hundreds of millions of people online for the first time.

According to The Wall Street Journal, Google is in talks with countries like Kenya and South Africa to fund and deploy cellular networks in those countries, using wireless spectrum reserved for television broadcasts. 

Bone deep in Google’s business strategy is that the more people that use the Web, the more Google benefits. That is why the company is testing its Google Fiber high-speed Internet access in various locations in the United States and why it bid in U.S. wireless spectrum auctions in 2007 and 2008. Google has long been planning to enter the cellular service market and there is no better testing ground than those portions of the planet that still lack Internet access.

Owning The Plumbing

Google’s play is to not only own what you do on the Internet, but the pipes you use to access it. 

Google would provide much of the critical infrastructure, such as the base stations and processors involved in building the networks, the Wall Street Journal reports. It could also employ “high-altitude platforms” – blimps and balloons – that could broadcast cellular signals for hundreds of miles. Google could also build out the network using satellites, a technique that a many remote areas use to quickly add telecommunications services. 

If Google can get the populations of sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia on the Internet, it can then sell low-cost Android devices into those regions through its manufacturing partners like Samsung, LG, ZTE, HTC and Huawei. Once those eyeballs are online, Google hopes to find ways to make money from them with its advertising and search products.

Google could also push various Android services to these newly connected Internet users. The Android Google Play app store is able to accept payments in 134 countries - giving the company the ability to sell apps, books, music and video to a large portion of the world’s population. 

In the end, this is a pure volume move for Google: get more people the capability to get online, give them a portal to do so (smartphones) and get them using Google. 

Google and Microsoft are finally shaking hands and agreeing to work together over Microsoft's controversial YouTube app for Windows Phone devices.

"Microsoft and YouTube are working together to update the new YouTube for Windows Phone app to enable compliance with YouTube’s API terms of service, including enabling ads, in the coming weeks. Microsoft will replace the existing YouTube app in Windows Phone Store with the previous version during this time," Microsoft and YouTube said in a joint statement sent to ReadWrite. 

Microsoft will take down the current YouTube app from the Windows Phone Marketplace and replace it with the version that Google and Microsoft will build together, based on YouTube's application programming interfaces, the established way third-party apps access YouTube content.

Microsoft had originally built its own YouTube app for Windows Phone that had violated YouTube's terms of service by stripping pre-rolled adds from the video content and allowing users to download videos. Last week, YouTube sent Microsoft a cease-and-desist letter warning that the Windows Phone app was a violation of the video website's terms of service. 

It's widely rumored that Apple's new iOS 7, to be unveiled at WWDC next month, will ditch the company's ill-fated love affair with "heavy textures," also known as skeuomorphic design, for a more flattened take on the user interface. A new report from 9to5mac on Friday suggests that this new flat design will also incorporate lots of black and white, though it's unclear just how far this simplified color scheme will permeate the new OS.

(See also: iOS Users Beg Apple: Set Our iPhones & iPads Free!)

Other updates will reportedly include changes to the longstanding lock screen, new widgets in the notification center and an overall uniformity in design and color among all native Apple apps. 

SimplyZesty, a digital agency specializing in design as well as mobile and social strategy, made headlines earlier this month with its mock-up of what iOS 7 might look like. Many point out that the mock-up looks a bit like Windows Phone, and that its unlikely Apple would ever take its UI in this direction. But it sure gives us a good start when thinking about flat design.

Image courtesy of SimplyZesty's mock-up. 

It's a huge year for TV's future. Yet for all the excitement about Web-first soap operas, data-driven programming and the disruption of broadcast, the Internet TV "inflection point" that 2013 has become is just the beginning. A Trojan horse is slowly rolling into town, and it's bursting at the seams with data. Wheeling it along is none other than Google. 

Indeed, if the data-fueled success of Netflix's House of Cards is as crucial to TV's future as many believe, what Google is most likely planning will make the transformation we've witnessed so far look like early innings in a very long ball game.

First, though, a caveat: Google has said almost nothing about its plans for taking on the TV market, and I don't have any new inside information to offer on that front. What follows is instead a giant thought experiment — a plausible (to me, at least), fact-based extrapolation of just how thoroughly Google could disrupt the TV industry should it put its mind to it. And should users consent to its plans.

TV's Future Hinges On Content, Data and UX

Whatever TV looks like in the future, it will be built atop three crucial components: content, intelligence and user experience. A fourth element, known as actually making money, hinges heavily on the "intelligence" part — which is to say, data. 

The industry is collectively still figuring out the user experience part. Apple is rumored to have "cracked" the interface problem, but until Steve Jobs's prophetic words find a home in reality, we're stuck with the puzzle's most promising pieces: the likes of AirPlay, Roku and a small army of creative video app designers. 

That leaves the content and intelligence parts, which are what Netflix is purported to have mastered with House of Cards and what Amazon hopes to mimic with with its own Internet-first TV pilots. Hulu has taken its own stabs, but has yet to score a House of Cards-sized hit.

For the last few years, Google's YouTube has also invested quite heavily in original, TV-quality programming for Internet audiences. It, too, is still trying to find its Kevin Spacey. But it's likely only a matter of time before everybody's buzzing about the new show on YouTube, much like we've long chattered about double rainbows and finger-biting babies. 

Google will find its killer content. It will do so in part by leveraging the very thing that gives the company an advantage in just about any space it enters: all that data. 

YouTube: A Burgeoning Trove Of User Data

An absurdly funny standup routine by Louis CK? Thumbs up. A mini-documentary about 3D-printed guns? Consider the "Watch Later" button tapped.  Every music video I ever wanted to see? YouTube has them too, and designating my favorites is effortless. With every tap of each of YouTube's buttons — thumbs up, add to a playlist, watch later and, most importantly, "play" — I'm feeding fresh data to the world's biggest video site. Which, in turn, it uses to build out personalized recommendations, not unlike the special sauce Netflix used to wipe out Blockbuster.

