“It Smelled Something Like Pizza”

This is the story of how Apple reinvented the phone. The general outlines of this tale have been told before, most thoroughly in Isaacson’s biography. But the Samsung case—which ended last month with a resounding victory for Apple—revealed a trove of details about the invention, the sort of details that Apple is ordinarily loath to make public. We got pictures of dozens of prototypes of the iPhone and iPad. We got internal email that explained how executives and designers solved key problems in the iPhone’s design. We got testimony from Apple’s top brass explaining why the iPhone was a gamble.

Put it all together and you get remarkable story about a device that, under the normal rules of business, should not have been invented. Given the popularity of the iPod and its centrality to Apple’s bottom line, Apple should have been the last company on the planet to try to build something whose explicit purpose was to kill music players. Yet Apple’s inner circle knew that one day, a phone maker would solve the interface problem, creating a universal device that could make calls, play music and videos, and do everything else, too—a device that would eat the iPod’s lunch. Apple’s only chance at staving off that future was to invent the iPod killer itself. More than this simple business calculation, though, Apple’s brass saw the phone as an opportunity for real innovation. “We wanted to build a phone for ourselves,” Scott Forstall, who heads the team that built the phone’s operating system, said at the trial. “We wanted to build a phone that we loved.”

The problem was how to do it. When Jobs unveiled the iPhone in 2007, he showed off a picture of an iPod with a rotary-phone dialer instead of a click wheel. That was a joke, but it wasn’t far from Apple’s initial thoughts about phones. The click wheel—the brilliant interface that powered the iPod (which was invented for Apple by a firm called Synaptics)—was a simple, widely understood way to navigate through menus in order to play music. So why not use it to make calls, too?

In 2005, Tony Fadell, the engineer who’s credited with inventing the first iPod, got hold of a high-end desk phone made by Samsung and Bang & Olufsen that you navigated using a set of numerical keys placed around a rotating wheel. A Samsung cell phone, the X810, used a similar rotating wheel for input. Fadell didn’t seem to like the idea. “Weird way to hold the cellphone,” he wrote in an email to others at Apple. But Jobs thought it could work. “This may be our answer—we could put the number pad around our clickwheel,” he wrote. (Samsung pointed to this thread as evidence for its claim that Apple’s designs were inspired by other companies, including Samsung itself.)

Around the same time, Jonathan Ive, Apple’s chief designer, had been investigating a technology that he thought could do wonderful things someday—a touch display that could understand taps from multiple fingers at once. (Note that Apple did not invent multitouch interfaces; it was one of several companies investigating the technology at the time.) According to Isaacson’s biography, the company’s initial plan was to the use the new touch system to build a tablet computer. Apple’s tablet project began in 2003—seven years before the iPad went on sale—but as it progressed, it dawned on executives that multitouch might work on phones. At one meeting in 2004, Jobs and his team looked a prototype tablet that displayed a list of contacts. “You could tap on the contact and it would slide over and show you the information,” Forstall testified. “It was just amazing.”

Jobs himself was particularly taken by two features that Bas Ording, a talented user-interface designer, had built into the tablet prototype. One was “inertial scrolling”—when you flick at a list of items on the screen, the list moves as a function of how fast you swipe, and then it comes to rest slowly, as if being affected by real-world inertia. Another was the “rubber-band effect,” which causes a list to bounce against the edge of the screen when there were no more items to display. When Jobs saw the prototype, he thought, “My god, we can build a phone out of this,” he told the D Conference in 2010.

The company decided to abandon the click-wheel idea and try to build a multitouch phone. Jobs knew it was a risk—could Apple get typing to work on a touchscreen?—but the payoff could be huge: If the phone’s only interface was a touchscreen, it would be endlessly flexible—you could use it not just for talking and music but for anything else, including lots of third-party applications. In other words, a touchscreen phone wouldn’t be a phone but “really a computer in your pocket in some ways,” as Forstall said in court.

Apple is known for secrecy, but Jobs wanted the iPhone kept under tighter wraps than usual. The project was given a codename—“Project Purple”—and, as Forstall testified, Jobs didn’t let the iPhone team recruit anyone from outside the company to work on the device. Instead, Forstall had to make a strange pitch to superstar engineers in different parts of the company: “We're starting a new project,” he’d tell them. “It's so secret I can't even tell you what that project is. I can't tell you who you will work for.... What I can tell you is that if you accept this project … you will work nights, you will work weekends, probably for a number of years.”

by Farhad Manjoo, Slate |  Read more:

Photograph by Tony Avelar/AFP

Picasso’s portrait of his adored dachshund, Lump.

