One of the most unusual and amazing architectural designs for an Apple store will reportedly appear in Aix en Provence (France), featuring a nearly all-glass structure enabled by new technology developed by Apple’s glass suppliers



Don't walk into it.

Amazon Digital Books uses its proprietary format called MOBI (also called Kindle format), while Apple uses an open format called ePub

Wait! Apple is open?

You should use whatever works for you. And I no longer have the patience or hubris to convince you what that should be. All I can offer is one data point: what I use, and how it works for me.



I've been leaning more and more toward such an attitude. I will offer my advice only when asked first and usually will try not to oversell people on making the same choices that I do usually because it will not work the same way. This linked post may be about evangelizing Apple products but I think it applies to all facets of life including personal opinions. 

Why do we believe in a particular thing? Because it works for us and makes us feel comfortable. It may not be the case for anyone else no matter how closely you're related to them. Offer your opinion when asked; when vehemently countered, don't persist because nothing is going to make them change their mind so why waste your breath?

The next Steve Jobs will totally be a chick, because girls are No. 2--and No. 2 always wins in America. Apple was a No. 2 company for years, and Apple embodies a lot of what have been defined as feminine traits: an emphasis on intuitive design, intellect, a strong sense of creativity, and that striving to always make the greatest version of something. Traditionally, men are more like Microsoft, where they'll just make a fake version of what that chick made, then beat the shit out of her and try to intimidate everybody into using their product.



Louis CK is the George Carlin of our generation. Well, not in the same league yet but he has one of the most profound and biting standup routines amongst his peers. One of his acts, he elaborated on the usage of words like 'nigger' and 'faggot' and not one black or homosexual person was offended. If you haven't seen or heard him yet and if you have a taste for slightly edgy comedy, you must.

The 5th Ave.NY, Shanghai, and Hong Kong ones are my favorite

The No. 2 free app on Apple’s app store is Cut the Birds by SolverLabs, which is a mashup of two really popular iOS games: Angry Birds and Fruit Ninja. Sure, they are not “exactly” the same, but play the game for a couple of minutes and you quickly realize why the app is getting angry reviews. I am just surprised it slipped past the Apple censors.

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Is the iPhone more data efficient than its Android rivals? Sprint CEO Dan Hesse says it is.

During an earnings call Wednesday, Hesse claimed iPhones use about half the network resources required by Android handsets, a feature that weighed heavily in the carrier’s decision to add Apple’s device to its portfolio.

“There is a misperception that our launch of the iPhone will increase the load on Sprint’s 3G network and require us to spend more 3G capital,” Hesse said. “The reverse is true. iPhone users are expected to use significantly less 3G than the typical user of a dual-mode 3G, 4G device. Even adjusting for more total new customers being added to the network, we believe they will put less load on our 3G network than they would have if we did not carry the iPhone.”

In other words, Sprint believes the iPhone is so data efficient that it will help the company continue to offer unlimited data plans for its smartphones — even following the debut of iCloud, whose services are presumably on the data-heavy side. Evidently, Apple’s strict network efficiency requirements, which prohibit apps from pinging networks as often as those on other operating systems, and the iPhone’s ability to quickly offload data onto Wi-Fi goes a long way toward reducing network congestion.

So the iPhone will likely be a big boon for Sprint, though one that’s not without risks. The carrier says the device’s benefits won’t exceed its costs until 2015. And in the meantime it may need $7 billion in new financing to cover up-front and network costs related to it.

With thanks to Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs got the last word on his remarkable life. But will Apple's founder be as fortunate extending his enterprise legacy? Apple's leadership — the Tim Cooks and Jonathan Ives — will step up to realize the vision of their late leader. But that's this year and next. What about in three years? Or five?

The greatest threat to Steve Jobs's legacy isn't competition from Google, Amazon, Facebook, or some young hippie from Yangshuo; it's his board of directors.

Jobs himself feared this. "Hewlett and Packard built a great company, and they thought they had left it in good hands," Jobs told Isaacson. "But now it's being dismembered and destroyed. I hope I've left a stronger legacy so that will never happen at Apple."

Leaving a charismatic legacy is one thing; leaving behind a board with wisdom, judgment, and entrepreneurial courage is quite another. Hiring insanely great executives is not like bringing on supremely perceptive directors. Stubbornly mercurial founders are not famous for building strong boards. They chafe at oversight. History suggests that well-governed, publicly-traded firms that have been run by their founders encounter profound problems after the founder dies. Organizational stresses, strains, and cracks concealed by reality distortion fields intensify with the founder's passing. Board competence — as much or more than successor CEO capabilities — determine how well cultural values and leadership legacies endure or ebb away.

HP's unhappy governance example requires little review. The firm's boardroom antics have contributed little positivity to shareholder, employee, or customer confidence. David Packard and William Hewlett — more modest and circumspect than the Jobs who admired them — would likely be displeased to see how the company they cofounded succeeded more in spite of its board than because of it.

The eponymous Walt Disney Company faced comparable challenges when its founding genius died. So did Edwin Land's (who Jobs also admired) Polaroid. Founders are a special breed. So are their boards. They may contain a constellation of all-stars, but all too frequently, the whole proves significantly and shockingly less than the sum of its parts. The death of a strong founder betrays the weakness of a supine board.

This is a hard leadership challenge. Steve Jobs's choice was, for the first time in his professional life, to make himself as openly, authentically, and honestly transparent as possible. He was revealing to the point of viciousness in his characterizations of colleagues and rivals. No one reading Jobs's quotes and comments could doubt where Apple's creator — and re-creator — stands as a business leader and technological visionary.

Apple's board should emulate his example. They should openly, authentically, and honestly be transparent about what aspects of Jobs's vision and values they will enshrine in their oversight and which ones they may downplay as Apple moves on without its founder. As fiduciaries responsible to shareholders and stakeholders alike, they should publicly disclose how they will hold themselves accountable for these efforts. Indeed, does Apple's board see its role as simply assuring the company and its management complies with the law? Or does this board recognize that a great deal of the firm's economic value derived from product, service, talent, and innovation ecosystem emphases that go beyond 10-Qs and 10-Ks?

Jobs's Apple — like Hewlett and Packard's HP, Disney's Disney, and Land's Polaroid — is a company where operational excellence unmoored from world-class governance can swiftly drift into the mediocrity of B+ innovation that briefly wins market share but never hearts and minds. It is no small irony that Disney itself acquired Jobs's Pixar — and put Steve on its board — in no small part to invigorate the company's creative energies, technologies, and insights. Who will be doing that for Apple's board?

Executive succession is always a challenge. Some companies &#8212 IBM after Akers, ExxonMobil, and DuPont — handle it particularly well. But Apple is undeniably a special case, and its board undeniably has a special challenge. Apple's board should have the courage and integrity to both acknowledge that and publicly articulate how it plans to rise to meet it. After all, they're overseeing the sequel to their founder's book.

One of the most frequently asked (and smartest) questions about the supposedly forthcoming Apple television is: Why does it need to be an actual TV set? Why can’t it just be an accessory like today’s $99 Apple TV thing?
That line of thinking generally goes like this: If the Apple TV remains an inexpensive add-on device, more people could buy it for less money, and Apple could get more users. Then, in theory, it could potentially disrupt the TV industry — the content and distribution side, that is — more effectively.
Plus, who wants to buy another new TV already? Many people just bought one within a few years to upgrade to HD. And isn’t the TV itself just a giant monitor, which Apple’s software can easily take over via an external box? (You can listen to Instapaper’s Marco Arment articulate something along these lines in his most recent podcast episode.)
That’s a fine argument, and it has been a decent way for Apple to practice its living room “hobby” so far. But here’s why I think Apple will eventually make an actual television set:
Apple sells complete experiences, not just devices.
That’s everything from the box it comes in to the status and emotion that owning and using one of its products provides.
There’s not much special about plugging an Apple TV box or Blu-ray player or game console into your HDTV, turning the TV on with one (obnoxiously complex) remote control, toggling over to the right HDMI input, and then resuming with the Apple remote.
Watching Apple TV on an off-brand display is the equivalent of running Mac OS on a Dell laptop. It works, but it’s not as magical. Apple sort-of tried this with the Mac mini — hook up your old PC monitor, keyboard, and mouse to this tiny new Mac — but I don’t think it converted as many people to the Apple brand as, say, the cool all-in-one MacBook.
Apple wants to be your primary interface.
Right now, the Apple TV box is aiming for “input 2″ on your TV — most people still reserve “input 1″ for their cable or satellite box. (Believe it or not, the average American still watches more than 5 hours of TV per day.) If you have a game console, maybe Apple TV is even input 3 or 4 — if your TV even has that many hi-def inputs. This was smart on Apple’s part, because for most TV watchers, today’s Apple TV box is still only a part-time solution.
But long-term, Apple probably wants its TV platform to be “input zero.” That is, the first thing you see when you turn your TV on. The only thing you need to watch video, make FaceTime calls, download apps, play games, and maybe even use Siri to order a pizza. The only remote control you need. The heart and soul and brain of your living room.
Importantly, the opportunity is growing for Apple — and Google, Microsoft, and others — to become the primary TV interface, as more cable companies test and deploy IP-based TV service. (Meanwhile, the first Google TV device already aimed for “input 1″ and flopped. But it had a bunch of problems, not just being too early to market.)
Apple sells tightly integrated software, hardware, and services.
Let’s say Apple wants to enable FaceTime calls and Siri voice controls in the living room. Is it going to sell you an iSight camera/mic add-on to stick on top of your Vizio and run another cord into your Apple TV box? Is it going to rely on your having another camera and mic — say, on an iPhone or iPad — handy at all times?
Or is it going to make the most gorgeous HDTV imaginable with a built-in HD camera and amazing speakers? Over the long run, my bet is on the latter. It’s not like the 27-inch iMac is even very far away from that!
Selling TVs could be the better business.
Recall that Apple makes its profits by selling hardware, not by selling apps or iTunes rentals.
It may be harder and take longer for Apple to sell 10 million television sets at $1,000+ than 10 million set-top boxes for $100. But the opportunity for Apple to generate several hundred dollars in gross profit per device is greater than it is on the existing Apple TV, where profits are probably in the tens of dollars per device. (And competitors like Roku are driving market prices down.)
So far, the Apple TV set-top box is not enough of a business for Apple to even break it out as its own category. But selling high-end televisions could potentially become a multi-billion-dollar business for Apple.
Don’t expect anything crazy.
Expectations seem to be insanely high for this device, and they shouldn’t be. Apple rarely leapfrogs — it usually just makes great products using the Apple formula.
The iPod wasn’t actually that different of a concept than existing hard drive-based MP3 players — it just had a novel and simple user interface (the wheel), better software, a neat name, and Apple’s intangible cool-factor. The iPhone, yes, was a complete leapfrog. But the iPad mostly applied Apple’s formula to the tablet format that had existed for years.
An Apple television may not look or work that much different than today’s TVs. (Then again, it might — I have no idea.) But Apple’s combination of hardware design, software and platform depth, services like iCloud, a novel user interface like Siri, and the overall Apple experience could set it apart from today’s TVs.
And that’s what’s so attractive about the idea — and why I think Apple will eventually make an actual television, and not just more set-top boxes.
Previously: Here’s how Apple could finally put the “TV” in Apple TV

There is only one Apple. It is big and powerful and it rules our lives, elegantly. So don't fuck with them. That's what the owners of Apfelkind, a small, family-owned café in Bonn, Germany, have come to learn. More »

Digital subscription and single-copy sales have spiked following the launch of Apple’s Newsstand app two weeks ago.

Magazine publisher Conde Nast has seen a 268% jump in digital subscriptions sales per week on average, Monica Ray, Conde Nast’s EVP of consumer marketing, announced Tuesday. Single copy sales across its titles have risen 142% compared to the previous eight weeks.

The app, which accompanied the release of iOS 5 earlier this month, offers publishers two things they have long been asking of Apple: greater discoverability within the App Store ecosystem, and the ability to automatically deliver new issues to subscribers’ devices.

Ray acknowledged that the growth in sales has been partly fueled by the attention the launch received — the launch of the Mac App Store had an even greater effect on app sales for some developers — but expressed confidence that the publisher would “see a consistently higher level of growth going forward than [it] did prior to the app’s introduction.”

Nine of the company’s titles — Allure, Brides, Glamour, Golf Digest, GQ, Self, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair and Wired — are currently available on the Newsstand. Vogue, Bon Appetit and Conde Nast Traveler are scheduled to join them by early 2012, Bob Sauerberg, president of Conde Nast, said earlier this month.



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According to a report from the Wall Street Journal, the music service Google is close to launching will include sharing features via integration with its Google+ platform, which isn’t that surprising, since Google has said the new social network will be part of everything it does. For Apple, however, the new social features in Google’s offering will reinforce what Spotify and other music services have already made obvious: Apple and iTunes are falling behind in the social-music race, which could have significant consequences for the company as the music industry continues to evolve.

By any measure, iTunes is still the 800-pound gorilla of the digital-music industry: More than 10 billion songs have been downloaded since Apple launched the service in 2001, and some record labels and music publishers now get a huge proportion of the revenue they make on their artists from iTunes. By launching the service — along with the iPod, which turned 10 years old on the weekend — Apple effectively re-engineered the entire music industry, convincing the major labels to use it as a conduit to reach music lovers who were busy downloading whatever they could get their hands on.

Obviously, that kind of power means iTunes isn’t going away anytime soon, and it will continue to be the main choice for record companies who want to monetize an artist. But the music business is changing — along with virtually every other form of media and content — as a result of the increasingly social nature of the web. And in that particular race, services such as Spotify are winning, in part because of their integration with networks like Facebook and their focus on streaming over buying.

Streaming and sharing is the new downloading
Facebook and Spotify have gotten a lot of criticism since the social network launched its “frictionless sharing” features, which allow services like Spotify to publish sharing info to a user’s Facebook page without having to ask permission every time. Many users have complained about this behavior — and that Spotify requires that anyone signing up have a Facebook account to connect to — and some have no doubt cancelled their accounts, but they are likely in the minority. In the end, this new kind of sharing, which shows links to what friends are listening to in the “ticker” stream on a user’s page, could be a hugely powerful driver for the industry.

And what kinds of weapons does Apple have? It has its massive market dominance — and it has Ping. Remember Ping? Apple’s music-based social network launched last fall, and was designed to do something similar to what Spotify and others are now doing: make it easy for users to share their activity and convince others to buy music. Except that Ping almost instantly looked like a social network from the late 1990s rather than a contender for the music-sharing future: as GigaOM’s Cyndy Aleo argued at the time, it looked lame in part because it wasn’t connected to anything else, and it made sharing surprisingly cumbersome (for his part, Om said that he thought Ping was part of “the future of social commerce”).

Ping shone a spotlight on one of Apple’s major weaknesses, which is a lack of knowledge or experience with social networks or social behavior. The company’s products are famous for their brilliant design and usability, but virtually none of that applies to things like Ping or Apple’s Game Center network (or to iTunes itself, arguably) since both seem more like ghost towns and afterthoughts than powerful competitors.

Twitter integration may not be enough
In an attempt to bolt on some form of social behavior, Apple added support for Twitter to Ping, and more recently it has integrated Twitter into many of its apps and services through iOS 5 — a ground-breaking move, since it rarely gives that kind of preferential treatment and real estate to a third party. (It tried to negotiate a Facebook deal but was rebuffed, presumably because of Spotify). This was a smart decision, since Twitter accomplishes much of what iTunes and Ping do not: Users can easily send out links to what they have bought or are listening to, and those links appear in the “media pane” at Twitter’s website and can be easily clicked on.