Of course, the data on Netflix's servers is a bit more useful when it comes to recommending long form, Hollywood-caliber video to its users, since that's what Netflix specializes in exclusively. It's the type of knowledge Google will presumably get better at building as its selection of professionally-produced video expands. 

What Google Knows - And Will Know - About Us 

In the meantime, Google is building out a much richer profile of its users than Netflix and Hulu could ever dream of creating.

Outside of YouTube, Google knows a great deal about us. Just how much it knows varies depending on how heavily you use Google's services — and how finely you tune your privacy settings.

For me, that data includes my browsing history (across devices), email, documents, voicemails, eight years of search queries, detailed location data from Maps, a limited view of my schedule from Google Calendar (I mostly use iCal) and a smattering of other data points from the more than 25 different active services tied to my Gmail account/ And I'm not even an Android user.

These services don't all swap data freely — and my Google Drive may well contain no information that's of value to YouTube. But collectively, these services build out a rather richly-detailed general profile of who we are, what we do, where we go and what we enjoy. In theory, YouTube has the capability of knowing not just what Netflix knows — what we watch, when we skip, how we rate — but also quite a lot about who we are in general. 

In the future — if Google's master plan unfolds accordingly — this will all be buttressed with social insights. As its social efforts ramp up, our list of Gmail contacts becomes much more informative: who's in which circles? What do they +1? Who do I trust? 

Google+ is still the exclusive domain of early adopters and media geeks, but in time the company intends for it to become a viable alternative to Facebook and will eagerly ingest all of the social data points that come with that distinction. You can catch an early glimpse of how Google intends to use social data in the next iteration of its Maps interface, which will leverage your social connections to provide recommendations about where to go next. Think Google Now for your physical location. 

How Google Could Use This Data To Win At TV

Similarly, we may one day see Google Now for TV. That is, anticipatory content recommendations fueled by your viewing history, social connections and insights inferred from a complex tapestry of data points from across services and devices. 

Recommendations are important (indeed, cracking this code certainly helped put Netflix in a position to win with House of Cards), but they're only the beginning of what's possible when television is fueled by very, very big data. As its video efforts ramp up, Google — like Netflix before it — will be able to factor in mountains of user data to determine not just what to recommend, but what content to buy the exclusive rights to, or even produce outright. 

Unlike other Internet TV shows, these new premium productions will sit within the world's biggest repository of online video. Sure, much of it is garbage, but the sheer scale of the material it has on hand increases Google's ability to smartly serve up relevant, worthwhile videos to people who come to check out its new shows. Not to mention how easy it would be to rope YouTube's casual, cat video-watching users into clicking the play button on their next big TV-style program. House of Cats, anyone?

In the fall, Nielsen is going to start factoring Internet viewing stats into its decades-old TV-viewing measurement methodology. It's a move that's widely viewed as being both long overdue and symbolic of where TV is heading. If you ask me, Nielsen isn't going far or fast enough to stay relevant. The further companies like Google move into the TV space, the less sense the old, panel-based methodology for tracking makes sense. 

In a recent post on the Monday Note, Frédéric Filloux argues that the sample-based method Nielsen uses to track Web user activity is ripe to be upended by Google's far more sophisticated mechanisms, which even go so far as to use statistical pairing to filter out repeat visitors that may be coming to the same site from multiple devices. Filloux is referring to Web tracking, not TV viewership — the traditional part of which Nielsen is uniquely capable of measuring.

But his argument carries over into the realm of online video and usage, which Google is far better at measuring than Nielsen is. As more viewers turn to the Internet for what we've historically referred to as "TV", Google's method — and what it means for potential advertisers — becomes a lot more attractive than Nielsen's.

When it comes time to monetize those shows, all that big data will be just as useful. This is, of course, Google's specialty. The company that figured out how to make billions by serving contextually relevant ads to people searching the Web is probably well-positioned to do the same with the future version of what we once knew as television commercials. 

What Stands In The Way

Just because Google has the algorithmic capacity to acquire, smartly deliver and monetize rave-worthy content on a disruptive scale, that doesn't mean it will. If this indeed what Google plans to do, it's going to have to clear some hurdles. 

For one, there are privacy implications associated with the type of cross-service data sharing Google would need to do in order to build out these rich, super-profiles of viewers. Using that data to sell video ads won't go over well with everyone, even if it isn't that far off from what Google does with Web search ads. The change could be as simple as a privacy policy update and opt-in button, but nothing Google does on that front will ever fail to arouse concerns about privacy. 

Then there's the content issue, which is huge. YouTube already houses a massive amount of video, and Google likely has the intelligence to find its own House of Cards. But when it comes to hosting premium, TV-caliber content, Google is still playing catch up.

As Tim Carmody pointed out recently, Microsoft is much better positioned to win the living room than Apple is, primarily because Microsoft has managed to pull together the most compelling selection of content. (The same argument applies if you substitute Google for Apple.) That includes not just video games like Halo and Gears of War but online video sources and live TV available directly from cable providers.

With the XBox One, Microsoft also takes a pretty compelling stab at the interface problem. It doesn't eliminate the hand-held remote, but rather augments it with voice control and gesture-based interfaces that make us feel like we're truly living in the future.

To win at TV, Google is going to have to learn from products like the XBox One and incorporate a level of polish and attention to the user experience as its done with its more recent Android versions and handsets. If Google can create the Nexus 4 or set top boxes, loaded up with with a bulletproof UX and a wide selection of supreme-quality content, the Apples and Amazons of the world will have some catching up to do. And the traditional players will be screwed.

Guest author Sam Hailes is a freelance journalist from the UK.

"What does this button do?"  That was the cryptic yet clever final tweet from John Mayer in 2010 when he abandoned his 3.7 million followers.

5% off your food bill. That was the offer that LA restaurant Eva gave to customers who surrendered access to their mobile phone for the duration of their meal.

"Internet Explorer cannot display the webpage." That is the error message that frustrates, angers and infuriates millions of people across the world.

What has happened to us?

