SEAN SILCOFF, JACQUIE MCNISH AND STEVE LADURANTAYE:

But smartphone users were rapidly shifting their focus to software applications, rather than choosing devices based solely on hardware. RIM found it difficult to make the transition, said Neeraj Monga, director of research with Veritas Investment Research Corp. The company’s engineering culture had served it well when it delivered efficient, low-power devices to enterprise customers. But features that suited corporate chief information officers weren’t what appealed to the general public.

“The problem wasn’t that we stopped listening to customers,” said one former RIM insider. “We believed we knew better what customers needed long term than they did. Consumers would say, ‘I want a faster browser.’ We might say, ‘You might think you want a faster browser, but you don’t want to pay overage on your bill.’ ‘Well, I want a super big very responsive touchscreen.’ ‘Well, you might think you want that, but you don’t want your phone to die at 2 p.m.’ “We would say, ‘We know better, and they’ll eventually figure it out.’ ”

Trying to satisfy its two sets of customers – consumers and corporate users – could leave the company satisfying neither. When RIM executives showed off plans to add camera, game and music applications to its products to several hundred Fortune 500 chief information officers at a company event in Orlando in 2010, they weren’t prepared for the backlash that followed. Large corporate customers didn’t want personal applications on corporate phones, said a former RIM executive who attended the session.

SEAN SILCOFF, JACQUIE MCNISH AND STEVE LADURANTAYE:

This investigative report reveals that:

Shortly after the release of the first iPhone, Verizon asked BlackBerry to create a touchscreen “iPhone killer.” But the result was a flop, so Verizon turned to Motorola and Google instead.

In 2012, one-time co-CEO Jim Balsillie quit the board and cut all ties to BlackBerry in protest after his plan to shift focus to instant-messaging software, which had been opposed by founder Mike Lazaridis, was killed by current CEO Thorsten Heins.

Mr. Lazaridis opposed the launch plan for the BlackBerry 10 phones and argued strongly in favour of emphasizing keyboard devices. But Mr. Heins and his executives did not take the advice and launched the touchscreen Z10, with disastrous results

Late last year, Research In Motion Ltd. chief executive officer Thorsten Heins sat down with the board of directors at the company’s Waterloo, Ont., headquarters to review plans for the launch of a new phone designed to turn around the company’s fortunes.

Sean Buckley:

Looking forward to Nissan’s 2020 autonomous vehicle push? Then get pumped: the company has just been given approval to test some of its automated driving systems on Japanese streets. Nissan has been issued a license plate to use with a Nissan Leaf kitted out with the firm’s Advanced Driver Assist System on, which will allow the vehicle to change lanes, pass cars, exit freeways and cruise down the road without driver assistance. Although the plate is technically just a normal license plate (unlike the distinctive red plates Nevada issues to automated vehicles), but marks the first time Nissan will be able to test these features on a public road. More importantly, the company says, it allows it to further develop the technologies that will eventually go into its fully automated vehicles. It’s a baby step, but at least it’s progress. Check out the company’s official announcement at the jump.

Via Paul Brody

Tim Bajarin:

Last year, when I had my triple bypass and was in the hospital for almost two weeks, during the times I was conscious I would often see the doctors and nurses come in to my room with smartphones, tablets, and various other mobile devices used to monitor my vitals as well as look up info related to my condition. In fact, I observed many doctors carrying iPad Mini’s in their white coats and was told that the # 1 application they used on their tablet was the Physician Desk Reference, which is their medicine reference bible of choice. In their world, mobile devices have become quite important to their practice.

Panoramic Scene

Adam Fisher:

Levandowski backs out of his suburban driveway in the usual manner. By the time he points his car down the street, it has used its GPS and other sensors to determine its location in the world. On the dashboard, right in front of the windshield, is a low-profile heads-up display. manual, it reads, in sober sans serif font, white on black. But the moment Levandowski enters the freeway ramp near his house, a colorful graphic appears. It’s a schematic view of the road: two solid white vertical lines marking the boundaries of the highway and three dashed lines dividing it into four lanes. The message now reads go to autodrive lane; there are two on the far side of the freeway, shown in green on the schematic. Levandowski’s car and those around him are represented by little white squares. The graphics are reminiscent of Pong. But the game play? Pure Frogger.

