Is the future of advertising embedded devices that measure the progress of your life? If the New York Times is right, Nike is already headed in this direction, using its relationship with Apple to move out ahead of the competion. The Nike+iPod Sport Kit is explicitly designed to provide performance feedback. Implicitly, it’s there to make Nike a constant presence in the lives of its users and drive traffic to Nike’s website.

Nike’s global sales have climbed in the last four years to more than $16 billion from $10 billion. And executives say the new type of marketing is a part of that trend.

The company plans to use the Nike+ idea in other sports categories, which could include basketball, tennis and soccer. While $29 for a Nike+ sensor hardly covers the cost of the device and the site maintenance and customer service, Mr. Edwards coolly points out that Nike+ is as much about marketing as it is about product.

People have complained since the Nike+ launched that it’s only for running. I’m glad to hear that the company is expanding into other sports. If they make a cycling model, I’m there.

Via Quantified Self

In addition to VOIP, the iPhone SDK may give programmers access to the iPhone’s motion sensors, which may result in all kinds of interesting motion-activated controls.

For example, hacker Erling Ellingsen has already built three homemade iPhone applications that are controlled by tilting, rotating or shaking the iPhone.

Ellingsen’s three demo apps are a virtual Steve Jobs bobble-head that bobs its head when the phone is shaken; a maze that is navigated by tipping and turning the phone; and a virtual box of balls that roll and bounce as he rotates the phone.

In the real world, there might kinds of interesting possibilities for game developers — think handheld portable Wii.

See Ellingsen’s impressive video:

Thanks to Apple’s just-announced iPhone software developers kit, VOIP will likely be coming to the iPhone, according to Alex Schaefer lead programmer of Apollo, a web-based iPhone instant messaging application.

“VoIP is next, and I’m preparing to start a new project working exclusively on that,” he tells Wired News’ software blog.

Schaefer is just one of many Mac developers itching to develop for the iPhone. There’s more reaction from developers in this other Wired News story: Developers on iPhone SDK: OMG! ABFT!

After months of speculation, multiple jailbreaks and not a few bricked iPhones, Apple CEO Steve Jobs announced today that a developer’s kit for the iPhone and iPod Touch will be sent out in February, creating a way to add function to the devices through official channels. But he’s still implying that developers will have to jump through hoops to actually get on the platform:

It will take until February to release an SDK because we’re trying to do two diametrically opposed things at once–provide an advanced and open platform to developers while at the same time protect iPhone users from viruses, malware, privacy attacks, etc. This is no easy task. Some claim that viruses and malware are not a problem on mobile phones–this is simply not true. There have been serious viruses on other mobile phones already, including some that silently spread from phone to phone over the cell network. As our phones become more powerful, these malicious programs will become more dangerous. And since the iPhone is the most advanced phone ever, it will be a highly visible target.

Some companies are already taking action. Nokia, for example, is not allowing any applications to be loaded onto some of their newest phones unless they have a digital signature that can be traced back to a known developer. While this makes such a phone less than “totally open,” we believe it is a step in the right direction. We are working on an advanced system which will offer developers broad access to natively program the iPhone’s amazing software platform while at the same time protecting users from malicious programs.

So it sounds truly homebrew apps will get shut out unless starting developers can prove their good intentions. By endorsing Nokia’s new way of doing things, Steve is heavily implying that Apple will stand in between developers and iPhones for our own good. I see his point — virally infected iPhones would be bad for the Apple image. On the other hand, maybe he could just make the iPhone as secure as regular OS X and block access to things like the base band and root folders? Just a thought.

Via AP 

Image via TechCrunch France

Well over a month after announcing its German and British partners, Apple has finally reached a firm deal to sell the iPhone in France, pairing up with Orange from France Telecom. The device will sell for 399 Euro (almost $575), and the data plans have not yet been announced.

France has been a tough nut to crack for Apple, as the nation has rather robust unlocking laws for cell phones that would appear to run counter to the iPhone’s business model. Only time will tell.

Via Engadget Mobile

Tech Prognosticating Really Not Paying These Days [Fake Steve]

Many Methods for Free Jailbreaks on iPhone [TUAW]

Patents Point to Multitouch MacBook? [Machines That Go Bing]

GUI for iPod Classic Brought to 5G iPod [iPod Wizard]

Because no one asked for it — it’s Netscape Navigator 9 for Mac! How is this better than Safari, Firefox, Omniweb or Camino, you might ask? Well, it’s got a totally non-OS X compliant interface! And it’s from Netscape! Is anyone planning to upgrade? Can you explain why?

