With Apple retail stores, carriers, and other retailers taking delivery of their launch-day iPhone 5 stocks overnight last night, hundreds of the units have been stolen in several incidents on opposite sides of the globe. While security is tight at Apple's own retail stores where staff were on hand all night to set up window displays and demo units, carriers whose retail stores were left unattended during the night have been the primary target for thieves.
The Wall Street Journal reports that a total of 191 units were stolen from three separate shops run by carrier partners KDDI and Softbank in the Osaka area in Japan. Police have not confirmed that the burglaries are connected and are still investigating security footage and other evidence. The majority of the stolen units came from a Softbank outlet that was cleaned out of its entire stock of iPhone 5 units.[A] Softbank Corp store in the western district of Osaka city was wiped clean of its iPhone 5 stock. All 116 devices were stolen, including one store display. The police said they were taken from the locked backroom within a four minute span from 4:24 a.m. as shown on security camera footage. The video recording also showed there were three culprits, all likely to be male. The police said it is uncertain whether the robbery is related to the incident in Ibaraki, located about 20 minutes away by car.In the United Kingdom, The Independent reports that over 250 iPhone 5 units were stolen from an O2 shop in London in what appears to have been an inside job.Officers want to speak to Usman Sethi, 23, of Audley Gardens, Ilford, east London, who works as an assistant at the store.
The phones were taken at 1.30am, with a quantity of cash which was also stolen from the shop's safe. [...]
Police also want to speak to Mr Sethi, a Pakistani national, in connection with the theft of jewellery belonging to a family member from his home address in Audley Gardens.At a median selling price of £599, the 252 stolen iPhones would be valued at approximately £150,000 or nearly $250,000. read more..
Wednesday 3 October 2012
Security Camera Footage-Apple Retail Stores-Iphone 5
Discovery Networks Is Brightcove’s First Partner For Its Dual-Screen Apple TV Service, Live First In Italy
Back in June, Brightcove unveiled a new strategy to take its App Cloud development platform open source, and at the same time it introduced a new dual-screen Apple TV feature aimed at growing its business on connected TVs. Today, Brightcove is announcing the very first implementation of that, with Discovery Networks International, which will be using it first in Italy. Jeremy Allaire, the CEO of Brightcove, tells TechCrunch that this is a global deal with Discovery, meaning that if all goes well, Discovery could take the features to other markets where it operates in Europe, the U.S. and the rest of the world.The new service will run on iPad and iPhone apps from DMAX Italy, a free-to-air channel operated by Discovery with 20 million subscribers. And it will give users the ability to initiate an action on, say, an iPhone or iPad, and then shift that content directly on to the larger screen of the TV using Apple's AirPlay technology. This makes dual-screen functionality a step beyond companion apps -- now very common in the TV world -- in that it gives users the ability to actually port features and functions from one screen directly to the other. read more..
Friday 28 September 2012
Juergen Teller-Belstaff
Dînatoire? What's a dînatoire? It was the question of the night in Milan,with a pair of overlapping dinners celebrating Belstaff's new store andJuergen Teller's latest exhibition The Girl With the Broken Nose.Dînatoire, it turns out, is a fancy word for buffet. But the virtue ofthese parties was their casual,drop-in-and-stuff-yourself-silly-with-prosciutto-and-prosecco vibes. AtDal Bolognese, we learned that Martin Cooper, the man who rebuiltBelstaff with its new owner Harry Slatkin in, oh, about a minute, hasnever, not even once, been on a motorcycle. "If I become a real biker, itmay blow the fantasy," he said. The revelation at the party Moschinohosted for Teller at Da Giacomo Arengario was the photographer's garb.Famous for wearing nylon running shorts everywhere, including to thebrand's fashion show this morning, he was sporting long pants for once.Why? He had his mum with him.
—Nicole Phelps read more..
Monday 24 September 2012
Compatible Devices-Chitika-Ios
While this is based upon info taken from people using Chitika's service, we've found overall trends are quite nicely tracked by this data. The latest report says that a full 15 percent of eligible iPhones, iPod touches and iPads are already running iOS 6. Considering it was released just yesterday? That's impressive. As TechCrunch points out, after two months of Jelly Bean (the latest Android OS) availability, Google has seen an adoption rate of only 1.5%. Apple customers are a little quicker to react and install whenever a new iOS appears, it seems. Of course, considering iOS 6 was Apple's first full version update over the air (5.0.1 saw the debut of OTA updates), adoption is likely that much faster as a result.Ad network Chitika reports iOS 6 on 15% of compatible devices originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Thu, 20 Sep 2012 15:15:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.Source | Permalink | Email this | Comments read more..
Thursday 20 September 2012
Bingo Simulator-Ipad App Store-Ipad Devices
If you had to take a guess at what has been at or near the top-grossing spot in the U.S. iPad App Store for the past month without looking, I'd bet a bingo simulator wouldn't be high on your list. But India's BitRhymes has proven that in fact users are interested in playing good old-fashioned bingo on their ultra-modern iPad devices, and revealed to TechCrunch that it's currently tracking to realize an annual run rate of $45 million in revenue on the back of its premiere title, Bingo Bash for Facebook, iPad and iPhone.That one of the best-performing social games on the App Store and Facebook right now isn't from someone like Zynga is a sign that there's still plenty of opportunity to be had in this space, but that it might be best explored by peering into corners that don't immediately seem like winners. Bingo is traditionally seen as a game for octogenarians, but BitRhymes' CEO Sumit Gupta said in an interview that surprisingly, there's been lots of interest from younger demographics, and users have predominantly been women. read more..
Saturday 15 September 2012
Party Monster-Forrest Gump-Karlie Kloss-Frank Ocean-Party Favor
Joan Smalls' favorite track on Frank Ocean's Channel Orange is "Forrest Gump." Karlie Kloss likes "Thinkin Bout You" best. They were the two songs that Ocean performed at J. Mendel's party last night, perched on a stool literally inches from the girls. The models were in heaven. So was everyone else with the good fortune to be on hand for a surprise performance by the man with the album of the year. So how did it happen? Gilles Mendel knew Ocean was in town for SNL so he asked him. Simple. The designer was a hands-in-the-air-like-he-just-don't-care party monster with his gorgeous gazelle of a girlfriend, Kylie Case, who gives La Kloss a run for her money in the tall-gal sweepstakes. Five generations of Mendels built the family business in Paris. Then Gilles flipped operations to New York. Now he's on a mission to reintroduce J. Mendel to the French. "It's a bizarre, exciting moment," he enthused. I think he was talking about his business, but his words worked just as well for his party.
When designers Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez finally made their way to Irving Place for their own post-show shindig, it was hugs and high-fives all around. "We're ready to blow off a little steam," McCollough told Style.com, trying on one of the black baseball caps with cat embroidery that everyone received as a party favor. "We've been in the office a lot, so now we're going to have our belated summer." Boys, those extra hours paid off. "Every item was special, but I loved it as a collective," Kate Bosworth said. "It felt very edited and precise."
The Proenza bash started winding down around 1 a.m., but late nighters were still going strong at Magnus Berger and Tenzin Wild's The Last Magazine bash at the new Pink Elephant. Watching Phillip Lim, Prabal Gurung, and Richard Chai on the dance floor, off-duty DJ Chelsea Leyland said, "My phrase for the night: Hashtag don't go home."
—Tim Blanks and Kristin Studeman read more..
Wednesday 5 September 2012
Gift Certificates-Profitability-Startup
GiftRocket, a 2011 Y Combinator grad, is a simple P2P digital gifting service that lets users send and receive digital gift cards via email. Originally, the startup was focused around location-based gifting, allowing friends to send each other digital gift cards that could be accessed once they checked-in to a certain location. With some angel funding behind it, the startup pivoted to a more universal use case, becoming a way to easily gift cash within a digital eCard.Co-founder Kapil Kale tells us that, since that change, people have begun to use the service as a replacement for traditional gift cards and gift certificates and usage has increased as a result. Today, the startup is announcing that it's profitable thanks to a $2 million in sales in 2012 (and what he expects to be $5 million run rate by December). It's also making some additions and changes to its service, including an API, bulk orders and reduced fees. read more..
