“Just after the arrival of the iPhone 5 here, Samsung plans to take Apple to court here for its violation of Samsung’s wireless technology related patents,” said an anonymous Samsung senior executive.“For as long as Apple does not drop mobile telecommunications functions, it would be impossible for it to sell its i-branded products without using our patents. We will stick to a strong stance against Apple during the lingering legal fights,” he added.
On September 1 we relaunched The Loop with one of the biggest design changes in the site’s two-year history. Overall, the reception to the new design has been great, but there have been a few small issues that needed to be addressed.
The most important issue that readers provided was that the linked posts — those that the headline links out to another site — were not clearly marked. Because of this, it was difficult for users to know how to navigate the site.
That’s the first thing we tackled and here’s what we did:
1. The headlines that are linked posts are now underlined.
2. Headlines that are linked posts are now a smaller font size than posts that are full stories.
3. Linked posts will now have the infinity symbol after the post, clearly indicating that it is a linked post. The headline will link off to the other site and the infinity symbol will link to the permalink of the story.
These changes also carry through to the mobile site and the RSS feed.
Linked posts in the RSS feed will have an infinity symbol after the post that will take you to The Loop, while the headline will take you to the originating Web site.
The mobile site for the iPhone and iPad look, and act, exactly the same as the desktop site, so the user experience will be same no matter what device you use.
I have to take a minute and thank YJ Soon and his great DFLL plug-in for WordPress. I contacted YJ a couple of weeks ago about what I wanted to do with the linked posts and he coded everything that needed to be done.
Just a superb job on his part getting everything to work properly.
Netflix will soon call its DVD mailing service Qwikster and will branch out to video game rentals. The revelation comes from Reed Hastings, the service’s decidedly more contrite co-founder and CEO, who sent out an e-mail to subscribers entitled “An Explanation and Some Reflections.”
Hastings started out the lengthy e-mail by admitting Netflix fumbled its previous announcement that it would break apart DVD shipping and streaming. “… many members felt we lacked respect and humility,” said Hastings. “That was certainly not our intent, and I offer my sincere apology.”
Hastings revealed that Netflix will rebrand its DVD subscription service “Qwikster.com,” and will branch out to offer users the ability to rent video games for Wii, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 consoles – a shot across the bow of Gamefly, which offers a Netflix-style rental service by mail, and Redbox, the video rental kiosk system which has also begun to offer video games.
Netflix.com and Qwikster.com will not have integrated Web sites, Hastings said. Users who continue to subscribe to both the DVD mailing and streaming services will need to manage their rental queues on the two separate services, and will see two separate bills on their credit card – though the cumulative price will remain the same as what Netflix has previously described.
Hastings’ note comes a few days after Netflix lowered its forecasted subscriber base by one million, from 25 to 24 million subscribers. The company’s stock valuation has taken a beating, down 40 percent since it announced plans to restructure its subscription prices over the summer. The company’s loss of content partner Starz hasn’t helped the stock’s downward slide, either.
Hastings defends the price increase, calling streaming and DVD “two different businesses, with very different cost structures.”
“I want to acknowledge and thank you for sticking with us, and to apologize again to those members, both current and former, who felt we treated them thoughtlessly,” Hastings said.
The three members of Green Day split songwriting royalties evenly despite the fact that, from what I can tell, Billy Joe Armstrong writes the lyrics and melodies for their songs.Kurt Cobain, on the other hand, received sole songwriting credit for all but a couple of Nirvana’s songs (a co-write and a b-side written by the band’s drummer Dave Grohl).
Balsillie on the iPhone in February 2007 from BusinessInsider:
“It’s kind of one more entrant into an already very busy space with lots of choice for consumers … But in terms of a sort of a sea-change for BlackBerry, I would think that’s overstating it.”
AT&T’s LTE plans have figured in the company’s bid to buy T-Mobile USA for $39 billion. AT&T says it originally planned to build out LTE to cover 80 percent of the U.S. population, but if regulators let it buy T-Mobile, it will upgrade cell sites in rural areas as well, to cover 97 percent of the population. AT&T has less radio spectrum available for LTE than Verizon does, so it wants to take some of the spectrum T-Mobile uses for 3G and convert it to LTE.
AT&T’s rollout of LTE is a relatively soft launch, with five cities online now and 10 more expected by the end of the year. That’s far behind competitor Verizon, which offers LTE in dozens of cities. While new devices are required to access the faster networking technology, AT&T isn’t adding on new data plans – they’re a “perk thrown in with existing plans,” according to the report.
AT&T is facing stiff resistance to its proposed acquisition of T-Mobile. Seven states have joined the Department of Justice lawsuit to stop the merger in its tracks; they claim that reducing the number of cell phone networks will reduce competition.
Apple, for its part, hasn’t indicated when it will offer LTE-equipped devices.
That’s why Paul’s post is dangerous. He’s shining the spotlight on something, but he’s missing the mark. There is exactly one person to blame for all of this — and her name is not Erick.
