Now, after passing Pentagon tests, the devices are actually approved for use.

Before authorizing any devices for use in security-conscious military environments, the military requires a very specific and detailed implementation and deployment plan. A large part of that is the creation of policy for approved use as per DoD Directive 8100.02, which says that cellular devices are not allowed into areas where classified information is discussed, stored, or processed without written approval.

And until that happened for the Apple devices, the hundreds of thousands of phones and tablets were in administrative limbo.

“Most of them have not been deployed and are still sitting in a warehouse,” a source I talked to a month ago said. “They haven’t yet been able to build an implementation guide on how to use them.”

Today’s decision, however, paves the way for the U.S. military to actually use the devices in secure areas, and potentially expand their purchase order. It marks a turning point away from BlackBerry devices, which have been considered more secure, and which to date have formed the vast majority of government-issued mobile phones.

The problem with clearing smartphones for use in top secret environments is that they are, essentially, full of radios: Bluetooth, WiFi, cellular.

“With standard consumer devices, there’s no way to prove that the Wi-Fi is turned off,” my source told me.

One solution the DoD had previously implemented for iPads was to hand them off to a second party after delivery from Apple to crack open the cases and “snip the Wi-Fi radio” to disable it, and then close them up again. Apparently, the DoD reached a special agreement with Apple to maintain warranty eligibility, which would normally be voided after opening the case.

Today’s approval, however, is for a version of iOS 6 that has likely been customized by Apple and certified by military technologists to ensure security compliance without actually having to snip wires.

Interestingly, according to Bloomberg, the military plans to create its own app store for military applications, which would allow DOD personnel to use commercial hardware but employ tested and approved applications.

photo credits: The U.S. Army via photopin cc, Devindra Hardawar/VentureBeat

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Since the company already employs 100,000 workers to manufacture components and devices for customers like Apple, Dell, and HP, that translates to 40,000 new workers. And since Apple is widely expected to be releasing not only an updated iPhone 5 but also a cheaper, plastic-bodied iPhone in the fall-to-winter time frame, that translates to speculation that Pegatron is gearing up for big orders.

This fits both with Apple CEO Tim Cook’s announcement during the company’s recent earnings call that Apple would not bring out any new products until the fall and with recent rampant rumors of new iPhone models.

And, says Reuters, Pegatron’s CFO Charles Lin indicated that 60 percent of the company’s 2013 revenue would come from the second half of the year.

Apple needs new products, badly.

Canalys’ numbers for smartphone, tablet, and laptop sales for the first quarter of 2013 show that Apple’s growing only 7.6 percent in smartphone sales, while the industry is growing at a 64.3 percent pace. And while Apple sold 37 million iPhones, Samsung shipped is growing its smartphone shipments by 64.3 percent.

Apple’s not interesting in market share for the sake of market share, but at some point market share has to impact the overall health of an ecosystem. And without a strong app, media, and device ecosystem, smartphone manufacturers are in deep, deep trouble.

photo credit: jurvetson via photopin cc

Once again, Android accounted for 75.6 percent of all smartphone shipments, and once again, Samsung is killing it.

The Korean smartphone king grew smartphone shipments by 64.3 percent year-over-year while shipping 82.2 million tablets, smartphones, and notebooks combined. Meanwhile, mobile rival Apple grew its iPhone shipments by a shockingly low 6.7 percent, hitting single digit growth in a market which has overall growth of 37.4 percent.

Let me say that again: Apple is at single digit growth in a market growing at almost 40 percent.

Source: John Koetsier

Android meets Wall-E.

If there’s any doubt why Apple’s stock in moldering in the mid-400′s after hitting highs last year of over $700, that’s why. And with Tim Cook basically telling Wall Street that Apple won’t ship any significant new products until this fall, or even 2014, the situation is not likely to change.

‘Despite its slowing growth, Apple still shipped over 37 million iPhones,’ Canalys analyst Pete Cunningham said in a statement. ‘But HTC and Samsung have raised the bar with their latest handsets and Apple needs to respond with its next iPhone. The iPhone user interface is now six years old and badly in need of a refresh.”

Tablets are one area of slight comfort for Cupertino.

Apple retains 46.4 percent of the tablet market, Canalys says, shipping 19.4 million tablets. That’s down from 58 percent market share in the first quarter of 2012, and once again, in a market growing at over 106 percent year-over year, Apple grew less than others — about 60 percent growth year-over-year.

‘Spearheaded by Google and Amazon, the commoditization of the tablet market has happened far quicker than that of the wider PC market,’ Canalys analyst Tim Coulling said.

The upshot?

Without significant new Apple products, major new product categories, and a much more intense Apple effort to produce a wider range of phones and tablets that the market is looking for right now, Apple share will continue to drop.

And one other interesting tidbit in the Canalys data:

Calculating operating system share over all “smart devices,” lumping in smartphones, tablets, and laptops does provide interesting insights. With that view of the industry, Microsoft ends up with an 18.1 percent OS market share — a very different proposition than high-90-percent share in the laptop/desktop world.

Image credit: Louish Pixel/Flickr

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The Dumasoft application, released by the State Duma’s executive office to streamline the work of the deputies, can only be downloaded to iPhones or iPads, with no Android version available for mobile device users. A few deputies wrote a request addressed to Speaker Sergei Naryshkin, asking him to deal with this inconvenience.

“Dumasoft does not support the Android operating system, while not all deputies are willing to buy iPhones and iPads,” a co-author of the request told Izvestia.

The new software was deployed in the fall of 2012, after Naryshkin had personally insisted that deputies needed to have the ability to work anywhere an Internet connection was available. The Dumasoft application allows deputies to view documents and correspondence, alter bills and comment on their colleagues’ proposals.

Yury Shuvalov, deputy head of the State Duma executive office, confirmed that the administration of the lower chamber was fully aware of the problem and looking for ways to solve it.

“We will certainly issue apps for other operating systems. I think this could be expected before the end of the year,” said Shuvalov.

According to Nikita Kislitsin, editor-in-chief of Hacker magazine, Apple devices are traditionally the choice of the well-to-do. Thus, it is no surprise that the State Duma executive office did not expect any opposition to the gadgets from the Duma deputies, whose average annual income hovers around 2 million rubles ($63,100) per person.

In addition, the State Duma thought that it could go easy on software developers in this case, an expert in Internet technologies, Ilya Knopov, added.

“Apple has just one platform for which new apps can be developed,” said Knopov. “It’s more complicated in the case of Android, so the development would cost more.”

photo credit: jurvetson via photopin cc

This article from Russian daily Izvestia was first published in English in Russia Beyond The Headlines and East-West Digital News.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Android may have wrestled massive smartphone market share away from Apple the past couple of years, but until now Apple’s managed to hold onto its dominance in tablet sales. That’s now changing, says IDC analyst Sameer Singh. Not only will Apple’s market share shrink, it will also start to see its iPad unit shipments drop, he says.

That would be a disaster for Apple, which pioneered the modern tablet revolution.

According to the IDC, Apple’s global tablet market share has dropped from over 60 percent in Q2 2012 to around 40 percent in each of the third and fourth quarters of 2012 and the first quarter of 2013. And while in Q1 2012 Apple outsold Android in the tablet market by 11.8 million to 8 million, in Q1 2013 Android outsold Apple by 27.8 million to 19.5 million.

