Mark your calendars: Apple may announce iPad 3 in early March

One year after Apple unveiled the iPad 2, the company is set to announce the iPad 3 in the first week of March, sources have told AllThingsD.

The event will likely be held at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, which traditionally houses Apple’s largest announcements. The timing makes sense for Apple since it launched the iPad 2 in early March last year.

There’s no word yet on when the iPad … Continue Reading

Nivio pulls in $21M to make cloud computing cheaper and more student-friendly

Cloud computing and desktop virtualization are rapidly growing trends in the tech world, and one company has spent a considerable amount of time developing this technology. Nivio, which started as an idea in 2004, announced today it has received $21 million in its first round of venture capital funding.

Nivio lets you store up to 10GB of your documents, music, and movies in the cloud for free with nDrive. Your files sync across all of … Continue Reading

Apple customers protest factory worker abuse, will present petition tomorrow

Apple customers are protesting the company’s role in factory worker abuse by bringing a 250,000-signature petition to the Apple store at Grand Central Station in New York City tomorrow and elsewhere around the globe.

In particular, the petitioners are asking Apple to make the iPhone 5 its first product produced under entirely ethical working conditions.

“I have been a lifelong Apple customer and was shocked to learn of the abusive working conditions in many of … Continue Reading

Role reversal: Apple accused of iPad patent infringement in China

Apple is being accused of patent infringement in China.

Yep, you read that correctly. China Daily reports that Proview Shenzhen Technology, a Chinese company based in the city of Shenzhen, has pointed the finger at Apple over the name “iPad.”

“We ask the court to stop selling and marketing for Apple’s iPad in China. We also demand an apology,” Proview Technology attorney Xie Xianghui told China Daily.

Both companies claim iPad as a trademark, but … Continue Reading

Showyou 3.0: Now with better video discovery and sharing for the iPad

After months of hard labor, Remixation, creator of the popular video discovery app Showyou, has released a new version of the app that works just as well for social media abstainers as it does for Facebook and Twitter users.

Showyou 3.0, available now for free on the iTunes Store, doesn’t look much different from past versions of the app on the surface, but dig a little deeper and you’ll find a richer and more rewarding … Continue Reading

Kindle Fire leads Android in taking a bite out of iPad market share

Good sales of Amazon’s Kindle Fire tablet led to significant gains for Google’s Android operating system in tablet market share during the fourth quarter of 2011, according to new data from mobile analytics firm Flurry.

Flurry, which purports to measure application sessions on more than 90 percent of all Android devices, found that Android tablets gained 10 percent share from Q4 2010 to Q4 2011 and now represent 39 percent of the overall tablet market.… Continue Reading

New to-do list app Clear simplifies and color-codes organization

Is there such a thing as being too organized? A new to-do app called Clear aims to cut down on the amount of time you spend managing to-do lists so that you can actually, well, do things. The app is being demoed for the first time Thursday at the Macworld/iWorld expo in San Francisco.

There is no shortage of feature-filled to-do apps in the App Store. Apple even launched its own in October called Reminders, … Continue Reading

Yuri Milner and Google’s Matt Cutts back $2.8 M round in medical app, DrChrono

There is no cure for the headache induced by excessive paperwork every time you visit the doctor’s office. So its no surprise that as tablet computer come to replace clipboards and smartphones become ubiquitous among patients, the medical app DrChrono is gaining some traction.

The service, which claims to have signed up 50,000 doctors and 400,000 patients, has raised a $2.8 million round of seed funding, reports the NY Times, from Russian billionaire Yuri … Continue Reading

Review: The futuristic OnLive Desktop runs Windows apps on the iPad

The current state of computing is always under scrutiny and speculation. For years laptop and desktop computers have been proclaimed dead, most recently in the face of smartphones and tablet computers. OnLive Desktop may be the first sign of an evolution for everyday PC computing, one that would silence naysayers and utilize all types of application-driven computing devices.

OnLive Desktop – from OnLive, the Palo Alto, Calif.-based cloud-gaming company – is a Windows 7 work … Continue Reading

Apple’s staggering Q1 earnings by the numbers

Apple investors jumped for joy at the company’s first quarter earnings report today, with results that beat high Wall Street expectations. The company earned a record net profit of $13.06 billion on revenue of $46.33 billion and sold a record 37 million iPhone units.

