Apple

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We’re starting to get reports that Apple is sending out emails to users in Spain and elsewhere in Europe notifying them the iTunes Match service is officially available for 24,99 € per year (as shown above). One Twitter user also claims that he was able to subscribe to the service in Europe two days ago before iTunes told him it was a mistake and returned his money.

“I managed to buy iTunes Match in Europe two days ago. Now they told me it was mistake and returned the money.

The email he provides looks identical to the one above apart from the language. It’s of course possible this is a slip up on Apple’s part ahead of an official rollout in the near future. Let us know in the comments if you have access to the service, which you can try here.

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We’ve got reports coming in from Canada where it is listed at C$27.99/year and Australia where it is A$39.99.  In the UK, it is £21.99.

Last week Apple also opened up the cloud service to users in Brazil to accompany the launch of the iTunes Store in Latin America.
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Google has just started rolling out an update to the Gmail app for iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch with a few new welcomed features. First off, users now have the ability to set a custom signature for messages as well as a vacation responder. Both of those new features will be available via the gear icon at the top of the app’s new menu. The update also includes support for nested labels and the usual “bug fixes and UI improvements”.

A new Scribbles feature allows you to open a canvas, draw a picture or sketch with multiple colors, brush sizes and line elements, and attach it to a message within Gmail. Scribbles is available now in both the Gmail iOS app and Gmail mobile web app. Another notable and highly requested change is a new notification sound on iOS 5, making it easier to tell when you’ve received an email

Google also mentioned in their blog post that they are continuing to work on some of the most requested features from users including multiple login support, banner notifications, and a “send as” feature to send mail from multiple accounts within the app.

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BBC is getting set to air a new documentary entitled ‘Steve Jobs: Billion Dollar Hippy’ tonight at 9:00pm on BBC HD and BBC Two. According to the Telegraph, the documentary apparently presents a more “ruthless image of Jobs” where Wozniak reveals that Jobs reduced him to tears following the release of Walter Isaacson’s ‘Steve Jobs’ bio (click the image above for the clip of Woz from the doc):

Jobs, for instance, tricked a young Wozniak into writing code for a computer game but pocketed the majority of the payment for the project from Atari himself. Wozniak admits on the programme that he cried when he heard about Jobs’s scam following the release of a book on Jobs.

The doc is hosted by Evan Davis, and features appearances from Tim Berners-Lee, Rita Clifton, and Stephen Fry. It will also of course include interviews with Steve Wozniak and others that were close to Apple and Jobs. The program profiles Avie Tevanian, who worked with Jobs as head of software at Apple until 2006, who tells a story of trying to get Jobs to join in on a stag party:
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[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FUa4IAQetTk]

Here’s a fun iPad game for the whole (Partridge) family.

Rockmate turns your iPad into a complete music studio easy and super fun to use. You can compose, record and play songs with up to 4 Rock players on one single iPad. Rockmate is easy to play with smart chords progressions, sounds great with separated guitar effects and in-house produced audio samples and is also fully customizable with multiple drums and keyboard styles.

Rockmate is ready to rock ! Your guitars are always well tuned, no need to carry your drum kit or to patch your keyboard. A smart metronome and a real-time looper will assist you in composing and recording your songs. That you can share by email or in your iTunes sharing folder.

We want as many people as possible to experience Rockmate. So we have decided to make Rockmate available for one week (From 14 to 21 december 2011) at the introductory price of $0.99. Regular price $3.99.

(iTunes $.99)

For those who are after something in the professional realm, a new App called Shredder was released today…
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Calcalist, a daily business newspaper published in Israel by the Yedioth Ahronoth Group (which also publishes Yedioth Ahronoth, the country’s most widely circulated newspaper) on Tuesday ran a story claiming Apple was actively engaged in talks to buy fabless flash memory chip maker Anobit for as much as half a billion dollars. In a follow-up story this morning, Calcalist reports that Apple’s senior research and development executive Dr. Edward H. Frank is already touring Israel, investigating possibilities of an Apple-run development center as numerous Silicon Valley technology giants already operate R&D centers in the country, including Intel, Google, IBM, Microsoft, Qualcomm, Broadcom, Yahoo!, eBay and China-based Huawei, to name just a few.

