Apple recently rose above Coca-Cola to become the most valuable brand in the world according to Interbrand, a corporate identity and brand consulting company that ranks companies on criteria including financial performance.

One of the things that stands out about the Cupertino company is its resistance to gamification. Gamification is turning work into play – any activity where you collect points, get a ranking and get something in return. And most of us are all too happy to play along, turning our daily lives into an epic quest for popularity or to get something more (anything!) than what we actually pay for.

You might start your day out putting a latte on your Starbucks Rewards Card, so that in addition to getting caffeinated you’re also on the way to free refills or food. While you’re waiting for the barista, you check your Twitter feed. How many new followers you have you got? Has your Klout score – whatever that really is – gone up? You stop to get gas for the commute to work – the first screen at the pump asks whether you’re a Safeway Club member. Are you? Then your full tank might earn discounts on that ciabatta you buy on the way home. At work, you book your conference tickets with the airlines you have the tallied the most frequent flier miles on, compare “likes” on your Facebook posts and get lunch with a Groupon.

It comes as a relief – to me, at least – that Apple doesn’t do loyalty programs, points schemes or offer fire sales.

Apple wants to sell you insanely great devices, that’s it. They sell on the strength of the product, not something else they throw in for good measure to make it seem more appealing or a better deal. They run very few contests  – like the iTunes $10,000 blowout for the 10 billionth download – and have never offered rewards cards. Apple has long offered discounts to schools, but that’s about it. The MacBooks, iPods, iPhones do not ever go “on sale,” in the way that other companies slash prices when products head down the inevitable road to obsolescence.

Compare this to Coke, which topped the brand list for 13 years in a row before falling flat to Apple. Coke has a website, intended to make its product go down better with worried parents, called “My Coke Rewards School Donations” program. If you participate, the Atlanta-based corporation will “donate points to your school, so it can get rewards like art supplies and sports equipment, and support all the ways kids play.” Sounds good right?

But as Nassim Nicholas Taleb points out astutely in “Antifragile,”  you only need marketing for things that no one wants or needs. Coke (or Pepsi, he adds) are in the “business of selling you sugary water…causing diabetes and making diabetes vendors rich thanks to their compensatory drugs.” So they must “dress up their companies with a huge marketing apparatus with images that fool the drinker.”

I would add that gamification is only necessary for stuff that no one really wants or needs, too. In the case of the Coke rewards program, for example, you are buying Coke to earn points so that the fizzy drinks company donates sports equipment to your child’s school. It would certainly be easier to buy sports equipment for your school directly than stocking up on Coke, collecting and turning in the points then waiting for the corporation to buy the equipment for you. The “money for nothing” aspect of gamification that we now accept everywhere makes it more difficult to see what we’re actually getting in return for purchases.

Fortunately, Apple doesn’t bother. And it’s probably for our own good. A few years back, an April fool’s joke proposed an Apple loyalty scheme that involved getting a company tattoo in exchange for a lifetime 25% discount.  Given the fierce loyalty that the company inspires, they might go bankrupt if they tried to honor it.

Gone but not forgotten: this week Cult of Mac Magazine pays homage to late Apple co-founder Steve Jobs.

We speak to Atari co-founder Nolan Bushnell who knew Jobs back when he was so difficult to be around he landed on the night shift, hear from Cult of Mac publisher Leander Kahney what it was like to cover tech with such an outsize personality always storming the headlines, share some of the best everyday anecdotes from people who encountered Jobs plus take a look at the best tributes to the man called the Edison of our times.

The latest issue is available in the App Store.

We hope you’ll enjoy it – and keep in touch with comments, questions, shout-outs – we’re listening!

We had the sense that in some ways, we’re talking even more about Steve Jobs than we ever did. Then again, we’re called Cult of Mac and our vision of things has a certain, shall we say, focus.

So we checked out a database called Newsbank to see if our hunch was right. After searching nearly 70,000 U.S. publications from 1999 to 2013 (just up to October 4, mind you) to see how many articles featured Steve Jobs in the headline, we feel pretty vindicated.

