Boot up: smartwatch chic, truth about Turkey's Twitter block, Chomper leaves Apple, and more

Plus tips for making user use your app, Waze's Google bounce, Prezi gets pwned, and more

For wearing a smartwatch, ensure your shirt is short.

A burst of 8 links for you to chew over, as picked by the Technology team

Smartwatch Chic >> Tumblr

Now in an arm-wrestling/staring match semifinal with White Men Wearing Google Glass.

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LAPD: All cars are under investigation >> Al Jazeera America

The Los Angeles Police Department says it cannot release information about its automatic license plate reader program because all cars in the Los Angeles metropolitan area are under investigation.
The LAPD made this legal argument in response to a records request from the American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which sought to find out what the license plate readers had captured, as well as the department's policies for retaining and sharing the data.

Seems reasonab... hang on.

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Cathy Edwards, cofounder of Chomp, is leaving Apple on 11 April >> TechCrunch

A notable personnel departure is coming up in Cupertino: Cathy Edwards, the co-founder and CTO of app search and discovery platform Chomp, is leaving Apple on 11 April, TechCrunch has learned. Apple, if you recall, acquired Chomp in February 2012 for $50m, kickstarting a long-term revamp of how users search for and discover apps in the iOS App Store and elsewhere in the Apple ecosystem.

See? Apple can't hold onto the entrepreneurs it acquires - clearly doomed. (Edwards had the thankless task of being "Director, Evaluation and Quality" for Apple Maps from mid-2012.)

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Waze cofounder skips Google to try startup world again >> Bloomberg

Uri Levine still has the entrepreneurial bug. After selling map-software provider Waze to Google for $1.1bn last June, the 49-year-old Israeli decided not to join the ranks of his famous acquirer.
Instead, he turned his attention to his next startup, FeeX, which debuts today. Similar to how Waze tackled one of life's biggest aggravations - getting stuck in traffic - the new company takes on another major irritant: hidden fees on financial services.

See? Google hires people who are overflowing with entrepreneurial spirit.

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Prezi got Pwned >> Engineering at Prezi

As you may or may not know, you can download a prezi in a portable format, which means your prezi's XML and all the referenced media objects are zipped together with a player for Windows and OS X. However, not every image/video in an online prezi is neccessarly stored on our infrastructure. When a portable prezi is created, these resources have to be fetched from their original location. We call this and the underlying infrastructure "conversion" and "conversion service" (we pride ourselves on our ability to give things obscure and irrelevant names).
You can probably guess what comes next: If it's possible to download anything from the internet, how about "file:///etc/passwd"? Headshot!

But the hacker who discovered it disclosed it, and got a bounty.

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Everyone is getting Turkey's Twitter block wrong >> Medium

Zeynep Tufekci:

During the rally, [Turkey's prime minster] Erdogan also talked about the threat social media, including Facebook and YouTube, poses to family values. He talked about its disruption of privacy, and how these foreign companies do not obey Turkish court orders but obey US and European courts.
In other words, Erdogan's strategy is to demonize social media.
It is a strategy of placing social media outside the sacred sphere, as a disruption of family, as a threat to unity, as an outside blade tearing at the fabric of society.

Excellent contextual piece. Erdogan is not a fool.

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Stop making users explore your product >> Users Know

Laura Klein:

Nobody cares about your product. Fundamentally, what users care about is themselves. They are using your product as a means to an end. We knew this back in 1960 when Theodore Levitt explained that when customers buy quarter inch drills, they really are buying quarter inch holes.
Think about the last time you bought a drill. Did you sit down with the drill in order to spend time exploring it? Not unless you're some sort of drill fetishist. What you almost certainly did was try to figure out the fastest way that you could set about completing the project for which you bought the drill.
The same is true of whatever product you're building. I know that you care deeply about the user interface of your product and all of the delightful features you have so lovingly handcrafted. Sadly, nobody else does. At least, not in the same way that you do.

Often overlooked.

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We're F****D, it's over: coming back from the brink >> Scott Weiss

In 1997, about a year after launch, Hotmail was growing exponentially, adding thousands of new users every day. We were on fire. And then one night, it all seemed to unravel. We had a program called the "janitor" that ran as an overnight batch process and it erased all of the email that users put in the "trash" folder. Except this night, a bug spawned an army of other janitors that cleaned out everyone's inboxes, too. That's right, deep-sixed their email. Here is what went through all our spinning heads: "We're fucked, it's over."
It's pronounced whiff-eee-o, that horrible, terrifying moment that nearly every entrepreneur goes through when they are certain that their company is dead.

Except they're not.

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