Apple shifted its 10 billionth song through iTunes yesterday. It was “Guess Things Happen That Way” by Johnny Cash – here’s an old clip of the man in black doing his thing.
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Posted February 25th, 2010 by Jonny
Posted February 25th, 2010 by Jonny
Apple will hold its annual shareholders meeting later on today, with CEO Steve Jobs on hand to field questions and (we reckon) show off the iPad as he tries to gee up investors.
We’ll be interested to see what transpires, but a couple of related business news stories should offer AAPL buyers some ease as US stocks dip today on gloomy economic news and more signs of an ongoing recession-based malaise.
In brief: Competing vendor Palm says sales have fallen steeply beneath expectations; conversely, France Telecom (Orange) returned better-than-anticipated quarters on strength of iPhone sales – and an impressive 91 per cent of iPhone users would recommend the device to a friend or colleague while 88 per cent would recommend the iPod touch.
That’s pester power.
Posted February 25th, 2010 by Jonny
91 per cent of iPhone users would recommend Apple’s flagship mobile device to a friend or colleague and 88 per cent would recommend the iPod touch, according to data from mobile ad network AdMob.
Also interesting, 16 per cent of iPhone users plan on purchasing an iPad, while 24 per cent of iPod touch users plan on buying an iPad.
Additional stats confirm it is Apple versus Google in the smartphone space, at least in the US:
Posted February 25th, 2010 by Jonny
Hmmm – seems to be an Adobe kind of day – here’s a neat report from the Telegraph, which looks at the work of artists Thad and Sarah Lawrence who use Photoshop to create “a surreal photo album documenting their relationship”. Great images, go and see them right here.
Posted February 25th, 2010 by Jonny
Adobe seems set to announce the next version of its Creative Suite bundle soon, if comments from company CEO Shantanu Narayen and sundry mutterings from the rumour mill.
Speaking at the Goldman Sachs conference this week, Narayen spoke up for CS, claiming the available market for the next bundle of creative apps is “larger than for previous versions”. He also blamed weaker-than-hoped for sales of CS4 on the economy, saying this was a great product, “that came out in an absolutely shitty economy.”
Posted February 25th, 2010 by Jonny
Speakers and schedule for music-tech startup event Music 4.5 was announced this morning.
This event should attract a diverse crowd, including music tech startups, artists, bands music managers, seasoned entrepreneurs, investors and music industry professionals.
Posted February 24th, 2010 by Jonny
The 10 billionth iTunes track has been downloaded following a two-week countdown. Just last month, Apple’s app store surpassed three billion downloads. (OK, we had expected Apple to cross the 10 billion target at the end of 2009, we’re a few weeks off, sorry about that).
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Posted February 24th, 2010 by Jonny
OK, so here’s the riddle – the iPhone 3G has been available for sale in Russia since October 2008 – now months since the all-new iPhone 3GS went on sale everywhere else, Apple and Russian carriers have finally sealed deals to offer the iPhone 3GS, starting this March.
Big sales aren’t expected – there’s a rich grey market in the country, problems ensuring internet access in some areas, and the GDP means per-capita income makes iPhone a status action. Despite this the country’s top three mobile carriers have reached a deal to offer the Apple mobile.
VimpelCom and Mobile TeleSystems both said they would start selling the iPhone 3GS soon. VimpelCom said sales would start “within a month at the latest.”
Sources told the Moscow Times that sales will begin at the end of March, with prices held uniformly between operators under a deal with Apple. VimpelCom’s online store already offers the 16GB model for 29,990 rubles ($1,000) and the 32GB version for 34,990.
Posted February 24th, 2010 by Jonny
The publishers of Bild, Germany’s best-selling newspaper, have condemned Apple’s recent move to kick thousands of vaguely nekkid-type apps off of the App Store, slamming the company for inconsistent enforcement.
It gets worse – proving that Apple’s version of US morality may not be an appropriate social consensus for other more liberal countries, like, erm, Germany, a German federation representing publishers said:
“We consider Apple’s behaviour to be unfair, arbitrary, bad for business and dangerous for freedom of the press.” (That image to the left is the kind of thing German newspaper readers see quite casually every day).
Posted February 24th, 2010 by Jonny
We reported on Google’s move to abandon support for Safari 2 on YouTube, now the future looks even more grim for older Macs – Mozilla has confirmed it will not support any Mac OS X breed older than 10.5 in the next Firefox release.
And this means for the Mac world everything soon will pretty much be Intel only – PowerPC Macs do run Mac OS X 10.5, but that’s the end of the OS line for those AIM Alliance machines. Which seems sad, somehow.
Anyway, Mozilla:
