It’s as if a virtual curtain came down before today’s “It’s Only Rock n’ Roll” event, about which there has been much speculation about what to expect…
For those of us who aren’t in San Francisco, or maybe weren’t VIP enough to be invited, it’ll be interesting to see what appears on the Apple store after the presser…
The future of digital government rests in building a model much like Apple’s, Tim O’Reilly told BBC News. That means creating “killer apps” and making them accessible, he added.
“The iPhone comes out and Apple turns it into a platform and two years later there is something like 70,000 applications and 3,000 written every week. They have created a framework and infrastructure and that is the right way we should be thinking about government,” said O’Reilly.
A working example of the strategy?
Apps for Democracy, a data hub site for government apps that also sponsored a contest that resulted in 47 web, iPhone and Facebook apps in just a month.
A $10,000 prize was awarded to Victor Shilo for an iPhone and Facebook app combination called 311 that allows users to send complaints and requests — abandoned cars, info on trash pickups, graffiti — to District of Columbia officials.
O’Reilly warned that “going back to politics as usual” was not an option.
“In terms of unlocking information, it’s not a question of fast enough, it’s a matter of strategically enough. The government is so large and there is so much data there that the real question is how much of it is really useful. This is why it is important for the government to think strategically.”
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sait24emvUw
Milan’s first Apple retailer is not in the heart of the fashionable city, as we noted last week, but that didn’t stop people from turning out in groovy headgear and giving stadium cheers for the first to walk out with the signature inauguration tee after camping out overnight.
Giving a touch of style to the event, web designer Marco Tognoli came adorned in Apple logos from old iMac G3s, topped by this fanciful conical hat with a real apple on top:
Proving Apple fans will live up to Milan’s reputation for daring fashion to open Apple’s second Italy store. (Hit the jump for more pics).
Apple clone maker Psystar’s got some new lawyers who believe the federal case against the Florida company is difficult, but not “crazy.”
Kiwi Camara and Tim Nyberg of Houston legal studio Camara & Sibley agreed to defend Psytar in June. They’re taking a winner-takes-all approach, charging the Mac cloner a flat fee — only if they prevail over Apple in court.
“We take hard cases, but not baseless ones,” Camara told the Houston Chronicle.
Marc Sky, better known as the “Dollar Artist,” crafts legal tender into everything from dog sculptures to bookmarks and chopstick holders.
Now he’s made these cool iPod sculptures, about which he remarks:
“Although it can’t be seen in the photos, the scroll wheel (eagle seal) is creased in around the border of the circle. This creates a 3-D effect of the scroll wheel rising up. When you run your finger around the circle, you feel the edge.”
He’s also coaxed dollar bills into cheap iPod stands, meant to angle your device so you can comfortably watch videos.
Basic one-bill sculptures cost $7.95; the more complex ones using two cost $15.90., they can be ordered from his online showcase.
Via Mac Surfer
Sales of Sony’s MP3 Walkman outsold iPods for the first time in Japan for the first time since 2005.
Research firm BCN Inc. found that Sony’s share of the portable music market share rose to 43 percent last week, creeping above Apple’s 42.1 percent.
The uptick in sales is attributed to the W Series pictured above, which sells for under 10,000 yen ($108). Sony’s answer to the iPod shuffle is a 2G wearable headset that has generally met with favorable reviews.
But Sony MP3 players might not be as big in Japan as they seem. As Bloomberg notes, the jump can be at least in part attributed to people ditching iPods for the iPhone, so Apple wins either way.
Via Bloomberg
We’re big fans of the unauthorized doc “Welcome to Macintosh” — a true love letter to the history of Apple and its community.
Now this indie film is available on iTunes.
Well, it’s also available on Barnes & Noble, Best Buy, Netflix etc., but we love the idea that what is a totally handmade film (tagline: “a documentary for the rest of us”) is now worthy of being sold by Apple.
There are a lot of Apple-inspired confections out there, but this apple pie with a logo at the center by a photographer in Uruguay who goes by Miss Gong looks almost too yummy to eat. (Not sure if the reverse logo was intentional or just turned round in the photo).
Imagine inviting your Mac user group over and serving this apple pie for dessert…
If the TV industry doesn’t invent a digital business that customers want, it risks an “iTunes moment,” when Apple took hold of the online music business, a Microsoft exec said.
“Realistically. I think the industry has about two to three years to adapt or face its iTunes moment. And it will take at least that long for media brands to build credible, truly digital brands,” Ashley Highfield, managing director of consumer and online at Microsoft UK, told the Guardian.
Highfield gave the gloom and doom prediction today as the keynote speaker at the MediaGuardian Edinburgh International Television Festival.
Answering the inevitable question of how to make money from these new ventures, he said “media companies need to embrace controversial targeted advertising techniques, such as behavioral targeting based on users’ web viewing habits, with the ad inventory going into an auction-style model similar to the system Google operates.”
