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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
Andrew Ng is helping lead a group at Google dedicated to making giant advances with neural networks:
It was a shift that would change much more than Ng’s career. Ng now leads a new field of computer science research known as Deep Learning, which seeks to build machines that can process data in much the same way the brain does, and this movement has extended well beyond academia, into big-name corporations like Google and Apple. In tandem with other researchers at Google, Ng is building one of the most ambitious artificial-intelligence systems to date, the so-called Google Brain.
Pretty good piece about the increasing overlap of neuroscience and neural network research for technological purposes, but what I want to emphasize is how much Google has invested in neural networks (or “artificial intelligence” generally, if you’d rather, but that term is pretty misleading). Both Apple’s and Google’s futures depend heavily on using user data and other data sources to provide value for users, and Google has a huge advantage here because they’ve been investing heavily in it for a very long time. It’s just as important to Apple, but Apple had to acquire the Siri team to gain the capability. That’s a huge disadvantage.
This isn’t just about speeding up voice recognition or making it more accurate, although that is an advantage Google Now has over Siri—using voice recognition in Google’s iOS search app feels much faster than Siri because it shows you what it thinks you’re saying as you say it. It’s much more than that; since this has been something very important to Google for a long time, and something of an intrinsic organizational competence, Google can move much quicker to develop the capability in Google Now than Apple can. Apple must move even quicker to make it a skill for Apple, too, and to take advantage of their own unique resources that Google doesn’t have.
Paper for iPad now has pinch-to-zoom support.
As usual with Paper, it’s a bit different than normal pinch-to-zoom. Rather than zoom the entire canvas, pinching places a loupe-like circle around the area you’re zooming on so you can make your changes while still retaining the entire canvas’s context. Smart.
One slightly related note, though: I still can’t get Paper’s two-finger undo gesture to work reliably for me. Gestures can make applications much better, but they can also make it maddening.
On any given day, a quick check of the top-selling paid apps list in the Mac App Store will reveal Apple’s Keynote, Pages and Numbers in the top ten. It’s surprising, given that each of those apps was originally bundled as Apple’s iWork ’09 productivity suite, released in, you guessed it, January, 2009. It makes me wonder when or if we’ll ever see an update to them.
Something I sure didn’t notice while watching the Next Generation: Riker sits down like a crazy person.
Ethan Hawke, Julie Delpy and Richard Linklater discuss “Before Midnight”:
Hawke: The first two films are so much about romantic projection. The third had to be the opposite of that. We couldn’t play that trick again.
Delpy: But it couldn’t be totally taken away from that romantic idea — otherwise it’s depressing.
One of the movies I’m most excited for this year.
Thinglist is an iPhone app for remembering things you want to try. Movies, books, restaurants, music, places. Great idea, and the app looks beautiful.
Welcome to TightWind. If you liked what you read above, you can read more in the archives and subscribe to the new ones. If you'd like to introduce yourself, you can send me an email or a message on Twitter.