Back in 1999, the year Jobs introduced the new Power Mac G3 and the color iMacs and “starred” in TV movie Pirates of Silicon Valley, the Apple co-founder headlined about 1,000 articles.

The number remained steady with about a thousand articles a year until 2005, when it bumped up to around 2,500. That was the year when iTunes expanded to include TV shows and music videos and Steve unveiled the new fifth-generation iPod that plays music, photos and video.

The number of news articles dedicated to Jobs nearly tripled by 2007, with the advent of the iPhone. In 2011 with his passing, it peaked to over 15,000 articles. That number hasn’t dipped to under 5,000 articles since. And we have a feeling it won’t for some time to come.

This story first appeared in Cult of Mac Magazine.

SAN FRANCISCO — Those purveyors of productivity Evernote recently held their third annual conference here.

There was something in the keynote for everyone: swag, an avalanche of announcements — a partnership with Post-it! A new stylus! Backpacks! Scanners! — and a few groan-inducing jokes. (“Do you know what’s the biggest room in the world?” “Room for improvement!”)

Coming on the heels of the Apple event which introduced the world to the new iPhones, it felt like someone had given the time-weathered keynote a much-needed facelift. Or just peeled back a few crusty layers from what we’re all so used to sitting through to hear about the cool new stuff we’ll want.

Here are a few things the Cupertino company could learn from the upstarts.

The new fingerprint sensor on the iPhone 5s brings with it a touch of the future: one where we won’t keep losing or forgetting our passwords. If we can get the sensors to work right, that is.

In this week’s Cult of Mac Magazine, reporter Sarah Stirland talks to a host of experts who give you the low-down on what this future will mean and we also get a breakdown of the new feature from a security expert.

We’ll also tell you how to win one of those gold iPhones and in our exclusive Ask a Genius column you’ll find out how much those smarties get paid as well as how to best the best Wi-Fi set-up for upstairs/downstairs signals.

The latest issue is available in the App Store.

We hope you’ll dig it – and keep in touch with comments, questions, shout-outs.

If you want a new iPhone but don’t have the cash, here’s a round-up of contests we’ve found offering the latest iPhones as prizes.

Major caveat: since Apple’s crackdown on third-party giveaways, there have been fewer legit freebies. The Cupertino company has nixed a large number of these contests – in one case not approving a company’s app until it pulled the contest – but it has been hit and miss. Apple did not respond to a request for comment as to whether it is actively pursuing companies that violate its giveaway guidelines.

In any case, if you want to get your hands on one without spending any cash, it’s worth a shot.

Just about all of the contest are no-brainers that ask you to tweet or give your details in exchange for the chance to win, although some have age and geographical restrictions.

If you hear of others, let us know. And remember your due diligence.

Good luck!

Wired UK

O2

 Square Trade

iSkin

Protect Your Bubble

AMC Theaters

Crowdtilt

Peterest

Lidtime

Carter Holt Harvey

With the release of iOS 7, we’ve prepped a guide to what you need to know about Apple’s new operating system — along with some things you might not already know.

In this week’s Cult of Mac Magazine we catch up with uber-designer Khoi Vinh who has been using it since the beta, why experts think the new activation lock (aka “kill switch”) won’t stop iCrime and take a light-hearted look at the real-world objects that inspired the new icons.

Once again, we’ve tapped an Apple Store Genius to answer your questions on how to get an iPhone 5 replaced for free and what to do when your MacBook Pro gets all wet.

The latest issue is available for free in the App Store.

Got questions, comments, topics in the Applesphere you’d like us to cover in-depth?

Tweet, email or give us a shout out any way you feel appropriate. (Just FYI, though, smoke signals are hard to read here in foggy San Francisco.)

Thanks for all your kind words and input on the first issue.

And, just so we know, were you guys serious that we should call it a “Macazine?”

