Daisuke Wakabayashi and Mayumi Negishi report for the Wall Street Journal on Japan being Apple’s fastest-growing market in the past two years.

“Apple’s brand is just overwhelming here,” said Eiji Mori, a Tokyo-based analyst at BCN Inc. “It’s not about specifications. It’s not about rationale. It’s about owning an iPhone.”

Two factors in the iPhone’s Japanese success are Japan’s wealth and the degree to which its phone market resembles the U.S., a “postpaid” market where the phones are subsidized by carriers and sold with multiyear contracts. “The U.S. and Japan are unique in that sense,” says Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. analyst Toni Sacconaghi.

In markets where most consumers pay for the handset upfront, the iPhone’s big price tag damps sales.

This is great news for Apple given how the Japanese market is traditionally biased towards Japanese handset makers. And it is also important to note that Japanese tend to shun Samsung because it is a Korean brand.

Bill Gates shares on Wired his plan to improve the world.

This realization led me to rethink some of my assumptions about how the world improves. I am a devout fan of capitalism. It is the best system ever devised for making self-interest serve the wider interest. This system is responsible for many of the great advances that have improved the lives of billions—from airplanes to air-conditioning to computers.

But capitalism alone can’t address the needs of the very poor. This means market-driven innovation can actually widen the gap between rich and poor. I saw firsthand just how wide that gap was when I visited a slum in Durban, South Africa, in 2009. Seeing the open-pit latrine there was a humbling reminder of just how much I take modern plumbing for granted. Meanwhile, 2.5 billion people worldwide don’t have access to proper sanitation, a problem that contributes to the deaths of 1.5 million children a year.

The article is a very good read. Take the time to go through it. And then sit down and reflect upon yourself.

John Gruber asks questions about the claims made in the Bloomberg article.

And whither the 4-inch display? I would like to see any report of next-generation iPhones with larger displays explain Apple’s plans for the existing 4-inch size. Would it be relegated only to the second-tier C-class model? Or would they continue to produce top-tier models at that size as well? A person familiar with Apple’s plans should be able to explain this.

Another thing I’d like to know about future iOS device displays sporting new physical dimensions — the pixel counts. Will they be like the iPad Air and Mini (same pixel count, different pixels-per-inch resolution)? Or will they introduce new pixel dimensions? Again, any person familiar with Apple’s plans should be able to answer that.

Mashable reports on an Instagram scam tricks users into giving away passwords.

More than 100,000 Instagram users fell for a bold, effective scam called InstLike, an app that promised free Likes and followers on the photo sharing platform. The app asked users to share their usernames and passwords after downloading, turning them into willing participants of a giant social botnet.

This wouldn’t have happened if these people focussed on creating great content that brings likes and followers instead of artificially engineering engagements and readership.

This is a follow-up to Matt’s piece on Apple’s investment in synthetic sapphire.

TechCrunch talks about how Apple might have found a way to mass produce sapphire displays cheaper.

This brings us to a few months ago, when Apple filed a patent called ‘sapphire laminates’, in which it discusses a variety of ways to laminate sapphire sheets together with other sapphire sheets or with glass. There are a variety of abstractions, but the key is a method which mates two separate sheets together to create one ‘piece’. The key claim we’re looking at here is “a glass assembly comprising: a glass sheet; and a sapphire sheet adhered to the glass sheet, wherein the assembly is less than or approximately equal to 1 mm thick.”

This claim outlines a process where a glass sheet could be produced and mated with a sapphire sheet to create a screen (another claim describes a ‘sandwich process’ as well, with two sapphire sheets). Why a screen with glass underneath and sapphire on top?

The Wall Street Journal reports on the disappointing sales of Moto X.

According to research firm Strategy Analytics, roughly 500,000 Moto X phones were sold in the third quarter, after the phone was released in August. By comparison, Samsung said it sold more than 10 million Galaxy S4 phones within a month of its April release.

This is bad news for Motorola. Is Google ready to roll out a Motorola phone that is capable of challenging other Android phones? At the risk of cannibalising its Nexus line?

The following makes me wonder if Google still sees a future for Motorola as a phone maker?

Motorola shipped fewer than 2% of smartphones world-wide in the third quarter, says Strategy Analytics, down from 4% two years ago. One reason is that Google pared Motorola’s product offerings from more than three dozen to just a handful.