Picture and News Via MacUpdate

Last week, Apple introduced a new series of iPhone ads featuring real people talking about the benefits they get from using the device. And, wouldn’t you know it, the very first parody of the campaign has hit the market, featuring a guy named Ben whose iPhone got bricked from the 1.1.1 firmware update, only it’s still TOTALLY useful.

Fun stuff.

Via TUAW

DListed gets the pics as Woz and his lady love Kathy Griffin show up together at the new Diablo’s Cantina at the Monte Carlo in Las Vegas. I guess this is real. Weird, huh?

Via the Raw Feed.

Apple has returned fire at Amazon’s Mp3 service today, introducing indie record labels to its DRM-free iTunes Plus service to only 99 cents per song. It is rumored that Apple will also drop the price of all other iTunes Plus tracks to 99 cents from $1.29.

Amazon MP3 only sells DRM-free MP3s, largely from Universal and EMI, but with indies in the mix, too. Amazon tracks cost $0.89 to $0.99 each. Apple began iTunes plus with only EMI on board, but doesn’t have Universal doing the DRM-free thing, and it’s quite unlikely they ever will. Universal is part of the same company as NBC, and we know how that worked out.

Even so, this reflexive decision by Apple is the first time I can remember the company following a competitor’s lead in the digital download market. This is more proof that Amazon’s offering is the first significant challenge Apple has faced since launching the iTunes Music Store more than three years ago.

Via Ars Technica

You know how Apple thoughtfully included a cell signal, WiFi and Bluetooth-free Airplane Mode on the iPhone so that the wunder-device could be using as a media player in flight?

Well, apparently ATA didn’t get the memo. A passenger named Casey bound for Hawaii was repeatedly harassed by multiple flight attendants for “talking on his cell phone.” (He was actually trying to watch the terrible Jennifer Love Hewitt vehicle “I Know What You Did Last Summer.”) Consumerist has the sordid story:

So I ask what rule I am breaking. He tells me I am talking on my cell phone. I again explain I am not using the cell part and it is disabled. I go on to further explain that I have been on other airlines that have specific written rules that say cell phones in airplane mode are OK above 10,00 feet, so how could it be a FAA rule. And if it is, what rule ? He has no answer for that, but to now yells at me “You have to do anything I say, I am going to have you arrested”….

He ended up detained at the airport for awhile. It’s ridiculous. And, worse, it’s quite likely that the kind of people who would assume an iPhone in Airplane Mode is dangerous would confuse an iPod Touch with an iPhone. It’s a lesson to us all: Keep it out of sight, folks.

Image via Russell Shaw.

Can you guys keep a secret? This is the first post I’ve written in more than a month that I created on my Mac. Right at the end of August, I opened my faithful 12″ Powerbook only to be greeted by the unwelcome sound of the Click of Death.

If you’ve never had a hard drive die, you might have never encountered the Click of Death. Count yourself lucky. It’s a sad sound. A heart-breaking sound. The sound of things falling apart. A tap, a skip, a whir and failure. Over and over and on into the future. And so, part way through a major writing project, my computer was beloved Mac and constant companion was rendered utterly unusable. Not immediately equipped to pay for the repair, I had to hold off until this last week to get a new drive.

I have walked in the valley of darkness, oh my brothers, and I am more convinced of the Mac’s superiority than ever. Fitted with a new drive, my little Mac feels dozens of times faster than the year-old ThinkPad I have to use at work. It just feels like being home. To make it more like home, over the course of the weekend, I’ve been restoring my Mac to just how I like it. I have five easy steps for doing it yourself, so click through to learn how.

Here’s two more data points supporting the rumor that Apple will allow Dashboard Widgets to run on the iPhone. (See earlier post)

Apple Evangelist Matt Drance is due to speak at next week’s Widget Summit in San Francsico. Matt is “actively involved in helping 3rd parties develop for iPhone,” says his bio on the Summit website. (However, it’s doubtful Drance will announce anything about the iPhone on Tuesday. It looks like he’ll be talking about Widgets in Dashboard.)

And reader Andrew Mayne notes that Apple’s new webapps page uses widget-sized icons to show all the apps for the iPhone.

