Lonnie Lazar - page 4

This is going to become the Must Have item of the Holiday Shopping Season for Apple iOS device owners.

Trust me.

With the release Thursday of 5.0 Beta for Mac OS X, Internet communications giant Skype took a big step on the path to aligning the Windows and Mac versions of its flagship calling platform.

Mac users who’d grown used to the modular UI of previous versions may find the new, more unified interface arresting initially, but there’s no question Skype designers have brought their software well within the confines of the “iTunes” UI model and new Skype for Mac users, should there be any left on the planet, ought to feel right at home from the get-go.

The big news with the new release is support for group video calling, for which Skype borrows from Safari’s curved pane effect to display the feeds of individuals on a group call, with the more important feature being that it just works.

NY-based DJ Rana Sobhany is fully committed to Apple’s mobile hardware — iPads and iPhones — as the technology that will be used to create the next generation of mobile music production. Her website Destroy the Silence chronicles her iPad Music Experiment and is filled with audio and video clips showing how the author and former instrumental musician is warping the boundaries of nightclub and dancefloor music production.

Sobhany notes in a recent interview that the strong emotional connection usually present between audiences and traditional live music performers can be lost in the transition to computer-based performance. She feels the touch-screen UI of Apple’s flagship mobile device may be able to help bridge that divide. “The iPad creates complete audio and visual engagement with the audience because I’m not just clicking a mouse,” she says, adding “I’m actively using these apps and mixing beats.”

This link points to a 10 minute clip of music Sobhany created during a recent set at the House of Blues in LA. It was mixed live on two iPads with one additional synth/drum machine controller powered by an iPhone.

[FastCompany]

Professional post-production photo effects software complete with hundreds of detailed, fine-grained controls to create virtually unlimited artistic styles for under a hundred bucks?

No way, you say.

Way.

PostworkShop is software from Xycod, a small Hungarian company that has built creative artists — of whom a number use Macs, apparently — a tool that so exceeds its cost in value, it’s nearly as breathtaking as some of the work it can be used to create.

Obihai Technology, a tiny Cupertino start-up, this month brought to market its first product, the OBi110 — an unassuming $70 box with blinky lights that may well prove to be the most disruptive telephony device to come along in a decade.

The OBi110 is the physical hub in a multi-layered communications model the company believes can revolutionize the way consumers use their mobile, Internet and fixed-line telephony services, bringing emerging social networking behaviors together with maturing Voice over IP (VoIP) technology to create total communication freedom at the personal level.

With web and mobile-based software products, including an iPhone app presently in Beta testing, Obihai is poised to show the millions of consumers who’ve bought magicJacks and all 237 of them who’ve bought an Ooma just how IP telephony can be done.

It’s just a clever little piece of marketing for a band that’s not half bad — and the back story is that they had their real-life instruments stolen — but here’s Brooklyn band Atomic Tom rocking the NYC Subway with a bunch of iPhones.

Can’t wait to see the band that tries this with some Windows 7 phones.

Apple’s App Store is a textbook case of the way Capitalism is supposed to work, according to one developer, who quit his day job when he realized all he needs to earn a living is a laptop and an Internet connection.

Getting information out of anyone who works at Apple can be more difficult than getting truth out of a politician, but every now and then someone pipes up with a personal revelation that sheds light on what it’s like to work with the 2nd largest company in the U.S.A. today.

A case in point is Dylan Ginsburg, developer of River of News, a $3 Google Reader app for the iPad, whose software has enjoyed what he describes as “modest” success since its release in August. Ginsburg pulled back the curtain just a bit in a blog post he wrote because “no one talks about what they make on the App Store.” If Ginsburg’s experience is typical of developers whose apps enjoy even middling success, it’s not just the big hitters in the App Store line-up who stand to gain from developing software for Apple’s mobile devices.

Developing River of News has been the most rewarding “work” of my life. It’s not even close. My sleeping is all screwed up because I keep thinking about how I can make my software better.

That’s right, “my software,” Ginsburg wrote. “What a great thing to be able to say. I’ve gotten such tremendous satisfaction from creating something that people use and like.”

It’s early in the game yet, and River of News could well be supplanted by a new flavor of the month at any time, but Ginsburg felt he has enough of the big picture in focus to have quit his corporate software job — the one at which he earned twice as much as he’s been making so far with River of News — and is a confirmed believer in the App Store business model. “The genius is they created an ecosystem that benefits them, the developer, and the customer [it’s what] you are supposed to get from capitalism.”