That 19.5 million iPad shipment number should drop this quarter, says Singh.

“iPad shipments normally see strong growth in calendar Q2,” Singh wrote. “However, this is always driven by a new product launch.”

The problem is that during April’s earnings call, CEO Tim Cook said Apple was hard at work on amazing new hardware and software, but that it was not coming until the fall and “throughout 2014.” Which means, Singh says, trouble:

“This means that iPad shipments should see another sequential decline in Q2 (to ~17-18 million).”

And that will push iPad market share below the 40 percent mark, making Android not only the majority tablet operating system but also the market leader by a wide margin. That’s bad news for Apple, but Apple can survive without sales leadership.

What would be tougher for Apple to survive is declining shipment volumes.

WemoLab snared admirers with the launch of its graphically beautiful 3D animated undersea world, The Blu. Now it is going after iPad fans with the launch of SuperFugu, an interactive tablet app built around a cartoonish pufferfish. SuperFugu offers kids a “digital field trip” of the world’s oceans and allows them to interact with and learn about aquatic species.

The app indicates that some developers are investing heavily in 3D graphics to stand out from a sea of competitors on mobile platforms, and that will drive mobile platforms to adopt better technology. If it takes off, it will show there is growing appetite for family content on mobile platforms.

SuperFugu is an educational app, and those haven’t always been the most enthralling for kids. But Venice, Calif.-based WemoLab is shooting to wow iPad users with beautiful graphics. The company has built the game on its high-end technology platform that it used to create The Blu, which the company quietly released on PC a year ago.

“We set this up to create the next-generation app,” said co-founder and chief executive officer Neville Spiteri. “It is an immersive and meaningful experience. We call it a digital field trip.”

The new app lets you play as a superhero pufferfish who has to free fish that have been captured by an evil octopus. Along the way, you collect golden coins (an homage to Super Mario Bros.) and watch out for predators. Fortunately, most other sea creatures don’t want to eat the poisonous SuperFugu. The app is aimed at luring kids into WemoLabs’ high-end product, The Blu, which is unique as a creative platform.

With The Blu, WemoLab created an underwater world imbued with artificial intelligence and a scientifically accurate environment. Without advertising, that world has grown to 100,000 users in 100 countries.

WemoLab created fish that behaved with the appropriate A.I., and it also created a platform so that third-party artists could create their own 3D-animated fish. The company curated the art submitted by the community of artists, and it wound up with submissions from more than 300 artists, known as Makers. They design their fish and get credit for their submissions, which can roam free in the ocean. Users can start their own sub-worlds, or habitats, and purchase the fish with virtual currency. Tapping the A.I. technology, the fish function as expected once the artist lets them loose in the world.

The platform is both educational and aimed at saving the world’s oceans, so it has garnered support from a variety of ocean experts, including Time Magazine’s Hero for the Planet, Sylvia Earle, a National Geographic explorer-in-residence. She narrates some of the experience, explaining the plants and creatures that you interact with in the ocean. You can visit different habitats in the world to check out fish in different environments. You can build your own habitat and populate it with fish — many created by Makers — that you can buy. About 25 percent of the proceeds go to Makers in The Blu, and 25 percent goes to nonprofits.

Spiteri said the world is monetizing in a healthy way. You can also adopt a fish and see where it swims in the ocean. When you click on them, you can see where they are from and who their owners are. In that respect, the game has a social component.

“Wemo stands for ‘world emotion,’ and our goal is to create next-generation, immersive connected experiences that bring people together from all over the world,” said Spiteri. “The feedback we received on The Blu overwhelmingly demonstrated that there is an exploding appetite for family-centric content with an element of learning and fun.”

With The Blu, WemoLab taped Academy Award-winning animation director Andy Jones, who created art for James Cameron’s Avatar film. Among the creatures Jones designed was a giant blue whale that swims throughout the ocean. The whale was auctioned off at a Wildaid event last year, and it garnered $10,000 for the charity. Wemo habitat creators and sponsors include The Smithsonian, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, The Ocean Elders, and others. Players can make donations from within the game that benefit ocean charities. Twelve habitats have been built, and four more are under construction in The Blu.

Jones also helped with the creation of SuperFugu, which is controlled through simple swipe maneuvers. Creators can build their own Fugu skins, and children can become “mini Makers” by submitting their own color drawings to be included in the game as a Fugu skin. Wemo added parental control features that enable parents to restrict purchases through tools such as a coin allowance. Parents can also set a timer for playtime and review a report card that promotes conversation. SuperFugu monetizes in a similar way to The Blu, where you can buy fish.

The free version of the game has 16 levels of play. WemoLab will add more levels over time and create new habitats from around the world, such as the Arctic or the Kelp Forests. The artwork is good on the iPad, but it isn’t nearly as breathtaking as the look of The Blu, which features 3D animated creatures and ocean waters in different shades of blue.

WemoLab was founded in 2010 by Spiteri, Scott Yara, and Anthony Batt. The firm now has 13 employees. They received $2 million in funding from angel investors including Digital Garage, headed by MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito. And in October, they raised another $2.5 million from strategic angels. Over time, Spiteri hopes there will be thousands of artists and children contributing to The Blu and SuperFugu.

Spiteri said that his team is at work on a second virtual-world platform dubbed The Green. That one is a world of plants, butterflies, birds, and other wildlife.

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July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Starting today, iPhone and iPad owners can finally get their hands on Google Now.

Think of it like an evolved form of Apple’s Siri personal assistant baked within Google’s iOS search app. In addition to receiving voice commands (a feature that’s already been present on on Google’s search app for some time), Google Now also presents useful information without your prompting.

It could, for example, tell you an estimated commute time to your office or the status of your package deliveries.

In my brief testing with Google Now on my iPhone 5 and iPad Mini, I found it to be just as easy to use as on Android. Google Now’s Cards (little boxes that it uses to deliver different types of information) are all located on the bottom of Google’s search app. Typically, the software presents the most relevant cards to you — so since I tested it in the morning, it displayed cards for my work commute and weather.

You can tap a card for more information (typically retrieved through a Google search), or swipe to remove them. At first glance, the biggest difference between the iOS and Android versions of Google Now is the available screen space. It’s a bit different juggling Google Now’s cards on the iPhone 5′s 4-inch screen, as most Android phones are approaching 5-inch screens. I also noticed that the Package Card doesn’t show any images for shipments on iOS — but that’s a fairly minor complaint.

Check out my hands-on video below:

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Google Now is officially invading Siri’s home turf.

Google announced today that an updated version of its iOS search app brings Google Now to the iPhone and iPad. Just like on Android, it’s focused entirely on bubbling up information that’s directly relevant — like warning you if there’s traffic before your next appointment, or if it’s going to rain later in the day.

Unfortunately, iOS users won’t get access to all of the Google Now Cards (each of which offer different functionalities). According to a handy comparison chart provided by Google, the iOS version of Google Now won’t have the following cards: Boarding Pass, Activity summary, Events, Zillow, Fandango, and Nearby events.

On Android, Google Now has access to a lot more information, since it’s a core part of the operating system. Google will likely never be able to give the iOS version of Google Now all of the features its Android sibling has — but Google has managed to bring over most of the core functionality.

It also looks like Google is gearing up to bring Google Now to Chrome on your desktop, according to some recently discovered testing code.

