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.

Marco Arment argues that free trials with higher-priced applications in the App Store would undermine people’s tendency to try out a number of applications even if they don’t use them long-term because they’re so affordable:

If the App Store mostly moved to higher purchase prices with trials, rather than today’s low purchase prices and no trials, this pattern would almost completely disappear. Instead, we’d get the free trials for almost everything, and then we’d only end up paying for the one that we liked best, or the cheapest one that solved the need, or maybe none of them if we didn’t need them for very long or decided that none were worth their prices.

In this type of market, the winners can make a lot more, because you can indeed charge more money. But the “middle class” — all of those apps that get tried but not bought — all make much less.

I think Marco’s right. (Please do read his entire piece. It’s very good.)

Since releasing Basil last year, I’ve been thinking a lot about this, and paid upgrades, which is a related topic. Trials seem like they would be a positive thing for developers; users could try out our applications, see how good they are, and then, theoretically, they would be willing to pay a higher price, and would do so at such a volume that our current sales would increase or, at minimum, wouldn’t suffer. Charging $10 for an application sounds a hell of a lot better than charging $2.99 or $3.99.

Marco is right that this would fundamentally change the nature of the App Store. Rather than spend a couple bucks here and there to try out new applications, users would more likely try out a large number of applications and end up paying for the one that best fits their needs. Of course, that may be more fair; users only pay for the application they need, and only the developer who provided it is paid. But as Marco points out, that erodes the entertainment aspect of the App Store.

As a result, since that market would resemble the PC or Mac software market, he argues the outcome probably would, too. A relatively small number of developers and companies will do especially well, and most others will make very little. That’s convincing.

I don’t think there’s a net benefit here for introducing trials. That market may support deeper, more full-featured applications, but it could also throw out one of the App Store’s greatest attributes: the ability for a single developer or small team to take a single good idea, turn it into an application, and make it accessible to a huge audience—all while possibly making a decent income and having the chance to make it a huge success.

Rather than hope for trials or even paid upgrades, I think developers need to utilize the tools we have: in-app purchase and subscriptions. IAP can allow developers to reach a wide audience with a low initial price (or free, even), and make more from those customers who are willing to pay for more. Paper for iPad is an excellent example of how to do this. The application comes with a “pen” drawing tool for free, but pencil, marker, paintbrush and color mixing tools are available through IAP. There’s nothing predatory or abusive about Paper; it’s a beautiful, useful application, and the tools available for purchase make it even more useful.

Those are the kinds of things we should be thinking about. Not only is hoping/waiting for trials unproductive, but it limits what your application is capable of. IAP is an incredible tool that allows for unique, powerful applications for users, all while making it available to a very large audience. That capability shouldn’t be shunned; instead, we should think about how to use it to make businesses that are sustainable for us and useful for customers.

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.

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.

Something I sure didn’t notice while watching the Next Generation: Riker sits down like a crazy person.

Thinglist is an iPhone app for remembering things you want to try. Movies, books, restaurants, music, places. Great idea, and the app looks beautiful.

Adobe has been working on a pen and ruler for tablets, and the combination looks awesome.

The pen is pressure-sensitive, but the coolest part is the “ruler,” which allows you to draw straight lines or precise arcs. Really, really cool.

The demonstration, though, shows a very large lag between drawing and the line actually appearing on screen. It’s strange because it’s much, much worse than I’ve experienced with any drawing or sketching app on iOS.

In any case, it’s heartening to see Adobe working on meaningful projects like this.

Enstitute is a group providing apprenticeships for college-age people:

How did she catapult from dropping out of college to landing a plum job? She became an apprentice to Hilary Mason, chief data scientist at Bitly, through a new two-year program called Enstitute. It teaches skills in fields like information technology, computer programming and app building via on-the-job experience. Enstitute seeks to challenge the conventional wisdom that top professional jobs always require a bachelor’s degree — at least for a small group of the young, digital elite.

“Our long-term vision is that this becomes an acceptable alternative to college,” says Kane Sarhan, one of Enstitute’s founders. “Our big recruitment effort is at high schools and universities. We are targeting people who are not interested in going to school, school is not the right fit for them, or they can’t afford school.”

Colleges are incredibly expensive, the cost continues to rise, and yet they are increasingly less effective at preparing people to be successful. There’s absolutely value in a liberal arts education (in fact, I think there’s even more value now), but many schools don’t even do a good job of exposing students to a variety of disciplines to make them more well-rounded. Universities crank students through, make them take class after class with lecture-midterm-lecture-midterm-lecture-final, put them tens of thousands of dollars into debt, and leave many of them not much better off than they were before entering.

So new education organizations like this should be welcomed. Perhaps they’re not exactly what we need to replace universities, but we don’t need to replace universities—we need different options, different paths, different ideas that allow people to take a route that fits them better, and places pressure on our bloated, staid education system to change.

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.

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.

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.

Alexis Madrigal on the missing Sunil Tripathi being incorrectly named as the suspect for the Boston bombing:

The next step in this information flow is the trickiest one. Here’s what I know. At 2:42am, Greg Hughes, who had been following the Tripathi speculation, tweeted, “This is the Internet’s test of ‘be right, not first’ with the reporting of this story. So far, people are doing a great job. #Watertown” Then, at 2:43am, he tweeted, “BPD has identified the names: Suspect 1: Mike Mulugeta. Suspect 2: Sunil Tripathi.”

The only problem is that there is no mention of Sunil Tripathi in the audio preceding Hughes’ tweet. I’ve listened to it a dozen times and there’s nothing there even remotely resembling Tripathi’s name. I’ve embedded the audio from 2:35 to 2:45 am for your own inspection. Multiple groups of people have been crowdsourcing logs of the police scanner chatter and none of them have found a reference to Tripathi, either. It’s just not there.

The web is incredibly powerful and empowering. It can also be incredibly dangerous. Let this be a lesson to all of us (that we should have all learned after Wayne Chiang was falsely accused for the Virginia Tech shooting in 2007) what it can do when we spread information that isn’t verified: it could lead to innocent people being harmed.

I use Instapaper a lot—basically everyday—to keep track of things I need to read and things to post. On my Mac, I just use Instapaper in the browser to make posts, but I’ve hoped for a decent Instapaper client for a while.

ReadKit looks like it fits the bill. It’s simple, supports Instapaper, Pocket, Pinboard and Delicious, but it’s also relatively well-featured. Managing folders in Instapaper through the iOS versions and on the web has always been a bit of a pain, but it’s much easier to do on a Mac—and should be much more useful for me as a result.

Here’s Federico Viticci’s review from January.

If you have similar needs, I’d recommend giving it a look.

Thanks to Ben Brooks for pointing it out.