Dropbox, the cloud storage outfit, has spent something like a reported $100 million in cash and stock pushing Yahoo and Facebook out of the way so it could buy a little 14-man e-mail management start-up whose early-stage widgetry, out maybe a month, can’t really scale so couldn’t meet initial demand and is thin on platform support. It’s also got a lot of features left on its to-do list.
Dropbox, the cloud storage outfit, has spent something like a reported $100 million in cash and stock pushing Yahoo and Facebook out of the way so it could buy a little 14-man e-mail management start-up whose early-stage widgetry, out maybe a month, can’t really scale so couldn’t meet initial demand and is thin on platform support. It’s also got a lot of features left on its to-do list.
Speculation is back in circulation that Apple – enflamed by Samsung’s “slavish copying,” the ensuring worldwide patent litigation and Samsung’s increasing dominance in smartphones and tablets – is weaning itself off its component dependency on Samsung and moving its A7 chip production to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) and Intel. The Intel part may, of course, just be wishful thinking especially on Intel’s part. DigiTimes, which is spreading the current crop of rumors, says institutional investors figure Intel, which wants to rent out its ovens because of the PC downturn, could get 10% of Apple’s next-generation A7 processor orders. In that case TSMC could get 40% leaving Samsung with the remaining 50%. Apple has also been shifting orders for DRAM, mobile RAM chips and panels away from Samsung.
Speculation is back in circulation that Apple – enflamed by Samsung’s “slavish copying,” the ensuring worldwide patent litigation and Samsung’s increasing dominance in smartphones and tablets – is weaning itself off its component dependency on Samsung and moving its A7 chip production to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) and Intel. The Intel part may, of course, just be wishful thinking especially on Intel’s part. DigiTimes, which is spreading the current crop of rumors, says institutional investors figure Intel, which wants to rent out its ovens because of the PC downturn, could get 10% of Apple’s next-generation A7 processor orders. In that case TSMC could get 40% leaving Samsung with the remaining 50%. Apple has also been shifting orders for DRAM, mobile RAM chips and panels away from Samsung.
If you want to learn iOS 6 development, this is a great place to start. The book spends the first several chapters covering the basics. The author first shows you how to get your system setup and how to install Xcode. He then covers the Xcode interface and the iOS simulator. After that he provides a short primer on Objective-C and then covers the Cocoa touch layers and the frameworks they contain. There are a ton of them but the author does a nice job of introducing them. You leave Hour 4 with a great understanding of the tools you have access to. The author continues with twenty more chapters broken down into hour long reads. Most chapters took me longer because I got sidetracked playing with the code samples. I have listed the chapters below. Their titles are descriptive enough to give you a good idea of what is covered.
If you want to learn iOS 6 development, this is a great place to start. The book spends the first several chapters covering the basics. The author first shows you how to get your system setup and how to install Xcode. He then covers the Xcode interface and the iOS simulator. After that he provides a short primer on Objective-C and then covers the Cocoa touch layers and the frameworks they contain. There are a ton of them but the author does a nice job of introducing them. You leave Hour 4 with a great understanding of the tools you have access to. The author continues with twenty more chapters broken down into hour long reads. Most chapters took me longer because I got sidetracked playing with the code samples. I have listed the chapters below. Their titles are descriptive enough to give you a good idea of what is covered.
A US district court judge Friday slashed the $1.05 billion award granted Apple last August by a jury that found Apple’s great nemesis Samsung copied Apple’s mobile widgetry. Apple’s stock thereupon fell. The court has ordered a new trial to decide exactly what Apple should get. District Court Judge Lucy Koh doesn’t think the trial will begin before the companies’ appeals are resolved and may not determine exactly how to calculate the damages. It’s not clear that Apple still won’t get the remaining $450,514,650 or more. And Apple also wants more damages than the jury gave it. Apple gets to keep roughly 60% of one of the largest awards ever made but will have to fight to get the rest, which Koh claims was granted on incorrect legal theory.
A US district court judge Friday slashed the $1.05 billion award granted Apple last August by a jury that found Apple’s great nemesis Samsung copied Apple’s mobile widgetry. Apple’s stock thereupon fell. The court has ordered a new trial to decide exactly what Apple should get. District Court Judge Lucy Koh doesn’t think the trial will begin before the companies’ appeals are resolved and may not determine exactly how to calculate the damages. It’s not clear that Apple still won’t get the remaining $450,514,650 or more. And Apple also wants more damages than the jury gave it. Apple gets to keep roughly 60% of one of the largest awards ever made but will have to fight to get the rest, which Koh claims was granted on incorrect legal theory.
