Global Nerdy

What Lenovo Gets

The rumors started earlier Wednesday afternoon, and they were confirmed in a Google press release a few hours later: Lenovo will acquire Motorola Mobility from Google for the sum of US$2.91 billion dollars.

This is Lenovo’s second purchase of a major American brand, the first one being the 2005 acquisition of IBM’s ThinkPad, along with the rest of IBM’s PC business. Lenovo played it smart and didn’t fix what wasn’t broken, namely the ThinkPad name as well as its look, which is descended from the original ThinkPad “bento box” design created by Richard Sapper in 1990. Lenovo founder Liu Chanzhi says that the three things that Lenovo got from the IBM acquisition were:

1. The Thinkpad brand
2. More advanced PC manufacturing technology
3. International resources, such as IBM’s global sales channels and operations teams

It seems to have worked; last year, Lenovo became the world’s biggest seller of PCs by unit sales, and it’s widening its lead over the nearest competitors, HP and Dell. That’s Lenovo’s blessing and curse: it’s now the leader in an industry that’s beginning to decline. You’ve probably seen all those charts that look something like this:

Lenovo’s plan appears to be to repeat their success with ThinkPad, and eventually beat Samsung. This time, Lenovo has the advanced manufacturing facility. In fact, they’re the 4th largest smartphone manufacturer in the world — even bigger than LG or HTC. Thanks to their success in the PC marketplace, they also have global sales channels and operations teams. The one thing they’re missing, and the one thing they’re apparently buying, is a brand that’s recognized in North America and Latin America. That’s why they were looking at BlackBerry — another respected brand that had fallen on bad times — but the possibility of a sale was supposedly killed by the Canadian government.

Bloomberg Technology quotes the head of Lenovo’s new mobile business group Liu Jun, who said this at the recent CES:

“The U.S. is the most important market in the smartphone space. From day one, when we targeted the smartphone business, we thought that to be a global player, we must win in the U.S.”

Motorola may not be getting the sales like the top two players here — Apple and Samsung — but they are in third place, and the name still has some weight, and that’s what Lenovo needs to get in the game here.

What Google Gets

Google’s taking a bit of a bath here. When they approached Motorola with an offer in 2011, they followed up by bumping it up by a third in a single day, even though Motorola wasn’t taking any competing bids. The agreed price was $12.5 billion.

“I bet it would take longer to literally flush $9.5 billion in cash down a toilet than it took for Google to do so figuratively on the Motorola acquisition,” wrote John Gruber in Daring Fireball. That flushing figure is probably closer to a mere $7.2 billion, as Ina Fried points out: Google made some money back by selling Motorola’s cable set-top box division in late 2012 for 2.35 billion.

Google gets to keep most of Motorola’s patent portfolio in the deal. The patents are a stick with which to beat money out of other companies without having to sell a single unit, but as Ina Fried observes:

Google has continued to assert Motorola’s substantial patent holdings in various cases, but courts and regulators have largely taken a dim view of issuing injunctions or large damage awards based on standards-essential patents — the patent variety that makes up a large part of Motorola’s holdings.

She also notes that by getting out of the mobile hardware business, Google is making nice with Android smartphone and tablet manufacturers, particularly Samsung. Google and the top Android smartphone vendor have come to a number of agreements, including a cross-licensing deal over past and future patents, and Samsung has promised to ease up on its own modifications to Android and stick to standard Google services and apps. It’s a signal to the mobile hardware folks that Google will stick to software and leave the hardware to its manufacturing partners, an arrangement similar to Microsoft and its hardware buddies — at least in the pre-Surface-the-tablet, pre-Nokia-purchase days.

Two notes:

• Google’s recent acquisition of Nest suggests that the “you do hardware, we’ll do software” arrangement applies only to mobile devices.
• I can’t help thinking of Jon Gruber’s snarky quote about this arrangement: “One of Alan Kay’s numerous oft-cited quotations is, ‘People who are really serious about software should partner with an OEM in Asia.’ No, wait, that’s not what he said. What he said is, ‘People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.'”

