Revere Digital

Microsoft said that it expects its deal to acquire Nokia’s phone unit to close soon -- with a couple minor changes. Under the revised deal, Microsoft will no longer acquire Nokia’s Korean manufacturing plant.

Instead, it will take on 21 people working in China that had been part of Nokia’s chief technology office, the rest of which is sticking with Nokia. Microsoft will also manage Nokia.com and Nokia’s social media presence for up to a year following the deal’s close.

If you’ve been worried about the dreaded Heartbleed vulnerability that shook the foundations of the Internet, you can start to breathe a little easier. But not completely.

The folks at the Internet security firm Sucuri have done a systematic scan of the top million sites on the Internet as determined by Amazon’s Alexa, and according to its findings, as related in a blog post by its CTO Daniel Cid, there’s mostly good news, but some bad.

The good news is that according to its findings, the top 1,000 sites on the Web are safe. They’ve been updated, their certificates and keys recreated, and they’re now safe to use, though you should probably still change your passwords just to be cautious. Perhaps even more reassuring is that within the top 10,000 sites, only 53 were found to still be vulnerable.

The bad news, and it’s relative, is that many -- about two percent -- of the of top million sites are still vulnerable. That works out to more than 20,000 sites. The more popular a site, the more likely it is to have been fixed.

After years of talks, Apple struck a deal in 2013 with the world’s largest mobile carrier, China Mobile, and began selling the iPhone 5s and 5c on its network on Jan 17.

Now it looks like that team-up was a boon for App Store revenue. According to an App Annie report released this morning, iOS revenue from China grew 70 percent between Q4 2013 and Q1 2014. The report also cited strong app download numbers led by the games, travel and social networking categories.

With several states and municipalities considering various mandatory “kill-switch” laws for mobile devices, the wireless industry announced a voluntary commitment to include new anti-theft technology on phones starting 2015.

The commitment has the backing of the five largest US cellular carriers as well as the key players in the smartphone device and operating system markets, a list that includes Apple, Google, HTC, Huawei, Motorola, Microsoft, Nokia and Samsung.

Those signing the pledge agree that devices going on sale after July 2015 will have the ability to remotely wipe data and be rendered inoperable, if the user chooses, to prevent the device from being reactivated without the owner’s permission. Lost or stolen devices could later be restored if recovered. The carriers also agreed they would facilitate these measures.

[Commentary] It’s no surprise that the National Security Agency may have used the Heartbleed exploit to tap into sensitive encrypted communication, including that of Google.

If you understand the nature of how the bug works, it goes hand in hand with undercover espionage. Heartbleed, the name given to the OpenSSL (Secure Socket Layer) flaw, allows sensitive information to leak (or bleed) from a server to any client connected to it. What makes this even more interesting is that the data is leaked to any computer connected to the server, so there’s no need to hijack someone else’s connection in order to exploit it. Here’s a simple scenario:

1. NSA connects to server with the Heartbleed flaw.
2. NSA stays connected, gathering leaked information until it receives the private SSL key of the server.
3. NSA stores private key and uses it to decrypt previous and future communication to the entire server’s domain, i.e., Google.com.

The worst part is that this vulnerability can be performed without any detection, and without leaving traces behind.

It’s important to note that the ability of not leaving any traces behind makes the bug even worse, because administrators cannot go back to determine what was lost. Now, this could have been used by the NSA, or it could have been used by a hacker. The end result is the same. Snooping and data loss are possible.

I would take this a step further and question whether breaches like Target’s data loss were the result of it.

[Martini, CEO, Iboss Network Security]

Primetime TV ratings grew -- by about 4 percent -- during the first three months of 2014. Analyst Michael Nathanson says that’s TV’s best performance since the last quarter of 2007.

And it’s the first time TV has grown, period, in more than a year. Nathanson attributes the boomlet to a confluence of big live events in the beginning of the year — the Sochi Olympics, the Oscars, NFL playoffs and the NCAA tournament -- plus an insane winter that kept everyone locked up in their houses, huddling around the plasma for warmth.