Despite this, however, it still feels like Apple is fundamentally playing catch-up in an industry that is moving rapidly towards sharing and streaming of music rather than simply purchasing, a la iTunes. With social services like Spotify and Rdio and MOG — not to mention Turntable.fm and Soundtracking — it is all about sharing music with friends rather than just acquiring it to keep forever. So how is Apple going to compete in this new kind of landscape? It will soon launch a streaming feature called iTunes Match, but the social element continues to elude it.

For the time being, at least, iTunes will remain the store of choice for many when it comes to buying music. And those who see their friends listening to music via Spotify and want to buy the same track may go to iTunes to do so — but then again, they might not. And if Google and Facebook integrate support for instant payments via Google Checkout or Facebook Credits, what kind of draw will Apple or iTunes have for new users then? The market dominance that Steve Jobs so brilliantly executed continues for now, but that dominance looks more and more precarious every day.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users Josh Lindsay and Yodel Anecdotal

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In the lead up to today's release of the Steve Jobs biography, there's been an increasing stream of news surrounding its subject. As a business researcher, I was particularly interested in this recent article that referenced from his biography a list of Jobs's favorite books. There's one business book on this list, and it "deeply influenced" Jobs. That book is The Innovator's Dilemma by HBS Professor Clay Christensen.

But what's most interesting to me isn't that The Innovator's Dilemma was on that list. It's that Jobs solved the conundrum.

When describing his period of exile from Apple — when John Sculley took over — Steve Jobs described one fundamental root cause of Apple's problems. That was to let profitability outweigh passion: "My passion has been to build an enduring company where people were motivated to make great products. The products, not the profits, were the motivation. Sculley flipped these priorities to where the goal was to make money. It's a subtle difference, but it ends up meaning everything."

Anyone familiar with Professor Christensen's work will quickly recognize the same causal mechanism at the heart of the Innovator's Dilemma: the pursuit of profit. The best professional managers — doing all the right things and following all the best advice — lead their companies all the way to the top of their markets in that pursuit... only to fall straight off the edge of a cliff after getting there.

Which is exactly what had happened to Apple. A string of professional managers had led the company straight off the edge of that cliff. The fall had almost killed the company. It had 90 days working capital on hand when he took over — in other words, Apple was only three months away from bankruptcy.

When he returned, Jobs completely upended the company. There were thousands of layoffs. Scores of products were killed stone dead. He knew the company had to make money to stay alive, but he transitioned the focus of Apple away from profits. Profit was viewed as necessary, but not sufficient, to justify everything Apple did. That attitude resulted in a company that looks entirely different to almost any other modern Fortune 500 company. One striking example: there's only one person Apple with responsibility for a profit and loss. The CFO. It's almost the opposite of what is taught in business school. An executive who worked at both Apple and Microsoft described the differences this way: "Microsoft tries to find pockets of unrealized revenue and then figures out what to make. Apple is just the opposite: It thinks of great products, then sells them. Prototypes and demos always come before spreadsheets."

Similarly, Apple talks a lot about its great people. But make no mistake — they are there only in service of the mission. A headhunter describes it thus: "It is a happy place in that it has true believers. People join and stay because they believe in the mission of the company." It didn't matter how great you were, if you couldn't deliver to that mission — you were out. Jobs's famous meltdowns upon his return were symptomatic of this. They might have become less frequent in recent years, but if a team couldn't deliver a great product, they got the treatment. The exec in charge of MobileMe was replaced on the spot, in front of his entire team, after a botched launch. A former Apple product manager described Apple's attitude like this: "You have the privilege of working for the company that's making the coolest products in the world. Shut up and do your job, and you might get to stay."

Everything — the business, the people — are subservient to the mission: building great products. And rather than listening to, or asking their customers what they wanted; Apple would solve problems customers didn't know they had with products they didn't even realize they wanted.

By taking this approach, Apple bent all the rules of disruption. To disrupt yourself, for example, Professor Christensen's research would typically prescribe setting up a separate company that eventually goes on to defeat the parent. It's incredibly hard to do this successfully; Dayton Dry Goods pulled it off with Target. IBM managed to do it with the transition from mainframes to PCs, by firewalling the businesses in entirely different geographies. Either way, the number of companies that have successfully managed to do it is a very, very short list. And yet Apple's doing it to itself right now with the utmost of ease. Here's new CEO Tim Cook, on the iPad disrupting the Mac business: "Yes, I think there is some cannibalization... the iPad team works on making their product the best. Same with the Mac team." It's almost unheard of to be able to manage disruption like this.

They can do it because Apple hasn't optimized its organization to maximize profit. Instead, it has made the creation of value for customers its priority. When you do this, the fear of cannibalization or disruption of one's self just melts away. In fact, when your mission is based around creating customer value, around creating great products, cannibalization and disruption aren't "bad things" to be avoided. They're things you actually strive for — because they let you improve the outcome for your customer.

When I first learned about the theory of disruption, what amazed me was its predictive power; you could look into the future with impressive clarity. And yet, there was a consistent anomaly. That one dark spot on Professor Christensen's prescience was always his predictions on Apple. I had the opportunity to talk about it with him subsequently, and I remember him telling me: "There's just something different about those guys. They're freaks." Well, he was right. With the release of Jobs's biography, we now know for sure why. Jobs was profoundly influenced by the Innovator's Dilemma — he saw the company he created almost die from it. When he returned to Apple, Jobs was determined to solve it. And he did. That "subtle difference" — of flipping the priorities away from profit and back to great products — took Apple from three months away from bankruptcy, to one of the most valuable and influential companies in the world.

This post originally appeared in Tim O'Reilly's Google+ feed.

This tweet by Steve Case (@stevecase) struck home for me, because in the aftermath of Steve Jobs' death I've been thinking a lot about O'Reilly, wanting to make sure that we streamline and focus on the stuff that matters most.

Here's the money quote from the article Case mentioned:

"My passion has been to build an enduring company where people were motivated to make great products," Jobs told [biographer Walter] Isaacson. "[T]he products, not the profits, were the motivation. [John] Sculley flipped these priorities to where the goal was to make money. It's a subtle difference, but it ends up meaning everything."

Jobs went on to describe the legacy he hoped he would leave behind, "a company that will still stand for something a generation or two from now."

"That's what Walt Disney did," said Jobs, "and Hewlett and Packard, and the people who built Intel. They created a company to last, not just to make money. That's what I want Apple to be."

All of our greatest work at O'Reilly has been driven by passion and idealism. That includes our early forays into publishing, when we were a documentation consulting company to pay the bills but wrote documentation on the side for programs we used that didn't have any good manuals. It was those manuals, on topics that no existing tech publisher thought were important, that turned us into a tech publisher "who came out of nowhere."

In the early days of the web, we were so excited about it that Dale Dougherty wanted to create an online magazine to celebrate the people behind it. That morphed into GNN, the Global Network Navigator, the web's first portal and first commercial ad-supported site.

In the mid-'90s, realizing that no one was talking about the programs that were behind all our most successful books, I brought together a collection of free software leaders (many of whom had never met each other) to brainstorm a common story. That story redefined free software as open source, and the world hasn't been the same since. It also led to a new business for O'Reilly, as we launched our conference business to help bring visibility to these projects, which had no company marketing behind them.

Thinking deeply about open source and the internet got me thinking big ideas about the Internet as operating system, and the shift of influence from software to network effects in data as the key to future applications. I was following people who at the time seemed "crazy" — but they were just living in a future that hadn't arrived for the rest of the world yet. It was around this time that I formulated our company mission of "changing the world by spreading the knowledge of innovators."

In 2003, in the dark days after the dotcom bust, our company goal for the year was to reignite enthusiasm in the computer business. Two outcomes of that effort did just that: Sara Winge's creation of Foo Camp spawned a worldwide, grassroots movement of self-organizing "unconferences," and our Web 2.0 Conference told a big story about where the Internet was going and what distinguished the companies that survived the dotcom bust from those that preceded it.

In 2005, seeing the passion that was driving garage inventors to a new kind of hardware innovation, Dale once again wanted to launch a magazine to celebrate the passionate people behind the movement. This time, it was "Make:", and a year later, we launched Maker Faire as a companion event. Around 150,000 people attended Maker Faires last year, and the next generation of startups is emerging from the ferment of the movement that Dale named.

Meanwhile, through those dark years after the dotcom bust, we also did a lot of publishing just to keep the company afloat. (With a small data science team at O'Reilly, we built a set of analytical tools that helped us understand the untapped opportunities in computer book publishing. We realized that we were playing in only about 2/5 of the market; moving into other areas that we had never been drawn to helped pay the bills, but never sparked the kind of creativity as the areas that we'd found by following our passion.)

It was at this time that I formulated an image that I've used many times since: profit in a business is like gas in a car. You don't want to run out of gas, but neither do you want to think that your road trip is a tour of gas stations.

When I think about the great persistence of Steve Jobs, there's a lesson for all of us in it.

What's so great about the Apple story is that Steve ended up making enormous amounts of money without making it a primary goal of the company. (Ditto Larry and Sergey at Google.) Contrast that with the folks who brought us the 2008 financial crisis, who were focused only on making money for themselves, while taking advantage of others in the process.

Making money through true value creation driven by the desire to make great things that last, and make the world a better place — that's the heart of what is best in capitalism. (See also the wonderful HBR blog post, "Steve Jobs and the Purpose of the Corporation." I also got a lot of perspective on this topic from Leander Kahney's book, "Inside Steve's Brain.")

See comments and join the conversation about this topic at Google+.

Related:

Work on Stuff that Matters: First Principles
The State of the Internet Operating System
State of the Internet Operating System Part Two: Handicapping the Internet Platform Wars
What is Web 2.0?

Dag Kittlaus — the co-founder and CEO of the company that created the Siri voice control feature, which Apple launched to much acclaim recently — has left the company, according to sources.

There were several reasons for the departure, which was amicable and has been planned for a while, sources said. They included Kittlaus’s family being in Chicago, a desire to take time off and an interest in brainstorming new entrepreneurial ideas.

Kittlaus has led the speech recognition efforts for Apple since Apple bought Siri in April of 2010. He had been Siri’s CEO since 2007. Before that, the Norwegian-born Kittlaus was an Entrepreneur in Residence at the Stanford Research Institute and had also worked at Motorola.

Kittlaus apparently left just after the launch of the iPhone 4S, in which Siri’s speech recognition technology was the highlight, but sources said other key execs from Siri are expected to remain at Apple.

I have queried Apple PR and am waiting for a response.

Here is a video of Kittlaus demoing Siri at the seventh D: All Things Digital conference in 2009:

[ See post to watch video ]

Walter Isaacson recounting a conversation with Steve Jobs about an Apple HDTV

“‘I’d like to create an integrated television set that is completely easy to use,’ he told me. ‘It would be seamlessly synced with all of your devices and with iCloud.’ No longer would users have to fiddle with complex remotes for DVD players and cable channels. ‘It will have the simplest user interface you could imagine. I finally cracked it.’”

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We already knew that Steve Jobs felt betrayed by Google’s launch of Android but wow, was he really mad. But oddly, despite vowing nuclear war against Google, as his forthcoming bio reveals, he kept Google as the search default in Apple products. The AP obtained a copy of the authorized Jobs...

Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

Everyone else wanted Steve Jobs to move quickly against his tumor. His friends wanted him to get an operation. His wife wanted him to get an operation. But the Apple CEO, so used to swimming against the tide of popular opinion, insisted on trying alternative therapies for nine crucial months. Before he died, Jobs resolved to let the world know he deeply regretted the critical decision, biographer Walter Isaacson has told 60 Minutes. More »

It's well-known that Steve Jobs put off surgery to treat his pancreatic cancer for nine months after it was diagnosed in 2003. Instead, he attempted to treat it with alternative therapies before electing to have a Whipple procedure in 2004. Now his biographer Walter Isaacson tells CBS show 60 Minutes that Apple's iconic CEO regretted not having the surgery earlier:

"I've asked [Jobs why he didn't get an operation then] and he said, "I didn't want my body to be opened...I didn't want to be violated in that way," Isaacson recalls. So he waited nine months, while his wife and others urged him to do it, before getting the operation, reveals Isaacson. Asked by Kroft how such an intelligent man could make such a seemingly stupid decision, Isaacson replies, "I think that he kind of felt that if you ignore something, if you don't want something to exist, you can have magical thinking...we talked about this a lot," he tells Kroft. "He wanted to talk about it, how he regretted it....I think he felt he should have been operated on sooner."

Isaacson also reveals that Jobs continued to receive treatment for the cancer while maintaining he had been cured of the condition to Apple employees.

The 60 Minutes interview with Isaacson will air Sunday, October 23 at 7pm EDT. Isaacson's book, Steve Jobs will hit store shelves on Monday, October 24, and the Ars review of the book will be up shortly thereafter, so keep an eye out for it.





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Samsung on Wednesday launched ChatON, its answer to Apple’s iMessage and RIM’s BlackBerry Messenger.

Unlike those services, though, ChatON is designed to work across different phone operating systems. The service, announced back in August, is for now available as a download from Samsung’s app store and on the Android Market.

In addition to conventional text-based instant messages, ChatON also allows multimedia and animated messages using a combination of audio, scribbled text and a background image, Samsung said. It also supports group chat.

Samsung plans to preload the software on smartphones running its Bada operating system starting later this month, and will make it “gradually” available for other operating systems by the end of the year.

The Korean electronics giant showed off the service last month at the IFA trade show.

“Through its multi-platform and global availability, ChatON heralds a new age of mobile communication,” Samsung Senior VP Kang Min Lee said in a statement.

Apple sold a lot of iPhones, iPads and Macs during the most recent quarter, yet Wall Street is very displeased. Since Apple announced its fourth quarter 2011 fiscal earnings of $6.6 billion in profit and $28.7 billion in revenue earlier Tuesday the stock has been pummeled by investors, sending it down $28 or about 6.5 percent. While Apple’s numbers were slightly below what those analysts had expected, it’s still above what Apple had forecast. So what gives? Based on the questions from analysts during the company’s investor call Tuesday, concern seems to center on the number of iPhones Apple sold during the quarter: 17.1 million versus the 20.1 million the previous quarter.

Here’s why that number concerns them and why it’s likely just a minor blip:

Apple says that this was a “record” September quarter for them. You would think that would mean record iPhone sales too. Sure, 17.1 million is a lot, but it’s still fewer than the 20.1 million iPhones Apple sold in the previous quarter, and perhaps more importantly to those keeping score on Wall Street, below the 18-21 million smartphones Samsung is believed to have sold last quarter. Samsung is Apple’s chief competitor, in many ways, and any sign of a slip is going to resonate with the investors who are closely watching Apple and its competition.
Apple, not surprisingly, said they saw this dip in iPhone sales coming. On the earnings call, CEO Tim Cook, looking on the bright side, said people were holding out for the iPhone 4S:

[It was] much less of a reduction than what we were expecting and that was a large factor in our revenue exceeding our guidance…We knew that there was great anticipation of a June or July new iPhone because that was the pace we had been on for the last several years. As we predicted, that sell-through decline did occur, but not really to the extent that we thought. So we significantly beat our guidance.