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#0981009301 ¬
linda vachon / tête de caboche
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Actually, Literally, What Your Crutch Word Says About You

Joe Biden said literally quite literally a lot last night in his speech at the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte. He also said figuratively, and he alluded to Barack Obama's steel spine. He also mentioned Osama bin Laden and General Motors (one is dead and one is alive, he said). But back to literally. Politico reports that Biden used the word 9 times as recorded by transcription service TVEyes, others counted as many as 10 uses. It's enough that if it were the word-of-choice in a convention speech drinking game, less hardy sorts might be literally intoxicated by the end of his turn on stage, and so it was fodder for much semantic mockery around the Internet. If there's one thing moderately word-nerdy folks (folks, he said that, too) hate, it's the repeated and possibly improper use of one of those crutch words. In truth, we hate a lot of things, but it's fun to hate crutch words.

Crutch words are those expressions we pepper throughout our language as verbal pauses, and sometimes as written ones, to give us time to think, to accentuate our meaning (even when we do so mistakenly), or just because these are the words that have somehow lodged in our brains and come out on our tongues the most, for whatever reason. Quite often, they do little to add meaning, though. Sometimes we even use them incorrectly. Almost always, we don't need them at all, which doesn't mean we won't persist in using them. Here's our list of frequently used crutches, and what your crutch of choice has to reveal about you.

Actually. Actually, you may already know how we feel about actually. I've argued that it's worse than literally because it offers up sheer attitude in place of literally's intellectual pretensions. It is literally with a slap in the face. Imagine Biden replacing his literallys with actuallys. For instance, "I want to show you the character of a leader who had what it took when the American people literally actually stood on the brink of a new depression.” It's almost like saying the American people had been claiming to be on that brink for years, crying wolf as it were, and only now, finally, did it actually happen. Actually, for once, it turned out to be true! You could read it other ways, of course, but if actually is your crutch, you are a little bit angry, maybe, and certainly adamant about making your point with a bit of a zing. You are not boring, actually, and you'd probably do OK in a bar brawl.

As it were. If you use this, which I did above, you are possibly worse than a literally-dropper. You're the most self-aware of crutch-word users, because you know you're saying something rather cliched, a hackneyed expression or at best an aging metaphor, and yet you're going forward with it anyway. The trick is that you're doing it with the acknowledgement that you already know exactly what you're doing, thank you very much. You are the equivalent of the guy with a broken leg doing tricks on his crutches. It's a crutch-word brag.

Basically. You like to cut to the chase, to synopsize, to bring things down to old bottom line of what's really, truly important. You are always downsizing, cutting the clutter, throwing out a sweater for every new one you purchase. So, basically, this is what you do. You talk for a long time, maybe, and then you sum up what you really meant to say with a basically. Everything else was just chatter, but it got you to where you were going, so, basically, that's OK with you. Basically, that's it.

by Jen Doll, Atlantic Wire |  Read more:

Photo: Jim Young, Reuters

Difference Engine: The PC all over again?

[ed. See also: The Future Will be Printed in 3-D]

What could well be the next great technological disruption is fermenting away, out of sight, in small workshops, college labs, garages and basements. Tinkerers with machines that turn binary digits into molecules are pioneering a whole new way of making things—one that could well rewrite the rules of manufacturing in much the same way as the PC trashed the traditional world of computing.

The machines, called 3D printers, have existed in industry for years. But at a cost of $100,000 to $1m, few individuals could ever afford one. Fortunately, like everything digital, their price has fallen. So much so, industrial 3D printers can now be had for $15,000, and home versions for little more than $1,000 (or half that in kit form). “In many ways, today’s 3D printing community resembles the personal computing community of the early 1990s,” says Michael Weinberg, a staff lawyer at Public Knowledge, an advocacy group in Washington, DC.

As an expert on intellectual property, Mr Weinberg has produced a white paper that documents the likely course of 3D-printing's development—and how the technology could be affected by patent and copyright law. He is far from sanguine about its prospects. His main fear is that the fledgling technology could have its wings clipped by traditional manufacturers, who will doubtless view it as a threat to their livelihoods, and do all in their powers to hobble it. Because of a 3D printer's ability to make perfect replicas, they will probably try to brand it a piracy machine. (...)