Apple’s Frank is a member of Carnegie Mellon University’s Board of Trustees and chairs the university’s Inspire Innovation campaign. He is apparently holding meetings with a bunch of Israeli startups who are hoping to wow the world’s most valuable technology company with next-generation solutions promising to bring flash storage prices down while substantially extending the lifespan of flash memory chips. The delegation headed by Frank has already met with executives at Intel Israel, the Calcalist story claims.

Globes chimed in with information from sources that “Apple has hired Aharon Aharon, a veteran player in Israel’s high tech industry, to lead the new development center”.

Should the Anobit deal go through, reporters Assaf Gilad and Meir Orbach write, Apple may be interested in further acquisitions of other Israeli startups specializing in innovative flash storage solutions. This includes XtremIO which develops server-based storage systems and its rival Kaminario, as well as DensBits which specializes in controller based signal processing to improve the operation of flash memory chip processors.

DensBits licenses its technology which improves flash memory chips’ reliability to about 100,000 deletions – twice that of its nearest competitor Anobit – helping reduce the prices of flash memory chips dramatically. Both DensBits’ and Anobit’s technology is believed to be licensed by many flash memory chip makers. Specifically, South Korean Hynix uses Anobit’s solution for a flash memory chip inside the iPhone 4S. Interestingly, Apple co-Founder Steve Wozniak is lead scientist for a competing enterprise SSD operation called Fusion I/O.

Ed Frank can be seen in the below clip talking about his experience at Carnegie Mellon University and how it continues to influence him today.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jhvb_hkJGkc]

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DigiTimes reports, based on “sources in the upstream supply chain”, that a next-generation MacBook Pro with a Retina-capable display sporting a 2880-by-1800 resolution could arrive in the second quarter of 2012:

While the prevailing MacBook models have displays with resolutions ranging from 1680 by 1050 to 1280 by 800, the ultra-high resolution for the new MacBook Pro will further differentiate Apple’s products from other brands, commented the sources.

The report continues asserting that Acer and Asustek Computer also plan to launch high-end Ultrabook models sporting  the 1920-by-1080 pixel resolution displays versus the 1366-by-768 displays typically found on today’s Ultrabooks. The rumor might make sense as Intel’s upcoming Ivy Bridge platform natively supports displays with up to a 4096-by-4096 pixel resolution and is capable of decoding multiple 4K video streams at once. Lion also added support for 3200-by-2000 wallpapers, doubling icon resolution to 1024-by-1024 pixels and enabling HiDPI display modes.

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On April Foolsday in 1976 Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ron Wayne signed the founding contract for Apple Computer.  Eleven days later, Ron Wayne  decided to sell his 10% of the company for $800, which is now worth $3.9 billion.  The founding contract that made history was originally expected to sell for $150,000, but today sold for a cool $1.6 million to Eduardo Cisneros, chief executive officer of Cisneros Corp, at a Sotheby’s auction in New York, reports Bloomberg. The Cisneros family is the second wealthiest in South America according to a 2006 Forbes listing.

The story goes that apparently the consigner bought the legal papers back in the mid-1990s “from a manuscript dealer” who is thought to had acquired them from Wayne. We’ve posted the bidding after the break.

Update: we’ve confirmed the documents have sold for $1,594,500, but the $1.3 million that Fortune reported doesn’t include the buyers tax the auction house tags on. Thanks Dewitt!

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Whoa, Microsoft is definitely on a roll today. In addition to the Xbox Live client for iPhone and the Halo Waypoint companion app for their popular gaming franchise, both of which were recently released on Apple’s iOS platform – and on top of today’s release of Kinectimals, their first-ever game for the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad, the Redmond, Washington-headquartered software giant just outed another iPhone app.

