The Office of Fair Trading (OFT) has launched a call for information as part of a study into how ecommerce businesses monitor the behaviour of people making web payments, which may be used to target certain individuals with personalized prices. It was observed many retailers track the activities of customers on their online platforms and can collect a wide variety of data, ranging from past purchasing habits and the type of items viewed to which web browser individuals are using. The OFT is set to examine how organisations use this vast amount of information and whether some people will see different prices as a result. Chief executive of the body Clive Maxwell said that innovation online plays a key role in driving economic growth and the new investigation is part of the OFT's commitment to ensuring that consumers can have confidence their personal details will not be used to treat them unfairly. This will be important in building consumer trust in the sector and encouraging further ecommerce sales. While he stated the collection of consumer data can bring many benefits to both retailers and customers - for example by allowing firms to improve their marketing by delivering targeted offers - it is essential that businesses are not misusing such information.
Close to 70% of smartphone owners plan to use the devices for holiday shopping, according to Deloitte (pdf). Smartphone ownership has jumped from 39.7% last year to 46.1% this year and tablet owners have doubled from 10.5% to 22.4% according to 9,000 shoppers surveyed by BIGinsught. This will probably also spur an increasing number of people colliding heads and walking into fountains as everyone in the mall will be looking down at their mobile devices instead of watching where they are walking. Knowing that these devices have become permanent fixtures on our bodies, retailers are using the technology in an attempt to enhance the shopping experience. As soon as you cross the mall threshold, your phone will buzz with merchant coupons or even better, your online shopping cart has been paid and converted to real items for you walk out, bags in hand, without standing in the check-out aisle. You’ll be able to browse inventory to know if that incredible deal is in stock or simply purchasing the item on the smartphone while standing in the store and have it arrive, already wrapped, the next day. Retailers are trying to combat the behavior of looking for the best deals on an item, only to go home and purchase online elsewhere. Many retailers are equipping employees with tablets and checkout areas with mobile payment systems. Employees have apps that offer richer information in case a shopper wants to know what a coat is made of, or specific warranty info on an electronic item. These employee handhelds could also check-out a shopper in the middle of the store, avoiding any lines. Some stores have even installed iPads in the dressing room so shoppers can choose what music to listen to while parading their selections in the mirror. Hopefully on those, the cameras are disabled since I can already see a remote ‘Peeping in the Dressing Room’ breach in the headlines.
Samsung has asked the California court handling the billion-dollar judgment against it to see Apple’s shiny new 10-year licensing agreement with HTC since Apple is claiming it will suffer irreparable harm – that money can’t recompense – without a permanent injunction against the Korean company’s goods. HTC was charged with infringing multi-touch patents that Samsung is charged with violating in other venues and Samsung doubtless wants to know if the deal includes these user experience patents that Apple swore it would never license.
A consignment of Apple iPad Minis was looted from a warehouse at JFK International Airport in New York the other night according to the New York Post. The cops suspect it was an inside job. The thieves used one of the airport’s own fork lifts to make off with two pallets of the little gizmos worth $1.5 million. They might have gotten the three other pallets if they weren’t interrupted by a worker coming back from dinner. The devices had just arrived from China and were on their way elsewhere.
Late Saturday – on the eve of Armistice Day – Apple and HTC announced that they have settled their patent litigation at the price of a 10-year license agreement that covers “current and future patents held by both parties.” Terms aren’t being disclosed. An HTC spokeswoman told the Wall Street Journal that the company “doesn’t expect the license agreement to have an adverse material impact” on it. Back in 2010 Apple offered Samsung terms of $30 a smartphone and $40 a tablet or $24 for a cross license, sums that might be pricey for HTC, which unlike Samsung, is no longer a serious market threat. It’s the first licensing deal Apple has cut with an Android vendor.
