Apple and the horrible, no good, very bad Maps app

The Amazing iOS 6 Maps Tumblr

The September launch of the iPhone 5 was marred by the disastrous reception Apple’s new Maps app received. Parody social media accounts popped up within hours, as disappointed users complained of poor or missing location data. CEO Tim Cook felt compelled to make a public apology, and it’s thought that the episode was the last straw that caused Cook to send SVP Scott Forstall packing. To rub extra salt in the wound, Google’s own Maps app for iPhone was greeted with the Twitter equivalent of a Hallelujah chorus when it arrived last week – and was downloaded 10 million times in 48 hours. – Erica Ogg

Google’s media player that never got a chance to play

Google surprised many in June when it announced the Nexus Q, a wireless digital content player dubbed as “the first social streaming media player.” But not all surprises are good ones. The small orb-shaped device launched at an introductory price of $299, triple that of the more capable Apple TV. And aside from the high price point, the Q offered no media services save Google’s own Play store for movies, television shows and music. The unique DJ function — allowing anyone’s Android device on the same network to mix the music — was hardly enough to justify the Q, which Google suspended indefinitely in July. — Kevin C. Tofel

Facebook’s troubled IPO

The initial public offering of the world’s largest social network was supposed to be the tide that lifted all technology boats, but the IPO instead turned into a stock-market train wreck and crushed the hopes of many other tech-stock hopefuls in the process. Thanks to a combination of mismanagement by the NASDAQ stock exchange (which used a new trading system for the issue) and a misreading of the initial demand by Facebook and its brokers — which resulted in an over-supply of stock — the company’s share price tumbled by more than 50 percent in the days and weeks following the offering. The company still wound up raising more than $16 billion, but the episode gave the tech darling a black eye as far as some investors were concerned, and likely set the market for tech-stock issues back by months, if not longer. — Mathew Ingram 

Two words: HP and Autonomy

The $11.1 billion purchase of Autonomy by Hewlett-Packard may have been announced in 2011, but the enormity of the screw-up didn’t fully surface till 2012. In May, HP management booted former Autonomy CEO Mike Lynch, and in November the company asked authorities in the U.S. and U.K. to look into Autonomy’s accounting practices prior to the buyout. That process is ostensibly now underway. Nevertheless, after airing all this dirty laundry in the November earnings call, HP CEO Meg Whitman asserted that HP remains “100 percent committed to Autonomy.” For the record, HP took a loss of $6.85 billion for the full fiscal year ended October 31, 2012 — most of that from an $8 billion writedown related to the Autonomy business. — Barb Darrow 

Nate Silver’s an idiot and Romney wins in a landslide

Except…Nate Silver isn’t and Mitt Romney didn’t. Silver, the founder of the New York Times‘ popular FiveThirtyEight politics blog, and several other notable statisticians mathematically predicted Barack Obama’s reelection with perfect or near-perfect accuracy. Meanwhile, Karl Rove sputtered through election night on Fox News, futilely defending his prediction like a child trying to convince a teacher a dog ate his homework. Maybe there’s something to this data analysis after all. Go figure. – Derrick Harris 

Amanda Palmer crowdfunding fubar

Alt-rock fave Amanda Palmer experienced the downside of social network savviness in September after she raised $1.2 million on Kickstarter to fund her new CD — then solicited musicians to play for free on her subsequent concert tour. Reaction was heated and Palmer quickly regrouped, saying she would pay more than beer, hugs and “merch” for the help. The alternate theory is that this was all a massive publicity stunt — in which case, it was hugely successful. (Palmer has since cancelled her 2013 tour to help a friend deal with cancer.) — Barb Darrow 

Twitter gags NBC Olympics critic

What do you when someone says mean things about your friends? You shut them up; at least, that’s what Twitter did during the London Olympics when it suspended the account of journalist Guy Adams, who tweeted snarky things about the TV coverage of Twitter’s corporate partner NBC. Twitter blamed an internal communications snafu and restored the journalist’s account two days later. Still, the incident became Twitter’s first full-blown PR crisis and a reminder of its growing shadow over our media lives. — Jeff Roberts 