“Last I checked, the normal OS X (non-widget apps) didn’t have as many button shaped icons,” writes Andrew in email. “The convenient button shaping could be a coincidence… but a rather convenient one.”

Hackers Open iPod Touch and iPhone To 3rd-Party Apps [Engadget]

Guide to Unlocked, Open-Source Touchscreen Phones [Wired News]

Dev Team A Few Steps Away From Re-Unlocking iPhone [TouchDev]

Commercial iPhone Unlocking and Unbricking Works\ [Gizmodo]

Samsung Might be Sun’s Partner for jPhone [CNet]

For years now, conventional wisdom has held that Apple’s halo strategy — using iPod marketshare to pump up Mac shipments — will take off any day now, and the company will leap from 3 percent marketshare to much, much more.

A post at Apple 2.0 suggests that this expected growth has already arrived and might be reaching its limits. For the first half of the 2007 fiscal year, Berstein Research reports, Apple carries nearly 30 percent of the high-end laptop market — the 20 percent of laptop computers sold that fetched the highest prices. This is an increase from 7.8 percent only three years ago. The switch to Intel has obvious made the MacBook and MacBook Pro into runaway hits. When removing business sales from the equation, Apple has almost 50 percent of the high-end laptop market. Which is great, except that it means that Apple’s gotten its boost.

Where’s the new growth going to come from in the computer business?

The One Laptop Per Child initiative seeks to bring technology to the developing world to make up for historic educational and economic inequities. Though I think the project has plenty of problems (Did anyone check to see that a laptop was the best way to repair inequalities in Africa and South America? Or, as Om Malik so succinctly put it, “What about the people?“), the actual XO laptop they’ve produced is quite cool and has capabilities rare on mainstream machines.

The machine is outfitted with a touch screen, a stylus, and a keyboard. In other words, it’s exactly like Apple’s eMate, a Newton product line extension from 1996 targeted at the educational market. Jason O’Grady has a great rundown of both the XO and the eMate over at ZDNet, but there’s a bigger point here that hasn’t been made: Technologies are not inherently interesting or bound to succeed. They require the right context and adoption strategies to take off. Though the XO is far from guaranteed to succeed in the long run, if it does, it won’t be because its technology or design is so superior to the eMate’s. It will be because it connects with people in just the right way. That’s all innovation is — the right idea at the right time for the right people.

Picture by hansdorsch

I heard a rumor today that Apple is shortly going to allow third-party applications on the iPhone. They won’t be full applications, however: they’ll be Desktop Widgets.
You will soon be able to drag any Dashboard Widget into iTunes, and they’ll sync with the iPhone, the source said.

To run on the iPhone and provide interactivity, they’ll require JavaScript, which means the iPhone will shortly get a Java update. When? The source didn’t say.

But the source did say that Apple hasn’t released iPhone widgets yet because Java has proven to be a major draw on battery power. Presumably, Apple has figured out how to tackle this problem. How? Again, the source didn’t say.

In OS X, Widgets are like mini web pages that run in Dashboard instead of a web browser. According to Apple’s Developer website, they’re a mix of HTML, JavaScript and CSS.

Unfortunately, this is all I know. I promised not to reveal the source of the rumor, but they’re well-placed. This is coming from just one source, via a third-person, so I’m only 70 percent confident it’s true. When I worked at MacWeek, we’d never publish rumors as news until it had been confirmed by at least three separate sources.

However, the redoubtable Glenn Fleischman reports for TidBits that Apple is getting near to making third-party applications available for the iPhone. Glenn has no details, but suggests the release is imminent.

UPDATE: As readers kindly point out, I’m confusing Java with JavaScriot: two separate technologies that share a name. The iPhone already has JavaScript, but not Java, so nothing would need to be added for Dashboard Widgets to work. Thanks for the feedback.

Radiohead’s “In Rainbows,” released early this morning over the Internet just nine days after the band announced its completion, is out and completely brilliant. It’s also not for sale through any existing music distribution channel. It’s DRM-free, you can name your own price (no, really), and not one penny goes to the record companies. My thoughts on what that means are over here at my other blog.

What bothers me is that this is exactly the sort of consumer-friendly, content-creator friendly business Apple should be encouraging. Instead, they’re acting in the best interest of record companies, movie studios and TV networks. Kind of disappointing. Either way, the songs still play on my iPod, so away I go!

