Seth Weintraub

TechCrunch reports on the eve of News Corp’s. The Daily launch that arch rival NYTimes is also releasing an iPad only daily news app called…wait for it…News.me.

..and it sounds pretty interesting:

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Remember when Verizon said they’d have Mac drivers for their 4G modems in February?  *Checks watch* Right on time, Verizon updated their client access software today for its Pantech UML290.  The LG model still is Windows only.

The devices were originally delivered in December, but now I might actually try one.

There has been a workaround for awhile but below are links to the legit official version of the software…

Data Devices	Windows (Vista/XP)	Windows 7	Mac (10.4.x/10.5.x) 32-bit only	Mac (10.6.x) 32-bit only
LG VL600	7.6.3 (2642c)1,7	7.6.3 (2642c)1,7	Please check back for availability	Please check back for availability
Pantech UML290	7.6.3 (2642d) 1,7 Vista SP2	7.6.3 (2642d) 1,7	7.2.4 (2534b)	7.2.4 (2534b)

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Here’s scary if you are a Kindle user…Apple just clarified yesterday’s NYTimes piece in a way that most users weren’t anticipating.  The NYTimes said that Apple rejected the Sony Reader because it tried to skirt the in app purchases (which Kindle also does by making purchases online).  Well, that wasn’t the whole picture. The problem was that Sony didn’t ALSO offer in app purchases.  Apple said:

Apple’s made no change to its App Store Guidlines, it’s simply enforcing a rule that’s been in them all along: apps that offer purchases elsewhere must support in-app purchases as well. “We have not changed our developer terms or guidelines,” company spokesperson Trudy Miller told me. “We are now requiring that if an app offers customers the ability to purchase books outside of the app, that the same option is also available to customers from within the app with in-app purchase.”

That means Amazon will have to offer their books via in-app purchases as well as online…which means Apple takes 30% of sales.  Yikes, that sounds like something they might not be willing to do.  Hope Amazon’s been working on their web app.
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Here’s an interesting graphic today from NetApplications.  It seems that the holiday boost that usually adds some oomph to iOS numbers has really pushed market share up dramatically in some places, particularly wealthy societies of the West and Hong Kong/Singapore/Australia.  Overall, iOS just passed 2% of the global web usage but in some places like Singapore it is close to 10%!

At this rate, it won’t be long until iOS passes MacOS, if it hasn’t already in some places.

You already knew all that but it feels a lot better when it comes from Woz’s mouth. That Nuance thing was an aberration. Also the Android stuff. He’s legit.  Feel better?

http://www.viddler.com/simple/36dc642e/
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TechCrunch talks to Mike Daisey, whose highly acclaimed show The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs is playing at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre.

Daisey is not only a brilliant monologist in the tradition of Michael Moore and Spalding Gray, but he’s also a crusading journalist who has exposed the inhumane working conditions of the workers at the Foxconn factory in Shenzhen, China. Daisy went to Shenzhen and stood outside the monstrous Foxconn factory and interviewed its workers – some as young as 12 years old – about the inhumane working conditions there. This is what he found…

Head over to TechCrunch for part 2.
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The Beeb is reporting that Russian Movie copyright holders aren’t fairly being compensated for their their wares on iTunes.

Films available via iTunes include old favourites such as Gentlemen of Fortune, Assa, The Diamond Arm, Kin-dza-dza and Cheburashka.

Despite their age, the films and cartoons are still protected by copyright.

The owners of the copyright on the films, – Russian film studio Mosfilm and the Joint State Film Collection (Obyedinennaya Gosudarstvennaya Kinocollectsia) – have told the BBC they have not given consent for their films to be sold in the app stores.

Apple, for its part said that it took copyright complaints seriously and took action as soon as it received a complaint.

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For those of us waiting for new MacBook Pros, (my 15-inch AirHD 1080P in particular), Intel has some bad news:

Intel Corporation has discovered a design issue in a recently released support chip, the Intel® 6 Series, code-named Cougar Point, and has implemented a silicon fix. In some cases, the Serial-ATA (SATA) ports within the chipsets may degrade over time, potentially impacting the performance or functionality of SATA-linked devices such as hard disk drives and DVD-drives. The chipset is utilized in PCs with Intel’s latest Second Generation Intel Core processors, code-named Sandy Bridge. Intel has stopped shipment of the affected support chip from its factories. Intel has corrected the design issue, and has begun manufacturing a new version of the support chip which will resolve the issue. The Sandy Bridge microprocessor is unaffected and no other products are affected by this issue.

On one note, it is good that Apple has taken to delaying putting new chips in their Macs by a few months.  On the other hand, WTF, I want a new MacBook Air!
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[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYecfV3ubP8&w=640&h=505]

Some fun facts on the 1984 commercial from Steve Hayden (via DF).

• The brief for “1984” was simple: Steve Jobs said, “I want to stop the world in its tracks.”
• We ran a 30- second version of “1984” in the top 10 U.S. markets, plus, in an admittedly childish move, in an 11th market—Boca Raton, Fla., headquarters for IBMʼs PC division.
• “1984” also ran in theaters through ScreenVision. One theater owner was so enamored with it, he ran it for a month after the buy was over.
• Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak saw the spot and offered to pay half the cost of running it out of his personal checking account.