I haven’t had a chance to try out the app yet (look for a hands-on later today), but it’s pretty obvious Google is turning its iOS search apps into a mini-ecosystem. It’s like the reverse of what Facebook Home is doing on Android. With Google Now, you’ll have even less of a reason to leave the Google search app on your iPhone. It doesn’t need specific commands like Siri to retrieve useful information, which could make it an even better digital personal assistant.

If you needed further evidence that tablets are more than a mere computing fad, just look at the latest numbers from Strategy Analytics.

The firm found that the tablet industry more than doubled in the first quarter — reaching 40.6 million units, up from 18.7 million last year. This was a significant quarter since we have more than two major companies backing tablet platforms, and consumers have plenty of inexpensive tablets to choose from.

In particular, it’s worth paying attention to Microsoft’s figures. The company is finally on the map in the tablet industry, with 3 million Windows tablets shipped, which includes both Windows 8 and Windows RT (Surface) devices. While that only makes up 7.5 percent of global tablet market share, it’s a notable figure, since Microsoft didn’t even have a tablet strategy last year (we can exclude the handful of Windows 7 tablets nobody bought).

Apple, not surprisingly, is still leading the tablet industry. The company reported 19.5 million iPads shipped for the quarter, up from 11.8 million last year. But Apple should also pay attention to how much Android slates are gaining on the iPad. Strategy Analytics reports that 17.6 million Android tablets were shipped in Q1, up from 6.4 million.

Now Apple and Google are basically neck and neck for the top spot in the tablet world. Android made up 43.4 percent of the global tablet market for the quarter, while Apple held 48.2 percent, falling around 15 percentage points from last year.

For the most part, it was small and cheap tablets like the Nexus 7 and Kindle Fire that helped Android gain so much ground so quickly. At $329, the iPad Mini is still significantly more expensive than $200 Android tablets.

Apple’s big problem? Android tablets will continue to get cheaper and there will be more of them to tempt consumers. Apple, on the other hand, will be stuck iterating the iPad and iPad Mini over the next few years (likely at the same prices).

At this point, it looks like Android will end up dominating tablets pretty soon — something I previously thought would take years to do.

Photo: Devindra Hardawar/VentureBeat

But it looks like a new iPhone, a cheaper iPhone, a new tablet, an iWatch, or any other new products will have to wait.

“Our teams are hard at work on some amazing new hardware, software and services we can’t wait to introduce this fall and throughout 2014,” Cook said.

That’s basically as close as Apple will come to saying: no new products for you. And that is not what investors want to hear. The lack of new product introductions — not a single new product in this past quarter — is partly what hurt Apple in the stock market, as investors want to see what is new and what is coming.

When an analyst later on the call asked for more details, Cook had this to say: ”I don’t want to be more specific. We have some really great stuff coming in the fall and all across 2014.”

Image credit: Dean Takahashi

The iPad is still the king of the tablet browsing platforms. But the king is not quite as kingly as it used to be.

Apple earnings are just about to be announced for the second quarter of 2013, and analysts are expecting tough news from the iPad maker. Its tablet market share has been a major strong point, with big sales numbers and even bigger percentage shares of usage: tablets used to browse the web.

In fact, Apple enjoyed 90-plus percentage point market share of tablet usage in North America for much of 2012.

But that’s changing.

Online advertising company Chitika, which measures tablet, smartphone, and other platform usage of online ad networks, and therefore browsing share, says that iPad share in the U.S. and Canada is down based on a study of hundreds of millions of tablet ad impressions the company conducted. Which means, of course, that Android-based tablets such as Kindle and Galaxy are increasing their share.

“While Apple continues to increase overall iPad usage, it is losing share as others enter the market,” eMarketer’s Clark Fredricksen said. “Apple’s share of U.S. tablet users is expected to fall to 60.5 percent in 2013 … from 64.9 percent last year and 83 percent in 2011.”

The major downtick, Chitika says, occurred from December to January, when Android tablet sales were particularly strong over the Christmas gift-giving season. The iPad’s share of U.S. and Canadian web traffic dropped from 92 percent in October to 80.5 percent in February, before rebounding slightly to 81.9 percent in March.

The loss in comparative browser share by itself doesn’t necessarily mean that Apple is losing the tablet battle. After all, the market is still expanding. But it does mean that Android is starting to gain some traction in what has been an extremely difficult market for it to crack.

Even with the introduction of the long-awaited and well-received iPad Mini.

Image credit: John Koetsier

Analysts expect earnings of $10.12 a share on revenue of $42.6 billion, which sounds great for almost any company on the planet but Apple, it seems. Apple’s own guidance was a rather more modest $9.23 to $10.23 per share on earnings of $41 to $43 billion.

The question is whether those results — or better — will push Apple’s brutalized stock up … or down.

I talked to Pace University’s Darren Hayes about Apple, technology, and the stock market. Hayes is a professor at Pace’s Seidenberg School of Computer Science and Information Systems.

VentureBeat: What has driven Apple stock down over the past six months?

Hayes: iPhone 5 sales have failed to impress. There’s been a lack of innovation over the past few years to come up with the next great device, and consumers have failed to see any differentiation. Samsung has captured the market.

VentureBeat: Isn’t the stock undervalued?

Hayes: It’s possible. The short sellers have had a field day, but once the stock starts to rebound, they’ll have to cover.

With the amount of short selling that has been going on, it has been oversold. So with any kind of bump, the short sellers will have to cover, and there’s likely to be some rebound.

Short sellers are happy when the stock is going down … they may even increase their short position. But if there’s a couple of days of increase, short sellers may need to cash in on their profits and buy it back, so instead of it moving $2 it may move $12.

VentureBeat: So if Apple reports good news, the stock could jump significantly?

Hayes: It’s possible it could bump up $50 or $75.

VentureBeat: What does Apple need to do to make that happen?

Hayes: The company needs to look at business alliances. We’ve all heard about BlackBerry’s difficulties maintaining market share. Apple has failed to grasp that opportunity … failed to capture a tremendous business opportunity.

For example, even with servers — Apple had tremendous servers, but never looked to expand their market. They need to talk more about how they’re going expand their reach in corporate markets.

Google and Android have had a very effective strategy — it’s easy for developers to develop for Android, it’s open source, integrated in the auto industry, into appliances — and its adoption rate is far great than Apple’s.

In terms of of security, Apple does have better security, but businesses are going with the cheaper option.

VentureBeat: What is Apple’s biggest challenge?

Hayes: Apple has the market share in terms of tablets and they’ve been able to compete in computers, but what people are really interested in is the smartphone market. Smartphones are the most important thing people are looking at right now. For example, look at HP and Dell — it’s clear people are buying smart devices and not investing in traditional computers.

There’s about one billion smartphones in use, and that’s likely to double by 2014 according to Gartner.

The problem is that the iPhone has really failed to impress – demand has been very soft for iPhone 5.

VentureBeat: What about a cheaper iPhone?

Hayes: That’s definitely a good move, but what’s really important is the incentives they offer to carriers. Apple has already incensed a lot of carriers by offering very, very small incentives, so many carriers feel they’ve been squeezed by Apple and now would rather promote Samsung and Android.

So it’s not just about improved features and better pricing … it’s about carriers.

VentureBeat: Can Apple ever get back to $700 stock price territory?

