Nilay Patel does a nice job explaining Google Drive’s terms of service:

That’s a lot of rights to give Google, on the face of it — in fact, it’s basically every right you can give to Google as a copyright holder. But think about how limited Google’s services would be if it didn’t have permission to use, host, store, modify, communicate, publish, or distribute your content — it couldn’t move files around on its servers, cache your data, or make image thumbnails, since those would be unauthorized copies. It couldn’t run Google Translate or Google Image Search. It would be illegal to play YouTube clips in public. In short, Google is giving itself all the permissions it could possibly need to run all of Google services, with the specific limitations that it doesn’t own anything you upload and it can’t use your data beyond running its services.

So, no, they’re not going to take your work and use it for themselves. We can all shut off the alarm bells.

Thanks to Minigroup for sponsoring this week’s RSS feed.

An Atlanta design firm uses Minigroup to work smarter and keep its clients happy

Braizen uses Minigroup to manage projects and collaborate and communicate with their clients.

A minigroup is a private, secure online space where members communicate with posts and comments, share large files, and manage projects.

Braizen uses one minigroup like an intranet, to discuss business and assign tasks. They also create separate minigroups for each client, where employees working on various accounts present comp designs and drafts.

“Telling potential clients that we use this tool, where we’ll keep in constant contact with them, definitely helps seal the deal,” says Tyrie, the copywriter at Braizen.

Watch the full interview with Braizen.

Minigroups start at just $3 per year for owners, with plans up to 100 minigroups and 100GB of storage. There are no user/member fees.

Find out more or try it free for 30 days.

Tim Cook puts the iPad’s growth in perspective:

“Just two years after we shipped the initial iPad, we sold 67 million,” he said. “It took us 24 years to sell that many Macs, and five years for that many iPods, and over three years for that many iPhones.”

Wow. It’s very easy to underestimate exactly how important the iPad is for Apple and the future of computing.

In response to an article by Ross Douthat, Julian Sanchez argues that invoking a creator, as Christianity does, doesn’t actually solve issues related to ethics—it simply defers them:

I’ll go ahead and make the obvious point: Invoking God doesn’t actually get you very far in ethics, because ascribing “goodness” to a deity or its laws is meaningless unless there’s some independent criterion for this.

Planetary Resources, a new venture supported by Larry Page, Eric Schmidt, and James Cameron, plans on mining asteroids for rare-earth metals.

It’s a long-term, ambitious plan that is more likely to fail than it is to succeed. Granted. But they’re trying to expand space exploration beyond low-earth orbit, and that’s awesome. I want to see manned exploration of our solar system in my lifetime, and this is a step toward it. I hope it succeeds.

The Economist reports that over the last thirty years, China’s fertility rate (the number of children a woman can expect to have throughout her life) has fallen from 2.6 to 1.56. This means China’s population will peak sometime around 2026 and then begin to decline. Worse, though, their population will continue getting older:

The differences between the two countries are even more striking if you look at their average ages. In 1980 China’s median (the age at which half the population is younger, half older) was 22. That is characteristic of a young developing country. It is now 34.5, more like a rich country and not very different from America’s, which is 37. But China is ageing at an unprecedented pace. Because fewer children are being born as larger generations of adults are getting older, its median age will rise to 49 by 2050, nearly nine years more than America at that point. Some cities will be older still. The Shanghai Population and Family Planning Committee says that more than a third of the city’s population will be over 60 by 2020.

Think about that. China is a developing (that is, still relatively poor) nation with an average age comparable to developed (rich) nations, and it will only get older in the coming decades. This means two things: first, China’s cheap labor advantage—which was largely responsible for China’s remarkable record of economic growth since the 1980s—will dry up as their youth decline as a percentage of population; and second, their aging population will require significant financial support. Traditionally, this support comes from the elderly’s children, but because the country’s birth rate is declining, they will be less able to do so.

