Aereo puts operations on hold, refunds customers last paid month

Aereo on an iPad.

Casey Johnston

At 11:30 ET this Saturday, Aereo officially pulled the plug on its broadcast streaming service and said that it would refund subscribers their last paid month. The closure comes just three days after the Supreme Court ruled that the company was violating copyright law by setting up an antenna for each of its customers to capture free television broadcasts and then letting customers stream those broadcasts online.

This morning, Aereo CEO Chet Kanojia wrote a letter to customers and press saying, "We have decided to pause our operations temporarily as we consult with the court and map out our next steps."

He continuted, "The spectrum that the broadcasters use to transmit over the air programming belongs to the American public and we believe you should have a right to access that live programming whether your antenna sits on the roof of your home, on top of your television or in the cloud."

Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Android Wear, Auto, and TV save you from skins, and OEMs from themselves

Two watches and two OEMs, but one operating system and one interface.

Andrew Cunningham

Our full Android Wear hardware and software reviews won't run until next week, but now that we've spent a couple of days with Samsung's Gear Live and LG's G Watch we have a better idea of how these watches are going to look and act.

One thing about both of them sticks out: their software behaves pretty much the same way no matter which device you have. There are small differences that Google has outlined here, but interacting with each watch is exactly the same, and digging down into the settings shows that they're both running the exact same Android versions and build numbers. This would be unusual for Android phones or tablets, which generally come with OEM-controlled UI skins, hardware and software flourishes, and pre-installed apps.

Talking with Google engineering director David Burke confirmed that all of the new Android initiatives announced at the keynote this week—Android Wear, Android Auto, and Android TV—will have user interfaces and underlying software that is controlled by Google, not by the OEMs.

Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Public officials’ personal texts and e-mails subject of open records flap

California's top court agreed Friday to decide whether government employees' personal texts and e-mails are subject to disclosure under public records law.

At least one other state high court, Alaska's, has already required disclosure and preservation of those communications if they deal with government business. Arizona's highest court has ruled that private communications with a "substantial nexus" to government activity are subject to disclosure.

Still, there's been a hodgepodge of lower-court state rulings nationwide on the topic, leaving much of the country's public officials across the 50 states to conceal their official communications from public review. Federal officials' private electronic communications, however, are subject to the Freedom of Information Act if they concern government business.

Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Serious Android crypto key theft vulnerability affects 86% of devices

Kevlangdo

Researchers have warned of a vulnerability present on an estimated 86 percent of Android phones that may allow attackers to obtain highly sensitive credentials, including cryptographic keys for some banking services and virtual private networks, and PINs or patterns used to unlock vulnerable devices.

The vulnerability resides in the Android KeyStore, a highly sensitive region of the Google-made operating system dedicated to storing cryptographic keys and similar credentials, according to an advisory published this week by IBM security researchers. By exploiting the bug, attackers can execute malicious code that leaks keys used by banking and other sensitive apps, virtual private network services, and the PIN or finger patterns used to unlock handsets. The advisory said Google has patched the stack-based buffer overflow only in version 4.4, aka KitKat, of Android. The remaining versions, which according to Google figures run 86.4 percent of devices, have no such fix.

There are several technical hurdles an attacker must overcome to successfully exploit the vulnerability. Android is fortified with modern software protections, including data execution prevention and address space layout randomization, both of which are intended to make it much harder for hackers to execute code when they identify security bugs. Attackers would also have to have an app installed on a vulnerable handset. Still, the vulnerability is serious because it resides in KeyStore, arguably one of the most sensitive resources in the Android OS. In an e-mail, Dan Wallach, a professor specializing in Android security in the computer science department of Rice University, explained:

Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Top 10 Silly But Awesome Products That Make Life Easier

There are a lot of gadgets and gizmos out there that make your life easier. Some, however, are a little sillier than others — so much that they seem like joke products. Here are a few gadgets and products that sound crazy, but actually rule. More »

   

 

 

RainmeterHub Is A Great Directory Of Skins To Customise Your Desktop

Windows: If you want to customise your Windows desktop, it doesn't get much better than Rainmeter. RainmeterHub is a new site that lets you browse and download new skins for your killer setup. More »

   

 

 

How Do You Block a Penalty Kick?

In today’s World Cup match between Brazil and Chile, it came down to penalty kicks. If neither team is ahead after two extra 15 minute time period, each team gets 5 penalty kicks. The team that scores the most of these 5 wins the match. Brazil won. Oh, was that a spoiler? No, it can’t […]

Are we in a tech bubble? VCs say yes and no

Everyone has an opinion about whether the current state of startups in Silicon Valley is actually a bubble — a sort of history-repeating feeding frenzy that will come crashing down in a spectacular fashion as it did in 2000. The argument is on the rise recently, and Om pointed out in May that there are some signs that things could take a turn for the worse. While it’s easy to look at the latest funding round from ride-sharing service Uber, in which it netted $1.4 billion with a post-money valuation of $18.4 billion,  and say we’re in a bubble, a series of talks onstage at 500 Startups’ PreMoney conference on Friday in San Francisco suggested that the argument is more nuanced.