But besides the established schedule for a new iPhone, Cook, along with CFO Peter Oppenheimer also lay some of the blame at the feet of Apple rumor bloggers. ”The reduction [in sales] happened largely in the back half of the quarter as speculation hit extreme highs,” said Cook. Oppenheimer later added, “The biggest impact was the rumors, which were very pervasive, especially at the end of the quarter.” In other words, it seems that the crush of Apple rumors and speculation recorded by blogs that drive up intense and frenzied interest in the company’s products are a double-edged sword for the company.
No matter who’s to blame, are lower-than-expected iPhone sales a harbinger of Apple being off its game? Very unlikely. Some things to remember: The company sold 4 million iPhone 4S units alone in the first three days it was available last week. So there’s clearly a demand for the new iPhone. About 25 million iOS devices were updated in the first five days the iOS 5 update hit Apple’s servers, which means older model device owners are keeping their products up to date with the latest software. And really, we’re talking about the slowing of sales of a 13- to 15-month old phone. Things could be worse.

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Reuters:

Apple Inc plans to shutter U.S. retail stores for several hours on Wednesday so employees can take part in a company-wide celebration of co-founder Steve Jobs’ life.

Classy

∞ Permalink

The groundbreaking work he did with Ken Thompson led to the operating system behind everything from set-top boxes to the iPhone, but who sings the praises of the late Dennis Ritchie?
It's funny how fickle fame can be. One week Steve Jobs dies and his death tops the news agendas in dozens of countries. Just over a week later, Dennis Ritchie dies and nobody – except for a few geeks – notices. And yet his work touched the lives of far more people than anything Steve Jobs ever did. In fact if you're reading this online then the chances are that the router which connects you to the internet is running a descendant of the software that Ritchie and his colleague Ken Thompson created in 1969.
The software in question is an operating system called Unix and the record of how it achieved its current unacknowledged dominance is one of the great untold stories of our time. It emerged from Bell Labs – the R&D facility of AT&T, the lightly regulated monopoly that ran the US telehone network for generations. Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson were two ferociously bright Bell programmers who had been assigned to work with MIT on the design of an impossibly complex multi-user operating system called Multics. In the end, the plug was pulled on the project, with the result that Bell Labs found itself with two pissed-off hackers on its books. Ritchie and Thompson badly needed a new operating system to provide an environment for their own programming, had hoped that Multics would provide it and had greatly enjoyed working on the project. Back in the lab they decided that they would just have to build the operating system themselves. So in a fantastic burst of creativity (and without asking anyone's permission) they wrote Unics (as a counterpart to Multics). Inevitably the 'cs' became 'x' and Unix was born.
Thus did AT&T find itself the astonished proprietor of a uniquely powerful and innovative operating system. The problem was that it couldn't sell it, because under the Consent Decree that gave it the telephone monopoly AT&T was not allowed to be in the computer business. So the researchers in Bell Labs did what geeks do – they gave it away to their peers in university research labs, under a licence that permitted the recipients to modify and improve it. In doing this Ritchie and Thompson unwittingly launched the academic discipline of computer science, because university departments were suddenly able to give their students software that was not only powerful (and malleable) but also free. The result was that virtually every computer science student in the world became a Unix geek in the course of his or her education. Unix was to computer science what the Bible is to divinity students. The difference was that geeks were free to modify and improve their bible – which is what Bill Joy and his fellow students at Berkeley did when they created their own version of Unix, codenamed BSD (for Berkeley Software Distribution) – of which more in a moment.
In due course, AT&T escaped the shackles of the Consent Decree and started to assert proprietary rights over Unix. This spurred an MIT programmer named Richard Stallman to embark on a project to change the world. He founded the free software movement, invented a clever way of using copyright law to preserve the freedom of programmers to modify software, and embarked on the GNU project to create a functional clone of Unix that would be free of proprietary constraints. (GNU stands for "Gnu's not Unix" which is the kind of recursive joke only programmers enjoy.) Stallman, who is one of the great figures of our time, built most of the software tools needed for his great project, but before he could write the kernel of the operating system a Finnish hacker named Linus Torvalds did it – and released it in 1991 as Linux.
The rest, as they say, is history. Linux became one of the greatest collaborative ventures the world has seen (second only to Wikipedia), in which geographically dispersed programmers collaborate over the internet to debug, improve, extend and enhance a complex operating system that is not only remarkably stable and reliable but is also free. Because it's free and malleable, every manufacturer in the world who needs a stable and flexible operating system to run an electronic device tends to use Linux – which is how your TV's set-top box and your broadband router and maybe also your smartphone comes to be a Linux box. The same goes for the millions of PCs that make up Google's server farms. In that sense, we are all now Linux (and, by inference, Unix) users.
The neatest twist of all, however, involves Apple. OS X – the operating system that now powers every Apple product – is actually built on the Berkeley distribution of Unix, so if you hack into your iPhone what you'll find is BSD 4.2. You could say, therefore, that what Apple really did was to give Unix a pretty face. I've often wondered what Dennis Ritchie would have made of that. Now that he's gone, we'll never know. What we do know, though, is that we owe him more than we realised.
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It’s not a shocker, but the availability of the iPhone 4S gave Sprint its best sales day ever.

The company, which is investing heavily to at long last get the iPhone on its network, said it broke its record by 1 pm ET on Friday. Sprint is also now selling Apple’s iPhone 4 after years of going without an Apple phone in its lineup. (The iPhone’s existing carriers, AT&T and Verizon, also reported impressively strong sales; see updates below.)

“Sprint today reported its best ever day of sales in retail, web and telesales for a device family in Sprint history with the launch of iPhone 4S and iPhone 4,” Sprint product chief Fared Adib said in a statement. “The response to this device by current and new customers has surpassed our expectations and validates our customers’ desire for a truly unlimited data pricing plan.”

The iPhone went on sale on Friday at Apple’s retail stores as well as other locations including Verizon Wireless, AT&T and Sprint stores. Apple said that it quickly sold 1 million phones during a pre-order period and all three U.S. carriers said they sold through their preorder allotments.

Update: A Verizon representative told AllThingsD that it is seeing strong traffic in its stores.

“Stores nationwide are reporting steady traffic as early-morning shoppers make purchases before heading to work,” said Verizon spokeswoman Brenda Raney. “We are seeing a nice mix of people who are first-time smartphone purchasers as well as those who are switching from competitors.”

Demand was particularly strong very early and during the lunch hour, Raney said. “Our customers were clearly excited to get their new iPhone 4s on the Verizon Wireless network,” Raney said. “We’re looking forward to a busy weekend.”

Update: And here’s the word from an AT&T spokesman: “As of 4:30 pm ET today, AT&T had already activated a record number of iPhones on our network -– and is on-track to double our previous record for activations on a single day.”

Regardless of whatever Google's CEO may say in an effort to assuage investors' concerns, this week may very well go down in history as the one in which Apple's intellectual property enforcement against Android reached a tipping point in Cupertino's favor. The famous reality distortion field may have to move up from 1 Infinite Loop to the GooglePlex in Mountain View at least as far as intellectual property matters are concerned.
Apple has not yet dealt a fatal blow to Samsung, but it's on an impressive winning streak and making headway at a breathtaking rate. I expected Apple to do well, but the results have exceeded even my expectations. Just this week,
Apple won its third preliminary injunction against Samsung in Australia (following similar, earlier decisions by courts in Germany, the Netherlands),
a federal judge in California expressed her belief that Samsung infringes some design patents held by Apple (even if doubts about the validity of those rights have to be addressed by Apple in order to win a US-wide preliminary injunction), and
today the Rechtbank 's-Gravenhage (a Dutch court based in the city of The Hague) made it clear that Samsung won't be able to win an injunction against Apple's products based on standards-essential, FRAND-committed patents. As a result, Samsung's motions for preliminary injunctions against the iPhone 4S in France and Italy are also very likely to be denied, though the courts in those countries have the right to take different decisions than their Dutch counterpart.
Apple still has miles to go until Samsung will really have no other choice than to back down and agree to a settlement on Apple's terms. Such a settlement would likely force Samsung to redesign its products, to remove certain functionality, and to pay royalties for those patents Apple is willing to license at all (without a legal obligation).
Samsung, however, appears to lack patents of the kind that would create a serious counterthreat. Under these circumstances, the only question is when, not if, Apple is going to get its way. If Samsung cannot obtain injunctions, there isn't a threat of mutually assured destruction, and Samsung is strategically lost.
Samsung will have to look for unencumbered patents. Maybe it has some hardware patents (such as antenna patents) that could be used to exert pressure on Apple. But so far, Samsung's lawyers rely mostly on FRAND-pledged standards patents, which appears to be a losing strategy.
Samsung is using at least 13 different FRAND-pledged 3G patents against Apple in nine countries. Apple's strongest patents -- unlike Samsung's (and Motorola's) -- are not FRAND-encumbered. Apple is in its right to seek injunctions. That's the difference.
Bad news for Samsung (and Google and Motorola Mobility), but good news for the technology industry at large
This ruling is good news for most players in the technology industry and should serve as a warning to desperate litigants who, for a lack of powerful non-standards patents, attempt to leverage FRAND-pledged patents in order to shut down their adversaries' products.
Motorola Mobility is another example of a desperate, embattled player trying to use FRAND-committed patents (against Apple and Microsoft). Like Samsung, Motorola Mobility has many patents, but apparently lacks unencumbered patents of the kind that would give it major leverage. Therefore, Google's acquisition of Motorola Mobility is not going to be the game changer as which Google announced it.
Patents aren't all the same. In a commercial sense, standards-essential patents are first-class citizens, but they are not suitable as strategic weapons. Their retaliatory power against a company wielding unencumbered patents is zero, provided that all courts decide along the lines of today's Dutch decision.
Key points of today's ruling
Today's Dutch ruling that couldn't be any clearer. Here are a few key points:
An injunction against Apple is out of the question. At most, Samsung can expect to receive FRAND royalties. The court formally dismissed Samsung's request for a preliminary injunction.
Samsung argued that its 3G-related FRAND promise was more of a solicitation of inquiries from interested parties than a binding and enforceable commitment. The court, however, ruled that it's an offer to negotiate an agreement on FRAND terms, and Apple and other parties can accept such an offer. An offer and a coextensive acceptance lead to an enforceable contract under the law in most European countries. In this case, the contract is under French law because ETSI, the standard-setting organization relevant to this case, requires participants in its standard-setting processes to enter into agreements under French law.
At a hearing on September 26, it turned out that Samsung was seeking a royalty of 2.4% of the chip price for each (!) of its asserted patents. In today's ruling, the Dutch court says that Samsung's offer was so far out of the FRAND ballpark that, in the court's opinion, Samsung has failed to honor its obligation to make an offer on FRAND terms.
Formally, Apple's counterclaims in this FRAND case were also dismissed, but that doesn't matter. Those were just an enhanced defense. Apple's defense succeeded anyway. That loss has no impact whatsoever on Apple's own assertions against Samsung.
There will be a hearing at the Tribunal de Grande Instance de Paris on Thursday of next week on Samsung's motion for a preliminary injunction against the iPhone 4S in France. That motion is also based on 3G standards patents. I am sure Apple's lawyers will present a certified French translation of the Dutch ruling to the French court.
If you'd like to be updated on the smartphone patent disputes and other intellectual property matters I cover, please subscribe to my RSS feed (in the right-hand column) and/or follow me on Twitter @FOSSpatents and Google+.
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Across the board, early reviewers of the iPhone 4S have singled out Siri as a standout feature. And a number of them have tried to test it with silly questions as well.

For the uninitiated, Siri is the 4S’s voice-recognition technology. The feature is designed to let you pose questions like “Is there an Italian restaurant nearby?” or give commands like “Change my meeting to Monday at 11,” but mischievous Apple engineers have also loaded a few easter eggs in the feature — responses to anticipated, abstract questions.

Above you’ll find the top 10 Siri comebacks so far.

More About: apple, features, iPhone 4S, siri, trending
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 Lexicalist calls itself a demographic dictionary of modern american english. What it does is analyse millions of words in online chatter on blogs, Twitter and other social networking sites and spews out information about who's using a certain word or keyword - breaking information down to age, gender and geography in the US (They also have a China version.)

So a Lexicalist report on Steve Jobs (screengrab below) shows that - in the US and on average - currently one (or more correctly two) in every 2563 words mentioned online is "Steve Jobs", with men aged upwards of 45 dominating mentions.

Apple expectations are so high that if I can’t talk to God on the next phone I’ll be deflated. @benkunz

Steve Jobs's black turtlenecks helped make him the world's most recognizable CEO. But the Apple co-founder wouldn't have worn them if his employees had accepted the nylon jacket he proposed as a corporate uniform instead. Before he died, Jobs himself explained his sartorial signature to biographer Walter Isaacson, in an interview published for the first time below. More »

The Dutch Senate is going paperless, and the iPad is going to get them there. The upper house of parliament for the Netherlands was told two weeks ago it would only have paper to rely on for one more week, after which point, the iPad and a special Senate-specific app would replace documents and printouts (via Reuters).

Dutch Senators are the first in Europe to try such an ambitious project, and two weeks into the experiment, reported being mostly “delighted” with how it’s progressing so far. Some document printing is still permitted, but by and large, reference information, calendars, proposed legislation, correspondence and meeting notes are handled through the special Senate app on iPads.

While the program, including the app development and iPad purchases, cost €150,000 (around $204,150 USD), Dutch Senate Secretary General Geert Jan Hamilton told Reuters it would save the Senate around €140,000 in paper printing costs during the first year alone. After that, upkeep for the program will only be around €35,000 per year, so the Senate will quickly be able to recoup their initial investment and save plenty besides.

The program by the Dutch Senate is only the latest example of a growing push to replace paper workflows and supporting documents with digital equivalents via the iPad. Airlines are also testing similar programs, as are local municipal governments in the U.S., and medical professionals. The iPad’s disruptive effective in government, education and business may eventually become its most financially advantage outcome for Apple. Though it will take longer to materialize than the iPad’s consumer success, since large organizations move at a slower pace than the average gadget-buyer, we could eventually see the iPad become for business what the Dell PC tower once was.

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The most notable way in which Tim Cook, Apple's new chief executive, diverged from Steve Jobs was in leaving all of the demonstrations of new technologies to his lieutenants.

For those still looking to pre-order the iPhone 4S, Sprint would like you to know that they aren’t totally sold out, although they have gone through their pre-sale allotment of the entry-level model.

“We do have the 32GB and 64GB versions, as well as the 8GB iPhone 4, available in both colors at this time,” Sprint representative Michelle Leff Mermelstein told AllThingsD.

The company said it won’t take backorders once it sells out on a model. “Sprint is committed to delivering devices to our pre-order customers on or very near the time of launch and also making these devices available for purchase on launch day – Friday, October 14,” Leff Mermelstein said. “Apple and other carriers may continue to take pre-orders that will be delivered to the customer at a later time.”

Apple has said it sold more than 1 million iPhone 4S pre-orders on the first day. AT&T, meanwhile, has said that it sold 200,000 devices in about 12 hours on launch day, while Sprint had previously said that sales had surpassed expectations.

Although all three carriers — Sprint, AT&T and Verizon Wireless — are selling the exact same iPhone 4S, there are differences both in the features of each network as well as the carriers’ billing plans. Sprint is focusing on the fact that it is the only carrier offering unlimited data plans to new iPhone customers.

