Apple has reportedly acquired an artificial intelligence startup that specializes in on-device machine learning software.
Silk Labs’ technology processes data without sending it to the cloud, which is a perfect fit for Apple’s privacy-conscious approach to AI. It’s not clear how much Cupertino paid for the company when the deal was struck earlier this year.
Another week, another round of awesome new deals on gear and gadgets in the Cult of Mac Store. This go around, we’ve got a special lens for taking ultra slick selfies, and 2 terabytes of secure cloud storage for life. On top of that, there’s a powerful VPN subscription, and a special podium stand for your iPhone. Plus, everything’s discounted more than 60 percent. Read on for more details:
As the weather warms up, we’re still rounding up the hottest new deals at the Cult of Mac Store. This go-round, we’ve got a set of future-ready wireless earbuds, a swiss army knife for iOS data, a full terabyte of super secure cloud storage, and a tool that’ll help you finally reach the bottom of your inbox. Best of all, everything is discounted by more than 60 percent. Read on for more details:
Rightly or wrongly, Apple’s stock taking a prolonged plunge has opened the floodgates for people to hold court about what it is that Apple’s apparently doing wrong — and how the company can be righted again.
Today it was the turn of venture capitalist Fred Wilson, founder and managing partner of Union Square Ventures. His answer: that Apple is failing to invest enough in artificial intelligence and cloud cloud computing.
Apple’s push to become a great company for large companies as well as consumers is getting a big boost this week with the hiring of former Box employee Karen Appleton who has joined the company in an enterprise-focused role.
Appleton revealed last week that she was leaving Box after working with the company since 2007 as employee number 8, but she hasn’t said what exactly she will be doing for Apple.
In an age of increasing specialization, stepping up a career means showing certification. That’s especially true in the realm of information technology, and the CompTIA certification is one of the most widely recognized in the business. This CompTIA A+ test prep bundle and will make sure you’re ready to knock it out of the park. Normally going for thousands of dollars, right now you can get access to it for just $59.
Backblaze launched in 2007, accruing hard drives and building out a backup capacity of what amounts to some 150 petabytes of data on its servers. They’ve since become one of the most trusted providers of backup, with prices that beat out even Amazon’s impressively prices S3 service. How much cheaper? Right now you can get a year of unlimited backup on Backblaze for $24.99 at Cult of Mac Deals.
One click and your digital life gets stored in the Cloud. Where or what that is exactly is a mystery to most of us. Two startup companies are producing products aimed at the segment of the computing population that doesn’t want to save pictures, videos and documents to large cloud-based servers.
These products let you create your own cloud to store the personal stuff.
The cloud is a pleasant yet mysterious name for that place our pictures, videos, emails and other digital bits of life go to be stored. With our vibrant lives taking up all the storage on our devices, we are slowly warming to cloud-based services that promise to keep our stuff safe and accessible.
A company called MiMedia has designed a cloud service it hopes allays reluctance with a clean user interface, quick uploading and easy, private sharing. Best of all, it can immediately free up storage space on your phone.
You’ve got the perfect photo lined in your sites and so you push the button on your iPhone camera. Instead of a memory etched in pixels, you get a message saying “Cannot take photo. There’s not enough storage.”
An iOS app called IceCream lets you quickly free up space without deleting photos, instead saving them to a secure cloud server with the tap of a button.
Cloud storage is crazy convenient, but it has its drawbacks. You can find yourself shaking your fist at the sky if your wireless connection drops out, not to mention the concerns offboard storage often raises about data privacy. Of course it beats having to lug around a brick in your bag, and avoids the risk of a power surge or accidental fall that suddenly turns all your critical data into nothing but a memory. Luckily we’ve found a deal that offers the best of both worlds by giving you both: the IDrive 1TB Wi-Fi Drive and 1TB Cloud Backup Bundle.
Save big on top selling gear and services every day at Cult of Mac Deals.
Time is running out to save big on the IDrive hard drive and Cloud Backup, the Bobine flexible charging dock and more.