15 years ago nobody banked online, updated their status or Instagrammed their food. Now, we’re all doing it. Even that last one (admit it). Plugging in to the Web has many benefits. But for some the whole experience has become overwhelming. Could interest in the Internet really be waning?

Perhaps.

A growing chorus is rising up from people glued to their computer screens. They complain of distracting noise and nonsense dominating their Twitter feeds and Facebook timelines.

Quit The Web Or Quit Smoking?

If switching off sounds tough, though, you're not alone. A 2011 survey found participants complaining that digital detoxing was about as difficult as quitting smoking.

Still, plenty of people are giving it a try. During the Christmas 2012 period, some 600,000 UK users deleted their Facebook accounts. Being online, especially when viewed through the lens of making and building friendships, may not be as cool as it used to be.

Web users are discovering three big problems:

1. Too Big To Keep Up

The Web allows almost anyone to become a publisher, and various guestimates put the number of active blogs at a whopping 450 million. And that's just the ones written in English!

The sheer quantity of information has become overwhelming, and it continues to grow exponentially. That's great for Wikipedia, but not so great for our brains.

2. Clogged Brains

The average American consumes 100,500 words a day. Three quarters of our waking day is spent consuming information. The effects can be stupifying as well as enlightening.

Have you ever had a day when you've done nothing but stare at a screen yet feel as if you've just run a marathon? Do you have more than 10 tabs open in your browser most of the time? Do you have social media apps on your phone, always running in the background?

While our brains may need to stop and switch off, occasionally, the Internet never takes a break.

3. Driving Us To Distraction

Whether you spend hours looking at pictures of cats or The Huffington Post, the problem is the same. You're distracting yourself with information. The knowledge that there's so much information out there just waiting to be consumed makes us jumpy. We barely digest one cute cat picture before moving on to a top 10 list. (Heck, I'm be surprised you're still reading this!)

Switching Off

Is it any wonder that more people are switching off - even if only for a limited time? The feedback from those who've tried it is nearly unanimously positive.

Talking about the two week period when he denied himself Internet access, Mark Hooper wrote in the Observer:

I read more, I cooked more, I wrote a few postcards (and managed to forget to leave enough space for the stamp). I drew. I went on long walks. I drove to Hastings and ate chips on the beach. I watched more curling in the Winter Olympics than I would have thought humanly possible. I rediscovered the rare thrill of staying up until midnight on a Saturday night to see if my football team had won (we're in the Championship) or - better yet - only finding out when I opened the Sunday papers.

But, most of all, I did nothing - and it was great. I could physically feel my head rising above the water again as the stream of information subsided. My wife told me I was more fun to be around, probably because I wasn't tutting at my phone every 10 seconds.

Can digital detoxing help you relax, unclutter your mind and make you happier?

It's no use asking me. There's only one way to find out. Are you brave enough to try it?

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

Iron Man 3 is a great - nearly classic - summer blockbuster, filled with awesome special effects, stellar performances, fewer plot holes than explosions and a heartfelt geek message at its core: technology drives and inspires us, enables us to save the world - and how we control our tech ultimately determines our humanity.

Iron Man is the role that Robert Downey, Jr. was born to play, though Ben Kingsley nearly steals the show, deliciously playing the dual roles of evil terrorist and drunken British footie fan. The film's entire lead cast is spot on, in fact, with each character able to stand out amidst the many loud rockets very bright red glare. 

The story is surprisingly well-constructed, if a bit boilerplate Hollywood: America is under siege - only, this time it's personal. Media-savvy terrorists have turned humans into walking bombs. But not even Tony Stark, aka Iron Man, can save us. In this third installment of the series, we require not one but a battalion of Iron Men, some human, some not - it's not always so easy to tell - to vanquish our enemy. 

In the end, superior technology - or at least the tech with the fewest major bugs - wins the day. 

We Are Our Tech

Iron Man 3 doesn't just revel in all its high tech wonder. High tech is its purpose, its reason for being, and the driver of the plot.  Terrorists have developed, with Tony Stark's unwitting help, something called "Extremis," which can re-grow limbs but also turn people into walking bombs. It also creates a battery of super-strong villains able to take on the well-suited Tony Stark, though at the cost of their sanity. 

In Iron Man's world, we are each the tech we put in or around our bodies - so choose wisely. 

Tony Stark may be a "genius, billionaire, philanthropist" but he is also most definitely a geek. Stark's sanctuary is his basement, where he relentlessly tinkers - creating voice-activtated Iron Man suits and relying upon what might be Google Glass 2.0 to help construct his visions. 

Stark builds several Iron Man suits, expertly repairs them when needed, hacks into a news truck's satellite feed, heroically soars above the clouds and commands computing power likely still a few years away from today's reality. His newest suit wraps itself around him at will. Think the rumored iWatch, only for the entire body and with military-grade weaponry standard-issue.  

Hollywood Follows Silicon Valley

Silicon Valley is leading the charge to construct the programmable world. With Iron Man 3, Hollywood follows, expertly dramatizing these changes.

Tony Stark, himself, is the stuff of Silicon Valley dreams: even smarter than rich, witty, equal parts computer programmer and mechanical engineer. He quit running his own mega-company, Stark Enterprises, to concentrate on the more visionary stuff and, Sergey Brin-like, spend his time building cool new gadgetry.  

Offered without irony, Stark inadvertently places his life in danger - and threatens the future of America - by turning down one hell of a start-up opportunity. 

Spoiler alert: The man Tony turned down, the smart, nerdy, hapless and ultimately evil Aldrich Killian, well-played by Guy Pearce, possesses a product - Extremis - that can “hack into the hard drive of any living organism."  If there is any cautionary message in the film, it's that technology that surrounds us is acceptable, but tech we put inside us remains to be feared.

The Whole World's Gonna Be Watching

In Iron Man 3, the female characters - yes, there are more than one - are badass, smarts are highly valued, terrorists are as stupid as they are evil, technology absolutely can make us better, children can do much more than we suspect, the good guys always have someone at their back, and you get better as you get older.

