During a Q&A session at D11 last night, Tim Cook was asked whether Apple would ever port any of its apps to rival platforms like Android or Windows Phone. His response was somewhat surprising; Cook said that Apple wasn’t against porting apps and services to other platforms — if it made sense.
The only problem is, Cook doesn’t believe that it does make sense.
Real Racing 3 fans have yet more content to look forward to in a new update that promises a new track, new cars, and new events. EA announced the release, which will introduce twilight racing at the Dubai Autodrome, on the company’s official Facebook page.
The post-PC world is already dumbing young people down. Way down.
I’m hearing accounts by hiring managers that new applicants right out of school often lack not only basic “computing” skills (for example, they don’t really know how to do a Google search), but they lack the imagination, creativity or curiosity to even learn those skills.
There may be multiple causes for this phenomenon, but I’m here to throw the post-PC world under the school bus.
Google is considering a buyout of Waze, the mapping app for iPhone and Android that specializes in crowd-sourced information. Waze’s asking price is around $1 billion, according to a new report from Bloomberg. Other big tech companies have been courting the map startup, most notably Facebook.
“None of the bidders is close to clinching a deal and the talks may fall apart,” says the report. There have been whispers that Apple has also considered an acquisition, but nothing concrete has surfaced yet.
Waze would be a good asset for any of the three aforementioned companies. The service has more than 40 million users that report valuable information like traffic incidents and wrecks. At this point, Apple Maps could probably use the functionality more than Google.
Source: Bloomberg
After being pulled from the App Store back in April for violating Apple’s latest guidelines, AppGratis has turned to Android to keep its app recommendation service alive. The company has this week launched a new app in Google Play that promises a free app every day, plus discounts of up to 90% on paid Android titles.
It’s unlikely that the Jawbone Jambox will be shoved off its throne anytime soon; not necessarily because it’s the best-sounding portable Bluetooth speaker out there, but because it was here first, and it made a huge splash (in part because, yes, it sounds pretty good).
But I were to bet on a challenger, I might put my money on the smart new UE Boom. Not only is it ruggedized against drops and splashes, but it’s armed with two very unusual tricks.
In a blog post today, aimed squarely at reports in both the Washington Post and the LA Times, Yelp’s Vice President of Communications Vince Sollitto refutes any claim of wrongdoing or pressure to advertise in exchange for hiding poor user reviews.
Pandora has finally updated its mobile apps and website to let you connect with Facebook’s “Open Graph.” This means that you can now flip a toggle and share everything you listen to on Facebook. What you listen to is collected under the music section of your profile. Services like Spotify and Rdio have had this ability for awhile.
Along with an update for its Mac app, Twitter announced today that it is introducing a new security feature to protect accounts against hackings. Twitter’s new two-factor authentification feature should help reduce the number of hacked accounts that have plagued the service recently.
To set up the new two-factor authentification feature on your account, log in and go to your Account Settings page. From there you can choose to require a verification code when you sign in, and add a phone number to your account.
The whole process takes about a minute, but if you get lost, Twitter made this handy video to help you out:
Apple began adding the Galaxy S4 to its ongoing patent-infringement case against Samsung last week, and it has now specified five patents which it believes the device is breaching. The Cupertino company has also taken aim at Google Now, which allegedly infringes its unified search patent.
Google announced the end of Google Checkout today, slated to go the way of Google Reader and the dinosaurs as of November 20, 2013.
Today, we’re letting web merchants know that in six months, Google Checkout will be retired as we transition to Google Wallet — a platform that enables merchants to meet the demands of a multi-screen world where consumers shop in-stores, at their desks and on their mobile devices.
It seems as this will mostly affect merchants who use Google’s Checkout system, as consumers will really only see a change in the name of the service. With Google Wallet API enhancements announced last week, like the Instant Buy API and the Wallet Objects API, the transition should be smooth for consumers who use Android to purchase goods and services.
It will mean something different to Google Checkout merchants and Android developers, however.
Turkey’s tablet loving Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, has been going on a tour of the U.S. in pursuit of the greatest tablet marker in the world to arm his students with. The prime minister visited Silicon Valley on May 18th to be briefed by the world’s best technology companies on their latest endeavors.
Erdoğan is looking to buy 10.6 million iPads for his country’s education new education project Faith. So far, Erdoğan was first greeted by Microsoft CEO, Steve Balmer, and then he paid visits to both Apple, Google.
Regarding his visit to the U.S., Erdoğan said:
Samsung has a problem. It controled 33.1% of the global smartphone marketshare last quarter — Apple was only 17.9% — yet that’s almost entirely in the low-end of the market.
What’s keeping Samsung from conquering the high-end of the market, where all the profit is and which Apple continues to dominate? Software: there is a wide-spread impression amongst consumers that Samsung’s apps just aren’t as good as Apple’s.
That’s a problem Samsung is eager to solve. That’s why they are ponying up $800,000 to developers willing to make great, Galaxy-specific apps.
