Apple and Intel both declined an invitation to invest in a new round of funding for patent assertion entity Intellectual Ventures, reports Reuters. Both companies had invested in the enterprise in the past. Intellectual Ventures did, however, receive further investments from both Microsoft and Sony.
Apple and Intel’s decision is significant because the biggest tech companies have supported IV in the past. “This would be a dramatic departure,” said Kevin Jakel, chief executive of Unified Patents.
Intellectual Ventures declined to discuss investments. Microsoft, Sony, Intel and Apple also would not comment. It is unclear whether Intel and Apple could still opt to invest in IV’s vehicle at a later time.
As a frequent target of patent trolls, it seemed an odd investment for Apple in the first place, and was most likely a simple protective measure: we’ll help fund you if you leave us alone.
An FTC filing revealed that Apple had been the target of a record 92 patent lawsuits in a three year period. Earlier this month Apple joined Microsoft, Ford, General Electric, IBM and other companies in forming a ‘Partnership for American Innovation’ to lobby against patent trolls.
Apple is worried that new legislation will limit its ability to protect its own intellectual property.
Reuters is reporting that Apple, Microsoft, Ford, General Electric, IBM and other companies are forming a lobbyist group called the ‘Partnership for American Innovation’. The group is worried that upcoming legislation focused on patent trolls may adversely affect true ‘innovators’ as well.
The jury for the second Apple vs Samsung patent case has now been selected after a number of potential jurors were dismissed for possible bias. Apple is seeking damages of up to $40 per device sold for those Samsung phones and tablets it says violate up to five Apple patents, while Samsung is counter-claiming that Apple devices violate two of its own patents.
Unlike the previous trial, in which the similarity of Samsung’s hardware to iPhones and iPads was a key issue, the patents in dispute here are all software ones, and include standard Android features, leading some to suggest that Google is the real target in this case.
Trying to find unbiased jurors in Silicon Valley was never going to be an easy exercise, and several of those with connections to the tech sector were accepted. The court also found it impractical to eliminate jurors because they owned products from one or both companies, and it’s been reported that most own at least one Apple device, with some also owning Samsung TVs.
The final jury comprises six women and four men. Occupations include a former IBM manager, county government employee, accountant, store clerk, plumber, secretary, police department community service officer and a retired teacher.
The trial opens today with a video providing an overview of patent law, before opening arguments from each side. Apple has scheduled senior VP of marketing Phil Schiller as its first witness. The trial is expected to last around a month.
In the previous patent case between the two companies, Apple was initially awarded $1B in damages before $450M was cut, with a retrial ordered to look again at the damages awarded for some of the patents. The retrial awarded Apple $290M instead for that portion of the case, giving Apple a revised total award of $930M. Apple did, however, fail in an attempt to obtain an injunction against the products found to infringe its patents.
(Head to 37:40 in the video to see the telphone comparison)
Harry McCracken tracked down this video from the launch of the Macintosh that hasn’t been seen since 1984. It turns out there was a second ‘launch demo’ a week after the original launch at the shareholder meeting and the videographer forgot he had the video of that (woops!) in his garage. The audience this time wasn’t wasn’t Apple shareholders but actually members of the Boston Computer Society and the general public, which made for a different type of presentation. The quality and tone of the video is often much different than the one given a week earlier at the Flint Center on the De Anza College campus near Apple’s then HQ.
Over at YouTube, you can watch the Cupertino presentation, along with a sort of a rough draft held as part of an Apple sales meeting in Hawaii in the fall of 1983. As for the BCS version, all 90 minutes of it are there in the video at the top of this post, available for the first time in their entirety since they were shot on January 30, 1984.
The Cupertino and Boston demos may have been based in part on the same script, but the audience, atmosphere and bonus materials were different. In Cupertino, Jobs spoke before investors, towards the end of a meeting which also included dreary matters such as an analysis of Apple’s cash flow.