In a 92-character shot heard around the web, graphic designer, blogger and former design director for The New York Times Khoi Vinh weighed in on Twitter about the new operating system: “If iOS 7 is revenge on Forstall, Forstall’s revenge may be that it’s kind of not that great.”

Now that he’s had a chance to play with it for a few months, Cult of Mac asked Vinh what the best (and worst) parts are of Apple’s new operating system. His first impression that iOS 7 is a mixed bag hasn’t changed – but he’s grown to appreciate the lighter side of the new OS as well as dread switching his mom’s iPhone over.

The good

The new iOS is beautiful

Lighter fonts, clear colors. And no more green felt in the Game Center! The clean lines of the new system are definitely easy on the eyes. Also, it’s the unbeige answer to the ho-hum design everyone else is doing. With a little more polish, Apple might really have something, he says.

“The overall look of it is really beautiful. And the fact that they’re willing to take this chance is commendable…they’ve built some really slick things,” he said.

Vinh finds the new mutlitasking feature irksome, but admits even that has some upsides. “They made zooming much more consistent throughout the operating system and not just on the home screen but throughout the apps too. So when you tap on an app you actually are zooming into the app tile and then you see that in the calendar app, too. When go out to a month, you zoom out to a month rather than just switching to a different view. And I think that stuff is really nice.”

You will find everything

“It’s really not that different, it’s a question of perspective. I think you could argue convincingly that the majority of the changes are cosmetic, that the underlying interaction models are consistent: you still have this concept of the home screen, there are apps that you launch and so forth.”

Your kids will love it

“I’m not concerned at all about three-year-olds understanding this,” he said. “Every time they inherit a device like this or an operating system like this they’re fully prepared to learn from square one and do so very rapidly.”

It opens up a whole new world for developers

The sleek new look of the OS makes everything that came before it look like knee-length bloomers at a Victoria’s Secret fashion show. And that may create an opportunity for indie developers to crash the scene by getting up to speed with the new UI and making the competitors look like last year’s news.

“One interesting thing of what they’ve done is they’ve created this artificial sort of disruption in the continuum of like an app’s lifecycle, and they’ve kind of created an opportunity for new players to come in and quickly gain favor. ”

The Bad

The new “back” button

Vinh feels so strongly about the former back button that he wrote a requiem for it, calling the it the best back button of all time.

“The original back button is just a really marvelous sort of piece of work. It does all those jobs at once and nobody ever has problems with visually understanding what’s there. And the new one sort of introduced this problem where there was no problem before. It was solved before. So I’m sad to see the old one go.”

Expect hell when you get stuck upgrading your favorite baby boomer’s phone

Boomers are a slow-growing but important segment of smartphone owners and they’re not always the quickest to adapt. Those of the rock n’ roll generation will probably skip the needle when they see iOS 7, given how different it looks. Expect squinting at skinny, high-fashion Helvetica Neue fonts and some senior moments over the interaction, too.

“It’s going to be kind of confusing for them. I’m kind of wary of the day I have to upgrade my mother’s iPhone,” Vinh said. “In the long run it might be just fine, but just the very fact that so much is changing, even if Apple can pull off the feat of making the net result neutral, why should someone have to muddle through it to that extent?”

The gestures are not as nicely in synch with the UI, as they were on the old operating system, he says. “There were stylistic changes that don’t necessarily break the feature, but they create like a half second of disorientation.”

The Meh

It’s pretty, but it’s not that much of an improvement on the previous version

“I haven’t seen anything that makes me believe that it’s better…I’m hoping that maybe something gets pulled out of the hat at the last minute. I also feel like we might have our minds changed a bit by new hardware,” he says, recalling that it makes sense to visually overhaul the device when what’s under the hood changes too. “Otherwise, the redesign is often just a failure.”

Then again, he added, “Maybe there’s just so much glare from the gold of the new phone that you can’t even see the UI anymore.”

This article first appeared in Cult of Mac Magazine.

