Chego is re-opening in Chinatown this Saturday (May 4th) after shutting down their Culver City location.

Chego is one of my favorite places to eat. Damned good food, great people running it, and reasonable prices. It’s one of the reasons I love Los Angeles so much. If you’re in the area and have never tried it, I suggest fixing that sometime. Roy Choi is a hero.

San Jose State University is integrating online courses in a big way:

Ms. Junn hoped that blending M.I.T.’s online materials with live classroom sessions might help more students succeed. Dr. Agarwal, the president of edX, agreed enthusiastically, and without any formal agreement or exchange of money, he arranged for San Jose State to offer the blended class last fall.

The results were striking: 91 percent of those in the blended section passed, compared with 59 percent in the traditional class.

Great news. More use of class time, cheaper for students, provides more access to education and frees up university resources; what’s not to like? Oh, well, the California’s university faculty unions propose a sensible alternative:

Any wholesale online expansion raises the specter of professors being laid off, turned into glorified teaching assistants or relegated to second-tier status, with only academic stars giving the lectures. Indeed, the faculty unions at all three California higher education systems oppose the legislation requiring credit for MOOCs for students shut out of on-campus classes. The state, they say, should restore state financing for public universities, rather than turning to unaccredited private vendors.

In other words: keep spending all that money on education and shut down anyone who tries to do it differently, more effectively, and more affordably!

If you’re looking for a new RSS feed service, David Smith’s Feed Wrangler looks like a great one.

As always, Federico Viticci (the man, the machine) has a very good look at the service and iOS apps.

Jay Haynes claims Ron Johnson failed at JC Penny because he misunderstood Steve Jobs’s statement that “You can’t just ask customers what they want”:

Ron Johnson took away the wrong message from Apple and decided not to analyze the jobs-to-be-done for JC Penney customers. Like almost every innovation effort that fails to analyze the customer’s job-to-be-done first, Johnson’s effort was a failure. But his biggest failure may be learning the wrong lesson from Apple and his former boss.

Jobs’s point was that you have to understand the needs customers have, rather than their expressed wants. Haynes presumes that because Johnson said that JC Penny shouldn’t test their changes since customers don’t know what they want, he meant customers don’t know what needs they have. That’s a huge leap that isn’t at all justified by the (second-hand) quote Haynes references nor by Johnson’s decision not to test changes. And one of Jobs’s other famous sayings is they do no market research for their products, and that they didn’t do any for the iPad because it isn’t the consumer’s job to know what they want.

I’m willing to bet that Johnson understands Apple quite a bit better than Haynes does, based upon this rather lazy attempt to connect a valid point—that there’s a difference between ignoring what people say they want and ignoring their needs—to Johnson’s failure at JC Penny. If you want to read a much more plausible take on why Johnson failed, Ken Segall’s is the one.

Jean-Louis Gassée:

Some read the decision to return gobs of cash to shareholders as an admission of defeat. Apple has given up making big moves, as in one or more big acquisitions.
I don’t agree: We ought to be glad that the Apple execs (and their wise advisers) didn’t allow themselves to succumb to transaction fever, to a mirage of ego aggrandizement held out by a potential “game changing” acquisition.

Yep. Large acquisitions are very, very hard. Apple’s discipline with its cash is one of its finer qualities.

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Facebook has agreed to acquire Parse:

These steps come in all sizes. Most are small and incremental. Some are larger.  Today we’re excited to announce a pretty big one.

Parse has agreed to be acquired by Facebook. We expect the transaction to close shortly. Rest assured, Parse is not going away. It’s going to get better.

Wow.

You know, if you’d like to build a mobile platform but don’t want to build an operating system, owning the best backend service for mobile developers is probably a good way to do it.

Marco Arment is selling Instapaper to Betaworks:

Instapaper is much bigger today than I could have predicted in 2008, and it has simply grown far beyond what one person can do. To really shine, it needs a full-time staff of at least a few people. But I wouldn’t be very good at hiring and leading a staff, and after more than five years, I’d like an opportunity to try other apps and creative projects. Instapaper needs a new home where it can be staffed and grown, but I didn’t want to give it to a big company that would probably just shut it down in six months.

Instapaper has been a key part of how I do work for years. Instapaper (and the New York Times application) are my two most-used applications.

