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The Girls-Education Edition Monday, January 22, 2018

Apple Partners With Malala Fund To Help Girls Receive Quality Education, by Megan Rose Dickey, TechCrunch

Apple has teamed up with Malala Fund to support girls’ education, becoming Malala Fund’s first Laureate partner. Founded by Yousafzai and her father, Ziauddin, the Malala Fund aims to empower young girls and help them access the quality education they deserve.

With the support of Apple, Malala Fund expects to double the number of grants awarded through its Gulmakai Network and launch its funding programs in India and Latin America, with the goal of extending secondary education to more than 100,000 girls. Apple will also help Malala Fund with technology, curriculum and education policy research.

I Had An Apple Store Experience From Hell — And It's Clear There Are Larger Problems With Apple's Retail Presence, by Avery Hartmans, Business Insider

The lack of signage indicating where to stand and who to talk to is extraordinarily frustrating. Having no clear points of contact or direction is confusing for all types of customers, even someone who knows exactly what she needs and how to ask for it. I know that Apple envisions having a store where customers can flow in and out, or congregate like a "town square," but sometimes, it's just easier to stand in a line. At least from a customer's standpoint, you know where you need to be.

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This brings me to the biggest issue I had: In Apple's world, every employee seems charged with helping every customer and every other fellow employee at once. Nearly every time I spoke with an employee during my week-long Apple odyssey, they interrupted me to talk to someone else, or were interrupted by a customer or fellow employee. The result made me feel like no one was listening to me or taking my concerns seriously — and the shoddy repair job from my first visit didn't instill me with any more confidence.

This Hearst Ranch Has Raised Cattle Since 1865, Now It Also Powers Apple's Headquarters, by Anita Balakrishnan, CNBC

Hearst's 3,000-head cattle operation at Jack Ranch itself is markedly old West: "There is a code among cowboys that transcends copyrights, technology, and other manifestations of culture that some folks may consider 'modern,'" the website says. "The cowboy way is simple..... It may sound like a bygone era, but it is our reality."

But 150 years after George Hearst bought the ranch, it took on a new, ultra-modern function: A 2,900-acre solar farm, which until now has been contracted by Apple to run the company's Cupertino headquarters.

Exclusively Algorithmic

Spotify Limited & Apple Records, by M.G. Siegler

If, consumers are conditioned by video services like Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Hulu, and the like to pay for multiple services, Spotify can easily make this move. If consumers are not, this is going to be a lot harder for Spotify to execute — not least because they’re going to enter an even bigger war with Apple (and presumably Amazon, and Google, etc).

That is to say, people are used to paying for a music service and having access to basically all music in existence — which is still wild! They’re not used to having to pay for Spotify and Apple Music in order to get access to all the content they want. I think this will change for the reasons listed above, but it’s going to be a harder transition, largely because music is more passive than video content is — it would (and will) be annoying to have to remember which song is streaming on which service.

How Spotify Beat Apple To Charting The Future Of Music, by Victor Luckerson, The Ringer

The exclusives gambit didn’t work for a few reasons. For one, these albums were only exclusive in the legal sense. They were all easily piratable with no more than a Twitter search or a visit to The Pirate Bay. Because the deals were mostly timed exclusives, fans also knew they could just wait a few weeks to stream the album, killing any real incentive to switch platforms. And while Tidal and Apple were locked in an exclusives arms race, Spotify was refocusing its entire user experience around curated playlists such as Discover Weekly and RapCaviar. That meant even if the album of the moment wasn’t on Spotify, something similar could be served up immediately.

“You want to be able to hear that really cool album that is exclusively available at a particular place, but you also just really need something that’s very good at providing you with hours of listening pleasure every day,” says James McQuivey, a tech and media analyst at Forrester. “Spotify has basically been able to overcome what’s generally really well understood about media streaming services—exclusive content matters. They’ve created an experience that does allow people to do what they want to do in the world of music, which is listen to hours of music every day and have that music be interesting and varied and true to their tastes.”

Stuff

Apple Gets Muhammad Ali To Sell You On iPhone X Selfies, by Chris Matyszczyk, CNET

In an ad released on Sunday, Cupertino gets the self-styled "Double-Greatest," Muhammad Ali, to bolster your self-belief.

The soundtrack is one of the, well, greatest speeches he ever made. The one where the boxing genius explains just how great he is.

Apple HomePod: Late, And Pricey, But This Smart Speaker Could Still Have One Advantage Over Its Rivals, by Steve Ranger, ZDNet

Apple faces a tough battle to break into a market with established companies offering cheaper products. But if it can convince enough people that it can do a better job of protecting privacy than its rivals, then it could still capture the premium and privacy-conscious segment of the smart home market. Apple may be late to the game, but it still has a shot or two in its locker.

Develop

Observations Of Apple Open Source, by Andrew Hyatt

Apple Open Source is a truly a strange beast. In many ways, it portrays Apple as a company that values open source and wants to give back to the community. But in many ways, it falls short of this and represents an effort to look like they care about Free & Open Source Software.

Notes

Why I Deleted The Instagram App — And You Should Think About It Too, by Kerry Flynn, Mashable

I understand some people — maybe a decent amount of Instagram's 500 million daily users — are inspired by the photos they see in their feeds. For my colleague Miriam Kramer, her highly curated Instagram account is a much-preferred distraction to the Facebook app. For one of my best friends Lizza Monet Morales, Instagram is part of her career as an actress, TV host, and social media personality.

For me, Instagram is a place of fakeness, humblebrags, and harassment, and I don't want to be a part of it anymore. That's why when I got an iPhone X for Christmas and started fresh by not restoring from backup, I didn't bother downloading Instagram.

Bottom of the Page

My daughter was introduced to Spotify before Netflix. And her first comment after browsing and searching through Netflix: why aren't all movies available in Netflix?

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Thanks for reading.