With all due respect, this was originally intended to be a gallery post dedicated to discovering the magic of MC Escher, a 99¢ app that brings users hi-res imagery of the artwork that’s decorated millions of dorm rooms and student apartments worldwide over the years. The app incudes two mindbending games as well, and for a buck, it’s got to be good value. MC Escher on the iPhone and iPad — how could you go wrong?

However, digging around for something to say about the Escher app, iFractal surfaced. It’s a free app that allows users to play around with renderings of the Mandelbrot and Julia sets of images derived from mathematical visualization theory. There’s also Fractals, a $2.99 app that seems to offer the same thing, with perhaps a finer manipulative granularity — but in the end, these apps warrant a gallery.

The Amazon iPhone app received an update Tuesday, allowing iPhone 3GS and iPhone 4 users to scan barcodes anywhere and instantly compare prices on the scanned item at amazon.com.

Using the device’s camera, users of the free app can point at a barcode out in brick-and-mortar land and know within seconds whether Amazon has a better deal on offer.

Apple released a 3rd beta build for iOS 4.2 on Tuesday, along with a 2nd for iTunes 10.1. It looks as though new builds are coming at roughly two week intervals at this point.

Who knew it might turn into infographic week? Here’s another visualization of the battle raging among companies in the mobile communications universe. This one plots the contestants’ current positioning and trend directions on XY axes of profit share and market share — and it raises some interesting questions:

Should we be talking about manufacturers or platforms? Is the ultimate success of one dependent on the success of the other (ie: can HTC thrive and Motorola whither if Android’s popularity continues to increase)? Do consumers have manufacturer, platform or carrier loyalty — some combination thereof, or no loyalty whatsoever?

And perhaps most crucial of all, can we get George Kokkinidis to re-do this chart?

Via [Horace Dediu]

Take a look at the litigious melee going on among companies trying to squeeze profits out of the mobile communications landscape. It’s a wonder we have phones and operating systems at all, isn’t it?

Interestingly, the one suit against Google by Oracle is somewhat misleading, given that many of the suits represented by the flying arrows in the graphic relate to Google’s Android operating system, including all of the ones filed by Microsoft.

Microsoft, with its Windows Mobile 7 OS about to ship, is asserting intellectual property infringement cases against Motorola and HTC, claiming Google’s Android operating system runs afoul of patents it holds for several important tasks handled by today’s new generation of smart phones. Specifically the software giant says Android copies its patented methods for handling email, contacts and calendar synchronisation, scheduling meetings and notifying applications of changes in signal and battery strength.

Via [The Guardian]

Well, it took nearly a year, gut Google finally put Goggles into its mobile search app for the iPhone, according to a blog post Tuesday.

A feature Android users have enjoyed since last December, Goggles allows a Google mobile Search user to tap on the camera button to search using Goggles. The blog post said “Goggles will analyze the image and highlight the objects it recognizes — just click on them to find out more.”

The feature remains a Google Labs project and thus should evolve and improve with time. It works reasonably well, according to Google, for things such as landmarks, logos, and products, but not so well yet for animals or food.

Via [TechCrunch] [iTunes app link]

Steve Jobs joined California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger in signing legislation to establish the U.S.’s first nationwide kidney donor registry.

Jobs, who received a liver transplant in 2009, has been credited with providing the impetus for the bill.

“As a transplant recipient, I know how precious this gift of life is,” Jobs said at the signing ceremony in Palo Alto. “And on behalf of those future transplant recipients who will now receive organs because of this new law, I want to thank governor Schwarzenegger, Senator Elaine Alquist and all of the legislators who voted for this law. Thank you all very much.”

Schwarzenegger said the registry will vastly increase the number of donors and make it much easier to find recipient matches. Only one quarter of qualified donors in California are currently signed up on registries, he said.

Donors can sign up here: Donate Life California.

There’s a webcast of the signing ceremony here.

BMW will soon offer an “official” iPad integration kit to allow backseat passengers the use of Apple’s magical new device to watch movies and play games in its automobiles, according to reports from the 2010 Paris Motor Show. Of course, Engadget hates it, but some may wait until BMW announces price and availability before drawing conclusions.

Perhaps if they offered free drinks and salty snacks, too, it could become a hit.

Ever wonder how they come up with those great songs you hear in TV, film, advertising and interactive media? You know, those songs that sound like they might be huge hits but are actually songs you’re probably hearing for the very first time?

Odds are — in recent years, at any rate — producers of that TV show, film or ad got the music from Jingle Punks, a New York-based firm with a proprietary search algorithm and a huge (and growing) library of independent music that is changing the way music makes it into consumer media almost overnight.