500 Startups founder Dave McClure, Andreessen Horowitz partner and COO Scott Kuper and Upfront Ventures partner Mark Suster agreed that the startup market was “bifurcating” — splitting between seed investors making smaller investments in new companies, and high-wealth funds pouring capital into big-market products. Kuper argued that the divide is a sign that a bubble could be forthcoming, but isn’t quite here yet  because the big money is going into companies that are taking their time going public: companies in the 2000s took just 3 years to IPO on average, according to the NVCA Yearbook by Thomson Reuters, but now that time is more than double.

"Because companies are staying private longer, it's not surprising to see them getting a billion-dollar valuation," Kuper explained.

As companies stay in the private market longer, they become more attractive to the investors that hold the highly concentrated wealth within Silicon Valley. Suster said in his presentation that in a lot of ways, the environment is positive. Revenue for companies looking to IPO has tripled since the dot-com days, and valuations are less than half of what they were as well — a sign that investors are making smarter choices about where they put their money. But as more companies stay private and pursue later-stage investment, the high concentration of wealth comes into play: Suster says that according to the Q2 2014 PitchBook US Venture Industry Data Sheet total amount of money involved in Series D rounds is groing rapidly up 24 percent in the last four years, and they’re only rising. This means that companies have a potential for big investment, but also big risk.

"If you have a need to raise additional capital later on, that bar you set in the last round may not be appropriate anymore," Suster said.

Both Suster and Kuper believe that the landscape for funding is changing radically — and behaviors will need to change quickly as mid-level VC firms dwindle and money continues to concentrate around big players. But whether or not it’s accurate to say that Silicon Valley is in a bubble is more complicated, and that question might have to do more with the market’s natural cycles than with existing investing behaviors.

“We’ve effectively been in a bull cycle for the last five years, which means you’re playing the odds,” Suster said. “The likelihood of getting to a bear market in the next two years is pretty good.”

Related research and analysis from Gigaom Research:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• 6 steps for scaling a startup
• Applying lean startup theory in large enterprises
• New trends defining the new business intelligence landscape

Why Google and Apple’s battle to lock users into their services will stop at your car’s door

Google is coming for our cars.

At I/O, Google revealed the car was another gadget on the long list of new devices in which the company planting the Android flag. It's easy to get the impression that car is about to swallowed up in the mobile OS wars, just like the smartphone and tablet, the wearable and TV set-top streaming box.

But Android Auto is a little different from the Android handset, slate or watch. We're not going to see Google take over the dashboard in your vehicle like it would another device. I'm certainly not taking away from the significance of Google moving into the vehicle. The world's most widespread development platform, along with Google's Maps and Search technologies, will start appearing in car dashboards starting this year. The implications of this are huge for the automotive world.

But I think we need to clear up some possible misconceptions about what Android Auto means for the auto industry, the tech sector and the driving consumer.

An Android connected Hyundai at Google I/O (photo: Signe Brewster)

We're not going to see Android cars pitted against Apple cars on the open road. Furthermore, the automakers aren't throwing up their hands and ceding the car infotainment market to Google. Car manufacturers are going to keep making their own connected infotainment systems, keep running their own developer programs and keep embedding 3G and 4G connectivity in their vehicles.

There's a lot of room in the dashboard, and we're going to see multiple options for apps and connectivity in the same vehicle. Android Auto is going to share space with Apple's CarPlay and other OS-agnostic interfaces like MirrorLink as well at the automakers own app platforms and telematics services.

"I can't imagine as this plays out in the future that you will have to choose between owning an iPhone to use one type of car or an Android to use another type," said Danny Shapiro, Nvidia's senior director of automotive.

And Shapiro would know. Nvidia is working with many automakers, including Audi, BMW, Tesla and Porsche, to embed its app processers and GPUs into their vehicles. Nvidia is also a founding member of Google's Open Automotive Alliance and has worked on many of the early Android Auto integration projects.

Exhibit A: The Audi A3

The Audi A3 with AT&T 4G connectivity, a mobile hotspot, and now Android Auto (source: Audi)

Audi's implementation of Android Auto is a good example of what we're likely to see in the near future, Shapiro said. Google isn't developing the underlying operating system for Audi's new MMI connected car platform. In fact, the OS is being supplied by BlackBerry's QNX division. On top of that, e.solutions — a venture between Elekrobit and the Volkswagen Group — has developed its own middleware, user interface, APIs and infotainment apps that ride on top of QNX.