Photo courtesy of AcidCow. Click to see the source.

The text from this great random internet find reads:

Google (www.google.com) is a pure search engine — no weather, no news feed, no links to sponsors, no ads, no distractions, no portal litter. Nothing but a fast-loading search site. Reward them with a visit.

This was true of Google around 1999, when the textbook was printed, but a lot’s changed in the last 15 years. The “no portal litter” is a reference to Yahoo! of that era, when people still thought of it as a search site.

Still, given the choice between Google, the internet, and tech in general circa 1999 and Google, the internet, and tech in general today, I’ll pick the latter.

“Dr. Sheldon Cooper” pointed us to the graphic; we just cleaned up the fonts and fixed a typo.
Click the graphic to see the source.

Actually, Star Trek did inspire Martin Cooper, inventor of the cellular phone, and without whom, we wouldn’t have much of a business:

The clip above is from the 2005 TV documentary How William Shatner Changed the World. If you’ve got an hour and twenty-five minutes to spare, it’s an entertaining and mildly educational watch:

How employees feel about wearables

The “wearables” section of Cornerstone on Demand’s State of Workplace Productivity infographic.
Click it to see the source.

Wearables are still a way off from mainstream use at the workplace, but once upon a time, so were desktop and laptop computers, and so were smartphones and tablets. The section on wearables in Cornerstone OnDemand’s State of Workplace Productivity 2013 Report caught our eye, and we thought we’d share it with you here.

The report has a lot of figures on mobile devices at work and BYOD, so we’ll very likely cite it in upcoming articles.

Pebble Steel

Pebble Steel’s brushed stainless steel (left) and black matte (right) models.
Click the photo to visit Pebble’s site.

Pebble — the small smartwatch company launched out of a living room in Palo Alto — have released their new Pebble Steel watch, and unlike others on the market, it looks as if it were actually made for grown-ups. Engadget has posted a review, which they close with:

Simply put, the Steel isn’t going to persuade many people to swap out their perfectly functional Hamilton, Movado or Citizen, but if you’re in the market for a replacement and want a smartwatch, this is your best option. What’s most important, though, is what the Steel represents: a realization that if smartwatches are going to become mainstream, they’ll need to appeal to people who prefer to adorn their wrists with jewelry. At the very least, the Steel is a significant step in the right direction.

Google’s contact lens for diabetes patients, and Microsoft Research’s version from 2011

Google’s blood sugar-sensing contact lens.
Click the photo to read the article on Re/Code.

The 400 million people worldwide with diabetes have a metabolic condition where they have high blood sugar either because they’re not producing enough insulin or because their cells don’t respond adequately to it. They manage their diabetes by checking their blood sugar levels several times a day, a process that usually involves some form of being poked with a needle.

Google’s latest announced research project is a contact lens that measures the glucose content of its wearer’s tears, which is a function of that person’s blood sugar level. The lens functions as a circuit board that houses the components and a circular gold foil antenna that lies outside the pupil’s visual range. Google says that their research wing, Google X, is working on the project not so they can eventually build and sell diabetes-monitoring contact lenses, but to publicize the work in order to find medical company partners to develop them.

As TechCrunch notes, Google’s not the first tech company to build such a prototype. Microsoft Research released this video that makes mention of a similar project back in 2011:

It turns out that a member of Microsoft Research who was working on their smart contact lens project, Babak Parviz (a former engineering professor at University of Washington), is now at Google, where he works on Google Glass and the smart contact lens project. Once upon a time, the brain drain worked in the other direction, with Microsoft absorbing bright lights from other companies, including Anders Heljberg from Borland, who ended up revitalizing their programming tools and creating the C# programming language (which in my opinion, is an improvement on Java).

California tech entrepreneur beats “driving while glassing” ticket

Cecilia Abadie made history last year as the first driver to be given a traffic ticket for driving while using Google Glass, based on the California traffic law that states that you can’t drive while watching a monitor. She was initially pulled over for speeding on Interstate 15, but when the officer saw that she was wearing Google Glass, she was issued a second ticket for “driving while glassing”.