Congratulations to Marco for creating such a useful and successful service, and congratulations to him for making what is a very hard decision: knowing when it’s time for your creation to move on to someone else who has the time and resources that it needs.

Here’s an example, I think, of where acquisitions are not at all wrong. Our community would do better to not automatically dismiss all acquisitions as a failure, but instead evaluate each one on their merits. Many times they are a failure; acquisitions are very difficult to do well. But sometimes, they’re the right choice for everyone involved, including customers.

Daniel Jalkut thinks WWDC has run its course:

Instead of a week each year when a developer must enter a lottery for a chance at talking directly with a knowledgable Apple engineer in the labs, beef up the existing Developer Technical Support process and workflow so that vexing issues can be driven to the point of resolution, and so that the fruits of those discoveries can be shared with others. For every “lifesaving” tip a developer has received in the WWDC labs, how many others continue to struggle in anguish because the effort was never made to codify that wisdom in the form of a developer technote or other reference material? It doesn’t make sense … it’s a bug, if you will … that so many Apple developers feel that their only opportunity to solve a problem is by meeting in person with an Apple engineer at WWDC.

I agree. Apple needs to re-think how they achieve WWDC’s goals, and Daniel has some excellent ideas for how to do it.

Circles is a new iOS memory by Built By Snowman. Beautiful app, and beautifully simple, too. They’re donating a portion of all revenue to an Alzheimer’s charity as well, which is just terrific. Check it out.

Benedict Evans points out that the smartphone market is mostly tapped out:

Growth for any given manufacturer necessarily becomes a matter of taking sales away from other smartphone manufacturers, not featurephone manufacturers (i.e. Nokia). Moreover, Moore’s Law is at work, driving down prices; you can now get a 4.5″ dual core Android phone from Huawei for just $200, and one from a generic Chinese manufacturer for $120-$150. 

This is clearly a challenge for any handset OEM, but especially for one at the high end. There are fewer and fewer new high-end buyers coming into the market and the ones you sold to in the past may increasingly be tempted by ever improving cheaper phones. So a high-end phone maker risks losing sales if it stays at the high-end, or losing margin if it makes cheaper phones, or both. 

This transition is the biggest threat to Apple’s future because the iPhone is responsible for so much of the company’s earnings.

A study finds that showing the doctors the price for tests they order results in a significant reduction in expenses:

When doctors saw this information, they ordered 9.1 percent fewer tests for their patients. That, a new paper in the Journal of the American Medical Association finds, saved the hospital just about $400,000.

“Our study offers evidence that presenting providers with associated test fees as they order is a simple and unobtrusive way to alter behavior,” the study authors, lead by Johns Hopkins professor Leonard Feldman, write. “Unlike the process in previous studies, no extra steps were added to the ordering process and no large-scale educational efforts accompanied this exportable intervention.”

Breaking news! Prices work as a signaling and rationing mechanism! (But I thought medical care was something too important to leave up to the market?)

The obvious next question here is this: if showing doctors how much things costs reduces the number of tests they order, wouldn’t showing patients the true costs have the same result?

Yes. The answer is yes.

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Nest will now automatically tune your thermostat schedule or adjust the temperature for peak usage periods to save money and use energy more efficiently:

Traditionally, Fadell explained, people turn on their air conditioners and leave them on all day, when it gets very hot. regardless of whether they’re home or not. That uses a huge amount of energy, and can force utility companies to power up special plants that often run on coal, or to buy power from third parties at very expensive rates.

But with Rush Hour Rewards, Nest owners can be part of the solution, Fadell argued. The idea is that the system builds a personal profile based on residents’ lifestyles, and then runs the air conditioner in a much more efficient manner, while still maintaining comfort, Fadell said.

They say that during peak periods, they can reduce power usage by up to 40 percent while only allowing the home’s temperature to rise by 3 percent. Incredible.

They’re reducing energy efficiency while saving money for owners. That’s a much better approach because owners will be more likely to actually use the service, and it should therefore be more effective. I love this company.

Dan Frakes points out a trend in iOS app design—the floating button:

In Facebook’s case (left), it’s a pill-shaped “New Stories” button that shows up at the top of the screen when there are new News Feed items to load. In Foursquare’s app (right), it’s a big, round “Check In” button at the bottom of the home screen.