Drug-addled nutjob Rush Limbaugh is giving away eight, 80-gig video iPods, one a week for eight weeks. The bad news: you have to sign up for his email newsletter “Rush in a Hurry.” Even worse, he’s vandalized the iPod with an engraving of his signature. How about a handful of painkillers instead?
About 4,000 dancers reveled to the sounds of their own iPods at an impromptu flash mob at London’s Victoria train station on Friday, according to the Evening Standard.
A deafening 10-second countdown startled station staff and commuters before the concourse erupted in whoops and cheers. MP3 players and iPods emerged and the crowd danced wildly to their soundtracks in silence – for two hours.
University of London student Lucy Dent, 20, was among the flash mobbers. She said: “It was my first flash mob and I’m hooked. I’ve been dancing non-stop since we began.
“I didn’t even notice the commuters. When you get into the dancing you’re oblivious to them and forget you’re at a railway station.”
Says Flickr user vandanger: “It lasted almost two hours before the police intervened. It was great.”
It’s good to be the king, isn’t it Steve? Especially when standing next to Damon Albarn, lead singer of The Good, The Bad and the Queen. Damn. Steve is relishing this DRM-free breakthrough with EMI:
“We are going to give iTunes customers a choice–the current versions of our songs for the same 99 cent price, or new DRM-free versions of the same songs with even higher audio quality and the security of interoperability for just 30 cents more,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “We think our customers are going to love this, and we expect to offer more than half of the songs on iTunes in DRM-free versions by the end of this year.”
Hear that, other record companies? They’re Steve’s footsteps — you’re all prey. His smug grin is coming for you.
Photo: Denver Post / Helen H. Richardson
A Colorado teenager was struck by lightning while mowing the lawn and listening to his iPod, according to the Denver Post. It appears the lightning struck his iPod and fried the earbud wires, severely burning the inside of his ears. Ouch. The paper reports:
Jason Bunch was listening to Metallica on his iPod while mowing the lawn outside his Castle Rock home Sunday afternoon when lightning hit him.
The last thing the 17-year-old remembers was that a storm was coming from the north and he had only about 15 minutes before he should go inside.
Next thing he knew, he was in his bed, bleeding from his ears and vomiting. He was barefoot and had taken off his burned T-shirt and gym shorts. He doesn’t know how he got back in the house.
…
Bunch’s ears were burned on the inside, and he’s lost some hearing, mostly on the right side. His hair was singed.
His face, chest, hands and right leg have freckle-size welts on them as if buckshot had come from inside his body out.
The wounds follow the line of his iPod, from his ears down his right side to his hip, where he was carrying the device. The iPod has a hole in the back, and the earbuds dissolved into green threads.
It’s a global mega-brand mashup!
Apple is teaming up with Nike to cross-promote sneakers and iPods. The footwear and earwear giants are soon launching a new line of iPod-compatible sneakers, plus a wireless pedometer-cum-connection-kit that pumps exercise feedback into runners’ ears. “Faster, fat ass!”
The Nike+iPod cross promotion encourages runners to buy a new pair of Nike+ sneakers, which have a little pocket for a wireless sensor. The wireless sensor is part of a $30 Nike+iPod Sport Kit from Apple, which is expected to ship within 60 days.
The Nike+iPod Sport Kit also includes a small receiver that plugs into the dock connector on the bottom of the iPod. Out on the road, the sensor sends data about time, distance, and pace to the iPod, which provides unspecified “workout-based voice feedback” while you run. Presumably, it’s encouraging.
Back at home, the iPod uploads the exercise data to the Mac or PC, and syncs with iTunes and the NikePlus website which records runs and sets goals. In addition, the site will allow runners to challenge each other to “virtual races” and download time- or distance-based workout routines. It will also offer sporty iMixes “chosen and introduced by top athletes.”
SanDisk has launched a new advertising campaign that portrays iPod users as mindless sheep or robots.
The iDon’t campaign asks listeners to “Think for yourself” and “resist the monotony of the white earbuds.”