If you’re a fan of 25 gigabytes of free storage from Microsoft (a 100MB individual file limit) , Christmas definitely came early with today’s release of the official SkyDrive for iPhone . A free download from the App Store, it lets you access all of your content (including files shared with you) stored on SkyDrive cloud storage. You can also upload photos or videos from your iPhone to SkyDrive, view your recently used documents, share a link to any file using email and create/delete folders.

So Microsoft, how about that Office for iOS?

[slideshow]

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Apple this afternoon revised holiday ordering and shipping deadlines for this year, as spotted by The Loop. For those looking to order customized Macs, you have until tomorrow, December 14, to place an order for your customized all-in-one system if you want to receive it by December 24, with free 2-3 day shipping. With custom engraved iPods you have until December 19 to receive it by the December 24 deadline.

And lastly, for off the shelf Macs and other Apple products you have until December 21 to receive them by Christmas Eve. Sadly, it doesn’t look like you’ll be able to get an iPhone 4S online before the holidays. Find all of the dates after the break:

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The Next Web notes that Apple today introduced Brazil to its Apple TV set-top box.  The hobby project is available in the Brazilian online Apple Store for R$ 399,00, or approximately $217 (compare this to the $99 price point in the United States). The gizmo is available now and comes with free shipping. This is the first BRIC nation to get the Apple TV (BRIC being a term for huge global emerging economies coined by Goldman Sachs). According to a Strategy Analytics analysis, Apple’s set-top  box is set to capture nearly one-third, or 32 percent, of the set-top box market in the US 2011 based on projected sales of four million units. A hardware update is expected to include 1080p video output and Bluetooth 4.0 technology, among other things.

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Originally aired on November 2, PBS is making their 60-minute “Steve Jobs– One Last Thing” documentary available on DVD starting today. Available on Amazon now for $22.15, the documentary includes a never-before-broadcast interview with Jobs from 1994, as well as interviews with a number of those who knew and worked with Jobs such as Steve Wozniak, Ronald Wayne, Ross Perot, and Dean Hovey.

The video is also available to rent on Amazon Video and is free for Prime members.  It is also available (Flash) on PBS’s website, or you can grab it on iTunes here.

Here’s an excerpt from the rare Jobs interview:

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In a matter of less than two weeks, the Carrier IQ controversy blew up and became the mainstream topic in national newspapers and evening newscast. The idea that over a hundred million cell phone owners weren’t aware of an app that secretly collect personal information without their consent has had privacy advocates cry foul.

Making the privacy scare even more scary, The Federal Bureau of Investigation refused to release information about its own use of Carrier IQ in response to the request under the Freedom of Information Act filed December 1 by Michael Morisy. David Hardy, who’s with the Bureau, replied:

The material you requested is located in an investigative file which is exempt from disclosure. I have determined that the records responsive to your request are law enforcement records; that there is a pending or prospective law enforcement proceeding relevant to these responsive records.

That the agency wasn’t forthcoming to Morisy’s request to release any manuals and documents outlining their use of data gathered by Carrier IQ only serves to underscore the lack of transparency on their part, if not a waste of taxpayers’ money. That’s not to say that Big Brother is monitoring your calls or eavesdropping on your messaging all the time, but the Bureau clearly has had this capability for a long time and could be working with Carrier IQ to downplay the media outrage.

UPDATE: Carrier IQ reacted to the FBI statement, telling VentureBeat it doesn’t don’t give your data to the FBI or any other law enforcement for that matter. “Just to clarify all of the media frenzy around the FBI, Carrier IQ has never provided any data to the FBI”, a company spokesperson said.

As we repeatedly stressed, Carrier IQ is the mobile industry’s worst kept secret. Carrier IQ CEO Larry Lenhart and vice president of marketing Andrew Coward sat down with AllThingsD’s John Paczkowski to discuss the controversial data mining software. In damage control mode, the two executives pretty much admitted to Carrier IQ’s keylogger-like capabilities and sucking your SMS messages into the cloud…

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People have been wondering what should Apple do with its cash hoard since the dawn of time and the company’s silence on the matter has only fueled speculation and increased pressure on the new CEO to pay a cash dividend, which they had stopped doing in 1995. If TechCrunch is to be believed, which relayed a Calcalist report in Hebrew, Apple is going to spend between $400 and $500 million to acquire Anobit, a fabless flash memory chip maker based in Israel.