The bad blood between Apple and Samsung is evidently getting worse. Samsung recently hiked the price of the so-called application processors it builds for Apple’s widgets by a hefty 20%, according to the Wall Street Journal’s MarketWatch, quoting a story Monday in the Korean-language paper Chosun Ilbo, which in turn cites a person familiar with the negotiations between the two companies. Apple is the only Samsung customer affected by the price increase. Apple’s problem is Samsung’s its sole source. Apple reportedly looked around but couldn’t find a replacement. Apple bought roughly 130 million of the gismos from Samsung last year and more than 200 million this year for its iPads and iPhones. The contract runs until 2014. Apple is expected to bring the effort in-house by then but ensure that the widgets are backward-compatible.
Sterne Agee analyst Shaw Wu think Apple is going to get $6–$8 in royalties on each Android phone HTC sells because of their weekend licensing arrangement that puts an end to all litigation between them. Of course, terms weren’t disclosed and Wu’s estimate could just be a shot in the dark. If the figures are on the money Apple would see an extra $180 million–$280 million a year, a negligible sum for Apple. He thinks it’s less than the number Apple originally proposed. HTC’s financial position has been deteriorating; it currently has only a 4% global market share, down from 10.3% year-over-year, below even Chinese handset maker ZTE. The payments to Apple will likely pressure its profitability some more.
This was a perfect size book for what I needed. What I needed was a book that would get me back up to speed quickly on UNIX. I have not used UNIX since the late 80's, and I have not used Mac since the early 90's. The book starts off with a nice introduction to you Unix and why you would want to use it. The second chapter using the Terminal, is a nice introduction to Terminal's capabilities and shows you how to customization. After the first two chapters the book starts digging into the details of what you can do with Unix on the Mac. I have listed the chapters below.
First thing Monday morning Apple said that it sold three million iPad minis and fourth-generation iPads in the three days since Friday when the widgets went on sale. The number is double the 1.5 million sold in the last three-day weekend in March when the third-generation iPad came out. Apple didn’t say how many minis and how many 4Gen iPads but did claim that its stock of minis was virtually depleted.
Apple’s record earnings came in a bit short of expectations Thursday, a situation the smart money attributed to its failure to make enough phones although it still sold an amazing 26.9 million of the things, up 58% year-over-year and good for $17.13 billion, into the expected launch of the new iPhone 5, which only came out at the very end of the third quarter. Apple admits to a lot of backlog and says it has no idea when supply and demand will even out. It earned $8.67 a share on revenues of $35.97 billion. It was expected to realize $8.75 a share on $35.86 billion. Apple sold 14 million iPads during the quarter, up 26% year-over-year, to $7.51 billion, less than the 17.5 million Wall Street originally anticipated and than rejigged to 15 million after Apple said Tuesday it sold 100 iPads since the beginning.
The International Trade Commission decided Wednesday that Samsung Android smartphones and tablets infringe four Apple patents – a design patent, a hardware patent and two multitouch software patents – a preliminary determination sure to be kicked upstairs to the ITC’s six commissioners for review in February since the agency’s only punitive power is to ban the import and sale of infringing products. Samsung reportedly has some kind of unidentified designarounds for the three utility patents. FOSS Patents says Android widgetry has now been found to infringe 20 patents worldwide.
The latest OSX update released last week removes all traces of what used to be an Apple-provided Java applet plug-in from Mac-compatible browsers when it installs. Apple doesn’t say why but it’s telling users to go to Oracle for the latest version of the plug-in if they need it for a particular web site. After a zero-day exploit was discovered this summer users were told they’d be safer from hacker-borne malware if they expunged Java from their systems because Java is easy for hackers to screw with. Reuters remembers that Oracle and Apple agreed two years ago that Oracle would eventually be responsible for providing Java to Mac users. That agreement may have kicked in.