“Now is the time to break free from restrictive formats and a single source of music,” it says. “It’s time for choice, for freedom, for self-expression — and for all independent spirits to stand up and say “iDont.” You don’t need to follow. Now there is an alternative.”
The alternative is SanDisk’s own Sansa e200 (there’s a memorable name), which looks like an iPod knockoff with a pseudo-scroll wheel.
The campaign is reminiscent of Apple’s ill-fated 1985 Lemmings commercial, which portrayed potential customers as lemmings walking off a cliff. The spot is judged to be Apple’s biggest advertising blunder. It’s never a good idea to insult potential customers.
New York’s popular Mac repair shop, Tekserve, has created a video advert for its services featuring dozens of iPods falling like dominos.
The ad is bound to spread virally — after all, you’re reading about it here and I saw it on Gizmodo, which got it from The Consumerist.
The company claims more than $60,000 worth of iPods were used in the filming, which I doubt, because it looks like the same dozen iPods were shot from different angles and edited together.
The question is, where did they gat all the iPods? Perhaps they were dropped off at the shop for servicing?
The nominees for the first iPod Emmy have been announced.
And the nominees are (with iPod-friendly movie links):
24: Conspiracy QT/iPod.
It’s Jerrytime! QT/iPod.
Live 8 on AOL QT/iPod.
mtvU Stand In QT/iPod.
Sophie Chase QT/iPod.
Stranger Adventures “Helen Beaumont” QT/iPod.
On the DealCatcher forums, Dan Baxter writes: “So I decided to install the new Apple Boot Camp Beta to dual boot Windows XP on my Mac. Everything went great then I got this after using it for about an 30 mins.”
And here’s another one:
What a shame Apple didn’t release Boot Camp — it’s new software for installing Windows on an Intel Mac — on April 1. What a surprise that would have been.
When I saw the news this morning — via email from an acquaintence — I thought it was a tardy April Fool’s joke.
One curious thing about Appe’s Boot Camp page: it’s entirely in black and white, except for the Mac OS smiley face logo in a screenshot towards the bottom of the page. The Windows logo is conspicuously monochrome.
There’s actually a much better Apple advert to be found in Google Maps than the iPod that made the rounds last week.
Take this iPod silhouette dancer. Note the hip haircut and how the road makes a perfect earbud cord — remarkable!
Click the thumbnail for the full-size image.
(Via Digg)
Someone called Pink Vixen sent me these pictures of some iPod earbud covers supposedly made of white gold and diamonds. I asked for more details but all I got was a price: $400-$500. I’ve no idea who makes them or where you can get them.
Pink Vixen wrote:
“I have discovered the ultimate Ipod accessory, 18k white gold w/ diamonds earpiece covers! Ttalk about bringin\’ the bling-bling to your ears in a totally different way. I know this is a gitly thing, but we girls jsut love our ipods, and this sista, just loves the bling, so combine the two, and what do you have!!! Photo is available…
Here is a photo, they slip on over the top of the head phone. And are available in hearts, stars, moons, and for guys black colored gold, with black diamonds with lightinghbolts! The price varies between $400-$550 a pair, I am in discussions with the manufacture, I just love these things. Yours PV.”
Gratis Internet, the company behind FreeiPods.com that’s being sued by the NY attorney general for what’s been described as the biggest internet privacy abuse ever, denies the charges.
In a statement published on Friday, Gratis says:
At all times, Gratis has maintained control and ownership of its user information and never, not once, profited from any sale of data…
Gratis at no time in its history ever sold its list to anyone or allowed a company to purchase consumer data, nor has it ever considered doing so, nor will it ever in the future. Email marketing represented a small fraction (less than 1.5%) of its 2004 and 2005 revenues, and the company earned less than $32,000 from users in the state of New York from its practice of sending promotional emails.
Establishing and maintaining a bond of trust between Gratis and consumers is a cornerstone of its business. Gratis believes that its impressive growth in recent years is a direct reflection of the fact
that, in all its dealings with consumers, the company has behaved in a trustworthy and responsible manner at all times and in all ways.
Yesterday BoingBoing’s Cory Doctorow rightly called out Apple’s hypocritical “state-sponsored piracy” response to France’s new law against vendor lock-in.