Apple devices are on the most wanted list for thieves who snatch smartphones and tablets out of the hands of distracted commuters in big cities.

This type of theft is so easy and generally without consequence that it’s become known as “Apple picking.” The Cupertino company has been on the forefront of trying to curb these crimes, dating back to the Find My iPhone app in 2010 and the new Touch ID fingerprint sensor for the iPhone 5s.  Apple has also added a new i0S 7 feature called Activation Lock, which many are dubbing the “kill switch.”

“As a consumer, I love the idea of a kill switch for the device that I, as the owner, can invoke, but giving that type of power to my carrier is another thing.”

In doing so, Apple has responded to further pressure from authorities who are inundated with cases involving iPhone and iPad crime. (See our investigation into lost and stolen iPhones on Craigslist for more.) But prosecutors in New York and San Francisco, where about half of all crimes involve smartphones, were initially lukewarm on the feature but say they are now optimistic after seeing it in action.

The industry insiders Cult of Mac sounded out, not so much.

“To really make this work, the ‘kill switch’ would need to be wired to carrier networks, so that as soon as the device’s IMEI shows up on the network, the device is disabled by the carrier,” said Tom Kemp, CEO of Centrify, a company that provides unified identity services across data center, cloud and mobile for businesses. “As a consumer, I love the idea of a kill switch for the device that I, as the owner, can invoke, but giving that type of power to my carrier is another thing.”

As smartphone use grows — nearly half of Americans own one — so has iCrime. According to recent comScore data, Apple owns almost 40 percent of the smartphone market, more than its next closest competitors Samsung and HTC combined, with 23 percent and 8.7 percent, respectively. But part and parcel with Apple’s success and their distinctive design aesthetic is the fact that Apple products are an easy targets for a quick snatch-and-resell.

“How much would mugging decrease if your wallet was worth $0? Essentially, that’s what Apple is doing with its new kill switch feature – making your smartphone worthless, ideally. But, who is it really worthless for in the end?” said David Anderson, director of product for smartphone insurance company ProtectYourBubble. “Smartphone thieves often resell stolen devices on the secondary market…Unknowing consumers will purchase devices from sites like eBay and Amazon to cut costs but (will) end up receiving a ‘killed’ device in the mail.”

Companies that survive on tracing stolen gadgets are also not worried that the kill switch will sound the death knell for their businesses. “Unfortunately for consumers, Apple’s tracking and other anti-theft measures are also fairly easy to disable. People are going to continue to steal iPhones and hackers will find a way around the kill switch. It can be as simple as jailbreaking the phone,” said Ken Westin, founder of GadgetTrak. Most of GadgetTrak’s customers are tracing Apple devices — check out the live map — and use of the service has led to a few spectacular recoveries like this one from Kansas to Mexico.

Which brings up another point: whether Apple should be partnering with authorities rather than potentially enabling users to pursue their stolen iPhones

Maybe Apple should be partnering with authorities rather than enabling their customers to pursue their stolen iPhones.

Absolute Software, which says it has recovered 29,000 devices in 100 countries to date, recently launched a partnership with Samsung and says one with Apple is very possible. They work with police and discourage people from trying to get their gadgets back, rogue style.

“Deactivating a device with Activation Lock so that an unauthorized user is unable to use it or sell it can have a positive impact on deterring theft. However, the value of this capability is limited and could lead to encouragement of owners trying to recover devices from thieves themselves,” said Ward Clapham, vice president of recovery services at Absolute. “Self-recovery can be dangerous – even fatal. The best case scenario is for the user to rely on trained professionals to work with law enforcement to recover the device and pursue any criminal charges that may result.”

iPhone users who keep their smartphones mute in their pockets out of fear may find the new service makes it once again OK to stumble down a crowded sidewalk while checking email.

The iWatch might be a really popular theft target.

