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Posts tagged with "apple"

What Does An Image Leak Suggest About Next Week?

 

Over the past few weeks, a number of “leaks” from Apple’s supply chain and retail operations suggested the company was on track to launch the next major version of OS X, Lion, alongside new Macs this week, more specifically yesterday, July 14. According to the rumors, Apple was gearing up to unveil new MacBook Airs, Mac minis and white MacBooks all featuring updated Sandy Bridge processors from Intel and Thunderbolt connectivity. Whilst rumors about Lion immediately sounded fairly accurate as Apple seeded the “Golden Master” version of the OS to developers on July 1 (unless major issues are discovered, the GM version usually matches the public release’s build number and codebase) and the company said at the WWDC Lion would be available in July, speculation about new Macs generated from a series of factors that had been capturing the interest of the tech press since February. Read more

Iconfactory, Seesmic, Yammer, and Other Devs Sent Notices by Kootol for Patent Infringement

In another case of ‘patent troll with a terrible website design sues other companies’, Kootol Software LTD has sent notices to numerous companies who deal in making software around Twitter, whom happens to be at the center of the latest patent feud. Twitter itself has already been contacted according to Kootol’s news feed, detailing that they own products and services for, “A Method and System for Communication, Advertising, Searching, Sharing and Dynamically Providing a Journal Feed”. The patent revolves around being able to send and receive messages on a public feed by subscribing  to (following) other users in real time, which sums up Twitter in a nutshell. The patent includes being able to search for information in real time, which includes archival information.

Kootol has also announced that it has sent a [caution] notice to Twitter Inc, USA and has brought to their attention their accepted US patent application. They have also expressed concerns that Twitter Inc’s micro-blogging website ‘Twitter.com’, introduced around July 15, 2006 may violate their intellectual property. Kootol is in the process of examining this position and the purpose of serving this notice is to bring the fact to attention of Twitter Inc at the very earliest stage so that Twitter Inc gets a full opportunity to examine the matter.

Apple, Microsoft, Ford, Amazon, AOL, and smaller developers such as The Iconfactory, Yammer, Seesmic, and Ubermedia have all also been sent notices for patent infringement. Kootol has submitted around 60 patents related to real time communications, including news-feeds, ‘unified’ communication systems, and ‘service based’ social networks that are present in the US, EPO, Canada, and the companies home country of India. Though keyword is submitted: a lawsuit can’t take place unless these patents are granted, thus Kootol is trying to bank on early license deals.

Small developers have lately been targets of patent trolls looking to profit of their pool of patents — notably developers are currently dealing with the patent troll Lodsys for in-app purchasing, though Apple has motioned to intervene.

[Kootol via PR Newswire]

Note: While preparing our own post, FOSS Patents put out an elaborate post detailing the situation better than I ever could have. Florian Mueller also express the same worries as I for The Iconfactory in particular. I recommend checking out the post here:

Kootol (India-based troll with US and European patent applications) sends notices to many companies regarding Twitter/Facebook-style feeds

Apple’s A6 Chip In Trial Production With TSMC, Might Be A Sign Of Apple Cutting Samsung Ties

A report from Reuters is claiming that Apple has begun trialling production of an A6 processor with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) ahead of an expected 2012 launch. If true it would be a movement away from Samsung, which for the A4 and A5 processor, has been Apple’s sole manufacturing partner.

Such a move would presumably be in part be due to the current legal battle between Apple and Samsung that began earlier this year. As for what the A6 brings, analysts are expecting the processor could be a quad-core chip, a jump from the current dual-core A5 chip and single-core A4 chip.

A final decision has not yet been made on whether TSMC would produce the commercial, high-volume quantities, but TSMC is well prepared for that – they are the largest contract chip manufacturer in the world. CNet notes that analyst Gus Richard told them this month that Intel could be an option as they have been aggressively seeking more business with Apple

[Via CNet]

An Analysis Of Apple’s Adjustment Of International App Store Prices

UPDATED: Included a discussion on various sales taxes to clarify some of sections of the analysis, also corrected a mistake regarding Denmark prices.

For those of you who aren’t located in the United States, Wednesday’s news of Apple re-adjusting their prices in the App Store for international stores might have been pretty big news. For many the headline was welcome news, indeed when I woke up Thursday morning and saw they had finally re-calibrated the iTunes ‘exchange-rate’ I was pretty happy about it. We first discussed the great disparity in global iTunes prices back in January and I was pleased to see Apple eventually act and restore some fairness for international consumers.

Unfortunately I soon figured out it wasn’t all good news; Apple had only adjusted the iTunes ‘exchange-rate’ for apps. For their other stores such as for music, movies, TV shows and books the prices remained unchanged. Nonetheless I have revisited my January analysis, updating that data and doing some further analysis of what the price changes actually bring, what it means for individual countries and who is better or worse off.

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Apple May Bring Back ‘Tech Talk World Tour’ for iOS 5 and iCloud

It’s been a while since Apple’s embarked on a ‘Tech Talk World Tour’, aimed at providing developers with additional sessions, presentations, and the opportunity to ask Apple engineers questions related to development. Macotakara via AppleInsider suggests that Apple may bring the program back online this year, offering additional seats for students at event locations, focusing on iOS 5 and iCloud integration.

