“Brand loyalty isn’t a concept unique to smartphones; it’s something pretty much all manufacturers of any consumer product work hard to get from their customers.”
Android Dominated Apple At CES
“Yet everywhere you went, people were using large-format Android phones instead of Apple’s iPhones, which are generally smaller. There is an assumption that most tech bloggers are Apple fanboys and girls.”
Apple Says It Has Never Worked With NSA To Create iPhone Backdoors, Is Unaware Of Alleged DROPOUTJEEP Snooping Program
“Apple has contacted TechCrunch with a statement about the DROPOUTJEEP NSA program that detailed a system by which the organization claimed it could snoop on iPhone users.”
Apple Passes Coca-Cola as Most Valuable Brand
“APPLE is the new most valuable brand in the world, according to a closely followed annual report.”
Did you lose Gmail over Exchange when you upgraded to a new iPhone 5s or iPhone 5c? Here are your alternatives… such as they are…
“Earlier this year, Google decided to ditch their Exchange ActiveSync-licensed GoogleSync service for free Gmail accounts.”
Apple Releases iOS 7.0.2 with Fix for Lock Screen Passcode Bypass
“The iOS 7.0.2 release follows the launch of iOS 7 on Wednesday, September 18. That day also saw a special release of iOS 7.0.1 specifically for the iPhone 5s and iPhone 5c, which launched on Friday, September 20.”
Apple ‘slide-to-unlock’ patent invalid, German court rules
“Apple’s famous “slide-to-unlock” patent has been invalidated by a German court earlier this week, which is good news for Samsung and Motorola (Google), both engaged in patent-based legal wars with the iPhone maker in the region. All claims of the slide-to-unlock patent (Patent No.”
Apple treats podcasting like an unwanted stepchild.
Apple treats podcasting like an unwanted stepchild.
I think this is a huge missed opportunity for Apple — and for audio and video content creators.
Here’s what Apple is doing wrong, and how they could do it right.
Apple is famous for re-thinking content consumption from the ground up, for rejecting knee-jerk assumptions about how things are supposed to work.
Apple has a powerful instinct in its DNA for blank-slate thinking.
One example comes from the Walter Isaacson biography, Steve Jobs. In that book, Jobs’ wife Laurene recalls why it took the Jobs family eight years to choose a sofa. She said: “We spent a lot of time asking ourselves, ‘What is the purpose of a sofa?’”
Jobs’ idea was not to just go buy a sofa because you’re supposed to buy a sofa, but to determine what problem a sofa is supposed to solve, then solving that problem in the best way possible (even if that solution doesn’t involve a sofa).
Another comes from a recent interview Apple Senior Vice President of Industrial Design Jony Ive gave to the UK children’s TV show Blue Peter. In the interview, the presenter asked Ive to judge children’s lunch box design contest entries.
Before he looked at the drawings, Ive said: “If we were thinking of lunch box we’d be careful about not having the word ‘box’ already give you a bunch of ideas that could be quite narrow, because you think of a box as being square, a cube, and so we’re quite careful with the words we use because those can sort of determine the path you go down.
This instinct is to avoid conditioned thinking before design, so that the designed object satisfies the requirements and solves the problems you desire to solve regardless of any preconceived ideas about how things are supposed look or work.
For some reason, it seems to me, Apple appears to have failed to think this way about podcasting.
Apple used to include podcasting on iOS as an also-ran feature in the Music app. Last year, they launched a dedicated Podcasts app.
The app has been universally panned. Mashable called it “horrible.” Business Insider called it “horrifically bad.” C|net called it the “worst app Apple ever made.”
A rough consensus has emerged in some quarters that Apple neglects the podcasting and the Podcasts app because there’s nothing in it for Apple. Podcasts are free, so Apple gets no cut. There’s no money in podcasting, so who cares?
I have no idea why Apple decided to separate podcasts from music or what series of blunders led to the release of an embarrassing Podcasts app.
But I do believe that Apple is missing an enormous opportunity by neglecting podcasting.
The Apple Way to Think About Podcasting
If Apple applied its famous blank-slate thinking to podcasting, I’m sure they would think different about it.
There are three basic Applesque questions to be asked and answered about podcasting:
1. What is a podcast, really?
The answer to the first question is simple. A podcast is simply serialized audio or video content that can be streamed over the Internet, downloaded and subscribed to.
Other types of audio and video content, such as radio and TV shows, used to be broadcast live. But now and in the future, content creators want to stream them live over the Internet, and make them available for downloading and subscription.
In other words, radio and TV shows want to become podcasts.