“With the kill switch, you will no longer feel unsafe using your iPhone on a city street. The kill switch makes the iPhone a much less desirable target for thieves — they’ll have to go back to nicking gold watches and fancy handbags,” says Dave Howell, founder and CEO of Avatron Software, which makes a number of productivity apps. “With this feature, Apple is responding to rising iPhone theft rates, but the company may also been preparing for the launch of the iWatch. The iWatch might be a really popular theft target. The kill switch is a neat, thoughtful feature but it won’t move the market-share needle.”

Howell, a former Apple software engineering manager whose team includes a number of veteran Mac programmers, says he doesn’t have any inside knowledge about the kill switch but that the service fits into Apple’s general ethos.

“I know Apple’s been working hard for some years to make iPhone as safe as possible…Apple has always garnered a reputation for designing for the benefit of users, even when it hurts sales. Certainly preventing theft will put a dent in replacement iPhone revenues.”

This article first appeared in Cult of Mac Magazine.

This article first appeared in Cult of Mac Magazine. 

You may think a gold iPhone is the tackiest thing since Mr T’s chains, but Apple is actually fashion forward.

Cult of Mac asked EDITD, a leading fashion forecasting firm, whether the gold iPhone would be in step with what’s going on in the world, fashion-wise.

“Metallics, and gold in particular, are certainly a growing fashion trend,” noted EDITD’s Julia Fowler. “We’ve recorded an 88 percent increase in gold products over the last 3 months.”

Over the sweltering summer, gold went from being barely a glimmer with about 10,500 items stocked at stores like Gap, Target and ASOS, to 19,600 products.

Bring on the bling.

Even if you don’t work in tech, you had better hope your town has more companies like Apple move in. If an innovation hub takes root where you live, you’ll be wealthier, healthier and less likely to divorce than areas that remain barren to it.

And if you are in a startup – wherever you live now, get yourself to one of these brain hubs before it’s too late.

That’s the crux of “The New Geography of Jobs,”  a fascinating book by Berkeley economics prof Enrico Moretti who leads readers on a whirlwind tour of how tech innovation is reshaping opportunity in the US, clustering around places like San Francisco, San Jose, San Diego, Austin, Seattle, Boston, Washington, DC and Durham, North Carolina.

There’s a big debate, of course, about the yuppification of cities like San Francisco, which have seen a huge influx of monied engineers from companies like Apple, Facebook and Google, who are feeding a huge boom in tech. Locals are complaining about skyrocketing house prices, $4 toast and the artisanal food trucks that charge $12 for a tofu Thai burrito. Outrage Missionites react with birthday pinatas shaped like Google buses and posters from the Yuppie-eradication project.

However, there is another side to it. If an Apple worker moves next door, that person will create on average five jobs, Moretti’s research shows.  Those jobs are a mix of skilled (nurses, lawyers, teachers) and unskilled ones (hairdressers, waiters, carpenters.) Innovation will never create the majority of US jobs, but it has an outsized effect on the economy of American communities, he writes. It’s not your resume but your zip code that determines how much money you make – so be glad instead of complaining about that Cupertino traffic, folks.

“Gentrification is a good problem to have”

Here in San Francisco a quick look around confirms that, at least on an anecdotal level. The Cult of Mac co-working space is abuzz with fancy-schmancy tattoo artists, hipster nail designers and boutique financial planners.

Moretti’s ideas – considerably nuanced and convincingly bolstered by research in the 250-page work – go counter to much of what’s being written about the squeeze of resources in the booming Bay Area. Gentrification is also a good problem to have, he says, acknowledging that it brings serious social consequences. The solution: not to discourage growth in innovation (in the vain hope manufacturing comes back to big cities) but manage the “growth in smart ways to minimize the negative consequences for the weakest residents and maximize the economic benefits for all.”

Given his local base, you’d expect a lot of interesting examples. In between a visit to a color scientist at Pixar and an artisan chocolate factory, he talks to a San Francisco bookbinder who employs eight people, uses the same equipment from decades past and whose fortunes go up and down with the high-tech companies of the NASDAQ. Noteworthy clients include the Jobs family, who had Steve’s condolence book made there.

