Although some are questioning how long Steve Jobs will continue to lead Apple, the Cupertino chief executive ranks No. 2 in a list of most-like company leaders.
Jobs had a 90 percent approval rating by participants in the first-ever survey by review site Glassdoor. Jobs garnered 290 reviews, far above the 50 needed to qualify.
Art Levinson, CEO of biotech firm Genentech, was ranked No. 1 most-liked boss with 93 percent approval.
Jobs beat Eric Schmidt, CEO of Internet Google, who had 88 percent approval.
Office Depot CEO Steve Odland ranked as the least-liked CEO, obtaining just 4 percent approval from reviewers.
Add Garmin to the list of companies announcing plans to introduce Android-based handsets in 2009. Garmin said its nuvifone will link GPS features with Google Maps.
The handset is expected to be the first in a series from Garmin, according to the company’s head of Asia Pacific marketing, Tony An.
An said while the nuvifone will launch this Spring, a number of others based on Android will appear during the second half of 2009. The Garmin phones will be produced by another company, reports said Monday.
Friday, Samsung said it would launch its first Android phone in the U.S. sometime between April and June of 2009. Development of the handset has been accelerated to meet the “specific needs of local carriers,” an unnamed Samsung official told the South Korean ET News.
Palm, the down-on-its-luck Treo maker, announced Monday $100 million in new funding amid talk it will unveil new products at the January CES trade show.
In addition to the $100 million lifeline, the deal allows Palm to sell shares worth $49 million — or a 31 percent premium before April 1.
The much-needed funding comes as Palm reportedly has just two years before cash is depleted and the company is set to unveil a new handset and a smartphone operating system.
‘Tis the Season of Giving and for a site such as MacHeist, where you can get bundled amazements year-round, giving really means giving. This Christmas, sign up for a MacHeist account and come to the MacHeist Giving Tree on Christmas to see what free gifts are under the tree just for you.
Refer your friends and get additional gifts with your name on them.
Prolific Baroque composer Johann Sebastian Bach has made it into the digital age with a dedicated iPod.
The Bach Pod from Passionato packs 175 hours pre-loaded on an Apple 80 GB iPod classic. Recordings are from the opus collection Hnssler Edition Bachakademier released in 2000 on 172 CDs that was favorably reviewed but was later discontinued as a set. The Bach Pod costs about $700.
There’s still enough memory left over, 63GB, to add a few things and it also comes with three back-up DVDs as insurance against hiccups.
While some hardcore classic music fans will want to pick and choose who interprets the maestro — you can check out download samples here — it would make a great gift.
eMusic is into the gifting spirit this season, offering a 12 song set of Christmas tunes available to download for free.
The playlist includes songs by an eclectic mix of artists ranging from Twisted Sister to Eartha Kitt, The Brian Setzer Orchestra to Lisa Loeb, with Shawn Lee’s Ping pong Orchestra and Kidz Bop Kids thrown in for good measure.
Classic seasonal favorites include Jingle Bells, Deck the Halls and Auld Lang Syne, as well as Bach: Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring and Angels We Have Heard On High.
Well worth checking out, after all – who doesn’t love free music?
When it comes to competition, the one between Apple and Dell often breaks out beyond traditional metrics such as revenue, profits, market share and units sold.
Many years ago, before Apple reinvented itself under the return stewardship of Steve Jobs, Dell founder and CEO Michael Dell was famously quoted as saying the best thing a new commander could do with the Apple ship would be to shut the company, sell its assets and give the proceeds to the shareholders.
This fall, around the time of Apple’s most recent quarterly earnings call, when Jobs took a rarely exercised opportunity to bask in glory of his company’s recent success in a lighthearted, congenial chat with analysts, many technology writers were quick to point out that Apple had more than enough cash on-hand to buy Dell outright, should the Board choose to do so.
In a recent blog post, Bob Pearson, Dell vice president of communications and conversations, sought to extend the competition between the companies to a battlefield on which many will be made and broken in the next decade – the environment.