In other words, China is growing old before it grows rich. That presents profound challenges both for China¹ and the rest of the world².

1. How do they quickly move from an unskilled labor-fueled economy toward a more productive, value-add economy? do they import workers to help augment their declining workforce? If so, how do they adapt their rather exclusionary society to help integrate workers? As economic growth inevitably slows, how will they decide to split up limited funds between government interests and costs for supporting the elderly? [↩]
2. As China’s ability to manufacture products cheaply declines, consumer product prices could rise as a result—which means that unless wages increase commensurately, consumers will face lower real wages. China’s rise has effectively subsidized the poor and middle class in the U.S. and Europe by making goods cheaper. [↩]

After the space shuttle Columbia disaster in 2003, NASA worked exhaustively to solve the issue before re-launching the program, and they believed they solved every possible issue before flying Discovery in 2005. Problem is, they didn’t solve the cause:

What you probably don’t know is that a side note in a final briefing before Discovery’s flight pointed out that the large chunk of foam that brought down Columbia could not have been liberated from an internal installation defect. Hmm. After 26 months of work, nobody knew how to address that little statement. Of course we had fixed everything. What else could there be? What else could we do? We were exhausted with study, test, redesign. We decided to fly.

When Discovery flew in July 2005, despite all of the work NASA’s team put in to make sure what brought down Columbia never happened again, the same issue recurred: foam came off the fuel tank during launch and possibly struck Discovery’s wing.

Luckily, either the foam missed the wing or struck it with such a glancing blow that no damage was done to Discovery’s heat shield.

This is a story of working tirelessly to solve a problem, but missing the problem’s cause, and therefore not solving it. It’s a story we’re all probably familiar with in our own work, but this one involved people’s lives. Work isn’t useful when it’s misdirected. Learn it, live it.

Thanks to Viper Comics for sponsoring this week’s RSS feed. “World War Hack” looks very well done.

Inspired by true events, World War Hack is a graphic novel that tells the story of how the U.S. Government gathers top computer hackers from around the country, under the guise of a hacking competition, to unknowingly help solve a pressing national security crisis. Little does the government know that eighteen-year-old hacker, Wyatt Dyer, is both the cause and solution to their crisis.

As a special for the readers of TightWind, you can preview the first full chapter online for free. Pre-order before May 6 and you’ll also receive free shipping.

Brent Schlender’s piece on his recently found audio tapes of interviews he did over the years with Steve Jobs:

There was one other big lesson he learned from his Hollywood adventure: People remember stories more than products. “The technology we’ve been laboring on over the past 20 years becomes part of the sedimentary layer,” he told me once. “But when Snow White was re-released [on DVD, in 2001], we were one of the 28 million families that went out and bought a copy of it. This was a film that is 60 years old, and my son was watching it and loving it. I don’t think anybody’s going to be beating on a Macintosh 60 years from now.”

How do you make it so products are more meaningful to people in the same way? Or if not the product, the company itself?

Tim Ricchuiti:

To all those who tout “make a compelling app, charge for it” as the be-all and end-all in “sustainable” business models, read that again. In its current iteration, the App Store really doesn’t allow for a “sustainable” business model any more than giving something away for free does for one very simply reason: developers can’t charge for upgrades.

I think that’s a point that’s been lost in this furor over Instagram’s and, now, Pocket’s business model: the App Store’s “sell once, give free upgrades for life” model isn’t very good, either. Low average prices for applications (99¢ to ¢2.99 or so) mean that developers have to sell a lot of copies consistently just to stay in business, let alone make a substantial profit. While it’s true that taking advantage both of the platform’s tremendous number of users and its blistering growth rate can make this model workable, that depends on creating a rather sizable hit of an application. For the growth to continue, the application has to be well-known. That means a relatively small group of people will realize that kind of success, and it creates two very distinct groups: a small group who are seeing long-term, sustainable success with their application(s), and the rest—a much, much larger group that isn’t.