What’s particularly interesting to me and not part of any other videos I’ve seen was Jobs’ comparison of the Mac (and eventually by extension GUI interfaces) to the invention of the telephone. Fast forward the video above to about 37:40 to see it. As McCracken puts it, the Mac wasn’t necessarily competing with IBM machines but competing with no computer at all. This metaphor is striking in hindsight.
The video also has a Q&A with the original Mac team which is also pretty interesting if you are into that kind of thing.
Those of us old enough to have been around to witness the launch of the Mac can enjoy a good dose of nostalgia today, while those who weren’t can try to imagine just what the world was like before the Mac, thanks to two YouTube playlists.
EverySteveJobsVideo has put together a playlist of 18 Steve Jobs videos, from the launch of the Macintosh at the Apple shareholder event 30 years ago today, through internal videos, some early ads to a set of videos featuring not just the original “1984” ad, but alternative versions and the story of the making of the famous video.
EveryAppleAds (sic), meantime, has collected together the complete set of Get a Mac ads, with the hugely successful “Hello, I’m a Mac / And I’m a PC” format.
Apple has recently updated its online support portal on Apple.com with a more modern look and feel. The new design puts easier access to support for each of Apple’s products, with large images and clean lines. The older design (screenshotted below) was much more boxy and cluttered.
In the old layout, customers would have to click through to ‘All Products’ to get help about more obscure products. With the new design, the infinitely scrolling carousel puts everything on the portal homepage. It is also much clearer where to find the Apple communities and access phone support as other aspects of support have been removed completely from the page.
Businessweek has a fun chart showing that Apple’s iPhone business alone would make it the 9th largest stock in the Dow Jones top 30 companies, ahead of such giants as Microsoft, Coca-Cola and McDonalds.
It’s not a terribly surprising fact – the iPhone represents the bulk of Apple’s business, with its $88.4B sales greater than all of Apple’s other products and services combined ($81B), but it is quite a graphic illustration of the strength of that one product line. Apple, of course, just announced that it sold 9M iPhones in the first three days of the 5s and 5c.
Perhaps more surprising is the company that just scrapes ahead of that nominal iPhone business: IBM. While giving every impression of an out-of-date business model, the company is still making billions from large-scale IT infrastructure products, services and software. Including, I kid you not, mainframes.
According to a report from IBM tracking shopping trends for Thanksgiving and Black Friday (via Fortune), Apple devices dominated among mobile devices for online buying with 10 percent of shopping online done from an iPad. The device also dominated for online purchases originating from tablets, accounting for 88.3-percent of traffic. The iPhone came in at 8.7-percent of traffic for online purchases, while Android devices combined came in at just 5.5-percent.
Apple appears to be testing a new “floating” Genius Bar design in a couple of retail stores. We originally saw images of the new communal Genius Bar configuration in July. However, today, TheDailyCity reported Apple is now testing the design in at least two stores: one in Orlando at Mall at Millenia and another in a Philadelphia Apple Store. Apple will apparently roll out the design to its Florida Mall store. Apple appears to like the new design, so we wouldn’t be surprised to see it in more Apple Stores in the near future.
Apple and Samsung are now both seeking to extend their patent infringement claims in the California-based lawsuit filed in August. Samsung asked the courts in a filing last week to add the iPad mini and new iPod touch to the case after recently adding the iPhone 5. Now, FossPatents reported that Apple, as of Black Friday, sought to add six new Samsung products, including: Samsung Galaxy S III, Galaxy Note II, Galaxy Tab 8.9 Wi-Fi, Galaxy Tab 10.1, Samsung Rugby Pro, and the Galaxy S III Mini. The case isn’t scheduled to go to trial until March 2014.
Will.i.am of Black Eye Peas fame is about to launch a new accessory for iPhone this week that is said to turn the device’s existing 8-megapixel camera into a 14-megapixel camera. The Telegraph (via MacRumors) spoke with Will.i.am who described the product called “i.am+:”
‘We have our own sensor and a better flash. You dock you phone into our device and it turns you smartphone into a genius-phone. We take over the camera.’… The camera will be the first of a series of digital products that bear his name – to support them, he has invested in what he calls ‘digital real estate’ online. He now owns the domain www.i.am. Users of i.am+ accessories will be given individual online profiles, for example www.i.am/Will.
