Apple targets SMBs with JointVenture
Apple laid the first stages of JointVenture out to Apple Retail staff today and as West Coast employees exit the meetings we are getting our first information on the new small business program. JointVenture will be launched on Tuesday and Wednesday this week.
First the price: Apple will charge $499 for up to 5 users and $99 for each additional user/year. They really want to hit the under 10-person organizations hard. Apple thinks Microsoft is exposed in this area because small businesses of this size are more agile, aren’t as likely to be connected to a complicated Microsoft infrastructure and don’t have a dedicated IT person to steer them wrong.
That $500 is also on top of the 3-year Applecare (not instead of), but retail employees were told that they business customers could receive enough in discounts to offset some, if not all of the price of JointVenture.
What does that $500 buy you? Read more
OS X 10.7 Lion's Recovery Partition changes the way the OS repairs itself
From Lion’s Install notes:
- The Recovery partition may not be created when installing Lion on a drive with an unsupported partition scheme.
This is a pretty interesting addition to the OS. When you install Lion, it puts a little partition on the boot drive with some of the OS utilities. If something goes wrong with your Lion build, you restart with the option key pressed and you boot into this new partition.
For me this worked a bit different. I installed Lion on a Firewire hard drive. The recovery partition was installed on my Snow Leopard internal disk(!). So when I turned off my Mac and rebooted with the Firewire Lion disk removed, it defaulted to the recovery partition (scary). Changing the startup disk fixed this pretty quickly but installer beware.
The repair partition is basically all of the repair/utilities you find on a OSX Installer DVD.
The obvious reason that Apple does this is because Apple will soon be going to more devices without optical media. Having the repair partition built-in makes it easier to fix your machine if things go bad. And who wants to keep a OSX Install/repair disc or USB stick with them wherever they go? Read more
Apple Geniuses to go on-site with 'Joint Venture'
We first detailed Apple Joint Venture service a year ago and it appears that Apple is getting ready to launch the service. BGR is reporting that Apple is readying the Joint Venture small businesses services:
Joint Venture is an extension of Apple’s current Genius Bar services that is aimed at small businesses and prosumers. Subscribers of the new service will be able to speak with a store-based Apple technician — lovingly referred to as Geniuses — over the phone for one-on-one consultation and troubleshooting, or they can request an on-site visit. Currently, Apple’s Geniuses are not allowed to provide support remotely via the phone or in-person outside of Apple’s retail locations. A source has confirmed that Apple will reveal these plans to retail employees this Sunday, explaining how to properly position, explain, and sell the new offering.
It will be interesting to see how this affects small to mid-sized Apple IT shops who often serve the market Apple will be targeting with ‘Joint Venture’.
Some of the verbiage from the original trademark, below:
Hitler meme hits Xserve cancelation
Yeah it had to happen. Fits pretty good with this one.. Read more
Visa begins iPhone 'iWallet' payment tests in Europe
COMPUTERWORLD: The iPhone ‘iWallet’ becomes even more real today as Visa Europe launches the first commercial deployment of its own iPhone payments App today. This news as NFC-capable iPhones should show later this year, with AAPL apparently pondering ways to offer a merchants cheap and easy set-up for payment kiosks — mobile payments are nothing without the infrastructure to accept them.
ActiveStorage to take over where Xserve leaves off
If you look over at Active Storage today, you’ll notice a little ticker that corresponds to the end of the Xserve in less than three days. Under wraps is the replacement. Boom! 9to5mac readers knew about this a few days ago of course 
We’ve been told the boxes will run “a webmin variant with Darwin” and to think of it as a “Web ServerAdmin”.
There was no screen shots at the briefing, but our source described it as looking like a Apple wiki page with the function of Server Admin. It isn’t clear if the Desktop ServerAdmin will be able to connect to these boxes in the same way as it connects to current OSX servers.
Apple has been telling enterprise reps about this solution for a few months saying that this will be the go-to hardware for Apple Enterprise Datacenters. We’d imagine some of these will be making their way to North Carolina as well.
Also, we heard that OSX was heading to virtual machines that ran on Non-Apple hardware next month as well.
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