Archive for March 22, 2017

Wednesday, March 22, 2017

Kindle iOS App Adds “Send to Kindle” Feature

Tim Hardwick:

Amazon has added a long-awaited Pocket-style read-it-later feature to its Kindle iOS app that allows users browsing the web to send articles to their Kindle device for offline reading.

Amazon has offered desktop Chrome and Firefox browser extensions to feed into its Send to Kindle feature for some time, but the company had not offered a Safari-compatible iOS solution until now.

This is a good feature to have, even though I already use Instapaper, because sometimes I want to send one particular article right now. Plus, it’s easier for people who don’t already use a reading service. It also works in other apps besides Safari, and you can set it not to save the document in the cloud (so you don’t have to clear it out later).

It’s shocking that this took so long, but Amazon doesn’t seem to care that much about its iOS or Mac apps. Despite the more advanced iOS platform, the iOS Kindle app has fewer features and views than an actual Kindle. Collections-related features are particularly lacking and buggy, whereas they work perfectly from Amazon’s hardware.

Sellers Printing Counterfeit Books and Selling Under Amazon’s Brand

Bill Pollock (via Hacker News):

Images of counterfeit copies of Python for Kids being sold on Amazon. Legit copies are thicker, color, layflat binding, nicer paper.

Unfortunately, these counterfeits come directly from Amazon’s inventory. Not from a third-party seller.

Previously: Amazon Selling Fake Apple Chargers and Cables, Amazon’s Chinese Counterfeit Problem Is Getting Worse.

XCTest Closure Based Expectations

Giovanni Lodi:

XCTest provides a method to generate an expectation that will fulfil based on the result of an NSPredicate, expectation(for:, evaluatedWith:, handler:).

Add to that the fact that NSPredicate can be initialized with a closure to evaluate, and now you have a recipe for a closure based expectation.

Seriously, Google, Can You Just Make Exact Match Exact?

Daniel Gilbert:

A few years ago (2014), Google eliminated advertisers’ ability to exclude close variants as part of “exact match,” and they got away with it. People were angry. The industry suffered a blow. But people gradually moved on.

Now they’re messing with exact match again, but this time they’ve gone too far.

In the new exact match universe, an “exact match” can include close variants of the keywords and can also include the same words, but in an entirely different order. Google is denying the importance of syntax, at the expense of the industry and, ultimately, itself.

The article is about AdWords, but the general Google Web search seems to also find matches that don’t actually contain the quoted words in sequence.

Why Large Companies Acquire Small Companies

Jason Cohen:

Large acquirers don’t care about small-company financials because mathematically those won’t affect the growth or value of the acquirer.

[…]

Rather, buyer behavior is rooted in their strategy — a combination of product thesis, their theory of their market’s evolution, how they need to position for customers and against competitors, their long-term brand development, geographic expansion plans, and so on.

[…]

Pundits couldn’t agree how to analyze the sale of Instagram to Facebook. It was said that Facebook drastically overpaid (a billion dollars for a company with fanatical users but zero revenue) but also that that Instagram was stupid to sell so early (because after more “inevitable” growth it would be worth much more, and would “inevitably” be bought or go public at that larger valuation).