Android Auto will be an application framework that runs over MMI. You can almost think of Google as a favored member in Audi's developer platform. It's tapping into MMI's display, command and control, and voice command APIs. The result is the Android interface projected onto the screen and emulated across the Audi's touchpad and various mechanical controls (MMI doesn't use a touchscreen).

The way Audi has implemented Android Auto, you can actually use MMI's turn-by-turn navigation system (which coincidentally draws map data separately from Google Earth) while listening to Google Play Music or composing a text message on your phone using Android Auto's voice commands. In the Audi A3, the first 4G car released in the U.S., the Android Auto apps would run on the phone and connect to the internet over its 3G or 4G connection, while the MMI apps would run inside the dash, connecting to the internet through an embedded radio linked to AT&T's 4G network.

"Audi's approach, I think, is a very elegant one," Shapiro said. Android Auto is one element in a multielement system, he said, and each of those elements can either function independently or work in conjunction. Not every Android Auto partnership, though, will be that sophisticated.

Source: Audi

Audi announced on Thursday that it has also joined Apple's connected car program, and the automaker said CarPlay would show up in 2015 vehicles. Shapiro wouldn't reveal any details about how CarPlay would be implemented in MMI or whether CarPlay and Android would occupy the same Audi dashboards, but he confirmed that Nvidia is working with several car companies on integrating both platforms into the same vehicles.

"There are definitely automakers developing car infotainment systems that will have both Android Auto and CarPlay," Shapiro said.

We're likely going to see scenarios where both CarPlay and Android Auto are running their software in the background, invisible to the driver. But when you plug in your phone with a USB cable or connect to Bluetooth, the car will automatically recognize it and then automatically bring either Apple or Google's software to the forefront, Shapiro said.

And while there's no guarantee that every new car next year will support both Android Auto or CarPlay — there are still some automakers that have joined one development group and not the other — that situation could be soon corrected with a simple software upgrade. There's no hardware component to either platform except for the USB or wireless interface necessary to connect them, Shapiro said.

To only support one system would frankly be stupid. The automakers have no vested interest in picking sides. Why alienate half of your potential customers?

A new era of in-car app innovation

So the connected car isn't going to be new front in the smartphone OS wars, and that's a great thing for consumers. We'll get to choose whether we want to opt for the navigation system, apps and mobile data plans offered by our car manufacturer or if we simply want to make our dashboards extensions of our smartphones.

Android Auto creates a driver optimized version of your Android phone’s UI on the dashboard (source: Google)

And if we go the smartphone route, we won't have to match our devices to the make and model of car we drive (I expect we'll see Microsoft launch a similar car connectivity platform soon). We could even choose to use a combination of services. I might want to use Android for Google Maps in my Chevy, but still use OnStar's telematics system for remote start and unlock features and engine diagnostics.

But let's face it: the auto industry has been painfully slow in delivering third-party apps to the vehicle. Programs like Android and Car Play will bring a much a richer app ecosystem to the vehicle because they're building off of Google and Apple’s already widely popular developer platforms.

I'm sure Google and Apple will be much more restrictive on what apps make it into the dashboard and how they perform (no Netflix in the front seat)  than they are with their smartphone platforms. But from a developer's point of view that's better than the alternative: joining dozens of different automaker developer programs and creating dozens of different versions or your app with no guarantee that they'll every make their way into a car. No matter how restrictive Google and Apple will be, the auto industry is going to be far more conservative.

Chevy’s new MyLink system in a 2015 Impala (photo: Kevin Fitchard)

Though the automakers are opening up to Google and Apple, I suspect these relationships are going to be a growing source of tension between Detroit and Silicon Valley. Presented with a choice between a free Google Maps or Apple Maps and a $20 a month subscription to an automaker's own nav system, I'm going to opt for the former. In my mind Google Maps is already a better turn-by-turn nav app than any vehicle embedded system.

So I give credit to the automakers for inviting Google and Apple onto their turf. In fact, this could mark a new strategic direction for the auto industry in which they use Apple and Google to connect cars they would typically leave unconnected.

Your luxury sedan might come with the automaker's full infotainment and telematics system, but your $15,000 neon-green subcompact might just sport basic integration your Android or iPhone on a small screen. It's the younger set that's often buying cheaper cars, and it's the younger set that accustomed to doing everything – and I mean everything – on their mobile devices.

Related research and analysis from Gigaom Research:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• How new devices, networks, and consumer habits will change the web experience
• How companies can grow by moving into newer, bigger markets
• How to manage mobile security through productivity