All that plus the gadgets, the rocket attacks and the big finish, makes Iron Man 3 the perfect start to the summer blockbuster season. It's fun, loud, action-packed, well-written, well-acted, filled with awesome special effects that almost but do not quite overwhelm the characters.

You probably want to go see it again.

ReadWrite will provide reviews of other summer blockbusters. Next up: Star Trek: Into Darkness.

Image of Sergey Brin courtesy of Flickr. All other images courtesy of Marvel.

Four companies are reportedly making bids for online video service Hulu, which has apparently put on the auction block after a disagreement between owners News Corporation and Walt Disney Company on how to operate the TV steaming service. 

Former News Corp president Peter Chernin, private-equity fund Guggenheim Digital Media, DirecTV and Time Warner Cable have all put in bids for Hulu, Reuters is reporting. If one of the latter two companies manages to pick up Hulu, it will be interesting to see how a satellite or a cable company (respectively) treat a service that's been at direct odds with their own content services for a while now.

Stay tuned.

This post is the third in the ReadWrite series Making Android Pay, focusing on the opportunities and challenges that mobile developers face trying to make money from Android Apps.

In the waning hours of the Google I/O developers conference last week, an Android developer stood at a microphone to ask a very pertinent question: “If I am in the top 2% of Android apps on Google Play, how much money am I really making? $30 a month? $3,000? $300,000?”

The two poor Google product managers on stage couldn't or wouldn't give him an answer. They declined to cite revenue of other Android apps on Google Play’s top lists. They refused to share a general number of how much successful Android apps earn. The two Googlers, Ibrahim Elbouchikhi (product manager of Google Play Commerce) and Bob Meese (Google Play games business development), had highlighted earlier in their session that average revenue per user had more than doubled in Google Play in 2012.

But the developer in the audience was essentially saying was that twice zero was still zero.

To The Winners Go The Spoils

Unless your apps are massively popular on Google Play, it is very difficult to make a good living with Android app development. Developers building apps for Apple’s iOS still make more money than those building for Android, and Apple’s download rate is considerably higher (50 billion for iOS against 48 billion for Android) despite Apple’s considerably smaller installed base).

During their session, Elbouchikhi and Meese gave developers several tips on how to make money from Android. The focus was on two specific topics: games and the top lists in Google Play. 

Essentially, Google is saying that you need to hit the top lists on Google Play to even have a chance at making a decent living. (Getting there is difficult, of course, but developers "get a lot of sales [just] from being on the top sellers list.") The top lists are almost all games - and almost all monetized via in-app purchases. Look at the top grossing apps in Google Play. Of the top 25 grossing apps currently in Google Play, 24 of them are games. The only exception is Pandora, which brings in most of its money from its subscription service.

Top grossing Android apps on May 21, 2013

The domination of games is not unique to Google Play. The Apple App Store's top grossing and paid sections are also filled with games. Smartphones and tablets are great for gamers, especially casual gamers. This has led us to believe that there is a coming golden age for game developers. 

Non-game developers may be in a bit of trouble though. Yet there are things that developers can do to entice their audience to pay up. The idea is to first acquire users (through a variety of means), retain them by delivering excellent apps and customer service and then turn them into passionate users. It is only then that you can ask them to pay you for your product.

5 Keys To Android App Success

Elbouchikhi and Meese highlighted five important aspects of Android that make it easier to monetize an app:

1. Tablets pull in 70% more revenue than smartphones: It helps to create a version of your app optimized for the tablet form factor, which Google made easier to beginning with Android 4.0, known as Ice Cream Sandwich.
2. Employ in-app purchasing systems: In-app revenue increased seven-fold in 2012. While the "freemium" model can be manipulative, it does help developers make money from their users. Once you have created a relationship with a user, you can then hit them up for the "upgrade" (usually in games) or the subscription model (like Pandora). You'll have to deal with any ethical dilemma concerning in-app sales on your own.
3. Subscriptions work: Android has seen 200% app subscriber revenue growth in recent quarters. This approach can work for app developers focused on businesses and enterprises, media publications or music services. Some games employ subscription models but most go for the in-app purchase freemium model. (Meese noted that almost all of the top apps are free-to-play. "The barrier to success for a paid title is very high.") 
4. Better ratings means more revenue: Google has done significant work to help developers get better ratings for their apps. That entails standardizing design principles for Android, working to minimize fragmentation and performance issues and letting developers reply to users who have rated their app. This critical, because the higher the rating, the more money the app earns. According to Google, apps that earn a 4- or 5-star rating average almost 29 times more revenue than do lower rated apps.
5. Go global: Google realizes that most of its subscriber base is not in the United States or even in Western Europe. This is why it released its transcription service in the Google Play Developer Console at I/O last week.

"I think we are at the beginning of that and we will see that beginning to happen next as people get used to the process and developers get creative in figuring out how to build those passionate users and when the right time is to ask for payment," said Ellie Powers, product manager for Google Play. "And also what are the types of things that people are willing to pay for. There are things that people are not willing to pay for and some things that they are."

Top photo by Nick Statt: Google's Ellie Powers introduces new Google Play Developer Console features at I/O 2013.

If you haven't heard, we're in the midst of a rampant and sometimes violent iPhone crime wave. In San Francisco, smartphone theft accounts for nearly half of all robberies in the city. Most of these are iPhones. In New York City, there were more than 11,000 thefts of Apple products - mostly iPhones - in just the first eight months of last year. This represented a 40% rise over 2011, far higher than the rise in other crimes. 

Blow Up Your iPhone

Fortunately, I have a modest proposal for a simple and definitive solution to this problem: iPhones rigged to burst into flames or even explode. You steal my iPhone, it catches fire or blows up in your hand. 

So go on, punk. Steal my iPhone. Let's see how many fingers you have come morning. Once word gets around, this problem will self correct in very short order. What better iPhone theft deterrent could there be than a city filled with petty criminals - all with stumps where a hand used to be? 