Siri, Apple's awesome voice assistant is more than enough reason to go out and buy an iPhone 4S (if you can get one). With hints that the Apple TV will get a hardware update — and that fast dual-core A5 processor, it's possible Siri might make the little black box less of a "hobby" and put the "smart" back in Smart TV.

Jean-Louis Gassée, who was an Apple executive for nearly 10 years, on how Jobs made computers more personal and elegant
"Humour is the politeness of despair", an approximate, Google-ish translation of "l'humour est la politesse du désespoir", a saying attributed to noted post-WW2 Left Bank jazzman, writer, and engineer, Boris Vian, So, let's start with the reverent, despairing humour of Chris Calloway in Wired magazine's memorial to Steve Jobs:
"Heaven got a major upgrade today…"
Yes, I can see the dear leader in his new abode. Having climbed his last mountain, he summons Saint Peter and utters the words that he has heard throughout his life: "You're doing it all wrong."
"Look at the name above the door, the typeface sucks, the kerning is off. The furniture is out of style – get something cleaner, fresher. And the stairs … We need something airier … I don't know, glass? Come to think of it, one of the founding partners of the architecture firm that designed the Apple Store moved in here a few months ago. Bernard Cywinski; look him up get to work."
…and then it's Saint Peter's turn to mourn Steve's untimely demise, and his own lost tranquility.
[Update: I just found this picture of the New Yorker's upcoming 17 October cover. Obviously, this is before Steve starts to take matters into his own hands.]

Back in our Valley of Tears, this Onion article provides just the right amount of serious thought wrapped in knowing derision. I can't resist but quote the entire piece, it's too good and, in a way, it's a consolation:
Last American who knew what the fuck he was doing diesSteve Jobs, the visionary co-founder of Apple Computer and the only American in the country who had any clue what the fuck he was doing, died Wednesday at the age of 56. "We haven't just lost a great innovator, leader, and businessman, we've literally lost the only person in this country who actually had his shit together and knew what the hell was going on," a statement from President Barack Obama read in part, adding that Jobs will be remembered both for the life-changing products he created and for the fact that he was able to sit down, think clearly, and execute his ideas—attributes he shared with no other US citizen. "This is a dark time for our country, because the reality is none of the 300 million or so Americans who remain can actually get anything done or make things happen. Those days are over." Obama added that if anyone could fill the void left by Jobs it would probably be himself, but said that at this point he honestly doesn't have the slightest notion what he's doing any more.
The real Barack Obama didn't disappoint. Rising above the official encomiums, he offered a well-worded and, I believe, heartfelt homage [emphasis mine]:
"Michelle and I are saddened to learn of the passing of Steve Jobs.Steve was among the greatest of American innovators – brave enough to think differently, bold enough to believe he could change the world, and talented enough to do it.
By building one of the planet's most successful companies from his garage, he exemplified the spirit of American ingenuity.
By making computers personal and putting the internet in our pockets, he made the information revolution not only accessible, but intuitive and fun.
And by turning his talents to storytelling, he has brought joy to millions of children and grownups alike.
Steve was fond of saying that he lived every day like it was his last. Because he did, he transformed our lives, redefined entire industries, and achieved one of the rarest feats in human history: he changed the way each of us sees the world.
The world has lost a visionary. And there may be no greater tribute to Steve's success than the fact that much of the world learned of his passing on a device he invented. Michelle and I send our thoughts and prayers to Steve's wife Laurene, his family, and all those who loved him."
Just the right words, neither too many nor too few.
Praise for Steve has been plentiful, personal, and often insightful. But we also have the dissenters. Some of them are merely laughable: One unhinged dissenter, a Baptist church leader named Margie Phelps, promised to picket Steve's funeral for "teaching his neighbours to sin." Her call to arms was tweeted from an iPhone.
We have Free Software Foundation's Richard Stallman in a sadly tasteless post:
Steve Jobs, the pioneer of the computer as a jail made cool, designed to sever fools from their freedom, has died.
As Chicago mayor Harold Washington said of the corrupt former Mayor Daley, "I'm not glad he's dead, but I'm glad he's gone." Nobody deserves to have to die – not Jobs, not Mr Bill, not even people guilty of bigger evils than theirs. But we all deserve the end of Jobs' malign influence on people's computing.
Unfortunately, that influence continues despite his absence. We can only hope his successors, as they attempt to carry on his legacy, will be less effective.
You can read an excellent, balanced retort here.
Most irksome of all is Steve Jobs Wasn't God, Hamilton Nolan's heartless and crude opinion at Gawker.com. Commenters chimed in and piled on, disputing Jobs' accomplishments, ascribing them to others, condemning him for lapses of judgment in his early adulthood. This earned Nolan, who claims to have never owned an Apple product, a stinging rebuke from the Macalope. It's well worth reading, as are all his weekly posts.
I side with the Macalope, but let's not forget that the objectors play a useful role in reminding us that we shouldn't canonise Steve. He was a genius, with an ''insane'' drive that took him and his company to the pinnacle – and brought us with them – but he was no saint. The undeniable, manic drive admits a dark side. If you want the works of art, you've got to accept the real artist. As I wrote in my late August tribute (Steve: Who's Going to Protect Us From Cheap and Mediocre Now?), Steve learned to ride the animal inside him and matured as a result.
So, indeed, Steve wasn't God, but let's give him his due. To those, such as Nolan, who belittle Steve's achievements because he didn't solve world hunger, invent a vaccine, or fight for civil rights, I'll say this: computers are one of mankind's most important inventions, right behind the written word, symbolic language. Steve saw computers as an extension of mind and body. His unique contribution has been, time and again, to make computers more personal and more elegant, to make Apple stand at the intersection of technology and liberal arts.
That's what I've always loved about Apple: I remember how happy I felt when I joined the company more than 30 years ago and found it had commissioned a Ray Bradbury poem for the (unfortunately short-lived) Apple magazine. I only remember the title, "Ode to the quick computer"; and the last verse, "So cowards, what are you afraid of?"
The dissenters are entitled to their views and they have a right to broadcast them. But to the rest Of us, their postures show a deep failure of empathy for the many ways in which Steve touched so many lives, in an ever-expanding number of ways. The drive for beauty and elegance, for enchantment even, is profound. It's what makes us human, it's what Apple came to represent, and that's why so many of us mourn Steve's demise.
As Jon Stewart lucidly explained, there's another reason for the outpouring: we feel cheated. Ford and Edison died old, they had enough time to give society all they were meant to give. With Steve, we're tragically robbed of what he could have accomplished with more time.
[Update: I just found this beautiful 17 October New Yorker article by Nicholson Baker where he writes:
"Everyone who cares about music and art and movies and heroic comebacks and rich rewards and being able to carry several kinds of infinity around in your shirt pocket is taken aback by this sudden huge vacuuming-out of a titanic presence from our lives."]
I bow to the happy family man he became, to the grand master of high tech, to the once dishevelled hippie who became the manager extraordinaire of one of the world's best-run companies and, last but not least, the editor-in-chief of a large group of engineers and artists.
I leave you with a nice tweet quoting Dr Seuss…

…and a newly unearthed version of the famous Crazy Ones video, this one narrated by Steve himself, instead of Richard Dreyfuss. Call me feeble-minded, but it moves me to tears. Weeks ago, right after Steve resigned as CEO, Adweek created a version of the famous commercial in which a picture of Steve, as a young man, is added to the end, a fitting inclusion in the procession.
Lastly, a reminder of Steve's mark on Apple, powerful because it's so simply elegant, the creation of a young Hong Kong designer named Jonathan Mak:

JLG@mondaynote.com
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LG introduced a new 4.5-inch smartphone display on Monday that rivals the resolution of a high-definition television set. The True HD IPS screen packs a 1280×720 resolution (720p) and LG’s Mobile HD Graphics Engine, which “offers advanced resolution, brightness and clarity and shows colors in their most natural tones.”

Such a screen rivals that of Apple’s Retina Display, which is used on the current iPod touch and iPhone models. These boast 960×640 resolution in a 3.5-inch screen, which works out to 329.65 pixels per inch. At that level, the human eye can’t detect individual pixels when the phone is held at normal usage distance, making for an extremely crisp viewing experience. LG’s True HD IPS provides 326.36 pixels per inch, which is essentially identical.

Last week, LG introduced its Optimus LTE; the company’s first phone that will use a True HD IPS screen. The handset, debuting in Korea, is launching with Android 2.3. I’d hope that any phones that use a 1280×720 display would see an upgrade to the next version of Android — Ice Cream Sandwich — so high-resolution Android tablet applications could easily run on the handsets.

Android 3.2 introduced new screen-density APIs to help developers code a single application for multiple screen sizes, but that version is intended for tablet applications. Ice Cream Sandwich is expected to unify the Android smartphone and tablet platforms. An upcoming Google Nexus phone, dubbed the Nexus Prime, is expected to showcase Ice Cream Sandwich on a rumored 4.65-inch, 1280×720 screen.

Regardless of the current and future version of Android supported by phones with this display, the end-user benefit will remain the same in terms of visuals. User-created content such as high-definition video and still images will look much better, for starters. High definition video purchases or rentals will also shine and won’t require any conversion to a lower-quality format, while gaming too could be vastly improved.

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EXCLUSIVE: I’ve just learned that Sony Pictures is making a hefty deal to acquire feature rights to Steve Jobs, the upcoming authorized biography by former CNN chairman and Time Magazine managing editor Walter Isaacson. I’m hearing the deal is $1 million against $3 million and that Mark Gordon will be the biopic’s producer. But this will be an MG360 project, which is the movie production partnership between Gordon and Management 360. ICM reps both Isaacson and Gordon. Sony Pictures would not comment. The studio seems a good fit for the book, having boiled business books into compelling dramas with both the Oscar-nominated The Social Network and Moneyball. The Isaacson book was supposed to be published on November 21st by Simon & Schuster, but now the release date has moved up to October 24th, according to a spokeswoman for the publisher. This was the hottest about-to-be biopic in Hollywood. [Will Hollywood Book Biopic Of Steve Jobs?] The 448-page profile is based on over 40 interviews with the Apple co-founder and over 100 conversations with friends, family members, colleagues and competitors. And it’s a compelling story: the building of the world’s most valuable technology company by creating the devices that changed how people use electronics and revolutionized the computer, music, and mobile phone industries. Jobs gave his full cooperation but had not read it as of mid-August. At first titled iSteve: the Book Of Jobs, Isaacson had second thoughts about what was appropriate for the first biography to get Jobs’ blessing and cooperation. Even when it wasn’t even finished, it made it (briefly) into the top 50 on Amazon’s bestseller list. Isaacson eventually persuaded his publisher Simon & Schuster to go with the simple title of Steve Jobs. First planned for 2012, the book’s release date was moved up.

Jobs reportedly fought off a long list of would-be biographers over the years then chose Isaacson, who’s written about Henry Kissinger, Benjamin Franklin and Albert Einstein. Jobs himself said he had no skeletons in his closet, though there were things he’d done he wasn’t proud of. But he was touchy about his personal life, understandably. According to Fortune magazine, in the early 1980s Jobs invited Michael Moritz, then Time‘s Silicon Valley reporter, to chronicle the Mac’s creation for the book that became The Little Kingdom (1984). But when Moritz reported, in Time‘s 1983 Machine of the Year, a detail about Jobs’ family, access was abruptly cut off.

At the time of Jobs’ death, only one movie had ever chronicled his rise to tech titan: Pirates Of Silicon Valley, a semi-humorous docudrama about the two visionaries behind Microsoft and Apple based on the book Fire In The Valley: The Making of The Personal Computer by Paul Freiberger & Michael Swaine. Shown on TNT in 1999, the telefilm starred Anthony Michael Hall as Bill Gates and Noah Wyle as Jobs. Reportedly, Jobs thought the ER actor did a fantastic job donning the turtleneck. And, during the Macworld NY in July 1999, Jobs had Wyle come out dressed like him to start the keynote. TNT re-aired Pirates back-to-back on Thursday night in tribute.

Yeah, so, here's a counterpoint take on Steve Jobs' death, from Green Day's Billie Joe Armstrong, screamed to thousands of fans at a concert in Lima one year ago. I won't repeat what he said here, but it's pretty horrible and shocking. It happens at 2:10 in the video above. More »

Patna : Lalu Yadav is inspired. Or as former president Abdul Kalam would say, ignited.

The former Railways minister has decided to appeal to the Election Commission to allot `apple’ as the symbol for his Rashtriya Janata Dal instead of the `lantern’. Lalu decided to make the change when he learnt that someone called Steve Jobs, who made apple so world famous that everyone started buying it, had died.

“Now that symbol is empty. No title holder,” Lalu enlightened mediapersons at his home in Patna. “So we have decided to appeal to EC to give us the apple. And just like Steve gave jobs to many people, our slogan in Bihar will be to provide jobs for everybody.”

When a scribe tried explaining that Apple is the name of an American company that makes PCs, computer software and consumer electronics and Steve Jobs was its highly successful former CEO, he was shouted down by an irate Lalu.

“Tut tut tut. Chup chup. Tum bhajpa ke agent ho kya? Do not try to teach me. One computer company called some soft, has windows. So does that mean no one can have window or door as election symbol. No communal force in India can stop Lalu from having an apple,” said Lalu.

Admitting Rabri Devi is not in favour of applying for the apple, Lalu dismissed her as ignorant. “She told me she had heard the story of an apple that caused problems between first man and first woman and so does not want me to get apple. I told her yeh some videshi kahaani hai. I will pucca get the apple for the party.”

If and when the EC accepts the symbol change, Lalu says he has his slogans ready. “An apple a day to keep Nitish Kumar away and Apple khao, Nitish ko bhagao,” he guffaws.

 

(Image courtesy : www.chennaitvnews.com)

 

My first Apple product was, like most PC owners, an iPod but the real Apple experience was when I got my first Mac. In 2009. Yup, I was very late to the party. The iPhone followed soon after and then the iPads, the Apple TV, and even the AirPort Extreme. People often mistake my love for simplicity in design, be it architecture (my major in a previous life) or technology, as fanboyism. I wear that badge with honor. But I never bought Apple products because I was in love with Steve Jobs. Actually, before buying a Mac, I had never heard a single Jobs famed keynotes. You could say I was living in the anti-reality distortion field.
I bought and loved Apple products because they just work and Steve Jobs philosophy, as I later discovered, emphasized just that. Breaking the shackles of complexity from computers and making users feel at ease was his underlying design principle, be in in hardware with a single scroll wheel or in software with the simple yet robust Mac OS X. Although the cult of Mac is derided and mocked relentless on any web forum, the sense of community is strong even if its growing by the millions every year (23% market share compared to less than 5% ten years ago). I remember my sense of puzzlement when I first got my Mac. As an avid Windows tinkerer, I had to unlearn all that. I still remember Supremus’ advice which he in turn had received from his Mac-using colleague:
When I got my first mac, my colleague had told me that I would go through 3 phases. 1st would be when I would get find myself comparing everything to windows and find things annoying with mac (ex: 2 button mouse, no way to expand apps to occupy full screen real estate etc). 2nd phase would be when I’d gloat over the fancy gui and tastefully done aesthetics and how everything fits together in OS X. The 3rd stage he told me was when I’d start looking *beyond* the beautiful UI and start knowing how the operating system has been designed, and that is when I’d appreciate OS X fully.
I went through the stages exactly as he described and if you are a recent convert or are planning on becoming one, I ask you to keep this in mind (although some things like “expand apps to occupy full screen” are now better than in Windows). As Supremus describes, it is hard to explain and has to be experienced firsthand with an open mind. If you think that the Mac is a toy then you haven’t yet delved into the wonder of AppleScript and Terminal which I’m no expert by any means. I have been proven wrong enough times by a work colleague who whips up a tweak that does things I have not thought possible on a Mac or any other platform.
As John Gruber put it succinctly, that Steve Jobs greatest legacy is not any particular Apple product but it was Apple itself. The company that he founded is instilled with this philosophy of providing the best user experience there is. Things may not be as ‘open’ or convenient or even have the latest top-of-the-line specs but the whole is always going to be greater than the sum of its parts. I hope this philosophy remains strong at Apple for as long as it can and although the domineering presence of Steve Jobs isn’t around anymore, we can only hope that his lessons have seeped in deep enough. Like all things, Apple may eventually fade away and be replaced by yet another innovative company but all I can hope is, that company would be guided by the same principles that Steve Jobs proved were so pivotal in creating a lasting and wondrous consumer experience.
(...)Read the rest of May the Crazy One Live On… (19 words)
 Follow me on Twitter: @patrix. For content without Links posts, use this feed. For Links only, use this feed.
© patrix for Nerve Endings Firing Away, 2011. | Permalink | 6 comments Post tags: Apple, Business, Philosophy, Steve Jobs, Technology

Steve Jobs’s death has prompted Simon & Schuster to move up the publication date for his much-anticipated biography by Walter Issacson. The CBS-owned publishing unit has moved up the release date for “Steve Jobs” from Nov. 21 to Oct. 24. Not surprisingly, preorders for the book are skyrocketing, and the title now tops bestseller lists at both Amazon and Apple’s iTunes.