In this light (or without it), it is dizzyingly uncouth that Motorola is going to even attempt to acknowledge that ad in their’s this week.

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We all know the intricacies of the famous Best Buy inventory system.  Today our tipster sends us this wonderfully confusing screenshot which seems to indicate that a Verizon iPhone type product will indeed be entering the retailler at some point in the near future…perhaps around Feb 10th.  This follows similar rumblings.

It is also interesting to note that Best Buy is showing a $699 price point (below) rather than the $649/$749 points that Apple showed earlier.
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[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ndhuEUX1kIU&w=640&h=390]

Looks like the gloves are off.  *this is only a teaser Motorola informs us.
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[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TgvBnUNDDFM&w=640&h=505]

If you are jailbroken and want to make an angel cry, here is a iPhone running a pretty convincing Windows Phone 7 theme.
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…and it isn’t even a year old.

Steve Lohr at the New York Times tries to get his head around just how successful Apple is at this moment.  The once “60 days from bankruptcy” company now introduces products that are bigger, by themselves, than most companies could ever hope to be.  iPad, the latest Apple creation is on track to deliver almost $20 billion in revenues in its first year.

How does Apple do this?  
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[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mWEvWYbxLEo&w=640&h=390]

While this may seem impressive at first glance, I’d like to make a few points.

1. You can do the first half of the video on just about any smartphone.  Google Maps isn’t something you need to boot up Firefox for, there’s an app for that.  In fact there are many better apps out there.

2. Who wants to dock their phone as a mediacenter?  That’s what AirPlay is for, except you can still use your phone while it is pushing video to the big screen.  What happens to the HD Multimedia dock when you get a call or want to multitask?
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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 :D

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.

[vimeo http://www.vimeo.com/19163938 w=650&h=400]

iPhone Demo from Fire Department on Vimeo.

Here’s an interesting app being put out by the San Ramon Fire Department. It basically let’s you log into their 911 system and help out if an emergency is happening in your neck of the woods. Time is critical and if your neighbor is going into cardiac arrest, and you are feeling up to it, you may be able to help out.

The obvious downside is that if 30 people show up to an emergency, the professional EMTs are going to have some issues getting through all of the mess.

What if: only people trained to help could sign into the system and they’d only be alerted (push notifications?) when the emergency was within a mile radius of the user’s location? That might make a great crowdsourcing app that could save some lives.

Who’s getting on that one?
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AllthingsD talked to Microsoft reps about bringing Office to the Mac App Store.

“It’s something we are looking at,” Microsoft’s Amanda Lefebvre told Mobilized. However, the company said its product is already available in lots of places as well as via the Web–including in a new, free 30-day trial version.

Of course they are looking at it.  They are also “looking at” bringing Office to the iPhone circa 2009.
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[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cEtw5d3_Uac&fs=1&hl=en_US]

We’ve been getting the word from our university readers that Apple has been making a push into colleges to recruit at home workers as part of their College advisor program.  We’ve been sent flyers that are being passed around like this one.

It is a pretty sweet deal for college students.  You make more than $10/hour, get a free iMac and work from your desk and full health benefits.  Apple is looking for 16 hours/week during the year and a full 40 during the summer.  A pretty solid resume booster as well.

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Interesting here that Orange just posted links to the White iPhone (joining other carriers around the world).  More interesting is that it is currently priced at €20 more than its comparably-equipped black counterpart (below).  The same price disparity happens at the 16GB level.  Is Apple going to charge a premium for this thing?  Perhaps that white paint ain’t cheap.

There is some precedence for this as Apple charged different rates initially for the Black and White MacBooks, that time the Black version was the premium version.  
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According to the Loop, the News Corp. iPad magazine called ‘The Daily’ will launch on February 2, a few weeks after the originally scheduled launch.  Also appearing on stage for Apple will be Eddy Cue.  Prior to announcing his medical leave, Steve Jobs was originally scheduled to appear on stage with Rupert Murdoch.

News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch will be making the announcement at the event at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and Apple vice president of Internet services Eddy Cue will join him. This is in contrast to News Corp.’s initial plans to hold the event at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in late January.

Also, it wouldn’t be surprising to see the release of iOS 4.3 at that time, since the iPad seemingly will need some additional features to deal with the new publishing model.

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[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0DVt15KD3Xk&fs=1&hl=en_US]

I’ve heard this from a seperate source, but buried deep within the Bloomberg Businessweek cover is this little tidbit:

[Google VP]Gundotra has also sparred with Apple behind the scenes. As Android became a threat to Apple in 2008, Apple began resisting Google’s claim to valuable location data gathered whenever an iPhone owner used Google Maps. His negotiations with Apple marketing chief Phil Schiller grew so heated that Schmidt and Steve Jobs had to intervene to settle the matter, according to two people familiar with the incident. (Apple announced earlier this year that it had developed its own location-monitoring system. Gundotra and Schiller both declined to comment on the incident.)

The other turning point was the release of the G1 which “looked nothing like the prototypes that Steve Jobs and Scott Forstall were shown by Google’s leadership”.  Android’s success didn’t help matters.  The rest is history.
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