Market research firm Interpret has issued a new report “iPad Gamers: A Look at the Users of Gaming’s Shiny New Toy,” which Interpret says “demonstrates that Apple’s popular tablet computer is both drawing the attention of traditional console gamers and developing its own new user base of nontraditional gamers.”In fact, the base of iPad gamers in the U.S. has now grown to over 8 million, the firm claims. 71% of iPad owners in the U.S. use the Apple tablet for gaming, and Interpret says that these owners “include a substantial number of traditional gamers, as well as an ever-bigger proportion of non-traditional gamers.”
It certainly shouldn’t be a surprise, given the widespread popularity of gaming on the iPhone, but it should be reassuring to game developers considering the iPad as a platform to know that there’s already a large and growing audience for their products.
Sony is updating the user agreement for the Playstation Network starting on September 15 and one of the changes included in the update seeks to stop class action lawsuits against the company.
Sony was the target of a hacker break-in earlier this year that exposed tens of millions of user accounts because of lackadaisical security. Sony’s move is a defensive measure to prevent more legal exposure. The company allows you to opt out of the arbitration clause, but you’re required to do so in writing within 30 days of agreeing to the new terms of service.
I would like to thank Pixelmator for sponsoring this week’s RSS feed.
Pixelmator is the beautifully designed, easy-to-use, fast and powerful image editing app for Mac OS X that has everything you need to create, edit and enhance your images. With tons of new features and improvements, the next generation of Pixelmator—codenamed Chameleon—is clearly the best Pixelmator ever built. Even more, Pixelmator 2 will be available later this month via the Mac App Store as a free upgrade for everyone who purchased any version of Pixelmator via the Mac App Store.
The attorney generals of California, Illinois, Massachusetts, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Washington joined the suit filed in the U.S. District Court of the District of Columbia. They argued that the deal would violate antitrust laws by reducing the number of wireless carriers from four to three national companies and removing an important lower-cost competitor.
By piling on the existing Department of Justice lawsuit, the states may make it less likely that Justice will accept a settlement instead of forcing the merger to stop altogether, according to a legal expert consulted for the article.
BlackBerry owners on Friday were dealt more unfortunate news Friday after many reported losing access to Internet services. Both BlackBerry Messenger and e-mail faced outages, primarily in Canada and Latin American countries. RIM was “investigating” as of Friday afternoon but didn’t have a cause or an estimated time for a fix.
U.S. President Barack Obama has signed the America Invents Act, the first major overhaul of the U.S. patent system in about 50 years.The America Invents Act, passed 89-9 by the U.S. Senate last week, would allow new challenges to patents granted by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). It allows third parties to file a challenge to a patent within nine months of it being awarded.
The law changes the patent process by giving the patent to the first person to file, not the first person to create. This puts the U.S. on a level playing field with most of the rest of the world. Opponents of the legislation fear that will put small businesses and sole inventors at a disadvantage with larger companies with deeper pockets.
Valve has released its seminal action puzzle game Portal for Mac and PC for free until September 20, 2011. The game is available for download through Valve’s Steam download service.
Portal was the first game from Valve to be published for the Mac when the company began supporting OS X in 2010. It’s an unusual 3D platform-oriented puzzle game in which you use portal guns – devices that open dimensional gateways on flat surfaces like walls, ceilings and floors – and must make your way through an increasingly complicated and bizarre series of rooms filled with intricate traps and puzzles.
Valve has released Portal for free as part of their Learn With Portals initiative, which seeks to inspire kids to learn about science, technology, engineering and mathematics.
“Using interactive tools like the Portal series to draw them in makes physics, math, logic, spatial reasoning, probability, and problem-solving interesting, cool, and fun which gets us one step closer to our goal—engaged, thoughtful kids,” reads a statement on the Learn With Portals Web site.
This isn’t the first time Portal has been made free – when Valve launched its Steam service for Mac in 2010, the company similarly offered up Portal as a free bonus for early subscribers. If you missed your chance to get it then, you can get it now, but act fast.
During RIM’s second-quarter earnings call, Co-CEO Jim Balsillie noted that the company plans to offer price cuts on the not-so-popular BlackBerry PlayBook in the form of rebates, and an incentive program for enterprise sales.
He also said there’s a big software update coming. Too little, too late.
Illustrator makes it easy to use symbols multiple times within a document as well. With the Symbols tools, you can add and alter several symbols at once. And in CS5, you can now change the settings for a symbol while editing.
We’ve been very clear since the very first CES demos and forward that the ARM product won’t run any x86 applications,” said Stephen Sinofsky, president of Microsoft Windows unit, during a meeting with financial analysts Wednesday. Windows 8 for tablets runs on devices powered by chips designed by U.K.-based ARM. The desktop version runs on traditional, x86 chips from Intel and AMD.
