The eBook publishing price-fixing scandal raised its fugly head again this week when the US Justice Department filed documents in advance of the June 3 trial in New York.
Among those documents was a series of emails and documents in which eBook pricing strategy and tactics are discussed.
An email from late founder and CEO Steve Jobs to News Corporation’s James Murdoch got all the attention. (The email itself was harmless but parts of it printed out of context sounded vaguely conspiratorial and old-boys clubbish.)
To me, the scandal is buried in those emails and testimony records. We learned that Apple used its control over app approvals to exert pressure on companies for reasons totally unrelated to the apps.
Listen, you tech-savvy, trend-resisting cynic you. I want you to stop dismissing wearable computing as a pointless, narcissistic fad.
Wearable computing is not for people too lazy to look at their phones. It’s not a trendy toy for wealthy yuppies. And it’s not about joining Robert Scoble in the shower.
What you need to know is this: Wearable computing is the next evolution of consumer electronics. And it changes everything for everyone and not just the people actually wearing the computing.
Apple haters, Android geeks and misinformed Wall Street analysts will tell you that Apple’s iPhone is falling behind because Apple can’t innovate anymore.
But iPhones are still lacking some of the best innovations out there. This isn’t because Apple can’t innovate. It’s because Apple can’t share. Apple can’t play nice with others. Apple wants to control the user experience, even at the expense of the user.
Apple isn’t open.
This quality used to be a benefit because it prevented the platform from becoming an ugly, confusing, fragmented mess.
But in the past month, Apple’s lack of openness has become a serious problem.
The “i” in the next iPhone will stand for “identity.”
When people hear rumors and read about Apple’s patents for NFC, they think: “Oh, good, the iPhone will be a digital wallet.”
When they hear rumors about fingerprint scanning and remember that Apple bought the leading maker of such scanners, they think: “Oh, good, the iPhone will be more secure.”
But nobody is thinking different about this combination. Everybody is thinking way too small.
I believe Apple sees the NFC chip and fingerprint scanner as part of a Grand Strategy: To use the iPhone as the solution to the digital identity problem.
NFC plus biometric security plus bullet-proof encryption deployed at iPhone-scale adds up to the death of passwords, credit cards, security badges, identity theft and waiting in line.
Tim Cook is a well-liked CEO, at least according to employee ratings on Glassdoor, a website that allows employees of any company to post reviews, ratings, and other such metadata about the companies they work for.
The current rating of Apple CEO Tim Cook on the service is a high 94 percent, gathered from all the employees who have rated him on the service, a total of 724 as of this writing. While Glassdoor is an opt-in survey system, it is anonymous. If they hated the guy, they’d probably say so. Anonymity plus the internet is anything but overly polite.
Welcome back, AppShopper. I mean, AppShopper Social.
Alternative iOS informational website, AppShopper, had an app that was pulled from the App Store last December due to a conflict with new App Store rules that went into effect at that time. The team behind the app, who also run the website, have spent the hiatus working hard on a new app that is both compliant with Apple’s current App Store rules and useful to consumers.
AppShopper Social was announced today as live in the App Store, bringing with it a host of new social discovery systems along with the familiar Wish List functionality it’s always had.
This is a completely separate app, so if you still have the original AppShopper app on your iPhone or iPad, you can use them both alongside each other.
There’s an argument in the platform wars, and also on Wall Street, that goes something like this: “Apple doesn’t innovate anymore. It moves too slowly, and is being taken over by more nimble, more innovative rivals.”
Any success Apple has is the result of slick marketing, rather than the newest technology. But now, Apple is a laggard and is being overtaken by more nimble companies.
Apple is working on the use of flexible-glass touch displays. Which products will Apple use flexible displays in?
The answer is: all of them.
When people think about flexible displays, they think about small-screen gadgets like iWatches and curved-glass iPhones. What most don’t realize is that flexible displays can bring some amazing benefits to a device, even if the display itself isn’t curved.
And Apple has patents on all of it.
Here’s how Apple might deploy flexible displays to transform every product they make.
First, Apple CEO Tim Cook was forced to grovel and kowtow to the Chinese Communist Party over their obviously false and politically motivated claims about Apple’s warranty.
Now, Apple is being publicly insulted and used by Facebook.
There is no way Steve Jobs would have put up with this kind of humiliating abuse.
According to “two people familiar with the matter,” Apple is super close to closing a deal with a couple of major music labels for its own streaming music service, one which is reportedly better than the deal that the labels are getting from rival service, Pandora.
While other reports have Apple “lowballing” the record industry on royalty rates of up to half what Pandora pays, CNET is reporting that new revenue options could make the iRadio deal better for labels in the long run.
The eBook publishing price-fixing scandal raised its fugly head again this week when the US Justice Department filed documents in advance of the June 3 trial in New York.
