Apple has hired a former Wall Street Journal correspondent from China to assume the post of PR Director for its Shanghai office.
Given that Apple shows such a mastery of the press, it’s no surprise to hear that it’s used to picking the cream of the tech-reporting media crop to work in its PR roster. Wei Gu falls into this category — even if her new role comes at a challenging time for Apple in China.
Compared to tech companies whose PR departments act like celebrity hangers-on, bigging you up and laughing at your jokes to win favor, Apple’s uber-succesful public relations department is more like the movie Mean Girls in its approach to those not on its wanted list.
And with the proposed new hiring of a former Apple communications wizard, it seems that Twitter’s looking to get in on the Cupertino-style action.
An iPhone 6 bend test left a German tech magazine with bigger worries than a needlessly broken smartphone: The publication was reportedly banned from future Apple events and told it would no longer receive the Cupertino company’s latest products for review.
Given Samsung’s habit of shamelessly copying everything Apple does, I wasn’t at all surprised to see this morning’s report that the South Korean company had just spent $650 million on a fingerprint scanning firm called FingerPrint Cards. In fact, I simply rolled my eyes when I saw the news and thought, “there’s a surprise.”
But it appears that the whole thing was completely fabricated. The press release that went out announcing the move was false, and both Samsung and FingerPrint Cards have denied the acquisition.
RIM’s European managing director, Stephen Barnes, was interviewed on BBC Radio 5 this morning about the new BlackBerry 10 system and phones coming down the line.
The host of the interview repeatedly asks direct, clear questions about what RIM has learned from Apple’s iPhone.
Barnes hilariously refuses to even acknowledge the word iPhone, let alone that RIM has obviously taken several pages from Apple’s smartphone book. Even, worse, he sounds scared.