Both the speeding and “driving while using a visual monitor” charge were dropped by San Diego Court Commissioner John Blair for lack of evidence. The police office who ticketed Abadie matched her speed with his car, and an expert did not show up at court to testify to the calibration of his speedometer. Abadie also testified that her Google Glass was off when she was driving, and there was also no proof that the Glass was turned off at the time.

My guess is that a whole host of legal and social problems could be solved by building some kind of indicator into Google Glass and similar wearables that indicates to other people that it’s on, perhaps something like the light that comes on when the webcam on your laptop or desktop is active.

Chinese pirates see no upside in making knock-offs of wearables

Click the photo to see the cringeworthy ad it came from.

While working on a story where they went to China to learn how the tech “knock-off” industry works, CNN reports that tech counterfeiters, who only copy devices that will help them make a profit, are quite obviously not making copies of wearable mobile devices.

They note that at Shenzhen’s Huaqiangbei (pronounced “Wa-chang-bay”) commercial district, the place to go for original and copycat electronics and components, demand for Samsung’s Galaxy Gear smartwatch is “ice-cold”:

“You won’t find any copies of the smart watch here. I’ve never seen or heard of any,” said a young man who was busy shipping off boxes, that he said were filled with counterfeit mobile phones, at a local logistics center.

“Thinking about it, I’ve never even seen anyone wear one,” he added.

If you’re curious about Huaqiangbei, here’s an interesting video published in February 2013, where Bob Jordan from AsianOps takes a tour of the electronics mall:

Diesel Sweeties’ amusing take on wearables

R. Stevens’ geek-and-hipster-centric webcomic Diesel Sweeties has an interesting term for Google Glass:

Click to see the full comic.

“Borg mullet.” Heh.

“BYOD is here to stay”

By necessity, banks tend to play it conservative when it comes to technology and paranoid when it comes to security, so it’s noteworthy when the American Bankers Association’s online journal runs an article titled BYOD is here to stay. “The genie is out of the bottle,” they write, “the toothpaste is out of the tube, and the practice of bringing your own device to work will not go away.”

The article points out that everyone, whether desirable or not, benefits from BYOD:

• Companies: by avoiding costs to keep their employees fitted with the latest gadgets, while gaining increased productivity in return,
• Employees: by avoiding frustration with having to use less useful company-provided gadgets and instead are able to use the better, faster, and cooler new gadgets, and
• Crooks: especially if, as employees and employers rely on outdated security measures or, worse, forego any security measures at all, they enable data theft, tampering, or destruction.

In spite of the benefit to that last group, the article states: “Still, like it or not, BYOD is no longer—if it ever was—just a fad. It is, or should be, a discrete corporate strategy.”

The article cites a number of analyst reports, including Ovum’s summer 2013 BYOX (“Bring Your Own Anything”) employee study that showed that 68% of employees with smartphones bring them to work, more than 15% do so without IT’s knowledge, and 21% do so even though IT forbids it, and Juniper Research’s estimates of over 1 billion employee-own smartphones and tablets in use in the enterprise by 2018.

BlackBerry, One Year Later

It’s hard to believe that almost year has passed since the launch of the BlackBerry Z10, the Canadian smartphone pioneer’s attempt to play catch-up with iPhone and Android. The Z10 — properly pronounced “zed ten” in Canadian English — debuted in the UK on January 31, 2013, followed by Canada, United Arab Emirates, and India in February, and finally in the U.S. in March. The phone and revamped OS sported some interesting and useful ideas for business users, most notably BlackBerry Balance, a sort of built-in BYOD system that allowed you to keep work and personal data separate. The New York Times’ David Pogue sang its praises in his review, newly hired Global Creative Director Alicia Keys literally sang BlackBerry’s praises, and then-CEO Thorsten Heins proudly declared the Z10 was the first step on BlackBerry’s comeback trail.

We all know what happened next, and the Toronto Star provides a summary including a quick guide to where the key BlackBerry players from 2013 are now in their article, BlackBerry, one year later.