Dear Steve,

We've never met. And yet nearly everywhere I turn in my house, I see your imprint. You don't know my family, and yet each of us has had our lives made better because of your work. As I put my kids to bed, I wanted to share some belated thank yous for all you have done for me and my family.

Thank you for bringing music back into my house. I was an aspiring classical musician in my early years And yet with the busyness of life, music had fallen by the wayside until you gave us the iPod and iTunes. Thank you for the ability to instantly share the soul of James Brown with my son, Taylor Swift with my daughters (I think), and, now, letting me express my sadness with Samuel Barber's Adagio for Strings — all with one device.

Thank you for the mini-MBA my 7-year-old Miya is getting via her favorite app, Bakery Story, where she is learning the joy and stress of running a business without even knowing it. Thank you for the cool factor of reading bedtime books to my 5-year-old Audrey via iPad. Thank you for Talking Tom, the cartoon cat that makes my 3 year old Luke laugh even with a skinned knee and gets him to eat his vegetables when I can't.

Thank you for turning my wife into Ansel Adams and Steven Spielberg. She was always a serious scrapbooker, but iPhoto and the iMac (plus Shutterfly) have been the equivalent of the Gutenberg printing press for her. She's used iMovie to help my parents feel closer to their grandkids and bridge the 8,000 mile gap that exists today.

And thank you for the master class in business. I recently wrote about category creation, but no one is more expert on it than you. Thank you for the cannon of case studies that Apple has created across product innovation, retail innovation and business model innovation. Thank you for the object lesson in investing and delayed gratification that I was able to share with my 17-year-old niece Emily, with whom I 'co-invested' in Apple shares 3 years ago which taught her that one dollar not spent today can be worth three dollars tomorrow.

Thank you for Pixar, which is my favorite of your creations. Thank you for creating a new category of "computer animated cartoons" for both kids and adults. Thank you for creating positive yet real father figures like Mr. Incredible, who go beyond the classic bumbling idiot father of yesterday's animated movies. Thank you for showing us the truest depiction of true love and loyalty in an amazing and dialogue-free montage at the beginning of Up that goes beyond the traditionally superficial narratives of love at first sight. I could go on and on, but thank you for being the modern day parables that have taught my kids the value of aspiration and perspiration, love and loyalty and friendship and family.

Thank you for showing us that in all of what we do in business, that the mission can be more than just margin. For showing us that creation much more fun than just conquest. For showing us that the $3 billion you have paid out to developers via the App Store is what a real job creation program looks like. For showing us that pursuing artistry brings more lasting joy than just adulation. And for showing us that fractional thinking about just market share is more likely to limit your future, while an exponential mindset around category growth will expand your horizons.

Mahalo and Aloha to you and your family.

For more commentary on Steve Jobs, see our special section, The Legacy of Steve Jobs.

I’m sad that today I’m adding a slide to one of my live presentations, adding Steve Jobs to the list of famous people who died treating terminal diseases with woo rather than with medicine.

Seven or eight years ago, the news broke that Steve Jobs had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, but considering it a private matter, he delayed in informing Apple’s board, and Apple’s board delayed in informing the shareholders. So what. The only delay that really mattered was that Steve, it turned out, had been treating his pancreatic cancer with a special diet [UPDATE] prescribed by the alternative medicine promoter Dr. Dean Ornish.

Most pancreatic cancers are aggressive and always terminal, but Steve was lucky (if you can call it that) and had a rare form called an islet cell neuroendocrine tumor, which is actually quite treatable with excellent survival rates — if caught soon enough. The median survival is about a decade, but it depends on how soon it’s removed surgically. Steve caught his very early, and should have expected to survive much longer than a decade. Unfortunately Steve relied on a diet instead of early surgery. There is no evidence that diet has any effect on islet cell carcinoma. As he dieted for nine months, the tumor progressed, and took him from the high end to the low end of the survival rate.

Why did he do this? Well, outsiders like us can’t know; but many who avoid medical treatment in favor of unproven alternatives do so because they’ve been given bad information, without the tools or expertise to discriminate good from bad. Steve was exposed to such bad information, as are we all.

Eventually it became clear to all involved that his alternative therapy wasn’t working, and from then on, by all accounts, Steve aggressively threw money at the best that medical science could offer. But it was too late. He had a Whipple procedure. He had a liver transplant. And then he died, all too young.

My whole family loves Apple devices. Steve made our lives better, and I think I can say that pragmatically and without any Apple heroin in my veins. Not only that, he created my profession.

His lifelong friend Bill Gates tweeted:

For those of us lucky enough to get to work with Steve, it’s been an insanely great honor. I will miss Steve immensely. b-gat.es/qHXDsU

I saw another tweet today from @DamonLindelof that I thought was beautifully worded:

Steve Jobs. On behalf of every dreamer sitting in his or her garage who is crazy enough to try to change the world, you will be missed.

We can’t say for sure that Steve would still be alive and making lives better were it not for the alternative therapy, but the statistics suggest it very strongly. If you insist on unproven therapies, fine; but also try the proven ones while you’re at it. Nobody likes to either write or read a post such as this one.

For a more expert response to this post, see Dr. David Gorski’s critique at Science Based Medicine.

Relentless focus and the purpose of an operating system boiled down to four words: Matt Drance, Pete Warden, Chuq von Rospach and others recall the experience
Flat structureApple's really efficient and very impersonal when it comes to making decisions [about killing a product]. There is never any illusion about what the company's focus is and that comes from the top, that came from people like Steve and Scott [Forstall, head of iPhone software], formerly [software chief] Bertrand [Serlet], Tim Cook, everybody, they know what Apple is supposed to be doing and the other side of that is they know what Apple is doing, they actually know what's going on in their back yards.
Apple is a very flat organisation, there's not that many layers, and they're just all really involved. There were either five or six layers between me and Steve – my boss was [marketing chief] Phil Schiller. I mean, these executives, they're sending emails very late at night, sometimes after midnight. Apple is the biggest startup in the world, people work day in and day out because they believe in what they're doing. I was at the bottom of the [organisational] chart, I didn't have people under me, but I still – every time I worked on my slides or I worked on a demo or whatever – I would ask myself, I'd say if I had to show this to Steve, what would he say? And, as long as people keep asking themselves that question, and I believe that they will, then Apple's going to be fine.- Matt Drance worked as developer evangelist at Apple from May 2001 to July 2009 and now runs Bookhouse Software
Steve was everywhereIn my years as an engineer at Apple I only saw Steve in the hallways, we never talked and I never presented to him. Even so, he completely dominated my work. I was building a fairly niche product for professional video editors, but despite our relative lack of significance the team still had to give him quarterly demos. Looking back, it's hard to imagine how many of those sort of meetings he must have done across the company. He was hands-on in a way I've never seen anywhere else, and it must have been exhausting and time-consuming for him.
These were nail-biting occasions for us. We'd wait in our office to hear the verdict while the designer presented behind closed doors. Several times he never even got as far as showing off the features we'd been slaving over because Steve would immediately focus on a bad visual element in the interface. Whether it was an ugly button, a mis-aligned font, or a control panel with too many buttons, we'd never recover. All our work under the hood meant nothing, he had seen enough and we'd failed.
At first I found this intensely frustrating. It felt like nit-picking over unimportant details. Couldn't he see past the cosmetic issues to the impressive code we'd been writing? We were solving hard problems, so what if there were a few rough edges? It took me time to realise how effective his method was. Because we knew any surface sloppiness would negate everything else we did, the user experience became the true top priority. We began to think about how Steve would see any changes we were considering, he would constantly come up in discussions.
Our lives would have been so much easier if we could have just cut some corners, in ways that would have been seen as perfectly reasonable at any other company. Knowing he had an absolute veto and would use it if he saw the experience being threatened forced us to do better. By being both unreasonable and right, he taught us to create products to delight people, not just satisfy them.- Pete Warden worked at Apple from July 2003 to July 2008. He now runs OpenHeatMap and is CTO at Jetpac
What if Steve had never existed?Try to imagine today's society if Steve didn't exist. Can you? The Apple II. the Macintosh. The mouse. Making computers accessible to non-technical people in general. Reinventing the music industry with iPod and iTunes, over the express wishes of the industry. Beginning a similar reinvention of film and video. Revitalising animation with Pixar. Reinventing the personal communication industry with the iPhone. And most recently the iPad. He was a fundamental part of so many societal changes, any one of which would make most people's careers.
I am who I am today because of Steve, through the companies and the products and the technologies he fostered; more importantly, because of the people he brought in and mentored who turned into people that mentored me. Because of the thinking and attitudes he promoted and inoculated that became key parts of what I've become. I'm the person I am because of Steve and what he did, the opportunities he created, and the attitudes and expectations he baked into those around him.
I almost ran over Steve once outside of Infinite Loop 1 as I was coming in for a meeting and he popped into the street without really looking, [iPod division chief] Jon Rubinstein and [iTunes chief] Eddy Cue in tow. He almost returned the favour once as he drove in to work as I was in the same crosswalk.
Steve could be a tough and very intimidating person, but as much as he demanded of others, he demanded more of himself. He was involved in one of my projects at Apple, and I used to watch the team scramble as Steve reviewed ad copy hours before a launch and mark up changes. He was that involved in the details, and he was always right.
Now Steve has left us, but his memory and his legacy live on, and they will continue to drive and shape the world we live in for years to come. Nobody can replace Steve Jobs – he was unique. Each of us can choose to do something to fill a small part of the void he's left. If we do, we will help fulfil the legacy he started in trying to make the world better for all of us. I am a better person for having lived under his influence, and I can never pay that back, but I can try to carry that forward in his memory. - Chuq von Rospach worked at Apple for 17 years, from 1989 to September 2009; he now works at Hewlett-Packard
Relentless requirement to meet the highest of standards – and everyday magic"It's all true." Those words compelled me to accept a job offer at Apple. And, it was all true. Steve's Apple had the most talented people in the world, the subtle chaos necessary to develop new ideas, and the relentless requirement to always meet his highest of standards. Steve Jobs has been described as "brilliant" and "mean" in the same breath. Brilliant because of his insight and vision, mean because he would let you know if your ideas weren't insightful or visionary.
Feature reviews were always stressful. Would Steve like the idea? Would a stray pixel distract the course of the meeting? Would it be axed on the spot? If it were, you might go back to sulk at your desk, but you'd always realise that his reasoning was right. This stress is how Apple ticked; the quest to make the world a better place doesn't happen by coddling egos or releasing mediocre products. The culture of excellence and attention to detail was rooted at the top.
In my time at Apple, I saw Steve's true gift was he could bring complete focus to a product, seemingly off-the-cuff. Lion started as many engineering-brainstormed ideas glommed together to form an incoherent product. The pieces were great, the sum was unknown. After months of development, it underwent first review by Steve. Like a dog being yanked back on its leash, Steve stated that Lion (Mac OSX 10.7, released earlier this year) needed to bring the iPad "back to the Mac". In a split second it all became clear. Hundreds of engineers now had a common goal to work for, all due to Steve's ability to distil down what would be millions of lines of code into four words. This is not an isolated story but a common occurrence. This was the everyday magic of Steve Jobs, which the world lost today.
Former staff member (anonymous at their request)
Steve JobsAppleCharles Arthurguardian.co.uk © 2011 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Steve Jobs’s influence touched people around the world. We’ve heard from many of them tonight, but that’s just a small sampling. Please feel free to use this forum to let us know what the Apple co-founder meant to you.

We’ll start out by including thoughts some of you have left on other posts on this site tonight, and then we’re going to open up the comments section. Please do remember our comments guidelines. (Refresher course: “Civility is the rule.”)

humanity does not get measured by sales of ipads, ipods, iphones. the world has lost a man. a great man
– Tablet Cases

Tonight I shut down the entire companies computers and we take a moment of silence to rembember a truely remarkable american. We will miss you Steve, you are an inspiration to us all
– Rogueknight

The very fact I saw this sad news on my iPad 2 first says a lot on how much Jobs has changed the world. He will truly be remembered not only as a one of the greatest business leaders in American history, but also one who had a huge impact on the motion picture industry through Pixar with its multiple Oscar wins.
Alas, gone too soon. :-(
– RaymondC

A tremor has been felt in the Universe.
– Fast Fred

I can proudly tell future generations that I lived during “Steve Jobs years” and how he impacted our lives and has permanently changed the future. He was the greatest mind in the last 50 years.
– Super Tino

Most of my life has been entwined with Apple — since the start of high school in 1980 and as the core of my working life over the years through selling and servicing. He was only 11 years older than me and I still feel so young. A real shame. His legacy lives on in so much we take for granted everyday.
– Todd Dixon

iSad
– Sybill

I almost feel like I’ve lost a brother.
– jethrObama

Steve Jobs’ passing reminds us reminds to make the most of our lives while we’re here.A brilliant innovator, but also a kind soul who — together with his family — greeted neighborhood kids with warmth and graciousness every Halloween.
– Joel Zand

heartbreaking. as i roll my iPhone in my hand, i feel a personal loss. … Till last breath you innovated. Hats off to you!
– Shirish Kumar

I feel like I lost a family member. My heart hurts. Rest in peace Steve. Many of us love you, forever and ever.
– Appletini

The world loses one of its greatest champions of excellence. Good-bye, Steve.
– MichaelK

What an amazing Human Being he was… By reading his words you can tell in a minute the clarity and simplicity of his soul… like he said: “…Simple is harder…”
– peoc

Only Steve Jobs made us feel like he knew what we really needed to get it done and gave us that. Without the fluff and chrome.
– Perk

I never knew Steve Jobs. As a tech devotee, however, I always admired the beauty of the products he sold, regardless of my OS leanings.
That being said, I can’t help but feel grieved at Steve Jobs’ passing. I don’t grieve for his passing from this life and relief from his suffering, but I grieve for our loss. I hope that people like him will pick up scrappy little companies like Pixar and help them shine, and will put out products that are concerned with the user experience, rather than the specifications.
As I mentioned, I never knew the man, but I marvel at the simplicity of the iPod’s interface (especially in later click wheel iterations, like my 4th-gen iPod nano). I marvel at how easily my daughter uses our iPad to create and to play. I marvel at the clean design of my wife’s Macbook Air.
While my phone is Android and my desktop is a personally-built Windows machine, I have become an Apple fan, somewhere along the road. And I know Steve Jobs is a big reason for that.
Thanks again, and rest in peace, from one Steve to another.
– Steve Sleight

In a very real way, Steve Jobs brought my family — dispersed around the country, like so many families — back together. From the oldest to the youngest, we’re in touch again and closer than ever because of the dreams he made sure came true. We’re all thinking of him — and thanking him — tonight.
– joebsf

Too soon to be finished; so much more to be done. Too much genius to be wasted. Too sad for the world to have lost so much. Condolences to us all.
– Jennifer Pierce

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For many, the name Steve Jobs is synonymous with inspiration.