Time was, creative directors in the entertainment industry sat in offices behind mountains of cassette tapes and CD jewel boxes, sifting through demos sent in by every Indy band from Bellingham to Boca Raton, searching for the right sound to make their productions sing. Often it amounted to drudgery as a job and a crap-shoot for musicians and songwriters, who never knew if their masterpiece would get played for the right set of ears.

Now, thanks to Jingle Player, an iPad app with advanced meta-tagging magic built inside, former drones for the likes of NBC, MTV, VHI and countless ad agencies on Madison Avenue are suddenly freed from their dank hovels to roam the earth brandishing iPads, fulfilling the dreams of indy musicians toiling in obscurity. The Jingle Player’s secret sauce lies in its ability to serve up the right songs based on the way people actually talk about music, using pop culture-relevant terms instead of technical music business jargon.

Beijing’s flagship Apple store closed at noon after opening at 7am Wednesday, after massive crowds and store personnel began pushing and shoving as some customers bought 20 and 30 iPhone 4 units at a time, with the clear intention of turning around and selling them on the street, according to a report at the China-based blog MICgadget.

Perhaps the idea of removing the two-phone purchase limit and allowing Chinese iPhone 4 fans to by them in unlimited quantities was not such a great one.

At press time MICgadget is reporting that sanity has been restored: “All four Apple retail stores in China now require customer to show his/her identity card while purchasing the iPhone 4. Every customer could only purchase one iPhone 4. Apple employees will unbox the iPhone 4 for customers and activate the phone right away. So, the iPhone 4 scalpers could not resell the iPhone 4 as “brand new” and buy in large quantities.”

Qwiki, a startup offering a new way to get informed, won the $50,000 first prize and Disrupt Cup at the 2010 TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco on Wendesday.

Founded by Doug Imbruce, a self-described recovering software engineer, and Louis Monier, sometimes called the Father of Web Search for his role as the founder of AltaVista, Qwiki has the ubernerd community all aflutter over the prospects for its automagical transformation of the way we search for and obtain information. Combining text, audio, video, and images presented together in a seamless interface, Qwiki is meant to generate dynamic movies of whatever a user searches for.

The company’s software is designed to run on the web as well as in apps on mobile devices. Qwiki crawls data covering millions of topics and presents it to a user in an engaging and visual way, which, as it turns out, plays quite nicely with the super-portable, visually oriented attributes of the iPad.

The company’s official presentation at TCDisrupt showed only a concept video of an iPhone wake-up app based on the service, and a working prototype running on a laptop in Flash. As the video above shows, however, their iPad prototype that remains in development offers tantalizing possibilities.

The software engineer who showed this little glimpse backstage at the conference seemed pretty stoked about it, anyway.

Apple leads all technology companies by a wide margin when mainstream tech writers try to figure out which stories to file, according to a new study released by the Pew Reasearch Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism. In the year between June 1, 2009 and June 30, 2010, Apple was the the subject of 15.1% of all stories in the mainstream technology press, with the bulk of the coverage being positive, according to the study. Google came in 2nd, with 11.4%, with Twitter, Facebook and Microsoft rounding out the Top 5.

While over 40% of the stories filed about Apple suggested the company’s products are innovative and superior in quality, just 17% suggested the products are overhyped, and less than half that, 7%, portrayed Apple as too controlling with its products. Stories about Google, on the other hand, portrayed its products as innovative and superior in just 20% of cases, slightly ahead of the 19% in which the thread was the idea that the company has too much information and too much power.

Clearly Apple PR does a great job and on the whole, the company turns out some pretty nifty products. But there may come a day soon when Apple, too, has faded from the headlines: “After being arguably the most important technology company, even as recently as five years ago, run by the richest man in the world and the world’s most powerful monopoly, Microsoft has…fallen off the mainstream media’s radar. It received just one-fifth the coverage of Apple, less than a third the coverage of Google and less than half the attention of Twitter.” Other technology giants such as Amazon, Best Buy, Yahoo and RIM all garnered less than 1% of the mainstream media’s attention.

After a disappointing Wi-Fi-less iPhone debut last year, more than 1000 people lined up to be among the first to buy an iPhone 4 at the Xidan Joy City Apple Store in Beijing on Saturday.

A number of Apple fans camped out for the release, according to a report covering the launch, with the coveted first place in line going to Yu Zhong Hui, who lined up in the early morning hours Thursday. “Physically, it’s been painful. But mentally, I’m very happy,” Yu said.

“It’s like waiting in line to see a movie star,” said 26-year-old systems engineer Sun Jian Kuan. “No phone can best the iPhone.”

China Unicom, the mobile carrier for the device, has reported 50,000 users signed up for an iPhone 4 on the first day of pre-orders. China’s pricing for iPhone 4 without a contract is 4,999 yuan ($744) for the 16GB model and 5,999 yuan ($893) for the 32GB model.

