Tech Industry

As colleague, Seth Weintraub points out – the iPad is an important Apple product – so much so it has just acquired its very own iFund.

CNET and E! Online co-founder Kevin Wendle has teamed with MusicNation co-founder Daniel Klaus to form AppFund, a company designed to help entrepreneurs create and launch iPad and other Tablet based applications, reports TechCrunch.

AppFund will offer funds and advice to help developers build the apps the iPad needs in order to become what it can be – those individualised yet essential apps which will help the product become tool of choice across multiple industries and consumer groups.

From its NYC HQ, the fund will offer between $5,000 and $500,000 to start-ups getting into developing for the Apple product, with fundage granted dependent on just how complex the mooted App may be.

There

With a pinch of salt, maybe, but we

We were all impressed by AT&T

Perhaps the world

Lots of insider slips behind the Apple curtain this morning, with news of an additional iPhone manufacturing contract, more iPad component makers named and rumours Apple’s moving to favour USB 3.0.

Pegatron Technology has reportedly landed a contract to undertake OEM production of the next-generation iPhone scheduled for launch later in the year, joining Foxconn Electronics which manufactures current iPhones for Apple, according to industry sources.

Taiwan-based Radiant Opto-Electronics will ship a total of 300,000 LED backlight units (BLUs) for the Apple iPad in January, according to a Chinese-language report on Economic Daily News (EDN), adding 10 percent to its revenues that month.

Passive component makers are also expected to see strong first-quarter revenues driven by increased demand from Apple|: Yageo, Cyntec and Mag.Layers Scientific-Technics are all set to benefit from inclusion of their components within the iPad.

Meanwhile, Apple might be about to climb aboard the USB 3.0 train – or maybe it isn

Apple

Kevin Lynch, CTO of Adobe penned a post on Adobe’s blog today defending Flash as the de-facto standard on the web for interactivity and video playing.  Lynch comes to Adobe from Macromedia where he was Chief Software Architect and obviously has been with Flash longer than even Adobe.  Therefore, it isn’t surprising to hear him say that he doesn’t believe HTML5 will replace Flash at anytime in the foreseeable future. 

Adobe supports HTML and its evolution and we look forward to adding more capabilities to our software around HTML as it evolves. If HTML could reliably do everything Flash does that would certainly save us a lot of effort, but that does not appear to be coming to pass. Even in the case of video, where Flash is enabling over 75% of video on the Web today, the coming HTML video implementations cannot agree on a common format across browsers, so users and content creators would be thrown back to the dark ages of video on the Web with incompatibility issues.The productivity and expressiveness of Flash remain advantages for the Web community even as HTML advances.

The Flash team will drive innovation over the coming years as they have over the past decade to enable experiences that aren’t otherwise possible. With the ability to update the majority of Web clients in less than a year, Flash can make this innovation available to our customers much more quickly than HTML across a variety of browsers.

The general consensus in the Apple community (including CEO Steve Jobs) is that Flash can die, the sooner the better. But does that mean Adobe has to die with it?  Adobe makes authoring tools which could be used to make HTML5 applications instead of Flash applications (though if Adobe Dreamweaver’s capability in the HTML world is any indication, they have a long way to go).

John Nack, Principal Project Manager for another Adobe product, Photoshop,  says precisely this:

Adobe isn’t in the Flash business. Seriously.  It isn’t in the Photoshop business, or the Acrobat business, or the [take-your-pick product name] business, either.  It’s in the helping people communicate business.  We’d all do well to remember that, because it means that the company’s fortunes are tied to building great tools for solving problems. If we do that well, we prosper; if we do it poorly, we fail. When we get too wrapped up in this technology or that, we lose touch with the problems that we (and more importantly our customers) are trying to solve.

The equation is simple. Adobe wants to make money selling tools, so it needs our customers’ clients to pay for work done with the tools. Clients won’t pay if their customers can’t see the work made with the tools. Therefore customers, clients, and by extension Adobe need a way to see the work, be that videos, interactive pieces, or anything else.

Just like the new Flash tools have the ability to export to moving GIF, flat HTML or even iPhone App, they could also be used to export to HTML5.  Here’s an example of video entirely done in HTML5.  Why can’t I take a video file on my computer and embed it as such?  Somewhere buried in the code on that page there is a MP4 just like the ones on my computer.  

Don’t worry.  There will soon be tools to embed your HTML5 video into your websites.  In fact, I’d be surprised if YouTube and the other video sharing sites don’t have a “Embed HTML5” code spitter-outter this year.  It is clear that Adobe, if they want to stay relevant, will start building tools like this.

Assuming Apple

Apple

Is Apple a confused fruit? Nokia thinks so, with the company

Weekend updates on Apple

Acer Taiwan president Scott Lin has confirmed his company doesn

It certainly appears that Apple is working on and prototyping an instant messaging client for future version of iPhone OS. Text strings found in the latest iPhone OS 3.2 beta appear to reference “ChatKit” which was an Objective-C based IM client framework developed by Adium but since left for dead.

The strings found in the SDK reveal that a future IM client developed by Apple might allow users to send pictures (similar to iChat) and would have a similar interface to the included Messages (SMS and MMS) app on the iPhone. The triggering indication of Apple working on an IM client in this text string is the references to the phrase “Buddy Messages.”

While this possible future IM client similar to iChat, with the User Interface of the iPhone Messages app, is referred to within the SDK’s core files, there is no IM client on the iPhone OS 3.2 simulator. Apple may very well be working on an IM client to work hand in hand with their Push Notification system on the iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch but only time will tell if this ever happens.

All-new from the

Apple

Apple has finally introduced dedicated iPad pages to the UK version of its website – but these make no mention of iBooks and continue to neglect to disclose product price.

Steve Jobs made iBooks a prominent feature of his iPad launch presentation, but Apple is not saying when it will acquire the licences necessary for selling ebooks in the UK and elsewhere outside the US.

The WiFi iPad is scheduled to go on sale in the UK and the US at the end of March, there

Huge pre-launch hype might almost have reached

Apple

It

Scrollmotion is the largest publisher to Apple’s App Store by far. 

We currently offer over 2,500 best-selling books in the App Store, and are thrilled to announce we will soon be bringing more than a million books, as well as more than 50 major magazines and over 170 daily newspapers to the iPhone. Our content partners include most of the leading book, newspaper and magazine publishers in the United States, as well as a growing portfolio of film, television, and educational clients.

With their Iceberg reader software they are able to take a book and turn it into a interactive app quickly and at the same time add lots of interactive media.  They’ve also got deals with all of the major publishing houses so it would make sense that theyd be involved with the Tablet’s eReading functionality, right?

I’d heard earlier that they were being bypassed by Apple, even though Apple brought them to stage at last year’s WWDC where they showed off the unreleased features of iPhone OS 3.0  (in-app purchases, etc.) for Iceberg reader.

The strange thing is that, when asked to comment, I got this reply:

Interesting

Imagine if your iPhone were natively capable of accessing information about points of interest in various locations, had the ability to poll data pertaining to train (or other) times, and had social networking features to boot?

All these features are available via individual apps, but a new Apple patent filing seems to put them all together, as spotted by the patent-curious Patently Apple.