Interesting he didn’t name Apple TV — speculated “dead” as Sony and Microsoft entered the market last year — as a specific threat, but spoke of the success of iTunes.
In 2007, a Forrester analyst said both iTunes and Apple TV were “dead ends” that would be “eclipsed by television and cable networks will quickly shift their content to free ad-supported streaming.”
Ha. I tried out Apple TV for about a week while house sitting this summer. The interface was nice, the remote control cool. I’d still rather keep the cheapo PVR with a slightly wheezy fan a friend rigged up — because, while it’s an ugly little box and the remote control works about 40% of the time, there’s no DRM.
Via the Guardian
Apple decides to open doors in Milan — recently named more fashionable than New York — so you’d think it’d be somewhere the city’s whippet-thin Pradamatons would want to be seen sashaying into.
Instead, Apple is opening its first Milan store this Saturday in a place called Carugate. It’s 15 km away from the city center, a place best known to locals because Ikea also calls it home.
It’ll be in a mall — note the pic above of a woman with a grocery cart — and hopefully the inside layout is a bit more interesting than the storefront. And instead of having 24/7 access, like many Italian malls, it’s usually closed on Sundays.
Rumors were that Apple’s first Milan store would be a former Stefanel store in Corso Vittorio Emanuele, a pedestrian shopping zone favored by locals and tourists who stroll from the Cathedral to Piazza San Babila.
Next time I need anything, I’ll be heading to the reseller in the chic Brera area — used as a fashion shoot backdrop and where staff wears “Steve Jobs for Mayor” T-shirts.
People: location, location, location.
Apple denied claims that faulty iPhones overheat and explode, saying the shattered, spattering phones that launched a government investigation in the EU are few and not due to a systematic problem.
“To date, there are no confirmed battery overheating incidents for iPhone 3GS and the number of reports we are investigating is in the single digits,” Apple said in a statement to AFP.
“The iPhones with broken glass that we have analyzed to date show that in all cases the glass cracked due to an external force that was applied to the iPhone,” the company added.
So far, 11 cases of snap, crackle and pop iPhones have been reported in France, plus one of an iPod in Britain. Another case surfaced today, with a Belgian teen’s iPhone which reportedly went flambé causing him severe headaches afterwards.
This is the first statement Apple has made since the EU launched a safety investigation Aug. 18.
Herve Novelli, secretary of state for trade and consumer affairs, said he would question Apple’s Michel Coulomb about the “causes of the implosion of these devices and eventual measures they could take,” according to AP.
Back in July, Apple issued a support guide about how to keep the iPhone and iPhone 3GS running cool.
Starting in September, Zipcar users will be able to reserve wheels via an iPhone app.
Zipcar founder Scott Griffin takes the app for a test drive for CNN:
Griffith enters the parking lot outside his office in Cambridge, Mass., pulls out his iPhone, and taps a button on the screen. Suddenly a yellow Mini Cooper starts honking like a crazed goose.
Griffith approaches the vehicle and taps the screen again. The doors magically unlock, and under the steering wheel the key dangles from a cord. He starts up the car — nicknamed “Meneus” — and drives away at a rate of $11.25 an hour.
The Zipcar app gets works as a wireless key, getting drivers into cars, letting them lock them — and helps find the closest available garage.
The car sharing program I get around with in Milan uses an RFID card to lock and unlock doors (kind of nice if you don’t have an iPhone). Reservations over the Internet work decently, as long as you realize you need a car while sitting at your computer.
Alternatively, you can call them to see what’s available but half the time the operators don’t have key info — like the garage is closed for lunch.
The Zipcar app sounds well thought through, it’ll be interesting to see what it’s like on the ground.
Via CNN Money
Recording engineer and music producer Michael Jack has amassed an amazing collection of 1,100 transistor radios.
These models from the 1950s look like predecessors of the iPod, he notes on his flickr stream:
“When I fist saw the Zenith RE-10 I figured I had come upon the most obvious inspiration for the iPod… Although all these radios appear to have similar design elements to the iPod I would ALMOST bet that the RE-10 was studied (or at least observed) by the Mac design team.”
I love the still-modern look of these half-century old radios, whether Jonathan Ive used them for inspiration or not.
What do you think?
A 23-year-old was sentenced to 13 months in prison for an iPod scam that earned him over half a million dollars before getting caught.
Through trial and error, Nicholas Woodhams of Portage, Michigan guessed serial numbers of the iPods still under warranty that were sent to him as an iPod repairman. He then fraudulently obtained iPods from Apple and sold them online.