Unconditional Clearance-Mobile Payments-Vodafone
A mobile payment joint venture from the UK's biggest carriers, first announced over a year ago, today finally received "unconditional" clearance from European regulators. The move means that now Vodafone, Telefonica's O2 and Everything Everywhere (the JV from T-Mobile and Orange) can proceed developing a cross-carrier mobile payments platform -- not unlike the Isis initiative in the U.S. They say they will be getting the service "up and running as quickly as possible," although no launch dates or other specifics -- including a name -- have been announced. In other words, now the hard work begins.Given that one of the biggest pain points in mobile payments has been lack of interoperability between platforms, this is potentially a big step in helping such services grow: the idea is that with a bigger potential audience to serve, bigger merchants, banks, payment providers, developers and handset makers will be more likely to make the necessary investments in infrastructure themselves. read more..
Tuesday 4 September 2012
Silicon Valley Startups-Entrepreneurs-Campaigns-Steli-Sins
Editor's note: Steli is the Co-Founder / Chief Hustler of ElasticSales and an advisor to several startups and entrepreneurs. You can follow Steli on Twitter here.At ElasticSales, we’ve had the honor to create and run sales campaigns for some of the hottest Silicon Valley startups today. We’ve also consulted with dozens more each week to learn the challenges their sales team face. We realize we can’t work with every startup just yet, but we have seen the same, avoidable mistakes made by many young companies as they conduct their sales campaigns.Below are “7 Deadly Sales Sins” committed by many startups today. Some of these may sound familiar to you, but by identifying and address these mistakes, you will help your company succeed. read more..
Monday 3 September 2012
Productivity Apps-The Killer Apps-Windows 8-Microsoft
Love it or hate it, but Windows 8 will soon arrive on computers around you. While virtually all of your old programs will likely run without a hitch in desktop mode, it's the Windows 8 Metro interface (or whatever Microsoft now wants to call it), that brings the biggest changes to the OS for users and developers alike. What Microsoft really needs right now more than anything else, though, is applications that can showcase the power of the new Windows 8 user interface. The current crop of apps in the Windows Store is a hodgepodge of games, travel and productivity apps that, for the most part, look fine but aren't very interesting (and that includes Microsoft's own default apps for Windows 8 Metro). What's still missing is a few killer apps for Windows 8 Metro that will get consumers interested in the platform. read more..
Sunday 2 September 2012
Recovery Solutions-Social Networking-Google Apps
Editor's note: Rob May is the CEO and co-founder of Backupify, the leading provider of backup and recovery solutions for Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications.Google recently announced that it will begin offering corporate control features for its Google+ social network to businesses for free -- at least for a while. If you run a Google Apps domain, you can set up domain-wide restrictions on how your users interact with Google+. Your users can also make "restricted" posts to Google+ which are visible only to members of your domain. It's social networking, but with corporate oversight.That's sounds a lot like Yammer (which Microsoft recently bought for $1.2 billion) and Salesforce Chatter: Sharing streams designed for employee collaboration rather than personal socialization. It sounds less like Facebook, the undisputed heavyweight in social networking that Google+ was supposedly intended to depose. read more..
Diagnostics Software-Prototype
As noted by 9to5Mac, an early iPhone 4 prototype has shown up on eBay running Apple's in-house diagnostics software.
A number of high-quality photos are included with the listing, showing a complete lack of Apple branding on the exterior of the device. Most notably, the Apple logo has been replaced with a distinct logo that was previously seen in a Twitpic posting in February 2010. The standard "iPhone" text on the rear of the device has also been replaced by "Prototype", along with text noting that the device has not been approved by the Federal Communications Commission and can not be sold until such authorization is granted.
Sonny Dickson has also provided an overview video of the device showing off several of the features of the device including the software and a lack of screws on the bottom of the device that is consistent with some of the earlier leaked prototypes.
As seen in the video, the serial number of the device indicates that it was manufactured during the 43rd week of 2009, which corresponds to late October, nearly eight months before the device was made available to the public.
The auction for the prototype currently carries a single bid of $4,500, with the seller advertising in the listing that a $10,000 offer would be acceptable to halt the auction process and simply purchase the device.
Update: The listing has been removed. read more..
Friday 31 August 2012
Facebook-Ios
Facebook has released a completely rewritten iOS app that is significantly faster than the prior version. With more and more Facebook users accessing the social network via mobile, the company views having a fast mobile app as increasingly essential. News that the update was forthcoming was first reported back in June.
With the updated version, Facebook's engineers have dumped the HTML5-based app and rebuilt it using Objective-C programming to make it perform more like a native iOS app. From All Things D:
“People have different expectations when it comes to using Facebook for iOS,” Mick Johnson, Facebook iOS mobile product manager, told me in an interview this morning. “They expect a level of performance and speed that just wasn’t there.”
Johnson says that the largest pain points — scrolling through the feed, photos and loading the app — will all be much faster, by a factor of three. Also, Facebook mobile developers working on the three separate iOS apps — Facebook, Camera and Messenger — all all now sharing a code base with each other, so Messenger and Camera are actually running inside of the proper Facebook app, bringing many of those features to Facebook for iOS. (As a bonus, a shared code base means faster development cycles, so we’ll probably see improvements sooner.)Facebook for iPhone is available free via the App Store. [Direct Link] read more..
Aalto University In Finland-Windows Phone-Microsoft-Incubator-Nokia
Next week Nokia and Microsoft are expected to unveil the first handset(s) running on Microsoft's Windows Phone 8 platform, and today comes news about the apps they hope will lure in more users to buy them. AppCampus, an $23 million (€18 million) JV between Microsoft, Nokia and Aalto University in Finland, first announced in May, to foster more app development on the platform, said it has doled out the first $1 million-plus of their budget on 36 developers out of a total of 900 submissions, an average of $30,000 per app, although individual investments over the course of the JV will be between $25,000 and $88,000.Pekka Sivonen, Head of AppCampus, tells me the apps are expected to be coming out starting in October, and will run exclusively on Windows Phone and "other Nokia platforms" for their first six months -- potentially touching some 500 million devices out in the market today. read more..
Thursday 30 August 2012
Windows Applications-Parallels Desktop-Internet Explorer-Google Chrome Os-Mountain Lion
Parallels announced the availability of Parallels 8 upgrades for the Mac for existing Parallels Desktop customers. Parallels 8 is the latest version of their virtualization software that allows Mac users to run other operating systems, such as Windows, alongside OS X. “People don’t need to make an either/or choice between Mac and Windows because Macs running Parallels Desktop 8 empower people to simultaneously use applications that best suit their needs – regardless of whether it’s an app for OS X, Windows, Google Chrome OS, Ubuntu, or even Android,” said Parallels CEO Birger Steen.
New features in Parallels 8 includes OS X Mountain Lion integration as well as Retina support and performance boosts:- Speak, don’t type – Use the new Mountain Lion Dictation tool across both Windows and Mac environments
- Open in Internet Explorer – When a website doesn’t render well within Safari, launch it in Internet Explorer with a click of a button
- Parallels Wizard – Download and automatically install Windows or other operating systems (OSes) including Google Chrome OS, Ubuntu and Android on your Mac.
- Windows apps on OS X Launchpad – Add Windows applications to the Mountain Lion or Lion Launchpad to quickly launch Mac and Windows applications used most
- Consolidated notifications – Integration of Windows notifications into the Mac OS X Notification Center makes it easy to stay updated on Windows virtual machine operations
- Mountain Lion gestures for Windows apps – Enjoy seamless integration of Mountain Lion gestures with Windows apps such as pinch to zoom, Mission Control, three-finger drag, swipe between full-screen apps, two-finger scroll, Launchpad and rotate
- Retina display support – Enjoy stunning Retina display resolution in Windows OS and Windows applications to see crisper fonts, vivid photos, images and animations
- Improved Parallels Desktop 8 performance - up to 30 percent faster for input/output (I/O) operations, 30 percent faster for games and up to 25 percent faster for virtual machine operations such as boot, suspend, shutdown and resume, when compared to Parallels Desktop 7 for MacParallels 8 will be available starting today as an upgrade for existing Parallels Desktop users. (Parallels' website not showing version 8 at time of publication) Upgrades are priced at $49.99.
The full version will become available for $79.99 both online and in retail stores starting on September 4th. C ustomers who purchased Parallels Desktop 7 for Mac on or after July 25, 2012, are eligible for a free upgrade. read more..
