Does Obama think Steve Jobs didn't build Apple?

 
“To say what he said is to say that Steve Jobs didn't build Apple Computer or that Bill Gates didn't build Microsoft or that Henry Ford didn't build Ford Motor Company or that Ray Croc didn't build McDonald's or that Papa John's didn't build Papa John's Pizza,” Romney said today at a town hall in Ohio. “This is the height of foolishness. It shows how out of touch he is with the character of America. It's one more reason his policies have failed. It's one more reason why we have to replace him in November.”

It’s not a new line. Here’s what Romney said yesterday: “The idea to say that Steve Jobs didn't build Apple, that Henry Ford didn't build Ford Motor; to say something like that is not just foolishness. It's insulting to every entrepreneur, every innovator in America. And it's wrong.”

It’s part of the Romney campaign’s latest condemnation of the president, who it says is anti-business. The Jobs charge is based on the Romney campaign’s reading of President Obama’s speech on Friday in Virginia, in which he said, in part: “If you’ve got a business -- you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.”

But does that mean the president doesn’t believe Steve Jobs built Apple? Here’s what Obama said in his statement after Steve Jobs died:

“By building one of the planet’s most successful companies from his garage, he exemplified the spirit of American ingenuity.”

This article comes from:http://firstread.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/07/18/12815514-does-obama-think-steve-jobs-didnt-build-apple

Checkmark for iPhone

While Apple may have complicated the field of to-do and reminder apps with the introduction of its own Reminders app in iOS 5, that doesn't mean other developers have given up. Checkmark, a new app from developer Snowman, has upped the ante with a superior implementation of one of Reminders's key features, location-based reminders.

My biggest problem with Apple's Reminders is the sheer frustration that comes with actually using the app. The process of entering items is slow, many of the features aren't fully fleshed out--for example, you can set a priority, but that priority doesn't show up anywhere--and you can set location-based reminders only for places listed in your Contacts. Checkmark addresses most of these issues and packages its features in a sleek, efficient interface that doesn't put the skeuomorphic cart before the horse, as it were.

The app is broken down into two handy lists of reminders: Where, for location-based reminders, and When, for time-based reminders--you switch between the two using Where and When buttons at the bottom of the screen. You won't find custom lists here; every reminder is tied to either a place or a time. Also note that there's no system of "priority" as in other apps of this ilk. I'm of the mind that assigning priorities is a time-sink, but if that's a feature you rely on, Checkmark isn't for you.

Checkmark's location-based reminders trump those of the Reminders app from the get-go. The app uses custom iOS-Home-screen-style pages of frequently visited locations. You add a location by using your current location, searching for a point of interest on a map, importing an address from your Contacts, or manually entering an address. This means that not only can you easily add locations such your home or work, but also other arbitrary places, such as your local drugstore, grocery store, library, post office, and so on. In my testing, this worked pretty well, although Checkmark occasionally failed to match locations such as my local coffee shop, or even my neighborhood Target, when I searched for them as points of interest; I had to instead add them via their street addresses.

When you trigger a location-based reminder by entering or leaving the geofence around the location, Checkmark sends you a reminder. In addition to onscreen notifications, you can choose for your reminders to include an alert sound, and you can opt to display an app-icon badge showing the number of pending reminders.

You can also view all your location-based reminders in a single list, delineated by location; if you choose to create a new reminder from this screen, you'll be asked to choose a location. When viewing the list, you can choose whether to view reminders that are currently active or those you've marked as completed, but there's no option to see both in the same list.

This article comes from:http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9229270/Checkmark_for_iPhone?taxonomyId=77

Apple's Ive is building the "most important and best work"

Apple is famous for its marketing and getting leading newspapers to print it for free. This week Jonathan Ive, the company's senior vice president of industrial design, pulled a swifty with the British media.
Ive came back from the colonies to pick up a knighthood from the queen for services to religion, er, design. He hinted that he was working on something that "feels like the most important and the best work" Apple has done.

He could have been referring to anything. The iBoat. The iTV. A very nice sandwich he made for lunch - or even the very satisfying dump in the office iBog. It is not a real quote.

If David "I am an Ordinary Bloke" Cameron told the Telegraph the Coalition is "working on a brilliant programme to cure unemployment and will shake up British history," readers would want to know what it was he was doing - and the Telegraph, we would hope, would ask on their behalf. If Cameron said "I can't tell you because it is a big secret", the reporter would have the public's permission to punch him in the face or not print the comment.

But in the case of Apple, this quote set off PC Week which felt the need to publish tons of speculation and marketing guff based on that one quote.
Ive has been working on the "hotly anticipated iPhone 5", the magazine pointed out. Who is "hotly anticipating" shelling out more cash for another update?

The Jellygraph enthused that it will have a screen larger by one inch. Not even an Apple cultist would claim that would make it the best work Ive has ever done.
Ive is also working on "the Apple TV," gushed PC Week. It does not take a genius to design a telly and Ive could not say it was the best work he has done.

Ive, like many people in Apple, gave nothing away, and yet the Tame Apple Press prints his marketing with fervent enthusiasm.