The Western Mail’s caption fail

Tweeters celebrate epic #fails on an almost minute-by-minute basis. And for digital media aficionados, ye olde newspaper sub-editing and caption errors rank high on that dreary list. But there was none more epic in 2012 than Welsh newspaper the Western Mail, which committed what was labeled “the worst caption fail of all time” when it identified a photo of an airport manager, who died when the plane he was travelling in hit a mountain, with “LOL.” Although British prime minister David Cameron may think the acronym stands for “lots of love”, everyone else knows not to “laugh out loud.” The internet was not amused. Nor was Western Mail publisher Trinity Mirror, which responded, “We apologize for any offense this error may have caused.” – Robert Andrews

AT&T’s face-off over FaceTime

Trying to convince your customers, the public and your regulators that you’re just a big, cuddly carrier without an anticompetitive bone in your body? Maybe blocking a wildly popular app that happens to compete directly with your core service isn’t the best way to score points. Oh, but wait, AT&T didn’t block FaceTime over its cellular networks. You could use Apple’s video chat app to your heart’s content if you signed up for one AT&T’s (more expensive) family share plans. It’s not every day that a carrier stifles competition and jilts its customers for more money in a single brush stroke, but Ma Bell is a very efficient painter. Eventually consumer protests and the threat of the FCC involvement caused AT&T to backtrack. It offered FaceTime over cellular to more subscribers, and sheepishly claimed it was just protecting its customers from the inevitable network overload FaceTime would bring. Okay, but if AT&T’s new fangled 4G networks can’t handle video, what was the point in building them? Email and Twitter updates? — Kevin Fitchard

Bravo’s Silicon Valley startup trainwreck

Silicon Valley has been abuzz with Randi Zuckerberg’s Bravo reality show “Start-Ups: Silicon Valley,” which attempted to portray the craaaazy lives of startup founders and their companies in the Wild West. However, the show has been widely panned by techies and journalists in the Valley, who are obviously underwhelmed by shots of people in the pool with iPads and dialogue like ”Silicon Valley is just…balls to the wall.” Of course there’s an element of hilarity to the shenanigans associated with tech startups in the Valley, but it doesn’t appear that Zuckerberg’s show will be the one to effectively dramatize it. And now that the final episodes are being downgraded to a 4 PM PST time slot, looks like the show’s on its way out. – Eliza Kern

J.K. Rowling’s unreadable book

Getty Images

J. K. Rowling fans who’d preordered the ebook edition of her hotly anticipated new novel, The Casual Vacancy, were in for a surprise on September 27: Thanks to improper formatting by publisher Hachette, the ebook was literally unreadable, with a choice of two type sizes — microscopic or massive. Hachette pushed out a new file later in the day, but this was one of the biggest books of the year, and in 2012 there’s no excuse for failing to test an ebook before you release it. – Laura Owen 

VeriFone copies Square’s user agreement

VeriFone launched its mobile payment acceptance system Sail to compete with Square. But it went a little too far in emulating Square when it copied big chunks of wording from Square’s user agreement. When called on it by GigaOM, VeriFone cut about a third of its user agreement out to eliminate the copied text. – Ryan Kim

So who didn’t suffer a data breach?

Shutterstock/deepspacedave

So much for consumer confidence. In 2012, several of the biggest names in tech were forced to ask for users’ forgiveness after hackers gained access to customer records. In January, Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh apologized after hackers accessed names, email, billing and shipping address and scrambled passwords for potentially 24 million customers. And, in June, Yahoo, LinkedIn , Last.fm and eHarmony followed up with confessions of their own after a spate of hack attacks that compromised user passwords. In April, electronic transaction processing provider Global Payments also confirmed a data breach of 1.5 million credit cards. – Ki Mae Heussner

That was the counterintuitive thing about last night: If you were watching a major news network or following Twitter, you were pretty sure that Barack Obama was your next president by 11:15. If you were instead relying on NYTimes.com and 538.com for the news, you might have gone to bed thinking the election was still up in the air.