Wednesday 29 August 2012
Mountain Lion Os X
Earlier this month, Arstechnica had reported that many users had found a significant decrease in battery life after upgrading to OS X 10.8 (Mountain Lion). Ars writer Chris Foresman, after extended testing, discovered that the battery life of his Retina MacBook Pro review unit dropped 38% from its previous 8-hours.The same findings were reported by many others in Apple's own support forums, and there were some reports that the development versions of OS X 10.8.1 may have addressed this issue.
MacObserver has conducted battery life tests on the final release build of OS X 10.8.1 to see if there had indeed been any improvement. Their testing process included using an Automator script that launched several apps and navigated to websites. The script would cycle this process continuously. The tests were run on a 2011 Macbook Pro. Here are their findings:
First, they were able to confirm the drop in battery life when going from OS X 10.7.4 to OS X 10.8. The drop they measured was 33% (2 hours and 10 minutes) just from upgrading OS X to 10.8. The "No WiFi Icon" was a "fix" of suggested by one of their readers, but showed no appreciable effect. They did find that OS X 10.8.1 (beta and release) builds did improve the battery life stats, adding as much as 52 minutes in their testing. The overall numbers, however, are still well under their battery life measurements in OS X 10.7.4 (Lion).
Apple is currently testing OS X 10.8.2, but there's been no word if that build helps further improve battery times back towards OS X Lion levels. read more..
Java Runtime Environment-Latest Version Of Java-Security Vulnerability-Oracle
Just two weeks after Oracle officially took over responsibility for Java on OS X with the launch of Java SE 7 Update 6, a new Java vulnerability has been discovered to pose a significant threat to systems running the software. Krebs on Security highlighted the issue yesterday, noting that it affects all versions of Java 7 on most browsers.News of the vulnerability (CVE-2012-4681) surfaced late last week in a somewhat sparse blog post by FireEye, which said the exploit seemed to work against the latest version of Java 7, which is version 1.7, Update 6. This morning, researchers Andre’ M. DiMino & Mila Parkour published additional details on the targeted attacks seen so far, confirming that the zero-day affects Java 7 Update 0 through 6, but does not appear to impact Java 6 and below.
Initial reports indicated that the exploit code worked against all versions of Internet Explorer, Firefox and Opera, but did not work against Google Chrome. But according to Rapid 7, there is a Metasploit module in development that successfully deploys this exploit against Chrome (on at least Windows XP).The report notes that Oracle is moving to a quarterly update cycle for Java, meaning that the next regularly-scheduled update to Java SE 7 is not planned until October, but it is unclear how quickly the company will move to address the issue. In the interim, some security experts are developing an unofficial patch while users are advised to simply disable Java if they do not need it active on their systems.
Computerworld reports that the issue does indeed affect fully-updated Macs running Java 7 on top of OS X Mountain Lion.David Maynor, CTO of Errata Security, confirmed that the Metasploit exploit -- which was published less than 24 hours after the bug was found -- is effective against Java 7 installed on OS X Mountain Lion.
"This exploit works on OS X if you are running the 1.7 JRE [Java Runtime Environment]," said Maynor in an update to an earlier blog post.
JRE 1.7 includes the most-current version of Java 7, dubbed "Update 6," that was released earlier this month.Both Safari 6 and Firefox 14 have been found to be vulnerable to the issue on OS X systems.
Apple has of course had its own issues with Java vulnerabilities, most recently with the Flashback malware that was able to infect over 600,000 Macs by taking advantage of an exploit in Java 6 that had already been patched by Oracle for most platforms but not by Apple for OS X. It is due to smaller, previous incidents similar to Flashback that Apple had already been moving to shift responsibility for Java updates to Oracle, a move that is taking place with Java 7. But while Mac users will now receive Java updates simultaneously with users on other platforms, Java remains one of the highest-profile targets for attackers seeking to compromise systems on a broad basis.
Update: CNET noted earlier today that most Mac users are not currently susceptible to the issue, as Java 7 is not installed by default on Macs. The current version of Java installed on Mac remains Java 6 for the time being, so users would have to have manually updated to Java 7 in order for their systems to be vulnerable. read more..
Tuesday 28 August 2012
Professional Music Producers-Electronic Music Producer-Software Programs-Paul Oakenfold
Historically there's been a pretty high barrier to entry when it comes to making electronic music. The standard tools used to create beats are software programs things like Traktor and Ableton Live, desktop programs aimed at professional music producers that have tons of complicated features (and pricetags that start in the hundreds of dollars.) They're great tools for pros, but they're still not exactly beginner friendly. That's where Beatlab, a San Francisco startup run by Jonathan Baudanza, has come in with a much more lightweight and low maintenance option. And this week, the site is having its first brush with the big time: Beatlab is partnering with famed electronic music producer and DJ Paul Oakenfold to hold a remix contest. read more..
Saturday 25 August 2012
Intellectual Exercise-Iphone-Video
The developer of the iPhone game Ninja Fish has released a video showing what the game would look like on a next-generation iPhone with a taller screen. The developer doesn't have any special information about the next iPhone, but is sharing the video as an intellectual exercise to show how games could look on the larger screen.
Ninja Fish for iPhone is available in both a free, ad-supported version and a $0.99 paid version from the App Store. read more..
Vmware
VMware on Thursday morning announced the launch of Fusion 5, the latest generation of the popular and well-reviewed app that lets users run Windows on their Mac computers. read more..
Entertainment System-Troubleshooting-Mountain Lion-Electronics-Navigation
The navigation and entertainment system interfaces most cars provide lack elegance or any indication that the people building them have actually spent time using them in an running vehicle. read more..
Bugs "Fixes: Troubleshooting Mountain Lion
The good news: The latest version of OS X appears to be a generally stable update. But that doesn't mean a few bugs can't crop here and there. Ted Landau looks at a few issues you may encounter when running Mountain Lion. read more..
Friday 24 August 2012
Presumptive Republican Nominee-Android Operating System-Mitt Romney-Dominance
Beth Myers, the head of Mitt Romney’s secretive vice presidential search, kept the mystery alive Friday when she gave a “Friday Follow” shout out to a number of potential running mates for the presumptive Republican nominee. Tweeting from the handle @BethMyers2012, Myers, who only has... read more..
Android dominance increases worldwide
Research firm IDC says Google's Android operating system has extended its dominance in the smartphone market largely because of the success of Samsung's line of phones that run the software. IDC says Samsung and other phone makers shipped nearly 105 million Android smartphones in the second quarter. read more..
Storage Market-Investments-Lightspeed-Positions-Lvp
Lightspeed Venture Partners (LVP) has had a phenomenal run in the next generation storage market. In the past 12 to 14 months, four of its portfolio companies have been acquired and one has gone to IPO. read more..
Mobile Device-Iphone App-Stitch-Video
More and more, people are shooting videos on their phones. But once the video is done, what do they do with it? For most users, those videos sit there, unused and unshared, on the mobile device. A few startups have emerged to help users create more entertaining videos and share them with friends. The latest in this batch is Lumify, which has built an iPhone app that creates awesome 20-second videos that can be quickly and easily uploaded to Facebook.The Lumify iPhone app, which is available on the App Store today, provides one of the easiest ways to automatically edit videos together. All users have to do is pick a few pieces of video from their Camera Rolls, choose to "Lumify" those videos, and pick a soundtrack to run in the background. The app then stitches together a montage of that video goodness. read more..
Thursday 23 August 2012
Consolidated Revenue-Quarter Revenues-Server Business-Deterioration
Dell had a tough second quarter with revenues down 8% as "deterioration," proved worse than expected. Revenues were $14.5 billion compared to $15.7 billion in the same quarter last year. Third quarter revenues are expected to be down an additional 2 to 5%.Dell's poor results show how quickly the market is shifting to a post-PC economy. Reflecting that was the contrasting increase in the company's server business. Dell reported that its enterprise solutions and services revenue grew 6% to $4.9 billion. That revenue made up 34% of Dell’s consolidated revenue and more than 50% of its margin. Dell said that business is approaching a $20 billion annual run rate.Server and networking revenue grew 14 percent. read more..