[Commentary] Today we are witnessing a new revolution, this time of “data natives” who expect their world to be “smart” and seamlessly adapt to them and their taste and habits.

• While digital natives were most concerned with what they can do with technology, data natives are more concerned about what that technology can do for them.
• Digital natives program their thermostat. Data natives expect the thermostat to program itself. Digital natives use the Starbucks mobile app. Data natives want the app to know their favorite drinks -- and when to suggest a new one.
• Digital natives use a cloud-connected baby monitor. Data natives expect their baby monitor to automatically calculate crying percentiles based on millions of other babies.

The data-native revolution is on the rise as the appetite for data-driven products keeps growing stronger. From connected homes to wearables, people expect their lives to be better, richer and easier due to an explosion of networked devices (50 billion of them by 2020, according to Cisco).

So we need data scientists, data engineers, data designers, people who “get” both data and the product experience, people who are creative with data and who have empathy for the wider audience that’s now represented and shaped by the data natives. In response to the oft-cited McKinsey Global Institute report anticipating unfulfilled demand for 190,000 big-data positions, data-science education programs have proliferated within traditional universities, MOOCs, large companies and incubator-style training programs.

[Rogati is vice president of data at Jawbone]

People are spending an increasing amount of time using apps on their phones, at the expense of the mobile web.

That’s worrisome, says Andreessen Horowitz’s Chris Dixon. But before you write off the mobile web, remember that it’s possible to use both mobile apps and the mobile Web at the same time.

As Daring Fireball’s John Gruber writes: “On mobile, the difference between ‘apps’ and ‘the web’ is easily conflated. When I’m using Tweetbot, for example, much of my time in the app is spent reading web pages rendered in a web browser. Surely that’s true of mobile Facebook users, as well. What should that count as ‘app or ‘web?’”

[Commentary] Smartphones and tablets, along with apps connected to new cloud-computing platforms, are revolutionizing the workplace. We’re still early in this workplace transformation, and the tools so familiar to us will be around for quite sometime.

The leaders, managers, and organizations that are using new tools sooner will quickly see how tools can drive cultural changes -- developing products faster, with less bureaucracy and more focus on what’s important to the business. If you’re trying to change how work is done, changing the tools and processes can be an eye-opening first step.

Tools have a critical yet subtle impact on how work gets done. Tools can come to define the work, as much as just making work more efficient. Early in the use of new tools there’s a combination of a huge spike in benefit, along with a temporary dip in productivity. Even with all the improvements, all tools over time can become a drag on productivity as the tools become the end, rather than the means to an end. This is just a natural evolution of systems and processes in organizations, and productivity tools are no exception.

It is something to watch for as a team. The spike comes from the new ways information is acquired, shared, created, analyzed and more. There’s a temporary dip in productivity as new individual and organizational muscles are formed and old tools and processes are replaced across the whole team. Everyone individually -- and the team has a whole -- feels a bit disrupted during this time, i.e. disruption in the tools of the workplace lend the impression that “you’re doing it wrong.” But eventually, things rapidly return to a “new normal,” and with well-chosen tools and thoughtfully-designed processes, this is an improvement.

[Sinofsky is Board Partner, Andreessen Horowitz]

As it prepares to go public, the Sina spinoff Weibo is pitching itself as a “mobile first” product with 70 percent of users accessing the social media service from phones and 22 percent of total revenue in 2013 from mobile advertising.

Weibo is hoping to raise $437 million in a Nasdaq listing, according to a recent filing. Weibo has 143.8 million monthly active users, with $188.3 million of revenue for a loss of $38.1 million in 2013.

Though Weibo is perhaps a little too old -- it started in 2009 -- to be a true mobile-only product, mobile is one of the stronger stories the company is telling.

Weibo has been hurt recently by challenges to user growth including competition from Tencent’s mobile messaging service WeChat (though Weibo still serves a need as more of a public tool), as well as rising government censorship, including arrests of prominent Weibo personalities like investor Charles Xue, which was perceived by many as a form of government intimidation of critics. The company said in its filing that growth has also been hurt by recent government identity verification requirements.