The first thing to know about 3D printing is that it is an “additive”, rather than a “subtractive”, form of processing. The tools are effectively modified ink-jet printers that deposit successive layers of material until a three-dimensional object is built up. In doing so, they typically use a tenth of the material needed when machining a part from bulk. The goop used for printing can be a thermoplastic such as acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS), polylactic acid or polycarbonate, or metallic powders, clays and even living cells depending on the application (see “Making it”, November 25th 2011).

As far as intellectual property is concerned, the 3D printer itself is not the problem. But before it can start making anything, it needs a CAD (computer-aided design) file of the object to be produced, along with specialised software to tell the printer how to lay down the successive layers of material. The object can be designed on a computer using CAD software, or files of standard objects can be downloaded from open-source archives such as Thingiverse and Fab@Home. Most likely, though, the object to be produced is copied from an existing one, using a scanner that records the three-dimensional measurements from various angles and turns the data into a CAD file.

This is where claims of infringement start—especially if the item being scanned by the machine’s laser beam is a proprietary design belonging to someone else. And unless the object is in the public domain, copyright law could well apply. This has caught out a number of unwitting users of 3D printers who have blithely made reproductions of popular merchandise.

by The Economist |  Read more: 

Photo: Wikipedia

Warhol
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Shizuka 静 (Nagare 流れ) (Silence no. 74
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Cindy Rizza, Summer’s End
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Obstruct and Exploit

Does anyone remember the American Jobs Act? A year ago President Obama proposed boosting the economy with a combination of tax cuts and spending increases, aimed in particular at sustaining state and local government employment. Independent analysts reacted favorably. For example, the consulting firm Macroeconomic Advisers estimated that the act would add 1.3 million jobs by the end of 2012.

There were good reasons for these positive assessments. Although you’d never know it from political debate, worldwide experience since the financial crisis struck in 2008 has overwhelmingly confirmed the proposition that fiscal policy “works,” that temporary increases in spending boost employment in a depressed economy (and that spending cuts increase unemployment). The Jobs Act would have been just what the doctor ordered.

But the bill went nowhere, of course, blocked by Republicans in Congress. And now, having prevented Mr. Obama from implementing any of his policies, those same Republicans are pointing to disappointing job numbers and declaring that the president’s policies have failed.

Think of it as a two-part strategy. First, obstruct any and all efforts to strengthen the economy, then exploit the economy’s weakness for political gain. If this strategy sounds cynical, that’s because it is. Yet it’s the G.O.P.’s best chance for victory in November.

But are Republicans really playing that cynical a game?

You could argue that we’re having a genuine debate about economic policy, in which Republicans sincerely believe that the things Mr. Obama proposes would actually hurt, not help, job creation. However, even if that were true, the fact is that the economy we have right now doesn’t reflect the policies the president wanted.

Anyway, do Republicans really believe that government spending is bad for the economy? No.

Right now Mitt Romney has an advertising blitz under way in which he attacks Mr. Obama for possible cuts in defense spending — cuts, by the way, that were mandated by an agreement forced on the president by House Republicans last year. And why is Mr. Romney denouncing these cuts? Because, he says, they would cost jobs!

This is classic “weaponized Keynesianism” — the claim that government spending can’t create jobs unless the money goes to defense contractors, in which case it’s the lifeblood of the economy. And no, it doesn’t make any sense.

by Paul Krugman, NY Times |  Read more:

Animated Banksy

Animated Banksy is a marvelous series of animated GIF images, made up from famous satirical Banksy street art, created by Serbian artist ABVH of the Tumblr blog Made By ABVH. It is truly amazing how adding a slight degree of motion to an originally motionless piece of artwork can really amplify the message being put out by the artist.

by Justin Page, Laughing Squid | Read more:

Kathryn Frund
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Trail Ale

Say backpackers, ever had to leave a six-pack behind because it was too heavy?

Patrick Tatera has, and it's a pain he never wants to feel again. So the former chemist who once lived in Talkeetna decided to take things into his own hands, creating what appears to be the first concentrated beer through his company, Pat's Backcountry Beverages. Backpackers, canoeists or anyone looking to have a good time in the wilderness need not strain their backs carrying water, so long as they pack a carbonator (essentially a specialized water bottle, complete with a carbon-dioxide activator), plus packets of citric acid and sodium bicarbonate. A few pumps, a little shake and the reaction is complete. Add soda or beer concentrate, and get ready to get your drink on.