Mendel Rosenblum-Angel Investors-Mayfield Fund-Diane Greene-Investment
CloudPhysics has raised $2.5 million from the Mayfield Fund and VMware Co-Founders Diane Greene and Mendel Rosenblum among other angel investors. The company will use the investment to build out an analytics platform for monitoring performance of a new emerging class of data center technology.This is an interesting play. CloudPhysics two co-founders are former high-ranking VMware executives John Blumenthal and Irfan Ahmad. Both have been working as entrepreneurs in residence at the Mayfield Fund, developing CloudPhysics. Their pedigree is confirmed by the prestigious backers who have come forward as investors. This is in particular reference to Greene and Rosenblum, who are married and have had quite a run since starting VMware. Nicira, the network virtualization company, is Greene's most recent investment to show great returns. The company sold last month to VMware for $1.26 billion. read more..
Cloud Storage-Samsung-Yandex-Russia
Yandex, Russia's biggest search company, today is making two key moves to ramp up Yandex.Disk, its foray into cloud storage services. Today, it is announcing that Samsung will preload Yandex.Disk on to its Series 5 range of Ultrabooks, starting in Russia. And on top of that Yandex is adding English-language support to the service -- an indication that Yandex is now setting its sights on taking Yandex.Disk international.The Samsung deal will see consumers who buy the new Ultrabooks before December 31 get access to 250GB of storage. (The Ultrabooks go on sale this week.) This is a big premium on the regular amount of free storage that Yandex.Disk has been offering users to-date: since the service first launched in April, Yandex has capped free storage at 10GB. read more..
Tuesday 21 August 2012
Population Of Women-Fashion Runways-Clothing-Shopping
Newsflash: Not everyone wants to look like a Kardashian.Body-hugging outfits that show some skin are what's front-and-center on celebrities and fashion runways, so those designs are often highlighted on e-commerce sites that deal in women's clothing. But in the real world, there is a huge population of women who -- for reasons related to work, religion, or even just personal taste -- seek out clothing that is on the conservative side. Fashion and trends are just as important to these shoppers, so they want to buy the same designers found on mainstream and high-end e-commerce sites, but often they have to sift through pages of low cut tops and above-the-knee dresses to find items that fit their needs.That's where a new site called Mode-sty wants to help. Mode-sty (pronounced mod-stee), which is currently in beta mode running individual flash sales as it builds out its full retail site, seeks to stock women's clothing that is conservative but still on-trend with the latest fashions. read more..
Sunday 19 August 2012
Blood Pressure Monitor-Personal Fitness-Heart Health-Companion
I'm a big fan of the Withings line of personal health devices -- over the years, I've purchased one of their Wi-Fi Body Scales and a Blood Pressure Monitor. The devices are great, and it's nice (and sometimes frustrating) to see how your health is doing over time. But the stats that were provided did little to motivate me to really exercise more, eat less, and even care about taking my blood pressure daily. The completely new Withings Health Companion app (free) is designed to not only monitor your health, but motivate you to do something about it. Unlike the previous WiScale app, which just tracked weight and BP and is the tool with which you take your blood pressure, the Withings Health Companion app lets you set goals and reminders. Upon launching the app, you see a "butterfly" with four wings -- one cyan, one orange, one magenta, and one green. Each wing is associated with a different health factor -- sleep, activity, heart, and weight. The idea is that you should try to eventually "fill" each wing with color, indicating that you're managing sleep, activity, your heart health, and your weight. Gallery: Withings Health Companion App To do this, the Withings Health Companion tries to "turn long-term goals into small achievable targets, and monitor your weekly progress toward your goals." In my personal case, I am able to monitor my heart health (BP and heart rate) using the Withings Blood Pressure Monitor and add my weight to the app every day using the Wi-Fi Body Scale. For capturing activity, I have now set up RunKeeper to report my activities to the app. I wish that there was a way to send info from my FitBit, which I wear constantly, to the app. The last item, sleep, requires input from other devices made by BodyMedia and Zeo. Once again, I'd prefer to have my sleep information sent to the Withings Health Companion app from the FitBit, which also tracks that info. There doesn't appear to be a way of adding my nightly sleep information to the app manually, which is somewhat irritating. Since I'm not exactly thrilled about having to spend a minimum of US$149 for yet another monitoring device, I'm hoping that FitBit and Withings will work out a way for the FitBit data to be used by the Health Companion. Of course, I could use the FitBit website to monitor all of this, since I could get activity readings and sleep information from the FitBit and weight data transferred from the Withings scale, but there's no way to track blood pressure. Sigh -- it's like these companies all want to get you tied into their particular ecosystem and don't want to make it easy for you to choose the combination of apps and devices to track your health. At this point, one of the "wings" of the butterfly will always be withered, since this app won't let me add my sleep information. I do, however, like the way that the app displays all pertinent health information on one screen and reminds me to take readings or to exercise. Do you have a favorite app or mobile website for tracking your health and personal fitness? Tell us about it in the comments.Withings Health Companion app: A new way to look at personal fitness originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Sat, 18 Aug 2012 18:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.Source | Permalink | Email this | Comments read more..
Saturday 18 August 2012
Stock Dividend-Stock Buyback-Stock Price-Apple
After setting a record high close yesterday, Apple's stock today has extended its strong run that has been in place since last month's disappointing earnings numbers, pushing through to set a new all-time intraday high. The stock hit a new high of $644.13 per share just minutes ago, besting the previous all-time high of $644.00 set on April 10.
The move has also pushed Apple's market capitalization above $600 billion for the first time since April 10, also marking a 23% increase in stock price since the bottom of this dip came at $522.18 during trading on May 18.
Apple's new all-time high comes a day after the company issued its first quarterly stock dividend since 1995, giving shareholders $2.65 per share as one piece of the company's strategy for handling its massive stockpile of cash. Investors had been calling for a dividend for quite some time as Apple's cash hoard approached and then exceeded $100 billion, with the company relenting in a March announcement in which the company outlined its belief that it will have enough cash on hand to meet its needs for the foreseeable future. The company also instituted a $10 billion stock buyback program intended to offset dilution coming from stock grants and employee stock purchases. read more..
The Cloud Gaming Company-Intellectual Property-Reliable Source-Liability
We're hearing from a reliable source that OnLive's founder and CEO Steve Perlman finally decided to make an exit -- and in the process, is screwing the employees who helped build the company and brand. The cloud gaming company reportedly had several suitors over the last few years (perhaps including Microsoft) but Perlman reportedly held tight control over the company, apparently not wanting to sell or share any of OnLive's secret sauce.Our source tells us that the buyer wants all of OnLive's assets -- the intellectual property, branding, and likely patents -- but the plan is to keep the gaming company up and running. However, OnLive management cleaned house today, reportedly firing nearly the entire staff, and we hear it was done just to reduce the company's liability, thus reducing employee equity to practically zero. Yeah, it's a massive dick move. read more..
Friday 17 August 2012
Mac Blu-ray Player software plays HD movies on your Mac
Want to play a Blu-ray disc on your Mac? Apple doesn't include Blu-ray as an option, but they are readily available through 3rd parties like Amazon or Other World Computing. You'll also need software to play the disc, which is where the Macgo Blu-Ray Player comes in. I reviewed the Macgo Blu-ray Player software more than a year ago and found it pretty flaky. It dropped frames, was slim on features, and not something I could get to excited about. The updated player is a completely different story. I tested the software on a Mac Pro, and also an older (2006) MacBook Pro. I'm pleased to see that the Blu-ray movies I tested it on worked just fine, there were no dropped frames, even when running movies full screen. That's much better than my last outing with the software, and smooth playbook on my aging MacBook Pro was impressive. The app also supports DTS5.1 surround sound if you have hardware that can play it. The Blu-ray Player software requires an internet connection when you first put in a new disc. This is due to the copy protection scheme built into the discs by the motion picture studios. One a disc gets its keys, you shouldn't need to go online again. If you try another disc, it's the same process. The Mac app has added some new features, including screen grabs, and what they call 'AirX' which allows you to beam a Blu-ray movie playing on your Mac to an iOS device -- on your same WiFi network, of course. This new version works much better than the old versions I tried, and movie playback is flawless but I can't say the same for the AirX feature. When I first tried it, Blu-ray Player crashed, then a second try went a bit further, but my iPhone and iPad reported a 'can't find the server' message, even though I'm sure I followed the setup instructions correctly. I think there's more work needed on this feature. The app has extensive help and an actively updated website. You can download a free copy and test it to see how it works with your hardware. If you want to view Blu-ray movies on your Mac, this is pretty much it right now, other than some open-source hacks that don't work very well and aren't as easy to use. There is a summer special on the Macgo Blu-ray player software for US$39.99, which is $20 off. The sale lasts until August 19th. Apple has never officially supported Blu-ray on the Mac, and the late Steve Jobs famously called the licensing terms a "bag of hurt." Even so, some people like the 50 GB capacity of Blu-ray media for backup, and if you have the hardware, wanting to play a movie in HD is an obvious next step Check the Gallery for some screen grabs and a look at the GUI for Blu-ray Player. Gallery: Mac Blu-ray PlayerMac Blu-ray Player software plays HD movies on your Mac originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Thu, 16 Aug 2012 17:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.Source | Permalink | Email this | Comments read more..