Apple notably missed Wall Street’s expectations for the first time in a long time during its last earnings report. But the company changed the release of its iPhone launch schedule by … Continue Reading

Apple smashes Q1 estimates with $13B profit; record iPhone, iPad, Mac sales

After disappointing Wall Street last quarter, Apple has made a massive comeback reporting record net profit of $13.06 billion on revenue of $46.33 billion for the first quarter.

Analysts have been speculating since December that this would be a blowout quarter for Apple. Meanwhile, Wall Street expected earnings of $10.07 per share on revenues of $38.76 billion, according to Piper Jaffray’s Gene Munster. Simply put, Apple blew pretty much every estimate out of the water.… Continue Reading

Tablet ownership doubled over the 2011 holiday season

Between Kindlemania and the usual gift-giving glut of gadgets, the number of e-reader- and tablet-owning U.S. consumers doubled between mid-December 2011 and early January 2012.

According to research just published by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, 29 percent of adults own at least one tablet or e-reader. Over the winter holidays, ownership numbers rose for both device types from 10 percent to 19 percent.

The Pew project conducted three surveys, one in mid-December … Continue Reading

How schools are reacting to Apple’s entry into education

When Apple announced its textbook initiative on Thursday, there was a rush of excitement among educators. Textbooks from major publishers, which can cost $40 to $75 dollars in print, would be available as interactive e-books for $15 or less. The new iBooks Author application could turn anyone into a publisher, with its simple interactive e-book creation tools.

But then there was the small print: In order to buy and read these textbooks, each student will … Continue Reading

App maker SkyGrid hits the big time with LG deal (video)

App maker SkyGrid has a plan to bring TV to your iPad. It’s also landed a promising partnership with huge Korean electronics maker LG to integrate its app technology into tens of millions of televisions.

We spent some time on the floor of CES last week talking with SkyGrid chief executive and founder Kevin Pomplun about his app and the new LG deal. (Watch our short, two-minute video interview below.)

“All you have to do … Continue Reading

iBooks 2: Apple’s stab at interactive textbooks (hands-on video)

Apple set its sights on education this morning when it announced a slew of new apps and services for students and teachers.

Among them was iBooks 2, an updated version of the company’s iPad e-reading app that adds support for interactive textbooks. Apple promises that iBooks 2 is a complete reinvention of the textbook as we know it. From my hands-on time with the app this morning, I’m not sure Apple has completely obliterated the … Continue Reading

Apple reinvents textbooks and curriculum with iBooks 2, iBooks Author, updated iTunes U

I can’t remember the last time anyone was so interested in education technology, but leave it up to Apple to whip up excitement. The company held an “education related” event at New York City’s Guggenheim Museum today, where many expected it to take on the textbook industry with new, interactive e-books.

And so it did. Apple announced iBooks 2, an updated iPhone and iPad app that will offer highly interactive electronic textbooks, as well as … Continue Reading

Chegg’s new e-book reader is practical, comfortable, boring

Chegg’s digital textbook reader is the “nice guy:” comfortable, treats you right, but doesn’t come with many exciting twists.

“[E-readers] are built for reading purposes, not studying purposes,” said Brent Tworetzky, product leader for Chegg, in an interview with VentureBeat. “We wanted to create an environment that works where students need it.”

Digital textbooks are quickly replacing the traditional, heavy, and cumbersome books of semesters past. This is especially the case as laptops replace notebooks … Continue Reading

Apple to revolutionize textbooks with “GarageBand for e-books,” says report

For its big education-related announcement in New York City this Thursday, January 19, Apple may be planning to unveil new tools that would make it easy for publishers and authors to create interactive textbooks.

That’s according to Ars Technica, which points to sources that describe Apple’s plans for a “GarageBand for e-books” — in other words, software for interactive e-books that would be as easy to use as the company’s renowned music software.

Apple was … Continue Reading

iPad 3 completes checklist: With speedy LTE by March, it maintains marketing edge against Android

The iPad 3 will run on the next-generation wireless networks called long-term evolution, or LTE, according to a report by Bloomberg. This lets Apple’s iPad keep the marketing edge against Android tablets.

Some manufacturers of Google’s Android-based tablets are hitting the market first with LTE. But overall, if the iPad gets LTE support by March, as expected according to these reports, Apple will have completed a checklist of extremely compelling features for the device — … Continue Reading