Reasonably Priced Protection

The cost would be quite reasonable. Lithium ion batteries are already prone to radical overheating. If a flaming iphone that melts the thief's fingers isn't a strong enough deterrent, gunpowder is cheap, and could easily be engineered into the iPhone 6. Meanwhile, exploding cases could be built to retrofit older models. Look at it this way, what's another $50 or so for the privilege of having a true remote wipe feature?

True, the theft victim is still out an iPhone, but that was a foregone conclusion anyway. Within moments the thief had likely placed an "almost new" iPhone listing on eBay. But the former owner can focus instead on the joy of knowing that the criminal paid an even higher price for that no longer-working iPhone. 

Help From Carriers And Smartphone Vendors?

Besides, as noted, once flaming iPhones become the standard, thefts will likely taper off very quickly. In the meantime, perhaps the mobile carriers would be willing to thank us for our help in stopping crime. No, they probably won't let you out of your contract - they're not crazy - but they might offer heroic vigilantes (nee victims) a free replacement device. 

I wouldn't look to Apple for help, though. Despite the iPhone crime wave, the company has done precious little to protect the products so far, and that's not likely to change. After all, Apple actually benefits every time an iPhone is stolen - mostly likely the vic buys a replacement device at the full, non-subsidized price. What? Is Apple supposed to not sell you another iPhone?

My proposal has wider benefits as well. No doubt there would also be a radical drop in pickpocketing and other two-handed crimes. And wouldn't it be useful to have immediate, obvious evidence of who the thieves are? The police could quickly shift their focus to fighting more important crimes.

Countering Objections

Now, some of you may object that flaming iPhones are dangerous. That the punishment doesn't fit the crime. That innocent people could get hurt.

Sure, fires are hard to control. But isn't that the point here?

And sure, losing a few fingers may seem harsh (it'll be hard to use a touch screen even on a legitimately purchased device), but anyone who's ever had an iPhone stolen probably wished for even worse things to happen to the thief. 

Finally, if bystanders don't want to get hurt, they can just avoid standing by iPhone thieves. And just like gun owners are encouraged to lock up their firearms so kids don't get their hands on them, a little care should keep most of the little ones from using Mommy's iPhone to play games without telling her about it. If not, they'll figure it out when little Johnny down the street has to learn to bat left-handed at stickball.

In the end, what's a little collateral damage compared to making sure my iPhone is safe? Heck, if this takes off, you can bet that Android, BlackBerry, Windows Phone and the rest won't be far behind. Pretty soon the entire smartphone market will be exploding. That's a good thing, right?

Image courtesy of Shutterstock. 

But this isn't necessarily a bad thing. Using Hadoop for cheap and efficient storage is a perfect starting point for the next phase of Hadoop's evolution. With this summer's expected debut of Hadoop 2.0, changes are afoot that will make information found within data warehouses and unstructured "data lakes" more accessible than ever.

Hadoop As A Big Bucket

Hadoop has been a great system for storing data since its initial adoption as a Big Data tool, but the data-processing framework MapReduce, which requires the creation of Java apps to reach into stored data and pull out the information required, has a high learning curve.

(See also Hadoop: What It Is And How It Works.)

There are other ways to get information out of Hadoop, of course. The HBase database is included in Hadoop, letting users treat data with a database paradigm. And the Hive data warehouse system enables you to build queries in the SQL-like HiveQL query language that can be converted to MapReduce jobs. But Hadoop is still limited by the fact that everything you do in it still has to be done one thing at a time. MapReduce jobs, Hive queries, HBase operations… they all have to take turns.

This is why a lot of vendors tend to frame Hadoop as the bucket in which data is stored, and cast their products as the magical tool to pull out or analyze that data. In fact, while the data bucket metaphor is apt, it has been super-sized among Hadoop users to become known as data lakes or even data oceans. Given the perceived limitations of Hadoop in its present state, it's not a hard sell to make.

But as the Hadoop development community starts ramping up for the next iteration of Hadoop, those limitations are about to be greatly reduced.

Knitting A YARN Solution

For Arun Murthy, the release manager for Hadoop 2.0, the most important change will be upgrading the MapReduce framework to Apache YARN, which will expand what software can be used in Hadoop and how much. Murthy, who is also YARN project lead and co-founder of Hortonworks, explained that "In Hadoop 1.0, everything was batch-oriented. In 2.0, you will now have multiple apps hitting the data inside all at once."

What YARN does, essentially, is divide the functionality of MapReduce even further, breaking the two major responsibilities of the MapReduce JobTracker component - resource management and job scheduling/monitoring - into separate daemons: a global ResourceManager and per-application ApplicationMaster.

Splitting up these functions provides a more powerful way to manage a Hadoop cluster's resources than the current MapReduce systems can handle. It manages resources similar to the way an operating system handles jobs, which means no more one-at-a-time limitations.

With YARN, developers will be able to build apps directly within Hadoop, instead of bolting them on from the outside, as many third-party vendor tools have to do now.

Murthy reported that the Apache Hadoop community is already seeing keen interest from vendors who want to build their apps within the YARN framework that will live directly inside Hadoop and have resources managed by YARN.

Because the Apache Hadoop community is driving the development of the new version of Hadoop, there is no set timeline for Hadoop's progress this summer. Murthy predicted that a "strong beta" of Hadoop 2.0 might be available in June or July timeframe, with a final release perhaps ready by August.

If YARN lives up to its promises, a lot of data lakes and oceans will suddenly be more accessible within the native Hadoop platform, which will greatly streamline and speed up the task of finding useful information. Big Data is about to get even more useful.

Reports are coming out today that Israeli mapping company Waze is now being eyed as an acquisition target by Google, for the tune of $1 billion. This, just days after similar reports that Facebook was looking at picking up Waze for a similar price tag, and reports earlier this spring that Apple was in the hunt too, definitely puts Waze in the cat-bird seat.

Why the sudden interest? For Google, it could be a simple absorb-the-competition play, or a chance to acquire Waze's social media features for it's own Google Maps. Whatever the reason, Waze is going to be on everyone's map now.