Throughout the years, he’s not only changed our lives with innovative products, but also with memorable words.

Among the ways people are commemorating Jobs’ passing is posting their favorite Jobs-isms. We took to Tumblr to track down what Jobs quotes have resonated most with the tech world. Check out the gallery below to be inspired.

Do you have a favorite Jobs quote? Share it in the comments below.





Jobs quote from 2005 Stanford commencement address. Posted by livinglauren.




Jobs quote from 2005 Stanford commencement address. Posted by heiids.




Jobs quote from 2005 Stanford commencement address. Posted by mondobarbie.




Quote from 2008 interview with Fortune. Posted by snapshotdiaries.




Jobs quote from 2005 Stanford commencement address. Posted by littleredheadgirl.




Jobs quote from 2005 Stanford commencement address. Posted by marleytothe.




Quote from 2003 New York Times article about the iPod. Posted by idiazsosa.




Origin of Jobs quote is uncertain. Writer and critic Phil Patton has said Jobs told him this when they met in 1981. Posted by nickslog.




Jobs quote from 2005 Stanford commencement address. Posted by blogsforjobs.




Jobs quote from 1993 Wall Street Journal interview. Posted by missambear.




Jobs quote from 1989 interview with Inc. magazine. Posted by mrborisduck.




Quote from 2008 60 Minutes interview. Posted by planetickets.




Quote from 1998 BusinessWeek interview. Posted by b-duarte.




Jobs quote from 1995 interview with the Smithsonian Institute. Posted by theaccidentalexecutive.




Jobs quote from 2005 Stanford commencement address. Posted by soupsoup.

More Coverage of Steve Jobs’s Death

NEWS:
Steve Jobs Has Died
Steve Jobs: 1955 – 2011
Steve Jobs Authorized Biography Release Date Bumped Up
Newspapers React to the Death of Steve Jobs [PICS]
Steve Jobs’s Other Amazing Companies: NeXT and Pixar
GALLERIES:

Steve Jobs, 1955-2011: The Web Remembers
15 Inspirational Steve Jobs Quotes
Mourners Create Impromptu Memorials for Steve Jobs at Apple Stores [PICS]
In Memoriam: Letters to Steve Jobs
VIDEOS:

Steve Jobs Remembered: 10 of His Most Magical Moments [VIDEO]
Steve Jobs’s 2005 Stanford Commencement Speech [VIDEO]
Steve Wozniak on Steve Jobs [VIDEOS]
CONDOLENCES :

Apple’s Board of Directors on Steve Jobs
Apple Pays Tribute to Steve Jobs
Jobs Family Statement: “Steve Died Peacefully”
Mark Zuckerberg Pays Tribute to Steve Jobs
Google Founders: Steve Jobs Was an Inspiration
Disney CEO: “Jobs Was Such an Original”
Bill Gates: “I Will Miss Steve Immensely”
President Obama on Steve Jobs: “The World Has Lost a Visionary”
Google’s Homepage Pays Tribute to Steve Jobs
OTHER:

RIP Steve Jobs: Share Your Condolences [OPEN THREAD]
Memories Of Steve Jobs: Interviews & Inspiration
Steve Jobs: Goodbye to an Icon

More About: apple, inspiration, quotes, steve jobs
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There I was, watching the Phillies-Cardinals game with Mike Montero at a pub near my apartment, feigning interest, all the time checking the Twitter feed, when I saw an alert from WSJ: Steve Jobs is dead. I will remember that very minute – bottom of the fifth, Game four. Suddenly, everything went out of focus. I could hear the blood pounding my head; tears welled up in my eyes.

It is perhaps the only time that I didn’t care for the news; I didn’t want to write that story. Why doesn’t the world realize that my Elvis is dead! I don’t care about news. I don’t care about a world that is a lot less exciting than it was when Steve was around. I don’t care what our readers might want to know. Can’t you see that my soul is being put through a meat grinder.

Every generation has its heroes. I was too provincial to love the Beatles and cry over John Lennon. I was too Indian to care much about Elvis. And I read about President Kennedy in books. But for me, Steve Jobs was all of those people. I don’t know why, how and where that happened but Jobs was my icon.

For many of us who live and die for technology and the change it represents, he was an example of what was possible, no matter how the chips were stacked against you. Jobs put life and soul into inanimate objects. Everyone saw steel, silicon and software; he saw an opportunity to paint his Mona Lisa. People saw a phone; Steve saw a transporter of love. People saw a tablet; he saw smiles and wide-eyed amazement. They made computers; he made time machines that brought us all together through a camera, screen and a connection.

Mac, iPod and iPhone — they are like Silicon Valley’s Harry Potter, Luke Skywalker and E.T. — magical, memorable and life-changing. And perhaps that is why I didn’t want to meet him, interview him or even talk to him. I had the opportunity on numerous occasions when I was attending Apple’s events, but I decided not to. To me, just the idea of Steve was powerful enough.

The idea of Steve led me to follow my heart, make tough choices, be brutally honest with myself (and sometimes annoying to people I love) and always remember that in the end, it is all about making your customers happy. There are simple ways to get along with everyone. There are easier ways to get things done. There are compromises. But to me Steve Jobs meant try harder, damn it, your customers (readers) expect better than that. Steve taught me to care about the little things, because in the end, little things matter.

Steve was my secret muse. Trust me –- he is a secret muse to many of us in the valley. Mark Zuckerberg. Jeff Bezos. Dave Morin. Jack Dorsey. We are all part of the tribe called Jobs. There is a whole generation of entrepreneurs who ask themselves this one question –- what will Steve do. Natch. What would have Steve done!

P.S. I wrote about Steve’s resignation as CEO of Apple earlier. It sums up a lot of my feelings – then and today.

 

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Apple unveiled its latest handset, the iPhone 4S, at the company’s Cupertino headquarters on Tuesday, showing off new software and updated hardware features. The phone will be available for pre-order on Oct. 7 with a starting price of $199 and availability one week later. Apple’s iOS 5, the updated operating system for the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad will be available as a free download on October 12.

I’ve been using Google Android on a full-time basis for almost two years now, having bought a Google Nexus One in January 2010. I’ll be honest; with iOS 5, Apple has addressed some of the reasons why I left the platform in favor of Google. I’ve used iOS 5 for a few months on an iPod touch and it has impressed me — from less intrusive notifications to wireless data synchronization with iCloud to improved Twitter integration.

Still missing for me is the outstanding Google service integration I find native to Android. But even there, I’ve seen improvements. The Google Voice app is now supported. Mail in iOS gained the ability to archive mail instead of simply deleting it all. And it’s pretty simple to connect multiple Google calendars to an iOS device too. I’d love to see Apple add customizable widgets, but I’ve already seen widget-like functionality in the new notification lock screen, so perhaps developers will be able to build some.

Hey phone, I’m talking to you!
New to iOS 5 is a function I haven’t yet seen in the beta operating system; from what I read on our live-blog of the Apple event, Siri Assistant wowed the audience. Near as I can tell, only the new iPhone 4S will be able to use Siri, because only the new phone has the A5 dual-core processor and perhaps enough RAM to make Siri work. Here’s an official Apple demonstration video of Siri:

Android owners likely already know that voice control has long been part of Google’s native platform since 2009. And third-party options with improved speech-to-text recognition, such as Vlingo and Nuance, are also available for Android. I’ve used them all, and while they work well, Siri looks to go a bit further due to its contextual integration with several iOS apps.

Instead of being an afterthought or add-on to the platform, Siri is more accurately described as part of the platform. I expect Apple to expand Siri’s integration over time as well. And unlike the Android voice action solutions, Apple will market the heck out of Siri’s capabilities and likely do more to bring voice recognition to mainstream users as a result.

Hardware wars
As far as the iPhone 4S itself, all the hardware changes are on the inside. Among the more prominent upgrades:

Apple’s A5 dual-core processor
8-megapixel backlit illuminated camera sensor with f/2.4 aperture and 1080p video recording
World phone with CDMA and GSM support, including a 14.4 Mbps HSPA+ radio
8 hours of talk time; 6 hours of 3G talk time; 9 hours of Wi-Fi browsing; 40 hours of listening to music

Many of these features can already be found in today’s Android phones in the price range. The Samsung Galaxy S II I recently showed off on video is a good example. It too has a dual-core chip; the 8-megapixel camera is superb both for stills and 1080p video; and it supports even faster download speeds –up to 21 Mbps — for the same $199 price in a 16 GB model. And that’s just one example; there are a number of capable Android phones that compete well with the iPhone 4S hardware, not to mention many more coming soon.

Not that I’m calling the iPhone 4S an incremental upgrade, but it reminds me of Apple’s jump from iPhone 3G to iPhone 3GS, which is now free on contract. Along with software updates, Apple bumped up the hardware specifications a bit. Android was just really starting to take off at that time, so it didn’t have the momentum or market share it currently holds. Times are different now. While the Apple faithful will very likely upgrade to an iPhone 4S, I don’t see the device stealing away much of the Android crowd, because the platforms are more similar now than they were two years ago.

Will I make the switch? Sorta, kinda, maybe.
My personal take as an everyday Android user? I may purchase the iPhone 4S, but I’d swap the SIM for use with a high-end Android phone like the Galaxy S II. Even though the iPhone uses a microSIM, I have verified it will work in some phones that take a full-sized SIM card. Most folks have one primary phone, so I’m in the small minority here, of course. But as it stands now, I use an iPod touch for work purposes to test iOS apps.

Had the new iPhone come with a larger display, I’d surely buy one to supplement Android. The same 3.5-inch screen as the iPhone 4 is a downer to me, but I have to say that Siri, the faster processor (used in my iPad 2), iOS 5 improvements and the updated camera might push me to purchase an iPhone 4S; there’s room for both platforms in my life.

Hardware vs. software cycles
One last, related thought pertains to the speed of advancement between iOS and Android. The 12- to 16-month refresh cycles for iPhones are becoming much slower than the constant onslaught of new Android phones and hardware. Chris Pirillo tweeted an insightful tidbit on this:

Follow @ChrisPirillo@ChrisPirilloChris Pirillo
Honestly? Apple has been "behind" with tech specs since the first iPhone. And ya know what? THEY'RE STILL AHEAD.
about 21 hours ago via Twitter for MacReplyRetweetFavorite

He makes a valid point that I can’t argue with, but I have to wonder: If Google can gain a little more control over hardware, perhaps with its purchase of Motorola, will Apple’s growth continue at the same pace or might Android leverage faster hardware cycles to offer the perception of superior products to the masses?

If I get a new iPhone 4S, that might be the first question I pose to Siri.

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Apple unveils the 'Cards' app during its October 4 keynote

Apple today announced a new mobile app called “Cards” that will allow users to turn any photo taken with an iPhone or iPad into a greeting card. After the card is designed, Apple will print and mail it anywhere in the world for $2.99.

Gee, that rings a bell.

San Francisco-based startup Sincerely launched earlier this year with a mobile app called Postagram that does a remarkably similar thing. The Postagram app — which is now available on both iOS and Android devices — lets users add a short message to any photo from Facebook, Instagram or their mobile device. Postagram then prints the cards and sends them anywhere in the world for 99 cents.

I gave Sincerely CEO Matt Brezina a call this morning to find out how he was feeling about his company’s new heavyweight competitor. According to him, the team at Sincerely knew this day would come — and have been preparing for it since the company’s inception. “I can’t say I was surprised that they did it. Apple’s been offering photo book services with the iPhoto desktop application for years now,” he said. “When we started this company, we talked about how Apple would eventually take what they did on iPhoto and bring it to the iPhone.”

Size matters
A Postagram postcard

So now that Apple has entered the space, how exactly does Sincerely plan to maintain its edge?  For starters, the startup can try to use its small size as an asset. “Our core focus is to let our users send simple thoughtful gifts from the mobile phone. That’s all we think about day and night,” Brezina said. “If our users want something special for, say, the holiday season, we can turn that around in weeks. For a company like Apple it would take months or even a year.”

He was also quick to point out that Sincerely’s offerings stretch a bit beyond postcard apps for the iPhone. In June the company debuted its PopBooth app that essentially turns iPads into photo booths, and in August it released an API to let developers build their own photo printing apps that run on Sincerely infrastructure. In addition, the Postagram app is also available on Android — something Brezina is happy his team prioritized early on. “Thank God we support multiple operating systems,” he said.

Diversify early, diversify often
At Sincerely’s launch back in April, Postagram worked only alongside of the Instagram app. I wrote at the time: “As clever as Postagram is (and I think it’s really clever), basing one’s business on a third-party’s software API is never a smart bet for the long term.” Soon after its launch, Sincerely was smart to quickly expand its technology to work with more platforms — integrating with Facebook photos, launching an Android app, and so on. Those early choices could turn out to be the company’s saving grace.

If today’s news proves anything, it’s that it can be dangerous to base a business on another company’s software or its hardware. It is a great time to be an entrepreneur, but with profits at companies such as Apple higher than ever, it’s also a great time to be a big powerful corporation. To avoid being trampled by industry giants, smart startups should take full advantage of their agility by hedging bets across different APIs, operating systems and devices much as possible.

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Apple is not done taking on application makers with iOS 5. The iPhone manufacturer just announced it is launching a new location-sharing feature called Find My Friends, that will allow users to easily share their location with other users.

The details are still coming in but users will be able to share their location with friends and find out where their friends and family are in real-time. Users can specify when they want to share and what time they want to stop pushing out their location. It reportedly has simple privacy controls and parental restrictions. It’s a free addition as part of iOS 5 and will likely just work between iOS devices like iMessage does.

Although it’s just iOS only, it’s another case in which Apple is not afraid to include a feature that other companies have built their businesses off of. I recently wrote about Life360 and Location Labs and their family location-sharing services and apps. Loopt and Google’s Latitude also include location sharing. These apps are cross platform so they can appeal to a wider array of consumers. But Apple might be able to pull away some users who have an iOS household or have a lot of friends on iOS.

I don’t think existing location services need to fear immediately unless iOS can overtake Android and become the default smartphone for users.  But I’d be more worried for paid services like Location Labs, which provides a white-label service to AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile.