There are two buttons on Levandowski’s steering wheel, off and on, and after merging into an auto-drive lane, he hits on with his thumb. A dulcet female voice marks the moment by enunciating the words auto driving with textbook precision. And with that, Levandowski has handed off control of his vehicle to software named Google Chauffeur. He takes his feet off the pedals and puts his hands in his lap. The car’s computer is now driving him to work. Self-driving cars have been around in one form or another since the 1970s, but three DARPA Grand Challenges, in 2004, 2005, and 2007, jump-started the field. Grand Challenge alumni now populate self-driving laboratories worldwide. It’s not just Google that’s developing the technology, but also most of the major car manufacturers: Audi, Volkswagen, Toyota, GM, Volvo, BMW, Nissan. Arguably the most important outcome of the DARPA field trials was the development of a robust and reliable laser range finder. It’s the all-seeing eye mounted on top of Levandowski’s car, and it’s used by virtually every other experimental self-driving system ever built.

Anji Raval:

Sandie Crisman sees the headlines hailing the US housing rebound and wonders when she will get her share of it. The 60-year-old Florida resident is one of the tens of thousands of Americans burnt by the housing bust that wiped out $7tn in homeowner equity and is still suffering from its fallout.

“If I could do it all over again, I wouldn’t be a homeowner,” she says. “What’s the point if you can’t guarantee your house will be worth what you paid for it in five or 10 years time?”

Ms Crisman moved to the US from the Netherlands in 2002 after she married her American husband Alan. The couple bought a house close to her parents-in-law in a small former steel town north of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. For a few short years Sandie lived her version of the American dream.

But the financial crisis hit the family hard. Tough times compelled Mr Crisman, who is an aircraft engineer, to move to Alabama in 2010 and then Florida for work. His wife and stepdaughter soon followed.

Bruce Schneier:

Back in June, when the contents of Edward Snowden’s cache of NSA documents were just starting to be revealed and we learned about the NSA collecting phone metadata of every American, many people — including President Obama — discounted the seriousness of the NSA’s actions by saying that it’s just metadata.

Lots and lots of people effectively demolished that trivialization, but the arguments are generally subtle and hard to convey quickly and simply. I have a more compact argument: metadata equals surveillance.

John Markoff:

Cars that can park, brake at a sign of danger and navigate in traffic are on their way to dealers’ showrooms, turning science-fiction fantasies about consumer-owned self-driving vehicles into a new reality.

But as private investors have been pushing ahead to develop the systems needed for these new robotic machines, one crucial innovator has been largely out of the loop: the United States military.

The armed forces have lagged on deploying their own versions of unmanned road vehicles, despite goals to create new machines that could be used in place of “boots on the ground” in conflicts. Restrictions on government spending and technological challenges have left the military with virtually no chance of meeting the goal set by Congress to have a third of the military’s combat fleet consist of unmanned vehicles by 2015, military experts said.

The military’s failure to lead the way in self-driving ground vehicles is ironic, given that today’s commercial advances have their roots in research originally sponsored by Darpa, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Pentagon’s advanced technology organization. A decade ago, Darpa offered a series of “grand challenges” to private researchers, which helped push the technology forward.

Steve Johnson:

On an equal-weighted basis, US equity funds recommended by consultants underperformed other funds by 1.1 per cent a year between 1999 and 2011, according to analysis of 29 consultancies accounting for more than 90 per cent of the market by a team from Oxford university’s Saïd Business School.

“The enormous power wielded by consultants is not matched by their performance,” said Jose Martinez, one of the authors of the study.

“In US equities, one of the largest asset classes, investment consultants as an industry appear to add no value in fund selection,” added co-author Howard Jones.