So, you’ve got your iPhone but you just lost your job? Or you’re looking to move to where the opportunities are in this contracting market? Job Compass could be the app for you.
Not yet available on the AppStore, but with the final version of the app having been submitted to Apple, this $3.99 offering from Securicy Ventures will leverage the iPhone’s location-aware capabilities and seamless integration between maps, web and email.
Job Compass’ protocols are patent pending, according to Securicy spokesman Titus Blair, who told Cult of Mac, “we have over 2+ million listings with more added daily. You can email the listing to yourself inside the app (without leaving) as well as apply online if you want.” Blair added that future releases will offer driving directions and other cool job hunting tools to help refine the search and locate relevant jobs.
It’s said in a declining economy, smart people go where the opportunities are. Job Compass might be just the thing to help you find one right around the corner.
Mac users are being warned to beware of a new scam by hackers to plant a Trojan horse. RS.Plug.D is a more flexible update of the RS.Plug.A threat discovered in 2007, a security software vendor claimed Tuesday.
Like the original, the new version relies on Mac users to visit malicious porn sites, according to Intego. Unlike RS.Plug.A, this trojan software opens a security hole enabling hackers to repeatedly download files to your system.
When on a suspect porn site, visits will be shown an error message: “Video ActiveX Object Error,” followed by a message that the browser is unable to view the video file and a request to start a download.
MacBook fans are in an uproar after discovering the new laptops contain hardware-based copyright protection that prevents the viewing of iTunes movies on some external displays, such as a second monitor or a projector.
“This movie cannot be played because a display that is not authorized to play protected movies is connected,” is the warning MacBook users receive when using an external display that doesn’t support the High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection (HDCP) protocol.
The HDCP technology is part of Apple’s Mini DisplayPort Content Protection built into MacBooks. Hollywood studios looking to protect their movies appreciate the 128-bit copy protection measures included in DisplayPort, according to reports.
As we enter the critical holiday shopping period, the future of Apple’s iPod hangs in the balance as two courts consider a patent lawsuit over memory chips. Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Spansion Inc. Monday named Apple, along with other customers of Samsung in a dispute over alleged abuse of flash memory patents.
While the Delaware lawsuit, covering six patents, asks for damages and an injunction against Samsung, Spansion’s case before the International Trade Commission could result in blocking imports of Apple and other makers of devices containing flash memory chips, according to the Wall Street Journal.
A wide range of gadgets, from MP3 players to cell phones and digital cameras, use flash memory. The ITC could forego an import ban if it views the blockage would impose undue harm on a company.
China and Apple still in iPhone talks (photo: The Tenth Dragon)
China Mobile’s CEO Tuesday gave the latest hint Apple may still get its iPhone into the world’s largest marketplace by the end of 2008.
“China Mobile is still interested in [bringing the ] iPhone into China Mobile markets,” Marketwatch quoted Wang Jianzhou when addressing the GSMA Mobile Asia Conference. The carrier’s head didn’t provide details, citing a non-disclosure agreement with Apple.
China, with over 600 million mobile users, remains a highly-prized target for Apple. CEO Steve Jobs has said he expects to sell the iPhone in the Asian country by the end of the year.
Apple released a firmware update today designed to fix trackpad issues reported by users of new MacBook and MacBook Pro notebook computers released in October.
Affected users can download and install the new firmware from the Software Update function in OS X or go to the Apple Support download site and retrieve it from there.
The company lists a resource for more information that currently goes to a “Not Found” page, but may provide additional information at some point.
After the bacon scarf, tiara and bicycle comes this whimsical (and mercifully faux) bacon case for the iPhone. According to German designer Antjes, the felt case really looks like a piece of bacon. “You can feel the irregular (texture) and the illusion is perfect.”
Bringing home the iBacon will set you back €25 (circa $32) plus shipping…
When I wrote about the new voice capabilities of Google’s iPhone search app on Friday, I was a little surprised it was not yet available on the AppStore. But it was relatively early in the day and I figured it would show up at some point. This morning, Charlie Sorrel writes at GadgetLab that Apple “forgot” to put Google’s app on the store.
Can that really be true? Sorrel refers to the fact that Google is subject to what he calls the “same arbitrary application approval scheme as everyone else,” and calls attention to a post by Michael Arrington at TechCrunch naming Google as the aggrieved party, saying “Apple really screwed up.”
I wonder. Might it not have been prudent for Google’s PR machine to have confirmed its application had been approved and was going to be available before kicking into high gear? Apple has thus far no comment on the situation and, as of this writing the voice search-enhanced Google Mobile app is not available on the AppStore.
For the second time this month, Barclays Capital’s Ben Reitzes reduced his target price for Apple shares. Citing lower handset expectation and increased pressure on higher priced products, Reitzes Photo: Cishore/Flickrcut his target price for Apple to $113, down from $121.