Skip hotel check-in and keys with your smartphone

Add hotels to the list of businesses that mobile technology is revolutionizing. Starwood Hotels are conducting experiments with their Aloft boutique hotels in Manhattan and San Francisco that will soon allow guests will be able to use their smartphones to check in and as their room keys, bypassing the usual need to go to the front desk upon arrival. The Starwood app will allow iPhone 4S and later models or Android phones running version 4.3 or newer to act as keys for their rooms, which will have Bluetooth-equipped locks.

Here’s the Engrish text that appears on the bottle:

iPhone six

[ 2013/03 Establish ]

Deducting striking smoothness and showing healthy quality
Bran-new Series is designed to meet your special hair demands
Rendering professionalism and deducting beauty

My guess is that the text is the output of a Google Translate session.

Almost every guidebook on BYOD looks at the subject from the point of view of management or the IT department. BYOD for You: The Guide to Bring Your Own Device to Work breaks apart from the pack by looking at BYOD from the point of view of the person bringing his or her own device to work. Written by Daniel Lohrmann, Michigan’s Chief Security Officer and Deputy Director for Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Protection, BYOD for You is a breezy, 54-page Kindle ebook that provides the perfect introduction to BYOD for end users at organizations that allow the work-related use of personal mobile devices.

You’ll be able to read BYOD for You’s eight chapters, most of which are only a half-dozen pages long, within a couple of lunch breaks. It looks at all sorts of issues that come up in a workplace’s BYOD program, and not just the technological ones, but the social, legal, and ethical as well. Its chapters cover these topics:

1. Categorizing your BYOD environment: Gold, Silver or Bronze?
2. Your workplace’s BYOD program, or the lack thereof
3. Security: How to safely use your mobile device at work and home
4. MDM
5. Privacy and other legal considerations
6. Maximizing the financial benefits of BYOD
7. Ethical dilemmas and proving you deserve your mobile device
8. Building a personalized BYOD plan that outlives your device

Throughout BYOD for You, Lohrmann constantly refers to his “Gold, Silver, and Bronze” levels of BYOD use at businesses:

• Bronze: An organization operating at the Bronze BYOD level has employees who bring their own devices to work, but doesn’t have an official BYOD policy. Mobile policy is ad hoc rather than clearly defined. It’s unclear about what happens when company information security policies and personal devices collide, if employees’ personal data will remain private, or if their work-related activities on personal devices will get them in trouble. Employees also bear all costs of using the device, even for work-related purposes. MDM is practically or completely non-existent.
• Silver: In organizations operating at the Silver BYOD level, there is a basic BYOD policy that spells out how its data can be accessed, as well as issues of security and privacy, and there is tacit permission for employees to access their work email from their devices. Employees can choose between all-expenses-paid COPE devices or BYOD devices without any reimbursement for operating costs. MDM is limited; it’s often something basic, such as the management provided by Microsoft’s Exchange ActiveSync.
• Gold: At the Gold level of BYOD, there’s a full BYOD policy that specifies the rights, responsibilities of employees who bring personal mobile devices to work, and the procedures and practices they should follow. In a Gold organization, employees are fully reimbursed for all device costs. The company makes use of state-of-the art MDM that is mandatory on all mobile devices used for work purposes.

While BYOD for You was written for end users at a workplace, it’s just as useful a guide for managers or technical decision-makers who are new to the idea of BYOD and want to get a grasp of the major issues that can arise when employees bring their own devices to work. Packed with a lot of good ideas and best practices, It’s an easy read, and at $2.99 from Amazon (you can even borrow it for free if you’re on Amazon Prime), it’s also one of the better one of the better deals you’re going to find.

An Amazon review that gave BYOD for You a four-star rating suggested that “A companion book on what the COMPANY should be doing to manage their employee-owned devices would make a great follow-on to this practical, employee-centric work.” Perhaps we’ll write that book.

Links

• BYOD for You’s page on amazon.com
• The BYOD for You official site