Tatera, who moved his family to Wheatridge, Colo., two months ago to start his beverage business, is a former chemist for Toyota who moved to Alaska 15 years ago to teach math in Galena, a Yukon River community of about 500 residents. After five years he moved to Talkeetna, where he worked as an assessment director for the Galena-based IDEA home-school program.

He's also an avid backpacker and longtime home brewer. It took a trip to Utah 15 years ago for him to realize how important concentrated beer could be. He and a friend left a six-pack of craft beer in their car, not wanting to haul the heavy booze into the backcountry. But once into the hike, he and his hiking partner realized a beer was the only thing that would make everything better. That meant a hasty retreat to the car to retrieve their stash -- and fresh thoughts about how to make beer lighter and easier to carry.

“It’s a sweet spot for me, to be honest. All my interests converged to a point of singularity,” Tatera said. “I get to incorporate the all my geekiness.”

Sketches on the backs of napkins eventually became Tatera's carbonator, which he claims is the first of its kind. Weighing just half a pound and not much bigger than a Nalgene bottle, Tatera said users can put any sort of treated water in the carbonator -- whether filtered or cleansed with iodine tablets. Follow the instructions and, presto, some trail ale.

by Suzanna Caldwell, Alaska Dispatch |  Read more:

The Worst Retirement Investing Mistake

[ed. George Mannes interviews William Bernstein, investment adviseor and author.]

One thing that we point out to our readers is that if you don't have stocks in your portfolio, you expose yourself to inflation risk.

That's true. By owning stocks you do mitigate inflation risk, but of course, you're exposing yourself to equity risk to do it. It's sort of like all these people who are now buying dividend-yielding stocks because Treasury bonds don't have any yield; they're exchanging a riskless asset for a risky asset.

But there's another asset class that people really don't think about when they think about inflation protection, which is short, high-quality bonds with a maturity of less than three years. If we ever do get an inflationary shock, investors will demand a high real short-term rate of return. It's what happened during the late '70s and early '80s.

Even though interest rates are terrible right now, if inflation recurs -- as I think it probably will -- short-term bonds are a fine place to be, as are individual Treasuries or certificates of deposit. Since they mature soon, you can replace them quickly with newer, higher-interest bonds.

Interest rates usually more than keep up with inflation. It's true that real yields right now are historically low, but as a student of financial history I have to believe that's not going to last forever.

Okay, so stocks are risky at retirement. What about when I'm young?

For the average person, you'll want a very high stock allocation. Let's imagine you start working at age 25, and let's say for the sake of argument you have 35 years worth of human capital -- that is, 35 years of salary left in you. That's an asset that you own. What you've saved in one year for retirement is still minuscule compared to that 34 years of earning and saving that you have left.

So even if your investment capital when you're 26 years old falls by one-half, your total worth has fallen by only a couple of percent because you still have that 34 years of human capital left. Your ability to earn and save dwarfs the loss in your portfolio.

And what about when I'm in the middle of my career?

That's the key phase. You need to start bailing out of risky assets as you get closer to achieving that liability-matching portfolio—when you can "win the game" without taking so much risk.

Instead of cutting your stock allocation one percentage point a year -- the standard formula -- in a year with absolutely spectacular returns, you might want to take 4% or 5% off the table. In a series of years when stock returns have been poor, you don't take anything off the table. And over time you start laying down a floor of safe assets with the proceeds from the stocks you've sold.When exactly am I doing this?

Getting close to hitting your number is usually going to happen during a bull market, so the psychology of doing this right is tricky. It's hard to cut back on risk and accept lower returns when your neighbors are getting rich.

If you're very lucky and very frugal, hitting your number might happen when you're 45. In the worst-case scenario, you do everything right and still come up short at 65, so you wind up working longer or greatly paring back your expectations.

It sounds like retirement success depends on when you were born.

Yeah, that is certainly true. Young people should get down on their knees and pray for a brutal bear market at the beginning of their savings career, because that's going to enable them to buy a large number of shares cheaply. Having a sequence of bad returns first, followed by strong returns, is the best-case scenario.

I did a little thought experiment in which I calculated how many years it took people starting work in different years to make their number. I realized that the cohort that started working during the worst of economic times is the one that did the best.

by George Mannes., CNN Money |  Read more: 

Can Fandom Change Society?

