San Francisco - page 2

Apple has never been a company to offer the kind of perks that Google and others do — allowing its stock options and world-beating reputation to make up for the tech giant’s lack of indoor climbing walls and free food.

But a new report suggests that Apple may be slowly rethinking its approach to incentives. And it’s all beginning with San Francisco real-estate.

The new Apple Store coming soon to San Francisco appears to be making decent progress. Leo Cheng snapped a nice photo from Solano Labs across the street from the new location and tweeted it at us. The store still looks like a hot mess, but the workers are apparently working on the glass doors for the entrance in this picture. Take a look.

A crowd of several dozen protesters gathered in front of Apple’s flagship retail store in Francisco last night to protest the U.S. government’s attempt to force Apple to aid the FBI in hacking into an iPhone.

Ranging from privacy advocates to casual iPhone owners, the crowd argued that such a move sets a dangerous precedent that threatens the safety and security of millions of iOS users around the world.

SAN FRANCISCO — It’s not as cool as installing a gorgeous glass staircase, but Apple is definitely making its mark on the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium here.

Flags, signs, security barricades — it’s all part of the prep for Apple’s massive iPhone 6s event scheduled for next week. It’s a shabby corner of San Francisco, but Apple is totally classing up the joint.

See more pictures of Friday’s street scene below.

SAN FRANCISCO — Just how big is Apple’s next product reveal going to be? All signs point to it being a massive blowout of an event — far bigger than the standard iPhone “s” upgrade the world is expecting.

Apple signed a lease for 300,000 square feet of office space in San Jose last month, but the company might be eyeing a bigger expansion in the city, according to a new report that Apple just purchased a massive development site in North San Jose.

In a deal worth more than $138 million, Apple has purchased 43 acres of land at 2347 North First St., according to documents obtained by the Silicon Valley Business Journal. Apple has yet to announce its plans for the property, but it will be the company’s first significant presence into San Jose in decades.

Here’s a map of the land Apple just bought:

Construction on Apple’s gigantic spaceship headquarters in Cupertino is coming along nicely, but the iPhone maker is reportedly looking to take its first big bite of San Francisco real estate.

This year’s Worldwide Developers Conference will kick off June 8 at San Francisco’s Moscone West, Apple said today. The five-day event will provide an early glimpse at the future of iOS and OS X, plus more developer sessions than ever before.

The Apple Store in downtown San Francisco got its own water fountain yesterday… sort of.

In the afternoon, a construction worker carrying out work on the the corner of Stockton and Ellis Streets, near to the Union Square brick-and-mortar store, accidentally burst a fire hydrant — resulting in a spectacular geyser of water erupting outside the Apple Store.

Although it didn’t last for long, the spectacle certainly made an impression on onlookers: one of whom filmed it using the slo-mo function on their iPhone.

Apple took the wraps of WatchKit yesterday and revealed an entirely new font created just for Apple Watch called San Francisco. Designers are heaping praise on the sexy new typeface that condenses at larger sizes to take up less space, and becomes easier to read at smaller sizes, but we can’t help but wish it was coming to OS X soon.

For those that can’t wait to interact with San Francisco on the Apple Watch there’s good news though: A developer named Wells Riley has released a bundle on GitHub that swaps Yosemite Helvetica Neue system font for Apple’s new Sans Serif creation.

To make San Francisco your Mac’s system font, follow these steps:

SAN FRANCISCO — Twenty-five years ago, a bike messenger sat in his garage and used an old-school Singer sewing machine to stitch his mark on the world.

That bike messenger was Rob Honeycutt, and the bags he made in 1989 were called Scumbags. They were designed for use by the city’s notorious two-wheeled delivery riders, whose fashion sense tended toward crude cutoffs, T-shirts and hoodies.

A year later, Honeycutt changed his operation’s name to Timbuk2, and the company’s been crafting an increasingly ambitious line of bags ever since, expanding far beyond the world of tattooed dudes on fixies.

“Timbuk2 wasn’t going to the office 25 years ago,” CEO Patti Cazzato told Cult of Mac during a recent tour of the company’s Mission district factory, where all of Timbuk2’s custom bags are made.

A massive new Apple Store planned for downtown San Francisco is being held up by… tulip trees?

The site in question overlooks Union Square, with Apple planning to demolish a large existing building and replace it with a giant, two-storey glass structure reminiscent of the iconic New York Apple Store on Fifth Avenue. However, in order for work to commence on the building Apple needs to bring in the right equipment, which necessitates the removal of seven tulip trees currently blocking the path.

Trouble is, things aren’t as straightforward as they might seem.

