TMO Link

Ever since retail supremo Angela Ahrendts announced her departure from Apple there has been a lot of discussion about what comes next for the company in the retail space. One of the predominant themes has been improving the customer experience in the stores. Some people advocated Apple opening more stores, to help reduce the waiting times for support. Over on 9to5 Mac, Michael Steeber explained why thinks that might not be the silver bullet solution.

Advocating for a rapid expansion tragically discounts the Goliath effort that goes into opening a modern Apple store. While you might be content with a fleet of the modest mall shops of the iPod era, Apple certainly is not. The company has repeatedly said it thinks of stores as its “largest product.” Just like new iPhone features are implemented with cautious consideration, Apple’s retail development adheres to similar uncompromising scrutiny in site location and building design. Even if Apple decided to double its store count today, the results would not begin to show for another 2-3 years.

LONDON – Mars One, the company that wanted to colonize the red planet, has gone bust.  Its for profit arm has been declared bankrupt. The non-profit foundation is unable to act without further investment, Engadget reported. The company wanted to document the process of colonizing one of the planets nearest to Earth in a reality tv show. Not surprisingly, the finances turned out to be something of a challenge and it looks like the project is no more. In July 2018, an investment deal with Phoenix Enterprises was announced, that was set to inject $12 million into the firm over the coming year.

Mars One was split into two ventures, the non-profit Mars One Foundation and the for-profit Mars One Ventures. The Swiss-based Ventures AG was declared bankrupt by a Basel court on January 15th and was, at the time, valued at almost $100 million. Mars One Ventures PLC, the UK-registered branch, is listed as a dormant company with less than £20,000 in its accounts. There is no data available on the non-profit Mars One Foundation, which funded itself by charging its commercial partner licensing fees. Speaking to Engadget, Bas Lansdorp said that the Foundation is still operating, but won’t be able to act without further investment.

Apple is being sued because two-factor authentication is too disruptive, takes too much time, and can’t be turned off after two weeks.

The suit, filed by Jay Brodsky in California alleges that Apple doesn’t get user consent to enable two-factor authentication. Furthermore, once enabled, two-factor authentication “imposes an extraneous logging in procedure that requires a user to both remember password; and have access to a trusted device or trusted phone number” when a device is enabled.

It’s only Monday and this is already the dumbest thing I’ve read this week.

LONDON – David Aguilar was born without a forearm. So the Spaniard decided to build his own one. This would be extraordinary enough, but he did out of Lego. He started aged 9 and, aged 19, is now on his 4th iteration of the prosthetic limb. Reuters spoke to Mr. Aguilar and told his amazing story.

Once his favorite toys, the plastic bricks became the building material for Aguilar’s first, still very rudimentary, artificial arm at the age of nine, and each new version had more movement capability than the one before.“As a child I was very nervous to be in front of other guys, because I was different, but that didn’t stop me believing in my dreams,” Aguilar, who is from Andorra, a tiny principality between Spain and France, told Reuters.

LONDON – Popular parenting website Mumsnet reported itself to the UK’s Information Commissioner. A bug that meant users’ accounts could potentially be switched was found. This meant people could have access to other’s account details and private messages. The company confirmed to the Guardian that it had reported itself, following the incident.

A botched upgrade to the software the forum runs on meant that for three days, if two users tried to log in at the same time, there was the possibility that their accounts would be switched. Each user was able to post as the other, see their account details, and read private messages. The company doesn’t know how many user accounts were affected, but says that over the three days the bug was live, from Tuesday afternoon to Thursday morning, about 4,000 users logged in. Of that, only 14 users have reported an issue.

The news of Angela Ahrendts’s impending departure from Apple came as a surprise to many outside the company. I can only assume the same was true for people on the inside There can be little doubt that the company’s outgoing Senior Vice President Retail has made a real impact during her five-year tenure. AppleInsider provided an incisive look at how Ms. Ahrdents’s came to be at Apple, and the legacy she will leave.

While Apple does also earn money from services and other business activities, the alterations that she’s made in the stores are central to the rise of the company into being the world’s most profitable firm.  These Apple Stores have been lauded as retail successes since their very beginnings, and externally they had appeared to be doing well even before Ahrendts joined. Yet in practice, the years before her arrival were marked with problems.