Jobs could have saved himself a few bucks by giving these out instead:

via Engadget

Billed as the world’s first social magazine, FlipBook pulls your facebook and Twitter feeds into a magazine like interface.  It is free for iPad. (iTunes link)

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v2vpvEDS00o&w=700&h=385]

From the developer:

Flipboard is the world’s first social magazine. Your Flipboard is a fast, beautiful way to flip through news, photos and updates your friends are sharing on Facebook and Twitter. And it

Apple just released its third quarter earnings.  Press release follows

Revenue: $15.7 Billion (record)

Profit: $3.25 billion ($3.51/share)

Margin: 39.1% (vs 40.9% last year)

International sales accounted for 52% of revenue

Sales: 

Macs: 3.47 million

iPods: 9.41 million 

iPhones: 8.4 million

iPads: 3.27 million

Apple Reports Third Quarter Results

All-Time Record Revenue
Earnings Increase 78 Percent

CUPERTINO, California

The service only requires a cheap Roku box and MP3Tunes (2GB free).  MP3Tunes also streams to iPhone/iPod/iPad (and Android and a bunch of other devices).  Eventually, Google and probably Apple will have this capability, but why wait?  Also.  Chicago?

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ctn4Dx0IGPE&w=689&h=413]

Edit: Yes commenters, we love Plex too. But it requires a Mac.

MP3tunes and Roku Partner To Bring Personal iTunes Music Collection To TVs

An Industry First: No PC or home server required to play iTunes music libraries on Home Entertainment Systems

San Diego, CA 

Interesting story at Businessweek: 

Heinen, as Hertzfeld tells it, said Apple would be

You keep asking for more Antenna-gate info so we’ll keep finding it.

http://g4tv.com/lv3/47472

Apple will be launching their free cases program at the end of this week, and its already affecting different iPhone case manufactures. Some companies most likely figure that many people will be swayed to Apple’s free bumper, as after all the case works well to solve the antenna issues and comes in a few stylish colors. Perhaps the most obvious and important reason is because of the price, free. Apple’s giving all iPhone 4 users the ability to get a Bumper for free, so why would anyone pay $29-49 for a case from someone else? 

Incipio is already realizing this so they’re running the “We love our customers too” campaign. This promotion lets users obtain their free Bumper from Apple, then send it in to Incipio for 5 bucks off one of their premium-quality cases. Incipio figures that a 5 dollar incentive will be good enough to keep themselves in the case race, and we think their campaign is quite clever. The catch is they’ll only be accepting 2 trade-ins per households, and that’s U.S. households only. But hey, what’s Incipio going to do with all those Bumpers? 

We’re back with another awesome case review, and today we have a very special one, the Vaja “Limited Edition.” The case is not only a luxury item, but it offers some great protection for the iPad. The case is separated into two high-quality leather pieces that offer great protection for the back and front of the iPad. During use, your iPad will sit on the back leather-piece and this offers protection for the back of the device.

While you’re carrying it, you get to use the front piece as well which sports the shiny chrome-metal Vaja logo. When the device is sandwiched between the two pieces you have great protection, with great style. With the front cover on you get access to the the sleep/wake/power button, headset jack, speaker, and volume rocker. The only downside is the lack of access to the dock-connector port when the front cover is on. Not to worry, the cover easily slips off.

You’re probably thinking… ‘what If i’m carrying my iPad around with the front cover, but want to take off to use the device, where do I put it?” Well, Vaja implemented an easy solution and that is the ability to attach the front cover to the back cover. It works pretty neat, and you won’t even notice it while in use.

The Vaja “Limited Edition” is a bit pricy at $150-200 but in the end this is a luxury item made with luxury materials, by a luxurious company. The case comes in three colors: Brown/Mamut ($200), White ($150), and Olive Grey ($150). The protection alone is not really worth the price, but the style, brand, and manufacturing process truly is. You can purchase one here.

Apple subsidiary, Filemaker, sent out erroneous e-mails to the press about a new product, “FileMaker Go” on Sunday. This product is set to be announced at a FileMaker press conference tomorrow and brings the FileMaker productivity tools to the mobile space via iOS.  The press release is pasted below.  Thanks James!

Press Release:

“SANTA CLARA, Calif.