Yahoo! has this morning announced that it has reached a deal to acquire popular blogging platform Tumblr for $1.1 billion. The company promises “not to screw it up,” and says that Tumblr will continue to operate as a separate business, with David Karp remaining CEO.
I used to mock Apple years ago because they advertised Apple as the fun alternative to stodgy, boring Windows.
The idea that Apple was fun and Microsoft was not was a misdirection at best. Windows was the biggest games platform and Xbox was the best console game (in my opinion). Apple had no games to speak of.
Five years ago, all that changed: Apple launched the iOS App Store, and it quickly became the biggest games platform ever, now making twice the money as portable game consoles. Apple’s App Store hit right when the casual and mobile games market was ready to take off in a big way.
The Android market is no slouch in the gaming arena, either, and will soon overtake the portable game console market as well.
But the mobile gaming market is still in its infancy. The Android gaming scene is about yesterday’s games — isolated, causal time-killing games, for the most part. So to take it to the next level, Google this week announced Google Play Games Services.
There are two gigantic opportunities that are potentially unique to Google: multi-device gaming and gaming as a mainstream spectator sport.
Earlier this week, Google beat Apple to the punch by launching a streaming subscription music service before Cuperino could unveil its own offering, iRadio.
How did Google managed to do it? Apple has all the music industry clout, so how could Google swing a deal first? Because Google Play Music All Access is essentially a clone of services like Rdio and Spotify, and the contract terms of services like that are easy to copy.
Apple’s iRadio? It’s a wholly different beast.
The Pebble smartwatch was a runaway success on Kickstarter, and backers have been receiving units in the mail for the past several months. Nearly 70,000 Pebbles have been shipped, and today the watch’s SDK has been updated to allow two-way communication between the Pebble and mobile apps. Pebble is encouraging devs to create “watchapps” that can “send and receive data from a connected smartphone app.”
Apps were previously restricted to the Pebble’s basic functions, but now nearly every facet of the watch can be controlled with (and control) a third-party iOS or Android app.
The new Google Hangouts app for Android and iOS is the best messaging service Google’s produced yet, but one thing that will probably prevent it from taking off is its lack of SMS support.
If you tried the Hangouts yesterday you probably noticed the amount of people you can talk to is sparse. That’s because Hangouts only uses Google+ to connect to other humans so all of your friends would have to sign up for Google+ before you can use Hangouts to send them a message.
The dearth of people on Google+ probably means that Hangouts isn’t quite ready to be your go-to messaging app quite yet, however, Google’s Community Manager says SMS integration is coming to Hangouts soon.
Handheld games consoles like the Nintendo 3DS and the Sony PlayStation Vita have long been suffering at the hands of smartphones and tablets. But the latest data from IDC and App Annie should give handheld game developers — including Nintendo — something to really think about.
While consumer spending on Android and iOS continued to rise during the first quarter of 2013, it fell considerably on handhelds.
Rovio really does make its games a worthwhile investment. Angry Birds Seasons is almost two and a half years old now, and it has just received yet another 36 new levels — plus a new power-up — on Android and iOS. That’s not bad for a 99¢ game now, is it.
Android and iOS managed to grab a whopping 92.3% of all smartphone shipments during the first quarter of 2013, with a total of 199.5 million units sold worldwide. There are no prizes for guessing which of the two platforms grabbed the most market share.
Seriously, have you gotten your tickets, yet? Star Trek: Into Darkness is coming this weekend, and it looks like the entire US is heading tot he theater to see it, en masse.
Fandango is having a good run of it, claiming that 71 percent of the pre-release ticket sales are coming through it’s very convenient service, with 32 percent of that traffic coming via mobile apps.
Further, they just told me that 15 percent of the mobile ticket sales through the Fandango app are coming from iPhone users, while 6 percent are coming from the Android mobile app.
It’s strange to think that, till now, as big a high-end audio player as Shure has had no answer to the extravagant, big-gun, flagship in-ear monitor models of its rivals — models like the Ultimate Ears 18 Pro Custom, or the JH Audio JH16 Pro.
But now they do — big time. The new SE846 extends Shure’s highly regarded SE line well beyond the SE535, previously their top, most expensive IEM.
Google unleashed an insane amount of news during its marathon keynote at the I/O developer conference today in California. A new music subscription service, Google Maps update, and messaging platform were just a few of the announcements.
Software and services was the name of the game at I/O this year, and here’s a roundup of everything Google unveiled earlier this afternoon:
Google Maps is already one of the best mapping services on the planet, but Google isn’t content to rest on its laurels. At the Google I/O keynote this morning Google announced that it will launch a new version of Google Maps for iOS and Android later this year.
The new Google Maps will come with a simplified UI, as well as new features like real-time traffic, dynamic re-routing, reviews from Zagat and there will even be a dedicated Google Maps app for iPad.
