Sanjay Mathur, Silicon Valley Data Science’s founder and chief executive officer, joined Apple as part of the move. He leads “strategy and analytics initiatives for a group at Apple,” according to his LinkedIn profile. About 20 data scientists from the firm joined Apple, according to their LinkedIn profiles. They’re working on analytics for ad-related initiatives, which may include optimizing App Store ads.

I’d be interested to know what data Apple is going to use to improve its products. Is it actual data that will improve the iPhone on a personal level, or is it general data from its customers to improve its services?

Discord has been around since May, 2015, and was built as a platform for gamers to chat. It features, text, audio, and video chatting, and can be tweaked to attain very high sound quality with zero extra noise. Discord is also built such that it can be used entirely inside a web browser, meaning your interview guests don’t have to download the Discord app. In fact, there’s a way to set it up so that your interview guests don’t even have to sign up for a Discord account.

This looks like an interesting solution for those that hate Skype.

Apple Inc (AAPL.O) will open a new campus as part of a 5-year, $30 billion U.S. investment plan and will make about $38 billion in one-time tax payments on its overseas cash, one of the largest corporate spending plans announced since the passage of a tax cut signed by U.S. President Donald Trump.

This is in addition to Apple giving employees $2500 bonuses today.

Mashable has reached out to both Apple and the local police to confirm whether the shuttles were being shot at, and we will update this when we hear back. At the time of publication, Apple and the local police were not able to confirm what object was shattering the windows. It could, of course, be rocks — but even rocks thrown at a moving vehicle on the highway could result in tragedy.

Be safe people.

Details of the project are being kept under tight wraps, but it would reportedly deal with a world’s battle against a monstrous, oppressive force. Should the project move forward, it would be Abrams’ first TV writing gig since “Fringe” in 2008.

J.J. Abrams is just the type of hitmaker that Apple needs if it’s going to make a big splash in the original series TV market.

A group of 21 U.S. state attorneys general filed suit to challenge the Federal Communications Commission’s decision to do away with net neutrality on Tuesday while Democrats said they needed just one more vote in the Senate to repeal the FCC ruling.

Good.

This compact 2×4 interface starts with esteemed UA conversion derived from UA’s flagship Apollo interface range, to sonically outperform anything in its class. With its Unison technology and built-in UAD-2 SOLO Core processor, you can record through classic audio tools including the 610 Tube Preamp, LA-2A and 1176 compressors, and a genuine Marshall Plexi amp plug-in — at near-zero latency, regardless of your audio software buffer setting.

This is an incredible looking interface and included plug-ins bundle.

This is a fascinating article at Forbes on how the FBI views Apple and its pro-privacy stance. It’s not as bad as I thought it would be.

Apple increased its share of smartphone activations in the fourth quarter of 2017, following the release of the iPhone 8, iPhone 8 Plus, and iPhone X, according to data shared with MacRumors by Consumer Intelligence Research Partners.

This is really interesting to me, especially considering all the rumors that the iPhone 8 sales were lower than expected because people were waiting for the iPhone X, and then iPhone X sales weren’t meeting expectations. It sounds like sales are doing fine, but we’ll find out during the next quarterly earnings.

The firm’s Alpha bike runs for about 100 km (62 miles) on a two-litre tank of hydrogen, a range similar to an electric bike, but a refill takes only minutes while e-bikes take hours to charge. One kilo of hydrogen holds about 600 times more energy than a one-kilo lithium battery.

The bikes are really expensive, and the charging stations even more expensive, but they do plan to bring these to the consumer market in the coming years.

TCM is the best way to manage your Macs, instantly. Take a screenshot, open an app, open a web page, reboot a computer, send a UNIX command, reboot to Windows — all without leaving your desk. TCM does all of this right from a web browser. No software to install on the administrator computer and accessible from anywhere.

Sounds intriguing.

We have some sponsorships available for the remainder of January and the month of February. If you would like to get your product or service in front of the wonderful readers of The Loop, get in touch with me and let’s make a deal. You can get more information on the sponsorships here.

This is the quote on Apple’s homepage:

“The time is always right to do what is right.” – Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Apple Park is just incredible.

The updated document from Apple includes info on Face ID, apps, networks, Apple Pay, and much more.