The US Patent and Trademark Office has tentatively decided that all 20 claims in Apple’s US Patent No, 7,469,381 are invalid. The non-binding decision had Samsung sprinting off to Judge Lucy Koh late Monday to inform her of the re-examination finding. See, Apple used Claim 19 of the so-called rubber-band patent to nail Samsung’s hide to the barn door this summer, one of five patents that made a California jury award Apple landmark damages of $1.05 billion against Samsung for infringing it in various products including the Galaxy Tab and Galaxy S2 smartphone. Fortune recalls that it was supposed to have been one of Steve Jobs’ favorite patents, the widgetry that convinced him that Apple could make a meaningful dent in the cell phone market, and something he distinctly told Samsung not to copy although it did anyway.
Apple Tuesday brought out the roundly anticipated iPad mini with most of the specs exactly as the rumor mill called it. At least the price remained a secret. The 7.9-inch diagonal widget will cost $329 to start, pricier than many people expected. In the manner of Steve Jobs’ famous “one more thing,” Apple did manage to surprise people by launching a new fourth-generation classic iPad tricked out with a fancier A6X processor that’s supposed to be good for 2x better graphics with a 2,048-by-1,536 pixel Retina display and faster Wi-Fi connectivity. Pricing remains the same as its predecessor, which just came out in March, upsetting entirely Apple’s traditional upgrade cycle.
Samsung told the Korea Times Monday that it will be terminating its contract to supply Apple with LCD displays next year. It blames it on the margins it can fetch from Apple’s business although it appears that it’s really Apple that’s doing the “terminating” by shifting its orders elsewhere. Apple is Samsung’s largest components customer, but Apple’s belief that Samsung stole its iPhone and iPad technology and the worldwide litigation that has resulted has driven a massive wedge between the two companies. The paper says Samsung Displays “believes its American partner is no longer a cash-generator due to the iPhone maker’s stiffer supply-chain management structure.” Apple has been rumored to be moving its business to Samsung rivals and Samsung’s move seems to confirm the scuttlebutt. Evidently Apple is getting better pricing in the process.
On returning from an awesome SAP TechEd in Las Vegas, I was waiting in the departure lounge for my Virgin Atlantic flight and looked through the iTunesU videos I had on my iPad2. There I saw the WWDC2010 Keynote, one that I had personally attended and decided to view it. Within 10 minutes I was amazed. In the world of mobile we seemed to be fascinated and compelled to look forward, project and speculate but I thought in this blog, I would do quite the opposite. It is only when looking back that we can realise how far we have come and in such a fantastically short time, two years! In fact it seems that the cycles of new devices and OS' is becoming shorter and also the time technology advances are in the spotlight before they become accepted as the norm.
After foiling press prophecies last week about when the media would get invitations to the supposedly thinner 7.85-inch iPad mini’s unveiling the precious suggestive invites arrived the other day. The widget, whose existence Apple has yet to acknowledge and addresses competition from Samsung. Google and Amazon, will apparently appear October 23, three days before Microsoft is scheduled to trot out its Apple-rivaling Windows 8 ARM-based Surface tablets, which will start at $499 like the entry-level iPad. The mini’s price is rumored to be $249 or $299 with 8GB of storage. Some think it may start at $199, where the Amazon Kindle and Google Nexus 7 start. The older iPad 2 is now available for $399.
Apple finds itself in the enraging position of having to deny in print that Samsung copied its iPad technology after losing an appeal to the UK’s Court of Appeals Thursday. It was protesting a High Court decision this summer that the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 couldn’t possibly infringe on Apple’s design patent because it wasn’t as “cool” as the iPad. The High Court said the Samsung tablet didn’t have the “understated and extreme simplicity” of the iPad. It ordered Apple to run ads in British newspapers, such as Daily Mail and the Financial Times, and post a notice on its web site saying Samsung didn’t infringe its patent or break UK law.
