News tagged ‘news’

Apple CEO Steve Jobs recently traveled to meet with executives at The Wall Street Journal and other publications. Today The Wall Street Journal reports that Rupert Murdoch, Chairman and CEO of parent company News Corp., confirmed that the newspaper will be present on the iPad. He also mentioned that Apple gave access to one of the tablet devices.

Mr. Murdoch said the Journal planned to be on Apple Inc.'s iPad tablet computer. "In fact, we've been allowed to work on one, and it's under padlock and key. The key is turned by Apple every night," he said in response to a question. "But we will be on that with The Wall Street Journal." Mr. Murdoch said he believed in a year or so there will be a half dozen or more devices on which consumers will be able to receive newspapers and other media.

After the news about Apple's lawsuit many of us have been wondering why Apple did this. Obviously, the thing is not about money as the company already has $40 billion of cash and investments. Digital Daily's editor John Paczkowski thinks the reason is a desire to extend iPhone's growing lead on the market.

"Apple is suing to make an example out of HTC and lengthen the engineering time-to-market for Android handset builders."

While other Android smartphone manufacturers will spend their time solving a problem with developing of noninfringing technologies to avoid lawsuits, Apple will continue to iterate the iPhone.

Ok, this is clear, but why Apple accused HTC now?

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Yesterday morning began with shocking news about lawsuit that was filed by Apple against HTC. As it turned out, Cupertino's company is accusing smartphone manufacturer of infringing 20 Apple patents tied to the iPhone. Google Nexus One, Droid Eris, T-Mobile G1, Touch Pro2, Touch Diamond and the Imagio are listed as exhibits in the litigation.

Copies of the suit can be read here and here. Short list of patents at issue is under the cut.

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Yesterday the Associated Press announced plans to create a new unit named "AP Gateway". It will focus on creating an application for mobile platforms and particularly for iPad tablet device.

It is likely that their app will require a paid subscription, but at first it may appear as free, according to AP senior vice president Jane Seagrave.

AP Gateway will work with local news affiliates to create package of their own content.

Other publishers are still expressing concern over the profit that will be shared with Apple and the latter's unwillingness to report information about subscribers (which is important for marketing and tailoring publisher's content).

The Wall St. Journal published a small article about Adobe Chief Executive Shantanu Narayen's talk at the Goldman Sachs technology conference this week. Adobe's CEO spoke on his view of why the iPad wasn't equipped to play Flash:

Narayen said Apple's decision likely had everything to do with its business model as it tries to keep a proprietary, closed system so everything goes through its iTunes store, and has nothing to do with the Flash technology. He said about 85 of the top 100 Web sites in the world use Flash, and 75% of the video on the Web today is in Flash, including Google Inc.'s (GOOG) YouTube, News Corp.'s (NWS) Hulu and broadcasters such as ABC and Fox.

Flash will be on every Android device sold at the end of the year. It will also be on Nokias, Palm Pres, Windows Mobile, Blackberries and just about anything else with an ARM Cortex processor. Not to mention 98% of all the Macs and PCs (and Windows/ChomeOS Tablets) throughout the world. It looks like Apple has it's own vision of what is good and bad for the business.

Shareholders meeting started at 1 p.m. EST Thursday. For almost 2,5 hours they discussed different topics and revealed some interesting information.

First of all, Apple is going to open 25 retail stores in China. As you know, the first Chinese store was built in 2008, and since then only plans about revealing another store were announced.

Secondly Steve Jobs told Apple will build its reserves to make big investments in the future. He also mentioned it is a better way of dealing with profit than paying dividends or doing stock buybacks. At this moment Apple has ~40 billion dollars in their chest.

A few days ago in an IRC channel the DevTeam and GeoHot discussed and summarized the state of the exploits found in the new baseband 05.12.01 in firmware 3.1.3. GeoHot explains that an exploit that had previously discovered and used in blacksn0w is still present in the new firmware released by Apple. It appears that both he and MuscleNerd are working on the same exploit, and if this were true, it would be a really good start to team up and release a new unlock tool.