Hayes: They need to get more hype about their products. And they need to think about the next big device that would really create some interest and buzz. Apple TV is probably not it … there’s not many details about it — they need to come out with something new.

We’ve been spoiled for years by Steve Jobs unveiling some new device year after year.

Image credit: Marco aka MenfiS/Flickr

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Chinese “app store” 7659.com is using Apple’s own bulk enterprise licensing technology to distributed pirated apps to Chinese iPhone and iPad users, completely free.

The site, which is only available within China unless you spoof your location via a proxy server, offers a wide selection of iPhone and iPad apps. In just a few moments, I found Final Fantasy V, a $16 iPad game; Badland, a newish $4 app; Le Vamp, a $2 game for iPhone and iPad, and many others.

Apple’s enterprise app deployment technology enables app distribution to an “unlimited number of iOS devices.” Essentially, enterprise app deployment enables corporations to function as their own app distributor, after getting a developer provisioning profile from Apple. That’s turned out to be a good thing for pirates in China, as over five million Chinese iPhone owners are currently using the site to find and install apps. And it seems to be a good thing for iPhone users, who are now getting free apps.

It is not, however, such a good thing for Apple or for the developers who expect to be paid for those apps.

Thanks to this ingenious enterprise strategy, iPhone owners in China do not have to jailbreak their phones in order to install pirated apps — as Taiwanese blog MicGadget puts it, essentially the same app is being distributed, again and again, with the same license ID. That’s exactly how Apple designed in-house enterprise apps to work, although it’s not likely they envisioned the technology being used this way. Jailbreaking, of course, comes with the increased risks of bricking your iPhone, boosting vulnerability to malware, and blocking updatability to new iOS software.

Source: John Koetsier

Final Fantasy V, a $16 game, for free.

The site is provided by a front company called Kuaiyong, which appears to be owned by Beijing YouRanTianDi Technology Co Ltd. Though English-speaking users cannot connect with and use the service, Kuaiyong provides a short explanation of what it does for foreign Apple users — along with a justification for providing the pirate app store: the apparent difficulty of Apple’s iTunes:

Statistics have shown that a significant amount of Apple users are Chinese based. However, the fact is that in China, a large number of Apple users are not very familiar with the iTunes system and how to effectively manage it.

In order for Chinese Apple fans to download applications securely, Kuaiyong developed its own method of giving users access to thousands of free apps without having to jailbreak their devices. Kuaiyong offers detailed descriptions of apps, free app download trial, IOS device management and visual and audio file backup system. IOS system backup and recovery features will also be released in the very near future.

Our goal has always been about bringing Chinese Apple users with quick, convenient and pleasant IOS experience. Since the introduce of Kuaiyong, the proportion of jailbreak in China has declined dramatically from 60% to around 30%. Kuaiyong will hold on to this goal in the future and we would like to see more support for Apple as well as Kuaiyong.

In other words, the company is clearly providing a valuable public service — and one that Apple should be thankful for.

That valuable public service, of course, is essentially like Amazon pulling a Kindle on Google: replacing the approved Apple iOS app store with a native Chinese service that would enable Chinese consumers to own and enjoy Apple hardware while cutting the cord on Apple’s services, app store, iCloud backup and recovery, and more. Essentially, everything that Apple uses to tie its customers into its services and to monetize them beyond the initial purchase moment.

It’s difficult to see how Apple can remain unaware of what’s going on here. Although apps are being installed — and presumably updated — via Kuaiyong, iPhones have historically phoned home to Apple for many things, including iCloud, location services (which led to privacy complaints and legal action), and, at least in early versions, the capability to see what apps are on a device and remotely kill them.

In all those communications, one would assume that Apple has built in provisions that it can check what enterprise provisioning profile exists on a device, and perhaps more. From there, it should be a piece of cake to find a stunning massive shadow “corporation” in China with five million employees, mysteriously scattered all over the country.

That’s something that Kuaiyong is at some pains for avoid, for obvious reasons. And if you visit 7659.com from outside China, you’ll see a note what seems to be a warning to avoid having your iPhone communicate with Apple in any way:

It is recommended that [you] do not use Apple ID or AppStore to reduce the frequency of repair.

I’ve asked Apple for comment multiple times but have not yet heard back.

One thing is fairly certain however: Apple will be looking for ways, or utilizing methods already available to it, to neutralize this threat and shut down this rogue app store. There’s a challenge in that, however: It’s in China. And China has not been a very friendly place for Apple lately, as state-sponsored media have had Apple in their sights, and Apple CEO Tim Cook was forced to apologize over the company’s warranty and support policies in a country where, according to a source I talked to, few companies accept returns of any products for any reason.

So the situation may require for some extreme delicacy on Apple’s part … and the solution cannot involve bricking five million Chinese consumers’ iPhones. That, more than anything else, would be corporate suicide in China.

More examples of pirated apps here:

Here’s a shocker: The iPad 5 will be 15 percent thinner and 25 percent lighter than the current model.

This report comes from KGI Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, according to MacRumors. Before you dismiss Kuo’s notes as guesswork, it’s worth noting that he has a very accurate history with his Apple predictions. Either he has great sources, or he’s very good at guessing.

If Kuo’s predictions are accurate, the next iPad be about 7.5mm to 8mm thin and weigh about 500 grams (1.1 pounds). It will carry a Samsung-supplied A7X chip and cameras “with similar specs to the iPad 4′s.” The iPad 5 will also have a thinner bezel that more closely resembles the iPad Mini’s design.

And while iPad 5 will have a smaller battery, more efficient display and chip technologies will make up for that difference.

Production for the new iPad should begin by August or September, according to Kuo’s research note.

The iPad design hasn’t changed drastically since Apple announced the iPad 2 in 2011. The iPad 3 released in 2012 with a Retina display upgrade, and the fourth-generation iPad came just a few months later in November with some minor processor tweaks and Apple’s Lightning connector.

Image credit/Apple

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

The booming mobile advertising market grew from $1.4 billion in 2011 to $4.1 billion in 2012, and it’s projected to hit a massive $7.3 billion in 2013.

And almost all of it is spent on Apple’s ecosystem.

There’s a reason that even though Android has almost caught up to iOS in downloads, it’s still way behind in monetization. Partially, it’s because iTunes has a long and successful history of commercial transactions, so people feel comfortable clicking and shopping and buying on iOS. Partially, it’s because Apple was the leader in mobile for so long.

But it’s also because advertisers are simply getting fed up with an Android ecosystem that doesn’t convert very well.

Source: MoPub

Mobile ad spend ballooned in March 2013

“There have been whispers and comments around Google’s Play app store, and some of those concerns were supported when they announced a redesign,” Paul Gelb, head of strategy for MoPub, the world’s largest mobile ad exchange says. “If you have people click on your ad and drive them to the app store and that becomes a breakage point … that will reduce the value of the ad that you want to buy.”

Which is a nice way of saying that ads for app installs aren’t always working, even when the mobile user taps on your ad.

Most advertisers and ad exchange partners don’t want to talk on the record, of course. But off the record, they’ll say that Google Play is just not at the quality level of the iOS app ecosystem. There’s too much crap, too much malware, there’s not the level of quality that iOS has … and there is a missing mass of people on the platform who have confirmed credit card accounts and are, frankly, in the demographic who are willing and able to buy.