“Between March 2006 and October 2007, Woodhams caused Apple to ship more than 9,000 replacement units to a post office box through this deception,” said a press release from the U.S. Attorney’s Office. “Woodhams then advertised and sold the units through a website for $49 apiece, a fraction of their retail value. In addition to this mail fraud scheme, Woodhams violated federal money laundering laws by wiring $200,000 of his criminally-derived proceeds from a financial institution in Michigan to a brokerage account in Missouri.”
In addition to the year-plus stint in jail, Woodhams will give over the fruits of his deceit including a home in Portage, Michigan, an Audi S4 sedan, an Ariel “Atom 2″ racing car, a Honda motorcycle, six computers and more than $570,000 in U.S. currency.
Woodhams pleaded guilty to fraud and money laundering charges back in April and faced a maximum 30 year jail sentence.
Via Mlive
Image used with a CC license, thanks to re-ality
Designers continue to be inspired by Mac icons as home decor.
The choice for these handmade fleece pillows is a bit random — iCal, the start button and an devilish version of Finder — but cool nonetheless.
$14.99 each at Etsy.
A week after EU regulators launched an investigation into safety issues of overheating iPods and iPhones, another French user found himself with an iPhone flambé in hand.
This time it happened to Yassine Bouhadi (above), a 26-year-old supermarket security guard in Villevieille, near Nîmes. He was texting his girlfriend (giving new meaning to the term “sexting?) when the device overheated and the screen shattered.
“The phone made a noise like ‘schplok’. A little bit of screen hit me in the eye and I had to remove it with a tweezer,” said Bouhadi.
The incident — similar to the teen in Aix-en-Provence whose iPhone screen shattered sending splinters into his eyes — made the front page of local paper Midi Libre.
Whether this is a copycat incident or evidence of an uptick in defective devices remains to be seen.
The EU commission is examining reports of problems with iPhones in France and an iPod in Britain.
Apple maintains these overheating issues are isolated incidents and not evidence of a general problem but is cooperating with EU investigations.
Via Charles Bremner
Apple’s Fifth Avenue store sells the equivalent of a Mercedes-Benz C300 in iPods, MacBooks and iPhones per square foot.
As our own Leander Kahney found out on a recent visit to New York, Apple’s Fifth Avenue location is recession-proof, filled with people waiting in lines to buy Apple gear in one of Manhattan’s most famed shopping streets.
But don’t take his word that the store is heaving, here’s what Bloomberg says:
Apple’s Fifth Avenue emporium probably has annual sales of more than $350 million, said Jeffrey Roseman, executive vice president of real- estate broker Newmark Knight Frank Retail. The location is 10,000 square feet, putting its sales per square foot at a minimum of $35,000, based on Roseman’s estimate.
Those sales trump tony jewelry sellers along the famed street — currently earning about twice as much: Tiffany & Co. rakes in just $18,000 per square foot, Harry Winston between $12,000 – $13,000.
Leander noted the place topped by a big glass cube seemed more like a hip bar than an electronics shop, something not lost on the Bloomberg reporters:
Some people even use the Fifth Avenue store as a “pick-up place,” said Consolo, who passes the location every day on her way to work. Tourists used to ask how to find Bloomingdale’s, Saks and Louis Vuitton, she said. “Now they say Apple store, Apple store,” Consolo said in a telephone interview. “It’s the main event.”
Maybe someone will make a movie about Breakfast at Apple?
Via Bloomberg
UPDATE: Ah, well it looks like the store was down for Snow Leopard, which you can pre-order now but ships Aug. 28.
Some of the changes (“refinements”) to the latest version:
If there are any other major differences to the Apple store, we’ll let you know.
The Apple store is down. Mac World speculates it’s for the next release of Snow Leopard.
I’m hoping for more of a shake-up — price drops, new product.
We’ll keep you posted.
New York’s Metropolitan Transit Authority wants to derail an independent iPhone app that publishes train schedules for violation of copyright.
Called Station Stops, the $2.99 app available on iTunes, is the work of commuter Chris Schoenfeld, who also writes the blog of the same name.
The app provides the timetable of the Metro-North Railroad for regularly-scheduled trains departing and arriving from Grand Central Station.
The MTA provides its schedules to Google Transit, but doesn’t release the data publicly.
To build his app, Schoenfeld did it the old way — by entering data manually from the published public schedule.
Schoenfeld, who has often been critical of MTA service, got a nastygram from MTA lawyers ordering him to stop presenting himself as an official service — and pay licensing fees for the schedules.
The MTA reckons the developer owes them a share of profits from the app, back pay the licensing fees. And a $5,000 non-refundable fee.
Schoenfeld’s not interested in ponying up. His sensible David versus ham-fisted Goliath story received a lot of sympathetic local news coverage — but that didn’t stop the MTA from asking Apple to take down the app on Aug. 14.
As of this writing, Station Stops is still for sale.