One of Apple’s messiest business dealings in recent years is the disintegration of its relationship with NBC. Though Steve Jobs routinely showed clips from “The Office” during his keynotes — and many think the iTunes Store saved the series — NBC pulled out of the iTunes universe in a snit this summer. And now a major NBC series that used to have a big tie-up with iTunes, “Heroes,” features a plot with a disappearing shipment of iPods. A subtle slap at Apple?

More curious, however, is the plotline involving Peter Petrelli (Milo Ventimiglia) and a missing shipment of iPods. Considering NBC Universal’s decision last month to pull its programs from iTunes over pricing issues, this struck us as more like product diss-ment. (Indeed, Heroes was among the most popular downloads at iTunes.)

Pure coincidence, said a Universal Media Studios representative. The episode was shot last June.

Broadcasting & Cable calls it “Product Displacement” and says it’s happening with Nissan, too. What do you think? Bizarre coincidence or subtle slap-back by NBC?

Thanks, Buzz!

A guide to what’s new in the Mac OS X Leopard Finder (AppleInsider, pictured)
Man Files Class-Action Lawsuit Over iPhone Bricking (ArsTechnica)
Other Man Claims iPod nano Set His Pants on Fire (NetworkWorld)
Apple Stock Hits $167 a Share — For No Reason (Daring Fireball)
Why I Won’t Buy an iPhone (BusinessWeek)
Apple Classifies Windows a Virus (Flickr)
Leopard Could Add $240 Million in Revenue in Q4 (Fortune)
Anti-Caps Lock Feature in new Apple Keyboards is Hardware-Based (Rentzsch)

The iPhone 1.1.1 firmware Apple unleashed a bit more than a week ago has wreaked havoc on anyone interested in doing more with the iPhone than its manufacturer wants them to. Unlocked phones were closed down and rendered useless. Third-party applications were deleted and prevented from re-installing. It was back to Square 1.1.1 as soon as the update dropped.

But all is not lost. According to Engadget, the hackers who first broke into the iPhone have done it again — and this time they got into the iPod Touch, too. For the time-being, third-party apps are back on the table, so fire up your NES emulators! No one has installed the Mail application on an iPod Touch that has been reported, nor Weather or the other left-out apps. I’ll let you know if I hear anything. The exploit relies on a security hole using TIFF image files that cause Mobile Safari to freak out and open a back door. This TIFF issue has been fixed elsewhere, however, so this won’t last forever. Any new firmware would probably close the loop again. Cat, mouse. Mouse, cat.

Has it only been 10 years since Michael Dell made himself public enemy No. 1 to all lovers of Apple? As Apple 2.0 reminds us, the Dell Computer founder painted the bullseye on his forehead at ITxpo97:

“What would I do? I’d shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders.”

Visionary! Because as Apple 2.0 also points out, Apple’s market capitalization, $140.4 billion, is no more than twice Dell’s, $62.27 billion. Is it time to give the money back to shareholders in Austin, Mikey?

It’s so nice to see how different things can be a decade later. Steve Jobs wasn’t even iCEO yet back then. Less than a year later, the iMac dropped, and Apple hasn’t stopped turning out the hits since. The mid-’90s were a scary time for the Mac. Things are so much more on track these days that it isn’t even funny.

Answering preliminary speculation about their departure, former Mac gaming kingpins and latter-day Halo-bearers Bungie Studios have addressed the subject of their imminent separation from Microsoft, which purchased the firm in 2000. My colleague Chris Kohler at Wired has the interview with spokesman Frank O’Connor. It doesn’t look good for a return to glory of Mac gaming:

The reality is that we like the 360, it’s a very comfortable environment for us to work. Realistically, for the types of games that we make, it is the most successful platform for us to work on, given the types of titles that we work on. So it makes prudent fiscal sense for us to continue working on it. And certainly all of our near- and mid-term projects are all Xbox 360.

Still, it doesn’t rule out the long-term projects…

My lord: They’ve turned C-3PO into a computer! Alarming work over there at Computer Choppers. Anyone interested in picking one up? Why?

Via Engadget

Looks uncomfortable, doesn’t it? The Mac Store in Maryland Heights, Missouri, blew out some old stock by building a couch from a few dozens Macintosh IIs. Wouldn’t a collection of Performa 6500s be a big nicer to sit on? Always to nice to see the spirit of the original Macquarium kept alive.

Via Digg Via New Launches.