(See also Facebook Rumored To Purchase Traffic App Waze For $1 Billion.)

You might think that Nintendo, beleaguered by falling revenues, minuscule profit and the almost-but-not-quite-failed launch of the Wii U, already has enough problems to worry about.

And you would be wrong, as Nintendo itself set out to demonstrate last week by going out of its way to alienate a bunch of its fans on YouTube.

The fans in question make YouTube "playthrough" videos about, well, video games — features that combine elements of commentary, review, tutorial and walk-through. Some of these commentators reach millions of subscribers, and many support themselves in full or in part by running ads against their videos.

The Empire Strikes Back

This, apparently, Nintendo could not let stand. So last week, the game company began making mass copyright claims on YouTube gameplay videos — in particular, on the the popular "Let's Play" series of playthrough videos. Nintendo did so via YouTube's "Content ID" system, which allows the company to robo-claim ownership of videos that contain footage of its video games.

Nintendo isn't trying to take down the commentary videos. But by asserting copyright, the game company can then run its own ads against the commentaries — and thus, of course, deprive the video creators of revenue.

In effect, Nintendo has put those video creators on notice that, while it will tolerate them for now, it won't let them make money from their efforts. It doesn’t matter if the post is a detailed review, a think piece on the art style, or a tutorial for a difficult level, all of which involve a substantial additional effort on the part of the video creator. Insofar as Nintendo, is concerned, any ad revenue those efforts raised now belongs to... Nintendo.

Nintendo released this statement to the gaming-news site Gamefront last week:

As part of our on-going push to ensure Nintendo content is shared across social media channels in an appropriate and safe way, we became a YouTube partner and as such in February 2013 we registered our copyright content in the YouTube database. For most fan videos this will not result in any changes, however, for those videos featuring Nintendo-owned content, such as images or audio of a certain length, adverts will now appear at the beginning, next to or at the end of the clips. We continually want our fans to enjoy sharing Nintendo content on YouTube, and that is why, unlike other entertainment companies, we have chosen not to block people using our intellectual property.

For more information please visit http://www.youtube.com/yt/copyright/faq.html

ReadWrite also contacted Nintendo for comment. A spokeperson replied that the company is "looking into" the mass copyright claims, but offered no further statement.

Mass Unhappiness Ensues 

Let's put this simply: Nintendo's move is one of the most egregious marketing mistakes ever committed by a major video-game company. It is going to come back to bite Nintendo. Hard.       

Playthrough videos such as Let’s Play do a lot to fuel the commercial videogame complex, every bit as much as magazines and blogs. With their ad revenue diverted to Nintendo, however, these Internet-famous gamers have no commercial incentive to play, or talk in-depth about, any Nintendo games ever again.

Some are already boycotting Nintendo. Take, for instance, Zack Scott, a prolific creator of Let's Play videos:

Since I started my gaming channel, I've played a lot of games. I love Nintendo, so I've included their games in my line-up. But until their claims are straightened out, I won't be playing their games. I won't because it jeopardizes my channel's copyright standing and the livelihood of all LPers.

Dozens of videos by angry gamers have started to populate the site, and comment sections across YouTube are exploding.

"I've bought, played and enjoy several games simply because I heard about them and saw gameplay on YouTube," one individual using the pseudonym TelaranRogue wrote in the comments to a new anti-Nintendo video (titled, cleverly enough, "Nintendo Hates YouTubers"). "With this move, Nintendo just killed their chance of getting sales from me."

"I think Nintendo really took a crap on themselves in doing this," wrote "robert letourneau" in comments to the IGN video "Let's Not Play Nintendo Games."

Nintendo's Self-Inflicted Headshot

Shaun Spalding, a former attorney at New Media Rights, argues that Nintendo is really only harming itself. “[G]ameplay videos generate consumer buzz (so much so that game publishers actually pay some high-level Youtubers lots of money just to start ‘Let's Playing’ their games)," he told me in email. Both the PS4 and Xbox have built-in capabilities that help gamers upload videos to the Internet, he said, but Nintendo has moved in the opposite direction.

It's not even clear that Nintendo's copyright claims are justified (although they're likely to stand unless successfully challenged in court). Some critics argue that playthrough videos should qualify for the "fair use" exception to copyright because they don't incorporate the entirety of the original game and also add a substantial amount of new creative material in the form of commentary, gameplay tips and the like.

As gaming commentator "Totalbiscuit" pointed out in his video on the topic:

[B]ecause you actually play the game yourself, and you do so in a different way, you transform the work in some respect. It becomes yours, it becomes unique.

Too bad Nintendo doesn't see it that way. At least it's first in line to suffer from its short-sighted decision. Unfortunately, its fans are queued up right behind it.

Image screencapped from YouTube video "Let's Play Donkey Kong Country 2" by Cobanermani456

Ready to embrace another arbitrary holiday - or just looking for an excuse to slack off and eat cake? Who isn’t?

This Saturday, May 25, is internationally known as Geek Pride Day. “But, Pi Day and Star Wars Day already happened,” you might be thinking. Which leads me to retort, “Do you want this holiday or not?” In actuality, Geek Pride Day is the only one of the bunch that works overtime as a general celebration of all types of geekery. 

3 Reasons To Geek Out

In fact, there is a trifecta of different reasons May 25 is considered the geekiest day in the year. 

1. It’s Towel Day, the day two weeks after Douglas Adams’ passed in 2001 in which fans celebrate by keeping a towel handy a la The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy.
2. It’s the anniversary of the very first Star Wars movie, Episode IV: A New Hope, which was released on May 25, 1977.
3. It marks the Glorious 25th of May, on which fans of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld books wear lilac and raise awareness of Alzheimer’s, following the author’s 2007 diagnosis. 