Apple Stock Price Marks All-Time Closing High Ahead of New iPhone Rollout
Apple's stock price closed at an all-time high of $636.34 today, passing the prior all-time closing high of $636.23 set four months ago on April 9th. The next day, April 10th, the stock hit an intraday high of $644 and the company's market capitalization breached $600 billion before falling back. Apple's stock price is up nearly 60% on the year, outperforming the NASDAQ by more than 3:1 and the Dow Jones Industrial Average by more than 6:1.
Growth in Apple's stock has been slightly weaker for the past month in the run-up to weaker-than-expected earnings for the third quarter, but new reports of a September launch for the next iPhone as well as a smaller, cheaper iPad Mini have been pushing the price higher.
All shareholders of record as of Monday's close also received a cash dividend of $2.65 per-share today, the first dividend payment to Apple shareholders since December 1995. read more..
Olympics
Opening Ceremony was founded on an Olympics concept—the nations of the world battle it out on its racks for fashion domination—and named for same. And in an Olympic year, the store's gurus, Humberto Leon and Carol Lim, with its in-house editor, Rory Satran, launched their own magazine. Its theme was just about a forgone conclusion. What else? Sport: sportswear, sports memories, and sports stars—though, as it turns out, none of the Olympic hopefuls pictured inside actually competed in London. "We have three amazing athletes, and none of them made it," Satran said with a laugh. "That's what you get for putting a magazine to bed before the Olympics." (Bruce Weber, Jessica Craig-Martin, Poppy de Villeneuve, and Theo Wenner are among the debut issue's contributors.)
At the launch dinner for the new magazine at Silkstone, the private event space run by the Fat Radish's Ben Towill and Phil Winser, Satran remembered her first tentative steps into the OC universe, back when she was still a Paris-based editor at Self Service. "I literally showed Carol and Humberto this binder of ideas I had in the middle of a nightclub," she said. "The band was playing; we were in the smoking corner." Magazine wonks unite? "I think we're all nerdy in the same way," she agreed.
Nerdy, maybe; life of the party, also. The crowds came to cheer the magazine out of the gate and take a few swings at the basketball-shaped piñata while they were there. Erstwhile OC collaborator Chloë Sevigny was on hand, topless in a pair of Kenzo overalls. Solange Knowles, with son Julez in tow, eyed the ribbon-twirling rhythmic gymnast who performed after ushering guests to their seats. ("She wanted a solo," Leon shrugged.) "I kind of want to get up there," Knowles said, eyeing the ribbon. "I can figure it out."
She settled for the ring instead of the ribbon, challenging Leon to a hula-hooping contest just before dinner was served. She lost, but she was a good sport about it.
—Matthew Schneier read more..
Thursday 16 August 2012
Ios Versions-Pulse News
There have been many times when I have wishes that my favorite news aggregators like Pulse news and Zite for iOS were available on my desktop or Mac laptop. Pulse News has answered my requests with a web version of the app that runs in any browser. You can log into your Pulse News account and get all the sites and feeds you normally graze in the iOS app displayed right in Safari, Firefox, or Chrome. The Pulse developers also had some help and probably a wee bit of cash from Microsoft to make the app work nicely with Windows 8 touch capabilities. There's a nice Windows Explorer logo in the upper right part of your browser, no matter which browser you are running. Anyway, Pulse News works just fine with Safari, and unlike the iOS versions you get some choice in layouts, mainly adjustments to the size of the tiles. If you change the shape of your browser window, Pulse news obliges and re-arranges itself. All in all, it's a nice experience. I saw a few rendering issues where words would get cut off and there was occasionally some odd image cropping, but basically it's working pretty well. Single-click on a tile, and you get a clean render of the story, with the familiar controls to read it directly at the source or email it to someone else. This is a nice evolutionary step for Pulse News, and I'll use it often. You can take a look at it by going to the Pulse website and logging in if you have a free account, or you can create a new account and start publishing your own personal news source.Pulse News comes to your favorite web browser originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Thu, 09 Aug 2012 16:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.Source | Permalink | Email this | Comments read more..
Iphone 3G-Ios
Cocoanetics has noticed something that's become apparent to most iOS developers already: with the advent of iOS 6 in a few weeks, Apple is essentially phasing out support for iOS on the iPhone 3G. Apple is slowly deprecating frameworks that iPhone 3G-compatible apps require from Xcode and app libraries, and the upcoming version of Xcode (4.5, currently in development) specifically states that it does not support armv6 devices or anything below iOS 4.3. In other words, both the original iPhone and the iPhone 3G have become extremely difficult for iOS developers to support, and by the time iOS 6 rolls around this fall, there will be essentially no reason for devs to try and make sure their apps and games work on the older hardware. While it may be technically possible to maintain separate codebases for newer and older hardware (by running old versions of Xcode), even the largest developers won't have financial reasons to do so. And the audience likely won't care much anyway. The number of people this affects grows smaller and smaller every day -- most phone contracts last about two years, which means it's been a few generations since the iPhone 3G was released in 2008. And there are a whole lot of new technologies for developers to take advantage of, including iCloud, Automatic Reference Counting, and Storyboard development, that make apps easier and quicker to develop and would never work with the older iPhone models anyway. Apple's never been accused of sticking with a product for too long -- the company has a reputation for moving on to the newer and better as quickly as possible. For developers, the iPhone 3G is essentially being lowered into the ground for good. Of course, that doesn't mean consumers are obligated to dump them; the existing apps they run will still work.iOS developer toolchain will bid farewell to the iPhone 3G originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Wed, 08 Aug 2012 22:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.Source | Permalink | Email this | Comments read more..
Tuesday 14 August 2012
Advanced Encryption Standard Algorithm-National Security Agency-Security Architecture
Technology Review takes a look at the evolution of security on the iPhone, noting how Apple has been able to gain acceptance in government and enterprise by overcoming its initially lax stance on device security to roll out industry-leading encryption options that can defeat essentially all attempts at accessing properly protected devices.At the heart of Apple's security architecture is the Advanced Encryption Standard algorithm (AES), a data-scrambling system published in 1998 and adopted as a U.S. government standard in 2001. After more than a decade of exhaustive analysis, AES is widely regarded as unbreakable. The algorithm is so strong that no computer imaginable for the foreseeable future—even a quantum computer—would be able to crack a truly random 256-bit AES key. The National Security Agency has approved AES-256 for storing top-secret data.As Apple highlights in a recent white paper (PDF) on iOS security, this hardware security involves the incorporation of a unique AES-256 key fused into each iOS device and which can not be directly read.
Access to the device's software can be restricted with a PIN passcode, and while the default passcode option for iOS is a four-digit number, users can opt to use significantly longer and more complex passcodes. And with brute-force attacks required to break iOS passcodes needing to be run on the device itself at a speed of 80 milliseconds per attempt, a device with an eight-digit passcode could take up to 15 years to compromise."There are a lot of issues when it comes to extracting data from iOS devices," says Amber Schroader, CEO of Paraben, a supplier of forensic software, hardware, and services for cell phones. "We have had many civil cases we have not been able to process ... for discovery because of encryption blocking us."Most of the information included in this report is not particularly new, and Apple's white paper goes into more detail on the company's efforts to address security on iOS devices, but the report offers an overview of the layers of security Apple has built into its products. read more..