One of the big reasons the iPod took off is because of Napster and other file-sharing services. People suddenly had huge collections of digital music on their computers, but no easy way to take it with them when they left the house.
Now it appears Steve Jobs himself once agreed with the thinking behind the French law, which is to protecting consumers’ right to move content they buy from one device to another.
In a 2002 interview with the Wall Street Journal, reprinted in part at Macworld, Jobs said:
“If you legally acquire music, you need to have the right to manage it on all other devices that you own.”
Compare that to what French lawmakers had to say this week:
“The consumer must be able to listen to the music they have bought on no matter what platform,” Martin Rogard, an adviser at the French Culture Ministry, told the Financial Times.
Image courtesy of wpc-fr.net.
(Via SiliconBeat)
Talking of Apple billboards, MacBillboard.com is a site devoted to — Mac billboards.
The site, based in Holland, has six pages of billboard photos submitted by snappers from all over the world, like the one above of a billboard in Los Angeles by Mark Adamson.
Better, the site also has a series of ebOY-style pixelart desktop pictures, showing incredibly detailed Amsterdam street scenes full of iPod billboards and office workers sitting at Macs. Here’s the index page with each image at several different resolutions.
There’s an Apple garage sale, an iPod factory, and an Apple retail store with a line of little pixely Macheads waiting to get in. Here’s a detail:
You can also get an Apple mini store desktop — modelled after Apple’s container-sized mini shops — which has lots of space around the edges designed to be populated with the site’s custom icons, like these I-heart-iPod icons.
It’s all free, so have at it.
It’s hard to believe, but there’s a graffiti artist in San Francisco who objects to the iPod.
This giant billboard on the southbound 101 freeway was recently scrawled with the message: “Unplug!”
It didn’t last long. Apple had the billboard replaced within a couple of days. It’s now been swapped for an entirely new iPod ad. (The picture is a couple of months old. I’ve been meaning to post it for a while.)
Gratis Internet, the company behind FreeiPods.com, was sued by New York’s attorney general on Thursday for selling e-mail addresses in what’s been described as “the biggest deliberate breach of Internet privacy ever.”
The AP reports:
“Attorney General Eliot Spitzer accused Gratis Internet of selling personal information obtained from millions of consumers despite a promise of confidentiality.
The consumers thought they were simply registering to see a Web site offering free iPod music players or DVD movies and video games, Spitzer spokesman Brad Maione said. On sign-up pages, Gratis promised it “does not … sell/rent e-mails.”
Instead of confidentiality, Spitzer said, Gratis sold access to their e-mail information to three independent e-mail marketers, and hundreds of millions of e-mail solicitations followed.
Designer Derek Yee won a prestigious honor for his fantastic work on my Cult of iPod book.
Derek’s work was selected as one of the best design pieces last year by Step Inside Design magazine, a leading journal that every year runs a competition to find the 100 top designs.
Derek, who runs Octopod Studios, was honored in the Editorial category. Derek also designed my Cult of Mac book.
Step Inside says:
The front cover, which met initial opposition from Yee’s colleagues, successfully avoids generic iPod imagery, while referencing its predecessor, The Cult of Mac. Yee, founder of Octopod Studios, reflects, “I really wanted to stay away from anything that showed an actual iPod, that was silhouetted, or had white ear buds and wires. I didn’t want to sell the iPod. I wanted to sell the people that love their iPods. And I wanted to do it in a way that was pure.”
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An experiment by CNet to see whether copy-protected music files sucked the life out of player’s batteries is interesting but flawed.
According to CNet, DRM copy-protected music can decrease battery life by up to 25 percent thanks to the processing overhead necessary to play them.
But as one commentator on the story points out, the test compared protected WMA files with unprotected MP3 files. It should have compared protected-WMA to unprotected WMA, or Apple’s FairPlay AAC versus unprotected AAC.
FreeiPods.com, the wildly popular marketing scheme that offers free iPods for trying out various subscription offers, sold the data it gathered on 7.2 million Americans to an email advertising firm, according to a story at Wired News by my colleague Ryan Singel.
