We’re on the ground at SXSW 2018 in Austin, Texas where Apple’s Eddy Cue is about to take the stage to discuss media curation with CNN’s Dylan Byers. The interview comes just moments after Apple announced plans to acquire digital magazine subscription service Texture, so Apple’s plans for that app will likely be the highlight of the conversation.
SXSW, the popular annual event that features film, music, media, and tech conferences and festivals, has announced its latest round of featured speakers for this year which includes Apple’s own Eddy Cue. While Apple has played its original content efforts close to the chest so far, Cue might shed more light on what we can expect from Apple in this area.
As noted on the official schedule website for the 2018 SXSW Conference & Festival held in Austin, TX, Apple’s Director of Global Accessibility Policy and Initiatives will make a public appearance at the annual event.
The latest to speak out on the Apple and FBI controversy is none other than President Obama who earlier today attended a talk at South by Southwest Interactive. While the talk was about “civic engagement in the 21st Century,” the conversation not surprisingly turned to the government’s role in the high-profile Apple and FBI case.
Obama made it clear that he isn’t behind Apple in the case, saying that tech companies shouldn’t “take an absolutist view” on encryption and encouraging them to make concessions instead of forcing Congress to pass new law:
Little-known until its debut at SXSW this weekend, Oscar-winning documentarian Alex Gibney’s “Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine” has been picked up by Magnolia Pictures for a North American theatrical release, and CNN Films for television broadcasts, Deadline Hollywood reports today. An earlier story from The Hollywood Reporter claimed that several Apple employees in attendance walked out early, and Apple’s Eddy Cue has used Twitter to denounce the film, calling it “inaccurate and mean-spirited.”
[tweet https://twitter.com/cue/status/577493714567852032 align=’center’]
The Man in the Machine includes interviews with a number of former Apple employees including Jon Rubinstein, Bob Belleville and Daniel Kottke, as well as Jobs’ ex-girlfriend Chrisann Brennan, and even video footage from a 2008 SEC deposition given by Jobs himself. Early reviews have described the documentary as “a riveting and important corrective to the myths Jobs helped to propagate,” and “unsparing portrait of Steve Jobs [that] will prove extremely displeasing to devotees.” A few representative quotes from those reviews follow…
South by Southwest (SXSW) just launched its official mobile app ahead of the festival and alongside it announced plans for the world’s largest deployment of iBeacons to offer mobile app features triggered by the Bluetooth beacons. In total, more than 1000+ beacons will be deployed to pull it all off. SXSW thinks the features will “fundamentally change attendee’s experiences” by letting mobile app users network and navigate the event.
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Over the past week, we’ve heard rumors that Apple planned “pop up” stores for displaying the new Apple Watch inside high end stores in both Paris Galeries Lafayette and London Selfridges (pictured above). Now the Austin Statesman notes that Apple has participated in SXSW in a number of ways over the past few years and it would almost be surprising if the Apple Watch wasn’t displayed in some capacity to the international SXSW Interactive audience there. Apple set up a pop-up shop for the iPad 2 during its spring launch in 2011 (pictured right).
Apple has used the festival in the past to showcase a new product (like the iPad 2) or to promote its services (like the iTunes Music Festival last year). SXSW Interactive is the perfect audience of early adopters for a product like the Apple Watch and it wouldn’t be surprising if the company offered a preview of the device there.
SXSW is an annual Music/Film/Interactive conference that runs March 13th-22nd this year, the week following the March 9th event and before the Apple Watch goes on sale in April. One SXSW event Apple Watch enthusiasts may want to check out: Wearables and the Happiness Quotient.
A possible counter-argument to an Apple Watch presence that Apple has focused on Fashion audiences and not Tech audiences for the Apple Watch launch.
Apple also plans another showcase of the Apple watch outside of the Yerba Buena Center where it will hold its Spring Forward event on March 9th.
