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Court rejects Apple’s attempt to dismiss claim that Siri infringes Chinese patent

Ben Lovejoy Jul 9 2014 - 6:46 am PT

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Reuters reports that a Chinese court has rejected Apple’s attempt to dismiss a claim by local company Zhizhen Internet Technology that Siri infringed its speech-recognition patent.

Zhizhen Internet Technology first alleged in 2012 that Apple’s Siri technology copied parts of its Xiao i Robot software, with pre-trial proceedings taking place last year. Apple said that it had not been aware of the patent when work began on Siri, and asked China’s State Intellectual Property Office to declare the patent invalid.

The Chinese patent office declined Apple’s request, leading Apple to file suit against it. It is this suit that has been rejected, leaving Zhizhen free to pursue its case against Apple.

Apple has said it intends to appeal to the Beijing Higher People’s Court, but suggested that a settlement might be reached by adding that “we remain open to reasonable discussions with Zhizhen.”

The backend for Siri was originally developed by Nuance, the company behind Dragon Dictate, though there have been persistent rumors that Apple plans to replace this with its own technology.

Image credit: forbes.com

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‘Apple of China’ brand Xiaomi pips iPhone in latest Chinese app usage stats

Ben Lovejoy Jul 9 2014 - 4:47 am PT

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Android may have the raw numbers, but iPhone users have always been the ones to make the most use of their phones – from web browsing through enterprise to paid apps. Mobile analytics company Flurry reports that one Android brand has finally caught up – but only in China.

Over the past 6 years, the average Apple iPhone consumer has spent more time in apps than consumers of every Android device we track- by a wide margin. This year, it looks like the story is about to change. In an analysis we conducted on a random sample of 23,000 devices in China throughout January 2014, we found that Xiaomi is now in the lead as far as time-spent in apps is concerned.

It’s no coincidence that the brand is Xiaomi. The company, and its CEO, has blatantly copied Apple’s marketing approach in every way from product launches right the way down to the Steve Jobs style clothing of the company’s founder. The company even recently announced an iPad mini clone known as the Mi Pad.

Xiaomi’s antics have so far been ignored by Apple, which has been focusing on developing good relationships with China, but given the company’s ambitious international expansion plans, there may come a time when Apple has to take a harder line.

(via TNW)

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Apple Campus 2 sample architecture displayed in Germany

Zac Hall Jul 8 2014 - 10:17 am PT

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We’ve already seen a number of renders showing Apple’s ambitious Campus 2 project as well as the progress in Cupertino, California at the site of the future spaceship-like building. Now photos shared today by German site ifun.de depict an early shot of architectural samples with the design slated for Apple Campus 2.
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Apple Maps senior engineering manager leaves role for job at Uber

Zac Hall Jul 8 2014 - 8:31 am PT

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Chris Blumenberg, a senior engineering manager at Apple who manages the Maps Apps and Frameworks team, has left the Cupertino, California company for a new role at Uber, The Information reports. Blumenberg’s time spent at Apple dates back over 14 years according to his LinkedIn profile, and his past experience includes building the original Maps app for iPhone as well as porting the Safari web browser to iOS.

Uber, of course, is a relatively new transportation company founded in 2009 which offers pickups in various cities which can be arranged by a mobile application. Interestingly, Google has in part backed Uber through its Ventures arm investing in the startup with $250 million last fall and adding Uber integration into its the Google Maps app earlier this year. Uber is also a partner for Google’s self-driving car program.

As you may recall, Apple first introduced its in-house Maps data in 2012, which was met with enough user complaints to prompt a publicly posted apology from Apple CEO Tim Cook, as it began the process of moving away from relying on Google’s mapping data.

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Market share of iPhone may increase as U.S. smartphone growth tails off, predicts analyst

Ben Lovejoy Jul 8 2014 - 5:22 am PT

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There are early signs that Apple’s market share of the U.S. smartphone market may increase as we move through the ‘Late Majority’ phase and into ‘Laggards’, suggests Asymco’s Horace Dediu.

