Apple today announced the eighth annual iTunes Festival in London with a whole bunch of massive acts already confirmed. Those lucky enough to bag tickets will see the likes of Pharrell Williams, Maroon 5, Kylie, Sam Smith, and Blondie.
Apple’s Tim Cook and Eddy Cue were invited yet again this year to the illustrious business conference put on by Allen & Company in Sun Valley, Idaho. Today they were spotted walking around and talking to reporters.
The tech and media world’s elites gather in the resort town of Sun Valley annually to discuss potential partnerships and deals behind closed doors. Think of it like a social mixer on steroids for the world’s most powerful business moguls. Everyone from Rupert Murdoch to the CEOs of Comcast and AT&T attend.
While casually strolling through the mountain resort today, both Cook and Cue fielded questions from eager journalists looking to get a juicy quote or scoop.
When it comes to all the elite conferences Silicon Valley is so well known for, Apple executives rarely make appearances. Apple’s shortlist includes the annual Code Conference and Allen & Co.’s business conference in Sun Valley, Idaho. The second kicks off next week.
Like last year, Tim Cook and Eddy Cue have been invited to hobnob with the tech and media world’s most powerful players. Both execs attended last year, and if they choose to do so again this year, there will undoubtedly be many interesting conversions had behind closed doors with competitors and potential partners.
The album is dead. So dead Amazon thinks customers won’t even care if all the songs in its new music-streaming service have been spun out of tune by DJs across the country for months.
To boost its digital offerings, Amazon is planning to launch its own music service, reports BuzzFeed, but rather than stocking up on the latest hit songs, Prime Music will shun new releases in favor of a potluck offering of songs and albums that are at least six months old.
Despite the fact that Steve Jobs didn’t want Apple to become a company in which people were constantly asking themselves “What Would Steve Do?” after his death, it was inevitable that people would compare Apple under Tim Cook to Apple under its legendary co-founder.
Asked about that topic during an interview with Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher at yesterday’s Re/code Code Conference — and specifically whether there had been a “reset” period following Jobs’ death — Eddy Cue commented that:
Now that Apple’s acquisition of Beats has finally been made official, Eddy Cue and Jimmy Iovine took the stage at the the inaugural Code Conference tonight to give a peak behind the scenes of deal, as well as glimpse at what’s to come in 2014 – including the best product pipeline the company has seen in 25 years.
The interview comes as Apple is preparing for its annual developer’s conference in San Francisco next week where it’s expected to announce new versions of iOS and OS X, and while will have to wait to see if any hardware will come out as well, Eddy Cue is already hard at work hyping Apple’s upcoming products.
Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg led the conversation with Eddy Cue starting things off by parroting Tim Cook’s statements that Apple acquired Beats for three reasons: Talent, Headphones, and a Music Subscription Service, before revealing these eight new tidbits on the deal as well as the future of Apple:
Elusive Apple CEO Tim Cook will skip his annual sit-down interview with tech journalists Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg. Instead, Apple is sending two of Cook’s top lieutenants to sit in the hot seat during the Code Conference this May.
Although the iTunes Festival has been a great success in the UK for years, it’s only at this year’s SXSW festival that it’s finally come to the States, with Apple arranging for artists such as Coldplay, Imagine Dragons, and Kendrick Lamar to perform free for five nights in Austin, Texas.
What was the hold up? According to Apple’s Eddy Cue, they just weren’t sure they could reproduce the positive vibe anywhere else. But it looks like they’ve succeeded.
Calling it an “honor, a privielege and truly from my heart to Steve,” Apple VP and kahuna beach moondog Eddy Cue accepted a posthumous award on Steve Jobs’s behalf last night, as the Apple founder was inducted into the Bay Area Business Hall of Fame. And Cue had a pretty cool anecdote to tell about Steve.
Apple packed a lot into one hour and 20 minutes today, with announcements about OS X Mavericks, Macbook Pro, Macbook Air, Mac Pro, and the stars of the show: iPad Air and Retina iPad mini. We think that this is about an hour and 18 minutes too long to watch, though, so we’ve condensed it to around 90 seconds.
Here is the Apple iPad Air and iPad mini keynote, right from Yerba Buena, in just 90 seconds:
The iTunes Festival, Apple’s 30-day music extravaganza, ended on September 30th with a performance by Katy Perry. Apple broadcasted live streams of all the festival’s shows on iTunes during the month of September, and the concert videos are still available to stream for a limited time.
Apple’s Eddy Cue recently gave an interview to Entertainment Weekly and talked about why artists (and Apple) love the iTunes Festival. He also explained how Apple is leveraging its connections in the music industry for iTunes Radio.
In a new profile of Apple CEO Tim Cook, Reuters spends time painting the two-year veteran of Cupertino’s top spot as deft, methodical, and tough. While he has earned a reputation as more of a delegator and less of a diva than Jobs was, the sources in the article say that he is still a focused CEO who expects results.