This ritual is seen so often in the trade press. Reuters is doing it now. How many stories about PCs do you see which has the mistaken comment that the PC has been killed by the iPad? Reuters said it twice in one story about Dell. Nowhere did Dell say its PC business was being killed by the iPad. Instead, it quite rightly said that its business was being done in by the European economy. Regardless, Reuters felt the need to throw in a free advert for Apple.

This reporter has asked the ethics staff at Reuters why the news agency is showing a marked Apple bias. TechEye heard that it wasn't, so that is the end of that. But when you see words like "eagerly anticipated" used to describe a product, then the reporter is editorialising in favour of the company's marketing department.

In the good old days, a hack would have been fired for that. It was unethical to talk up one company - that was up to the paper's advertising department. Now, it seems that it is the job of the media: to hawk products at the expensive of their readers.

This article comes from:http://news.techeye.net/software/apples-ive-is-building-the-most-important-and-best-work

Why Google and Microsoft want to emulate Apple

It's clear as retina display. Microsoft and Googlewant to do an Apple. The time for bluster, arguments and experiments has passed. The situation has turned desperate in the iPad, er,tablet market. All the 'Transformers' 'Galaxies' and 'Playbooks' haven't humbled the iPad. Worse, research firm IDC forecasts that by 2016, iPad and iPad-Mini (moniker for rumoured 7-inch version) will still control over 60% of the market. If you can't beat Apple's game, what do you do?

Play by its rules and share the spoils. Don't just code, weld. Microsoft went all the way, Google found a Taiwanese partner, Asus, to chip in. Two companies which swore by "open systems" took the first step towards controlling the entire user experience.

Of course, neither admits to the strategy change. Carefully worded scripts say the same blah-blah: adapting to market and giving consumers something they hadn't seen before.

Like the two weren't going green in their gills with Apple envy. Or weren't worried that a whiz-bang for Apple was vending out pennies for them. What if the Cupertino guys thought of "one more thing" before they got a chance to understand the slate market?

From this perspective, the hardware route wasn't a choice for Google and Microsoft. It was a compulsion, not just because of Apple but demons in their backyards.

Survival issues
Google's operating system (OS), Android, is all over the place. The big complaint: most devices don't do justice to the tablet version of the OS. As a result, smartphone apps perform poorly and dilute user experience on the tablet.

For Microsoft, the problem is more existential. The tablet and smartphone markets are growing at the expense of laptops and PCs. Tech advisory firm Gartner predicts that by 2016 tablet sales will total a whopping 665 million units. Microsoft is staring at a shrinking source of bread-and-butter revenue.

Yet, it remains a laggard in the smartphone/tablet market. Latecomer Windows Phone 7 hasn't been able to lift the fortunes of Nokia or Microsoft. Nokia's Windows 8 tablet was due this summer but has been delayed.

Microsoft couldn't afford the wait. It needed a product bang. So it imported the only strategy that has proven successful in the market - hardware plus software. But imitating a business model doesn't guarantee that Surface will make money. Look at Kindle Fire.

Math behind hardware
Google earns nothing from Android as the OS comes without licence fee. Last year, it even gave up its share of glory when Kindle Fire pipped Samsung, Asus, etc, to become the world's second largest, and Android's highest-selling tablet-cum-e-book reader between October and December 2011.

But Amazon doesn't make money out of Kindle Fire. In fact, some say it suffers a net loss to sell at $199. Yet Google wants to snuff out Amazon Fire. For the Nexus 7 may be a long-term bet against iPad Mini, but immediately, it bulldozes Kindle's territory. Same price - $199 - similar looks, more features.

This article comes from:http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/tech/personal-tech/computing/Why-Google-and-Microsoft-want-to-emulate-Apple/articleshow/14988446.cms

iPad mini: How much would you pay for one?

If the blogosphere is anything to go by, it seems that while the iPhone it too small, the iPad is also too big.The endless speculation that Apple is planning to shrink the iPad while at the same time make the iPhone bigger continues. While I believe that there is a strong case for making the iPhone bigger, it's harder to make a compelling case for a larger iPad.

According to Patrick Moorhead, president and principal analyst of Moor Insights & Strategy, Apple needs a 7-inch tablet because without one the Cupertino-based giant face the prospect of losing market share and profit dollars."The Google Nexus 7 will sell well," writes Moorhead, "which is good for Google, Android, ASUS and NVIDIA, but bad for Apple, unless they act before the holidays".

The problem though, is price. "Apple may have redesigned some of the innards of the new iPad 2 as they lowered the price," writes Moorhead, "but not nearly enough to offset the $100 price reduction, so a mini-iPad would be additive, not dilutive like the $399 iPad 2".

The problem is massaging the numbers to make it work.Take a look at the bill of materials estimate for the iPad 2 and iPad 3 drawn up in March by iSuppli Research:

Let's take the cost of a 16GB Wi-Fi iPad 2, listed as a little over $245 as a starting price for the mythical iPad mini. We can make a few common sense assumptions about any smaller iPad, for example, that it would have a smaller screen, a smaller touch screen and, one would assume, a smaller battery.

