Founder, Publisher and Editorial Director of the 9to5/Electrek/DroneDJ sites.
Seth Weintraub is an award-winning journalist and blogger who won back to back Neal Awards during his three plus years covering Apple and Google at IDG’s Computerworld from 2007–2010. Weintraub next covered all things Google for Fortune Magazine from 2010-2011 amassing a thick rolodex of Google contacts and love for Silicon Valley tech culture.
It turns out that his hobby 9to5Mac blog was always his favorite and in 2011 he went full time adding his Fortune Google followers to 9to5Google and adding the style and commerce component 9to5Toys gear and deals site. In 2013, Weintraub bought one of the Tesla’s first Model S EVs off the assembly line and so began his love affair with the Electric Vehicle and green energy which in 2014 turned into electrek.
In 2018, DroneDJ was born to cover the burgeoning world of drones and UAV’s led by China’s DJI.
From 1997-2007, Weintraub was a Global IT director and Web Developer for a number of companies with stints at multimedia and branding agencies in Paris, Los Angeles, New York, Sydney, Hong Kong, Madrid and London before becoming a publisher/blogger.
Seth received a bachelors degree in Industrial and Systems Engineering from the University of Southern California with a minor in Multimedia and Creative Technology in 1997. In 2004, he received a Masters from NYU’s Tisch School of the Art’s ITP program.
Hobbies: Weintraub is a licensed single engine private pilot, certified open water scuba diver and spent over a year traveling to 60 cities in 23 countries. Whatever free time exists is now guaranteed to his lovely wife and two amazing sons.
More at About.me. BI 2014 profile.
Tips: seth@9to5mac.com, or llsethj on Wickr/Skype or link at top of page.
Google Voice is a pretty incredible service, but not everyone understands what exactly it does (hint: it isn’t VoIP – yet!). Google is hoping to remedy that with a fantastic series of videos which I’ve painstakingly pasted below for you to view.
Although, Android phones allow full use of Google Voice services, even people with iPhones through AT&T can take advantage of Google’s Voicemail services. And Google Voice has a nice iPhone Web App.
It is happening slowly but it isn’t hard to see where this is going. Apple bought Lala to help it stream music from the Web but they are also putting iTunes App, Music, Movie, etc. Stores on the web as well.
Over the past few months, those links you click to go to the iTunes Store have opened up web pages as well. Today, the iPhone App Store is now a category on the iTunes “Preview” page which allows you to browse through all of the different categories of apps before you buy.
Everything but the final purchase of an item can now be done on the Web. You can even preview music on the right in the Webpage before you buy. The next step would be for Apple to make the sale on a web page and then communicate that via the cloud to your iPhone/iPod/iTunes/iPad. The question is: Will Apple go this next step, and if so, when?
We’re definitely not feeling this one, but to each their own. Amazon today announced that Blackberry owners could now enjoy reading novels from their 2.5-inch screens. Thoughts anyone?
Two patents have shown up today which have some fairly interesting details. First up is Patently Apple’s finding of the “Rock and Roll Magic Mouse”. It is similar to the Gyration Airmouse that has been on the market for a few years but has a rounded bottom that allows for tipping to move the mouse up and down and forward and back. The new mouse would have a 3 dimensional gyroscope inside to give it direction. Interestingly, the current Magic Mouse bottom is also curved on the bottom. Anyone want to take theirs apart to see if Apple buried a 3D accelerometer in there?
Next up, Apple is still investigating front-facing cameras says this patent filed in 2008 with the familiar iPad classic chassis:
The patent, titled “Apparatus and Method for Compensating for Variations in Digital Cameras” is otherwise a little on the light side and concerns dealing with camera variables from different vendors.
The WSJ has a quick roundup of the tablet space with some interesting tidbits. One, HP let Steve Ballmer “show off” their Slate computer at CES but waited for Apple to announce pricing so they could tweak their pricing to make their product competitive. They compare to the $629 3G iPad model, so it is assumed that the HP device will have 3G.
