SAN FRANCISCO, MACWORLD/IWORLD 2012 — If your iPhone videos are so lame that even your loved ones won’t watch them anymore, we’ve got some advice for you.
Cult of Mac talked to Matt Dessner, co-founder of the Original iPhone Film Festival (OIFF), about choosing a subject, keeping it steady, getting enough b-roll and what he calls the Golden Tip of Editing.
The OIFF is about to announce 2012 winners here; with a little practice you might win next year’s competition and a MacBook Air.
We all love our tech, and manufacturers spend millions of dollars making sure we get excited about it through commercial spots. Unfortunately, they don’t always hire the best voice-overs to dub these commercials, and we’re about to see what happens when Samsung goes out on a limb to hire a sailor for their latest Samsung’s “It’s Time To Tab” commerical. Be warned, this is not safe for work, or anywhere else that crude sailor mouthed language is prohibited.
One of my favorite developers, Spacetime Studios, has announced yet another great project they are working on. If you haven’t heard of them, they’re the guys behind the hit cross-platform MMO Legend Series. From Pocket Legends to Space Legends, they have done everything right in the realm of true cross-platform gaming, and are pioneers in what I believe will be the future of gaming. Their latest project falls in line with the Legends series, and is entitled Dark Legends.
While Apple has been actively seeking to improve the working conditions for employees at the Chinese factories manufacturing its products, a former executive for the Cupertino company believes it could do more. The trouble is, Apple’s infamous secrecy is getting in the way.
“We’re trying really hard to make things better,
While Apple has been slow to fix the battery issues plaguing its new iPhone 4S and other devices running the new iOS 5 software, it seemed the jailbreaking community had come to the rescue. A tweak that hit Cydia earlier this week claims to fix your battery life woes under iOS 5, but it wants $4.99 for the privilege.
As it turns out, the tweak does nothing; it’s just a complete scam to steal your cash.
It’s a great time to be an Apple employee. Not only is it the most successful company on the planet right now, but it’s also slashing the price of some of its most popular products as a thank you to its employees. According to one report, the Cupertino company’s CEO, Tim Cook, announced at an internal Town Hall meeting that staff could enjoy $500 off a new Mac, and $250 off a new iPad.
A Microsoft spokesperson has revived rumors that its Xbox LIVE platform is coming to iOS after they revealed the company’s plans to provide the Xbox experience and its titles on other platforms. While iOS users already have access to a basic Xbox LIVE app, Microsoft is expected to introduce a more in-depth experience including Xbox LIVE games like that available to Windows Phone users.
I distinctly recall a bit of maneuvering when Joe Daileda, head of sales and marketing at MEElectronics, contacted us about reviewing some of their earphones. Joe seemed particularly keen on getting a pair of their ceramic CC51Ps in our hands, but I wanted none of it — being the armature junkie I am, I was fixated on their armature-powered A151s ($75). Joe eventually ended up sending us three models (impressions of the unique, modular SP51 coming soon to a review near you).
Joe’s favoritism may have been entirely in my head — I get like that sometimes; but true enough, the CC51Ps turned out to be a stunning revelation. The A151s? Not so much.
Zynga Games is a company that has made most of its many millions on games “inspired” by other titles. And by “inspired,” we mean “shamelessly ripped-off.” Mafia Wars was a rip-off of Mob Wars. Words With Friends is a rip-off of Scrabble. Cafe World is a rip-off of Restaurant City. And so on.
So when Zynga came knocking and wanted to buy up NimbleBits, developers of Tiny Tower (which Apple recently named one of their games of the year), it didn’t take a genius to figure out that if the deal didn’t go through, Zynga would rip-off NimbleBit’s games anyway. And — shocker — it turns out that’s just what happened.
Following Apple’s incredible sales numbers from yesterday’s quarterly earnings report, the iPhone has taken the number one spot in U.S. market share from Google’s Android OS, according to the researchers at Kantar Worldpanel ComTech. 37 million iPhones were sold in the fourth quarter of 2011, making Apple the top smartphone manufacturer on the planet.
Based on the last 12 weeks of sales in 9 countries (including the U.S., U.K., and Australia), the iPhone is growing faster than Android. The tides are turning.
Apple has passed Exxon as the world’s most valuable company before, only to lose the title shortly thereafter, but after last night’s blow-out holiday quarter results, Apple is once again the undisputed king of Wall Street, beating Exxon Mobil’s market cap by a cool $6 billion. Let’s hope this time it lasts!
There was an earlier report of Apple going after the Samsung Galaxy Nexus for violating its slide to unlock patent, which left most Android users scratching their heads. It was obvious that the new unlock feature in Ice Cream Sandwich was vastly different than the traditional slide to unlock, leaving many to chalk this up to another Apple patent trolling. Now we know this isn’t the case, thanks to a report in the Korean Herald, in which an unnamed Samsung official says:
For a company named after nature’s candy, Apple’s releases a surprising lack of edible products. That’s not likely to change any time soon, but if you’d like a cake or a bit of pastry with Apple’s eye for style and incredible packaging design, look no further than this incredible Taiwanese bakery.