Incubator Hitfox-Mobile Games-Startups
Well that was quick or just well timed PR: HitFox Game Ventures, the games distribution incubator that launched last month, has given birth to two new startups already.AppLift, co-founded and managed by Kaya Taner, who was an early employee at HitFox, promises to be an affiliate network that will focus solely on mobile games. App Discovery, also co-founded and run by another HitFox manager, Xavier Rezgui, operates at the consumer end to help mobile gamers intelligently navigate the 100,000 or so games in the iOS App Store.Both startups hatched with a "seven figure" Euro seed investment from HitFox. read more..
Monday 13 August 2012
Standalone Spot Satellite-Satellite Service Company-Global Satellite Network-Satellite Transmitter
Cellphones are pretty good for calling 911, or letting your family know where you are, but if you get in trouble off the grid things can go wrong in a hurry. Coverage is far from universal, especially in rural or wilderness areas. The folks at SPOT, a satellite service company, have a handy solution that lets your iPhone connect to a global satellite network through the SPOT hardware. Along with a dedicated app, the SPOT Connect transmitter can get your distress message out, along with your exact location anywhere in the world. Similar to the standalone SPOT Satellite GPS Messenger and the SPOT Personal Tracker (both of which work without a phone, but offer a more limited set of message options) the hardware is a small device with a GPS receiver and a satellite transmitter. The SPOT Connect pairs with your iPhone via Bluetooth; you run the SPOT app, and your iPhone suddenly becomes a satellite communicator. The service is not built for voice, but you can update Twitter or Facebook, send short email messages or text messages (41 characters long for free input, up to 120 characters if you pre-program them), update a plot of your travels on the SPOT website for family & friends, or send your coordinates out to the GEOS International Emergency Response Coordination Center to get help on the way. This seems perfect for sailors, hikers, pilots or people exploring places where cell networks are unreliable or don't exist at all. The device is available direct from SPOT, or at a variety of retailers like Best Buy, REI and West Marine. It lists for US $149.95, and there is a mail-in $50.00 rebate available now. The needed app is free. You'll also need a subscription that gets you the satellite time ($99.00 a year). There are some extra fees for extended services. This can literally be a lifesaver if you find yourself in the wilds, and it's a clever integration of iPhone hardware and satellite technology. Gallery: SPOT Connect for iPhoneSPOT Connect helps your iPhone rescue you via satellite originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Sat, 11 Aug 2012 11:55:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.Source | Permalink | Email this | Comments read more..
Sunday 12 August 2012
Mountain Lion
You're about to spend US$19.99 on Mountain Lion and want to know how long it will take to update your Mac. Fortunately, the folks at Tekserve have updated several machines and shared the results. The New York-based company keeps several demo machines running on its sales floor for customers to try, including laptops and desktops. The team recently updated every last one to Mountain Lion (we assume they were on the latest version of Lion previously). Note what a difference SSD made in the chart below: Apple servers are very busy today, as the company is distributing new Mac versions of iPhoto, iMovie, Safari and iWork in addition to the OS. Our readers have reported a range of download times from one to three hours. The Mountain Lion installer is 4.05 GB in size. All this means you should set some time aside and get comfortable. Tell us how it goes.#next_pages_container { width: 5px; hight: 5px; position: absolute; top: -100px; left: -100px; z-index: 2147483647 !important; }Continue reading How long will it take to install Mountain Lion?How long will it take to install Mountain Lion? originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Wed, 25 Jul 2012 15:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.Source | Permalink | Email this | Comments read more..
Personal Information Management Application-Modern Operating Systems-Web Applications
Ecco Pro, a much beloved outliner and personal information management application for Windows was discontinued about 15 years ago. But you can still download it and run it on Windows 7 today thanks to the efforts of a handful of volunteers. Even though the software isn't open source a few devotees have continued modding it and keeping it current for modern operating systems. They say that no modern application has yet replicated its functionality.Another piece of software with longevity is Eudora, which as of 2009 was still in use by Steve Wozniak as per an interview with Lifehacker. Wozniak didn't say which version he's using, but since he says it's been discontinued, I assume he's using Eudora 6.2.4 or earlier, not the newer Thunderbird based Open Source Edition. I've heard of people using versions as old as 3. They say they can still do stuff with it they just can't do with anything else.If these were web applications, what are the odds people would still be using them today, more than a decade after they were officially discontinued? And are there any new web applications out today that are so good that 15 years from now users will still be clinging to them? read more..
Open System Preferences-Notification Center-Mountain Lion
Mountain Lion's Notification Center is handy. It displays banners and alerts from notification-aware apps to keep you informed of changes, like a new Twitter mention, Calendar event or email message. That last one can get distracting, depending on how much email you receive. Here are some ways to tame email alerts:
- Disable alerts and banners in System Preferences. Open System Preferences and click Notifications. Select Mail from the list on the right and then click None. You'll no longer see email notifications.
- Quit Mail. Apple's Mail app won't push notifications if it isn't running.
- Turn them all of at once. Open Notification Center on your Mac and swipe up to the very top. Move the slider labeled Show Alerts and Banners to the Off position to silence all pop-up alerts and banners (they still appear listed in Notification Center itself). Slide it back to On to restore alerts and banners.
Notification Center-Mountain Lion-Hot Corners
Apple's Mountain Lion introduced Notification Center to the Mac. This handy feature lets notification-aware apps display pop-up style alerts when something changes, like an incoming email message, Twitter mention, Calendar appointment and more. Apple notes that you can access Mountain Lion's Notification Center by swiping your trackpad or Magic Trackpad from left to right. Alternatively, you can click the Notification Center icon in your Mac's menu bar (here's a more thorough look at Notification Center options). Those are great, but I use a third option. Specifically, I've assigned Notification Center to a hot corner by following these steps:
- Launch System Preferences and click Desktop & Screen Saver.
- Click the Screen Saver tab, then click Hot Corners.
- Click the drop-down menu at your corner of choice, choose Notification Center and then click OK.
Saturday 11 August 2012
Jet Propulsion Laboratory-Mission Control-Curiosity Rover-Control Room
For those of us who stayed up late last night to watch the streaming coverage of the Curiosity rover's landing on Mars, it was a treat to see the huge numbers of MacBooks, iPads, and even iPhones that were in the control room at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. The image above shows one of the EDL Ops (Entry, Descent and Landing Operations) engineers gazing intently at the screen of a MacBook Pro at incoming data. Other photos we've seen show a conference room full of engineers and scientists at JPL sitting around a table loaded with MacBook Pros with nary a Lenovo or Dell laptop in sight. Why the love of Macs? It's probably because OS X is the "Unix that works," the mainstream operating system that's built upon the BSD UNIX beloved by scientists and engineers (and is also certified by the Single UNIX Specification group as an Open Brand UNIX 03 product). Of course, the scientific and engineering community may not be thrilled with the recent shift away from bundling Apple-branded X11 with OS X in Mountain Lion, as that's often used to run legacy apps. The current X11 solution is the XQuartz open source project, which is heavily supported by Apple. Be sure to check back later; TUAW's Mel Martin is following up with a post about more reasons for all of this Apple love at JPL. [h/t Jeff Gamet]#next_pages_container { width: 5px; hight: 5px; position: absolute; top: -100px; left: -100px; z-index: 2147483647 !important; }Continue reading Macs abound at NASA/JPL Mars Curiosity mission controlMacs abound at NASA/JPL Mars Curiosity mission control originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Mon, 06 Aug 2012 11:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.Source | Permalink | Email this | Comments read more..