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Does your organization have people in several remote locations who need to work on visual documents together? Now you can forget about e-mailing files, saving versions and all the related headaches: With Lucidchart, anyone can collaborate in real time to create charts in the cloud. And Mac users can get to work with Lucidchart at a fraction of the cost of Microsoft Visio.
Less than a decade ago, Apple was singled out by Greenpeace as one of the least environmentally-friendly tech companies on the planet.
Apple has since turned over a new leaf, embracing environmentalism as something every bit as central to the company as the latest iPhone.
Just how important became evident a few months ago, when, during a routine earnings call, Cook spoke of his dream for Apple as a “force for good in the world beyond our products.” The recent global celebrations for Earth Day for the first time in nearly a decade mean that his dream is closer to becoming a reality.
So what changed exactly?
“When I was at Apple from 1999 to 2005, sustainability was pretty much an afterthought,” says Abraham Farag, a former senior mechanical engineer of product design at Apple. Farag describes Apple’s approach to being green at the time as “lip service.”
Under Steve Jobs, Apple’s refusal to embrace sustainability came down to two principle factors: cost and design. For example, recycling plants wanted components which weighed over 25 grams to be marked with a special code so that they could be properly recycled. “But the marks were not pretty so Apple wouldn’t put them on,” Farag says. “Sustainability [organizations] want different materials to be attached in a method that was able to be separated later for recycling. No way we could alter the design for that consideration. Pure looks trumped any possible consideration for sustainability.”
Of the 16 mentions of the word “environment” that appear in Walter Isaacson’s 2011 biography of Steve Jobs, all except one have to do with the environment (read: the mood and corporate ethos) inside technology companies. Jobs was a man who wanted to shape environments, not be shaped by the environment.
The same is true for the appearance of other words like “sustainability,” “green,” and other buzzwords that will likely appear time and again in the Tim Cook biography, when it is written. The only mention of the word “recycling” is in the context of an annoyance: a plane which flew overhead during Jobs’ famous Stanford commencement address, waving a banner which read “Recycle all e-waste” and threatening to distract listeners.
Apple’s environmental tussles reached their nadir in 2005, when the company got into a spat with Greenpeace International. Greenpeace slammed Apple for its use of toxic chemicals in the manufacturing process, and also for its lack of a recycling program. Jobs stood up for Apple’s environmental efforts at first — particularly when compared to competitors — but soon agreed that changes needed to be made. From mid-2006, Apple began phasing out CRTs and replacing them with LCD monitors, which met the European Union’s Restriction of Hazardous Substances in electronics, years before the EU deadline for compliance.
Apple additionally focused on lowering the power requirements of many of its products in general, which scored high Energy Star ratings, as well as gold ratings from the Electronic Product Environment Assessment Tool (EPEAT), which attempts to measure products’ environmental impact over their lifespans — taking into account energy use, recyclability, and the manufacturing process. Products were also redesigned with recycling in mind — seen by choices like the decision to switch from plastic to aluminum for Macs.
While Jobs got the lion’s share of the credit, behind the scenes two of the driving forces behind the “greening” of Apple were reportedly Tim Cook and Jony Ive. As both began to get more power within the company, Apple’s focus on sustainability grew.
What was key about Cook and Ive being sustainability advocates was their placement within Apple. Since both had considerable operating autonomy, they were able to get things done that predecessors with similar ideas had never been able to. For instance, while Abraham Farag was employed at Apple he recalls the company hiring a former colleague he had worked with at IDEO. She was brought on with the job title of program manager for Environmental Technologies and Strategies Group within R&D; charged with tracking environmental attributes for all new hardware projects.
There was just one problem, however: she was the only one doing this at the time.
“Imagine with everything Apple was doing they [only] had one person looking at the environmental impacts,” Farag says. “[There’s simply] no way one person could have much impact without very strong top-down support, which she didn’t get. She certainly tried, but it was an impossible task.”
Apple has embraced alternative energy source like solar power and hydroelectric power for its data centers.