While the pair were huge rivals at the helms of two competing companies, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates were still somewhat fond of each other. In a recent interview with ABC News and Yahoo!, Gates recounts his last visit to Jobs’s house during his final months, the conversation they shared, and how Jobs’s passing has affected him.
Beginning March 1st, Google will roll most of its privacy policies into one new main privacy policy to cover the majority of its products. Google has been slowly working towards the goal of creating a unified and more personal experience across their products and the new privacy policy is just another step in that direction.
The U.S. government declared the act of jailbreaking legal on July 26, 2010, encouraging hundreds of thousands of iOS users into hacking their devices, safe in the knowledge that their actions would incur no legal repercussions. The ruling certainly had a huge on the jailbreaking community, but the tables could be set to turn once again.
According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), jailbreaking could become illegal again this year, but you can do your bit to prevent it.
Despite being labeled the first real competitor to the iPad, it seems Amazon’s 7-inch Kindle Fire tablet still has a long way to go before it can lure tablet users away from Apple’s device. Although it seemed to be incredibly popular when it launched last year, largely thanks to that attractive $199 price tag, Apple CEO Tim Cook says the Kindle Fire, and other “limited function tablets,” had no impact on iPad sales whatsoever.
Today during Apple’s Q1 2012 earnings report, CFO Peter Oppenheimer revealed that Apple has a staggering $97 billion in cash, with over $60 billion currently held offshore. Oppenheimer said multiple times during the call that Apple was not letting its near-$100 billion in cash “burn a hole” in its pockets.
Tim Cook and Oppenheimer were very tight-lipped about what Apple plans to do with its gigantic cash reserve moving forward, noting that the company was “thrilled” to acquire the “fantastic tech talent” at flash memory firm Anobit.
Coincidentally, AAPL stock blew past its previous all-time high during after-hours trading today at over $450 per share. Apple has trumped Exxon Mobile again with a overall valuation of over $420 billion to become the most valuable company on the planet. Based on this past quarter’s iPhone sales, Apple is also the top smartphone manufacturer in the world.
A tiny note from today’s Apple earnings: 37 million iPhones were sold in Q1 of 2012, meaning that Apple is the top smartphone manufacturer in the world. The number one spot has previously been held by Samsung. There seemed to be no way that Apple could take the crown so soon.
Samsung said that it shipped (not sold) 35 million smartphones in the last quarter (analyst estimates were a more conservative 32 million), and Apple just sold 37 million iPhones. Way to go, Apple.
Apple has announced its earnings for the first fiscal quarter of 2012. The Cupertino company is pleased to report record-breaking earnings this time around, with $46.33 billion in revenue and a net profit of $13.06 billion. Last quarter Apple reported $28.27 billion in revenue and a net profit of $6.62 billion.
37 million iPhones and 15 million iPads were sold in the first fiscal quarter of 2012, making this quarter Apple’s most successful one ever. Apple also saw Mac sales climb to 5.2 million. The only decline in sales was the iPod, which declined 21% year-over-year to 15.4 million units sold.
It is common for the President of the United States to honor American heroes by inviting them to the annual State of the Union address. No surprise, then, that President Obama is tipping his hat to the legacy of Apple founder Steve Jobs at tonight’s State of the Union address by inviting Jobs’s widow Laurene Powell Jobs to share First Lady Michelle Obama’s box at the event.
The event is believed to be Powell’s first public appearance since her husband’s death.
What’s more valuable: the White House or the Apple Store? The most iconic and easily identifiable residence in the country might seem like the safer bet, but guess again: it’s actually worth just about as much as any one single Apple store.
Ever since the iOS 5 and the iPhone 4S first debuted, a small but extremely loud and angry minority of handset owners have reported extraordinary battery drainage, and despite the iOS 5.0.1 update, the problem is still unresolved.
It’s well known that the iOS 5battery issues are a software problem, but since Apple hasn’t been able to fix the problem in three months, maybe it’s time to give the jailbreak community a shot at things. In fact, that’s what a new Cydia tweak called iOS 5 Battery Fix claims to do… and initial buzz suggests that it may just have delivered on its promise.
We know Apple puts a lot of effort into its product packaging to ensure it’s almost as beautiful as the product within, but you may be surprised to hear that an entire room within the Cupertino company’s headquarters is dedicated to testing different variants of product packaging.
Siri has a new competitor, and her name is Evi. Developed by True Knowledge and powered by the same Nuance-based backend as Apple’s virtual assistant, Evi is available for all iPhones in the App Store. There’s also a beta app available for Android handsets.
While Evi doesn’t have the integrated advantage that Siri wields, she is perhaps the first clone that’s just as smart, if not smarter, than Siri.