A protest involving around 50 people blocked customers from entering the main doors of Apple’s flagship San Francisco Union Square retail store yesterday.

The protest was related to service employees claiming to be underpaid. Organized by the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), they staged a sit-in for nearly an hour. While the Apple Store remained opened during this time, customers had to enter through a side door.

One of the protestors, describing himself as an Apple security guard, decried the firm for its lack of job protection. “If [security officers] miss a day of work, they don’t know if they’ll have the job the next day,” he told Business Insider.

SAN FRANCISCO — It’s every entrepreneur’s worst nightmare: The app you’ve spent hours developing gets shut down before it even really launches.

It’s been a rocky road for four young French entrepreneurs who hoped to make their mark with a parking app called Sweetch. Their idea was to alert prospective parkers that spots on the street were freeing up, exchanging a nominal fee between drivers that could be donated to local charities. But instead of paving the road to fame by clearing the city’s congested streets, they ended up pulling their app from the Apple store under threat of litigation from San Francisco’s City Attorney.

“We helped five or 10 people a day, we brought value to them, but the city didn’t even try to understand that,” co-founder Hamza Ouazzani Chahdi says, speaking to Cult of Mac in the sunny, immaculate and modern apartment the guys call both home and office in the city’s Mission District. “We were lumped in with the other apps that definitely had a predatory model and it was toxic for us.”

He says that despite a meeting with San Francisco officials, the entrepreneurs weren’t really give a chance: “It was just, ‘Here’s your deadline.’”

SAN FRANCISCO — There’s a new kind of gold hidden in the hills of this city: A mysterious Twitter account is leading locals on a treasure hunt for Bitcoin.

The folks behind @SFHiddenBitcoin, which has been active since July 1, are hot on the heels of @HiddenCash, the Twitter account that made news doling out the dough of a real estate mogul.

While judges debate whether Bitcoin is money and crashing economies around the globe fear the virtual currency’s wake, it’s the coin of the realm in certain circles here. If you can handle being a “cyphervegan,” you can basically already live on Bitcoin.

Coding marathons, packed parties and more fanboys than should be legally permissible in one building await developers when Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference kicks off in San Francisco next week, and while the conference is serious business for most devs, who says you can’t have a little bit of fun too?

WWDC rips into high gear with a keynote on June 2nd followed by days of coding sessions, high-profile speakers, hands-on labs and tons of get togethers for developers of all sizes and backgrounds.

Sneaking in time to tour San Francisco is nearly impossible thanks to the stuffed scheduled at WWDC and nearby AltConf, but whether you’re coming to WWDC as a first timer or a seasoned vet, here are nine things every Apple fan must do at least once while visiting the Bay Area.

Your usual prepackaged USB charging cable gets the job done for a short time. But after a month or so of life on the go, you find it damaged, knotted and unreliable. Cult of Mac Deals has a cable that will help you make that inconvenience a thing of the past.

The 10Ft Bungee Charging Cable features resistant nylon material is strong enough to keep damage away and the cord from tangling, so you won’t get the mess or the headache from for all your wild times. And Cult of Mac Deals has this cable available for only $11.99 for a limited time.

Forged in the fires of Silicon Valley and backed by venture capital power players comes Lyft® – a service revolutionizing public transport. You request a ride through the free iOS or Android app, then watch on a real-time map as your driver approaches.

Lyft drivers are friendly, always available, and cheaper than a cab – why would you ever take a taxi again? And right now Cult of Mac Deals has $30 of Lyft credit available for just $10, meaning you’ll save even more money.

SAN FRANCISCO — Cult of Mac is on the ground for Macworld/iWorld 2014 at the Moscone Center. We’ll be roaming the show floor and sitting in on workshops all day to bring you the coolest Apple-related stuff we can find.

You can follow us throughout Macworld on the liveblog below. No need to refresh the page; new posts will appear automatically!

Tech companies such as Apple and Google will pay $1 per stop, per day for employee shuttle bus services using public bus stops in San Francisco — according to a new pilot program approved by the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA).

In a scheme that will bring in around $1.5 million in fees over an 18-month trial, companies such as Apple will pay SFMTA more than $100,000, while smaller tech companies will pay around $80,000 per year. Any money gained will be put back into the program to cover administrative fees, permits, enforcement, and other related costs.

There are different ways to measure the success of a tech company — thing like how many lucrative patents it’s sitting on, how much money it’s giving back to shareholders, and what its overall market penetration is in whatever area it’s operating in.

Well, there’s another way also: how much do its product launches correlate with a spike rates. You can keep your reports about Apple’s recent financial quarters disappointing Wall Street analysts — as far as San Francisco’s criminal element is concerned, Apple is doing better than it has in years.