That may sound sacrilegious to Android enthusiasts, many of whom are tech-savvy and higher-income, but it’s borne out by the numbers.

Not only are 75 cents out of every mobile ad dollar spent on iOS, but iPhone, iPad, and yes, even iPod touch ad rates are much higher. While Android smartphones draw $.50 CPMs (cost per thousand impressions), iPhones pull in $.65 to $.88 CPMs, iPod Touches do $.74 to $.98, and iPads do between $.82 and $1.16.

Source: MoPub

Mobile ad CPMs for the first quarter of 2013

So while tablets are the highest-revenue mobile ad platforms, Android tablets only account for a skinny single percent of all mobile ad sales.

That’s entirely due to the basic question underlying ad pricing: Do they work? Click-through rates on Android devices are about half as good as those on iOS devices, with under one percent on Android tablets and just over a percent on Android smartphones. Meanwhile, iOS devices such as iPads pull in 2-2.5 percent click-through rates, and iPhone pulls in 1.4-1.7 percent.

Source: MoPub

Click-through rates for mobile ads – first quarter of 2013

All of that adds up to an ad-share spend in which iPad almost eclipses the entire Android ecosystem single-handledly, iPod Touch by itself does about a third to a quarter as much as all of Android, and iPhone owns about double the share of all Android smartphones and tablets combined.

Which brings us to the 75 percent iOS ad share:

Source: MoPub

Mobile ad market share, Android vs iOS devices

Does this matter?

On a certain level, Android users might not really care — after all, who likes advertising? But advertising is increasingly driving mobile monetization strategies for app developers, who must therefore care. And that means the apps and experiences Android users will eventually get from their platform suffer from the Android monetization gap.

Which doesn’t mean the gap will exist forever. MoPub’s Gelb isolated two key factors that need to change for that gap to disappear:

“I think Android tablets need to hit. It’s incredibly important — the larger screen just offers more ad potential,” he told me. “Also, there needs to be a bit more certainty and success around identifying high-value users who are known to have credit cards and disposable income.”

The question, of course, is when that will happen.

photo credit: photo credit: swishphotos via photopin cc

FarFaria is a popular electronic book app for children. Today, the company is celebrating its first birthday by announcing major milestones, “record setting” reading engagement, and its vision for the world of children’s literacy.

“It is obvious that getting children to read is important,” said Ajay Godhwani, the CEO of FarFaria developer Intuary. “We are delivering unlimited, high-quality content that is exciting for both children and their parents and encourages them to keep coming back for more.”

Godhwani said that kids are reading FarFaria stories at more than five times the national average each week. The app launched exactly a year ago, and since then kids and their parents have opened over 2 million stories, with 1 million read in the past month alone. Furthermore, 25 percent of subscribers read FarFaria stories every day.

The app offers readers places like “Fairy Tale Forest,” “Animal Kingdom” and “Sing Along City.” Entering any of these worlds presents stories that readers can explore as they choose. Comparisons to Netflix or Hulu come to mind, because the service is subscription-based and yields more content and variety than outright purchasing an e-book.

The popularity of the iPad led to an explosion of children’s e-books and educational apps. Kids are excited about playing with new technology, and the iPad opened up a world of opportunity for interactive content. Godhwani said that FarFaria is so successful because their team constantly adds new stories. The library is ever-expanding and currently holds 400 stories, with three to five added each week. Kids and parents don’t grow bored with it because it almost always has new lands to explore and stories to read.

Additionally, FarFaria adds new features regularly to enhance the reading experience. Earlier this year, FarFaria put in an interactive story browser, introduced more sing-along books, and rolled out a read-aloud feature. Now that it’s a 1 year old and growing fast, FarFaria plans to introduce single-story apps for the iPhone and iPad and introduce a rewards programs.

Intuary is based in San Francisco. Its other product, Verbally, helps people with nonverbal disabilities communicate.

This sponsored post is produced by StackSocial.

Remember playing with remote-controlled toys as a kid? The joy you’d feel when that car took off at breakneck speed or that airplane briefly took flight? Well, this VentureBeat offer allows you relive those days and unleash your playful side with this iOS controlled bug.

It’s not going to break your bank to have that feeling again either – because we’ve got it for the stunningly low price of $29!

It’s easy – and fun – to use. Just sync up this technological toy to an iPhone, iPad, or iPod and let the fun begin!

Here are just some of the features of this insanely great iOS insect:

• Realistic Robotics: Inspired by movements and characteristics of an insect, these creepy crawler will have everyone fooled.
• Plug and Play: Download the controller App from the App Store, plug in the included transmitter in the headphone jack, and you are ready to go!
• USB Rechargeable: Recharge your iBug with the included USB charging cable. No batteries required!
• Free International Shipping: Free shipping to the United States, Canada, Germany, France, United Kingdom, Italy, Spain, The Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland, Australia, South Africa, Japan, South Korea, and Singapore.

This iHelicopters product takes remote-controlled toys to a new level. You can see the iBug in action on the VB Store page – and get the goods on all of this offer’s important reminders at the same time.

But this gadget won’t be here for long – especially at this price. Visit the VB Store and take home of these iOS insects today!

Note, that’s potential bad news.

KGI Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo says that Apple’s iPhone 5S, an as-yet-unannounced low-cost iPhone, and the new version of the iPad mini are all going to be delayed, due to production difficulties.

Originally, he targeted a summer launch for all three products; now, based on manufacturing challenges with integrating a potential new fingerprint sensor in the iPhone 5S, color coatings for the low-cost iPhone, and difficulties fitting a high-res retina display into the second-generation iPad mini, Kuo says that launch dates could be pushed back as far as October/November:

Currently, market consensus for shipments of iPhone 5S, low-cost iPhone and iPad mini 2 is July, July, and August, respectively. But in light of publicly available information and our knowledge of technological trends, we now think all three products will begin shipments later than our previous expectation and market consensus.

This is not what Apple needs right now.

Apple’s domestic iPhone sales are up 11 percent this past quarter, according to one ComScore report, but the international mobile market, already dominated by Android, has been clamoring for a cheaper iPhone. And with Apple’s current stock price woes, anything that even smells of new product delays is dangerous.

If Kuo is correct reading the supplier market and the delays are real, he projects that Apple will see only single-digit year-over-year growth in iPad and iPhone shipments in the coming third quarter, far below analysts’ projections.

Apple, however, has never released a product roadmap claiming the products will be released at any given time, and a summer release would mean that Apple would be shipping the iPhone 5S much quicker than other follow-on models. For example, the 4S lagged the iPhone 4 by 16 months, and the 3GS followed the 3 after about a year. A summer iPhone 5S launch could make a gap of just eight months between the 5 and 5S ship dates.

We’ll know more about what might actually be happening on April 23 when Apple releases its second quarter numbers and issues guidance for the third quarter.

Image credit: ShutterStock/Delayed

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Hon Hai Precision Industry, better known as Foxconn, reported an almost 20 percent drop in earnings in the past quarter. The problem, apparently, is lower than expected iPhone sales.

What does that mean for Apple earnings, coming up in two weeks?

Sixty to 70 percent of Foxconn’s revenue is dependent on assembling Apple iPhones and iPads, Reuters says, and a drop in demand resulted in sales dipping from $33 billion in the fourth quarter of 2012 to $27 billion in the first quarter of 2013.

