The European Union has given its official stamp of approval to Apple’s acquisition of UK-based music discovery app Shazam.
While the deal was announced way back in December, it has been held up until now by an EU antitrust investigation, based on the popularity of Shazam and the amount of data it holds. This investigation was requested by seven European countries, including France, Italy, Spain and Sweden.
It’s not exactly breaking news that Steve Jobs was a great salesman. But a hilarious anecdote from Adam Fisher’s recent oral history of Silicon Valley, Valley of Genius, gives a great example of Jobs’ next-level skills.
Want to know how Jobs persuaded a product marketing expert from Microsoft to join his company NeXT? It turns out it involved little more than a bit of patented Steve Jobs charm — and a helping hand from a local Italian restaurant menu.
Apple is supposedly cooling its plans to bring Apple Pay to India, despite having discussions with leading banks and the National Payments Corporation of India.
Eddy Cue previously said that Apple hoped to bring Apple Pay to India sooner rather than later. “It is great that all of these payment mechanisms are coming out in India because it empowers people to be able to pay,” Cue said last year. “What Apple Pay does is make that process easy, integrated and safe. We absolutely want to bring Apple Pay to the market here.”
Apple may be commissioning its own TV shows, but it’s also picking up finished productions, too. With that goal in mind, Apple is sending some of its top production names to the Toronto International Film Festival this week to try and acquire new content.
According to trade magazine Variety, at least one of Apple’s top entertainment programming execs, Zack Van Amburg and Jamie Erlicht, will be in attendance at the festival — and they’ll have “checkbooks in hand.”
Back in 1996, Steve Jobs’ sister, Mona Simpson, wrote a novel about a Silicon Valley tycoon who has a difficult and distant relationship with his oldest daughter. He even denies her paternity altogether, and then hands out meager amounts of child support to look after her and her mom.
At the time, Jobs denied that the protagonist in A Regular Guy was closely based on him. Others thought differently, however. More than 20 years later, Lisa Brennan-Jobs’ new memoir describes just how accurate Simpson’s novel was. And what she thought of it.
Small Fry is the memoir of Lisa Brennan-Jobs, the daughter Steve Jobs didn’t want. Frequently sad and occasionally disturbing, it’s not the airbrushed portrait of Steve that Apple would like to see in print.
But it also relays some charming moments, showing us a side of the Apple co-founder that we’ve never seen before. It’s a glimpse of Steve Jobs at his most personal.
The six San Francisco Bay Area Apple Stores targeted by thieves in the past several weeks have one thing in common (besides the iPhones, iPads and Macs on display). They don’t have uniformed police officers on site.
Speaking about the crime spree, San Francisco Police Officers Association President Tony Montoya noted that neither the Marina or Union Square Apple Stores in San Francisco have so far been targeted by thieves. His theory about why they’ve escaped the Apple crime spree? Because both have uniformed officers stationed there.
As Apple makes moves to become a provider of streaming video content, it will be among the companies bound by new EU laws, stating that companies dedicate at least 30 percent of their on-demand catalogs to local content.
Roberto Viola, head of the European Commission department which regulates this area, says that the laws are on track to be enshrined in December. “We just need the final vote, but it’s a mere formality,” he recently told trade publication Variety.
Evernote, the popular mobile app for note taking, organizing, tasks lists, and archiving, is going through some hard times. A new report reveals that it has lost multiple senior executives — including its Chief Technology Officer, Chief Financial Officer, Chief Procurement Officer, and head of HR — in the last month.
A tipster told TechCrunch that that Evernote is in a “death spiral.” They claim that paid user growth and active user numbers remain flat, and that the company’s enterprise product offering has failed to catch on with customers.
Right now, a lot of the discussion of Apple’s original video content focuses on the drama series the company is developing. But Apple’s not abandoning its focus on creating videos to promote Apple Music musicians — as a pair of new teaser trailers make clear.
The short teasers are for an upcoming documentary to coincide with Chris, artist Héloïse Letissier’s second album as Christine and The Queens. Check them out below.
Recent job listings on Apple’s hiring page suggest the company is considering giving Apple Maps an AR overhaul.
The move would keep pace with Google, which showed off an AR mapping feature for Google Maps at its I/O event earlier this year. It comes at a particularly interesting time for Apple, as the company recently acquired an AR headset maker. It’s yet another hint that augmented reality won’t stay confined to our iOS devices for long!
Do you enjoy reading? Do you like finding out behind-the-scenes information about Apple? Either you’ve crash-landed on the wrong website, or you may be interested in Creative Selection, a new book by former Apple software engineer Ken Kocienda.