The Tech Talk World Tours offer developers a more intimate setting and a second chance to meet engineers at Apple if they’re unable to attend the WWDC event — while Apple’s tours aren’t too extensive, they do try to hit major tech hubs in hopes of reaching out to the largest portions of the iOS developer base. Previous hotspots have been various cities including Seattle, Austin, and New York City. Apple previously ran the developer events in 2008 and 2009 as the iPhone saw a surge in development — new and groundbreaking technologies in iOS 5 would give Apple plenty of reasons to revisit the Tech Talk World Tours. The events would be likely held between October and December.

[Macotakara via AppleInsider]

Nuance Releases Another iOS App, Dragon Go! with Intelligent Voice Search

Voice-powered search has become increasingly popular in recent years as more and more people purchase smartphones such as the iPhone or an Android device. Google has extensive voice-integration on Android and similarly has iOS Apps that include the ability to search by voice commands, others such as Microsoft with Bing, Nuance and Siri have done similar things. Furthering their previous efforts, Nuance yesterday released a new app, Dragon Go!, that combines Nuance’s top-notch voice recognition with the intelligence to do what is actually being said.

It plugs into various services from the typical Google Search to Pandora, Fandango, Wikipedia, Yelp, IMDB and many more – in fact at launch the app supports more than 180 options. Consequently saying, “What’s the weather like?” will pull data from AccuWeather, whereas saying “Super 8 showtimes” will direct you to Fandango.

Not only does Dragon Go! hear what people are searching for, but it understands what they want, giving them direct access to relevant results from 180 of the most trusted and reliable content providers, including AccuWeather, Bing, ESPN, Facebook, Fandango, iTunes, Last.fm, LiveNation, Milo.com, OpenTable, Pandora ® internet radio, Rotten Tomatoes, Twitter, Wikipedia, Yelp, YouTube, Yahoo! and many others – with the list of content providers growing each day

Dragon Go also integrates with the iPhone so that if you say “Play Coldplay” you can play music straight from your device, similarly it will integrate with the Phone app, the Maps app and more. This is now Nuance’s fourth iOS app, and it complements their Dragon Dictation app and the more tradition Dragon Search app. Earlier this year there had been a number of rumors that Apple was set to do a deal with Nuance to integrate a service similar to what this app offers, but at the base iOS level. Dragon Go! is available for free in the US App Store.

[Via AllThingsD]
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Adobe Releases Flash 11 And Air 3 Betas

Adobe yesterday made betas builds available for Flash 11 and Air 3, which tout some fairly significant improvements and feature additions. Perhaps the most interesting is the inclusion of Stage3D APIs (codenamed “Molehill”) which are a set of low-level, GPU accelerated 3D APIs that can enable high performance rendering of advanced 3D scenes. Adobe, in conjunction with Frima Studios has put together a demo of what this can achieve – we’ve embedded it past the break.

The inclusion of native support for 64-bit operating systems and browsers is also welcome news for performance and works on Windows, Mac and Linux in the new versions of Flash and Air. The last point of note is the inclusion of H.264/AVC software encoding for cameras, this will allow higher quality real-time communications from within Flash player.

Jump the break for that demonstration video of Stage3D as well as a full list of improvements in Flash 11 and Air 3. You can download the beta builds of Flash 11 here and Adobe Air 3 here.

[Via 9to5 Mac]

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App Store Volume Purchasing Program Coming To Businesses Soon

In an email to developers, Apple has revealed that it is implementing an App Store Volume Purchasing Program (ASVPP) for Businesses, following a similar system that has existed for educational institutions. This system, which Apple claims is “coming soon” will vastly simplify the process in which businesses can offer their employees the apps they need. The program will initially be US-only and will require a valid Dun & Bradstreet Number (D-U-N-S) and a valid physical address.

Once enrolled, the ASVPP can be accessed from the Apple website. This website is where businesses can purchase their apps in volume. The following screenshots highlight the process of doing so, which includes: searching for the app, setting the quantity and completing the transaction with either a corporate credit card, PCard or PayPal.

All volume purchases will result in an email from Apple and they are then added to a particular institutions purchase history which is located on the ASVPP website. Once purchased, an institution gets a redemption code for each app.

The program website delivers these redemption codes in a spreadsheet format that contains multiple codes, one for each app in the quantity purchased. Each time a code is redeemed, the spreadsheet is updated on the program website so you can track the number of codes that have been redeemed by your users.

Apple offers three ways in which institutions can quickly and easily distribute the app to their employees/users. The first is just a simple redemption URL which includes redemption code so that users do need to manually enter it into iTunes. Secondly they suggest posting the codes or URLs to a company portal or intranet page. The third option is to use a “third-party Mobile Device Management (MDM) solution” which offers an easily manageable system of centrally managing and distributing the apps.

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Apple Updates Prices Of International iTunes Stores

As we reported earlier today, the downtime of the iTunes Store last night and iTunes Connect today seems to be bringing along some interesting price changes for apps and other material available in the iTunes Store worldwide. Whilst we’re still examining the changes (which are rolling out as we speak), we’re getting the first reports of increased prices in the UK for apps (from £0.59 to £0.69 for apps sold at $0.99 in the United States) and lower prices in the Australian iTunes Store. The change for UK customers is a rather important one, raising prices for “cheap apps” – it’ll be interesting to notice how this will affect sales, as writer Craig Grannel points out.

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