On Nov. 7, Reitzes trimmed his target price for Cupertino shares to $121 from $125.
The Barclays analyst told investors he expects a two percent drop in first quarter 2009 earnings to $9.4 billion, down from $9.6 billion. Apple may earn $34.4 billion for 2009, a drop from $35.7 billion previously expected. In fiscal 2010, Apple earnings could rise 18 percent to $40.55 billion, a drop from $42.8 billion early estimated.
This is the sound of slork, the Stanford Laptop Orchestra.
All instrumentalists are equipped with a black MacBook and a hemispherical speaker pod made out of Ikea tableware.
The brain behind the orchestra is Ge Wang, and if his name sounds familiar that’s because you might have seen it mentioned recently in connection with the superb app Ocarina.
Recently highlighted at apple.com, slork makes use of custom software written by Ge Wang:
“I wanted to focus on the intersection of music and computer science. So I authored a language with my advisor, Perry Cook, and researchers at Princeton and beyond. We called it ChucK. It’s a programming language completely tailored for sound. It let us quickly synthesize sound and use various controllers in our performances.”
The battle to bring the iPhone to Taiwan became a bit more crowded as that Asian nation’s top carrier announced it will start selling iPhone service “before the end of the year.”
December is the tentative launch date for exclusive sales deal, Digitimes reported Monday.
In a brief statement released over the weekend, Chunghwa Telecom said it “has signed a contract with Apple, and it will provide third-generation iPhone services in Taiwan before the end of the year,” according to the Dow Jones News service.
We’ve written before about some of the creative ways Mac users act to protect their gear and to foil the nefarious intentions of would-be thieves. This week brings another, called MacTrak, from GadgetTrak, Inc., makers of the new anti-theft software for mobile devices.
MacTrak features location-awareness from Skyhook Wireless’ Wi-Fi Positioning System (WPS) and integration with Flickr to capture the location and images of laptop thieves.
“Skyhook’s cutting-edge location technology allows our software to send the location of the device to the owner along with a photo of who is using the system, greatly increasing the chances of getting the stolen device back,” says Ken Westin, founder and CTO of GadgetTrak.
When a MacTrak-enabled laptop is stolen, the device owner can remotely activate tracking for their stolen system. Once the stolen device connects to the Internet, MacTrak determines the device location using WPS. It will also activate the Mac’s camera and photograph whoever is using the device. The image, location and network information are then uploaded to Flickr and an email is sent to the owner with the same information. Data will continue to be sent over time until tracking is disabled.
“Skyhook’s Wi-Fi Positioning can pinpoint the location of a stolen device within 20-30 meters even in dense urban areas or indoors, meeting the tough performance standards of security applications,” says Kate Imbach, director of marketing at Skyhook Wireless.
Designer Dmitry Zagga kept his iPod speakers simple: all you need for his CupSpeakers, dubbed the “iPod Ghetto Accesory” are four white paper cups (preferably from the company cafeteria) and a couple of toothpicks to hold them together.
By his own admission, “the increase in volume, of course, is radiculous, (sic?) but hey, you get stylish iPod accessory out of nothing!”
Go figure. Just like Tommy Hilfiger listening to Jimi Hendrix or John McCain listening to Abba, it goes to show there’s a little bit of the unexpected in everyone’s playlist.
The mildly entertaining redemption story of The Rocker hinges on a Mac. Serial-geek actor Rainn Wilson (Dwight Schrute from The Office) plays an almost-been heavy metal drummer called Robert Fishman. His niece, annoyed that she can’t do her homework, uploads a video of his sweaty practice session from her iMac. It goes viral. The rest is history.
The Google Mobile team is expected to enhance its iPhone search product with a voice recognition add-on as soon as today, according to a report in the New York Times.
Having already reorganized the way it delivers the results of an iPhone search request earlier this week, the Mountain View, CA search engine company is taking another step toward perfecting the way it handles the challenges of entering and retrieving information with hand-held wireless devices.
“Solving those two problems in a world-class way is our goal,” says Vic Gundotra, a former Microsoft executive who now heads Google’s mobile businesses.
With teams of voice recognition engineers working in New York, London and Mountain View utilizing trillions of search queries Google users have made over the years, one aspect of the service relies on a statistical model of the way words are frequently strung together, according to Mike Cohen, a speech research who was co-founder of Nuance Communications before coming to Google.
The service also takes advantage of the iPhone’s accelerometer to put itself into “listen” mode when the phone is raised to a user’s ear, a design development contributed by a Google researcher in London.
Both Yahoo and Microsoft already offer voice services for cellphones. The Microsoft Tellme service returns information in specific categories like directions, maps and movies. Yahoo’s oneSearch with Voice is more flexible but does not appear to be as accurate as Google’s offering, according to the Times report.