Interestingly, since the device will be running Windows 7, it will need PC internals, probably those of a Netbook (Intel Atom Processor) which typically run at higher prices than the ARM chips that the iPad is based on.
The Journal also mentions that Microsoft is still hammering away at their “secret” Courier device which Gizmodo profiled last year in videos and still images of all sorts.
Dell skipped the big tablet space and is instead going after the “big iPod touch” space with its Mini 5 which will be running Android.
But with Apple’s iPad a month away and costing much less than anyone had anticipated, Apple clearly has the upper hand.
Those lovely people at Panic software have put together a utility to batch shrink vector-based PDF files, such as those produced by Illustrator, on the fly. They use Apple’s own Preview.app engine to pull all of the extra “crud” out of files that Adobe builds into PDFs made with their software:
What was all this extra crud? Will started digging into the files and brother, you won
One of the bigger stories this week out of the MWC is Opera Mini for the iPhone. Opera Mini isn’t a normal web browser, however. When you click a link, Opera Mini sends the request to one of Opera’s servers which renders the page and sends back a much smaller file that represents that page – usually just a image file with mapped links
For those who haven’t had a chance to play with the iPad Safari simulator (or the real thing) here’s a quick 6-minute run-through of the iPad’s browser features: http://embed.break.com/MTc0MjI0OQ==
iPad Safari Walkthrough
First of all, I must say I like the design of the new Windows Phone 7 series OS (but what a horrible name!) It is very ZuneHD-like which in my experience has been quick, minimalist OS. Microsoft boasts of Facebook and Twitter integration right into your “People” contacts list.
It integrates your photo albums into Facebook and Windows Live. gives you a feed of your friends’ status updates. Don’t forget Xbox Live.
This is every CIOs dream phone!
Time to ramp up the help desk to deal with those Facebook/Twitter calls and get them trained up on Xbox issues.
I’ve got absolutely nothing solid to go with here, but doesn’t it seem strange that Skype has been promising 3G/Push notifications for months on the iPhone yet they announce an “always-on app” for Blackberry and Android on Verizon first?
I’ll let Skype do the talking:
Russ Shaw, General Manager of Skype’s mobile business in December 2009:
Many of you have also been asking when we’ll release a version which allows you to make calls over 3G – the holy grail of Skype on the mobile, if you like. We’ve had a 3G-capable version ready for some time now, but Apple’s current restrictions mean that they won’t allow us to make it available on the App Store for the moment.
Apple, of course, lifted this restriction last month when vendors such as Fring released 3G versions of the Skype client. AT&T lifted any restrictions on VoIP apps last year.
Nothing from Skype.
Push Notification requests flood our comments and those of Skype every time they make an iPhone announcement. They clearly know this is the first (and often only) feature request people have yet they’ve failed to address this at every update.
Let’s not pretend Skype is a mom and pop shop and need some help figuring out this Push notification thing either. Skype has over half a Billion user accounts. That’s almost two accounts for every man, woman and child in the US. They had revenues of $185 million in the last quarter on 27.7 billion Skype-In minutes and 3.1 billion Skype-Out minutes.
Skype is the world’s largest international voice carrier, bigger than Vodafone, AT&T, Verizon or anyone else. They have versions of Skype for just about every platform imaginable: Symbian, Maemo, Linux, Windows, Mac, WinMob, Blackberry, Java phones of all shapes and sizes, etc.
Skype for iPhone was a smash hit. They had a million downloads in two days. It is one of the most popular apps on the iPhone.
So after all of that let me get this straight: Skype hasn’t been able to get 3G and Push Notifications working on the iPhone why? The only reason besides complete ineptitude that would possibly make sense is that they threw that into the Verizon deal.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bd9hNq4ZIqU&hl=en_US&fs=1&]
Even at $9.99/month the iPad edition of the New York Times isn’t necessarily going to clean up -mostly because the free website will have almost all of the same content and will still look great on the iPad. But imagine trying to sell people on the idea of a $30/month version of the Times – the same cost as the paper edition.