A Texas district court Wednesday upheld a jury verdict arrived at in November awarding Internet security firm VirnetX more than $368.2 million after it found Apple and its FaceTime video chat service infringed four virtual private networking patents designed to establish a secure connection between two devices. The court denied Apple’s motion to lower the damages. Apple has to pay VirnetX more than $333,500 a day until the case is settled, a situation supposed to force the companies to come to an agreement on future royalties. Failure to reach an agreement could mean more damages. The iPhone 5, iPad mini, iPod touch and recent Mac computer are all implicated.
A Texas district court Wednesday upheld a jury verdict arrived at in November awarding Internet security firm VirnetX more than $368.2 million after it found Apple and its FaceTime video chat service infringed four virtual private networking patents designed to establish a secure connection between two devices. The court denied Apple’s motion to lower the damages. Apple has to pay VirnetX more than $333,500 a day until the case is settled, a situation supposed to force the companies to come to an agreement on future royalties. Failure to reach an agreement could mean more damages. The iPhone 5, iPad mini, iPod touch and recent Mac computer are all implicated.
Word that contract manufacturer Foxconn had stopped hiring across its Chinese plants sent Apple stock into a tizzy this week on an assumption by the Financial Times that the bottom had dropped out of demand for iPhones, Apple’s bestselling and most profitable product. Foxconn claimed the hiring freeze had nothing to do with iPhone 5 production, which Apple has already said should be less this quarter than last, but happened because more workers came back to work after the Lunar New Year than usual or expected. UBS analysts Steve Milunovich thought maybe it had to do with cutbacks in orders from HP, which represents about 8%-10% of Foxconn sales, ya know, desktop PCs, printers and some servers.
Word that contract manufacturer Foxconn had stopped hiring across its Chinese plants sent Apple stock into a tizzy this week on an assumption by the Financial Times that the bottom had dropped out of demand for iPhones, Apple’s bestselling and most profitable product. Foxconn claimed the hiring freeze had nothing to do with iPhone 5 production, which Apple has already said should be less this quarter than last, but happened because more workers came back to work after the Lunar New Year than usual or expected. UBS analysts Steve Milunovich thought maybe it had to do with cutbacks in orders from HP, which represents about 8%-10% of Foxconn sales, ya know, desktop PCs, printers and some servers.
Tuesday when a report by American security firm Mandiant that’s been six years in the making was circulating tracing an “overwhelming percentage” of Communist China’s far-flung corporate and governmental cyber espionage to a 12-story building in Shanghai connected with the People’s Liberation Army know as PLA 61398, the usually secure Apple disclosed that its Macs had been hacked and infected with malware by bad guys leveraging the known vulnerabilities that Oracle doesn’t seen to be able to eradicate from the Java software used as a browser plug-in. Facebook last Friday confessed to experiencing the same infestation.
Tuesday when a report by American security firm Mandiant that’s been six years in the making was circulating tracing an “overwhelming percentage” of Communist China’s far-flung corporate and governmental cyber espionage to a 12-story building in Shanghai connected with the People’s Liberation Army know as PLA 61398, the usually secure Apple disclosed that its Macs had been hacked and infected with malware by bad guys leveraging the known vulnerabilities that Oracle doesn’t seen to be able to eradicate from the Java software used as a browser plug-in. Facebook last Friday confessed to experiencing the same infestation.
There have been quite a lot of rumors these last few weeks with regards to Apple reportedly working on an iWatch. I was wondering what they would gain with such a move? Some have pointed out that they already have the iPod Nano as a simple watch, but this repeats the functionality of the music player and lacks functionality of the full iOS device. Does this mean the age of Dick Tracy is around the corner? Far fetched you think? I would have agreed, but after I visited the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA last week it may not be. The Computer History Museum exhibits hardware up to the year 2000 and it's awesome how far we have gone beyond that in 13 years! So this may not be far off… and trust Apple to make it happen.
Apple has cut the price of its 13-inch MacBook Pro laptop by $200 and updated its processors. It’s also put out new models with faster processors and more memory. It said the MacBook Pro with a Retina display and 128GB of flash memory will now cost $1,499, down from $1,699. A new model with 256 gigs of flash will cost $1,699. The 15-inch model has a faster processor and the same price. Apple put out new MacBook Pro models last fall with flash memory instead of the traditional hard drive, making it thinner and lighter. Mac sales dropped in Q4 down 22% to 4.1 million units.
According to the blogosphere and both the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal the world is waiting for Apple to deliver a Dick Tracy-like wristwatch that mates with the iPhone and shows you the time, who’s calling, texting or e-mailing or directions to the address you’re looking for and saves you from pulling the phone out of your pocket – or from pulling out your wallet for that matter since it may contain a near-field communications chip.