(New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer) announced Monday that e-mail marketing giant Datran Media had agreed to a $1.1 million fine for knowingly buying marketing lists from companies with privacy policies that promised not to sell or transfer the lists to a third party.
… Datran’s biggest purchase, according to the text of the settlement (.pdf), was a list of 7.2 million Americans’ names, e-mail addresses, home phone numbers and street addresses from Gratis Internet, a company best known for promising free iPods, televisions and DVDs to users willing to sign up for promotions offered by partners such as Citibank, Blockbuster and BMG’s music club.
The sites inspired dozens of “Is there really such a thing as a free iPod?” stories in the press (including one by Wired News), and internet forums were packed with pleas for information on how to acquire a free version of Apple Computer’s signature fetish item. The freebie required a registrant to sign up five others into the program, and eventually the legalized pyramid scheme reached its inevitable saturation point.
While many did indeed get a free iPod, all ended up with inboxes full of marketing pitches, which began showing up within hours of registering.
Gratis lied to me for the story I wrote originally about the company (also linked above), which did wonders for their early credibility, and then lied again for a follow-up story I wrote about it’s privacy practices that was prompted by the avalanche of spam its customers mysteriously received.
In addition, Gratis Internet was a member of Truste, which provides a “privacy seal” to companies it says have a trusted privacy policy.
When asked by Wired News in 2004 how third-party spammers got hold of Gratis members’ e-mail addresses, Truste said it could not find a problem with Gratis’ practices.
“The results of our investigation indicate that Gratis Internet did not violate their privacy policy,” Truste investigator Alexander Yap wrote in an October 2004 e-mail. “Truste did, however, work with them to strengthen and clarify their privacy statement.”
Several months later, Truste revoked Gratis’ seal of approval, then quickly reinstated it, then pulled it again, but declined to state publicly its reasons.
In the wake of this week’s settlement, Truste’s spokeswoman did not return repeated phone calls, and executive director Fran Maier did not respond to e-mailed questions about why Truste never discovered the alleged sale or informed the public that Gratis was not adhering to its privacy policy.
As a million posts of New York Craiglist attest, there’s a lot of people on public transit wondering about the hottie across the way with the iPod on. What are they listening to? Will they go out with me?
The latter question is what “Missed Connections” is for, while the former may one day be answered by a device like the iPod Status.
Created by designer David Lu, the iPod Status is a “wearable information display” — a small screen attached to a shoulder strap that displays the song and artist information for a currently-playing tune.
“Many of us have taken rides on public transportation and wondered what the interesting-looking person beside us is listening to,” says a description. “IPod Status is intended to encourage social connectedness by making this hidden information visible.”
The device — presumably a prototype — was shown at the Seamless Fashion Show in Boston last month. More photos from the show on Flickr.
Take a craft knife, an iPod nano, some iPod Linux and a copy of MAME (Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator) and what do you get?
Pacman on an iPod in its own 6-inch tall arcade cabinet!
It is possible to get audiophile quality sound out of an iPod, but probably not from Apple’s iPod Hi-Fi boombox, says technologist Tim Bray.
“I gather that on stage today, Mr. Jobs freely flung about the word ‘audiophile’ while pitching the new iPod Hi-Fi. Well, I’m one of those: wrote for the mags, have gear from obscure British manufacturers, turn off a fridge thirty feet away to listen. I’ll look forward to giving the Hi-Fi a listen. It seems fantastically dubious that something 43 cm wide, with a listed bass floor of 53Hz (the bottom string on a bass is 42Hz), weighing 6.6kg, and costing $349, could actually produce ‘audiophile’ sound.”
Bray, Sun’s Director of Web Technologies, suggests instead plugging in a good pair of in-ear canalphones. Bray recommends Etymotics or Shure. I have a pair of Xtrememac FS1, which have heartier bass than the Shure or Etymotic. But Bray says most important of all…
… get your music off CDs and use lossless compression. The D/A in an iPod is really not bad at all; if you send all of the music through it and play it through first-class transducers, you’ll be happy.
