Apple has reportedly hired Karl Heiselman, chief executive officer of branding agency Wolff Olins, to join the company in a new marketing communications role.
The former CEO and branding expert has been with Wolff Olins for a total of 14 years — and during his seven years as chief executive officer has worked with a number of high profile clients, including Apple.
Faster than a speeding bullet,
As one of last year’s top-grossing iPad apps, the digital comics platform has sold an astonishing 6 billion comic book pages since its 2009 debut — 4 billion of those coming in 2013 alone.
In helping revive an industry that was almost dead on its feet, ComiXology has done for comics what iTunes did for legal music downloads.
At the height of its success, it’s now been snatched up by Amazon for an undisclosed amount of money — prompting the question of whether Apple has missed out. (Particularly when taking into accounts the reports that Amazon is reportedly set to debut a smartphone of its own — capable of busting out 3-D.)
After all, ComiXology’s CEO David Steinberger has always had big ambitions. He once wrote that his “crazy goal” was to turn everyone on the planet into a comic reader. Sounds just like Steve Jobs.
Before the acquisition, CEO David Steinberger told Cult of Mac ComiXology’s backstory and its deep ties to Apple. Sometimes the Cupertino company has acted as its Krypton-esque home planet, and other times more like its Lex Luthor-style nemesis.
Ready for ComiXology’s secret origin story?
Technology group Kudelski has become the latest company to file a patent lawsuit against Apple.
Kudelski’s OpenTV and Nagravision subsidiaries are claiming that Apple is infringing on five of its U.S. patents in pretty much every product under the sun — including iOS devices, Apple TV, the App Store, iTunes, iADS, Safari, and Macs running OS X.
Back in the heady days of 1996 — when Apple shares were worth less than the cost of a VHS tape of Independence Day — one of the many awful ideas the company came up with was to latch onto the then-popular trend for theme restaurants, by announcing the debut of Apple Computer cybercafes.
These were supposed to start in Los Angeles, before eventually spreading over the entire world.
Needless to say, they never happened — but if they had done, they may have served pizzas bearing the face of Apple’s co-founder Steve Jobs. (Or possibly not, since he wasn’t with the company at the time.)
Either way, if you’ve been waiting for the past two decades to finally have an edible snack in the form of Apple’s late co-founder and CEO, you may want to buy a plane ticket to take you to Papa’s Pizza restaurant in Puerto Rico, where pizza artist Wilhelm Rodriguez can whip you up a pizza pie like the above.
Have a great app idea written down in a notebook that would make you a millionaire if only you could turn it into a working prototype? (Sure you do!)
Marvel is a great iPhone app that lets you take sketches and turn them into a free prototype, by applying “hotspots” to your images and then letting you link these hotspots with other photos to create a demo you can tap your way through.
Got a tough, possibly life-changing ethical decision to make? Why not make your iPhone part of the decision-making process?
A recently released app called Ethical Decision Making lets you work through your options by prompting you to identify the people who have a stake in your decision, consider your options through five different ethical perspectives, weigh different approaches, and score and rank potential decisions.
When last summer solstice we heard tell of the legend that Microsoft was planning to bring ye olde strategy franchise Age of Empires to iOS, we did rejoice greatly.
Today scouts from the Pacific Northwest (read: Redmond, WA) have traveled to bring tidings, and moving pictures, of the game known as Age of Empires: World Domination.
Fancy building your own glittering high-tech utopia, or a bustling cosmopolitan metropolis?
Either way, gamers will be happy to know that SimCity 4 Deluxe Edition today became available for download, exclusively in the Mac App Store. Combining both SimCity 4 and the Rush Hour expansion pack — which adds bonus disasters like UFO attacks and Autosaurus Wrecks — the game is a steal at $19.99.
Monument Valley is one of the most original iOS games ever. A triumph of isometric design, it’s a trippy puzzle game in which you guide a white-clad princess through a series of twisting, turning structures, inspired by the mind-bending art of M.C. Escher.
Creating a world of this complexity might sound like a nightmare project, but for the UK-based game developers at ustwo, coming up with such an audacious creation was something of a dream.
“One of the first things we did when designing Monument Valley were to try and come up with images that seemed impossible,” says lead designer Ken Wong.
Still reeling from the success of the game — priced at $3.99, it was the top paid iPad app in its first week of release — Wong cracked open his sketchbooks to give Cult of Mac readers a glimpse at how Monument Valley‘s breathtaking designs came to be.
Here’s what we found.
Could Apple’s revolutionary re-imagining of Apple TV not be a set-top box at all, but rather an Oculus Rift style headset?
A patent published Thursday hints that this might be the case, as it refers to a head mounted display (HMD) capable of providing a personal media viewing experience for users.
The patent describes how data processing circuitry could feature optical component capable of adjusting left and right images to display 3-D media, or else to account for a user’s eyesight limitations.
The success of The Simpsons: Tapped Out meant it was only a matter of time before Family Guy got similar mobile game treatment.
First announced back in December, today marks the arrival of Family Guy: The Quest for Stuff in the App Store.
A joint venture between Fox and TinyCo studios, the game lets you help Peter Griffin and the rest of the Quahog residents to rebuild their city after it’s destroyed.
Expect lots of fan service, in the form of regular Family Guy characters and reprised gags from previous episodes (Mermaid Peter, Rambo Lois, and the Petercopter, for instance.)
When you’ve got $158.8 billion in the bank, there’s not a huge amount you need to be envious of.
But while Apple is beating rival Samsung on both the quality of its products and adverts, it is perhaps losing out when it comes to the kind of big digital media strategies that really attract attention (and customers) — like Ellen DeGeneres’ famous Oscars selfie which Publicis CEO Maurice Levy recently valued at between $800 million and $1 billion.
With that in mind, Apple is reportedly changing up its marketing approach to invest more in digital marketing and social media support — adding four new digital agencies to its roster.
How do you convince a jury you’re owed $2 billion in damages? If you’re Apple you hire an MIT-trained economist to do it for you.
While the patent war between Apple and Samsung continues to rage, Apple on Tuesday called economist Chris Vellturo to spell out exactly why Apple is asking to be paid $2 billion in damages ($2.19B to be exact) from arch-rival Samsung for infringing on five of its utility patents.
Kicking off this Friday, the Coachella Music Festival will become the latest event to use iBeacons to provide proximity-specific information to attendees.
Coachella’s iOS app has been updated with a new Version 3.0 which enables on-site iBeacon notifications for users who enable Location and Bluetooth services.
Are we getting closer to the long-awaited iWatch?
According to a new report, three Apple suppliers have delivered samples of flexible circuit boards for the iWatch — with the device now expected to be unveiled in September.
Amazon’s Prime Instant Video service is on fire in the United States — and that growth happened before Amazon even introduced its $99 Fire TV set-top box.
According to a new report from online-video delivery and caching solutions provider Qwilt, streams on Prime Instant Video have almost tripled over the past year — and in the process have passed both Apple and Hulu in terms of volume of video streaming traffic. The data was gathered from MSO broadband providers that use the Qwilt systems.
Back in the early 1990s there was a series of handheld games consoles made by Japan’s Epoch company. Called Barcode Battlers, they let you enter the numbers from real world barcodes to generate characters, monsters, and power-ups, which could be used as part of in-game battles. Novelty aside, they were never much good, but they were certainly popular — and the idea was intriguing enough that the Barcode Battlers are still remembered today.
Jump forward thirteen-or-so years, and the rear-facing camera used by iOS devices have proven adept at scanning barcodes and using this to access information.
Perfect timing, then, for a game like Barcode Kingdom to come along. The basic premise is pretty much identical to the Barcode Battler: you scan in barcodes to create warriors, weapons, and other items that you can then use in RPG-style battles like the one depicted above. But is it any good?
A massive 87% of iOS users are currently running some version of iOS 7 — according to the latest numbers revealed on Apple’s developer site.
The figure is up from 85% at the end of March, and 83% one month ago, when Apple introduced iOS 7.1. This update added several new features such as CarPlay, and also tweaked iTunes Radio, the Touch ID fingerprint sensor, and Siri.
Remember that recent story about Apple’s lack of racially diverse emojis?
A patent, published Tuesday, may solve some of those problems by promising Automatic Avatar Creation for Apple users — literally putting a virtual “you” inside your Apple device.
The patent explains how devices could create three-dimensional avatars that resembles users by first photographing them, and then comparing this image to a database of pre-created facial components which can be fitted together in different combinations. The resulting creation could be used in gaming, social media, and video conferencing.
Want to know what a business lesson about Apple looks like at Harvard Business School?
A whole lot like a comic book, apparently. The publishing arm of Harvard Business School is turning to comics to help tell case studies related to high profile companies. One of these — called “Apple’s Core” — turns the story of Apple’s early days into sequential art, reminiscent of the Steve Jobs manga from last year.
This change was reportedly done to make the story more interesting and palatable to visual and foreign learners, who would prove less inclined to learn about Apple if made to read a printed case study.
Apple is reportedly planning on creating an R&D team to develop baseband chips for future iPhone models, according to a new rumor from Digitimes.
Baseband chips, for those who don’t know, are used to control a device’s radio functions related to modulation, signal generation, and more.
If the rumor is to be believed, these chips could debut with the round of iPhone updates following the iPhone 6 — which would mean they could arrive with the iPhone that, by current naming standards, will be called the iPhone 6s.
Business owners who use the iPad for retail will likely want to check out the latest update of point-of-sale app ShopKeep POS, which has just been updated to version 2.0.
A significant update, ShopKeep Version 2.0 radically overhauls the look and feel of the app, with an attractive new interface inspired by iOS 7.
The app also features streamlined functionality — allowing vendors to ring up customers faster than ever with a Single Sign On feature that means that both managerial functions and ringing transactions can be done with one code.
Having launched its iPhone trade-in program back in August last year, Apple has now expanded the program to cover Apple Retail Stores throughout Germany.
The trade-in program lets customers trade in older iPhone models and receive gift cards of up to €230 ($315), which can then be used toward the purchase of a brand new iPhone.
Popular video-sharing website Vimeo has added another update to its official iOS app.
Up front, the single most prominent update relates to the in-app search feature — something that was initially absent when Vimeo made the jump to iOS 7, then restored but hidden, and now made constantly visible within the app. Since search is of vital importance on video sharing sites, this improvement means that Vimeo users can breathe a sigh of relief.
Looking for a more explosion-filled egg hunt this Easter?
If so, you may want to check out the latest version of popular third-person shooter Respawnables which adds a new Easter Egg Hunt mode, where players must gather as many Easter eggs as they can and collect prizes in doing so.