With Cook and Ive now the two most powerful people at Apple, the focus on environmental factors has gained steam. In May 2013, Cook announced that Apple had hired the former Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, Lisa Jackson, to serve as its top environmental adviser.
“Apple has shown how innovation can drive real progress by removing toxics from its products, incorporating renewable energy in its data center plans, and continually raising the bar for energy efficiency in the electronics industry,” Jackson said around the time she joined. “I look forward to helping support and promote these efforts, as well as leading new ones in the future aimed at protecting the environment.”
New reports coming out of Apple have continued the stress the company’s breakthrough green products — from a Mac Pro which uses less than half the allowable energy limit, to a focus on the environment in Apple’s latest Supplier Responsibility Progress Report.
Cook has also sorted out the last of the major sticking points for Apple’s green credentials: its data centers, which saw Apple ranked dead last out of various tech companies in a 2011 Greenpeace report. Jump forward just a few years, and Apple has embraced alternative energy source like solar power and hydroelectric power for its data centers, as part of its pledge to use 100% renewable energy to power all of its facilities.
Similar sentiments are behind the decision for Apple’s $5.5 billion Cupertino “spaceship” headquarters to have 70% of its power provided on-site by photovoltaics and fuel cells, with the remaining power covered by sustainable “green sources” in California.
“This is a Tim Cook initiative,” says former Apple CEO John Sculley, speaking with Cult of Mac about Apple’s drive toward promoting sustainability as one of its primary goals. While Sculley notes that Jobs was responsible for a great many groundbreaking innovations, he has it on good authority that Cook is the one who has driven Apple’s embrace of sustainability.
“This is a Tim Cook initiative,” says former Apple CEO John Sculley.
The company’s green direction may look like a marketing stunt. After all, this is hardly an area that Apple is coming to early.
But it is something that Tim Cook feels strongly about. A cool and collected CEO with none of Jobs’ reputation for tantrums, Cook has lost his temper very few times publically while at the helm of Apple. One of those occasions came in March this year, however, when he was pushed by the conservative think tank National Center for Public Policy Research to disclose the cost of Apple’s sustainability programs.
Claiming that ethical decisions sometimes trump financial ones, Cook snapped that he didn’t “consider the bloody ROI” (return-on-investment) when it came to promoting sustainability. “If you want me to do things only for ROI reasons, you should get out of this stock,” he said.
Cook has often sounded too much like a person impersonating Steve Jobs during his stint as CEO: saying the kinds of things Steve might say, but without Jobs’ charisma and ability to distort reality with his “gee whiz” boy inventor proclamations.
When Cook narrated Apple’s recent Earth Day commercial, though, it came across as Cook speaking about a subject he felt passionate about, that you couldn’t imagine coming out of Jobs’ mouth.
At the same time, the ad — and the overall vision for Apple — works because it makes total sense given the company’s ethos. Apple might only have embraced environmentalism lately, but its identity owes a great deal to organizations like the Whole Earth Catalog — the hippie-tech magazine Jobs mentioned during his Stanford commencement address. The phrase “Stay hungry, stay foolish” came from that magazine’s founder, Stewart Brand, who stayed in touch with Jobs his entire life.
Brand’s 1960s vision was for a combining of personal technology with the kind of back-to-nature thinking prevalent in counterculture circles. Jobs took many of the Whole Earth Catalog’s ideas, but instead of using them to refer to the literal ecosystem, he used them as metaphors for the kind of tech ecosystem Apple runs on today — where sales in the App Store, drive iPhone sales, which drive iPad sales, and so on.
Tim Cook’s vision for Apple as a green company brings Apple back in line with that ideology — minus the metaphor.
At a time when new earning reports coming out of Apple are spun as negatives once again by certain analysts (despite another record quarter), and the world is still awaiting the next breakthrough Apple innovation, Cook may have given it to us with Apple’s rethought approach to sustainability.
His belief in Apple as an environmental “force for good” speaks more of a man evolving what Apple stands for as a company — rather than continuing to rule over the kind of “haunted empire” Yukari Iwatani Kane described Apple as in her recent book.
