Do you think you have what it takes to earn real money playing Fortnite? You’ll soon have the opportunity to prove it in the Winter Royale Online Tournament, a new competition from Epic Games that’s offering a $1 million prize pool.
Winter Royale will serve as a testing ground for next year’s Fortnite World Cup, and it will be open to all Battle Royale players — not just the pros.
Apple Music cranked up the volume on music streaming, turning an insider topic into water-cooler fodder as musicians, industry bigwigs and tech analysts weighed in with questions about the future of the music industry.
Seemingly everybody is suddenly talking about Apple Music subscription numbers and the chances of competitors like Spotify and Pandora. But in all the media buzz about who’s winning and who’s losing, almost everyone is disregarding another major player — Rhapsody, the streaming music service that just happened to spark the streaming revolution.
It seems like just yesterday in many ways that Apple released the first iPhone, but it was actually the better part of a decade ago. Even so, it took the better part of that “better part of a decade” for the competition to catch up, as this great video, showing the evolution of smartphones, shows.
Spotify doesn’t want to go down without a fight. The service is debuting Discover Weekly, a new playlist for every user that updates every Monday with unique recommendations for each person. One of Apple Music’s advantages over Spotify is its personalized playlists for users’ tastes, and now Spotify is matching it.
Apple is accused of corporate bullying after reportedly booting rival headphone maker Monster from its “Made for iPhone” accessory program.
Monster claims the move is in retaliation for an ongoing lawsuit against Beats, which is now owned by Apple. Monster was the original contract manufacturer of Beats-branded headphones. The move could seriously impact Monster’s headphone business.
Considering the headphone market is a $2 billion industry in the United States, there’s plenty of money to be lost without Apple’s support.
Apple is finally giving iOS developers the opportunity to provide promotional codes for in-app purchases. EA will be one of the first to take advantage of the new scheme with a Real Racing 3 promotion that will allow players to redeem free in-game gold that would usually cost $1.99.
Samsung has admitted that a Korean PR agency did offer money to app developers to promote a competition on the popular developer question and answer website Stack Overflow. The electronics giant insists that this is “clearly against” its cooperate policy, and says that it cancelled the plan as soon as it was made aware of the situation.
If you’ve though of an awesome idea for an iOS app, but you haven’t got a clue how to write code and you haven’t got the time to learn, then App Idol may be able to help. The competition is giving you the chance to win $1,000 and see your app idea turned into a reality. But you’ll have to be quick; the deadline for applications is July 24.
Ken Segall’s new book, Insanely Simple: The Obsession That Drive Apple’s Success, made its debut this week, and one of the more entertaining anecdotes within details Steve Jobs’s plans to celebrate the one millionth iMac purchase.
Rather than a $10,000 iTunes Gift Card like the company usually offers up for milestone App Store downloads, Steve wanted to play Willy Wonka and provide the lucky customer with a golden ticket that would entitle them to a full refund on their iMac purchase and a personal tour around Apple’s Cupertino campus.
