Indian mobile tech blogger Clinton Jeff of Unleash the Phones, talking to The Next Web's Brad McCarty:

We got a call from Samsung India saying ‘You can either be a part of this and wear the uniform, or you’ll have to get your own tickets back home and handle your hotel stay from the moment this call ends…

Samsung released a statement calling the debacle a “misunderstanding” but only apologized to Mr. Jeff in the privately-emailed version of the statement. They said:

I would like to reach out to you and deeply apologize to you for your experience in Berlin at IFA. We put you through undue hardship and we are trying to rectify the situation.

Samsung’s behavior is inexcusable, and even worse for the lack of a public apology.

Amazon increased the power and range of its Kindle offerings and achieved impressively-low pricing across the board. Again.

I’m 100% certain someone I know will get one of the newly-announced devices, maybe even before the holidays, and I can’t wait to have a look.

Further Reading

• Comparison of the Kindle Fire HD to other major tablets at The Verge

Robins Wauters interviewed Seesmic founder Loïc Le Meur at The Next Web today on his company’s sale to rival HootSuite.

I have always thought Seesmic was the best multi-profile app for Twitter and Facebook on mobile, and I always preferred their web interface to Hootsuite’s. But Le Meur is a brilliant fellow, and, as long as his team is taken care of, via either jobs at Hootsuite or decent compensation, I can only be happy for Seesmic.

Further Reading

• After Long Startup Journey, Seesmic Is Bought By Social Media Management Service Hootsuite by Eric Eldon at TechCrunch
• HootSuite CEO: We’re Buying Seesmic For The Users, Not The Tech [Interview] by Ingrid Lunden at TechCrunch
• I’m forty today by Le Meur at his Facebook page

MG Siegler posted yesterday about his desire to write with more concision. His point is a good one: writing concisely suggests, when you think about it, a far better grasp of a topic than does the need to write 1,000 words about it.

It’s a lesson I learned from a couple of professors in law school (while others tried to teach almost the opposite):

Get in, make your point, and get out.

Steph Hay, writing at A List Apart:

Your mom may not be your target user, but she is a real person who’ll call you on your bullshit.

This is great advice.

John R. Quain, writing at American Photo:

When the hyperspectral eye was turned on an early draft of the Declaration of Independence written in Thomas Jefferson’s hand, researchers could see that Jefferson had originally written the word “subjects” on one line, which he then scratched out and replaced with the more politically correct “citizens,” exemplifying the egalitarian sensibility of one of the Enlightenment’s greatest minds.

Okay, that is the most fascinating tech I will see this month. Read the whole article. It’s, well, fascinating.

His most vulnerable answer (in my opinion) was with regard to a question about his most difficult decision so far as President:

The decision to surge our forces in afghanistan. Any time you send our brave men and women into battle, you know that not everyone will come home safely, and that necessarily weighs heavily on you. The decision did help us blunt the taliban’s momentum, and is allowing us to transition to afghan lead - so we will have recovered that surge at the end of this month, and will end the war at the end of 2014. But knowing of the heroes that have fallen is something you never forget.

The session may have lasted only thirty minutes, and he may have only answered ten questions, but the President of the United States’ taking questions over Reddit will be seen by history as a bold and positive statement about the importance of the internet and its native communities.

Jeff John Roberts provides an update on Twitter’s latest legal battle over at GigaOM. I think it’s fascinating that Twitter is living two lives:

They’re vigorously defending the rights of their users to maintain control over what happens to their tweets with regard to the government. They’re also perfecting a a cold hostility toward third-party developers.

These two strategies feel, for obvious reasons, very different from one another. But they are both directed at achieving the same two goals:

1. to maximize the user-base, particularly to keep Twitter attractive to dissidents, protesters, journalists, and others whose use cases may involve sensitive or vulnerable action or information
2. to maximize Twitter’s control over user-generated content (mostly individual tweets) and how it is consumed by users

It’s a great time to be a Twitter user who is happy with the service’s in-house apps and undaunted by their increasing bloat. It is a very bad time to be someone interested in providing Twitter users with a better experience that Twitter itself is willing or able to do.

Rebecca Grant, writing at VentureBeat:

Restaurants can use this iPad app to keep track of available tables and alert customers with a text message when their table is ready.

This sounds like technology with the potential to go far beyond restaurant use cases.

Neil Armstrong on Chuck Yeager’s breaking the sound barrier, quoted by his own biographer:

All in all, for someone who was immersed in, fascinated by, and dedicated to flight, I was disappointed by the wrinkle in history that had brought me along one generation late. I had missed all the great times and adventures in flight.

Hardly, Mr. Armstrong, hardly.

Bill Nye, as quoted in an article by Kevin Dolak at ABC News:

And I say to the grownups, if you want to deny evolution and live in your world, in your world that’s completely inconsistent with everything we observe in the universe, that’s fine, but don’t make your kids do it because we need them. We need scientifically literate voters and taxpayers for the future.

Watch the full clip of Mr. Nye’s thoughts on creationism on YouTube.

