It now appears that the white MacBook is going nowhere anytime soon. Instead, the new unibody MacBooks will now be the MacBook Pro line across the board. Makes sense considering there wasn’t a whole lot of difference anyway. More interesting is the price cuts: MacBook Airs are now $1,499 for the standard configuration and $1,799 for the SSD model — huge price cuts for both.
Apple’s getting aggressive price-wise, don’t you think?
The first announcement from WWDC is in, and its a 15-inch MacBook. Like the MacBook Air, the device sports a sealed battery, however it will provide up to 7 hours of charge, about 2 hours more than previous models. Apple is claiming the battery should be good for about 1,000 recharge cycles, equaling about 5 years of life for average use.
Interestingly enough, Apple has done away with the ExpressCard slot, instead opting to include an SD slot. This puppy will also be blazing fast, with a 3.06GHz option and capability for 8GB of RAM, the most ever for a Mac portable. Hard drive capacities of 500GB in standard drives and 256GB in SSD would be offered.
The 15-inch models would start at $1,699.
13-inch models are also being updated with an improved screen, sealed battery, and SD card slots. It’s also been upgraded to a MacBook Pro… hmm one begins to wonder…
According to data from Internet statistics firm StatCounter, Bing is now the second largest search engine in the US in terms of search share. The two competitors are virtually tied worldwide however.
In the US, Google maintains a commanding lead with 71.99 percent of the market as of June 4. However, this is down over six points from the day before. During the same period, Bing rose from 8.4 to 15.64 percent. Yahoo only dropped slightly, from 11.28 to 10.32 percent.
Google seems to be the primary victim of Bing’s success. “It remains to be seen if Bing falls away after the initial novelty and promotion but at first sight it looks like Microsoft is on to a winner,” StatCounter CEO Aodhan Cullen said.
Worldwide, Google controls 87.66 percent, followed by Bing at 5.56 percent and Yahoo at 5.17 percent. Obviously Bing has a ways to go outside of the US to present any meaningful challenge to Google’s dominance.
Obviously, it remains to be seen whether Bing can hold on to its gains. A jump like this is not all that unusual: a lot of web users are likely giving Microsoft’s new search engine a shot, and it may have artificially gained from the IE6 bug which defaulted search to Bing (StatCounter estimates share at around 23 percent).
It will be interesting to watch over the next few weeks.
Shocker. Two big media companies come together to take control of their online video offerings, become quite successful. Attempt to further capitalize by nickel and diming their users even further.
Hulu is considering charging its users to view some content, according to News Corp chief digital officer Jonathan Miller. While he has only been on the job a little over two months now, his words should carry some weight considering he is the head of the venture’s digital strategy.
Miller notes that it is only his own speculation, but “in my opinion the answer could be yes. I don’t see why over time that shouldn’t happen.” This doesn’t mean all of the content would become pay-per-view either: it seems as if Miller is suggesting Hulu may place a premium on select streams.
It really is a shame that Hulu continues to do things that make it seem like the company is out to make a quick buck, or force the user to do things the way they want. Hulu’s Boxee tiff is a perfect example.
Ah well, just gives me another reason not to use it. Since the site’s launch, I’ve visited only three times. I guess with this latest news, it gives me even more of a reason to continue to pass over the service.
Apple is looking into ways to allow iPhone users to share media during calls, according to a patent filing uncovered by entusiast site AppleInsider. The patent is titled “Methods and systems for mixing media with communications” and says that while media is portable, it still is not easily shared remotely.
Essentially, what the technology would add is an “Add Media” button which would allow the user to share media with another iPhone user on the other end of the line. Users would be able to share music files, video, images, voicemails, and podcasts under this system.
After the media is shared, the sharer has full control over its playback, and can even move to a different media type altogether if they so desire.
What may be interesting to some is the repeated references in the filing to video conferencing on the iPhone. This seems to indicate that future iPhone models will indeed include a forward-facing video camera, if Apple is actually serious about bringing this functionality to the device.
Media sharing is definitely an interesting concept. However, I question how the entertainment industry would feel about this. As prickly as they are, I’d venture to guess they would have some problem with it.
For anybody who’s been to an Apple Store, the company’s location on Fifth Avenue in New York City is quite the spectacle. Whether it’s the exquisitely-designed glass cube that is the store’s entrance, or the fact you can buy an iPod at 4 a.m., it’s always buzzing with activity.
Thanks to some sleuthing from the New York Post, we now have specifics. A prospectus for the GM Building, which was sold to a Boston-based group last year, listed $440 million in annual sales for the location. If correct, this would be about 10 times higher than the average store.
Furthermore, with $6.3 billion in revenue across the entire chain, it means that 7 percent of Apple’s retail revenues come from this one store. Pretty impressive, eh?