[Computerworld]

Fuse Box, the company behind some of the best collaboration tools on the Internet, announced this week the arrival of Fuze Meeting, the first web conferencing service that allows users to run a meeting from an iPad. Dubbed ‘meetings in a pinch,’ the Fuze Meeting app (iTunes link) supports Keynote presentations on and off the iPad, content uploads from third party apps such as Dropbox and SuharySync, and full duplex in-app VoIP so users don’t even need headphones to join a meeting.

Some of the cooler features supported by the app include support for HD video content and Fuze Box’s iPoint™ Laser Technology that transforms a user’s finger into a digital laser pointer, viewable by all meeting participants. Cloud storage enables users to pull any document or file directly from the server and also add content from the iPad straight into a meeting, then store it on the cloud for later. Both hosts and attendees can share, control, and present content from their iPad.

Chat integration with AIM, Yahoo, Google, OCS and others allows users to see who is online and bring them into a meeting from wherever they are and in-app account creation lets users meet exclusively from the iPad without ever booting up a desktop PC –- making the app a truly mobile solution.

Users who download the app before October 15 can use an upgraded version of the app free for 30 days, after which, accounts will convert to the always free lite account.

iBooks and games may be currently popular apps for the iPad, but if Apple’s latest game-changing device is going to have real legs it will one day have to be seen as a productivity tool. And productivity means business. The success of Fuze Meeting should be a good indicator of iPad’s potential value in the academic and enterprise spaces.

iPhontography is a revolutionary new art form of images inspired by, shot with, and edited on the iPhone. A series of exhibits, the result of a presentation made in August at the Artistic Photographers of America meeting in San Francisco, will bring together artists and their work at some of Apple’s larger retail stores around the country and the world starting later this month.

The work is curated from art submitted to Pixels at an Exhibition, a website created to showcase images submitted by iPhone users from across the globe. Show curator Knox Bronson and other iPhone artists will attend each exhibit and present information about the Pixels project and talk about techniques and apps used to create the images on display.

The exhibits begin September 27 at the flagship Apple retail store in downtown San Francisco at One Stockton Street, with a reception from 6:00 – 8:00pm.

Additional exhibits are thus far scheduled for Chicago on October 21, and at the New York City Soho Apple store on October 29 – in conjunction with the PhotoPlus International Photography Expo and Conference. Plans for shows in Los Angeles and London are also said to be in the works.

At least he was polite, but it’s obviously not customers for whom Steve Jobs has little regard — it’s journalists.

When Long Island University senior Chelsea Kate Isaacs, 22, emailed Jobs Thursday asking why Apple’s PR department wasn’t responding to her questions about about the use of iPads in academic settings, she claimed she wasn’t expecting a response, according to a report at Valleywag.

But she got one, several in fact, and in the end Jobs said, simply, “Please leave us alone.”

Ms. Isaacs should have emailed us about why Apple PR doesn’t respond to questions like hers; there’s a whole staff here with lots of experience in that area.

[Gawker]

Avid will soon begin offering packages of its M-Audio branded audio hardware bundled with an entry-level package of its Pro Tools recording software that could well make a dent in the progress Apple has lately made with Garage Band.

Three offerings priced under $130 will make it easy for first-time Pro Tools users to easily create and record music at home using Avid’s Key, Recording and Vocal studio products with the included Pro Tools SE recording software. Whatever Pro Tools SE may lack in Garage Band’s take-you-by-the-hand user friendliness, it more than makes up for in multi-track recording capability and direct compatibility with higher-end professional grade Pro Tools installations.

Recent updates to Apple’s iLife suite of software included a revamped, juiced up version of Garage Band with well-received interactive learning features that solidified the software’s status as a highly capable tool for creating great-sounding recordings at home. But soon it will become possible to do the same things using an inexpensive version of Pro Tools — with the resulting tracks being readable and usable by the same more expensive studio versions of Pro Tools used by nearly every major recording facility in the world today.

Let’s dispel here and now any notion that the next great guitar solo or hit record will be produced or recorded using Apple’s mobile devices or the myriad amplifier emulating and recording applications available for them today.

Will. Not. Happen.

That said, for the casual music enthusiast and app dabbler, a few interesting peripheral/app combinations continue to highlight the versatility of Apple’s mobile development platform — and point the way to a future in which talented individuals won’t have to invest thousands of dollars in equipment and studio time in order to produce professional sounding music recordings.

We’ve spent the past several weeks playing with three of these, from Agile Partners, Frontier Design Group, and IK Multimedia. Our report contains a decidedly mixed bag.