Apple is all talk and no walk, to paraphrase Pearson’s criticism. He is apparently unappreciative of new Apple advertising touting Mac notebooks as “The World’s Greenest Family of Noteboks.” Pearson goes on to list some specific measures Dell has taken to reduce its carbon footprint and describes interactions with suppliers that will reduce Dell’s responsibility for millions of pounds of unnecessary shipping and packaging waste. Apple’s advertising is dismissed as “wild claims” and mere “rhetoric.”
Fighting words, perhaps, to some. Edible Apple has a nice critique of Pearson’s post – much ado about nothing, in short – though I can speak to one suggestion Pearson has for Apple that they might consider at One Infinite Loop. Pearson says “be part of the conversation,” and goes on to whine about Apple employees not being permitted to write blogs, which seems an off-the-mark complaint.
But I have been working on a story for a green designs publication for over a month, trying to get someone at Apple to speak with me about the very things the company advertises in its “greenest family” spots – and I’ve run into a brick wall. There are over two dozen Public Relations Vice Presidents on my list of Apple contacts, and from what I can tell none of those people seems interested in speaking to journalists – even to those of us who are nominally interested in helping Apple tell its story to a wider audience.
Dimensions is a virtual toolbox offering a bakers’ dozen of functional tools animated with gorgeous 3D graphics that turn your Apple mobile device into something far more useful than any other cameraphone/musicplayer/gamestation-computer could hope to be.
Among the things you can do are:
* Use the caliper to measure to a precision of 0.156mm or 0.006 of an inch.
* A flexible tape measure lets you measure interior furniture, fabric and more up to 2.5 meters or 8 feet.
* Another tape measure handles interior and exterior distances up to 5 meters or 16 feet.
* A third measuring tool uses the iPhone’s camera to measure distances up to 25 meters, or 82 feet.
* Distances over 80 feet, up to a mile, can be calculated with the measuring wheel.
* The podometer uses GPS location services to measure thousands of miles or kilometers.
All calculations can be rendered in metric or Imperial scales. Dimensions was 2008’s best selling app in AppStores France and Italy, the #2 seller in Japan, Belgium and Switzerland, according to advertising placed by its developer, pocketDEMO.
And here we are in the US spending all our money on Sim City and Pull My Finger – it’s no wonder we’re a laughingstock in Europe.
There are many fine and useful offerings coming out of the Freeverse development shop and I recommend a visit to the website, but I want to talk right now about a couple of their iPhone/iPod Touch games – Flick Fishing, which you can see in the video above, and Flick Bowling.
When I got into this gig, I didn’t intend on becoming an iPhone game addict, but I’m beginning to understand why some people chase the mobile handset dragon.
Ancient wisdom in fishing circles holds that the worst day fishing beats the best day working. Well, Flick Fishing is an app that will give you a mighty realistic taste of a day on the water during that smoke, or coffee, or lunch break on a day when you’re stuck at work.
Choose from 6 locations, 9 types of bait and tackle, a dozen tournaments and dozens of unique species of fish, for a far more satisfying virtual fishing experience than you’d think 99¢ might buy. You can even use Network and Hotseat play to compete against your friends and show off your trophy catches by email with the “Brag” feature.
If you’d rather kill some time with a virtual indoor experience, you could do a lot worse then Flick Bowling. There are a couple of other bowling games on the AppStore, but Freeverse’s 99¢ program knocks ’em down in the first frame.
Excellent 3D animation and realistic bowling alley sounds, along with great music – and customizable bowling balls in the latest version – make Flick Bowling an oddly relaxing way to feel good about doing nothing in particular. You can choose from varying levels of difficulty and bowl solo, against your friends or against a built-in opponent. Between frames you can switch over to iBeer and come back to pick up where you left off.
With only five shopping days left until Christmas you’ve probably just got enough time to take care of your last minute stocking stuffers to make the Mac or iPhone lover on your list say “Happy, Happy, Joy, Joy!” with a protective skin that’s also a work of art – from San Francisco-based Infectious.