Venerable pop artist David Hockney brought his art from the screen of the iPad to towering heights in San Francisco.

If you’re used to seeing his quick iPhone sketches on a screen, the 12-foot-high views to Yosemite are an eyeful. You can catch them at San Francisco’s de Young Musuem in the aptly titled “David Hockney: A Bigger Exhibitiion” until January 2014.

We’ll have more on Hockney’s stunning work and the exhibit in the November 2 edition of Cult of Mac Magazine, dedicated to mobile art.

Even if you don’t work in tech, you had better hope your town has more companies like Apple move in. If an innovation hub takes root where you live, you’ll be wealthier, healthier and less likely to divorce than areas that remain barren to it.

And if you are in a startup – wherever you live now, get yourself to one of these brain hubs before it’s too late.

That’s the crux of “The New Geography of Jobs,”  a fascinating book by Berkeley economics prof Enrico Moretti who leads readers on a whirlwind tour of how tech innovation is reshaping opportunity in the US, clustering around places like San Francisco, San Jose, San Diego, Austin, Seattle, Boston, Washington, DC and Durham, North Carolina.

There’s a big debate, of course, about the yuppification of cities like San Francisco, which have seen a huge influx of monied engineers from companies like Apple, Facebook and Google, who are feeding a huge boom in tech. Locals are complaining about skyrocketing house prices, $4 toast and the artisanal food trucks that charge $12 for a tofu Thai burrito. Outrage Missionites react with birthday pinatas shaped like Google buses and posters from the Yuppie-eradication project.

However, there is another side to it. If an Apple worker moves next door, that person will create on average five jobs, Moretti’s research shows.  Those jobs are a mix of skilled (nurses, lawyers, teachers) and unskilled ones (hairdressers, waiters, carpenters.) Innovation will never create the majority of US jobs, but it has an outsized effect on the economy of American communities, he writes. It’s not your resume but your zip code that determines how much money you make – so be glad instead of complaining about that Cupertino traffic, folks.

“Gentrification is a good problem to have”

Here in San Francisco a quick look around confirms that, at least on an anecdotal level. The Cult of Mac co-working space is abuzz with fancy-schmancy tattoo artists, hipster nail designers and boutique financial planners.

Moretti’s ideas – considerably nuanced and convincingly bolstered by research in the 250-page work – go counter to much of what’s being written about the squeeze of resources in the booming Bay Area. Gentrification is also a good problem to have, he says, acknowledging that it brings serious social consequences. The solution: not to discourage growth in innovation (in the vain hope manufacturing comes back to big cities) but manage the “growth in smart ways to minimize the negative consequences for the weakest residents and maximize the economic benefits for all.”

Given his local base, you’d expect a lot of interesting examples. In between a visit to a color scientist at Pixar and an artisan chocolate factory, he talks to a San Francisco bookbinder who employs eight people, uses the same equipment from decades past and whose fortunes go up and down with the high-tech companies of the NASDAQ. Noteworthy clients include the Jobs family, who had Steve’s condolence book made there.

Cities change and grow or they die out. And whether they thrive or wither in America now depends on innovation.

This picture of tech making things a little better for most of us is in stark contrast with the San Francisco that has been painted by the tech press as a gentrified, bloated old floozy who puts out for soulless tech workers who trample what dignity she has left by kickstarting pop-up food trucks and lofts that proliferate like mushrooms.

This strikes me as strange, coming from people whose livelihood often depends on breathless excitement over things like cell phone covers. Then again, I’m the fourth generation of my family to live here. I like to imagine that my great gran would find it funny that the Del Monte plant where she gave up elbow grease putting peaches into cans has morphed into a gaudy tourist shopping center. (I am also fairly sure she’d arch an eyebrow at my earnest writings about iPad stands, but still.)

Cities change and grow or they die out, basically. And whether they thrive or wither in America now depends on innovation. Whether you’re part of the innovation or provide services for those who are in it, you’re still better off. Moretti’s research shows that more college grads raise the salaries for everyone in an area – regardless of the higher cost of living. Same with lower divorce rates and better general health.

So get over that Tesla parked in your new neighbor’s driveway and get on with your life.

Following weeks of anticipation, Apple today issued invites for a September 10 press event that will finally see the grand unveiling of its latest iPhones. The Cupertino company is expected to show off both the iPhone 5S and the iPhone 5C, and announce a public release date for iOS 7.

Thieves in San Francisco are reportedly forming teams and developing new ways to steal your smartphone. The various schemes they’ve devised usually employ one person to create a distraction while another nabs your device and takes off with it. But a more recent trend uses a phony good Samaritan who will actually return your device in the hope of receiving a reward.