Charlotte Henry

Sir Jony Ive is leaving Apple. You might have heard about it. John Gruber gives his take over on Daring Fireball and highlights the key issue about the departure – design is now reporting to operations. (I know Gruber doesn’t like formal titles, which is fair enough, but I’m a Brit so I have to use them!)

It makes me queasy to see that Apple’s chief designers are now reporting to operations. This makes no more sense to me than having them report to the LLVM compiler team in the Xcode group. Again, nothing against Jeff Williams, nothing against the LLVM team, but someone needs to be in charge of design for Apple to be Apple and I can’t see how that comes from operations. I don’t think that “chief design officer” should have been a one-off title created just for Jony Ive. Not just for Apple, but especially at Apple, it should be a permanent C-level title. I don’t think Ive ever should have been put in control of software design, but at least he is a designer.

Facebook’s announcement it was launching a cryptocurrency freaked lots of people out. It’s not just about privacy. It’s not too far-fetched to say that firms like Facebook are almost becoming countries in their own right, as Molly Wood outlined for Wired.

While Facebook’s ambitions appear unsubtle (at least to me), the biggest tech companies are all building more and more advanced and immersive ecosystems. So maybe it’s time to start asking: What is the functional difference between a company and a country? It’s not a crazy question: We’re already at a point where huge multinational tech monopsonies have so much power over the global economy that central bankers and regulators are starting to wonder if they even have the tools to set economic policy, like they used to in the old days.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the social network could put deepfakes into a “completely different category.” His comments at the Aspen Ideas Festival came in the wake of altered video of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, which was widely shared on Facebook. Axios had a good summary of all his comments.

Zuckerberg has been getting clobbered by politicians and the media for two years for everything from election manipulation to fake news unfolding on his platform. He knows the pummeling may only intensify with 2020 heating up. Zuckerberg also said Facebook is rethinking its handling of deepfake videos, and said it might make sense to treat them differently from other “false news,” as Facebook calls fake news. Zuckerberg said it’s worth asking whether deepfakes are a “completely different category,” and said developing a policy on these videos is “really important” as AI grows more sophisticated.

Can anywhere in the U.S. challenge Silicon Valley, and San Franciso in particular, to become America’s next tech hub? Economist Tyler Cowen thinks he has the answer. He puts the case for LA in his latest Bloomberg column.

First, consider the virtues of the Los Angeles area. It has splendid weather — warmer and sunnier than San Francisco — and a deep pool of talent. It is America’s second-largest city, with many nice neighborhoods to choose from (some of them, to the east, even affordable). It even has a subway, albeit an underdeveloped one. I would argue it has much better food, and of course a much larger and more diverse entertainment scene. You might reasonably conclude that top talent might prefer to live in or near Los Angeles rather than the Bay Area.

Savings bank Volksbanken Raiffeisenbanken will become another German institution supporting Apple Pay. The move will happen sometime by the end of 2019, AppleInsider reported. The Euro-Cheque card is not expected to be supported at launch. That will follow at a later date.

Volksbanken Raiffeisenbanken, a branch of German savings banks and cooperative banks, will support Apple Pay in 2019. While there is no specific date mentioned, the service should start “later this year,” said Jennifer Bailey, Apple’s vice president of internet services. Other German banks have already begun to adopt Apple Pay. “The ink is dry,” the Federal Association of German Banks wrote on Twitter, “The Volksbanken Raiffeisenbanken will offer their customers Apple Pay later this year.” According to an article at Heise Online, the EC card, or Euro-Cheque card, will not be supported at launch. Girocard, the producers and managers of EC cards, will need to do some work on their end before integration can happen.

The NSA has been found to have improperly collected the phone records of U.S. citizens. Again. The Wall Street journal reported on documents obtained by the ACLU. It said that the collection took place in October but it was unknown how many records were involved. The name of the telecoms firm involved was redacted.

The previously undisclosed error, which took place last October, occurred several months after the NSA said it had purged hundreds of millions of metadata records it had amassed since 2015 due to a separate overcollection episode. Metadata include the numbers and time stamps of a call or text message but not the contents of the conversation. The American Civil Liberties Union obtained the documents, which were reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, as part of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit involving the surveillance program. They are heavily redacted internal NSA memos that discuss oversight of intelligence-collection activities.

Well thought-of advertising exec Nick Law is joining Apple, according to AdAge. He will join from Publicis Groupe in September. It is not known what role he will take at Apple

Following yesterday’s Ad Age report that Publicis Groupe Chief Creative Officer Nick Law would be leaving the company to take a post at Apple, CEO Arthur Sadoun and Law confirmed the departure today in letters to the staff. In the letters (reprinted in full below), Sadoun notes that Law will be leaving the company in September to join Apple, a “once in a lifetime opportunity” for him. “But of course, we would have loved to have Nick with us forever,” he writes. He goes on to acknowledge Law’s contributions, which included helping to bolster the company’s creative and strategic bench and for giving the Publicis Groupe community a “vision and ambition for modern creativity.”

A new patent, discovered by 9to5Mac, suggested a way the Apple Watch could be used as a camera. It proposes a flexible section in the band. The section could also be adapted and used for FaceTime.

Apple’s proposed solution is to integrate the camera into part of the band, rather than the Watch itself. You’d be able to pull out a section of the band, which would be flexible so you can angle it as desired. The lens itself would rotate on the end of the band for complete flexibility. “A potential barrier to smartwatch adoption is their minimal image-capturing ability. Some embodiments described herein include a smartwatch with the functionality of a camera that is independently positionable relative to a watch body.”

Elon Musk is no stranger to Twitter controversy. Today he committed another social media faux-pas, The Independent reported. The Tesla and Space X founder tweeted a picture with the slogan Occupy Mars on it…accompanied by a picture of the Moon. As you might imagine, nobody on Twitter pointed out the error…

Elon Musk has amused his Twitter followers by tweeting the words “Occupy Mars” alongside a picture of the moon instead of the Red Planet. Users on the social media site were quick to point out the error. “Hey Super Space Genius, that’s the moon in a total lunar eclipse,” said Upulie Divisekera, an Australian scientist, in reply to the post. The SpaceX founder appeared to admit the mistake in subsequent tweets joking about the faux pas. “Moon too,” Mr Musk said, using laughing emojis in a separate reply.