Choose from 43 eye-catching, original designs like the ones above for your iPhone, or a selection of 85 from the laptop gallery, to personalize your Apple gear in style. Infectious features designs from artists all over the world and has ongoing open submissions if you are an artist who sees any blank surface as a canvas.
Infectious makes adhesive art for walls and automobiles, too, so don’t let your Apple gear limit your imagination. The skins are easy to install and easy to remove when you’re ready for a change. The iPhone skins, which include device backing as shown above as well as a complementing strip of art for the phone face around the home button, regularly sell for $15 but are on sale for the holidays at 1/3 off.
See the website for details.
That aging isn’t for sissies has been obvious for awhile, but there’s a new crop of advice manuals about how walking the walk of youngsters works as an age-defying tactic.
Sparked in part by bestselling “How Not To Look Old” (which offers life-altering observations on how young women wear lip gloss, their mothers wear lipstick or, worse, lip liner), another expert is convinced that one way to take 15 years off your age in a job interview or at work is to know your way around Apple products:
Rule #5: Peruse your local Apple store. At least learn the difference between an iPod Classic, iPod Touch, and iPod Nano and you’re on your way. And buy a set of those identifiable white headphones to keep around, even if you don’t have the iPod to go with them. It’s all about perception.
So says Steven Vicussi, author of a book with such a long-winded title it could bring on dementia: “Bulletproof Your Job: 4 Simple Strategies to Ride Out the Rough Times and Come Out on Top at Work.”
So talk about Apple and you’ll be cooler, younger, hipper.
Reminds me of a friend, in her early 30s but a bit of a proud Luddite, who says things like “the email” (as in “I was on the email the other day”) and refers to her iPhone as “thingy.”
Let me know what you think in the comments…
Photo used under Creative Commons license, thanks to Irargerich on Flickr
Samsung could join T-Mobile to offer the second Android phone in North America.
Samsung expects to launch its first Android-based touchscreen phone in the U.S. between April and June next year, reports said Friday.
An unnamed Samsung official said the company is “accelerating” development of the handset in order to meet “specific needs of local carriers,” according to South Korean ET News.
Although few details are known, the handset may include a design similar to Samsung’s Instinct and Omnia phones, according to one report.
Steve Wozniak, Apple co-founder and designer of the Apple I and Apple II computers, has joined the advisory board of Axiotron, maker of the Modbook Mac tablet.
Wozniak “brings a network of personal and professional contacts and offers his insight into market trends,” according to an Axiotron statement.
In 1976, Wozniak cofounded Apple with Steve Jobs, now CEO of the Cupertino, Calif.-based computer-maker.
Earlier this month, Axiotron updated the tablet-based Modbook, improving its screen and dropping to 5.3 pounds the weight of the unit priced at $2,249. MacBooks can also be converted to a Modbook, using Modbook Service for $1,299.
RIM announced Thursday it sold 6.7 million BlackBerry handsets between September and November, a figure approaching Apple’s 6.9 million iPhone 3G sales.
The Waterloo, Ontario-based RIM referred to a “record” quarter that saw revenue climb 66 percent to $2.8 billion – despite an economic recession expected to slow handset demand.
RIM told analysts it is having trouble keeping pace with demand for the BlackBerry Storm, the company’s first touch-screen smart-phone.
These Danish-designed iPod Nano and iPod mini cases do double duty, covering your pod and giving you a notebook.
Called the iPod Pad, the leather case secures your iPod in foam and offers a 72-page note pad opposite. (It looks like the notepad might be refillable but unfortunately, google translate didn’t get me far enough to be 100% sure — though a kind Danish CoM reader had a better look and says the site doesn’t specify).
It comes in 10 different color combinations and looks like a Moleskine notebook, which might make it less attractive to thieves. Currently for third generation nanos, a 4G version will be ready by late January 2009.
They cost about $26 dollars (139DKK) from Scripta.
Apple is being sued for patent infringement after a company alleges Cupertino used confidential data to launch Apple TV and other products.
