This week, the USPTO issued a first Office action rejecting all 20 claims of U.S. Patent No. 7,479,949 on a “touch screen device, method, and graphical user interface for determining commands by applying heuristics”, which has been referred to by many people, including Apple’s own lawyers, as “the Steve Jobs patent”.
This isn’t a final decision, but it’s certainly an important one for Apple.
TSA baggage screener Sean Henry, 32, was arrested on Tuesday after a sting operation conducted jointly by the TSA and the Port Authority Police Department caught Henry leaving the airport with two iPads that had been planted as part of the sting, as well as numerous other electronics devices he had allegedly stolen from passengers. Just as in a recent ABC News investigation of thefts by TSA agents, the sting used the iPads’ own tracking capabilities to follow the stolen tablets’ movements.
I’m glad they’re getting caught.
Gannon Burgett looks at how we use gestures and how important they’ve become to us.
Apple has confirmed news that T-Mobile will be carrying Apple products in 2013. […]
If Microsoft is being coy about revealing Surface sales data, it may be for good reason. Early demand for the company’s first tablet is lousy. How lousy? Put it this way: If Microsoft really did manufacture three million to five million Surface tablets to sell in the fourth quarter, it’s going to have between two million and four million left over at quarter’s end.
Estimates from the analyst are 500,000-600,000 for the quarter.
MG Siegler made a lot of great points here. It’s definitely worth a read, but many of you won’t be surprised by the ultimate conclusion — traditional publishers just don’t get it.
I’ve been thinking quite a bit about the Microsoft Surface over the past few weeks, in an effort to figure out what the company is trying to accomplish. While I have given Microsoft kudos for not blindly copying Apple’s tablet strategy, what they released doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. […]
Great interview on GigaOm with Loren.
Despite offering more lucrative revenue splits for app developers than competitors Google and Apple, many of the largest digital media properties in the U.S. and makers of the most-popular tablet apps have decided that developing apps for the Surface — and the Windows app store in general — is not yet worth their time.
Developers are key to the success of any platform.
Peter Cohen has been with The Daily from day one as a subscriber, and has some thoughts about its demise.
Jack Shafer:
To place The Daily venture in scale, the last attempt to start a national, general-interest print newspaper from the ground up—USA Today—lost $600 million over the course of a decade before turning its first profit in 1994. (In today’s money, that’s more than $1 billion.) The National, the national sports daily, lost $150 million (about $250 million, corrected for inflation) in 18 months before closing in June 1991. In the late 1990s, when Murdoch was trying to crash the China satellite TV market, he had invested $2 billion and was losing $2 million a week according to his former right-hand man in that enterprise. So, please, let’s not obsess too much over Murdoch’s squandering of $30 million a year on a failed experiment. In the history of journalistic bets, this was a trivial gamble.
Jeff Sonderman for Poynter:
Being the first-of-a-kind is as dangerous as it is exciting in the technology world. With few or no prior examples to learn from, you’re left to try stuff and learn the hard way. With the benefit of hindsight, there seem to be at least two major lessons from The Daily’s failure.
News Corp. is calling it quits on its “The Daily,” a daily newspaper produced for iPad and other tablets.
Apple today announced the Wi-Fi versions of iPad® mini and fourth generation iPad with Retina display will be available in China on Friday, December 7, and iPhone 5 will be available on Friday, December 14.
This is huge for Apple.
This is just terrible. Not Apple’s fault, but there definitely has to be a way to track this.
Inspired by the ultimate collection of legendary and boutique amps and effect pedals, GuitarTone offers a vast array of high quality tones. Sonoma passionately created tonal interpretations of essential vintage and custom amps, pedals and microphones, and assembled them into GuitarTone.
You can do dual amps with this too. Looks great.
“We’re innovating on the seam between software and hardware,” said Ballmer, asked why his company had fallen behind rival Apple. “Maybe we should have done that earlier.”
You think?
“I feel pretty good about our level of innovation,” he added.
And there is the problem.
This looks like a lot of fun for the whole family. Talk about taking advantage of multiple Apple devices, this is it.
A Dutch court ruled on Wednesday that some of Samsung Electronics’ Galaxy smartphones and tablets infringe an Apple patent in the latest round of the two firms’ worldwide battle.
The court ordered Samsung Electronics to pay Apple damages, determined by how much profit it has made from the sales.
The patent dispute concerns the Android operating system versions 2.2.1 to 3.0 used on Samsung’s Galaxy tablets and smartphones, the court said.
Smart people those Dutch.
You have to admit, this was a great idea.
Amazon today announced that this Black Friday and Cyber Monday were the best ever for the Kindle family, and the popular new Kindle e-readers and tablets remain at the top of Amazon’s best sellers list worldwide.
How many exactly did they sell? Amazon won’t say. Could be they sold 10 Kindles between the two days, nobody knows for sure. Just more bullshit from Amazon.
Bloomberg:
Richard Williamson, who oversaw the mapping team, was fired by Senior Vice President Eddy Cue, said the people, who asked not to be named because the information wasn’t yet public. Cue, who took over last month as part of a management shakeup, is seeking advice from outside mapping-technology experts and prodding digital maps provider TomTom NV (TOM2) to fix landmark and navigation data it shares with Apple.
Eddy is cleaning house.
I can’t wait to see Microsoft’s quarterly earnings when they reveal how many Surface tablets were sold. They will tell us, right?
One is packed, one isn’t.
The big kahuna in the mobile shopping landscape: the iPad. Apple’s tablet “generated more traffic than any other tablet or smartphone, reaching nearly 10 percent of online shopping,” according to IBM’s report. The next device in line was the iPhone, with 8.7% of shopping traffic, then all Android devices combined with 5.5% of traffic. The iPad’s 10% slice of mobile retail translates to a whopping 88.3% of tablet shopping traffic, with the Nook, Kindle and Samsung Galaxy tablets all eking out shares of 3% or less.
What is it people do with these other tablets and smartphones?
I got a note last night from Kai Aras about some demos he’s done using iOS to control the Philips Hue lights. He has an explanation on each video page about what exactly is going on, so you can read those as well. […]
I’m not a developer, so I don’t know what’s involved in making this work, but the developer, Brandon Evans, has put the code and instructions on Github. Good video though. […]
When it comes to devices, kids’ holiday wish lists are simple this year. The most-wanted gifts are predominantly from one company—Apple. According to a recent Nielsen study, Apple’s popularity leading up to the holiday season continues a trend seen over the last couple of years, with American kids aged 6-12 generally more interested in the latest iOS offerings than other consumer electronics and gaming devices.
It’s going to be a good quarter for Apple.
Matthew Panzarino interviews Black Pixel CEO Daniel Pasco and Director Michael Jurewitz about some of the changes the company has gone through. I have a tremendous amount of respect for these two guys and everyone that works at Black Pixel.
Nokia said they would offer their mapping solution for iOS users and here it is.