When my phone is in my pocket, I tend to hold it like a gadget security blanket, and I sometimes end up squeezing the side buttons. This was never a problem until I got the iPhone X, which has some new features tied to those side buttons. More specifically, if you press and hold both the power button and a volume button for a few seconds, your phone will call 911 and/or your designated emergency contacts.

I’ve never done this, but a friend of mine had an iPhone X in a car phone mount and it slid down during the drive, pushing both buttons, and automatically called 911.

As it continues to showcase new types of content in the App Store, Apple has recently started highlighting popular subscription applications with free trials. The new section is located under the “Apps” section in the App Store and aptly titled “Try It For Free.”

This is a great addition to the App Store.

This ad focuses on Portrait Lighting.

Ben Bajarin:

Gone are the days of Apple’s presence, or observably “winning” of CES, even though they are not present. It was impossible to walk the show floor and not see a vast array of interesting innovations which touched the Apple ecosystem in some way. Now it is almost impossible to walk the floor and see any products that touch the Apple ecosystem in any way except for an app on the iOS App Store. The Apple ecosystem is no longer the star of CES but instead things like Amazon’s Alexa voice platform, and now Google’s assistant voice platform is the clear ecosystem winners of CES.

Ben says that Apple is not doomed, and he’s right. However, this is not a good sign for Apple.

When design leads to friendship, and that friendship leads back to design, magic happens. This is the story of how an intern and her mentor designed Apple’s original emoji set and together changed the way people communicate around the world. It was also a project that led them to become lifelong friends, a key ingredient in the success of these tiny icons. In a nutshell, I was the intern and Raymond is my lifelong friend and mentor. In the course of three months, together we created some of the most widely used emoji: face with tears of joy, pile of poo, red heart, and party popper, plus around 460 additional ones. Later, as a full time Apple employee, I even got to create a few more.

It’s hard to remember a time without the ability to add an Emoji to a conversation on the iPhone.

For all you kids out there, gather round: history time. We once used to buy things called “rolls of film”. We then had to put these rolls in our cameras. These rolls had finite space for photos, and when they were full, we’d take them and get them developed into tangible photographs (usually on glossy photo paper). I know. Whoa.

I didn’t know people still wondered about these services, but a friend of mine just asked me about this the other day.

Alphabet Inc’s Google said on Thursday it had already deployed software patches against the Spectre and Meltdown chipset security flaws last year, without slowing down its cloud services.

Researchers with Google’s Project Zero, in conjunction with academic and industry researchers from several countries, first reported the flaws publicly on Jan. 3, but major tech firms have said they knew about the flaws months ago.

A bug report submitted on Open Radar this week reveals a security vulnerability in the current version of macOS High Sierra that allows the App Store menu in System Preferences to be unlocked with any password.

Important to note that this seems to fixed in the latest beta releases, but the current public release still has the vulnerability.

Senator John Thune, a Republican who chairs the Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, said in a Jan. 9 letter to Apple Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook that “the large volume of consumer criticism leveled against the company in light of its admission suggests that there should have been better transparency.”

It’s going to be a while before this goes away.

Push Notifications alert you right away on your Mac, iPhone, or iPad when a new task has been delegated to you and when you’ve been invited to a meeting. As soon as you delegate someone a task in Daylite or invite someone to a meeting, it triggers a notification on your Mac, iPhone, and iPad. Now you can be confident that you are up to date and can act fast to changes or surprises in your day – even if you don’t have Daylite running.

Marketcircle is one of my favorite companies. They make great products and continue to improve them all the time.

Ford Motor Co on Tuesday said it will partner with delivery service Postmates Inc as the automaker starts testing ways to transport people, food and packages using its self-driving cars in a U.S. city during the first quarter.

This is an interesting partnership for Ford. I’ve used Postmates a couple of times and it’s an okay service, if you can get a driver.

The other day, we posted a story about two groups that want Apple to create ways for parents to restrict children’s access to their mobile phones. […]

This looks really cool.

A French prosecutor has launched a preliminary investigation of U.S. tech giant Apple (AAPL.O) over alleged deception and planned obsolescence of its products following a complaint by a consumer organization, a judicial source said on Monday.

I think this will be the first of many such investigations.