Available to buy today, the book tells the story of Kocienda’s work on several major Apple projects, ranging from software like Safari to the iPhone’s autocorrect keyboard. It’s a neat dive into Apple’s creation process, as told by someone who had a 15-year inside look.
Small Fry, the memoir written by Steve Jobs’ oldest daughter Lisa Brennan-Jobs, is out today. The book details Lisa’s challenging relationship with her famous father, who early on denied his daughter’s paternity, before eventually forging a (still difficult at times) relationship with her.
Lisa has said the book was prompted by her apparent dislike of Walter Isaacson’s 2011 Steve Jobs biography. However, it seems that Lisa’s book is also going to stir up some controversy among Steve Jobs’ family.
You probably don’t know the name Gerry Roche, but he was heavily involved in one of the most significant events in Apple history.
Roche, who died over the weekend at the age of 87, was the executive recruiter who brought John Sculley from PepsiCo to Apple in the early 1980s. Sculley wound up overseeing a massive boom in Apple’s business, the launch of the Macintosh, and — perhaps most memorably — the departure of Steve Jobs.
A large-scale study into heart health among Apple Watch owners is coming to an end, with Apple informing some users who signed up that their contribution is now complete.
The study took the form of an app, previously open to all Apple Watch owners in the U.S., 22-years and older, with a Series 1 or above. Called Apple Heart Study, the initiative was a collaboration between Apple and Stanford Medicine. It launched in November 2017.
Will Apple’s proposed flagship Apple Store in Melbourne, Australia’s Federation Square ever happen? Increasingly, the answer appears to be in doubt — although we hope that changes.
In the latest setback to the project, Melbourne City Council has kicked back Apple’s revised designs for the store. Having already changed it once to make it more in keeping with the area, Apple’s updated design is now being accused of causing a, “loss of definition to the square.”
The recent spate of Apple Store robberies in California is continuing, as thieves burgled an Apple Store in Burlingame on Sunday morning.
As with the other recent robberies, the incident took place when a group of people entered the store and started snatching items from the display tables. They then fled the scene in a waiting getaway vehicle.
An employee of Apple chipmaker Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) has been charged with stealing secrets from the company, and trying to take these to a new job in China.
It’s just the latest in a string of examples of attempted industrial espionage that highlights the dark side of the rush to win orders from companies like Apple.
We’re mere weeks from our screens being flooded with ads for the new 2018-era iPhone refresh, but some Apple fans clearly can’t wait that long.
Among them is South Korean Apple fan Lee Gunho, who has taken last week’s gold iPhone XS image and recreated the handsets in the form of a high quality dramatic concept video. Check it out below.
The Apple Watch Series 3 is easily the best Apple Watch so far, but you wouldn’t know it from sales. Although Apple continues to lead the smartwatch industry, a massive 9 out of 10 Apple Watches sold are the older Apple Watch Series 1.
That’s markedly different from the smartphone industry, where Apple’s newest iPhone tends to be the world’s most popular (and certainly Apple’s most popular) handset. That’s even true when it’s a device like the iPhone X that are much pricier than older models.
Apple takes every opportunity to talk up its pro-privacy agenda — and if you’re a developer being hosted in the App Store you’d better show that same level of commitment to users.
According to a new report, Apple has started telling its developers that they will soon need to host a privacy policy in their apps’ metadata. This change will apply to all new apps and app updates from October 3, regardless of whether or not they connect to the internet.
The Qualcomm vs. Apple legal battle rages on — and, boy, is it getting convoluted at this point!
In the latest legal decision in the case, Judge Lucy Koh denied a motion by plaintiffs that would have allowed them to block Qualcomm from getting the necessary permissions to block certain iPhone imports to the U.S. Got that?
It wasn’t that long ago that Warren Buffett, probably the world’s most famous investor, said that he just didn’t get get Apple and wasn’t investing in it as a result.
To quote the late Biggie Smalls, “things done changed.” In a new interview with CNBC, coinciding with Buffett’s 88th birthday, the now-Apple-loving financial titan shared his thoughts on a number of topics — and you can bet that the iPhone was among them!
Apple representatives reportedly visited Taipei this week to attend the Touch Taiwan display industry convention.
During the event, Apple is said to have held private meetings with two Taiwanese display makers to discuss their MicroLED and MiniLED technologies, both of which could be used in future devices.
Apple is one of five tech companies — along with Google, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter — targeted in a new lawsuit accusing them of displaying bias against right-wing news outlets.
The lawsuit comes from Larry Klayman, founder of Judicial Watch and Freedom Watch and a former Department of Justice prosecutor. It alleges that the companies are working together to “quash and/or limit advocacy by conservative and pro-Trump public interest groups, advocates and others to further the leftist anti-conservative agendas.”