It might not be an iWatch, but perhaps this will ultimately prove to be Tim Cook’s lasting legacy at Apple.
And, hey, it’s never bad when Apple gets to point out how it genuinely “thinks different” to competitors like Samsung.
Eye-Fi – the company that makes the Wi-Fi-enabled SD cards we use for covering trade-shows – has launched a Eye-Fi Cloud, a new app and service that stores all your photos in the cloud, whether you took them on your iPhone or a big fancy camera.
Cloud computing is quickly becoming the standard method of creating scalable, manageable Web Application Services. Today Cult of Mac Deals is offering a course that will give you an in-depth walkthrough on how to utilize the wide range of cloud computing services that Amazon provides.
You’ll learn what is available in AWS, and how to use it effectively for your own needs. After you start by learning exactly what cloud computing is, and why you should be using it, you will be shown all the wonderful features that AWS brings to your digital life. And Cult of Mac Deals has this course for only $19 – a savings of 61%!
Box has updated its iOS apps for iOS 7, and seems to have gotten a little drunk at the celebration party: Box is giving a free 50GB storage to anyone who downloads the new app in the next 30 days. Or 29 days, I guess, as the announcement came yesterday.
An official Google Play Music app is finally available on iOS, bringing Google’s All Access music streaming service to your iPhone. Users can listen to millions of tracks on demand and enjoy custom radio with no limits, as well as access to the music they’ve uploaded to Google’s cloud-based storage service.
You know the drill: you get some crazy attachment in the mail, and you need to convert it to a format you can use. And – of course – you’re on your iPhone or iPad.
Maybe it’a a FLAC file you want in AAC, or a Microsoft DOC file that you’d prefer to see as a PDF. On the Mac you can convert these with little problem, but on iOS? Well, it’s now actually even easier than it was on the desktop. If you use CloudConvert anyway.
For Americans, iTunes in the Cloud has freed a lot of us from the tyranny of having to constantly switch movies and music on and off our devices. As long as we purchased a movie or song on iTunes (or, alternatively, subscribe to iTunes Match), we can stream it from the Cloud.
Unfortunately, Apple’s been taking a creeping approach to rolling out iTunes in the Cloud internationally. For at least two European countries, though, rollout has just started: Austria and Switzerland can now stream movies they bought from iTunes from the Cloud.
JoliDrive is JoliCloud’s new iOS app and it’s pretty good, if a little basic. The general idea is that you use the app to log in to your various web servixes and then use a single app – JoliDrive – to access them.
If you’ve got your music stored in the cloud, then streaming it to your iPhone might be difficult. Depending on which service you use, you may need to find a third-party app — one that actually works well, and is designed specifically for music playback. AudioBox is exactly that.
Compatible with a whole host of cloud-based storage services — including Google Drive, SkyDrive, Box, and Dropbox — AudioBox ensures that you can take your entire music library with you on your iPhone.
SAN FRANCISCO, MACWORLD/iWORLD 2013 – There are plenty of cloud storage solutions out there these days, including services such as Dropbox. Having your files stored on the cloud comes with some downfalls, though, such as monthly payments as well as decreased security. The Transporter, a new device created by the people behind the Drobo tries to give you the best of both worlds.
With the Transporter, you have access to all of your files stored on the device as long as you have an internet connection, but the files themselves aren’t stored in the cloud. By using this approach, you can avoid the hassles of cloud storage while still having the ease of access that services like Dropbox provide.
Tonido, a new service from CodeLathe, is a great way to access the music, movies, photos, and documents you have stored on your Mac or PC using another computer, or an Android or iOS device. Unlike cloud-based storage services, which require you to upload your content just to download it again, Tonido turns your computer into your storage locker and then provides other devices with direct access to it.
It’s easy to set up, and you sync up to 2GB of data without paying a penny.
I thought I had the whole “paperless” thing under control until Doxie sent over the new, budget-priced Doxie One for me to review. Trust me: If you snap photos of your receipts with your iPhone in an attempt to banish dead trees from your life, you should probably switch to a portable scanner.
It really is that much better.