The feds raided Gibson’s factory in late August confiscating several pallets of wood, electronic files and guitars. The feds executed search warrants for ebony and rosewood that were imported from India — the government says Gibson violated the Lacey Act, which stipulates that a company cannot import wood in a manner that’s against the laws of the country the wood is coming from. However, Gibson says it complied with Indian law and no concerns have been raised by the Indian government.
Two stores in Queens, New York, accused of peddling unauthorized Apple Inc accessories have agreed to hand over all products in their inventories bearing the word “Apple” or any of the company’s ubiquitous trademarks.
This is Apple’s original AppleTV, from circa 1996. Rob Gould, who works on the AOL HD project with my company, Castfire, sent me these awesome pics from his time back at Bell Atlantic (now Verizon) when they had access to this box. He calls it the “Pippen”, likely a spin-off from the Apple Pippin, from earlier in the decade.
Pictures are a lot different than what we have now.
RIM just reported earnings (PDF) for its second fiscal quarter of 2012. Seventy-three percent of its $4.2 billion in revenue came from the sale of hardware, which includes Blackberrys and Playbooks. This means RIM brought in $3.066 billion from hardware sales.
RIM shipped 10.6 million Blackberrys and 200,000 Playbooks. Assuming the average selling price of a Playbook is $554 (what I used last quarter), then RIM brought in $2.9552 billion in revenue from the sale of 10.6 million Blackberrys.
That means the average selling price of a Blackberry this quarter was $278.79. It rose 3.80% over last quarter’s $268.56, but it’s still down 7.76% over the last six months.
The following chart shows the average selling price of a Blackberry since 2009:
If you’re not intrigued by Windows 8 and Metro, if you can’t recognize that it’s a big leap forward, if you’re not excited about what it means for you, personally then you don’t really care about technology; you care about brands. You care about platforms. You care about politics. You’re a fanboy.Look, we all lean certain ways. I have my own set of preferences. I tend to vote for Democrats and buy Apple products. But that’s because they tend to support my priorities, not vice-versa. If the Democrats suddenly turned their backs on science, or Apple began pushing out products with buggy cluttered interfaces, I’d look elsewhere. I don’t really get those who treat brands like sports teams, offering blind allegiance over self-interest. That’s just zealotry. God bless that file system; my platform, right or wrong.The older I get the less I trust anyone who puts party or platform over the advancement of society.
I agree with Mat wholeheartedly. Use what you want to use – Windows, Android, OS X, iOS, whatever. Just stop being such a dick about it.
It took RIM a full quarter (let’s say 90 days) to ship (not sell) 200,000 PlayBooks. In its last quarter, Apple sold 9.25 million iPads, or approximately 102,000 per day. In two days of sales the iPad beat the PlayBook.
Update: I fixed the silly calculation I made in the numbers. Still doesn’t change the end result.
The numbers are in and they don’t look good for RIM.
The company reported shipping approximately 10.6 million BlackBerry smartphones and approximately 200,000 BlackBerry PlayBook tablets. Keep in mind, those numbers are shipped, not sold.
By using the shipped number, RIM could fill up the channel with product, but not actually sell a single device to customers.
A Sharp has announced the release of King of Dragon Pass, a unique indie strategy game for the iPhone. It costs $9.99 and is available for download from the App Store.
King of Dragon Pass is set in a mythical land called Glorantha. You are the leader of a clan fighting for its survival. Each time you play is different – the developer says 475 different situations are possible. Even choosing the same response from game to game can force a different outcome, depending on different factors.
The game combines elements of interactive fiction storytelling with turn-based strategy. A Sharp indicates that the game sports more than 462,000 words of text.
King of Dragon Pass originally ran on Mac OS and Windows; A Sharp has streamlined the game play, added new stories and reworked the interface to be optimized for iOS.
Namco Bandai has announced plans to release Sky Gamblers: Rise of Glory worldwide on the App Store on Thursday, September 22, 2011. The game will cost $4.99 and a “Lite” version will be made available the same day.
Sky Gamblers is a World War I-era 3D aerial combat game. You take to the skies in the cockpits of authentic World War I fighter planes, flying one of 12 solo missions in a Campaign Mode. One hundred dogfight missions and a “Custom Game” feature are also included.
You can also go head-to-head with other players in a multiplayer mode that works with up to eight gamers in either individual or team-based matches.
It feels like the whole world is holding its breath for the Apple tablet. But maybe we’ve all been dreaming about the wrong device. This is Courier, Microsoft’s astonishing take on the tablet.Gizmodo — September 22, 2009
Essentially, we think the success of the Kin One depends a lot on how much it sells for – if it’s less than £200 then it’s got a very real shot of being a massive phone.TechRadar — April 14, 2010
The first time I opened Kin Studio felt like magic. An entire website was created to hold my Kin’s content, yet I had done absolutely nothing extra to put it there.AllThingsD — May 4, 2010
The Kin sold for $49.99 (£31) and was canceled less than two months after it launched.
Hello, Windows 8? This is iPad. You win.Paul Thurrott — September 13, 2011