Before the mass media, people actively engaged with culture through storytelling and expanding well-known tales. Modern fan culture connects to this historical tradition, and has become a force that challenges social norms and accepted behavior. Whether the issue is gender, sexuality, subversiveness, or even intellectual property law, fans participate in communities that allow them to think outside of what is possible in more mainstream scenarios. "Fannish" behavior has become its own grassroots way of altering our society and culture, and a means of actively experiencing one's own culture. In a sense, fans have changed from the faceless adoring masses, to people who are proud of their identity and are stretching the boundaries of what is considered "normal".

h/t: Boing Boing

“Mountain Road” by Robert LaDuke.
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Android, Apple, Starbucks & NASA: What Inspired These Four World-Famous Logos?

Imagine you’re a newbie fresh out of design school (and I don’t mean one of those faux-accredited hipster schools where all you have to do is turn up, swagger around with your fixed gear bike and strike pretend nonchalant-poses with your strategically positioned dirty-fake tatts showing). [ed. Be sure to click on this link for some pretty good (natured) laughs.]

You’ve studied hard, you’ve got the principles down, and you feel like you can easily navigate how to tactfully deal with clients and the intricacies of what to charge, so as not to be viewed as a slap-happy rip-off merchant. You’ve managed to blitz a first meeting with the perfect client, during which you’ve delicately pitched your ideas for a mind-bendingly awesome logo redesign.

During that meeting, you’ve even managed to trot out your gorgeous leather bound notebook with hand-sketched logo prototypes thrown in for that retro feel – all done with authentic 6B lead, obviously. You’re sure you’ve nailed it. Your revamp ideas are solid – complete with a bold new colour palette, a delicate twist on the original logo with just the right amount of zing to make sure the subtly is actually noticeable, and a font choice that would make mothers weep with joy , including your own (if, after paying your ridiculously high tuition fees she actually cares about anything other than you scoring an authentic job with dollar signs attached).

You’re absolutely, definitely positive the client is about to contact you with a sublime barrage of confirmation like “When can you start?“ or “You’re a designer queen who positively drips brilliance, you’re hired!” and “We want you to have our design babies, right now, on this couch!”. This uber-grateful praise (understandably, as the redesign is completely awesome) is to be accompanied by massive amounts of Square-swiped credits and a big-green-lit-go for the logo redesign to commence.

Right?

Wrong. If history (and actual working examples) proves correct, the process of designing logos – whether that’s through modifications to an existing design, or a brand-spanking-falling-off-the-newness-shelf type – is far more hairy and much more complex. Take, for instance, the stories of serendipity, underhandedness, and censorship that pepper the histories of world-famous logos. From ultra-recognisable tech icons to global coffee house branding, each logo comes with a distinct bubble of intrigue that makes designing logos look more like a train-wreck than a picnic.

by Mez Breeze | The Next Web | Read more:

Image via: TechCrunch

Mizue Hasegawa practices the ancient art of kyudo at Soto Mission of Hawaii in Nuuanu. Hasegawa, president and sensei of local archery club Hawaii Kyudo Kai, says it’s the oldest martial art in Japan, one with deep philosophical roots. “We focus on three main goals: shin, the truth, zen, the goodness, and bi, the beauty,” she explains. “If you have all three, the arrow should go through the target. But hitting the target is not our main objective.” Hawaii Kyudo Kai’s 15 members hone their skills every Sunday

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Nokia’s Visionary Wants to Out-Design Apple

Marko Ahtisaari spreads out several models of Nokia’s new smartphone with the self-assurance of a Tiffany diamond salesman. It is several weeks before the launch of Nokia’s Lumia 920 — the flagship phone for Microsoft’s Windows Phone 8 platform, a crucial product for both companies — and the head of Nokia design has come to New York City to reveal his wares in advance of today’s glitzy event.

There they are, shiny colored polymer bars fronted by bold 4.7-inch Gorilla Glass screens. Good looking, to be sure. Ahtisaari, who heads Nokia’s design studio, picks up a canary yellow one. Others are black, gloss red and matte gray. His face is all business, but his fingertips caress the surface like a lover’s.

“Our products are human,” he says. “They’re natural. They’re never cold. That’s partly driven by color, but also partly how they feel in the hand. This looks less like a product coming off a production line in a factory — though it does—than a product that might have grown on a tree. The grandest way I could put it, is post-industrial.”