That’s clearly not great news for Apple, which will be reporting quarterly earnings on April 23.

But it’s also a little surprising, given that according to ComScore numbers released just recently, Apple’s Apple’s U.S. iPhone sales are up 11 percent this past quarter. Which could mean that the international mobile market, already dominated by Android, has increasingly pivoted away from Apple.

Credit Suisse analyst Kulbinder Garcha said recently that competition is heating up and that iPhone sales will be only 38 million units. While that’s up from Q2 2012 numbers of 35.1 million, it’s a massive drop from Q1 2013′s 47.8 million. And DisplaySearch raised an alarm in February that Apple’s iPad sales are shifting massively to the cheaper iPad Mini — which could be disastrous for both Apple’s revenue and margin numbers.

Foxconn’s drop, however, could also mean that Apple is diversifying its supplier list. The company does have 748 suppliers, mostly in China.

The Wall Street consensus projections for Apple’s Q2 are in the $42.5 billion range. Even if Apple hits that, however, it would signal a slowing of the company’s growth rate. And even hitting it would likely be a disappointment for an increasingly unsatisfiable Wall Street, which hit Apple’s stock hard even for its last quarter, in which Apple reported a monster $54.5 billion in revenue and $13.1 billion in profit.

Apple’s earnings in two weeks will tell the tale.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Glasses.com has introduced a cool new way to try on sunglasses without having actually having to try on sunglasses. The company has created a 3D virtual try-on technology that captures your face in 3D graphics and then overlays glasses on your virtual face. It’s realistic enough that you can try on a huge collection of sunglasses without ever stepping into a store.

The technology is an application of augmented reality, but with a realistic style that makes the shopping experience much easier, as you can quickly check out hundreds of sunglasses (or regular glasses) and find a match for your face. The Glasses.com 3D Fit app will even recommend glasses to you, and you can share the images with your friends so they can help you decide. The app will be available on the iPad in May, with iPhone soon after.

“We make a 3D model of your face,” said Jonathan Coon (pictured with his own virtual image), CEO of Glasses.com parent company 1-800 Contacts, in an interview with VentureBeat. “You can search for sunglasses and get lots of suggestions. Our goal is to make it more fun. We borrowed more from Hollywood special effects than augmented reality.”

Coon showed the app to me yesterday and scanned my face. The app captures your face by taking a series of photos. I had to stay still and turn my head slowly from side to side so that the iPad’s camera could capture my face from many angles. It then stitches the images together into a 3D rendering in a relatively short time. Once the company’s servers render your face, you can play around with it, swiping sideways to see the side of your face. Then you can try on different sunglasses, four at a time (mine is scanned above).

Coon had the idea a while ago, but the technology is finally good enough to execute on it. The app capitalizes on OpenGL ES, the graphics standard that allows an app to use a device’s 3D graphics processors to render an image, rather than the central processing unit. The graphics processor is much faster and makes for fluid motion graphics in the app. You can swipe sideways endlessly and the app will keep showing you new glasses and how they would look on you. You can even see the shadows the glasses would cast on your face. If you move the glasses, the shadows move too.

“We try to get much closer to realism than your typical augmented reality app,” Coon said.

The app is an innovation that comes from the small Glasses.com division (with a few dozen employees) of 1-800 Contacts, which health insurer WellPoint acquired last year for an estimated $900 million.1-800 Contacts has 750 employees. Android and web apps will come later this year.

That’s not bad for a business that started in Coon’s dorm room at Brigham Young University in 1992. He had the foresight to acquire the contacts.com web domain in 1997, and he picked up glasses.com in 1999. Coon, as an aside, is the brother of Jeremy Coon, the executive producer and editor of the hit 2004 film Napoleon Dynamite. Looks like Jonathan Coon has some dynamite of his own with this app.

You can move the glasses up or down your nose and see what they look like from the side. You can also view them up close by zooming in. The speed of the 3D is never an issue. That comes from a few years of iteration in development.

“It never felt like the tech was there before, until we saw a demo of [Microsoft's 3D image synthesis app] Photosynth in 2007. That technology can be used to create 3D panoramic photos and recreate images such as the cathedral of Notre Dame in 3D.

“I thought you could do that with glasses one day,” Coon said.

The iPad captures the images and then sends them over a Wi-Fi, 3G, or 4G connection to a data center. There, the images are processed and a 3D rendering is sent back to the iPad. That process takes maybe 30 seconds or so. Once you scan your face, it’s easy to try on new glasses.

Coon showed off the technology at an exhibit at the recent TED conference in Long Beach, Calif. Nobody asked about the 3D technology, which was very difficult to create. The most common question he got from people trying the app was, “Which of these final pairs is good for me?”

So my question is, based on the photos at the top, which pair is good for my face?

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Mike Reiners is the co-founder and CEO of NOMAD.

As of February 2013, 4.5 million iPads had been purchased for use in the U.S. K-12 academic environment. One million of these purchases happened in Q2 of 2012 alone, which represented more than the total number of K-12 iPads purchased up to that point. The growth rate is staggering, and doesn’t show signs of slowing anytime soon. But are our schools ready for the iSwarm?

They think they are. Nearly every day, you see another story about a school making a large iPad purchase. First, it was schools testing the waters by buying a class set of 30 to be usable by multiple teachers or assigned to one tech-forward pilot classroom. That quickly became full school rollouts, 1:1 iPad programs, private school recruiting tools, and even rolling kindergarten implementations. But keeping up with the Joneses does not constitute preparedness.

Now, this might seem like a self-defeating premise coming from a guy who makes his living building and selling apps, most of them with some kind of educational bent. Don’t get me wrong: I’d love it if even 10 percent of iPad-active elementary classrooms used my company’s apps, AWEsum! or AWEsum Plus, to build our children’s core abstract reasoning skills.

Furthermore, be assured that I don’t have anything against the iPad as a product, nor am I opposed to its use in schools. I’m simply imploring that we resist our very American tendency to rush to action, at least long enough to consider the following points:

1. Teaching requires planning. And planning requires time. Poll 100 teachers, and 99 of them will tell you they don’t have the time available to do their jobs as well as they’d like. (And save the cracks about “done at 3 pm” and “3 months vacation”; between undercompensated supervision of extracurricular activities, faculty committees, late nights spent correcting papers and summers of planning & fundraising, the average teacher makes less than $15/hour.)

When schools/districts are considering adopting a new textbook series, the curriculum committee may meet for a year or more to evaluate, decide, plan, and implement. The iPad isn’t just new curriculum for one subject; it’s an entirely new educational content delivery method. Yet we’re making snap purchase decisions, often coming from the administration level where the political/PR splash value is greatest, and not spending the time necessary to evaluate the overwhelming library of apps, iTunes U content, and iBooks.

Consider this: the most common iPad implementation plan (term used loosely) that I’ve encountered is to give each teacher a $X-per-student annual app budget, with virtually no oversight or coordinated collaboration.

2. Consider where we’re spending our education dollars. I have a number of good friends who were teachers, but have left the classroom for corporate positions. Oftentimes, these positions still have some connection to academic roots (e.g. educational sales, textbook curriculum development, or education consulting), but they carry two to three times the salary. Many of these friends were considered among the best teachers at their schools, and this is the point: We’re losing our best teachers.