Apple switched battery suppliers for iPad and MacBooks from Samsung SDI to Amperex Technology Limited and Tianjin Lishen Battery, according to a report from China Business News (via TechCrunch). Recent reports about processor price hikes, and Samsung dropping out as an Apple display supplier, were later denied by the company, so we’ll wait for official word regarding the batteries.
The majority of iPad mini displays are coming from LG, according to a report from Digitimes. We already knew LG Display, AU Optronics, and Samsung are supplying display components for the device, but the sometimes-unreliable Digitimes claimed this weekend that the majority of displays are coming from LG—not AUO.
While still behind Coca-Cola, which retained its No. 1 spot from last year’s report, Apple is one of Interbrand’s top risers as the No. 2 brand in its 2012 Best Global Brands Report. Apple sits just above IBM, Google, and Microsoft with a brand value of $76, 568 million—up 129 percent from last year’s study. You can see a full list of brands that made this year’s top 100 list here and a chart of Apple’s growth below:
The Wall Street Journal today shows that the value of Apple’s brand varies greatly depending on who is taking the survey. Apple’s brand may be worth as much as $183 billion, according to an earlier Millward Brown study. The study’s results greatly vary from a separate Interbrand study, which valued the company at less than a fifth of that value and half of the value of Microsoft’s brand.
The most valuable brand in the world, according to WPP PLC’s Millward Brown, is Apple Inc., worth $183 billion—nearly a third of the company’s market capitalization of $581 billion.
Omnicom Group Inc.’s Interbrand, however, judges Apple’s brand as worth only $33.5 billion, or eighth, behind such names as MicrosoftCorp. (ranked third at $59 billion), International Business MachinesCorp. and Coca-Cola Co. (first at $71.9 billion). Interbrand notes its estimate of Apple’s brand value has risen.
Why such a big difference?
“The value of brand is both art and science,” says Allen Adamson, a managing director of Landor Associates, a branding firm owned by WPP. “It’s simple in theory but hard to pin down in reality. It’s really about how much would a consumer pay for a caramel colored soda versus how much they would pay for a Coke.”
If you think about PCs, how much would someone pay for a similarly spec’d Microsoft PC Ultrabook vs. a MacBook Air? Usually much less. The same goes for tablets—even though Apple’s prices and margins are smaller than phones or PCs. Apple’s reputation is what allows it to grab such huge margins in its hardware.
Yet, Interbrand ranks Microsoft at double of Apple’s brand. I would re-run the numbers if I were Interbrand. Millward Brown’s numbers are below:
Reporting for Gizmodo, Cord Jefferson has a great account of what it is like to be an extra in the upcoming Steve Jobs biopic, “jOBS“, featuring Ashton Kutcher. While Jefferson was able to meet Kutcher, he described the experience as being long and boring. One part of the gig included listening to Kutcher give Jobs’ speech against IBM in Honolulu. Jefferson said he heard the speech 26 times:
I’ll remember those lines for the rest of my life. Not because I find them particularly profound, but because I heard Kutcher say them, by my count, 26 times over the course of about three hours. If you have any assumptions that the work of making movies is glamorous or exciting, kill them now.
As for the biopic’s success, the writer was not able to give a firm answer. He said Kutcher sounds serious about the gig (Kutcher looks close to Jobs, just saying). He talked about Sorkin’s upcoming film, too:
You may have come across versions of the “Blue Busters” Ghostbusters-style internal sales video originally created to be shown at an international sales meeting in Hawaii in October 1984. The version featured on YouTube is clearly lacking an appearance from then-Apple’s CEO Steve Jobs. Today, former Apple employee Craig Elliot, the same one who released that video of Jobs playing FDR, has provided Bloomberg with a copy of the original that indeed features Jobs in full Ghostbusters attire with an Apple II strapped to his back. He also explained in the interview above that the video was made to rally the troops during the height of big blue’s (IBM’s) success.
