News tagged ‘app’

Penguin, one of the biggest publishers, gave a very interesting presentation in London. Penguin CEO John Makinson spoke about eBooks, iPad Books and Apps.

Penguin is not using the ePub format for books, rather building the applications in html according to Makinson:

"We will be embedding audio, video and streaming in to everything we do. The .epub format, which is the standard for ebooks at the present, is designed to support traditional narrative text, but not this cool stuff that we’re now talking about".

"So for the time being at least we’ll be creating a lot of our content as applications, for sale on app stores and HTML, rather than in ebooks. The definition of the book itself is up for grabs".

"We don’t know whether a video introduction will be valuable to a consumer. We will only find answers to these questions by trial and error."

Makinson sees ebooks hitting 10% of book sales next year (up from 4%). Take a look at the video:

Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Here is the top 5 worst product names according to CNet. Guess who's got first place? Let's watch:

Company named Transparent House created a video tribute to an Apple. Its idea was to design some of the well-known innovative products that company has developed in their more than 30 years history.

All the animation took about 10 days to complete. The work was done using only 3Ds Max and V-Ray Render. Creators say it is not connected with Apple or any commercial company, and they hope it will be used only in educational purposes. Let's watch!

The Examiner reporter Daryl Reino claimed yesterday the March 26 for iPad's release date is "very likely". He said he has information from some unnamed Apple store manager in Southern California.

Daryl also reported Apple employees will start training March 10, and the official commercials will begin to air on TV starting March 15. It will be emphasizing the e-book capabilities of the device. Those who camp out for the new device will receive some "special gift".

As we wrote before, some manufacturing bottleneck has been lengthening the production terms, but Daryl said it will not delay the launch of iPad (though the number of devices will be much more limited).

When HTC found out about Apple's actions, the company told Gizmodo website they will defend their technologies:

"We only learned of Apple's actions based on your stories and Apple's press release. We have not been served any papers yet so we are in no position to comment on the claims. We respect and value patent rights but we are committed to defending our own innovations. We have been innovating and patenting our own technology for 13 years."

Steve Jobs expressed his opinion in the official press release:

"We can sit by and watch competitors steal our patented inventions, or we can do something about it. We've decided to do something about it. We think competition is healthy, but competitors should create their own original technology, not steal ours."

It is interesting, that 14 years ago it was Steve Jobs who said: "We have always been shameless about stealing great ideas.".

Wow! It looks like Steve Jobs totally changed his mind?

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?

Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

As you remember, Steve Jobs clearly said at the iPad's presentation that the device will have a 1 GHz A4 Chip. But after that event there was no information given about this secret two-letter name "A4". And this isn't usual, as almost every company reports the specification of every announced device before it'll come to market.

Later it was rumored that the chip is based on Cortex A9 with dual cores. But finally Arstechnica author Jon Stokes revealed that A4 is a 1 GHz custom system-on-chip with a single Cortex A8 Core and a PowerVR SGX GPU. Though the information is not announced publicly, the author is sure it is true.

Read the rest of this entry »

Analyst Peter Misek from Canaccord Adams had issued a report about Apple. It says that iPhones sales are better than expected, but the iPad production has some "manufacturing bottleneck", that can cause a delay of the sales start.

"An unspecified production problem at the iPad’s manufacturer, Hon Hai Precision, will likely limit the launch region to the US and the number of units available to roughly 300K in the month of March, far lower than the company’s initial estimate of 1,000K units. The delay in production ramp will likely impact Apple’s April unit estimate of 800K as well. It is also possible that, given the limited number of units available in March, the launch will be delayed for a month".

He also thinks such a delay won't affect iPad sales in 2010 and 2011 (approximately 1,2 million and 3.5 million units respectively).

Last year at least 11 fifteen-year-old children were working in 3 factories that supply Apple. They are situated in China, but Apple also has factories situated in Taiwan, the Philippines, Singapore, Malaysia, Czech Republic, Thailand and of course United States.

Cupertino's company claims children are no longer used for work or at least they are no longer underage:

"In each of the three facilities, we required a review of all employment records for the year as well as a complete analysis of the hiring process to clarify how underage people had been able to gain employment".

This is a citation from Cupertino's Supplier Responsibility 2010 Progress Report. After studying of it we summed up a whole bunch of interesting facts...

Read the rest of this entry »

After the unveiling of iPad in January most of us understood that it looks like enlarged iPod Touch. French web-resourse Begeek.fr decided to think about what should we expect from Apple in the next years,  so look what they concocted:

Read the rest of this entry »

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).

Since only one month remains to iPad's launch, such hardware manufacturers as SDI Technologies, Gelaskins Inc., Sanho Corp. and Griffin Technology gear up their production of chargers, sticker covers and other accessories for a new device. And it is not surprising - according to Poper Jaffray & Co, overall sales of iPod and iPhone accessories in 2009 were about $3.7 billion.

But while these companies want to release their products as soon as possible, some other accessory manufacturers are taking a wait-and-see approach. Jonathan von Rentzell, a representative for Blue Microphones commented on this:

"If you're making it for a product, you want to make sure there's a market."

Steve Jobs already showed 2 key accessories for the iPad - a case and a keyboard dock with charging function. Both of them are created by Apple and will be sold separately with iPad.

Grooveshark is a web app that allows you to listen to music on-demand through the Internet without any charge (it requires only a Grooveshark VIP subscription for $3/month). The song can be chosen from the gigantic 7-million song catalog.

Grooveshark creators claim it supposed to be released in App Store but it wasn't because Apple has been "ritually rejecting" the app for "primarily selfish reasons". TechCrunch reports there were spent months of waiting for Apple approval. After Grooveshark's patience gave out they decided to release its iPhone application via Cydia.

From now on you can download it from the Big Boss Cydia Repository.

Read the rest of this entry »