For all the money that’s been spent on education reform in this country, the solution is not going to come from Santa showing up with a bag full of shiny new hardware, nor from tax referenda that rescue a few sports and activities. You want the best students? Make sure they’re being taught by the best.

Let’s say a high school of 1,000 students decides to purchase an iPad for each of its students. That’s a minimum of a half-million-dollar investment. Suppose instead the school invested $100,000 apiece in salary and benefits to retain (or recruit!) five outstanding teachers, who probably love the art of teaching, as they weigh their options and their future ability to support a family.

Think of what happens to an NFL football team and its surrounding fan base when it signs five high-powered free agents, all of whom are instantly among the team’s top ten overall players. Isn’t the successful education of our children at least as important?

3. The iPad is primarily a consumption device. A major buzzword in US education circles for the past few years has been STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics). We lament that we are losing so many prominent U.S. tech jobs to foreign-born scientists, engineers, and programmers. There is essentially universal agreement that we need to invest heavily in STEM education, particularly from a human resource standpoint. Well, guess what: Handing a student an iPad won’t inspire them to build it or program it. You’d be better off giving them a graphing calculator or a cheap computer and teaching them to code.

If you think the device is inspirational in and of itself, walk into a school that has a BYOD policy, then lift any content or usage restrictions and see how students spend their time. A few exceptional kids might surprise you, but for the most part, you’ll find a gaggle of Facebook and Twitter posts and some really high Temple Run scores.

Teach a man to fish, eh? Give a kid an app and you inspire her for a day; teach a kid to make apps and you inspire her for a lifetime.

4. Our students should be mobile multilingual. Android device sales now outpace iOS device sales by 8 percentage points in our country, and the gap is growing. Who decided Apple should be the sole delivery platform? Personally, I’ve been a Mac-vs.-PC agnostic for years, and I currently own an Android phone, Android tablet, and iPad as my everyday mobile devices.

We all know that the Apple ecosystem is designed to work well within itself, and struggles (intentionally?) to support multi-platform users. We’re potentially doing our children a great disservice by forcing them into mastery of only one OS environment and its support of learning structures – and I’d say the same thing about Android if it were the beneficiary of a crowd mentality artificial monopoly.

In summary, let’s think about what we’re doing. Blind, quick-trigger actions in education, especially expensive and invasive ones, have historically disastrous results. What’s needed now is a lot of conversation across sectors, a lot of focused training, and a commitment to keeping the teacher-student educational relationship at the forefront.

Mike Reiners is the co-founder and CEO of NOMAD, an app development startup based in St. Paul, Minnesota. He is also a 17-year veteran high school mathematics teacher (still actively teaching). Mike lives in the Twin Cities with his wife and three young beta testers.

Photo credit: Northern Ireland Executive/Flickr

Narr8, a publisher of motion comics and other digital content on tablets, is announcing today it is embracing a freemium business model and launching on the Amazon Kindle Fire soon. The company takes paper-based comics and brings them to life in a digital world using the easy user interface of touchscreen tablets. It is the latest platform to take advantage of the free-to-play (or, in this case, free-to-read) business model, where users play for free and pay real money for extras.

Narr8′s content includes motion comics — books in which you can tap the screen to see animated sequences — as well as interactive fiction and nonfiction. The company has more than 700,000 users from its previous launches on the iPad (where it got 200,000 downloads in the first two weeks) in November, and more recently on Android. The app hit “top free entertainment” downloads in Apple’s web site, and it has a rating of 4.5 out of 5 stars on Google Play. The digital content aims to capture users who are making the shift from paper entertainment to tablet entertainment.

Narr8′s content is in four languages and has stories from a variety of genres. The app stories include fluid animations, original music, and interactive features. Narr8 is also introducing updates today for its iPad and Android versions that include an in-app purchase system. Users can unlock episodes of content after they try the initial offerings for free. This kind of business model has worked out well in games and it will be interesting to see if it works with motion comics and other media.

“We are very excited to be launching on Amazon devices. As one of the leading e-book reading devices, we know the importance of being compatible to Amazon products, especially Kindle Fire,” said Alexander Vaschenko, the president and founder at Narr8, in a statement.

Narr8 seeks to be a bridge between the analog world — of TV, comics, movies, and books — and digital content on tablets. Others have done this, but not necessarily with the free-to-play model and an ally in the game market to boost awareness.

The Moscow-based company shares investors with Russia’s mobile firm, Game Insight, which is helping Narr8 get exposure on mobile devices. Narr8 is a single platform you can use to log in and enjoy different content, including games, educational material, and digital videos. You can purchase Narr8 currency, dubbed NARRs, in order to buy content or unlock additional content. The first two episodes of every series will be free, and you can pay for more content. The Narr8 motion comics also have a new autoplay feature, which lets you continuously stream episodes of motion comics with one tap.

Narr8 will let you accrue a weekly bonus of 120 NARRs per week. One new episode will cost 100 NARRs, which can also be purchased for 99 cents. You can buy bundles of 100, 300, 500, or 1,000 NARRs. These features are available in Russia, English-speaking countries, and a variety of others.

So far, the most popular content includes Jam, The Secret City (from Russian fantasy/sci-fi author Vadim Panov) and Paradigm (an education series).

Narr8 has 10 internal studios developing content, and it is encouraging third-party content makers to use its upcoming applications programming interface. Narr8 hopes to become a hope that spans digital content for games, sports and education. Game Insight and Narr8 are cross-promoting each other. If you are in the Narr8 app and tap on a Game Insight game, the app will take you to an installation screen so that you can install the Game Insight game. Narr8 is also working on getting licensed intellectual property for its digital publishing platform in a variety of regions. It is seeking deals in cartoons, comics, sports, and education.

“We’re happy to host an innovative application such as NARR8, we believe that their content will do well with our current readers. Looking forward to seeing the success of NARR8 on Amazon,” said Dave Limp, vice president at Amazon’s Kindle division.

The platform is based on HTML5 as well as Narr8′s own technology.

Narr8 was founded in October 2011 by Alexander Vaschenko, formerly of Moscow-based Mail.ru and Astrum Online. It has $4 million in funding from IMI.VC Venture Company, based in Moscow. That firm is led by Igor Matsanyuk, who is also on the Game Insight board and is a former executive from Mail.ru and Astrum Online. Narr8 has more than 170 employees. Rivals include Madefire and Comixology.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Imagine all the things you’ve ever wanted iOS to do.

Quick settings from the lock screen, widgets that let you make changes in running apps without opening them, true multitasking in which you can see and flip through all open apps, multiple desktops, the ability to download files and store them locally in a user-accessible location, and much more.

Now, make an awesome video showcasing all those. That’s just what Federico Bianco did:

What’s certain about iOS 7 is that we’re going to see something new and updated under the leadership of Jony Ive. He’s not a fan of the kind of skeuomorphic design that Scott Forstall favored – design that connects the new to the old with decorative but unnecessary elements. So we’re pretty likely to see something streamlined, simple, and elegant.

The question is: Will Ive edit iOS while leaving the core of the mobile operating system’s design ethic intact, or will he massively revamp it and come with a new overall concept?

And whether it will contain these or similar elements, only those in Apple know.