According to Gawker, that is a very real possibility. If the paper group at the Times gets their way, you’ll have to pay around $1/day to access the Times on the iPad. It isn’t an insane price but it is a lot when compared to online editions of the Wall St. Journal for instance. The rationale for the paper people is that the iPad edition will be cannibalizing sales of the print edition — so the cost should be a break even.
But, it will also be killing printing costs and delivery costs. And it is a joke to think it will do well at $30/month.
But at $10 or under and a product that gets content better/quicker than the free web version, I could see a strong following and am personally considering making the plunge when it becomes available.
Let’s hope smarter heads at the Times prevail
Apple today notified developers that its iPhone (iPad/iPod) Developer guide (PDF) had been updated to 5.3.
Some of the updates you
Verizon’s Android and Blackberry customers who use Skype got some huge news today. Verizon and Skype announced that they are going to let Skype work over 3G in an always-on type of mode, thus allowing their phones to act as Skype devices while attached to Verizon’s network.
The service will allow incoming and outgoing Skype calls including Skype phone number access. The service will always be on and will be active so long as there is a Verizon 3G data connection. That means you can make really inexpensive international calls on Skype rather than Use Verizon’s native service. It also means that incoming calls to your Skype-In voice number will “ring” on your Verizon phones.
Apple released Pro-level photo editing and organizing application Aperture 3 last week, promising the “faces and places” of consumer level iPhoto as well as some additional high end features that professionals could use.
What a lot of those Pro users got, however, was a frozen computer and an “out of disk space” warning.
I’ve been wavering on whether I think Macworld Expo can continue to be a success without Apple on board. The products on the show floor by and large aren’t anything you haven’t already seen on the Internet. You could probably visit for less than two hours and see everything you’d want.
But that doesn’t mean that it wasn’t absolutely packed. The show floor was fairly full of exhibitors and at noon when the doors opened to the general public, it was so packed that it was hard to walk around. David Pogue’s un-Keynote was also packed and entertaining, if not technology focused.
But some products were surprisingly interesting…
The US has been falling behind the world in Broadband capacity to the home largely because of the complacency of the telcos and cable service providers.
Google might get them to switch into high gear with their announcement today, however. Google will be running Gigabit(!!) fiber to the home for a reasonable price to up to half a million households. That is 100 times most current Internet speeds.
Ever since the MacBook Air, a machine made for 3G wireless access, was released without built-in ability to connect to mobile wireless, I’ve been waiting for Apple to put 3G access in their laptops.
Will my wait be over soon?
A couple of things have happened in the last month that give me a bit of hope.
I have a 16-month old who loves books. He also loves playing games on my iPhone and typing keys on the family computer. He knows a few letters and numbers but clearly he’s nowhere near learning to read.
But I have to wonder: In two or three years, when it is time for him to learn how to read, will he be learning on old fashioned books or will he be learning with interactive exercises on iPad-like devices?
Maybe I’m not thinking out of the box enough on this one, but one of the things I am most looking forward to on the iPad is the ability to use remote desktop to control my larger computers.
Did you know that Google’s ChomeOS is taking the form of a Tablet? I covered a previous report on the matter, but now we are starting to get images of prototype OS shots. And they look very tablet- y.
On Google’s ChomeOS User Experience page, you’ll find many prototype OS screenshots and mock-ups of Chrome running on 5-10 inch tablets.
…or price of the device (starting at $499) and price of the data plan ($30/month for unlimited data).
If you were worried about the demise of the Apple-Google business relationship, the iPad announcement gave you some reason to hope that there is still a lot of cooperation.
If you or your company is making the switch to Google Apps and you are on the Mac, you now have a quick way to upload your email to Google’s servers.