Geek Pride Day has been celebrated in dorky masses since 2006, when it originated in Spain as "Día del Orgullo Friki.” (That’s “Day of Geek Pride” in Spanish, natch.) The Internet did the rest, and today it’s an (unofficial) celebration all over the world. Here are a few of ways you can commemorate it:

Geek Stats

For three years running, IT recruitment agency Modis has conducted an annual Geek Pride survey in honor of the holiday. More than 1,000 American adults shared their thoughts about all things geek. Some of this year’s findings:

• The majority of Americans (87%) are proud of their geeky hobbies. Or, as the survey cringingly puts it, most “don’t sneak their geek.” 
• Good news for Google Glass! More than half of respondents (60%) are interested in “wearable tech,” with 56% specifically interested in “smart glasses.”
• You might want to dial it back a bit with the Doctor Who in-jokes. While 74% of self-identified geeks rated themselves “very funny,” only 53% of non-geeks agreed.

Learn A New Geek Skill

Historically, we’ve used “geek” to refer to people “who are unabashedly interested in learning and will eventually be our bosses.” (And before that it referred to sideshow spectacles, but let’s not get into that.) What better day to encourage your own intellectual curiosity? 

ReadWrite has covered many online programs that can teach anyone — even kids — how to become programmers. But one we didn’t cover, Code School, is offering a free trial specifically in commemoration of Geek Pride Day. Sign up on its celebration page to dabble in Ruby, JavaScript, HTML/CSS or iOS for free over the weekend. 

Acquire, Collect & Consume Geekiness

Where would our economy be without geeks lining up in droves to snag the foil-cover limited-edition 3D-capable Blu-ray copy of The Avengers? Embrace capitalism while ensuring that any date you invite to your apartment will have to stare down your anime figurines first. 

Predictably, ThinkGeek has an annual Geek Pride Day promotion. Just like last year, it's shipping out freebies and holding a giveaway. Redbubble is also kicking off a geeky weekend sale. Actually, just Google “Geek Pride Day Sale” and you’ll find tons of companies hungry to snatch up your nerdy, nerdy money. 

Meet Up, Geekily

Not one, not two, but eleven different science fiction, fandom, gaming and anime conventions take place on the weekend of Geek Pride Day 2013. From San Jose’s FAnime Con to Houston’s Comicpalooza to Toronto’s Anime North, the convention centers of Northern America are bound to be crawling with fellow geeks. 

It should be easy to find people out and about who are celebrating Geek Pride Day in particular. If Twitter (#GeekPrideDay) and Facebook aren't enough, just look for people inexplicably carrying lightsabers, lilacs and towels. 

Photo by betsyweber.

You probably already knew this, but a new report from Forrester wants to emphasize this seemingly obvious point: Tablets are not simply larger touchscreen smartphones. There are significant difference in where people use them, how they use them and for how long - all of which have big implications for app developers, marketers, tablet makers and a lot of other folks.

As the table market continues its white-hot growth - nearly 50 million tablets were sold last quarter alone - these differences will force  both innovation and disruption in publishing, advertising, retail, gaming and work, as people optimize apps, media and services specifically for tablet use.

Tablet Usage: The Little Differences 

The majority of tablet users use their gadgets primarily in the living room and bedroom of their homes. This is true even for tablets with cellular connectivity, not just Wi-Fi. 

Even outside the home, Forrester's data reveal that tablet usage is concentrated in "fixed" locations. These include coffee shops, airports and hotels.

Whereas smartphones are highly personal devices, used mostly "on-the-go" and in short "snackable" sessions, tablets are more likely to be shared with others inside the home. Tablets are also used for longer stretches of time. 

Forrester's data also show that tablet users are wealthier and better educated than typical smartphone users. In addition, tablet users are more likely to discuss their opinions of products on social media and other online services.

Forrester's research also reveals the versatility of these devices. Reading, email, watching video, playing games and taking pictures are all common activities. Across their 15 primary activity categories, browsing the web was most common - undertaken by 68% of individuals polled in Forrester's survey - and note-taking was least common, though still undertaken by a respectable 26% of respondents. At present, there is no one specific task driving people to purchase a tablet.

Though the market is relatively new, the report also suggests that users will embrace tablets for controlling numerous home-based technologies - such as entertainment systems, energy monitoring and more. 

Tablets As Second Screens

Tablets are preferred over smartphones as the "second screen" - i.e., as something else to look at while the TV is on. And it turns out that people also use tablets and smartphones differently as second screens. 

According to Forrester's data, web browsing, product research and watching videos online are all more likely to be tablet-based second-screen activities. Social networking and chatting while watching television, however, are the province of the smartphone.

This raises an intriguing possibility: Tablets might actually have a big impact television advertising. As a second screen, tablets offer advertisers new possibilities for integrating their marketing efforts across seemingly disparate media. Some app makers are already jumping on this bandwagon.

For instance, Shazam just updated its "what's that song" app to tag and identify live TV events by "listening" to them. On one hand, that lets the app provide more information about the show or sports game you're watching, including links to related information. On the other, though, the app will also tag the commercials, potentially opening up a new way for advertisers to reach you through the tablet as well as the big screen.

It's not all about play, either. The Forrester study found the people actually report using tablets for "work" surprisingly often. A full 58% of surveyed users report spending an average of 2.5 hours per day on their tablets for work from home. There is, of course, a possibility of responder bias; some people might be inclined to say they're working on their tablets even if they're not.

Assuming those numbers are solid, though, that finding could provide an opening for makers of apps and even tablet hardware focused on personal productivity. Wait, did someone just say... Microsoft?

Shazam, an app best known for identifying songs playing around you, is making a big move into identifying all kinds of media playing around you.

That promises to move Shazam from our pockets, where its smartphone apps mostly identify songs, to our living rooms—and hence to the tablets we typically keep near our TVs. Those tablets are becoming known as "second screens"—and Shazam wants to have a big presence on them.

The most intriguing aspect of Shazam's latest version is its added capability to tag events on live TV in the U.S., a clear sign that Shazam wants to be the gateway app for second-screen use. As you watch a TV show, Shazam can listen and identify it, revealing information about the show and linking to related content. Commercials will be tagged as well, giving advertisers another channel to reach you.

iPad users will also now get to use auto-tagging and lyrics delivered through Shazam's LyricPlay system. Those features were previously available on other platforms, but not the iPad version.