The Google system is far from perfect, and it can return queries that appear as gibberish. Google executives declined to estimate how often the service gets it right, but they said they believed it was accurate enough to be useful to people who wanted to avoid tapping out their queries on the iPhone’s touch-screen keyboard.
As of this writing the add on was not yet available on the AppStore, but as Raj Reddy, an artificial intelligence researcher at Carnegie Mellon University says, “whatever they introduce now, it will greatly increase in accuracy in three or six months.”
Apple is now Steve Jobs has said he wants to enter by the end of 2008. However, there may be several snags delaying the iPhone getting into the hands of the world’s largest cell phone market.
The new Apple employee would “focus on international releases of our iPhone and iPod touch products for Beijing,” the post reads.
Earlier this year, Jobs told CNBC he thought iPhone launches in China and Russia would “happen later this year.” Although Russia announced in October, an agreement with China has been held up by technologic and political roadblocks.
Njection Mobile is a new iPhone app designed to alert you to speed traps, red light cameras, and speed detection devices using the phone’s 3G and GPS capabilities.
The app uses a native Microsoft Virtual Earth Web Services (VEWS) implementation, leveraging the mobile tile set to speed up map displays, and provides what promoters call “one of the best mapping experiences on the iPhone.”
Drivers may be alerted audibly to approaching speed traps based on several different criteria. The application uses an Active Intelligence Selection System to alert users to the most relevant speed trap, based on speed, direction of travel, and current time. Users can submit and verify speed traps directly from the iPhone as well.
The $9.99 application’s features include:
Speech notification of Speed Traps based on current moving direction, speed of the driver, and distance to closest point using Active Intelligence Selection System (AISS)
Live Updates of speed traps updated from the website or other iPhone users
Speed Trap Ranking based on level of enforcement and time of day area is monitored
Submit and Rate Speed traps from the iPhone or on the website
Njection Mobile is compatible with both 3G and Edge network protocols, though the developers caution it may not work as well without GPS.
Citing a “more conservative outlook for the PC industry,” Credit Suisse Thursday cut the target price for Apple shares to $120 from $135. Analyst Bill Shope also trimmed Apple’s 2009 revenue projectionPhoto: Cishore/Flickr to $33.36 billion from $34.85 billion.
In a note to investors, the analyst reversed his projection of PC shipments for next year. Shope believes shipments will fall 4.7 percent rather than increase 4.9 percent.
Overall, PC industry revenue is expected to fall 16.6 percent in 2009, according to the Credit Suisse note.
Shope said his estimate is in line with an outlook for a “severe recession” in the PC market with a 13.7 percent drop in desktop computers compared to a 4.2 percent previously projected.
With consumer buying in the tank and computer makers reportedly readying $299 holiday PCs, can Apple afford to repeat its usual $100 discounts on Macs? One analyst thinks its time for Steve Jobs to get ‘aggressive’ during the all-important ‘Black Friday’ after-Thanksgiving sales.
Barclay Capital’s Ben Reitzes told investors Wednesday Apple should offer discounts on iPhones and iPods, as well as Macs.
“We would like to see Apple get more price aggressive in every product, including the iPhone, given obvious weakness in the economy,” he wrote in a note to investors.
Word comes from Le Macbidouille of Apple’s plans to set up shop in the “Carrousel of Louvre” at the famous gallery complex in Paris.
Slated to begin at the turn of the year, Apple has apparently expanded upon plans originally announced over a year and a half ago, and may become a very high profile tenant at an attraction that drew over 8 million visitors in 2007.
According to the report published at HardMac (conveniently translated into adorable French-English for the non-French-speaking reader), Apple has taken “many options in France, primarily in shopping malls in construction, such as the Odysseum in Montpellier,” and declared “2009 should be the year of Apple Stores in France.”
Here’s a gallery of the space Apple may be converting at the Louvre complex, and sure enough, you can almost see an Apple store in it, can’t you?
Love this clear stand for the Mac Mini to make it look like a PowerMac G4 Cube. The only slight flaw in handiwork of Trademarklaser is the upside down Apple logo (due to the position of the optical reader) but an etched and painted acrylic cover that would set things straight is on its way. No word on price, but they are for sale.
Flickr user Mickphoto has put up a couple of extensive photosets showing how he hacked an MSI Wind to turn it into an Apple “netbook” he calls the MacBook Nano.
Many have expressed a desire for a small, super-portable Apple notebook and Mickphoto’s creation has a certain je ne sais quoi that’s sure to get the notice of Apple enthusiasts – if not the Apple legal department – and keep the netbook conversation going.
Click on a few shots in the gallery below and visit Mickphoto’s Flickr pages for more. Is this Apple evangelism, a labor of love, or is it over-the-top? Let us know your thoughts about the MacBook Nano in comments.