EZ4Media is asking an Illinois court to grant an injunction and fine Apple for infringing on four patents on technology to stream video from a device to a television.
The company claims three employees with “confidential and proprietary information” about the patents were hired by Apple months before the computer-maker launched Apple TV, a product that streams video to home television screens.
We want to know what the Mac community’s favorite new apps are. What software – first released during 2008 – has fired you up, made you incredibly productive, had you screaming with joy or laughing with delight, or generally just been jolly useful?
We want to know.
We’re prepared to be a little fuzzy with the rules. If your nomination first appeared as a beta in late 2007, that’s fine. If it’s only just appeared in the last few days, that’s fine too. But it needs to be a NEW Mac app, and it needs to have been new this year. You get the idea.
(And yes, we’re going to do one of these for iPhone apps too – maybe next week. One thing at a time.)
So, fire away. Speak your branes. Perhaps we can reach some kind of consensus. The comments box, lovely Cultists, is yours to sully.
‘Tis the season for Holiday parties and overindulgences of many kinds, not the least of which can sadly include having too much to drink. It’s fitting then, that December is National Drunk Driving Awareness Month and we wondered how our iPhone might help us avoid the embarrassment and possible tragedy of too much drinking and driving.
Cheers! is a handy app from Addison Hardy that will help you estimate your blood alcohol content (BAC) over time, as long as you remember to add each drink you consume into the program. It factors in weight, gender and the time of each drink to help you make a reasoned estimate of your BAC after you’ve had last call and are ready to head for home. An excellent feature of this $3 program is that it will use your physical location to help you call a taxi if you’ve had too much to drink and drive.
A similar app that comes at the problem from a different angle for just a buck is Drink Timer, from Simpsonics. With Drink Timer you enter your drinks and a calendar wheel tells you when you’re estimated to have zero alcohol in your system from the time you stop drinking. So if you’re out on a Friday night and being good about entering your drinks into Drink Timer, and you look down to see that calendar reading, say, Monday, you may want to throttle back a bit and have a nice warm cup of tea when it comes time for the next round. No Taxi services with Drink Timer.
r-u-drunk? is a game you can use to approximate the embarrassment and shame you’d face if a cop pulled you over driving in that condition. With 5 tests, including a balance test and a straight line test that make use of the iPhone’s accelerometer, it also has an alphabet typing test, a hand-eye coordination test and a simulated breathalyzer. Given the hit and miss nature of typing on the iPhone’s virtual keyboard, you might want to start out with that one and if you can pass it, have another glass of champagne. The developers at MobilityWare market this $3 app as a companion to drinking games and it falls under the AppStore’s 17+ rating category.
Last but not least is iMeter, a 99¢ app that could actually help you save lives with its big graphic “meter” you can use to show your drunk friend that he is in fact talking too loud and that his BAC is at danger levels. Simply announce what you’re going to measure and when the meter loads on the iPhone’s screen, you control the “level” the meter will read out using a slider similar to the one used to unlock the phone. Comes complete with funny sounds and pop-out animation for maximum meter readings.
Please remember that drinking and driving is not a laughing matter and it is never fun to play games when real lives could be at stake. The Holiday Season is a time to celebrate with friends and family and to enjoy the spirit of giving and togetherness that make being part of a “cult” special. Drink responsibly and remember that Taxi feature if you use Cheers!
It’s probably a good bet Phil Schiller is not going to introduce an iPhone with a built-in video camera in a few weeks at Macworld. In the meantime, Sol Lipman and 12seconds.tv have created a 99¢ app for the iPhone that lets you take 3 photos (either on the fly or choose from your camera roll), record 12 seconds of audio, which it ties into a multimedia masterpiece “video slideshow” you can then share with your friends and an unsuspecting world.
Slideshows are automatically uploaded to servers at 12seconds.tv, where users have an account from which they can manage their body of work. Every video has its own page (sort of like Flickr) and any video can be emailed, downloaded or embedded.