The social aspects of the new version of the app are not to be ignored. The home screen on the iPad app will have real-time updates on what shows and songs people find popular. Shazam users on both iPhones and iPads will now be able to explore a map of tagged music, presumably to discover what the people around them like.

Shazam for iOS 6.0.0 on the iPad

Playing around with the app today, I found most of the features worked as advertised, though there was a period where the app's tagging did not work—the app thought I wasn't connected to the Internet. (I was.) Live TV tagging picked up very quickly—though it does need to be live, I discovered. Some shows I have on Amazon Prime didn't get tagged when played back on my Roku player.

I appreciated Shazam's integration with Rdio, the streaming-music service, but if I wanted to connect to Spotify (or Pandora), I would have to pay a one-time fee of $6.99 for the Encore edition.

Beyond the new features for iPad users, the new version of Shazam offers a sneak peek into a potential future of online entertainment: a strong blend of social and multimedia content designed to make us forget the time when we ever watched TV through a single, lonely screen.

Google is reducing Datastore prices by up to 25%, according to an announcement on their Cloud Platform Blog. This price change impacts both App Engines HRD and the new Cloud Datastore introduced last week at I/O. The price decrease is sure to capture the attention of Amazon Web Services, perhaps even to the point of a small cloud price war.

(Also read How Amazon's Rising Headwaters Could Threaten Google.)

Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) polices are increasingly popular as a way for companies to let workers use the hardware they like best and are most productive with. But according to a new study from Cisco, that not be the best way to think about BYOD.

Implement a strong BYOD policy, Cisco says, and your organization could save $1,300 per year per mobile user. Users meanwhile, report that they are happier and more productive - even though they may end up paying more out of their own pockets!

(See also Worried Workers: BYOD Or You're SOL [Infographic])

Happier, More Productive, But Poorer?

The survey, released Wednesday by Cisco's Internet Business Solutions Group (IBSG) consulting unit, polled 2,415 users in six countries to determine the effects of letting employees bring their own devices into the office. The results indicate that employees around the world were very interested in BYOD, and they were even willing to pay for it: On average, workers said they would spend $965 out of pocket for their own devices and another $734 annually for the data plans to go with them.

Here's why: Workers with their own devices said they were happier and (more objectively) reported significant productivity gains. In the U.S., BYOD participants saved 81 minutes of time per week - just over 70 hours a year.

Not every country noted such productivity increases, and use of employee devices also had negative effects, such as increased administration, downtime and distractions that dragged the overall efficiency down, explained Jeff Loucks, senior manager at IBSG. 

Most of the devices in question were phones: 81% of device bringers reported they uses smartphones, 56% brought tablets and 37% brought their own laptops. On average, each of the estimated 198 million BYOD users around the world had 1.7 devices, said Loucks.

BYOD Keeps Growing

The number of BYOD users is expected to swell to 406 million by 2016. Even though the U.S. leads in BYOD use right now, by 2016, China alone is expected to have 166 million alone, compared to the 106 million in the U.S. and 76 million in India.

Companies fared best, Cisco discovered, when they implemented a strategic BYOD plan, rather than stick than just trying to keep up with devices coming into the organization. Such reactive policies tend to make users figure everything out for themselves, often working with an IT department that only grudgingly allows such devices into the organization.

Want to realize those promised cost benefits? Get ahead of users with a proactive BYOD policy that enables employees to quickly access corporate tools and data, perhaps featuring a self-service help system. Such policies also help organizations keep better security on corporate data.

(See also ReadWrite Survey Results: What A Typical BYOD Program Really Looks Like.)

Be Careful What You Wish For - BYOD Edition

As much as workers seem willing to pay their own way to get the devices they want without their employers' interference (only 30% said they would be willing to work with corporate-provisioned devices - often called Corporate Owned, Personally Enabled, or COPE), it's hard to shake the feeling that even though employees are more satisfied and productive, there's something unsettling if they end up footing the bill for this innovation. 

(See also Forget Bring Your Own Device - Try Corporate Owned, Personally Enabled.)

It's not an idle question: A recent Gartner survey of CIOs found that 38% said their companies planned stop providing employees with devices by 2016. Gartner also expects that nearly 50% of employers will demand employees provide their own devices for work purposes - out of pocket - by 2017.

Companies are increasingly willing to explore BYOD policies - but it seems that the reasons may not be entirely altruistic. Letting employees use the tools they prefer is clearly a good idea, but making them pay for the privilege doesn't seem right. 

Despite Google Android's long market-share rise against Apple iOS, developers continued to stick with iOS as their first deployment target. While Android offered superior volume, that volume was fragmented between different versions of the OS and disparate hardware. Meanwhile, Apple offered better development tools plus clearer, more profitable revenue options. Even open-source developers tended to congregate on highly proprietary iOS.

Something changed in 2012, however, and Android-related open-source development exploded.

This makes sense, given the target audience for mobile applications: consumers. Even though open source now permeates server-side computing, and drives industry trends like cloud computing and Big Data, it has had a negligible impact on the desktop, where mainstream users don't want access to source code and simply want polished products that work. Hence, despite the impressive efforts to clone Microsoft Office with OpenOffice and now LibreOffice, the world still happily gives Microsoft billions of dollars of Office profit each quarter. 

It's easier to stay on that beaten path.

Hence, while I don't expect open-source developer affinity for Android to squash iOS anytime soon, it's still a troubling sign for Apple. Even on the desktop, many mainstream applications are open source, including Adium (IM client for the Mac), VLC Media Player, Handbrake, and more. And if Android is the place open-source developers target for their innovations, we're likely to see the next Big Data-like trend emerge on Android, not on iOS, just as Linux is the home of cloud computing and Big Data on the server.

Open-source developers matter. And, apparently, they matter most to Android.