Curiosity Mars Rover-Processing Power-Curiosity Rover-Mars Rovers
One of the recurrent Internet memes since the successful landing of the Curiosity Mars rover has been that the iPhone has more processing power than the computer onboard the rover. It's true -- but some of the numbers touted in the rush of blog posts have been flawed. Let's take a closer look at Curiosity's computing power versus the iPhone 4S. First of all, just about every post I've seen so far neglects to point out that Curiosity has two identical computers, each called a Rover Compute Element or RCE. Of course, it only uses one at a time; the other is configured as a live backup that will take over the tasks of navigation, control, and communications if the other has problems. Does your iPhone 4S have a backup computer? I didn't think so. Each RCE uses a RAD750 CPU (based on the IBM PowerPC 750), a radiation-hardened single-board computer made by BAE Systems Electronic Solutions. That computer has 256 KB of EEPROM, 256 MB of DRAM, and 2 GB of flash memory. The CPU runs at 200 MHz and is capable of 400 million instructions per second (MIPS). The iPhone 4S uses an Apple A5 system-on-a-chip containing an 800 MHz dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 CPU. The A5 also includes a PowerVR SGX543MP2 GPU that adds even more processing power. The iPhone is equipped with 512 MB of DRAM and either 16 GB, 32 GB or 64 GB of flash memory. The CPU runs at 800 MHz. So, why not just use a couple of iPhones to run the next Mars rover? Well, in the first place, the device would probably fail rather quickly in interplanetary space and in the harsh conditions of the Martian surface, where a thin atmosphere fails to shield rovers from high radiation levels. That RAD750 CPU is capable of handling a radiation dose of up to 1,000 gray -- a 5 gray dose is enough to kill a human being within 14 days. Putting it all into perspective, the iPhone 4S does have a much more powerful brain than the Curiosity rover, but it's a moot point. Engineers design products, whether they're mass market smartphones or one-off Mars rovers, to handle the conditions that they'll see in everyday usage. To quote Elton John, "Mars ain't the kind of place to raise your kids." That delicate flower of an iPhone wouldn't last a minute on Mars.#next_pages_container { width: 5px; hight: 5px; position: absolute; top: -100px; left: -100px; z-index: 2147483647 !important; }Continue reading iPhone more powerful than Curiosity Mars rover, but so what?iPhone more powerful than Curiosity Mars rover, but so what? originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Tue, 07 Aug 2012 10:35:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.Source | Permalink | Email this | Comments read more..
Retina Macbook Pro-Results Database-Geekbench
Exactly one month ago, we noted the presence of a "MacBookPro10,2" entry in the Geekbench results database, suggesting that a 13-inch version of the Retina MacBook Pro is indeed in the works, as has been rumored for October. In comparison, the 15-inch Retina MacBook Pro carries a "MacBookPro10,1" identifier, while current non-Retina versions of the MacBook Pro carry "MacBookPro9,x" identifiers.
While much of the data presented to Geekbench by machines can be faked and many Hackintosh enthusiasts go to great lengths to match their machines' details to those of actual Macs, the details of the MacBookPro10,2 were consistent enough with expectations that both we and Geekbench developer Primate Labs believed the entry to be genuine.
Following the original entry, a second MacBookPro10,2 has now appeared in the results database, with the data bearing very strong similarity to the original entry but with some differences that suggest this entry may also be legitimate.
Like the machine that appeared first, the new machine runs a 2.9 GHz Core i7-3520M, the same processor found in the current high-end model of the non-Retina 13-inch MacBook Pro. The machine's motherboard identifier also matches the previous machine, which itself matched a previously unaccounted for identifier seen in early developer builds of OS X Mountain Lion. And as would be expected for machines running the same specs, the two machines have very similar Geekbench scores of roughly 7800.
There are a few differences, however, with one of the key ones being a custom 12A2066 build of the unreleased OS X 10.8.1. Just two days ago, Apple gave the first indication that it will begin seeding OS X 10.8.1 to developers, but it has yet to do so. In addition, the four-digit build number suffix is sometimes used internally by Apple on its test machines, although such four-digit build numbers are sometimes also used publicly for special builds such as the version of OS X 10.7.4 that shipped on new 15-inch Retina MacBook Pro models.
In addition, this new entry reflects a MacBook Pro with 8 GB of RAM, in line with what ships paired with the Core i7-3520M on the corresponding non-Retina model. The previous MacBookPro10,2 entry showed a machine with only 4 GB of RAM. Finally, the BIOS string for the new entry appears to show an updated date code of July 18, 2012, compared to the previous one registering as June 11, 2012.
Geekbench results have on several occasions revealed upcoming Mac models, most recently in mid-May with the MacBookPro9,1 that turned out to be the non-Retina 15-inch MacBook Pro upon its release the following month. Notably, an iMac13,2 entry that also appeared to be legitimate surfaced around the same time, but Apple has yet to release updated iMacs.
(Thanks, Matthew!) read more..
Apple Tv
A weekend feature from Gizmodo's Brian Barrett explores the Apple TV's increasing importance with the recent addition of Hulu Plus and other features. The interesting part of the article is the numbers: 1.3 million Apple TV units sold in the previous quarter along with US$2 billion in sales of digital content from the App Store, iTunes and iBookstore. Barrett thinks this information shows that the Apple TV has become the company's most important product, and future dominance rests with the little Apple TV box rather than a dedicated television set. Forbes agrees with Barrett's stance, wondering if the Apple TV has become a legitimate platform rather than the hobby Steve Jobs tinkered with. I think it'll achieve this status when an Apple TV SDK comes out. It was something I hoped would happen at WWDC, but now I'm wondering if that might come out this fall with the expected slate of new iPhones and iPods. I disagree with the Forbes estimate that Apple will eventually allow its content to be licensed on premium TVs. That's not the way Apple runs things, and it's why I think the Apple TV's price is $99. If you're picking up a new TV, another $99 isn't going to matter in the long run if you're using the Apple TV constantly. Yes, Hulu Plus and the Amazon Instant Video app for the iPad are competitors to Apple's content, but you're still using Apple's hardware to view said content. Chances are, if you're using an iPad to watch Amazon Instant Video, you're likely to upgrade to another iPad somewhere down the road. Amazon gets your money, and so does Apple. Over time, as features are added, I've noticed that the Apple TV has become more important in my living room. At first, I wasn't using it much. Then came AirPlay and Netflix. Then came AirParrot. Now there's AirPlay Mirroring and Hulu Plus. The only thing it's missing is Plex. We're still using the PS3 to access Plex content. Oh, and BBC iPlayer, but I think there's a chance of pigs flying before getting it in the U.S. There's an excellent jailbreak community surrounding the Apple TV, but the hassle to unjailbreak the ATV to upgrade it was just too much to bother jailbreaking it again. But with the recent new features, anything I can pull up on one of my Macs can be sent to the Apple TV. I can use HippoRemote to control the Mac streaming the content. We're to the point that we happily dropped cable early this year and haven't looked back. It's so convenient that whenever we get a new TV, I know I'll grab another Apple TV to go along with it -- and that's exactly what Apple wants.The Apple TV's increasing importance originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Mon, 06 Aug 2012 18:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.Source | Permalink | Email this | Comments read more..
Friday 10 August 2012
Television Spot-New Television-Retina Display-Ipad
Apple today posted a new television ad for the new iPad called "All on iPad". The ad is identical in style to Do It All which was released in June. The Retina Display remains a focus, with a number of different apps sharing the spotlight.
Read it. Tweet it.
Be surprised. Be productive.
Make a sale. Make some lunch.
Make it movie night.
Play a game. Or an old favorite
Do it all more beautifully, with the Retina display, on iPad.This is the third television spot that Apple has released for the 3rd generation iPad.
The ad comes shortly after a new and controversial series of ads focused on an "Apple Genius". That ad debuted during the opening ceremonies for the summer Olympics and were sharply criticized. Those are ads no longer running which Apple's ad agency claims was the plan all along. read more..
Thursday 9 August 2012
Retina Macbook Pro-Notebook Battery-Mountain Lion
Ars Technica has been doing some testing after reports emerged that some Mountain Lion early adopters were experiencing degraded battery life after upgrading to OS X 10.8. A 46-page thread with nearly 700 replies has been growing over the past several weeks on the Apple Support Forums.
Ars writer Chris Foresman, after extended testing, discovered that the battery life of his Retina MacBook Pro review unit dropped 38% from its previous 8-hours. He was unable to narrow down blame for the battery loss to any particular bit of software or system process.
Our own testing revealed similar (and significant) drops in battery runtime after installing Mountain Lion. In previous tests, we were able to regularly achieve just over 8 hours of use by relying solely on our Retina MacBook Pro's integrated Intel HD4000 GPU. Performing the same "real-world" test using the same software applications and usage pattern, we never got the Retina MacBook Pro to run for more than a few minutes past 5 hours after a full charge.
Typically, the quad-core processor wasn't taxed beyond 5 percent capacity, except for occasional 10-20 percent spikes when loading webpages, reading or writing files, or other activities. Unexpected file system or network access, or less efficient use of the GPU, could cause additional power drain without showing significant CPU use.One poster on Apple's support forums claims a company support representative told him that "an update will be issued via the [Mac App Store] as soon as they can work a fix". read more..
