Apple’s iTunes makes saving music from CDs onto one’s personal computer a simple process, but doing the same with a DVD is much more complicated endeavor. Most DVDs are encoded with digital rights management technology to prevent copying.
There was a time when all you needed was a good record review in Rolling Stone or a stellar book review in the New York Times to get a boost in sales and popularity. But as those old gatekeepers lose their cachet in the digital age, a new set of gatekeepers has sprung up and they don’t have bylines. These are the editors who pick featured artists and apps at the Apple iTunes store, who choose videos to spotlight on YouTube, and who highlight Suggested Users on Twitter.
A question inspired by this week’s news that Research in Motion, the company that makes the BlackBerry, has become the chief sponsor for U2’s next bombastic world tour: Who exactly is profiting from this deal?
Users of iPhones beware–state gaming agents are watching you. California gaming authorities tipped off their Nevada counterparts to a blackjack card-counting program that can be used on either the Apple iPhone or the Apple iPod Touch portable music player.
Steve Jobs’s Apple TV hobby, the box that brings iTunes content into the living room, is getting ready for its third revision. What will the company do to leverage the recent spurt of interest in the device and boost sales even further?
Last Tuesday, iTunes, Apple’s ubiquitous online music store that sold more than 2.4 billion tracks last year alone, changed its own tune, announcing that songs would no longer be sold with copying restrictions and that they would be available at various prices.
“You can’t roll a joint on an iPod,” the singer-songwriter Shelby Lynne told the New York Times Magazine early last year. And, OK, I suppose that’s among the iPod’s drawbacks. But it’s hard to think of an electronic device released in recent decades that’s brought more pleasure to more people. Should anyone care that in the process, the iPod has all but killed the music industry as we’ve known it?
Seven years after Apple snapped up his idea for a portable music player that worked with an online music store, iPod chief Tony Fadell is stepping down to spend more time with his family, as confirmed by Apple in a statement. Replacement Mark Papermaster is a chip expert and soon-to-be-former IBM executive. His tenure could reflect a major shift in Apple’s approach to music.
Apple last week introduced a pair of very nice notebook computers that, not at all surprisingly, looked like riffs on the MacBook Air. … but what strikes me is what won’t be announced–the big surprises that are missing. What happened?
In a Q&A session after the launch of Apple’s new notebooks today, Steve Jobs called Sony’s Blu-ray a “bag of hurt” and stated that licensing the standard for Blu-ray hardware and software is currently too complex. Jobs then remarked that Apple is waiting for Blu-ray to “take off in the marketplace.”
Apple has applied for a patent to–no joke–extend digital rights management to tennis shoes and other articles of clothing. “What is desired,” the patent application says, “is a method of electronically pairing a sensor and an authorized garment.”
Apple’s much-anticipated “Let’s Rock” media event yesterday featured a group of largely expected announcements on updates to iTunes, the iPod Nano and the iPod Touch that left investors distinctly uninspired.
For the last few weeks, I’ve been staying up late glued to my screen. No, not watching the Olympics or the nonstop political gabfest on 24/7 news channels. I have been obsessively logging in to iTunes. It’s not about the songs, audio books, TV shows or movies. It’s all about the apps.
State legislators look at Apple’s iTunes and other digital download services stealing away business from offline retailers, and you know what they see? A piggybank.
iPhoneDevCamp 2 took place in San Francisco this past weekend; one of the great things about the conference this year and last was the number of applications written by people who met there for the first time or who had no prior iPhone development experience.
Sometimes, the cleverest ideas and applications arise from these chance encounters, despite having only two days to come up with these applications.
Here are brief descriptions and a few screenshots of some of the nearly 40 applications developed or demoed during iPhoneDevCamp 2.
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