Yet nobody ever says this. The radio industry and Hollywood want to podcast without calling it podcasting so they can maintain the lie that what they’re doing is fundamentally different from what podcasters are doing.
So let’s be clear: The whole future of all media is podcasting — streaming, downloadable and subscribable — but the legacy producers want to exclude grass-roots competition by never, ever calling themselves podcasters.
2. What’s wrong with podcasting, currently?
The biggest problems for podcasters are 1) finding audience; and 2) monetizing the content.
The truth is that podcasts are often shunned and ignored in part because of the artificial distinction described in Question 1 between different types of content.
It’s easy for people to gravitate to YouTube or harvest content on social streams. But it takes some effort for users to find a good podcast they like and subscribe to it — especially if they’re using Apple’s lousy Podcasts app.
The “market,” if you will, for podcasting is artificially suppressed in part by Apple’s neglect.
And when good podcasters do find big audiences, they can struggle to get paid.
Some, like Leo Laporte’s TWiT network of “netcasts,” are very successfully monetized through advertising. (Full disclosure: I appear on three TWiT netcasts from time to time.)
Others, such as Adam Curry’s and John C. Dvorak’s No Agenda podcast are successfully monetized through listener donations.
Still others, such as Cult of Mac’s own Cultcast, both monetize through advertising and also provide additional content and context to readers of another medium (such as the Cult of Mac blog).
But for every successful TWiT, No Agenda or CultCast, there are thousands of podcasts with zero prospects of making significant revenue.
And this shouldn’t be the case. Vastly inferior programming on the radio and on TV makes far more money, simply because there’s a monetization model in place that everybody is used to. Without monetization, there’s little investment. And without investment, there are no budgets for production or marketing.
Another problem with podcasting is that there’s no single, unified place to do everything.
Podcasts that broadcast live, then make their audio and video podcasts available later tend to be scattered all over the Internet, combining custom-built web sites with RSS feeds with multiple places for the live stream plus multiple more for the downloadable file.
3. What are the opportunities for Apple and the world in podcasting?
Apple should have an advantage in the future of audio and video content. After all, it was the iPod that mainstreamed digital media entertainment. The word “podcast” was even named after that product.
Rather than joining Hollywood in the debasement and neglect of podcasting, Apple should be holding it up as the future of all serial media.
Yet Apple is losing (by forfeiture) the battle for new kinds of online content. The big winner is YouTube, where all kinds of innovative programming are going online. People want to listen to “radio” in the car and elsewhere — satellite and terrestrial — and yet podcasting would be a bazillion times better because there are several orders of magnitude more selection and because the user is in total control.
Apple should strive to replace talk radio, including satellite radio, with podcasting.
And Apple should strive to become the Internet’s biggest facilitator of whatever it is that will replace television, and ultimately use its market power to bring TV shows into its podcasting network.
From a business perspective, Apple should realize that all kinds of companies are making all kinds of money on recurring audio and video content. Properties like Funny or Die are pioneering a new TV-less form of serialized comedy. They’ve got an app, so they’d dying to be on the Apple platform. Yet where’s the “Between Two Ferns” podcast?
Why should users have to stumble across new episodes by hearing chatter on Facebook, then go do a search on YouTube to find it? Zach Galifianakis fans should be able to simply subscribe to the “Ferns” podcast and have new episodes download automatically.
By offering the content creators a clear, simple, flexible and profitable way to monetize, Apple could essentially create a new business that’s forward-looking (rather than its backward-looking approach to simply selling TV shows and seasons, for example).
In Apple’s view of the world, a TV show shouldn’t be a TV show. It’s should be a podcast.
And a podcast shouldn’t be considered a file that’s like a song, but un-monetizable. It should be considered a form of content equal to a radio or TV show.
Apple should destroy the culturally constructed and needless boundaries between podcasts, radio shows, TV shows, university lectures, vlogs and all the rest.
The only meaningful distinction is whether it’s audio only, or both audio and video. Any streamable, downloadable, subscribable content is either listened to or watched.
All those other distinctions are simply accidents of media history and now obsolete.
I think Apple is making a huge error by neglecting podcasting.
Rather than sweeping the medium under the rug and buying into the Hollywood fiction that old-school media is superior,
Apple should instead set up a brilliant, flexible model for all content creators to showcase their work, and enable users to live-stream, download, pay for, subscribe to and enjoy any kind of audio or video content regardless of who produced it — from the smallest, one-man podcast to the biggest-budget Hollywood TV series.
And call it podcasting. Because that’s what it is. All of it.
Read more at http://www.cultofmac.com/218123/why-apple-needs-to-fix-its-podcast-problem/#jWYSBCdy12jkHMZ6.99
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Which apps will drain your battery and data plan? Verizon’s got a list!