Wednesday 8 August 2012
Simulator-Ios
9to5Mac reports that it has discovered through some testing with Apple's official iOS simulator that iOS 6 is capable of automatically scaling its home screen display to fit a taller 1136x640 display, compared to the current 960x640 display. Numerous rumors and part leaks have indicated that Apple will be including a taller display on the next-generation iPhone to be introduced next month.Thanks to some tweaks to the iOS Simulator application that is included in the iOS development tools, we were able to run the simulator at the rumored next-generation iPhone display resolution of 640 x 1136. We did this running both the current public release of iOS 5.1 and the upcoming iOS 6.0 The iOS 5.1 simulator displayed the home screen with a stretched set of four rows of icons. On the other hand, iOS 6 displayed five complete rows – as our sources said Apple was testing for taller iPhone displays.
iOS simulator at 1136x640 with five rows of icons under iOS 6 and four rows under iOS 5.1
Notably, setting the iOS simulator to resolutions other than 1136x640 does not result in automatic scaling, with the software instead simply defaulting to an "iPad-like home screen layout" different from what is seen for the iPhone. The observation suggests that there is something special about that 1136x640 resolution that suggests Apple has at least been working on an iOS 6 device supporting that screen size. read more..
Tuesday 7 August 2012
Humble Indie Bundle-Windows-Charity
I bet that behavioral economists get rather excited when they see pay-what-you-want offers going viral. Assuming the seller is collecting some basic demographic detail, the resulting statistics might deliver some interesting insights into the relative altruism (or discretionary cash reserves) of different sorts of folks. The Humble Bundle team (responsible for the Humble Indie gaming bundles that we've covered before) is running a Humble Music bundle, accessible to all sorts of music fans. Featured artists include Jonathan Coulton, They Might Be Giants and MC Frontalot; a flexible portion of the purchase price goes toward not-for-profit cause groups like Child's Play Charity and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The bundle price is entirely up to the buyer, although suggested pricing goes from $100 down to $15. If you pay more than the rolling average price (currently around $8.28) you get a bonus album of remixes from viral-video darlings OK Go. You can also define the split between the artists and the charities, and contribute a "Humble Tip" for the bundle organizers. Given that buyers can pay what they want, what sort of variance do the Humble Bundlers see among their contributors/customers? It's not scientific, and there could be a whole horde of confounding factors, but take a look at the stats in the image above. Mac users (representing about 1/5 of the 45K total customer count) are paying an average of $9.84 for the bundle, more than $1.50 above the average price and $2.40 above the average Windows user. That might be skewed by a few "whales" who are contributing $100 or more from the Mac side, but even so the population is large enough that the differences would seem to be significant. Before you start forwarding this post to your penny-pinching Windows-using wealthy relatives, note that the Mac users aren't the most likely to empty their wallets for tunes. Linux users, with a slightly smaller share of the overall purchases, are coughing up a stunning $11.94 per transaction -- more than $3.50 higher than the average cost. This might be an artifact of the Humble Bundle's past service to Linux gamers, who may be feeling especially supportive of HB's efforts here, or maybe Linux users feel more strongly about the charities/artists involved. Or they just really are more generous by nature. With the recently finished Humble Indie Bundle 5, Linux users donated an average of $12.51 per transaction. It would be really interesting to do a deeper dive into the HB sales data, especially from the perspective of Dan Ariely or the Freakonomics guys. Most sellers aren't this transparent about their customers, and what they do with the behavioral data they collect -- and there's good PR reasons why they don't share more. In June, travel site Orbitz caught some flak for acknowledging that it showed different search results to Mac users (skewed towards the higher-end properties that they apparently prefer to book) than to PC users. While both sets of searchers would pay the same price for the same room, Mac users responded better to upscale hotels and slightly more expensive stays. The Humble Music Bundle is available until Thursday, August 9.Humble Music Bundle shows charity disparity among Mac, Linux and Windows users originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Mon, 06 Aug 2012 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.Source | Permalink | Email this | Comments read more..
Professional Photographers-Canon Binoculars-Sporting Events-Nikon Lenses-Photographs
When you think of professional photographers shooting sporting events, you usually visualize huge Canon or Nikon lenses mounted on expensive camera bodies on top of massive tripods. But as The Guardian's photographer Dan Chung proves, sometimes you can do just as much with a lot less. Throughout the Olympics Chung is photographing the games using only an iPhone, an app, and (occasionally) an add-on iPhone lens or some binoculars. The stunning image of Michael Phelps shown here was captured by Chung using only the iPhone 4S with its 8 megapixel camera and the excellent iOS photo editor Snapseed (US$4.99 in the App Store). To get other images from the Games using his iPhone, Chung also sometimes chooses to shoot through the Schneider lens iPro Wide Duo Kit or with a pair of Canon binoculars in front of the phone's camera. Chung is obviously a photographer with a lot of talent, but it's still amazing that these photographs were captured through a smartphone. For those interested in photography (or the Olympics) click on over to The Guardian where they are running a photoblog of all Dan Chung's images throughout the Games. Special thanks to Dan Chung and The Guardian for permission to reprint the image above. [Image credit and (C) Dan Chung/The Guardian.]Dan Chung photographs the Olympics using an iPhone, Snapseed and some binoculars originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Fri, 03 Aug 2012 11:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.Source | Permalink | Email this | Comments read more..
Monday 6 August 2012
Wall Street Expectations-Mountain Lion-Talkshoe
Tonight on the Talkcast, it's time to share your first few days with OS X Mountain Lion. Got it running? What's to enjoy? Gotchas in the process? Bonus points for anyone who delivers their comments via Dictation. We'll also dig into Apple's earnings report a bit, given that the markets have not been kind to the modest beat of guidance (and the substantial miss of Wall Street expectations). Bring your calculators. To participate in the call, you can use the browser-only Talkshoe client, the embedded Facebook app, or download the classic TalkShoe Pro Java client; however, for +5 Interactivity, you should call in. For the web UI, just click the Talkshoe Web button on our profile page at 4 HI/7 PDT/10 pm EDT Sunday. To call in on regular phone or VoIP lines (Viva free weekend minutes!): dial (724) 444-7444 and enter our talkcast ID, 45077 -- during the call, you can request to talk by keying in *8. If you've got a headset or microphone handy on your Mac, you can connect via the free X-Lite or other SIP clients -- basic instructions are here. Skype users with dial-out credit can call in via the service, or use those free iPhone minutes. Talk to you tonight!#next_pages_container { width: 5px; hight: 5px; position: absolute; top: -100px; left: -100px; z-index: 2147483647 !important; }#next_pages_container { width: 5px; hight: 5px; position: absolute; top: -100px; left: -100px; z-index: 2147483647 !important; }Talkcast tonight, 10pm ET: Meow, Mountain Lion originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Sun, 29 Jul 2012 19:50:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.Source | Permalink | Email this | Comments read more..
The Winners-Atari-Pong
The winners have finally been announced in the long-running Atari/Pong Indie Dev Challenge, and the three winning entries have been revealed prior to their eventual release on the App Store. Atari's contest sought out modern versions of Pong for the App Store, and offered cash prizes and revenue sharing for the top contestants. Before we go through the winners, please note that I served as a volunteer, unpaid judge on this contest, along with Atari founder Nolan Bushnell, developer David Whatley, and Pocket God's Dave Castelnuovo. That means I got to play through all of the finalists and deliver scores based on my impressions of the games. According to those scores (as well as Atari's input and a popular vote), zGames' Pong World came out in first place -- it's a very colorful take on the old school game, with furry creatures as paddles and lots of ball tweaks and fun twists. Mad Ruse's Pong Tournament picked up second place, featuring a very wild 3D version of Pong, with high level tournament play and quite a few powerups and extra items to try and protect your wall while a ball is passed back and forth between two players. And Eppy Games' Fong variant got third place -- it's a really crazy circular version of Pong, with some strange rotational controls and some really frantic action elements. Each of those winners will get a cash prize for winning and a three-year revenue share agreement, enabling them to use the Pong name for their titles as well as earn money alongside the commercial releases. There's more information on those coming soon, so hopefully you'll be able to play some of these titles when they arrive.Winners revealed for Atari's Pong Dev challenge, Pong World earns first place originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Fri, 03 Aug 2012 07:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.Source | Source | Permalink | Email this | Comments read more..