Kanye West hasn’t been shy when it comes to expressing his opinions about Apple. Earlier this week he sat down for an interview with AdWeek and noted he thought Samsung’s deal last year with Jay-Z might have influenced Apple to invest in pop culture through its purchase of Beats. Above, Kanye expands on that thought in an interview with Bloomberg during the Cannes Creativity Festival. In the interview, while explaining that he thinks Apple didn’t see the value in investing in pop culture before the Samsung deal with Jay-Z, Kanye drives the point home by noting Apple offered artists “extra space on the iTunes page” instead of paying them to perform at the iTunes Festival.
We already knew that Apple wasn’t paying artists to perform at its iTunes Festival, which arrived in the U.S. for the first time this year during the SXSW festival in Austin, Texas. Kanye previously called out Tim Cook during one of his usual onstage rants earlier this year, but we didn’t know Apple was offering artists prime real estate on the iTunes store in exchange for their performances.
Kanye’s full quote is below:
“It showed, now that Steve has passed… It showed a number one company the importance of connecting with culture. And I know you might of heard about this thing where I was on stage calling Tim Cook out and saying why do you have these guys performing at SXSW and you don’t want to pay them. You just want to give us extra space on the iTunes page and stuff. Meanwhile, Samsung realized, the whole point of what we’re saying, is that no you have to go and pay these guys. And that culture and creativity is worth something. The best thing about the fall of Blackberry and the rise at Apple is the win for creativity…
Apple kicked off its iTunes Festival event at SXSW tonight with Apple execs Phil Schiller and Eddy Cue in the crowd. Tonight’s show will feature performances by Coldplay, Imagine Dragons, and London Grammar. The entire event is being live-streamed on a dedicated Vevo page and Apple TV channel.
The five-night event will also have performances by Kendrick Lamar, Pitbull, Keith Urban, and more. You can view the full lineup and more in the free iTunes Festival app, which launched last week.
Schiller and Cue both tweeted photos from the Imagine Dragons concert:
[tweet https://twitter.com/pschiller/status/443568910860701697 align=’center’]
[tweet https://twitter.com/cue/status/443569400159825920 align=’center’]
Ahead of this upcoming week’s iTunes Festival concert series at SXSW, Apple has added an iTunes Festival channel to the Apple TV so that users can live stream the concert’s content. Late last week, Apple released an updated version of the iTunes Festival application for the iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch. The Apple TV application is similar in style to the iOS app, and it includes a colorful logo…
As MacStories notes, an updated version of Apple’s iTunes Festival app has appeared in the App Store with an iOS 7 redesign and streaming support for next week’s iTunes Festival at SXSW (although the app does not appear ready for download just yet).
Earlier this week, John Gruber offered that Apple’s iTunes Festival app could require iOS 7.1 and suggested a correlation between the absence of both software releases. Compatibility notes, though, list iOS 7.0 is supported and some users are reporting success with downloading the app with iOS 7.0.6.
At any rate, iOS 7.1 is still expected to debut sometime this month.
On top of the many uses for iBeacons we’ve seen in retail environments, event organizers are another group that have started taking advantage of Apple’s new Bluetooth tech recently. The MLB is deploying them in stadiums to send notifications to baseball fans, CES hosted an iBeacon scavenger hunt this year, and today we’ve found out the upcoming SXSW festival where Apple is hosting its latest iTunes Festival will also be using the technology.
Eventbase, the company that has been building the official SXSW festival app for a few years now reached out to let us know it will be deploying some iBeacons around the event this year to improve the experience. Specifically, it will be using the technology to “help attendees in Austin pick up their badge faster and get more involved in the sessions they attend.” One feature in the app will allow for real-time audience interaction during sessions:
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Update: Didn’t happen. That “little birdie” is “for the birds”.
In a brief note on Daring Fireball, John Gruber makes a notable connection between Apple’s planned iTunes Festival at SXSW next week and the pending release of iOS 7.1:
Apple’s first iTunes Festival in the U.S. starts a week from today at SXSW in Austin. Apple is going to stream the performances to iOS devices using an app, but I’ve heard from a little birdie that the app requires iOS 7.1 (which explains why the app isn’t out yet). That means iOS 7.1 should ship any day now.
The fifth and most recent developer preview of iOS 7.1 was released four weeks ago from today, and we reported a few days later that the public release was slated for March.
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