SUMMARY:
Verizon is now reviewing iPhone and Android apps, but not based on how fun or useful they are. It’s concerned about the resources they consume, which means Facebook and many popular games get docked.Verizon Wireless may have shut down its own app store, but it’s not wiping its hands of app curation entirely. The carrier has started reviewing, rating and recommending Android and iPhone apps to its customers.
What’s interesting about Verizon’s approach is it isn’t making its recommendations based on how entertaining, useful or fun a particular app is. Instead a team of Verizon engineers is looking at each app’s impact on the phone’s battery life, its drain on a customer’s data plan and how loosely it plays with security and customer privacy.
Basically, Verizon is compiling a series of regularly updated recommendation lists. The first is a list of 20 apps available either for Android or iOS that Verizon claims deliver a “best in class” experience on smartphones and tablets. As you might expect, Verizon isn’t being entirely objective in its choices, but it never claimed to be. One of the apps is even Verizon’s own AppLuvr software, which recommends other apps based on what’s already installed on smartphones.
The second list applies a much more visible methodology, rating the top 25 free and top 25 paid apps in Google Play based on three criteria: security, battery consumption and data usage. The third set of reviews is essentially Verizon’s naughty list: 13 apps – all games – that will drain your battery or eat up your data plan at a rapid clip.
Verizon isn’t making any friends here among the game development shops. Enormously popular games like Halfbrick’s Fruit Ninja Free and OMGPOP’s Draw Something got bad marks because of their battery drain. Other apps like Facebook Messenger and eBay scored relatively high but were penalized because of their high data consumption.
That may come us a surprise to many users since Facebook and eBay wouldn’t appear to consume that much data, especially compared to streaming multimedia apps like Pandora and Netflix, which received the highest possible Verizon ratings. But what Verizon is likely highlighting here is the persistence of those two apps’ connections. While Facebook might consume only a tiny fraction of the data in a single hour than, say, a Netflix video stream, the social networking app is always running in the background – transmitting a constant stream of signaling traffic over the network and whittling away at your data plan.
Alcatel-Lucent recently analyzed the enormous impact Facebook has on mobile networks through that signaling traffic. On Nov. 15, the social networking giant updated its iOS and Android apps, precipitating a 60 percent boost in Facebook signal load on mobile networks, even though the number of new Facebook mobile users increased only 4 percent in the same time frame. Alcatel-Lucent now estimates that Facebook is responsible for more than 15 percent of all mobile signaling traffic and accounts for more than 20 percent of all network airtime.
Carriers have long implored developers to keep the constraints of mobile networks in mind and build more efficient apps. With these rankings Verizon could be upping that pressure, punishing developers who keep developing unnecessarily chatty software.
As you might expect, neither Facebook Messenger or the main Facebook app made Verizon’s list of “must have apps” (though eBay did). Verizon, however, named Facebook’s much more network-efficient Instagram photo-sharing app in its top 20. I doubt Facebook cares either way.
Any time a carrier produces a must-have list you should take it with a grain of salt, but I will give Verizon credit. It actually recommended Tango, an over-the-top voice, video and messaging app that competes directly with Verizon’s core voice and SMS services
via Which apps will drain your battery and data plan? Verizon’s got a list — Tech News and Analysis.
New untethered jailbreak works for iDevices running iOS 6.x
An iOS hacking team that calls itself “evad3rs” has released a tool to jailbreak devices running iOS 6. The tool, called “evasi0n,” is available for OS X, Windows, and Linux. It can jailbreak iOS 6.0, 6.0.1, 6.0.2, and 6.1 on all compatible iPhones, iPads, and iPod touches.
For those unfamiliar with jailbreaking, it’s a process that defeats the built-in security and DRM features of iOS, allowing greater flexibility in customization, the ability to install apps outside of the official App Store, and access to iOS’s underlying UNIX internals. Jailbreakers tend to use the technique to enable functionality that isn’t part of iOS, or to customize the look of icons and other elements. Some also use it to unlock devices from particular carriers or to install software otherwise barred (and sometimes pirated) from the App Store.
Jailbreaking tools typically rely on some undocumented flaw that enables working around iOS’s security measures. As such, each new version of iOS usually patches flaws once they are exploited by jailbreaking tools, so each version of iOS often requires a new jailbreak tool. evasi0n uses a previously undisclosed exploit that works on all available versions of iOS 6. It also works “untethered,” meaning the iOS device doesn’t need to be plugged into a computer to re-enable the jailbreak every time the device is rebooted.
via New untethered jailbreak works for iDevices running iOS 6.x.
