Farhad Manjoo:

Tesla is trying to create this infrastructure by itself, which means everything’s moving more slowly than it could. If the entire car business worked together to improve this stuff, batteries and charging infrastructure would improve at a faster pace.

So how can Tesla persuade General Motors, Ford, Toyota, Mercedes, BMW, and other car giants—not to mention other car startups that are similar in size to Tesla—to all work together to improve the world’s electric vehicle infrastructure? By licensing its tech to its competitors, in the same way that Google gives Android away to every phone-maker in the world.

That’s exactly what Tesla has started doing.

Interesting idea; I wasn’t aware that Tesla was licensing its motor and battery technology. Getting more electric cars on the road and a shared quick-charging infrastructure in place would certainly benefit everyone involved.

Research suggests that the brain corrects grammar errors while you listen to others speak:

The brain does all kinds of amazing things while you’re not paying attention (you know, like regularly remind you to breathe). But it’s also engaged in less critical but equally interesting tasks, like correcting the grammar of the person sitting across from you at dinner. A University of Oregon study has logged hard evidence that the brain processes and compensates for errors in grammar and syntax without your being aware of it.

The Verge’s Casey Newton has a good look at the new Google+ features:

Enter the data center. Google is betting that its powerful machine-learning algorithms will work not just to attract users to Google+, but to keep them there. And as with Instagram and Facebook before it, photographs will be central to the effort. Photographers were among the most enthusiastic early adopters of Google+, which alone among its peers displayed photos up to 2,048 pixels wide. (Last month Google began permitting full-size photos to be uploaded, though they count against the free 15GB shared-storage limit Google now has for Gmail, Drive, and Google+.) Until now, Google has worked to make Google+ the best online home for your photos. With today’s update, it wants to make your photos look better there than they do anywhere else.

There’s certainly some neat ideas here; surfacing the better shots (ones that aren’t blurry, under or over-exposed, and duplicates) is nice, for example, and if the auto-enhance isn’t overzealous, that’s convenient as well. (Some features, like combining multiple group photos together so you get one where everyone’s smiling, or automatically smoothing people’s skin to hide imperfections, might be a little less exciting.)

Google announced a lot of exciting things. Google search by voice, where Google will reply with answers instead of just search results in many cases, is coming to the desktop as well, and is continuing to get much better. Google+ is nice generally and the iOS application is quite lovely. Their new streaming music service looks pretty good. Despite that I think putting a screen in front of our eyes is a terrible idea, Google Glass is impressive work in many ways. Etc. etc. But while much of what Google is doing is nice in and of itself, there doesn’t appear to be a thread running through it all—it’s just a lot of stuff.

Google is doing incredible things and is capable of incredible things, but I think that’s their single biggest weakness: an inability to focus their work for a single thesis. I speculated in March that Larry Page was re-focusing Google; that may still be true, but this year’s Google I/O certainly doesn’t support that idea.

Terrible news:

NASA’s planet-hunting Kepler spacecraft has been crippled by the failure of one of the reaction wheels that keep it pointed, the space agency is announcing this afternoon, according to astronomers close to the situation.

Hopefully they can get it fixed. Kepler is one of the most important space missions we’ve conducted in the last few decades.

Megan McArdle:

There’s a growing school of thought among columnists and television pundits which says that the “real” scandal in Washington is not the fact that a government agency investigated people based on their political leanings, but that 501(c)(4)s are multiplying like Typhoid bacteria, allowing anonymous donors to fund unlimited amounts of political speech.   These groups, it is rather tediously explained, should actually have been registered under section 527, which would require them to disclose their donors. A related genre is the column explaining how the real victims here are liberls*, the Obama administration and maybe the American public.

I’m going to stick with “the real scandal is a employees of a government agency using the large powers we have granted them to selectively investigate people based on their political beliefs” and “the real victims are the people who were investigated”, though of course, I think this is also terrible for the American people, because we deserve good government.

“Yes, this happened, and it shouldn’t have, but the real issue here is…”

Josh Barro:

A lot of the calls for the Internal Revenue Service to crack down on political 501(c)(4) organizations — which is what the IRS was trying to do when it touched off the scandal over Tea Party groups — focus on the claim that ideological, political groups are obviously not “social welfare” organizations as required under the law. Not so fast.