But Find My Friends could also, if done right, help ease people into the idea of location sharing, which is still a privacy concern for many. By giving more granular controls, it might help convince people of the utility of sharing this information. And it might open up opportunities for app makers to go up market and stay ahead of Apple by offering more premium experiences. That’s the feeling Instapaper maker Marco Arment, who said there’s plenty of room in the market for Apple and its new Reader time-shifting functionality.

But again, it’s a good reminder that platform holders can shake things up and introduce features that can compete against existing third-party offerings. It might shine a light on location-sharing, which can be good for many location-based services but it could also mean more competition for apps and services, who will need to step up their game.

Image courtesy of the Verge

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A handful of code in iTunes 10.5 beta 9 suggests that Apple may soon start allowing customers to rent apps from the App store, according to The Tech Erra. If a rental system were put into place, it could cut down on money spent on apps that customers never use, which could reduce resentment customers feel toward developers when an app doesn’t work the way they thought it would.

A few strings in the iTunes beta code appear to be pop-up messages to notify customers about the state of rented apps: "Apps are automatically removed from your iTunes library at the end of the rental period" and "This app will be deleted from your computer" are a couple of the included statements.

A rental system through the App Store would be similar to the try-before-you-buy program that Amazon currently offers in its own Android Appstore. None of the language uncovered in the iTunes beta indicates whether rentals would carry a price or be free for their limited run.

The text does suggest that Apple will favor the consumer in rental transactions, in that customers won’t default into an app purchase at the end of a rental period; instead, the app will be removed from their devices. When so many negative reviews focus on an app not doing what a buyer expected it to (through either misdirection or misunderstanding), rentals could create a more positive app shopping experience.

But even with fewer negative reviews, developers could still lose out. Most iPhone users never use an app after the first download, according to a (now aging) study, so customers could dip in and out of apps they only need once without any monetary consequences.

The report is unconfirmed by Apple, as the company did not respond to Ars' requests for comment. If Apple plans to launch a rental program, we’ll likely hear about it at the iPhone event scheduled this week. Ars will be reporting live from the event Tuesday at 10AM PDT.




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Google, Apple and Facebook are the tech trifecta, so we found facts that could help you land a job at one of these companies. No doubt, there will be stiff competition: Nearly one in four young professionals wants to work at Google, for instance, but there’s more room in the Googleplex for software developers. Facebook gets 250,000 applications a year and sifts through them to find the cream of the crop, preferring those who build things, whether they’re apps or organizations. And Apple wants, well, Apple fanboys to help create the next generation of gadgetry, but you ought to have a reference from an existing Appler.

The tech field is booming, and the industry needs bright young talent to keep innovating. Some facts:

An IT manager can make more than $110,000 a year
Android app developers are especially coveted
Data mining and statistical analysis are ideal collegiate specializations

So, if you’re like most other young professionals and are looking to nab a job at any of those three companies, take a gander at the infographic below. There are tips on how to optimize your resume, how to land an interview and how to impress the HR team. If you’ve landed a job at any of these companies, feel free to offer tips and insights in the comments below.

Social Media Job Listings

Every week we post a list of social media and web job opportunities. While we publish a huge range of job listings, we’ve selected some of the top social media job opportunities from the past two weeks to get you started. Happy hunting!

Marketing Manager: New Product Development at The Motley Fool in Alexandria, Virginia
Lead Developer – Director of Technology at Attention in New York
Product Manager – Local Business Products at Yelp, Inc in San Francisco

Infographic courtesy of MastersDegree.net

More About: apple, Facebook, Google, infographic, job search series, Tech
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Samsung has agreed to make a number of changes to its Galaxy Tab 10.1 to keep the devices from getting banned for sale in Australia before the holiday shopping season. During hearings in Sydney, lawyers for the company agreed to remove two multitouch features patented by Apple in order to get the device on the market as soon as possible. On Friday, Samsung also offered Apple a proposed settlement agreement, which would let Samsung sell the Galaxy Tab 10.1 as soon as next week.

Apple and Samsung are currently embroiled in as many as 23 lawsuits globally after Apple accused Samsung of "slavishly copying" its designs for the iPhone and iPad in its Galaxy S smartphones and Galaxy Tab tablets. Apple has been been requesting preliminary injunctions in a number of markets where it has filed claims against Samsung, including the US, the Netherlands, Germany, and Australia.

So far, Apple has been awarded preliminary injunctions against the Galaxy Tab in Germany and against some Galaxy S smartphones in The Netherlands. The hearings this week in Australia concern Apple's request for a preliminary injunction there, which could be decided as early as next week.

Throughout the proceedings, the numerous claims Apple brought were essentially reduced to three patent infringement issues, including two for certain multitouch-related features and one that relates to how multitouch-capable touchscreens are manufactured. Samsung agreed on Thursday to remove features that use certain heuristics to filter out "accidental" touch input as well as the "zoom bounce" effect that the iPhone uses when zooming past the minimum or maximum zoom level.

On Friday, Samsung told the court that it also made proposed settlement offer to Apple. The settlement, if Apple agrees to forgo its request for a preliminary injunction, would allow Samsung to launch the Galaxy Tab 10.1 as early as next week. The details haven't been made public, but it could at least bring a temporary truce while Apple presses for a full hearing by the end of the year. Apple's attorneys said of the proposed agreement that "[o]ur friend's inconvenience would be minimised and we would be comforted."

The hearing will continue again on Tuesday, and the judge has encouraged Apple and Samsung to settle the issue before her final decision is entered tentatively by the end of next week.




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The gadget fixer-uppers at iFixit took delivery of a Thunderbolt Display—supplies are so constrained that Apple's flagship Chicago location doesn't even have one on display yet—and promptly took it apart in the name of science. What they found inside is basically a 27" iMac sans Intel processor and internal storage.

"Both sides of the logic board are packed with enough chips that it's hard to believe there's no computer inside this display," iFixit's Miro Djuric told Ars. Among the hardware on the logic board is a Light Ridge Thunderbolt controller, Broadcom Gigabit Ethernet controller, several USB 2.0 controller and hub chips, and an LSI open host controller interface. Like the 27" Cinema Display, it also features a 49W class D audio amplifier that drives 2 full range stereo speakers and a tiny embedded subwoofer. The included FaceTime camera is capable of full 720p HD resolution, an upgrade from the camera in previous displays.






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Amazon’s Kindle Fire is what everyone expected: A small tablet, mostly for consuming media, watching video, playing games, reading Kindle e-books, browsing the web, and goofing around in apps. It is also cheaper than expected, at $199 — less than half the price of Apple’s iPad.

There are some nice touches, like the “Silk” web browser, which does some of the page-crunching in the cloud, so web pages should theoretically load faster. And the software actually looks decent. Amazon isn’t screwing around.

So: How big of a threat is the Kindle Fire to the iPad?

I don’t see the Kindle Fire significantly disrupting Apple’s iPad business. I think both devices will sell well, and can easily coexist. I don’t think Apple will have any trouble finding iPad buyers, and I think the $199 price tag will attract many people to the Kindle Fire.

For now, the Kindle Fire isn’t as useful of a device — it’s a simple entertainment pad, whereas the iPad is already shaping up as the PC of the future. They will probably attract different buyers, and right now, the market is so small and nascent that there is easily room for both of them. Some people may buy a Kindle Fire instead of an iPad, but many others will want the richer iPad experience, and some may buy both and use them for different things.

Looking forward, we’ll have to see how much Amazon can do with the Kindle Fire software platform — both the OS and app ecosystem — and how tablet pricing shakes out.

My hunch is that Apple will remain well ahead of Amazon in software, hardware, and ecosystem, and therefore the iPad will continue to be the “premium” tablet indefinitely. Amazon may help force Apple to lower entry-level iPad prices, and Apple may even have to make a smaller iPad someday. But Amazon is not likely to take over Apple’s spot at the top of the tablet market.

Bottom line: The Kindle Fire isn’t much of an iPad threat yet. The real trouble will be for companies like Barnes & Noble, RIM, and Samsung, which are trying to sell 7-inch tablets that either cost considerably more or have poorer content and apps ecosystems.

Also: 500 days with the iPad

It's been announced.

Invitations to Apple's iPhone event on October 4th have been sent out, and we asked famed numerology expert Helmut Weltschmertz (see photo at right) of the Koblenz Institute of Numerology and Used Car Sales to tell us exactly what the numbers and symbols on the invitation meant. Here's what Dr. Weltschmertz was able to surmise for TUAW:

The Calendar icon -- "Here, Apple is telling us that there will be "tues" ("two" in some ancient foreign tongue lost in history) devices to be announced. The number 4 is below the word Tuesday, indicating that both new iPhones are 'raised above' or more capable than the iPhone 4. Some might say that this is indicating the date of the event, but there's much more to this icon than meets the eye."



The Clock icon -- "The hands of the clock are pointing at both the number 10 and the number 12. Actually, the second hand is also pointing at the number 12. Add those numbers up -- 12 + 12 + 10 -- and you get the number 34. This is very telling ... Steve Jobs' birth mother Joanne Simpson was remarried to George Simpson when she was 34 years old, which proves that the government is covering up everything that happened at Area 51 in 1966. But I digress. There's a progression there. 3 ... 4 ... 5! Yes! The iPhone 5 will be announced!"

The Maps icon -- "280 in the shield on this icon is an obvious indication that iOS 5 will be released and has 280 new or improved features. The meaning of the intersection of the yellow and orange lines is also obvious to anyone with half a brain -- it means that Apple's new products will come in two colors, orange and yellow. The red pin signifies that this icon might fall off of the web page and someone stuck a pin into it to keep that from happening."

The Phone icon -- "Ah, yes, the number 1. It can mean many things. One is the loneliest number, and its location on the upper right-hand corner of the icon has special meaning. That points to the northeast, and in the olden days of America, that's where witches were burned -- in the northeast part of the country. It is obvious to anyone that there is magic and witchcraft involved in the design of the new phones. The green pinstripes on the background portend an event where all of the Apple executives will be wearing suits. The white phone icon even has deep meaning. Note that it looks exactly like a silhouette of a fetus, which points to the birth of a new era of technology, cheap beer, and world peace."

Alrighty, then.

We thank Dr. Weltschmertz for his, uh, insights into the Apple event invitation.
The secret numerology behind the iPhone event invitation originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Tue, 27 Sep 2011 12:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Apple has officially announced its iPhone event, to be held on Oct. 4 as previously reported. The event will take place at Apple’s Cupertino Campus in California, beginning at 10 a.m. PDT (1 p.m. EDT), according to press invitations issued by Apple on Tuesday.

The invitation features a depiction of iPhone home screen icons, and the phrase “Let’s talk iPhone,” so there’s no doubt the next smartphone from Apple will be on the agenda. We’ll be sure to be there watching closely next Tuesday, and will bring you all the news coming out of the event.

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The Facebook iPad application has become a hostage in a tense negotiation between Apple and Facebook.

While the world awaits Apple’s next iPhone, the Android smartphone juggernaut continues to gain momentum, according to new figures from Nielsen. Android smartphones accounted for 43 percent of all smartphone owned in the U.S. as of August, up from 40 percent in July. And among recent purchases within the past three months, 56 percent of them have been Android devices, said Nielsen, which presented the data at GigaOM’s Mobilize Conference.

The iPhone continues to hold its ground with 28 percent of both the entire smartphone market share and recent acquisitions. RIM, meanwhile, slipped in overall U.S. market share to 18 percent, down one percentage point from 19 percent in July while it has 9 percent of recent acquisitions.

These figures could change quickly with the arrival of Apple’s next iPhone. With the usual annual summer iPhone launch pushed back at least into fall, it’s likely that there’s a lot of pent up demand for the next model. And with the device expected to debut on Sprint , it should open up even more sales opportunities. Apple, in fact, has to be pretty confident, considering it hasn’t lost any ground even with an aging iPhone 4 still selling well against an army of much newer Android devices.

But the Nielsen figures show that the Android train has kept on chugging and may have benefited from a later start for the next iPhone. A recent Nielsen survey found that among consumers expecting to buy a smartphone in the next year, both Android and iPhone got about one-third of the consumers. But without a new iPhone to buy, some smartphone buyers may have sprung for an Android. It will be interesting to see how the market changes with an iPhone available on three of the top carriers in the U.S. Apple got a boost when the iPhone debuted on Verizon and could see another increase, though probably not as big, when it launches on Sprint.

And the entire smartphone market continues to grow with 43 percent of all devices now smartphones, up from 40 percent in July. Among recent purchases within the last three months, smartphones now make up 58 percent of all mobile phone buys. That means we’re continuing to inch closer to the day when smartphones will make up more than 50 percent of all mobile phones. Nielsen had predicted that milestone would be reached by the end of this year and it may still happen with a big holiday season ahead.

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If Samsung really does plan to take a bolder stance in its intellectual property battle with Apple, it best clean up its own operations first. Because it’s tough to take the company’s claims of commitment to innovation and distinctive design seriously when it really does seem to have a penchant for … er … referencing the work of others.

Consider the wall of apps in this photo of the company’s new shop-in-a-shop in Italy’s Centro Sicilia, which appears to feature not only the iOS icon for Apple’s mobile Safari browser, but the icon for the company’s iOS App Store — three instances of it.

Embarrassing, particularly given Apple’s allegations that Samsung “slavishly” copied the design of its iPhone and iPad devices. It’s hard to imagine there’s a reasonable explanation for this. Samsung phones don’t support iOS apps and I can’t imagine Apple is making the company a version of Safari.

Now it’s possible this was a display left over from some other event or product, but still.

Samsung has not yet responded to a request for comment.

Apple may be on the verge of opening up its Japanese iPhone sales to another cellular service provider, ending SoftBank’s exclusive hold on the popular smartphone. A new report says that KDDI au, one of Japan’s three major mobile carriers, could get the iPhone 5 beginning next year.

Nikkei Business Online (via TechCrunch) is the source of the report, and also notes that the iPhone 5 will support CDMA as well as GSM, which could open up the possibility that NTT DoCoMo, Japan’s largest mobile carrier, might also be able to get in on the action sometime down the road. Japan is one of the last major markets where iPhone availability is still limited to one carrier. China, another lucrative market where that’s currently the case, also seems to be on the verge of entering a partnership with a second provider.

A growing trend
Early this year, Apple opened up iPhone sales to a second provider in the U.S. when it introduced the CDMA iPhone 4 on Verizon’s  network. It also started selling the iPhone 4 factory unlocked, so iPhone buyers could take their business (albeit minus 3G speeds) to T-Mobile, which it turns out has a very high number of customers using Apple’s smartphone.

Apple’s trajectory with exclusivity reflects a very smart and elaborate plan which helped make the iPhone the success it is today, and now that exclusive carrier deals are ending, Apple stands ready to reap the rewards it has sown.

Why exclusivity used to matter
In the beginning, exclusivity served to help Apple gain concessions from cellular providers it might otherwise not have been able to negotiate; the iPhone carries no on-device carrier branding, unlike most other phones, and also doesn’t come with a lot of pre-installed bloatware from network operators, the way most non-iOS phones do. Apple essentially cut carriers out of the software and services side of the equation, and even though it had its marquee brand and the success of the iPod backing up the potential success of an iPhone, it wasn’t necessarily a “sure thing.”

Aside from appeasing carriers, exclusivity also made it easier for Apple to guarantee a uniform experience across all its iPhone devices in the early days, but more importantly, it helped promote an air of scarcity around the phone. The iPhone is by no means a limited edition collectible, and Apple was doubtless happy to sell as many as it could produce, but making it available on only one carrier at launch helped it feel like a rarity without any artificial limitations on production numbers.