For those who weren’t paying attention in economics classes in school, new products tend to experience an S-curve pattern to their growth. In the tech sector, Innovators are pretty much synonymous with techies.

Innovators (first 2.5%) need to be sold on the premise of novelty itself. Early adopters (next 13.5%) seek status and exclusivity. Early majority (34%) seek acceptance and Late Majority (34%) seek pragmatic productivity. Laggards (last 16%) seek safety.

If those percentages appear rather random, it’s because they are derived from the shape of the curve – the typical points at which it gets steeper or shallower.

With U.S. smartphone penetration now at 70 percent, we’re about two years into the Late Majority stage, with around two further years of growth to come. What Dediu’s analysis suggests is that iPhone growth has a steadier pattern to it than Android growth, which appears to be more closely driven by product launches and promotions. The more mature a market, the fewer product launches and promotions there are designed to drive adoption.

Why, when we are in a late stage of the market, does the iPhone do well when users are not incentivized to adopt? As we crossed 70% adoption, 1.4 million more users adopted the iPhone than Android.

Even if we look out to the last six months, iPhone added 15.5 million late majority users while Android added 14.2 million. If promotions decrease for the “late late majority” and laggards then would the iPhone do even better relative to Android?

Dediu points to the featurephone market as support for his hypothesis: at the tail-end of the curve, before smartphones took over, the most popular phone in the U.S. was the RAZR – a premium handset.

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Apple’s new coding language Swift receives significant update for developers alongside new Yosemite and iOS seeds

Benjamin Mayo Jul 7 2014 - 11:37 am PT

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As part of the updates to the Yosemite and iOS betas today, Apple’s new coding language Swift has received several major improvements and tweaks to make the language more consistent and help developers make better, safer apps. The intricacies of the changes are very gibberish to non-developers, but the fixes resolve many of the issues that developers had been requesting. In particular, the new value type model of arrays fixes several inconsistencies and prevents many potential code ‘gotchas’ that could arise in previous Swift builds.

Apple has also updated the ‘Introducing Swift’ iBook to reflect the improvements, if you want to learn in more detail about the changes.

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Google’s co-founders on how the company differs from Apple

Ben Lovejoy Jul 7 2014 - 6:59 am PT

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[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wdnp_7atZ0M&start=1500]

In a ‘fireside chat’ with leading venture capitalist Vinod Khosla, Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin discuss everything from the moment they nearly sold the company to why they are cautious about moving into health technology. One interesting angle for Apple fans was how the two contrasted their approach to that of Apple.

Brin, who runs Google X, said that the experimental wing of the company was about making a number of bets and hoping that some of them paid off.

From my perspective – running Google X – that’s my job, is to invest in a number of opportunities, each one of which may be a big bet. […]

If you look at the self-driving cars, for example, I hope that that could really transform transportation around the world [but] it’s got many technical and policy risks. But if you are willing to make a number of bets like that, you’ve got to hope that some of them will pay off.

Page contrasted this approach with Apple, which focuses on a very small number of products.

I would always have this debate, actually, with Steve Jobs. He’d be like, ‘You guys are doing too much stuff.’ And I’d be like, ‘Yeah that’s true.’ And he was right, in some sense. But I think the answer to that – which I only came to recently, as we were talking about this stuff – is that if you’re doing things that are highly interrelated […] at some point, they have to get integrated.

Another difference between the two companies, say Page and Brin, is in their view of technology in the health sector. Apple’s long-awaited iWatch is of course believed to be equipped with multiple health and fitness sensors, and the Health app is a key feature of iOS 8. Google says that while it does have some health-related ambitions – such as glucose-reading contact lenses – it views the field with considerable caution.

Generally, health is just so heavily regulated. It’s just a painful business to be in. It’s just not necessarily how I want to spend my time. Even though we do have some health projects, and we’ll be doing that to a certain extent. But I think the regulatory burden in the U.S. is so high that think it would dissuade a lot of entrepreneurs.

You can watch the complete interview in the video above.