TMO Link

Angela Ahrendts recently gave her first interview since leaving Apple. However, it seems some at the company will not miss her. Bloomberg News spoke to a number of staff members at Apple Stores who say they became more unfriendly under her leadership.

They say the quality of staff has slipped during an 18-year expansion that has seen Apple open more than 500 locations and hire 70,000 people. The Genius Bar, once renowned for its tech support, has been largely replaced with staff who roam the stores and are harder to track down. That’s a significant drawback because people are hanging onto their phones longer these days and need them repaired…. [Deidre] O’Brien’s immediate challenge is to make the stores more shopper-friendly—even if that means moving away from the tony gathering places her predecessor favored and creating more clearly defined spaces for browsing, quick purchases and service.

Passwords are dying, and nobody is going to miss them very much. Fast Company reported on firms who are leading on finding the alternatives, including MobileIron, and even Google. Not surprisingly, there is a large focus on biometrics.

Mexico’s drug war is infamous the world over. The Verge reported on how a group of mothers in the country used drones to find victims’ graves.

When the members of family collectives like Solecito search for a mass grave in places like Colinas de Santa Fe, they go in groups. Often, dangerous people would prefer the bodies not be found. The sites are isolated, making the visits conspicuous, and it’s hard to say for sure whether the visitors are being watched. There is some safety in numbers. Drones have become a crucial part of the routine. The families sail them over the land to scan for signs of human presence, like a smoldering campfire or discarded cans of food — signals that they could come under attack because a criminal group is still there.

Facebook is developing its own payment system based on cryptocurrency. The Wall Street Journal reported that the social network is bringing in finance firms and online merchants to support its efforts.

The effort, should it succeed, threatens to upend the traditional, lucrative plumbing of e-commerce and would likely be the most mainstream application yet of cryptocurrency. It comes as the social-media giant is under intense pressure from regulators, users and shareholders to address privacy shortcomings. At the heart of the initiative, under way for more than a year and code-named Project Libra, is a digital coin that its users could send to each other and use to make purchases both on Facebook and across the internet, according to people familiar with the matter.

Warren Buffett was pleased with Apple’s latest earnings report. He told CNBC that his company, Berkshire Hathaway, ‘haven’t changed our [Apple] holdings.” It holds around $50 billion worth of Apple stock.

“I was pleased with what they reported,” Buffett said, while noting he never makes investment decisions based on a single quarterly report. “What they talked about and reported is consistent with the reason we own $50 billion-plus of Apple.” Berkshire owned more than $40 billion worth of the tech giant as of end of last year, according to its 2018 annual letter. The conglomerate decreased its stake in Apple by nearly 3 million shares in the fourth quarter of 2018, but Buffett said at the time that the selling wasn’t under his direction.

The headline is from Gizmodo: “A New Storage Breakthrough Could Squeeze a Library’s Worth of Data Into a Teaspoon of Protein.”

By 2020, researchers estimate that the world’s digital archive will weigh in at around 44 trillion gigabytes. That’s an astounding amount of data that isn’t necessarily being stored in the safest of places. Most storage mediums naturally degrade over time (if they’re not hacked or accidentally destroyed) and even the cloud isn’t as reliable as companies want us to believe. So researchers at Harvard University have turned to some unique chemistry they believe could safely archive the world’s data for millions of years—without requiring any power.

Lots of apps have camera functionality. It normally takes a couple of steps to use it though. M.G. Siegler is fed up with it and wants a solution.

What I really want in a mobile OS is the ability to fire up the camera, take a picture, and launch apps and/or services from there based on that picture. A good example: I’ve been using an app called Vivino to track the wine we’re drinking and/or buying. Why on Earth do I need to load Vivino, then hit the camera button inside the Vivino app to take the photo? This is slow. Beyond swiping and pecking for the app itself, it takes a few seconds to load.