One of the 12seconds dev team told us, “we tried hard to keep the app simple and straightforward and fun.” From all appearances, they have succeeded. The slideshows make effective use of the “Ken Burns effect” that will be familiar to anyone who’s made a slideshow in iPhoto, and the recording quality of the iPhone’s microphone is surprisingly good.
Another consideration behind limiting the final output to twelve seconds was that “twelve seconds is about the ideal amount of time for most user-generated content,” according to David Speiser, who consulted with Lipman on development of the app. “The goal is to keep the barrier for consumption really low – no matter how badly a video might suck, you know you’ll never waste more than twelve seconds of your life watching it.”
At long last, there’s a desktop app for UK Mac users to download digital copies of BBC TV shows.
The launch of the Mac beta comes many months after its Windows rival. It also comes with a self-congratulatory news story at news.bbc.
And it’s also a bit of a mess.
Lots of people, myself included, have spent long hapless hours this evening, trying to find any way to download the app in the first place. I hunted high and low and found nothing. I signed up as a Labs user. I clicked randomly on some stuff. Hmmm. Finally a friend sent me this link, which took me to a Download option.
It’s an Adobe Air app, so installation is fairly straightforward from that point. Even so, with the app installed, I still can’t find a single show available as a download. And that’s after trying in three different browsers. Hence the disappointingly empty screenshot above.
But hey, let’s not moan. It’s great to have the app at all, and UK Mac users will be delighted to have it around. Thank you lovely Auntie Nerds!
Only Google treats us as well as this. Other software developers insist on adding functionality to their updates; only Google gives us the benefit of enhanced version numbers. These people really care about us. It brings a tear to my eye, it really does.
Philippe Starck, one of the most famous and prolific designers alive, has made these monumental iPod speakers.
Called Zikmu and designed for Parrot, these sleek, wireless “couture” speakers stand 2.5 feet tall with a docking station for an iPod or iPhone on top. Audio can also be streamed from a PC or Mac via Wi-Fi or Bluetooth, and the speakers emit sound from both sides.
They’ll be in available in spring 2009 and cost $1,500.
If British tab The Sun is to be believed, 18-year-old Gavin Brooke stayed awake listening to an iPod as surgeons removed a brain tumor.
The teen had a tumor in a tricky place that surgeons didn’t want to damage, so the boy had to stay awake during surgery.
Brooke was given an anesthetic to numb the pain, but the head surgeon let him hook up his iPod Touch to give him something to do.
What was on the playlist?
The first tune Brook played on his iPod was “Apologize” by Timbaland Featuring One Republic, the rest were garage and R’n’B tracks that kept him occupied during the six-hour surgery. The iPod was plugged into the operating theater’s sound system and the volume was low enough so that Brooke could carry on conversation with the surgeons.
The tumor was removed and Brooke has since recovered.
Photo: Cishore/FlickrApple’s withdraw from Macworld Expo marks “the beginning of a shift in leadership roles,” Piper Jaffray’s Gene Munster told investors Wednesday.
The decision by CEO Steve Jobs to bypass a keynote speech in favor of marketing head Phil Schiller, sends “a clear message that a leadership shift is underway,” Munster wrote in a note.
This isn’t the first time onlookers have attempted to read Apple’s intentions through trade show speaker selection. In October, the inclusion of Schiller and Tim Cook prompted questions of a potential exit by Jobs.
The Apple Expo in Paris became the latest victim of Cupertino’s decision to scale back its participation in industry trade shows. The French show announced Wednesday next year’s show was cancelled.
Attendance at the 25 year-old Paris event had dwindled to 30,000 this year from a high of 90,000. Apple CEO Steve Jobs had skipped the event since 2004, when he underwent surgery for Pancreatic cancer. The trade show suffered another black eye in 2007, when Apple was unable to show the iPhone.
Tuesday Apple announced San Francisco-based Macworld Expo 2009 would be its last and that Jobs would not be keynote speaker. The company explained the move, saying trade shows had become ‘a very minor part’ of customer outreach.
A similar app that comes at the problem from a different angle for just a buck is 
Last but not least is 