Apple has poached a top chip designer from Samsung, its nemesis as well as its foundry. It’s waltzed off with the guy who was chief engineer at AMD until June of 2011, when he went to work for Samsung down Texas way as chief system architect. Jim Mergard, who was at AMD for 16 years, is regarded as an expert in PC chips, APUs and SoCs. It’s not clear why exactly Apple hired him – aside from spite – or what his job’s going to be at Apple. But the Wall Street Journal quotes one of Mergard’s former colleagues from AMD, Patrick Moorhead, now in the research business at Moor Insights & Strategy, as saying, that besides Mergard’s SoC skills, “He would be very capable of pulling together internal and external resources to do a PC processor for Apple.”
Well, no invitation to the supposedly thinner 7.85-inch iPad mini’s unveiling materialized last week as most of the press corps predicted. So now according to All Things Digital the widget, whose existence Apple hasn’t acknowledged, will appear October 23, three days before Microsoft is scheduled to trot out its Apple-rivaling Windows 8 Surface tablets. The mini’s price is rumored to be $249 or $299 with 8GB of storage. Apple is supposed to post its quarterly numbers on October 25. It’s supposed to have 10 million mini units on order this quarter.
Chatterboxes in the Apple supply chain have got the rumor mongering US press, including the Wall Street Journal, reporting that Apple has placed orders for more than 10 million 7.85-inch iPad minis to be delivered in Q4. Apple of course hasn’t acknowledged the existence of such a dingus although this Wednesday it’s supposed to send out invitations to the thing’s grand unveiling next week. The number of minis on order is reportedly twice the number of Kindle Fires Amazon is planning on making. The Fire and Google’s Nexus 7 are assumed to be the baby iPad’s biggest rivals.
Before the trial that led to Samsung being told to paid Apple over a billion dollars in damages for infringing its patents, Apple propose they cut a cross-patent license but they couldn’t agree on terms. The proposal came to light when the court unsealed some documents this week. It’s in a three-page letter dated April 30 from Apple’s IP licensing director Boris Teskler to his counterpart at Samsung Seongwoo Kim. Apple offered to license Samsung's 3G/UMTS patents on FRAND terms of 33 cents a device instead of the sky-high 2.4% of the selling price the Korean company was demanding. In return Apple would license Samsung its standards-essential UMTS patents for the same 33 cents a device.
Press reports claim Apple is going to announce its unconfirmed iPad mini tablet on Wednesday, October 17 and a major Apple investor told Fortune that he heard from multiple sources that Apple will send out invitations on October 10. The mini is supposed to have a 7.85-inch screen compared to the classic iPad’s 9.7-inch screen. The cheaper widget would compete with Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Android, which are offering smaller, cheaper alternatives to the market-defining iPad. Google, for instance, now has its own seven-inch Nexus tablet selling for $199 and Amazon’s got a Kindle Fire priced at $159. iPad starts at $499.
Late Monday Judge Lucy Koh lifted the temporary injunction she ordered in June forbidding Samsung to sell its Galaxy Tab 10.1 in the United States. She said the jury that decided Samsung should pay Apple $1.05 billion for infringing its patents didn’t find that it infringed the Apple D'889 design patent that the injunction was based on. “Thus, the sole basis for the June 26 preliminary injunction no longer exists.” The jury did find the Tab infringed two other Apple patents and Apple may get the jury’s D'889 finding overturned after a hearing scheduled for December 6.
In an odd, unexpected, unusual, and perhaps Byzantine move, Google subsidiary Motorola Mobility has dropped its second ITC complaint against Apple. It was filed in August right before a California jury found Samsung guilty of infringing and awarded Apple $1.05 billion. In the complaint Motorola charged Apple with infringing seven patents that aren’t standards-essential. The ITC formally took the case two weeks ago and on Monday reassigned it to Administrative Law Judge Theodore Essex, who handled Microsoft’s ITC complain against Motorola. Motorola Tuesday moved “to terminate all claims in this investigation without prejudice,” which means it could re-file. It also said there was no deal of with Apple.