A person familiar with Tim Cook’s meeting style said “He could skewer you with a sentence. He would say something along the lines of ‘I don’t think that’s good enough’ and that would be the end of it and you would just want to crawl into a hole and die.”
Not bad for a CEO whose own board is deeply concerned.
Tim Cook isn’t the only one attending the Sun Valley Media Conference this week, a private gathering of over 300 industry leaders in which some of the big media inks get privately worked out. Eddy Cue — Apple’s savvy media dealmaker — is also there, according to Bloomberg reporter Jon Erlichman.
Is an Apple TV deal in the works? Asked if it was shaping up to a big week, Cook would only comment, “We’ll see.”
Via: TUAW
Apple just rolled out a new software update for the Apple TV that adds new channels for HBO GO and WatchESPN, as well as Sky News, Crunchyroll, and Qello. The iOS 5.3 release is compatible with both the second- and third-generation Apple TVs, and is available to download now.
Eddy Cue is at the Daniel Patrick Moynihan United States Courthouse in lower Manhattan testifying in the Department of Justice’s e-books antitrust case, and he’s been sharing more information on the work that went into developing iBooks prior to its launch in 2010.
Cue reveled that Steve Jobs, then Apple’s CEO, chose to give away a free copy of Winnie-the-Pooh not just because he liked the book, but because its colorful illustrations showcased the capabilities of digital e-books in the iBooks app.
iBooks has been a big successful venture for Apple — despite the ongoing price fixing case from the Department of Justice — but it’s a service that may never have been if Eddy Cue hadn’t convinced Steve Jobs it would be awesome on the iPad.
Before Apple was gearing up to launch its popular tablet in late 2009, Steve Jobs wasn’t interested in the iBooks idea, and he felt e-books had no place on desktops and small smartphone displays.
Apple has today announced the winner of its $10,000 App Store gift card after the App Store surpassed 50 billion downloads on Wednesday. The lucky customer is Brandon Ashmore of Mentor, Ohio, who downloaded Say the Same Thing, a word game from Space Inch.
As Apple continues to ramp up development on its new music streaming service, negotiations with record labels haven’t been going well.
Apple’s music streaming service is rumored to be similar to Pandora’s radio service, but rather than settling with the same royalty rate that Pandora enjoys, Apple is trying to lowball record labels into giving them a better deal.
Ferrari announced its newest supercar today — the hybrid model ‘LaFerrari’ — along with plans to deepen its partnership with Apple.
The newest Ferrari comes equipped with iPad minis on the passenger seats, but Ferrari says it is in talks with Apple about bringing more in-car entertainment to their supercars.
What do you get when you combine a highly anticipated iPhone app with a fascinating link to a senior executive at the most valuable company on earth? You get Mailbox and Adam Cue, a software engineer working on the hyped email app that’s going public soon. Cue works at Orchestra, the app development company behind Mailbox. You may recognize Adam’s last name because it also happens to be the last name of Eddy Cue, a longtime Apple senior executive who now oversees all of the company’s internet services, including email.
While this doesn’t mean that Apple will acquire Orchestra’s Mailbox app, it’s interesting to note the connection between the two companies.
Apple Maps has been the butt of an exhausting number of bad jokes. People in Australia have been stranded in the outback thanks to Scott Forstall’s mishap.
For most of us, glitches in Apple Maps are just a minor inconvenience and you can just switch over to Google Maps when you have a problem. But for one restaurant in Portland, Oregon, Apple Maps has cost them about $50,000 worth of business since it was released in September.
Apple has today announced that the App Store has surpassed a whopping 40 billion downloads, with almost 20 million seen in 2012 alone. A record-breaking December, helped by another successful Christmas, boosted this year’s figures, with more than two billion downloads during the month.
Following Apple veteran Bob Mansfield cashing in $20 million worth of AAPL, Eddy Cue has decided to let go of roughly $8.8 million in stock. Cue, who’s official title at Apple is “Senior Vice President Internet Software and Services,” recently sold 15,000 shares valued at about $583 per share.
Cue only owns 285 accessible shares in Apple now, but he has a treasure trove waiting for him should he choose to stay with the company for the foreseeable future.
The world has hated Apple Maps with a fiery passion, and Apple is ready to clean house and get rid of key people who were in charge of the disaster.
According to a tweet by Bloomberg news, Richard Williamson, the executive behind Apple’s new Maps app, just got fired by Eddy Cue. After Scott Forstall was recently fired, Cue was given the reigns on the Maps app and it appears that he’s wasting no time getting things fixed.
For the last month rumors have floated around the web that Apple is been planning to build it’s own Pandora-like music-streaming service. It makes perfect sense to us, but Apple didn’t announce it at the iPhone 5 keynote which had many people wondering if it’s going to actually happen.
A report from the New York Post this morning is claiming that the reason Apple hasn’t launched their music-streaming service is because negotiations with Sony/ATV hit a last minute snag, forcing Apple to scrap the iTunes Streamer announcement from the iPhone 5 keynote.