Problem is, it's hard to see this shaving much more than about $40 off the bill of materials. Let's push the numbers further by assuming that the component costs have dropped by some $20 since the original bill of materials was drawn up in March and we come up with a device that has an overall materials and manufacturing cost of around $185. This figure excludes costs associated with R&D, marketing and so on.

If the iPad mini costs around $185 to make, how much should Apple slap on the price sticker? $299 is the logical price point, pegging it at $100 cheaper than the current 16GB Wi-Fi iPad 2. On the face of it that seems like a healthy $115 above what it would cost to make.

However, scanning through the cost analysis we find that this would mean the iPad mini would have the smallest gap between the bill of materials plus manufacturing costs of any iPad.

In other words, this would mean that by releasing a 7-inch iPad Apple would be risking cannibalizing the sale of iPads with a better profit margin.

That doesn't sound like the Apple we know.

There's another problem with that $299 price point. Would the market stand a $100 price premium for the Apple logo on the back of the tablet when Amazon and Google already sell cracking tablets for $199? And what if Amazon slashes the price of the existing Kindle to $149? Where does that leave the iPad mini at $299?

In theory, a smaller and more portable iPad sounds great, but in practice, unless Apple is willing to massacre its profit margins to bring one to market, it's just not going to happen.


This article comes from:http://www.zdnet.com/ipad-mini-how-much-would-you-pay-for-one-7000000694/

Google Could Pay $22.5 Million for Safari Violation

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and Google are reportedly close to agreeing on a $22.5 million settlementstemming from charges that the search engine giant bypassed the security settings in Apple's Safari browser. This will be the largest penalty imposed by the FTC on a single company, but is seemingly chump change compared to the nearly $38 billion in revenue Google earned in 2011 alone.

This won't be the first run-in with the FTC. The company previously had to settle with the commission over complaints regarding the now-defunct Google Buzz and the "misuse" of personal data. The agreement, established in March 2011, forced Google to adopt a comprehensive privacy program as well as submit to an independent privacy audit every two years.

One year later, the FTC caught wind of an article by the Wall Street Journal which claimed that Google linked Safari's browsers to its servers in order to see if account holders were signed into their Google accounts. This linking not only bypassed Safari's privacy settings, but also established additional cookies on the users' computers.

Unlike other Web browsers, Safari's default settings prevent sites from slipping cookies on the device, whether it's a smartphone or desktop. However the one exception enables users to engage in social media on other sites such as clicking the "like" button above an article. Google's temporary cookie allowed surfers to interact with the "+1" button, but the side effect was that it also allowed Safari to accept other tracking files from Google's ad network. Thus, Safari users saw ads based on their browser history which is a direct violation of Apple's privacy settings.

At the time, the FTC said that it was investigating whether Google had misrepresented itself when informing users that it would abide by Safari's privacy settings. It was also investigating whether Google violated its own Google Buzz consent decree as well. Google said that the user-tracking was inadvertent and didn't cause any harm to users, but so far both the FTC and Google have declined to comment on the investigation's status. Insiders claim the two are close to reaching an agreement.

"We cannot comment on any specifics," a Google representative said. "However we do set the highest standards of privacy and security for our users. The FTC is focused on a 2009 help center page published more than two years before our consent decree, and a year before Apple changed its cookie-handling policy. We have now changed that page and taken steps to remove the ad cookies, which collected no personal information, from Apple’s browsers."

The Wall Street Journal reports that Google could face other government actions outside the FTC probe. A group of U.S. state attorneys general are currently investigating the issue, and could fine Google $5,000 per violation. Overseas, the European Union is still investigating the Safari incident as part of a wide-ranging examination of whether Google's new privacy policy actually complies with Europe's data-policy regulations.

This article comes from:http://www.tomsguide.com/us/FTC-Google-Safari-Privacy-Settings-Cookies,news-15829.html

Microsoft to Apple: Bring it on

A detail here, a tidbit there: we're finding out the specifics of Windows 8 a little bit at a time. We know how much Windows 8 will cost (a penny under $40 for most upgraders) and now we have a date, or at least a timeframe: the first PCs running Microsoft's latest OS will be available in late October.

Microsoft announced the release at its Worldwide Partner Conference in Toronto on Monday, coyly declining to give the exact date Windows 8 will be available. No surprise that it'll drop in October: that's what most analysts were expecting, given that the Windows 8 Release Preview came out in late May (an October release also means Windows 8 computers, tablets, and smart phones will be ready in time for the holiday shopping season). The final version of the OS will be released to manufacturers at the beginning of August.

Microsoft has placed much of its future on this new release. As Apple gobbles up 25 percent of the American computer market with its MacBooks and around 60 percent of the tablet market with the iPad, Microsoft hopes the new OS can pull double duty. Windows 8's Metro interface will aid PCs, become the sole OS for tablets, and take on a modified form with Windows phones.
This article comes from:http://www.csmonitor.com/Innovation/Horizons/2012/0709/Microsoft-to-Apple-Bring-it-on