New Scientist's Jacob Aron interviewed Matthew Inman of The Oatmeal fame, whose latest endeavor is the financing and creation of a museum dedicate to Nikola Tesla’s work.

A random piece of trivia that caught my eye:

He actually built an earthquake machine in his laboratory in New York City, and when he turned it on they had to smash it with a sledgehammer to keep it from taking the whole block down. Not a useful invention, but kind of cool.

Contribute to the project here.

Sean Gallagher reports at Ars Technica on biNu, a company developing an asynchronous, server-side smartphone emulator in Java. The system’s low-bandwidth, high-security nature makes it a perfect fit for countries where the next iPhone is out of reach.

Read Gallagher’s article for the details. This is far more exciting to me than the next iPhone. Networked mobile computing technology is still in its infancy when it comes to worldwide availability and adoption. Clever technology like biNu’s may help change that.

Samit Sarkar, reporting at The Verge:

The interactive element of the hub is a live polling system. It will gather impressions from Xbox Live users as they watch live broadcasts of the three scheduled presidential debates between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney.

It’s not exactly the cross-examination inspired debate format pushed for by Will McAvoy in The Newsroom, but I think it’s a forward-thinking use of the platform.

This article by Joseph L. Flatley at The Verge is a feat of modern reporting and storytelling. Do yourself a favor and watch the associated documentary, too.

I like to give everything a “link” / “longread” category and one other that describes the content. This one covers a topic I won’t likely post about often, so I’m filing it under “journalism” because, again, it’s just that good.

Kevin Purdy, formerly of Lifehacker fame, shares the morning strategies of several people in this Fast Company article. I have never liked the empty proclamations of Tony Robbins and his ilk, but the rest of the article is interesting.

Tent is decentralized, not federated or centralized. Any Tent server can connect to any other Tent server. All features are available to any server as first-class citizens. Anyone can host their own Tent server. Tent servers can also be run as Tor hidden services to create a social darknet for at-risk organizers and activists. Anyone can write applications that connect to Tent in order to display or create user content.

Is it Diaspora? Is it IRC? Is it Twitter? Is it Wordpress?

Well, I think, yes. And no.

Twitter’s recent adoption of a hostile stance toward its developer community and, to some extent, its users, is catalyzing the market for alternatives. Matthew Panzarino reports at The Next Web that they cut off Tumblr’s ability to help you find Twitter friends who also use Tumblr, as they did with Instagram.

Further Reading

• Marco Arment’s commentary on the Tumblr news
• "The Twitter Hit List" by Matt Buchanan at BuzzFeed
• "Protocols don’t mean much" by Dave Winer at Scripting News

Ben Fullerton of Method, writing in UX Magazine on the interplay between user experience design and brand messaging:

For designers, the development of a compelling brand helps to round out the design, creating a before and after. It builds a background narrative and meaning that empowers people to respond to design in more complex ways.

Susan Wu, on Quora:

All products inherit the values of their creators and have a sort of corresponding ‘morality.’ When you create an algorithm, it’s optimizing for something — it might be that you think “saving time” is a value worth optimizing for. Or it could be that what you’re trying to optimize for is quantity (quantity of access, of distribution), which can often come at the cost of quality and depth of interaction. Or like most of us who are successful Americans, we automatically assume that our stance on individual rights and belief in the individualistic survival of the fittest / the elite will rise are “ideal” or “optimal.”. Another example is our cultural bias towards the “cult of the celebrity.”. And we tend to measure success by economic output.

This is geared toward inhabitants of the Silicon Valley “island” on which so many people become detached from reality, but much of it applies generally to life in a first-world country, as well.

Listen to a mashup of ambient noise recordings from your city (via Soundcloud) and local police scanners. Thanks to Geekadelphia for posting about this.

Mark Potts, writing about his major part in what might be properly called the genesis of the first digital publishing strategy:

As someone said when they saw PostCard a few years later, “It looks like the Web.” Except that, in those early days of experimentation, the Web didn’t really exist yet.

Twitter’s Michael Sippey posted an update at their Developers Blog yesterday announcing that the company will:

1. essentially be crippling many of the third-party apps that got the company where it is today; and
2. severely bloating and degrading the user experience

Of course, that’s my take on it. Read the linked post and feel free to draw your own conclusions, but I’m willing to bet that they’ll be similar to mine…

Taken as a whole, the changes at Twitter are probably the most powerful form of advertising Dalton Caldwell's new App.net could possibly have imagined.

Further reading

• "Interpreting some of Twitter’s API changes" by Marco Arment at Marco.org
• "Twitter sets max user caps for 3rd party clients, tightens API rules to direct users to official apps" by Matthew Panzarino at The Next Web

Joel Mathis, writing at Philadelphia Magazine‘s blog The Philly Post, may have a point. But going online-only would require a serious modernization of the Philly.com brand and site design.

I don’t see the ownership having the vision to invest in either branding or a design refresh, and if they do, I’m not confident they’ll pick the right people for the job. I hope I’m wrong, because the only sure thing about Philly’s major papers these days is that something needs to change fast.

This happens on Friday, August 17, 2012. I. can’t. wait.