Image credit: Federico Bianco/Flickr; Hat tip: Cult of Mac

The rumors, frankly, sound extravagant, even fanciful:

• 60″ Apple HDTV
• 9.7″ Apple mini iTV for second screen experiences
• Apple iRing to wear and control your TV with gestures
• View content on your mini iTV up to 200 meters (656 feet) from your Apple HDTV
• Add up to four iTVs for each Apple HDTV
• Home security applications and integrations
• Video conference (FaceTime) and phone call integration
• Siri integration
• And yes, lest we forget, iWatch integration
• $1,500-2,500

Source: YankoDesign

An iPhone-controlling ring

They also sound very very cool and compelling, and perhaps just the thing Steve Jobs was talking about when he told biographer Walter Isaacson that he had “cracked” the essence of the TV experience.

According to White, who says he learned this information at least partially by checking with component suppliers in Asia, “the ‘iTV’ ecosystem represents a major innovation for the $100 billion LCD TV industry that will revolutionize the TV experience forever.”

That’s a mark in the rumor’s favor, actually, in two ways.

Apple needs to revolutionize something, soon. After the computer (arguable, I know), the phone (not so arguable), and the tablet, Apple needs new device markets to reinvent. While still huge and critical, the phone and tablet markets have major competition at lower price levels and similar sophistication levels, meaning that profits are going to be drained from that swamp.

With Apple stock at year-long lows and analysts attacking the company almost daily, Apple needs something to reinvigorate itself.

And, Apple needs to approach markets with an ecosystem point of view. That’s exactly what won it the smartphone market and tablet market, and that’s the only way to build a somewhat defensible moat against the competition that inevitably arrives in any hot new space.

That all said, there are major challenges here.

TV is a massive market, with massive competitors — including Apple arch-rival Samsung. And it depends heavily on wealthy, entrenched enterprises with interests in content creation and transmission … and interests in maintaining control of those activities. Even more of a challenge, the TV market is commoditized, with little profit on the device side.

In addition, these rumors have been coming for so long that an Apple HDTV is almost a joke. Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster, for one, has been predicting the Apple TV since 2009, continuing in 2012. We have yet to see the product, and it’s a challenging one to anticipate, not least because Apple has an Apple TV set-top product, which tends to cloud the waters in conversations with suppliers and analysts.

So a good dose of skepticism is well-advised.

But where there is smoke, there’s often fire. And, of course, Apple has done this before. The above description of the TV market would have been a pretty good view of the mobile market before iPhone. And, as someone who wants to see Apple tackle massive challenges and innovate hidebound industries, I hope the rumors are true.

Certainly the timing is right for a 2013 Black Friday and Christmas shopping schedule.

Image credit: YankoDesign; Hat tip: 9to5Mac

“Let’s just call it as it is,” he said today on CNBC, “there has not been a single piece of good news about Apple for 300 points, and today is just another day when the news is just horrendous.”

He’s either referring to Apple’s apology to China or to the fact that Goldman Sachs downgraded the stock today.

But not only has Cramer not seen any good news from Apple for months, he’s also predicting that the company’s next product, due in September, “is a clear loser,” as he seems to believe that Apple is incapable of pulling out of a “tailspin.”

That’s a fairly remarkable statement, even from Cramer. He is, of course, the financial analyst who predicted two years ago that an “overpriced” LinkedIn IPO would “destroy everyone,” so he is not unknown for hyperbole and bombast. But predicting the utter failure of a future, unreleased product?

Interesting.

Essentially, what Cramer seems to be saying is that the momentum of the mobile markets has swung so far in favor of Apple competitors Google and Samsung that Apple will not be able to reverse it, no matter what devices they bring out: new iPhones, new iPads, a new iWatch, or even other unexpected products. That’s essentially a platform call, saying that Android is winning and iOS is losing.

Of course, if that’s true, and if Apple misses on its next quarterly numbers — as Cramer expects — CEO Tim Cook’s job security could be in doubt.

Cramer did temper his comments at the end of the show by backpedaling a little, saying that Apple still has a strong installed base and that if it releases a new wow product, it would still matter. Of course, that came after some theater in which he somewhat incoherently complained that Tim Cook is no Steve Jobs:

Now, you feel that if Cook were to do one of these big shows and come out and say we are about to announce maybe the most disappointing product we’ve ever had since the Lisa … this is the Lisa 2 and nobody likes it and I don’t know why we’re doing and it’s all yours, America and China.

And we apologize that it’s so bad.

We’ll see Apple’s quarterly results in three weeks. Meanwhile, the stock is up almost $8 today:

Source: Google Finance

Apple stock April 2

Revenue will definitely be down from the company’s traditionally big holiday quarter, but the big question will be how Apple’s Q2 2013 will compare to Q2 2012.

With two product lines — iPhone and iPad — making up 72 percent of Apple sales, Apple’s quarter — and its sagging stock price — will hang on those two products.

But the limited amount of data we’ve seen lately on iPhone and iPad sales has not been great. Apple lost some U.S. smartphone market share this past quarter, and with some analysts saying that iPad shipments collapsed in the first month of this year, it’s likely we’ll see minimal growth at best. To make matters worse, it looks like Apple’s best-selling iPad model is the cheaper, lower-margin iPad Mini, meaning that even with good unit sales, revenue and margin could be problems.

Investors at Estimize are projecting revenues of $43.5 billion, up slightly from the year-ago quarter of $39.2 billion, but the Wall Street consensus is only $42.5 billion. In early 2012, when Apple stock was in the middle of its incredible growth phase, its Q2 numbers were down 15 percent from the holiday Q1. This year, if Apple hits the Street consensus, it will be down 22 percent from first-quarter numbers.

Either direction, this quarter will be one that confirms the nay-sayers’ opinion that Apple is slumping, or if the company can pull some magic with a spectacular quarter, one that reaffirms the believers.

Apple stock is down almost $14 dollars today to $428.91. At its height in October 2012, Apple stock hit $702.

Image credit: waferbaby/Flickr

I always lose the pieces to my board games. I still find Monopoly pieces lying around my parent’s house from that time we played it 15 years ago. That’s why I appreciate developer Playdek, which takes popular hobby games like Ascension and turns them into digital apps for the iPad.

Today, the developer announced it raised $3.8 million in Series A funding to help further its development of digital board games. It will also use the new influx of cash to build an online community platform around these hardcore board games.

Qualcomm Ventures led the investing round followed by IDG Ventures and FF Venture Capital. Previous Playdek investors Deep Fork Capital, Greycroft Partners, Jarl Mohn, and other angel investors poured in additional capital.

“This infusion of capital will allow Playdek to continue our mission of bringing the best tabletop games to digital platforms,” Playdek chief executive officer Joel Goodman said in a statement. “We are also able to advance our lead in the market by building and launching our online hobby games platform, giving gamers that ‘around the table’ feeling in the digital realm.”

Playdek’s next game is an adaptation table-top farming game Agricola. It’s due out this spring for iPad.

Coming later this year, Playdek plans to reveal a community platform for people who love its digital hobby games.

“Playdek’s ability to forge relationships with the best tabletop gaming producers and transform these well-loved board games into innovative and outstanding digital games for mobile devices positions the company for continued success,” Qualcomm Ventures senior vice president Nagraj Kashyap said. “In a little over a year, Playdek has established themselves as the market leader in tabletop gaming, and with the new community they are developing, the potential for growth is impressive.”

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