As one station stops blog reader, Karen Cavanaugh commented:
“I always use Station Stops to check the train schedule when I visit my daughter in Hoboken, NJ. I never think of it as an “OFFICIAL” website. I’ve been to the official website and it’s awkward.”
If you’re lucky enough to live in Pittsburgh, you can report stuff like potholes, graffiti and other everyday annoyances straight to city hall via an iPhone app called iBurgh.
Peeved Pittsburghers first download the app, gratis on iTunes. First time users need to fill in name, phone number, email and home address — stored automatically for logging future complaints.
Users snap pics of traffic gridlock, abandoned cars or whatever. The photos are geotagged and sent immediately to the city complaint hotline 311. Officials hope that if enough people use the app (they already get about 200 rants a day) they’ll have a cluster map of trouble areas to plan for future maintenance and repairs.
There were a few snafus as iPhone wielding citizens tried complaining via smartphone when the service debuted yesterday — a server restart was necessary at one point — but at least one user managed to report that pothole successfully.
It’s the first app available on iTunes from a Carnegie Mellon spin-off whose other product was mobile video technology for sports events, called “yinzcam” that let users at hockey games pick what to zoom in on with their iPhones.
Via AP
Much has been said about the super-handy Flip digital video cameras. These well-designed, inexpensive cams have gotten plenty of favorable reviews.
But the question is whether they’re worth having when the iPod gets video capability.
The Flip model we tested is ripe for iPod comparison: the 8G UltraHD records two hours of video and is slightly cheaper than an 8G iPod Touch, with a price tag of $199. It shoots 720p (1,280×720) high-definition video.
So, should you wait to see what’s behind door no. 2 or stick with the Flip HD?
Full review after the jump.
Multimedia designer Federico Mauro‘s got Mac on the brain: his Flickr stream is a constant source of quirky, Mac-related designs and spoofed ad campaigns.
His vision of what’s really inside your Mac Pro includes a feet-on-the-desk work environment that includes a mini-golf area, plus Apple logo topiary in the garden and a well-populated pool, where a couple of those bathing beauties appear topless.
Hit the jump for more of his designs — including the modern designer’s workbench and a game of Tetris played with Macs — plus few words about why he does it.
If you’ve been inspired by David Hockney’s iPhone paintings or the New Yorker cover, you know that doodling on your device can be more difficult than it looks.
At least if you want results that don’t completely suck.
Enter a blog called fingerpainted.it, headed by freelance web designer Benjamin Rabe. He and a band of 11 creatives, including prolific iPhone artist Matthew Watkins, share tips, artwork and tutorials.
The how-tos show just how much dexterity and thought go into these mini-masterpieces; Luis Peso’s demonstrative cat sketch in the above Layers app tutorial has about seven steps.
A lot of the art is done with the Brushes app, but artists use a variety of tools including Layers, Jackson Pollock, Kandinsky Lite, Photofx. The tutorials show you how to start with Kandinsky, move to Pollock and end up with something entirely different, like this vibrant iPhone work by Patricio Villarroel.
While there are plenty of places to ogle iPhone art — flickr groups especially — fingerpainted seems to give the most info on how to get from art-icapped to art.
After our post on yesterday’s en masse binning of hundreds of working Macs from a “PC only” school district in Florida, a reader who wished to remain anonymous sent us pics of those computers destined by that school for the trash. We also received comment from a school administrator.
First things first: here they are, stacks of laptops and neat rows of Macs destined for the rubbish heap. Our tipster says more than 208 perfectly good Macs are headed for the dump.
As many of you pointed out in the comments of yesterday’s piece, even if the school district didn’t want to use the Macs, they could’ve sold them and used the money — or given them away instead of just dumping them.
More pics of the great Florida Mac massacre & commentary after the jump.
An elementary school in Sarasota, Florida is sending several hundred working Macs to the trash heap — in keeping with the school district’s “PC-only” policy.
Piled up in the cafeteria of the Emma Booker school, 140 G3 and G4 laptops and over 50 iMac and eMac machines await the scrap heap.
An account in the local paper takes on dramatic overtones:
Sarasota County Public School system employees who alerted the Pelican Press to the salvage effort asked not to be identified because they feared retribution. “All of the machines are still working,” said one. “The teachers asked if they could buy them or give them to the kids. We were told, ‘No.’”
Putting the Macs out to pasture is the result of a decision by Superintendent Gary Norris, who headed the school system from 2004-2008, who declared the school system would be PC-only, the paper said.
Even the county school district’s program that donates computers to needy kids, called Texcellence, is a Mac-free zone.
“We’ve never used Macs,” foundation spokeswoman Laura Breeze told Pelican Press. The group recently received 1,100 used PC computers and is refurbishing them and adding software before giving them out.
At a time when budgets are tight, you have to wonder why a school district would send working computers to the scrap heap.