The networks began projecting Obama had won a little before 11:15 p.m. as the votes from Ohio rolled in.

NBC News declares Barack Obama as the projected winner of the Presidency of United States. More at NBCNews.com #NBCPolitics

— NBC News (@NBCNews) November 7, 2012

Fox News projects #Obama re-elected president fxn.ws/Svj9UI via @foxnewspolitics #election2012

— Fox News (@FoxNews) November 7, 2012

That was also Obama tweeted the following…

This happened because of you. Thank you.

— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) November 7, 2012

…and tweeted and Facebooked the photo that has now become the most-retweeted tweet ever.

Four more years. twitter.com/BarackObama/st… — Barack Obama (@BarackObama) November 7, 2012

Yet the New York Times — and Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight, which accounted for a massive amount of traffic to the New York Times this week (with 71 percent of visits to NYTimes.com’s politics section also including a stop at Silver’s blog) — were silent, with the NYT’s homepage headline alternating between reporting Obama’s win in Pennsylvania and saying that the networks projected Obama had won the election. My husband was working late, and when I called him at 11:15 p.m. to discuss the Obama win, he said, “Are you sure? The Times doesn’t have anything.” At the same time, people outside on my street were cheering. The New York Times did not project that Obama had won the election until 12:03 a.m.

Breaking News: President Barack Obama Wins Re-election, The New York Times Projectsnyti.ms/TvricB — The New York Times (@nytimes) November 7, 2012

At that point, this was happening in Chicago, per the NYT’s own election blog:

Romney supporters were clearing out:

Nobody tell Rove, but the Ohio GOP has conceded and gone home. twitter.com/daveweigel/sta…

— daveweigel (@daveweigel) November 7, 2012

And the Empire State building had turned blue.

#BREAKING: The Empire State Building is BLUE. #ObamaWins

— The Daily Beast (@thedailybeast) November 7, 2012

Nate Silver has built his reputation on accurately predicting elections, and it looks as if his model got all 50 states right last night, though votes in Florida and Virginia are still being counted. But if you were looking for commentary from him last night, particularly after the networks announced an Obama win and the Obama campaign started celebrating, he and the NYT were not the place to get it — even though readers were seeking him out.

Instead, a lot of discussion of the results was coming from Karl Rove, who was arguing on Fox News with the network’s own anchors that they’d called Ohio too early.

The delay makes some sense: Silver has to be cautious, and the New York Times has to protect its own reputation. It can’t call the election too early and it doesn’t want to risk a Dewey defeats Truman moment. But Nate Silver is the man of the hour, the NYT’s top brand and probably traffic driver yesterday, and he could have brought even more traffic to the site between 11:15 p.m. and 12:03 a.m. if he’d been saying, well, anything.

@fivethirtyeight Little slow, eh?

— Tyler Hicks-Wright (@tghw) November 7, 2012

He, or another Times writer, could have written about why the Times hadn’t called the election yet and explained to readers what they were waiting for. But last night the paper was too slow to get in on the action, and readers who wanted a really good sense of how the election was unfolding had to turn to other sources.

Update, 4:19 p.m.: The NYT’s recently appointed public editor Margaret Sullivan commented on the NYT’s slowness on her blog. “Journalism history is full of cautionary tales about ill-fated instances of jumping the gun – whether the famous “Dewey Defeats Truman” headline in The Chicago Tribune or, much more recently, the many newspapers and cable networks who got the presidential results wrong in 2000,” she writes. And “unlike the television networks, which depend on their combined exit polls in calling elections, The Times prefers to look at real numbers in addition to exit polls, said Janet Elder, an associate managing editor who is part of The Times’s election ‘decision desk.’”