Cities change and grow or they die out. And whether they thrive or wither in America now depends on innovation.

This picture of tech making things a little better for most of us is in stark contrast with the San Francisco that has been painted by the tech press as a gentrified, bloated old floozy who puts out for soulless tech workers who trample what dignity she has left by kickstarting pop-up food trucks and lofts that proliferate like mushrooms.

This strikes me as strange, coming from people whose livelihood often depends on breathless excitement over things like cell phone covers. Then again, I’m the fourth generation of my family to live here. I like to imagine that my great gran would find it funny that the Del Monte plant where she gave up elbow grease putting peaches into cans has morphed into a gaudy tourist shopping center. (I am also fairly sure she’d arch an eyebrow at my earnest writings about iPad stands, but still.)

Cities change and grow or they die out, basically. And whether they thrive or wither in America now depends on innovation. Whether you’re part of the innovation or provide services for those who are in it, you’re still better off. Moretti’s research shows that more college grads raise the salaries for everyone in an area – regardless of the higher cost of living. Same with lower divorce rates and better general health.

So get over that Tesla parked in your new neighbor’s driveway and get on with your life.

You might think it’s too soon for a movie about Steve Jobs. After all, the Apple co-founder walked off the world stage just 676 days before Friday’s premiere of Jobs, the movie about him that stars Ashton Kutcher.

I had that same uneasy feeling sitting through the interminable 122-minute Jobs, a PG-13 movie that frequently stalls like a spinning beach ball.

In the ongoing smartphone culture wars, Samsung spent a reported $5 million engaging the latest song stylings of Jay-Z as an exclusive for Galaxy owners.

Owners of that phone contended for a million copies of the impressively-titled album “Magna Carta Holy Grail”  launched July 4 in a special app, three days before the rest of us can get it in iTunes. Media saw the promotion as a tactical move by Samsung to gain position on the music front over Apple.

The cachet lasted about as long as a cheap sparkler: there are thousands of torrents of the album available.

As one of the guys who decided to spread the work of Beyoncé’s husband up for everyone put it: “I should clarify it was available to the first million (I think…) Samsung Galaxy owners to chime in with an app for the album. My wife got it but I’m not rocking a Samsung :/”

There are two things people care viscerally about in the San Francisco Bay Area: food and tech.

There’s always someone with an iPhone Instagramming dinner or squinting over health scorecards for those taco trucks on Yelp. (See also: “Foodies The Musical,” a local hit.)

But a lot of these apps don’t deliver what food lovers really hunger for, says the organizer of a new app contest.  The 8-Hour Food App Challenge wants local residents to sit at their kitchen tables and concoct new apps about all things culinary on Saturday, June 29.

“The kind of food content that makes you salivate isn’t the kind you find in apps designed by engineers,” says Pietro Ferraris, founder of Map2app and sponsor of the Challenge, told Cult of Mac. “Most apps made by engineers about food are pretty boring, so we hope to change that.”

You really had to hope that Apple would be more above board than other companies about who has access to our iData. We love them so much: half of all U.S. households own at least one Apple device. They’ve sold us on documenting our growing kids, cooking for our families and debuting new haircuts with iPhones, iPads and Macs.

Instead, Apple initially denied any involvement in PRISM, the National Security Agency’s massive e-spying program. Then, like Facebook and Microsoft, the Cupertino company issued a statement meant to clear things up but the numbers released by all three companies just confuse and minimize the issue.

So if they all did it, why am I seeing red about Apple? We deserve more from a publicly-traded company that has built its reputation on products that aspire to “enhance the life it touches” as in the above two-page ad timed to appear in the Wall Street Journal the day of the PRISM statement.That statement, headlined “Apple’s Commitment to Customer Privacy,” seems about as phony as this Android iPhone clone.

SAN FRANCISCO, CA

Brad Smith wants to encourage developers to explore the final frontier: making apps for Apple TV.

Smith, director of engineering at RadiumOne, spoke at AltWWDC about facing the challenges for this new territory.