Josh Barro:

A lot of the calls for the Internal Revenue Service to crack down on political 501(c)(4) organizations — which is what the IRS was trying to do when it touched off the scandal over Tea Party groups — focus on the claim that ideological, political groups are obviously not “social welfare” organizations as required under the law. Not so fast.

Josh Barro:

A lot of the calls for the Internal Revenue Service to crack down on political 501(c)(4) organizations — which is what the IRS was trying to do when it touched off the scandal over Tea Party groups — focus on the claim that ideological, political groups are obviously not “social welfare” organizations as required under the law. Not so fast.

Mad Mimi is a design-oriented email newsletter service founded in 2008. Developed to provide a mobile-app-like feel, and with a drag-and-drop email composer, Mad Mimi offers a simple, elegant user experience that helps customers create, send, and track beautiful html email campaigns.

Mad Mimi also offers robust APIs, integrations, and add-on features. This makes it a perfect fit for today’s visionaries, artists, and entrepreneurs, including great digital brands like Fancy and StumbleUpon, who use Mad Mimi to communicate with their customers.

Best yet, Mad Mimi is free for up to 2,500 contacts. We hope you’ll give us a try or email us with questions.

Sponsorship by The Syndicate.

The ACLU made a Freedom of Information Act request about text message surveillance, and they received an entirely redacted document.

Because transparency!

The Justice Department seized two months of phone records for the Associated Press, apparently in relation to the AP reporting that a terrorist plot had been disrupted:

The Justice Department secretly obtained two months of telephone records of reporters and editors for The Associated Press in what the news cooperative’s top executive called a “massive and unprecedented intrusion” into how news organizations gather the news.

The records obtained by the Justice Department listed incoming and outgoing calls, and the duration of each call, for the work and personal phone numbers of individual reporters, general AP office numbers in New York, Washington and Hartford, Conn., and the main number for AP reporters in the House of Representatives press gallery, according to attorneys for the AP.

Mathew Honan:

In well-defined markets, it’s rare to see a breakthrough device. And yet here we are. There are a lot of sleep and activity trackers to choose from right now, but none better than the Fitbit Flex. It is the most wearable, best-syncing device in the scrum, with the best app to boot. And it does all this at a great price.

This is one of the most interesting areas in technology right now.

Liat Ben-Zur:

So what’s the problem? Aren’t all these hot new connected IoT devices connected up to the cloud? Well, that’s the problem. We are oversimplifying the landscape. Each specific device seems to connect to its particular cloud service. There isn’t really one cloud. Every manufacturer has their own cloud service, and often these clouds are closed, proprietary environments. Devices that live in their own siloed cloud cannot speak to one another, meaning they cannot benefit from the data, context or control of nearby IoT devices. That is why we currently need a separate app to control — and interface with — each connected thing we buy. This may be acceptable in the near term, but it cannot scale.

That’s not just a problem for Internet-connected devices, either; we have more web services than ever before, but they’re increasingly walled gardens. Beautiful gardens, maybe, but locking up so much data and so much user data is holding back the web’s development.

Health is a great example. We have weight tracking applications, meal tracking applications, exercise tracking applications and devices, sleep tracking applications—and hardly any of them speak to each other. That data should be combined for users, because it’s health data, and it’s their health data, but it’s mostly locked up into a number of different services.

That needs fixed. There’s nothing inherently wrong with trying to build a feature someone else already does, but it should only be done when it makes sense. Every new service and device should not be an island unto itself.

Jim Dalrymple just announced the Loop magazine for iPhone and iPad.

Long-form articles will be a great complement to the Loop.

Jeff Jordan argues Amazon is Google’s biggest threat:

In Google’s case today, I am becoming increasingly convinced that their most challenging competitor isn’t another search engine like Yahoo!, Bing, Baidu or Yahoo! Japan. It’s Amazon, which is bringing a completely different take on search—in this case, product search.

Amazon is a vertical search engine focused on helping users find products. The overwhelmingly dominant way to find things on their site is the search box.  Users enter a keyword phrase and are presented with results that match his or her query. The order of the search results is determined by algorithms that seek to optimize relevance and monetization. Sound familiar?

This perspective helps explain the Kindle Fire, too.

(Via Rian van der Merwe.)