Amazon is reporting that they’ve reached a tipping point of sorts with their Kindle environment.  I say environment because it isn’t just about the physical reader, but the Kindle App that we see on iPads, iPhones and Android devices.  

“We’ve reached a tipping point with the new price of Kindle–the growth rate of Kindle device unit sales has tripled since we lowered the price from $259 to $189,” said Jeff Bezos, Founder and CEO of Amazon.com. “In addition, even while our hardcover sales continue to grow, the Kindle format has now overtaken the hardcover format. Amazon.com customers now purchase more Kindle books than hardcover books–astonishing when you consider that we’ve been selling hardcover books for 15 years, and Kindle books for 33 months.”

Over the past three months, for every 100 hardcover books Amazon.com has sold, it has sold 143 Kindle books. Over the past month, for every 100 hardcover books Amazon.com has sold, it has sold 180 Kindle books. This is across Amazon.com’s entire U.S. book business and includes sales of hardcover books where there is no Kindle edition. Free Kindle books are excluded and if included would make the number even higher.

Besides the popularity of the iPad, Amazon has also slashed the price of its own Kindle eBook reader to just $189, less than a third of its original cost.

Full press release pasted below:

We linked to a ZDNet article earlier but the whole thing is now online.  Really interesting stuff in here.  Like:

For Apple, the idea of restricting the iPhone was akin to asking Steve Jobs to ditch the black turtleneck.

More pads!  Today Engadget finds Apple’s upcoming Magic Pad device A1339 sitting in the FCC database with the following picture attached: 

The device would basically add a MacBook like touch device to your desktop Mac setup.  The FCC is involved because it connects via Bluetooth.  IT would be cool if you could use iDevices like this instead of buying more hardware.  See those spyshots of the prototype below:

Remember how Apple started killing off anything that had ‘…pad’ in it because it was a possible trademark infringement?  Well, now HP is throwing down with a big fat juicy new name that should have Silicon Valley trademark lawyers giving high fives all around.

Ziiinnnnggg! 

PreCentral

USPTO

Google has their own video format, why shouldn’t Apple?  Hardmac reports that the new ‘AppleHD’ video format would be scalable up to 4K.

we can suspect that Apple will be using a format evolving or directly originating from Dirac. 

They postulate that this superHD format would allow Apple to differentiate with huge Retina Displays which would facilitate a new type of AppleTV.

Youtube started supporting 4K recently.

You won’t get a better earning’s forecast from all of the major analysts than what is put together by Fortune.

For the past few weeks we’ve been gathering Q3 estimates from a broad cross-section of analysts for our quarterly professionals vs. bloggers analyst smackdown…everybody is expecting robust year-over-year revenue growth — anywhere from 48% to 69% — with the amateurs about 7% more bullish than the pros. Meanwhile, we’ve received a flurry of last-minute notes from analysts adjusting their estimates and trying their best to reconcile those two narratives.

ZDNet’s Jason O’Grady encapsulates an article by Wired this week in their printed edition that basically drops the hammer on AT&T.  Or maybe Apple.  Well both, sort of.  Here’s some quotes of quotes taken totally out of context: 

… after the honeymoon was over they [Apple and AT&T] started noticing each other

Apple’s earning call is set for tomorrow.  We know Apple will report selling 1.7 million iPhone 4s in three short days (and millions more iPhone 3GSs) as well as somewhere between 2.9-3.5 million Macs.  But will it be enough to pass its long time rival?

Andy Zaky poses the question at Fortune: Will, after 30 years of being behind Microsoft in revenues, Apple finally surpass Microsoft?  Both companies are expected to report just over $15 Billion in revenue for the quarter and most analysts think is is just a matter of time before Apple is truly the bigger company.

Apple surpassed Microsoft in market cap for the first time (since the 80’s) earlier this year.

Zaky points out that Microsoft’s 50+% operating margin will keep it ahead in the income game for some time ahead.

Hey, do you remember that ‘magical’ device called the iPad that was doing so well before the iPhone 4 came out?  Well, Apple today announced that it would be selling in Austria, Belgium, Hong Kong, Ireland, Luxembourg, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand and Singapore as of Friday, July 23.  That’s both 3G and Wifi models.

Press release follows:

CUPERTINO, California

From the same news outfit that did the Tiger Woods videos:

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Interesting how the news gets distorted as it moves overseas. Via