A new report from business weekly Barron’s(via Reuters) claimed The Dow Jones Industrial Average stock index could potentially replace stocks from Alcoa, Bank of America, or Hewlett-Packard with Apple or Google. There’s no exact timeframe for the overhaul of the index, but Barron’s said adding the companies would be complicated due to the fact the Dow calculates the absolute price of shares. Reuters explained that getting Apple would require the company to split its shares:
Apple, whose shares on Friday closed at $603, would overwhelm the index with a 26 percent weighting. That is double the influence of current Dow component IBM, whose $207 stock price gives it a 12 percent weighting in the index, Barron’s said.
Barron’s said the heavy weighting that Apple would command at its current share price could prove a barrier to becoming a Dow component. To guarantee a Dow spot, Barron’s said, Apple would have to split its shares by five-for-one or 10-to-one. But Barron’s noted that Apple has not split its stock since 2005.
Stanford University’s Silicon Valley Archives currently holds “the largest assembly of Apple historical materials” stored within hundreds of boxes taking up over 600 feet of shelf space in an undisclosed facility outside San Fran.
The Associated Presspublished a story today detailing their recent visit to Stanford’s Apple Collection, which contains in-house video Apple recorded in the 80s, blueprints for early Macs, user manuals, company shirts, and drafts of Steve Jobs’ speeches.
Stanford historian Leslie Berlin had this to say about the collection:
“Through this one collection you can trace out the evolution of the personal computer. These sorts of documents are as close as you get to the unmediated story of what really happened.”
While you may have heard versions of how the name Apple came to be, an interview recorded with Wozniak and Jobs in the 80s (originally meant to be an in-house video for employees) has the two men recalling the exact moment:
Woz: “I remember driving down Highway 85. We’re on the freeway, and Steve mentions, `I’ve got a name: Apple Computer.’ We kept thinking of other alternatives to that name, and we couldn’t think of anything better.”
Jobs: “And also remember that I worked at Atari, and it got us ahead of Atari in the phonebook.”
That video and others were donated to Stanford in 1997 after Jobs returned to the company and plans for an in-house Apple museum were cancelled. Also included in the collection is this “Blue Busters” Ghostbusters-style internal ad featuring Apple executives, embedded below. The ad was originally shown in October 1984 at an international sales meeting in Hawaii. Blue Busters is obviously a not so subtle reference to their biggest competitor at the time, IBM.
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, Calcalistreports 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.
Globeschimed 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.
Despite Apple vowing to audit fifteen of their suppliers following accusations of pollution from Chinese NGOs, a report from China Labor Watch says 1,000 employees of a Jingmo Electronics Corporation factory in Shenzhen staged a strike earlier this week. The factory is owned by one of the world’s largest keyboard manufacturers, Jingyuan Computer Group, and happens to be an OEM for Apple, among others including LG and IBM. The Chinese Labor Watch organization is particularly urging Apple to take responsibility:
“China Labor Watch calls upon Apple, IBM and the other clients of this factory to assume responsibility for these workers’ dissatisfaction and work with the factory to improve the working conditions in the factory. We particularly urge Apple to take responsibility, as there are more than 300 workers working on the Apple keyboard assembly line.”
The workers decided to strike over management’s decision to enforce nightly overtime, adding a 6 p.m.- 12 p.m nightly shift to their regular hours of 7-11:30 a.m. and 1-5 p.m. That accounts for approximately 120 hours of overtime per month. They were also refused the right to work this overtime on the weekends, which would have required the company to pay workers double time under Chinese Labor Law. Chinese Labor Watch explains there were other concerns raised by employees as well: Expand Expanding Close
Charlotte local news channel WCCB-TV did some snooping around the new Apple Maiden, NC data center and details the facility including the possibility that Apple may open a campus in the area on another 70 acres they’ve purchased. Expand Expanding Close
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