Ahtisaari eventually ticks off some other features that he hopes will draw customers to the Nokia phone. Windows 8 software, of course, with the status and activity tiles that provide information at a glance. Well-integrated mapping and location applications, including an augmented-reality layer called City Lens. Wireless charging. Near Field Communications (NFC) technology, not used for yet another payment scheme, but quick and reliable connections for activities like streaming music to a speaker.

But all of these, he says, are part of a general overall vision where advanced function is blended into unforgettable form — post-industrial form. The dream, if not the exact language, is very familiar. Nokia is marketing its phone directly into the teeth of Apple’s strength: design.  (...)

His first order of business was energizing the culture of his team — it was apparently suffering from the same sort of drift as the rest of Nokia — and raising its importance in the company so that design became central to all product decision-making. While some observers thought that Nokia was left behind in the smartphone wars, and questioned Elop’s decision to cast Nokia’s fate with the unproven Microsoft Windows phone platform, Ahtisaari believed that there was still plenty of opportunity for a comeback.

“As a product area, smart phones are almost so over-covered that sometimes there’s a feeling that the core innovation in design is almost done,” he says. “Actually nothing can be further than the truth.”

The analogy he supplies is that of the auto industry. In the 1890s, he says, cars were steered by tillers, like rudders on small boats. Over the next couple of decades, ideas were exposed to the marketplace and ultimately a standard emerged, with steering wheels and gearshifts. “I think that we’re in the middle of that period,” he says.

Apple offers one path for design, he explains, with apps and folders, and Android is a variation of that, with multiple home screens. And now there’s this third option, involving live tiles that give real-time, at-a-glance information about the applications lurking beneath. “It’s another take on completely solving all the things that smartphones need to do,” he says.

Think about that auto analogy. Can he be saying that the iPhone approach will one day be as absurd as a rudder on a car? As they say in Finland, yikes.

by Steven Levy, Wired |  Read more:

Photo: nomadig/Flickr

Superman, Grab a Book

[ed. Some people are awesome (others, not so much).]

The best time to turn a pay phone into a lending library is early on a Sunday morning, said John H. Locke, an Upper West Side architectural designer who may be the world’s leading expert on the subject.

“There aren’t a lot of people out,” he said. “You can just go down, find a good booth, carry it out, latch it in. It takes seconds. And then just fill it up with books and let’s wait and see what happens.”

Last winter, Mr. Locke designed a lightweight set of bookshelves to fit inside the common Titan brand of New York City pay phone kiosks. A fabricator in Brooklyn cuts the shelves, which Mr. Locke paints and assembles in his apartment.

So far he has carried out four installations, most recently at Amsterdam Avenue and West 87th Street just before 8 a.m. on a Sunday last month.

As several sleepy-eyed patrons of a 24-hour deli looked on in confusion, Mr. Locke snapped a lime green bookcase into place, stocking it with children’s books and paperback novels.

Hooks on the unit allow Mr. Locke to install it without hardware, and the entire process took less than five minutes.

He had barely rounded the corner before a man who had been standing outside the deli began browsing through titles, choosing “The Shining” by Stephen King, tucking it under his arm and heading home.

What happens to the installations after the first few minutes is a bit of a mystery to Mr. Locke. He checks on them periodically, he said, until they disappear — after a few days or a few weeks. Which is fine with him.

“It’s a spontaneous thing that just erupts at certain locations,” he said. “People like it, people are inspired by it, but then it disappears again.”

The libraries have endured long enough to attract their share of fans. Publishing houses, bookstores and neighbors have approached Mr. Locke to donate books for future installations. The project is currently being featured in Spontaneous Interventions, the United States’ contribution to the International Venice Architecture Biennale, an architecture show.

If any disused fixture of city streets cried out for repurposing, it would seem to be the pay phone. The city’s Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications acknowledges as much. In July, the department began soliciting ideas about what to do with the city’s remaining 13,000 sidewalk pay phones once the current contracts expire in 2014. (...)

The city is also engaged in a pilot project to use pay phones as Wi-Fi hot spots. Eleven pay phones, including ones in every borough but the Bronx, have been providing free Wi-Fi since July. About 2,000 people logged on to the networks in August, according to the city. Users stayed connected for an average of 38 minutes.

Mr. Locke, who has an aversion to outdoor advertising, said he wanted nothing to do with the city’s initiative. He does post the plans for his shelves on his Web site, in the hope that people will install their own versions in their own neighborhoods.

by Joshua Brustein, NY Times |  Read more: