Yahoo is reportedly in talks to acquire business app developer Tomfoolery for around $16 million.
Tomfoolery is most notably the developer behind Anchor, a social network for coworkers, which we have previously written about at Cult of Mac.
Starwood Hotels & Resorts has begun a pilot program in two of its major hotel locations in Manhattan and Silicon Valley, which does away with keycards altogether by allowing guests to enter their rooms using just their smartphones.
With Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Christmas, New Year and Chinese New Year all now firmly in our rear-view mirrors, Apple is focusing on the next big sales holiday of the year: Valentine’s Day.
Describing the iPad Air and iPad mini as “two ways to your valentine’s heart”, Apple has posted a new ad campaign on the main page of its online store — advising that users take advantage of Apple’s free custom engraving to “include a few love letters on any iPad”.
Steve Wozniak has been announced as the headline speaker for next week’s Apps World North America event in San Francisco.
Running February 5-6, Apps World is an event presenting the latest insight into the multi-platform app ecosystem, expected to attract more than 8,000 attendees.
Top-grossing iOS developer ComiXology has just updated its popular Comics app with several improvements — including the addition of a highly-requested “Wish List” feature.
The feature lets users build their own list of ComiXology wants by tapping a Wish List button, which saves the book for later. Wish Lists can be accessed in the app’s Purchases section.
Flying Experience by Umoove isn’t really a game in the strictest sense of the word. As the title implies, it’s really more of an “experience” — although it may wind up changing the way games are played on your iOS device all the same.
What gameplay there is is straightforward. You play an unnamed character flying over a desert settlement. A little bit like Crazy Taxi, or a similar title, the clock is ticking down all the time and it’s up to you to collect power-ups which give you more time to explore. The power-ups are glowing magic potions, which hover in mid air, and you collect them by flying into them. That’s it really.
This story first appeared in Cult of Mac Magazine.
“Adapt or die” is the rallying call of business strategists and evolutionary biologists everywhere. But when it comes to a U.S. tech company expanding its reaches into a new country, things aren’t always that simple.
History is littered with examples of American businesses that have tried and failed to crack the Chinese market — either because they attempted to adapt too much to local markets (thereby losing what made them unique), or else not changing enough.
While Apple’s success in China and other Asian countries is only of direct concern to shareholders, there is a very real reason for your average Apple watcher to be interested.
Russia’s second-largest mobile carrier MegaFon will start selling iPhones again in its retail stores — for the first time since 2010.
MegaFon’s new three-year contract with Apple comes after the Cupertino company relaxed its sales policy in Russia.
There are very few computers in history more famous than the Macintosh 128K. As a result, it’s pretty hard to unearth any new information about it.
Fortunately, that is exactly what Time.com has managed to do, having discovered a video of Steve Jobs and the Mac team discussing the Macintosh shortly after its 1984 launch.
A new Kickstarter project is aiming to build minimal charging docks designed to hold Apple’s 8-pin Lightning Cable. The underside of each “MikroDok” features a Mikro-suction adhesive backing, which allows the doc to be securely positioned and also moved multiple times.
Google has beaten out Facebook to acquire London-based Artificial Intelligence company DeepMind — for an amount alleged to be in excess of $500 million.
DeepMind was founded by neuroscientist and chess prodigy Demis Hassabis, as well as Skype and Kazaa developer Jaan Tallin, and researcher Shane Legg. While it is unknown exactly what the company is working on, it describes itself as a “a cutting edge artificial intelligence company” to build general-purpose learning algorithms for simulations, e-commerce, and games.
While Tweetbot has added a feature that allows timelines to stream to iPhone and iPad, this is currently limited to Wi-Fi only.
Thanks to a new jailbreak tweak called Tweetbot 3 Stream 3G/LTE, however, the ultra-useful feature can now be carried over to 4G LTE and 3G cellular data networks.
Virgin Mobile has been competitive with its iPhone pricing ever since it came out of the gate, and that trend doesn’t appear to be going anywhere.
In the U.S., Virgin Mobile has reduced its unsubsidized iPhone prices by 10 percent in a time-limited, Web exclusive offer — meaning that you can pick up a 16gB iPhone 5s for $494.99: representing $154 less than the unsubsidized handset cost from Apple’s Online Store.
While there are a whole lot of smartphone-controlled helicopters on the market, there are surprisingly few smartphone controlled planes available. It is this niche that German toy company TobyRich is hoping to fill with its recently launched SmartPlane.
For those of us who grew up on a 1980s diet of Top Gun, this is your chance to “buzz the tower” again and again — all using your iPhone, and done from the comfort of your own home.
According to Phil Schiller, merging the OS X and iOS operating systems would be a “waste of energy.”
Schiller was giving an interview with MacWorld on the eve of the Mac’s thirtieth anniversary. Asked about the chances of such a convergence, Schiller had the following to say:
Called 5by, StumbleUpon’s new iOS app is designed to let users, well, stumble upon videos that might be of interest to them.
5by is basically a video concierge service that sifts through the mountains of videos available online, and creates custom playlists based not just on your mood and interests, but also the time of day and the length of time you have available for viewing.
Whether you’re at work and want to watch videos on your lunch break, or looking for a dinner recipe while waiting for the bus, 5by can pull up relevant content.
Audio accessory maker Zoom launched its iQ5 microphone this week — providing a nifty, Lightning-connected solution for users looking to record high quality audio with their iOS devices.
Popular free iOS news app Newsy has gone universal.
The app — which delivers news through engaging video bites — first launched for iPhone and iPod touch in September 2009, with Newsy for iPad following in April the next year.
The Macintosh may be celebrating its thirtieth birthday today, but three decades on it’s no longer Apple’s flagship device — coming a distant third to the iPhone and iPad (although still ahead of iTunes — for now.)
But just how many Macs did Apple sell last year?
Combing through the data, Fortune created the above infographic, which shows the Mac’s fluctuating sales throughout 2013: starting off weakly in Q1 when a missed iMac deadline signaled the end of a 26-quarter streak in which Mac sales outpaced those of the PC industry. In all, Macs generated $21.5 billion for Apple in fiscal 2013 — representing one eighth of the company’s total revenue.
Thirty years ago today — January 24, 1984 — the Apple Macintosh went on sale for the first time.
Arriving in stores two days after the SuperBowl airing of the famous “1984” television commercial directed by Ridley Scott, the Macintosh 128K forever changed the way people look at personal computers. It wasn’t Apple’s first mass market computer (that would have been the Apple II), it wasn’t the company’s first machine to use a WIMP interface (windows, icons, mouse pointer), and it was pretty underpowered in its first iteration — but this was the computer that brought everything that was good and innovative about the Apple brand together: the ease of use, the focus on personal creativity, and the idea that there was something better going on in computing than the green-text-on-black-screens that were more or less ubiquitous everywhere else.
A new Apple patent application published today relates to iAd technology that will allow Apple to target users with specific content based on a person’s predicted mood, their likely interest level, other content they are currently interacting with, their current geographic location, and the time of day.
In some applications, mood would be gauged using a camera which, equipped with facial recognition algorithms, would be able to measure specific expressions.
One month after its launch in the App Store, Codeacademy: Hour of Code has gone universal — being optimized for iPad and iPad mini, as well as iPhone and iPod touch.
Sony Pictures Television has a new iOS game available in the App Store and, unlike previous titles, this one’s based on an original property.
Called Suits and Swords, the game is a cross between a blackjack card game and an RPG, set in four different fantasy realms.
You’ve most probably seen Apple’s tear-jerking “Misunderstood” Christmas commercial: an ad about a seemingly isolated teenager who spends the holidays with their face buried in their iPhone — only to reveal at the end that they’ve been using the device’s camera to create a touching tribute to family togetherness.
Well, it seems that someone from Universal Studios Orlando’s ad agency David&Goliath also watched it (or else this whole thing is an amazing coincidence) because the theme park’s new ad — embedded above — bears an uncanny resemblance to Apple’s much-lauded commercial.
If your New Year’s resolution was to age in style, then you’re clearly thinking along the same lines as the makers of The Sims FreePlay for iOS.
In its first update of 2014, the freemium mobile version of the EA life sim now lets you “complete your family tree” by aging your teen Sims into adults by completing the “Adulthood” quest, while also letting you socialize with senior sims by completing the “Seniors” quest.