This dynamic also concentrates development in more popular categories like productivity, because larger categories have a greater chance for that success. As a result, more niche applications are less likely to be created and sustained over long periods of time. The end result is we have an App Store focused on big hits with much less diversity.

I don’t know if charging for upgrades is the answer, nor whether Apple is even interested in implementing it.¹ But we need to figure out better ways to sustain applications as a business. I think in-app purchase and subscriptions can help. Small up-front prices for applications (or free, even, like Paper) with additional features or content available through in-app purchase could be much more sustainable, because not only does it have the potential to increase total revenue per user, but it also spreads this revenue over a period of time rather than lumping it up-front. By spreading revenue over time, it should make the business much more predictable and consistent for a larger number of businesses.

1. It is something they should be thinking heavily about, though, because a healthy third-party development community is one of the main factors that has made the iPhone and iPad so successful. Maintaining that strength is important for Apple. [↩]

Facebook’s Instagram deal tells us a lot about how Facebook operates:

It was a remarkably speedy three-day path to a deal for Facebook—a young company taking pains to portray itself as blue-chip ahead of its initial public offering of stock in a few weeks that could value it at up to $100 billion. Companies generally prefer to bring in ranks of lawyers and bankers to scrutinize a deal before proceeding, a process that can eat up days or weeks.

Mr. Zuckerberg ditched all that. By the time Facebook’s board was brought in, the deal was all but done. The board, according to one person familiar with the matter, “Was told, not consulted.”

It’s Zuckerberg’s ship.

As the film industry moves to digital, we are gradually losing films from the past:

“What worries me is there’s a vast number of films that exist,” says Bernardo Rondeau, assistant curator of film programs at LACMA. “Will all those millions of films make the transition to DCP? Certainly they won’t. A lot of the films haven’t even made the transition to DVD.”

With every move to a new screening format, a percentage of films doesn’t make the jump. And once they’re gone, they’re gone. It is a gradual winnowing down of the past. Our entire knowledge of the silent film era, for example, is barely a glimpse of what was actually produced.

One of the advantages of digital formats and the web is supposed to be that we can keep copies of things forever, never losing them due to negligence or failing physical media—a permanent record of the past. For film, that doesn’t appear to be at all true.

Think about what it means to lose films entirely. They will gradually be erased from our cultural memories until no one’s sure that they existed at all. And with it, our understanding of past eras will disappear, too.

My article for this month’s Read & Trust was published today. I wrote about the future of technology. Here’s a small excerpt:

But what if the vanguard of the post-PC, the touch smartphone and tablet, are disrupted on a much quicker schedule? What if, unlike the PC era (where the PC’s form was relatively fixed, whether desktop or laptop), the post-PC era has many different forms? What if the true disruption of the post-PC era isn’t that the smartphone and tablet end up replacing the PC, but rather that computing is something that begins to inhabit many different devices and objects, so our entire lives are influenced by computing, rather than just the part that deals with PCs?

If you’d like to read it, and the other excellent articles published each week, you can check it out and subscribe here.

Federico Viticci:

And now the problem: some people don’t like free on principle. The backgrounds are different, but the core issue is that they are used to one type of business model (the single purchase) and they want every other service to work that way.

How ironic that I’ve read many of these complaints on sites that are, effectively, using a freemium model with ads and premium subscriptions.

Nate Weiner explains why Pocket, the new version of Read It Later, is now free:

By being a paid app, Read It Later was charging like the fast food case, even though the value of our product maps much closer to the second and third graphs. Put simply: From a business perspective, having a user pay $2.99 up-front once and then use the app for 4 years just doesn’t make a lot of sense.

After this realization about our previous revenue strategy we knew we had to change it. We’re moving towards a new model that better fits our business and our users. In the end this will allow us to provide a better service to all of our customers.

He argues their plan is not to get acquired, and going free is a step toward their plan for making money. The argument makes sense, so I’m curious what the plan is.

Pocket looks great, too.