Michelle Obama waited until the very last minute to invite people to sit in her box at her husband’s State of the Union address Tuesday evening. That means that Apple CEO Tim Cook, who will be her guest, had to rearrange the agenda of the Goldman Sachs Technology and Internet Conference in San Francisco, where he was supposed to speak at 1:15 in the afternoon Pacific time – after the market closed in New York – and answer a lot of tough questions about Apple’s stock plummeting and what he’s gonna do with the $137 billion Apple has in the bank. He’s now supposed to get up at the crack of dawn, speak at the conference at 7:15 in the morning local time then hop a plane to Washington to show up cool as a cucumber on Capital Hill to listen to Obama, who may say nothing substantive about jobs, visas or anything else important economically. He’ll be there because – according to White House economic advisor Gene Sperling – “Apple is a great American company, and it stands for our sense of innovation, invention, entrepreneurship, and risk taking and I think that’s quite an appropriate person to be in the First Lady’s box when the president
The US Circuit Court of Appeals in Washington, DC, Monday tossed Apple’s bid to fast-track its motion to ban several Android-based Samsung phones, denying it the right to argue its case before the full appeals court right away. A district court rejected Apple’s move for a permanent injunction after a federal jury awarded Apple $1 billion dollars last year. The appeals court said Monday that a three-judge panel will consider Apple’s appeal first, and that the full appeals court wouldn’t decide whether to hear the case until after that. The decision will keep devices that Apple regards as “stolen” on store shelves. The same court rejected to reconsider banning Samsung’s Galaxy Nexus phone last week.
Apple Tuesday announced a fourth-generation iPad with 128GB of memory to grace the top of the existing line currently available with 16GB, 32GB and 64GB. Obviously it’s for people who need to carry around a lot of data. It will sell starting Tuesday February 5 in black or white for $799 with Wi-Fi and $929 for Wi-FI plus 3G. It will have the high-resolution Retina display of its cheaper siblings that start at $499. The older iPad 2 starts sat $399. The company said it’s sold 120 million iPads since the widget first debuted in April 2010 and pointed out that it has 300,000 iPad-specific applications in the App Store.
District Court Judge Lucy Koh decided late Tuesday that Samsung didn’t willfully infringe six Apple patents as a federal jury found last August denying Apple the chance to get parts of the jury’s $1.05 billion damages award trebled.
In our industry the biggest game is “expectation management”. Apple was in big news last week after its earning report. In the latest quarter, Apple topped $50B revenue, an increase of $8.2B from the same period last year. This should be the envy of any company. It sold 48m iPhones, more than any competitor can dream of. As Mike Moritz wrote in the Financial Times yesterday, if Apple were a nation, it will rank 45th. in the world, ahead of Pakistan and New Zealand. Suddenly the sound-bytes by the analysts showed disappointment that Apple only grew “18 percent” and management was forecasting slower growth. The stock was pounded and went down to sub-$450 range. There is such a herd mentality. When your quarterly revenue reaches $50B, growth at double digits become very hard. Look at Microsoft, Cisco, and IBM in the most recent fiscal year – 4%, 6%, and -2%. But Apple is supposed to defy the laws of gravity, according to our financial pundits! Mike says very colorfully that Apple grew by 45% for last 5 years and if that rate continues, it will hit $3 Trillion by 2020. At 5%, that number will be $231B, and at 10% it will be $334B in 2020. No company in history has seen such kind of numbers.
Apple wants the whole US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit to decide whether Samsung really deserves to avoid permanent injunctions barring its widgets from the American market while infringement suits are pending. It claims the court and the District Court in California have prevented it from getting injunctions protecting its patented widgetry, forcing Samsung to change its products or remove them from the market. The appeals court ruled in October that Samsung could continue selling its Galaxy Nexus smartphone despite a $1 billion jury decision in Apple’s favor because it figures that Apple has to prove that the patented features Samsung copied drive consumer demand.
If you are still asking the question should I build a mobile website or create an installable application for mobile… …then you are asking the wrong question! The Mobile Web vs. Mobile App debate is finally over. It is no longer a question of either…or. Making your website mobile friendly is no longer an option – it is mandatory requirement. More and more people are accessing the web from mobile phones and tablets. Share of Internet traffic from such devices has already reached double digit percentage and inching up…up…up. In next couple of years it is likely to overtake internet traffic from desktops and laptops. In fact, as per Mary Meeker (she is known as “queen of net”) then it has already happened in India!
It’s that time again – the New Year has arrived and everyone’s excited to start 2013 on the right foot. We’re ready to tackle the biggest projects, climb the tallest mountains, and make the biggest deals. Now all we need are the right tools to help us get the job done. To make this task easier on you, we’ve compiled a list of ten innovative apps that are bound to be big hits in 2013. Sign In Blue: This year, did you make a resolution to manage your time more wisely? Then you’ll want to check out Sign In Blue, which allows users to electronically transmit signatures. No more waiting for overnight deliveries or incoming faxes; now, your contracts can be sent and received instantaneously. Imagine all the time you could save.