Why exclusivity no longer matters
But exclusivity has exhausted its early usefulness. Carriers no longer need convincing that Apple’s model can be lucrative for them, even if it does mediate their relationship with customers to some extent. Apple doesn’t need to make concessions to negotiate with carriers anymore; if anything, the reverse is true.

Also, the illusion of scarcity is no longer necessary to make Apple’s products appealing in the eyes of buyers; even after more than a year since introduction, the iPhone 4 is the highest selling Apple smartphone in the U.S. and iPhone owners are the most likely to stay with their handset maker more of any smartphone buyers.

On the flip side, ending exclusivity across most major markets opens Apple’s business to a huge number of new potential customers. Android devices are available in more markets and on more networks than Apple’s iPhone. Anything that helps narrow that gap should help Apple win back market share from Google’s mobile OS.

The staged ending of exclusivity also means that Apple effectively gets a brand new launch every few years. An iPhone might not be totally new anymore, but it’s new to a network’s subscribers if an exclusivity deal was previously in place on a competing network. That will help it appear more attractive to customers tied to their carrier who’ve been watching and waiting as their friends on other networks had all the fun. Restricted access breeds interest; Apple likely anticipated that when it penned the original iPhone exclusivity deals with AT&T and others around the world.

Everybody wins
In the end, we all benefit from Apple’s approach to exclusivity. Consumers get a pure iPhone experience, mostly unadulterated by carrier demands, software and restrictions. Apple gets more control over its product, and a staged global rollout of its handset that keeps momentum rolling in its favor. Carriers, too, benefit. Even those that suffered as rivals rode the early success of the iPhone now get a chance to steal some of that thunder at the expense of their competitors; Verizon has AT&T’s history of sub-par iPhone service in major urban areas to parlay into switched subscribers, for instance.

The iPhone 5 will be a massive hit when it arrives (most likely next month), but if it also comes with expanded availability thanks to the continued erosion of exclusivity deals with carriers worldwide (and at home in the U.S., too), sales of Apple’s latest smartphone should easily smash previous records. This is definitely the one to watch.

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U.S. Wireless Data Market: Q4 and Year-End 2008Mobile payments: forecasts, technologies and opportunitiesMobile Q1: All Eyes on Tablets, T-Mobile and AT&T

The verdict is rolling in. Commentator after commentator is ruling Google+ a failed experiment.

Dan Reimold, Google+ Social Media Upstart ‘Worse Than a Ghost Town’

Google+ is dead. At worst, in the coming months, it will literally fade away to nothing or exist as Internet plankton. At best, it will be to social networking what Microsoft’s Bing is to online search: perfectly adequate; fun to stumble onto once in awhile; and completely irrelevant to the mainstream web. To be clear, I do not buy the beta argument anymore. G+ still being in beta is like Broadway’s “Spiderman: Turn Off the Dark” still being in previews. It has premiered. Months have passed. Audiences have tried it. Critics have weighed in. It is a show — just not a very entertaining one. Worse Than a Ghost Town As it stands, my Circles are sparse. The stream of updates has basically run dry — reduced to one buddy who regularly writes. My initial excitement about signing on and inviting people to join me has waned. Nowadays, I apparently get tired just thinking about it.

I paraphrased Rainbow Russell in the title, saying its not even haunted, because it’s a ghost town that was never really inhabited.

And this is another proof of the Rule Of Switching:

To get someone to drop an existing application that does X for a new application that does X, the new application must do X an order of magnitude better, because the costs of switching are too high otherwise.

I also known as ‘is the juice worth the squeeze?’

And, of course, with social apps the costs are the highest.

What do we expect Google will do? The only caveat I have about the imminent death of Google+ is what I wrote at the time of the launch:

Stowe Boyd, Life Is A Mosaic, Not A Monolith

Apps are the tiles of the new mosaic, our composite life online.And Google+ is a deft straddle, with one foot in the old world and the other in the new. Google+ is currently a browser based system, but it is relatively easy to imagine the core functionality implemented in a next generation Android, and all the tools — like Circles and Hangouts — accessed as complementary apps, along with dozens or hundreds of others built by Google or a growing ecology of developers.Of course, Apple will respond in kind, and is perhaps a step or two ahead with its Twitter partnership, and its plan to integrate Twitter into iOS 5. So we can expect a similar flowering of iOS 5 apps that build on a core of social capabilities, and that will allow app developers to leverage profiles, following, streams, and other foundational social componentry at the OS level.By lowering the core elements of sociality into the infrastructure, Google and Apple will be setting the stage for a new generation of app development, and therefore, user experience. Which will mean an acceleration of the transition for us, as users, from monolith to mosaic.Google+ shows that Google is going to make that transition, and it will be Apple and Google that will be defining the next ten years of the social revolution, as a result. Facebook and Microsoft may be fated to fall into each others arms, just to catch up, or survive at all.

Of course, the failure of Google+ as a monolithic competitor to Facebook, today, doesn’t bode well for Google’s future efforts, when it might be able to shift into a different modality, with apps as the tiles in a mosaic. 

They better roll out a socialized version of Android pretty quickly, or they will have fumbled the future again.

related

The Influencers Verdict: the Google+ example (loiclemeur.com) — Loic says its too early to tell if Google+, you need to wait for the average people to use it not just early adopters , he’s having a great time in Google+, and asks Reimold ‘who are you, anyway?’. Not convincing to me, Loic.
What Facebook needs to do in order to populate the Subscriptions ghost town (thenextweb.com) — Macale suggests that Facebook Subscriptions is an attempt to adopt Google+ semantics, and its not being adopted widely: a failure, or too soon to say?

Now that my 6-year old daughter has begun to recognize 3-letter words and is curious to know the spelling of any new word she comes across, I am hoping that she will pick up the habit of reading. Reading printed books, not the e-book kind. That hasn’t stopped me from helping her with some interactive learning books & apps on the iPad. My earlier list of must-have iPad apps for kids had a few activity based apps, spelling apps. This one has books mainly and a few activity based apps – all making for great learning though.

Blue Hat, Green Hat: $4.99

The description over at iTunes says: OOPS…” Blue Hat, Green Hat, Sandra Boynton’s famous and funny book, comes alive with sound and zestily ingenious interactivity. This wonderfully clever digital book app will surprise kids and grownups alike. Turkeys may also enjoy it, if they can ever figure out how to turn the dang thing on. Apart from the amazing interactivity, what I liked is the fact that the narration is in a British accent – thank God for that.

Drawing Pad: $1.99

An extremely easy-to-use drawing app, Drawing Pad comes with options that simulate crayons, pencils and paint brushes. Kids can add some stickers for some extra fun. As the PR blurb says: Cheaper than a box of crayons! Drawing Pad is a mobile art studio designed exclusively for the iPad! The beautiful user interface puts the fun into creating art

The Going To Bed Book: $2.99

Even better than the ‘Blue Hat, Green Hat’ one, this is another winner from Loud Crow Interactive. The little discoveries that kids make as they read along, poke at the characters is joyful to say the least.

Meegenius: Free

While its a free app, most of the books available are paid (from $1.99). The books are devoid of any ‘interactivity’ and pop ups which is actually refreshingly different…more for parents, perhaps?

Rapunzel: $3.99

This one’s the Avatar of e-books: full of popups, 3D animations and so on. Some may find this distracting as the kids are more interested in the effects than the story.

Read Me Stories: Free

One of my favorites, the app encourages you to open it daily – in order to add books to your ‘library’. Many of the books are free with paid versions starting at $0.99. The books have an element of interactivity in them – the illustrations are top class, worthy of the slick iOS interface.

Touchy Books: Free

Like MeeGenius and Read Me Stories, this ones free too with in-app purchases galore. The stories have interactive elements but not as distracting as the ones in Rapunzel.

If you own an iPad and have a toddler or pre-schooler at home, give these a try. Such apps reiterate the key success factor of the iPad for me: great apps that cater to a variety of needs, are slick as hell and so easy to use that even a pre-schooler can master them. Not just master them but crave for them. OK, that may not be healthy as I would still like kids to develop a love for the printed book. But these apps go a long way in encouraging their need to learn in away only a device like the iPad can. There, mandatory plug for Apple done too.

Spend some time on the subway in Shanghai, and you'll see that despite the challenge of having to use thousands of characters, Chinese commuters are among the most fluent texters in the world — unless they're using iPhones.

Writing a text message in Chinese requires typing a few letters, then either allowing the phone to enter what it thinks is the intended character or selecting the character from a string of choices. It's a quick and simple process on the smartest phones, but it's laborious on an iPhone, where the software isn't as good and the characters are small and easy to miss.

If you've ever watched someone trying to text from an iPhone with one hand while hanging on in a packed Line 1 car, you know why, when it comes to texting, most Chinese prefer to put away their iPhones and pull out their other phones. In fact, the Chinese slang term for the iPhone is jieji, or "street phone," which might be better translated as "dress phone." It's something you show off, like an expensive watch, when you want to impress. In China, the iPhone is a fashion accessory.

Although Apple's China sales amounted to $3.8 billion in the second quarter of this year, a product's initial impact is no guarantee of sustained success. Recent history is filled with stories of alluring products that took off at first but stalled because of issues such as ease of use or compatibility. Think of Microsoft's WebTV, the unseating of Movable Type in blogging platforms, Sparq's portable mass storage, and the Mighty Mouse within Apple's own suite of products. These failures represent a gap between how companies think consumers will use a product and the way consumers use it. The size of this gap is a powerful predictor of product sustainability, and unfortunately for Apple, the gap in China appears to be quite large.

You might find it difficult to believe that Apple, which represents the epitome of functional user design, is selling something in China that is clunky and unusable. But as a latecomer to China, Apple seems remarkably indifferent to its users there. Given the current and potential size of this market, having only four official stores in the entire country seems almost irresponsible. Despite his incredible success as Apple's two-time CEO, one of Steve Jobs's biggest mistakes was never going to China. The company's strategy of centralizing product design and development in the U.S. stands in stark contrast to that of successful China veterans like GE, GM, SABMiller, and KFC, whose investments in highly localized operations help them develop products that truly satisfy local needs.

In an article in the current issue of Harvard Business Review, we show how GE and other savvy companies rely on what we call "global bridgers" to find and develop innovative ideas in emerging markets. This is exactly the kind of expertise that Apple lacks. Without that expertise, Apple has no way to notice the dissatisfaction of Chinese texters — or, for that matter, the emergence of fake Apple stores and the explosive growth of the HiPhone and other knockoffs. It seems to have no mechanisms for getting this important market information to headquarters.

As a start, Apple needs to take a page out of GE's book and get its executives out in the trenches. GE recently reorganized its business, moving top-level executives into emerging markets. Even if none of Apple's California-centric executives are willing to live semi-permanently in China or other high-growth markets, they should certainly engage in extended visits. At the very least, someone needs to take a Shanghai subway ride.

Second, Apple must be serious about adapting its product for Chinese texters. This will require building strong in-country design capabilities.

Third, Apple needs to build out service and support for its products in China. Part of the appeal of Apple products in mature markets is the company's warranties and excellent support. By largely leaving support and service up to others ($3.8 billion in sales can't be serviced through four stores), Apple risks damaging its brand in China and is missing another opportunity to gather extremely valuable data from Chinese customers.

If the past decade has taught us anything about doing business in high-growth markets, it is that you can't expect your mature-market products to fully satisfy emerging-market users. You must invest in on-the-ground capabilities. This is an expensive lesson that has already been learned by veterans of these markets, but Apple, apparently, hasn't learned it yet.

"I contribute ideas, sure. Why would I be there if I didn't?"

Apple's CEO always wanted to get something great to the customer without any obstacles – except that they should pay
Ten years is, of course, a long time in media. Ten years ago, if you wanted to download some music, your best bet was Napster or one of the filesharing systems such as LimeWire or KaZaA. There were legal services, but they were so dire they wouldn't pass much muster today: there was PressPlay and MusicNet (from rival groups of record companies), which required $15 a month subscriptions for low-quality streaming (when most people had dialup connections, not today's broadband). You couldn't burn to CD. They were stuffed with restrictive software to prevent you sharing the songs.
What happened? Steve Jobs happened, mainly. The hardware and design team at Apple came up with the iPod (initially intended to be a way to sell more Macintosh computers), and then followed the iTunes Music Store – a great way to tie people to Apple by selling music. In 2003 Jobs persuaded the music companies – which wouldn't license their songs to bigger names like Microsoft – to go with him because, he said, Apple was tiny (which it was, at the time). The risk if people did start sharing songs from the store was minimal, he argued. The record labels looked at Apple's tiny market share (a few per cent of the PC market) and reckoned they'd sell about a million songs a year, so they signed up.
Apple sold a million in the first week of the iTunes Music Store being open (and only in the US). It sold 3m within a month. It's never looked back.
Nowadays Apple sells TV shows, films, books, apps, as well as music. We take the explosion in available content for granted. But without Jobs, it's likely we wouldn't be here at all; his negotiating skill is the thing that Apple, and possibly the media industry, will miss the most, because he got them to open up to new delivery mechanisms.
Content companies have been reluctant to let their products move to new formats if they aren't the inventors, or at least midwives. Witness Blu-ray, a Sony idea which wraps up the content so you can't ever get it off the disc (at least in theory); or 3D films. Yet neither is quite living up to its promise, and part of that comes down to people wanting to be able to move the content around – on an iPod, iPhone, iPad or even a computer – in ways the content doesn't allow. Apps downloaded directly to your mobile? Carriers would never have allowed it five years ago. Flat-rate data plans? Ditto. But all good for content creators.
Jobs pried open many content companies' thinking, because his focus was always on getting something great to the customer with as few obstacles as possible. In that sense, he was like a corporate embodiment of the internet; except he thought people should pay for what they got. He always, always insisted you should pay for value, and that extended to content too. The App and Music Store remains one of the biggest generators of purely digital revenue in the world, and certainly the most diverse; while Google's Android might be the fastest-selling smartphone mobile OS, its Market generates pitiful revenues, and I haven't heard of anyone proclaiming their successes from selling music, films or books through Google's offerings.
Jobs's resignation might look like the end of an era, and for certain parts of the technology industry it is. For the content industries, it's also a loss: Jobs was a champion of getting customers who would pay you for your stuff. The fact that magazine apps like The Daily haven't set the world alight (yet?) isn't a failure of the iPad (which is selling 9m a quarter while still only 15 months old; at the same point in the iPod's life, just 219,000 were sold in the financial quarter, compared with the 22m – 100 times more – of its peak). It's more like a reflection of our times.
So if you're wondering how Jobs's departure affects the media world, consider that it's the loss of one of the biggest boosters of paid-for content the business ever had. Who's going to replace that?
Steve JobsAppleComputingAppsDigital mediaMedia businessCharles Arthurguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Ultimately only No.50 made the difference #Apple

Metropolitan Transportation Authority officials offered a glimpse Monday morning at the Apple store proposed for the train station, near the terminal’s east staircase. Apple plans to start building the gadget shop immediately, should the agency’s board give its approval Wednesday. Construction is expected to take about four months.



A new retail strategy implemented in one of the prime locations in New York City. One of the foremost in modern industrial design giants in one of the beloved historic designs in the world; a perfect match. I love the last three lines of the article.

All you need is Garage Band and iTunes.