To put this in perspective, the Anobit acquisition would be bigger than any since the 1997 purchase of NeXT for $404 million that brought back Steve Jobs. Anobit specializes in flash storage solutions for enterprise and mobile markets and making them cheap and reliable using its proprietary MSP technology (which stands for ‘Memory Signal Processing’). MSP lets Anobit engineer more reliable flash memory chips with significantly longer usable life.

Anobit’s list of clients isn’t public, but the Calcalist report claims Apple is a client:

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Apple is hiring dozens of talented people on a daily basis, but this one deserves your attention. Jan-Michael Cart, a mass media arts student from Georgia, is the brains behind a bunch of very insightful iOS interface concepts you’ve likely seen on the web, as noted by iPhoneinCanada.ca. This includes the notification center and application switcher mockup videos below.

As Apple is always on the lookout for young blood, Cart’s work caught the company’s attention and they decided to hire him as an intern, he announced in a blog post:

Soon I will be embarking to California, where I will be interning at a fruit company for seven months. I will be updating this to chronicle my adventures and misadventures in the Bay Area for my family, friends, and followers online. Stay tuned, I leave in less than a month!

“And like that, my time has come — I am now a member of the Apple community”, he confirmed on the front page of his personal web site. Congrats to Cart on his new gig! We sure are looking forward to seeing some of his great concepts implemented in iOS.

Heck, even the BlackBerry maker Research In Motion hired the Astonishing Tribe design shop to make the PlayBook tablet’s operating system aesthetically appealing. Watch Cart’s Dynamic Icons and Speech Recognition user interface concepts right after the break and don’t forget to check out his YouTube channel.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rn4wt-6KRI0]

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We’re getting several reports this evening from our great readers in Latin America that the iTunes Store is beginning to roll out all over. The countries that we’ve heard about so far include Peru, Dominican Republic, Chile, Panama, Venezuela, Argentina, Ecuador, and more.  It also sounds like Brazil is getting their first taste of iTunes Match.

Cheers to everyone who sent this in!

Update: Apple has just pushed a Press Release saying as much:

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The Wall Street Journal reported this evening that Apple isn’t seeing the success they’d like with their iAd platform. The company has deployed iAd as an advertising platform throughout their iOS devices in the summer of 2010 and is now making changes in the hope of attracting both more developers and ad spending. First off, Apple is reportedly lowering the entry-level cost for marketers to $400,000 – down from $500,000 and even lower from the original $1 million when the platform was launched. Apple is also reportedly putting new caps on what it charges for clicks on ads, letting advertisers pay $10 each time an advert is viewed every 1,000 times (CPM) and $2 every time it’s specifically tapped on.

So why is Apple making these changes? Apple had tied for the lead in ad market share last year, but has reportedly fallen back to the third place in 2011 advertising market share, behind Millennial Media (#2) Google (#1), per IDC. Hoping to re-gain lost share, Apple is also launching a training program to bring in more advertisers onto the network, partnering with its media buying agency OMD, part of Omnicom Group Inc. to educate new advertisers on iAd, a standard practice providers of digital advertising platforms such as Google and Yahoo! have been exercising from the onset. In the recent weeks, executives from Pepsi, Clorox and JC Penny have reportedly visited Apple’s campus to talk about iAd. OMD also hopes to lure more advertisers in February 2012.

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Apple today updated iTunes to version 10.5.2 weighing in at a hefty 257MB. Right up front, Apple notes that Match is getting a fix with “several improvements”. Also, an audio distortion issue which we hadn’t heard of, also gets a fix.

Update: In other news, Apple updated its Thunderbolt displays yet again.

Here are the notes:

What’s new in iTunes 10.5.2

iTunes 10.5.2 includes several improvements for iTunes Match and fixes an audio distortion problem when playing or importing certain CDs.

iTunes 10.5.1 also included:
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Earlier today, Mark Tweeted the amusing new file Apple put in iOS 5.1 beta 2 which includes a lot of silly references to devices that don’t exist.  This isn’t entirely new – Apple had done this to another file in iOS 5.1B1.

