text: The article has a pretty good post mortem on the idea of home 3D printing though it is a pity so much money was squandered before they came to these rather obvious conclusions. Setting aside the poor performance of low cost machines, and the limited choice of materials, most people don’t build stuff.
  “”This notion of consumers buying their own machine and printing for themselves just is not working out, because it’s not easy,” he said. “You need to have some design talent, and most people aren’t designers. You need to learn design software, and most people don’t want to mess with it.” And 3D printers cheap enough for the consumer market tend to be less sophisticated than the industrial-strength models, Wohlers added. “3D printers that are affordable are limited in size, material color, surface finish, a lot of things,” he said. “You’re really limited as to what you’re going to print with them, even if you have some design experience.””
  This is the time of year when all the industry analysts downgrade their estimates for existing markets (the ones you can measure) and upgrade their estimates for emerging markets (where nobody can dispute using real figures). I find the unit growth expectation to be quite high but there are a lot of cheap, good quality handset coming on the market and that might help unit demand. The problem is prices are going down so chances are revenue is going to go down a lot more than single digit unit growth might suggest.
  “Gartner, Inc. said global smartphone sales will continue to slow and will no longer grow in double digits. Worldwide smartphone sales are expected to grow 7 percent in 2016 to reach 1.5 billion units. This is down from 14.4 percent growth in 2015. In 2020, smartphone sales are on pace to total 1.9 billion units. “The smartphone market will no longer grow at the levels it has reached over the last seven years,” said Roberta Cozza, research director at Gartner. “Smartphone sales recorded their highest growth in 2010, reaching 73 percent.””
  Whenever I hear about Apple pay I think about chip and PIN in the US. Somehow the rest of the world made the switch without too much bother, but US consumers and vendors seem to be in a uproar over this relatively ancient technology. Sorry about the auto play video at the begging. It is simply a demonstration of how awful Yahoo is: it makes noise while presenting a summary of the story in caption form. Somebody thought that was a good idea.
  “The deadline for retailers to switch to chip-enabled payment cards was last October. This was when U.S. credit card companies, including Visa (V) and Mastercard (MA), announced new liability rules that would shift the burden of responsibility for fraudulent transactions to businesses if they didn’t update their technology. The chip cards, which use what’s known as EMV technology, have unique transaction codes that make them more secure. But even as the deadline has passed, merchants have delayed EMV migration. Many retailers have cited avoidance of long lines that develop from the slow process. And other retailers claim they have installed the card readers but are waiting for the credit card industry to do their part.”
  This seems like the week of obvious tech stories, except that this was probably obvious a few years ago. Apps are lightweight and complex function which requires cloud infrastructure is cheap enough to rent. There are only so many ideas and so many things you can get people to do with a few square inches of screen. Heck there hasn’t been any innovation in PC software in 15 so why should mobile software be any different?
  “The mobile app boom kicked off in July 2008, when Apple introduced the App Store. Now it is over. People are still making plenty of apps, of course. And many people are still downloading them. But the go-go growth days are gone. If you are an independent app developer or publisher, you have probably known this for a while, because you have found it very difficult to get people to download your app — the average American smartphone user downloads zero apps per month. But now even the very biggest app publishers are seeing their growth slow down or stop altogether. Most people have all the apps they want and/or need. They’re not looking for new ones.”
  Autonomous vehicles are 15 to 20 years away so we have lots of time to think about this. From a societal perspective both AVs and the enabling advanced safety features (which are already on the market) will save untold lives and vastly reduce pain and suffering from car crashes. From a lawyer’s perspective, as long as you can convince 12 jurors something isn’t perfect enough, you can profit. After all some lawyers recently convinced a jury baby powder is carcinogenic, all actual scientific evidence to the contrary, so AV litigation should be easy unless laws are crafted to limit it’s damages. Thanks to Alain Belanger for this item.
  “Today no court ever asks why a driver does anything in particular in the critical moments before a crash. The question is moot as to liability—the driver panicked, he wasn’t thinking, he acted on instinct. But when robots are doing the driving, “Why?” becomes a valid question. Human ethical standards, imperfectly codified in law, make all kinds of assumptions that engineers have not yet dared to make. The most important such assumption is that a person of good judgment will know when to disregard the letter of the law in order to honor the spirit of the law. What engineers must now do is teach the elements of good judgment to cars and other self-guided machines—that is, to robots.”
  This sort of thing is a pretty serious. Not so much the loss of infotainment systems but you can imagine what might happen if the software for advanced safety systems gets borked during an over the air software update. At least old fashioned go to the deal and spend a fortune type updates would be scheduled and presumable checked out after the fact.
  “Lexus social media channels have been flooded by frustrated owners, but the company has been unable to give any estimates for when the problem will be resolved. The company also couldn’t say whether customers will see the problem fix itself with another software update or if they will need to head into dealers to get it fixed. Some users on Twitter have reported success with disconnecting their battery for a few moments to force a reset of the system.”
  There have been questions about Oracle’s cloud revenues for some time now. Like most companies they are probably trying to put their best foot forward and make it look like they are an important force in the business (external evidence to the contrary). Almost certainly they are doing so which is all according to accounting rules. Regardless, Oracle’s position in the cloud should be the least of investor concerns: their traditional, staggeringly expensive, centralized database solution is not the way modern developers solve modern problems. So, chances are their licensing revenue will gradually decline over time and there isn’t much they can do about it.