Here is their discussion:

< visnet_ > What does geohot tweet mean?
< %geohot > its my bb exploit for safekeeping
< %Par4doX > geohot: did you turn that over to the dev team or are you doing something with it?
< %geohot > my days of turning things over are done
< %geohot > i hope its different from the one they have
< %geohot > but they prob already have it
< %geohot > its the one i orig wanted to release blacksn0w with
< %Par4doX > it’s still there in the new bb
< %geohot > yep, just checked
< %geohot > but then opted to use xemn since it was public
< Evan > Oo, it carries over from 05.11 to 05.12?
< %geohot > why wouldn’t it, apple doesn’t fix things proactivly
< @MuscleNerd > geohot we prob should figure out a way to know if we have same exploit double blind, otherwise we may release 2 different ones at same time
< %geohot > any suggestions?
< @MuscleNerd > not sure how to do that without making it easy to brute force tho
< %geohot > yea, i salted the hash
< @MuscleNerd > yeah
< @MuscleNerd > hmm maybe if we both hash the stack dump
< @Confucious > Can you two take this out of public sight?
< @MuscleNerd > the stack itself, not the header before it or the registers after it
< Her > muscle: any notice about the exploits are the same ?
< %geohot > we are working on it
< %geohot > cryptography, perfect for people who don’t trust each other

We should not expect much for the firmware 3.1.3 since the rumors predict the firmware 3.2 for mid-March. However these news are really good for owners of locked devices.

Apple announced that it has added App Store support for 13 new countries:

You can now distribute your apps to more customers with the addition of App Store support in Armenia, Botswana, Bulgaria, Jordan, Kenya, Macedonia, Madagascar, Mali, Mauritius, Niger, Senegal, Tunisia, and Uganda. Log in to iTunes Connect to view and update the countries where your applications are available.

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We're continuing to cover news from the MWSF 2010, and this time the talk will be about MacSpeech Scribe app, MusicSkins accesories, Kanex adapter and CarMD device.

MacSpeech is known for its MacSpeech Dictate program that allows user to speak to Mac and wind up with formatted text. At the MWSF company released MacSpeech Scribe (US 149$), which turns recorded audio into RTF-files (that are readable by any word processor). It doesn't create text with punctuation and you have to train the program by correcting its mistakes, but with the Nuance engine from the previous app it looks really impressive.

MusicSkins was also present at the MacWorld 2010. This time there were vinyl skins not only for Apple devices, but for any gadgets known (at least they say they add 5-10 devices to their roster per week). Company reps told us the accessories for the iPad are also ready to be printed, but before it’ll go to the market they want to make sure their production will work well and fit correctly to the device. At this moment skins for iPod and iPhone (US 15$) and for the Macbook (US 30$) are available.

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Steve Jobs’s attempts to convince publishers to provide the content in a useful digital form were not that successful and the negotiations initiated in February have "stumbled."

Some newsmakers report of "friendly" talks, but speak of Apple's business model as a crucial change for the publishing business. They aware of the impact iTunes had had on the songs industry in 2003. Then the number of downloads of single songs from Apple influenced the resulting purchases of the singers’ albums.

Apple has been conquering the e-reader market long before the new iPad was on offer. So that is not a surprise that such companies as Amazon, which previously dominated the market have to increase their prices in response to the iPad’s outbreak.

According to 9to5Mac it seems that Apple will present the new Firmware 4.0 on a new event scheduled for March 14, 2010. The news were received from a reliable source, but this is still rumors. Previously Apple was expected to release firmware 3.2 in March-April and firmware 4.0 some time in July. We'll see!

MacWorld Expo 2010 started on the Feb, 11. We'll show you how that day and the MWSF generally started.

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Square iPhone payment system trial is now avaliable to the public. If you're interested to be one of the few first users, just sign up and try it.

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Gameloft has just released the new exciting video podcast (February). This month is particularly interesting, because we can see the spectacular graphics of Brothers in Arms 2, online multiplayer mode in NOVA, news about Pocket Chef, and much more. Let's watch:

Silicon Alley Insider reported recently that Steve Jobs visited New York City to meet with executives at The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times for discussions about bringing their content to the iPad.

Apple CEO held a dinner meeting with 50 representatives of The New York Times, though the visit to The Wall Street Journal was more low-key and the audience was very limited.

On Friday morning Steve Jobs also visited Time & Life Building to demonstrate an iPad to Time Inc. CEO Ann Moore and roomful of magazine editors.

It is obvious, that the goal of Jobs’ NYC visit is a content partnership. Since the iPad presentation, Apple has been working hard to broaden its content deals by pursuing book publishers and bringing textbook publishers on board. Currently the company apparently starts to focus its efforts on the magazine and newspaper industries.