As you’d probably expect, it isn’t going to stop developers from finding the special sause inside iOS 5.1B2.  That doctored file is a high level file which is easily found.  Developers which we are in contact with are already digging through the lower level stuff which remains the the feeding grounds for useful information.
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[vodpod id=Video.15812105&w=650&h=420&fv=videoGUID%3D%7B645A7F70-4DE7-48FF-8058-03B54A358C3C%7D%26amp%3Bplayerid%3D2001%26amp%3BplyMediaEnabled%3D1%26amp%3BconfigURL%3Dhttp%3A%2F%2Fm.wsj.net%2Fvideo-players%2F%26amp%3BautoStart%3Dfalse]
As a Grand Central commuter, Late night talk show host Jimmy Fallon articulates my feelings on two great things coming together.

But here’s an awesome bonus that offsets the added foot-traffic that stands between me and my train: Free speedy Wifi which stretches throughout the main concourse.  It is fast and it goes way beyond the store (even in some trains!).  I wonder what was required by its contract with the MTA and which is Apple just being cool.
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Walter Isaacson signing books in Times Square | Photo: Tanner Curtis

We noted last week that Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs biography published by Simon & Schuster became Amazon’s best-selling book of 2011, but that included just sales of the dead trees version. Print sales do not, however, paint an accurate picture because Kindle e-books are now outselling hardcover and paperback editions combined, prompting Amazon to include Kindle books into the rankings.

The company this morning issued a press release stating that the biography of Apple’s late co-founder broke all records to become the best-selling book of 2011 – just 50 days following the October 23 release. It’s not just Amazon, the book also topped Customer Favorites chart on Amazon and is #2 on Audible.

The exclusive biography is also a top-seller in the Non-fiction category on Apple’s iBookstore, where it can be yours for fifteen bucks. It’s also available as a digital download from the Kindle store. It did not fare as well on Barnes and Noble however, only garnering a #34 ranking of NookBooks. Go past the fold for Amazon’s list of Top 10 best-selling books overall.

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Apple just issued a press release announcing that its App Store mobile bazaar now carries over half a million apps for the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad. Additionally, customers have downloaded apps from the Mac App Store over a hundred million times. The App Store has passed over eighteen billion downloads since its inception and continues to clock more than a billion downloads a month.

An Apple spokesperson confirmed to The Loop’s Jim Dalrymple that Mac App Store downloads don’t include Lion, updates or downloads to other Macs. Apple CEO Tim Cook said at the October 4 iPhone 4S introduction that they were approaching 60 million Mac users worldwide and that Mac OS X Lion had been download from the Mac App Store over six million times. The press release quotes Apple’s head of worldwide marketing Phil Schiller:

In just three years the App Store changed how people get mobile apps, and now the Mac App Store is changing the traditional PC software industry. With more than 100 million downloads in less than a year, the Mac App Store is the largest and fastest growing PC software store in the world.

The statement also features quotes from Autodesk and Pixelmator, developers who saw tremendous success with their iOS and Mac offerings. AutoCAD in late-August 2011 made its Mac App Store debut, along with companion iOS apps on the App Store such as the free AutoCAD WS app for iPad and iPhone or sketchbook for iPhone, a pro-grade paint and drawing app that recently raked in fourteen million dollars, or about $9.8 million after Apple’s customary thirty percent cut.

Pixelmator, a popular image editing program, was recently updated to version 2.0. This nifty Photoshop alternative is being exclusively distributed on the Mac App Store and in no time proved one of the most popular downloads on the store. The success has prompted Apple to name Pixelmator  the Mac App of the Year in the iTunes Rewind 2011 charts released last week.

As for Adobe, they released Photoshop Elements Editor 1 and Adobe Premiere Elements 10 on the Mac App Store, the Carousel image management app for the Mac and iOS devices and promised to deliver a range of iPad apps soon. Microsoft, the world’s leading software maker, is rumored to bring Office to iOS. Full release below the fold.

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