“I like to think of it as the forgotten iOS device,” Smith said, showing a slide of Tom Dickson, who has blended every device from the Cupertino company — with the exception of the Apple TV.

SAN FRANCISCO, CA Collin Donnell wants app developers to learn from his mistakes.

Donnell, a full-time iOS developer  since 2008 whose app credits include Pinbook for Pinboard, shared some tips to a packed room at AltWWDC, which we have been all over like an snuggle iPad case. He divided them into practical and philosophical, but they sort of blend together.

SAN FRANCISCO, CA — Andrew Stone, an indie NeXT developer who worked with Steve Jobs for almost a quarter century, believes that Jobs would’ve never let Apple be a part of the United States National Security surveillance program PRISM.

SAN FRANCISCO, CA — Apple has been holding developer conferences for almost a quarter century, so it’s not surprising that the AltWWDC Keynote breakfast is less like Ugly Betty’s anti-prom and more like a midnight run of “The Rocky Horror Picture Show.”

You won’t have a lot of spare time at the World Wide Developer’s Conference — what with the sessions and a packed schedule of parties — but here are a few great ways to spend those precious hours, whether you know San Francisco like you know your code or are here for the first time.

How much interest is there in Apple’s World Wide Developer Conference?

Enough to stage an alternative free five-day conference with over 40 speakers and hands-on labs that WWDC attendees may want to check out for all the topics Apple isn’t likely to cover. For the second year running, AltWWDC will be hosting the have-nots (as in have no WWDC tickets) for a gathering cloned from the official conference.

Just a few blocks from Moscone Center at the San Francisco State downtown campus, devs from around the world will be hanging out and helping each other out. There will be a volunteer lab to tackle things like crash debugging as well as talks on game development and “marketing you won’t hate.”

Around 1,500 people have signed up, meaning, yeah, even free/freewheeling AltWWDC is technically “sold out.” No worries: if you don’t have a ticket, as long as there’s room to plant your laptop, you’re in.

Cult of Mac talked to Rob Elkin, a London-based software engineer and one of the four founders of AltWWDC about what constitutes an “alt” keynote breakfast, talks Apple doesn’t want you to hear  and sponsors.

I am not a psychic, but I have a good idea where you and your iPhone parted ways.

If you’re desperately seeking it on Craigslist, chances are you lost your device – or had it stolen – over the weekend, especially at night. And probably at some fun destination – shopping, the beach, a bar – or heading there on your usual means of transportation (the car, a gas station or parking lot, or bus).

If your iPad doodles are a little primitive, there are a few apps that can get you canvasing the art greats from Caravaggio to Picasso and creating some deft original strokes of your own.

So says Sumit Vishwakarma in a talk for Macworld/iWorld 2013, adding that if you’re willing to forgo one cinnamon latte at Starbuck’s, that money spent in apps will take your work to the next level.

Vishwakarma is an iPad art advocate whose work has been featured at the first Mobile Art Festival in Los Angeles, the Apple flagship store in San Francisco, and the Mobile Creativity & Innovation Symposium. He also teaches free workshops to promote iPad art and animation to kids, teens and adults.

Here are his top picks:

Google won the award for Best Mobile Application at the sixth edition of the TechCrunch Crunchies Awards, beating out Grindr, Instagram, and Square.

“I see a few empty seats, so it looks like those guys haven’t downloaded the app and got lost somewhere,” said the Daniel Graf, Google’s director of mobile maps, accepting the statue of a gorilla smashing a TV set.

SAN FRANCISCO, MACWORLD/iWORLD 2013 – After you’ve brushed up on your iPhone photography skills and checked out the gadgets on the Expo floor, there’s still a few Apple-related things to do in San Francisco.

It’s a bit disappointing that the strip clubs have decided to stop offering their usual MacWorld free passes – and we don’t recommend you follow Apple maps to the Tenderloin to visit “My Butt,” either — but here are a few ideas.