The Justice Department has launched an antitrust probe to take a look at the methods used by some tech companies to hire employees. The Feds believe that methods used when negotiating the hiring of each others employees may be anti-competitive. According to the Washington Post, the investigation is industry-wide, however the DOJ is focusing primarily on the actions of several big-name tech companies.
Google, Yahoo, Apple, and Genetech are receiving the most attention in the early stages of the investigation. Investigators believe the deals to not hire away star talent may be anti-competitive and allows the companies maintain market dominance illegally.
This case is not the first time that the DOJ has taken on tech. In May, it said it would look into Google and Apple, who have strong ties in the leadership of each company. Specifically, the boards of either have strong representation of executives of the other, which could potentially be a conflict of interest.
Back on the subject of hiring, it will be interesting to see what the DOJ concludes. I never really noticed any issue until this story. Come to think of it, there is very low turnover between companies, especially in the upper echelons of managemen
EchoStar will be forced to pay a total of $190 million to TiVo as a result of a Texas District Judge’s ruling that the company was infringing on technologies patented by TiVo. Furthermore, it was found the company had violated an earlier injunction by attempting to develop a “workaround” which it said still violated TiVo’s patent rights.
TiVo’s case against EchoStar has been going on for quite awhile now: it lost the original case in 2006. This set off a seemingly endless stream of attempts by EchoStar to appeal, of which it lost all major rulings.
In an attempt to avoid further infringement, EchoStar developed what it called a “workaround,” which it said removed what TiVo claimed to be patented technologies. The DVR maker disagreed, and the courts have now found that the workaround did still infringe on patents held by TiVo.
The patent infrigement claims will be worth $73.9 million plus $15.7 million in interest, plus another $103.1 million has been tacked on as a result of infringement that occurred during the injunction period.
In addition, the company will now be required to shut off the infringing technology from practically all of its DVR recorders. In addition, it will not be allowed to attempt another “workaround” without telling the court first.
EchoStar is remaining ever defiant, saying it will appeal the order with a federal appeals court, however its beginning to look like sooner or later the company’s going to have to pay up.
TiVo seems to enjoy the fact that EchoStar wants to continue pushing its luck: “EchoStar may attempt to further delay this case but we are very pleased the court has made it clear that there are major ramifications for continued infringement,” it said in a statement.
It may make better business sense for EchoStar to just pay up and license the technology. A single court has yet to side with them on any major decision regarding the actual infringement, thus chances of victory in the courts seem slim to none.
Research by the Harvard Business School seems to indicate that we might need to temper our enthusiasm for Twitter a bit. Taking a random sample of 300,000 users in May, researchers found that the top 10 percent of Twitterers in the sample accounted for 90 percent of all tweets.
Furthermore — and this may be surprising — most rarely tweet. The study found that the median number of tweets was one, which it said translated into half the group only tweeting once every 74 days.
Success as a tweeter also has to do with sex. On average, a male will have 15 percent more followers than a female. Men will follow men: they’re twice as likely to do so as following a woman.
Harvard researchers noted that this is reversed from what is typically seen on other social networks. “On a typical online social network, most of the activity is focused around women – men follow content produced by women they do and do not know, and women follow content produced by women they know,” they said.
While this is probably not the most representative sample here, I’m wondering if and how often our Technologizer readers tweet.
I for one tweet at least 2-3 times per day. You’re welcome to follow me, of course! 🙂
It was today in 1999 when a then-Northeastern University student Shawn Fanning changed the digital entertainment industry for good. The program he released was called Napster, and it made it stupidly easy to share just about anything. Within a matter of two years, the program went from relative obscurity to 15 million unique users monthly by its peak in February 2001.
I’m not going to sit here and act holier than thou: as a sophmore at Temple University in 2000, I was turned onto Napster by a fellow fraternity brother. Within a few days I was hooked — I had amassed quite the collection of music and videos. So were practically all my college friends with a computer.
Half the stuff I had was those old songs from my youth. Come on, I was like every other college student: I had no money (maybe I should have stopped spending my money on alcohol, but I do digress) and wasn’t about to go drop $15 just for one or two songs that I liked.
Napster made it really easy to solve that problem and at no cost. It’s popularity on some college campuses –including Temple — brought some networks to their knees as hundreds, if not thousands, of students were downloading simultaneously.
Almost immediately, the record industry jumped to action, suing Fanning and Napster in December 1999, although they were not successful in shutting down the network until July 2001.
From there, its assets would be fought over: Bertlesmann attempted to buy the company in 2002 for $85 million, although a judge would later block it. It would later be acquired by Roxio for use of its name for the pressplay service, and most recently was sold to Best Buy for $121 million in 2008.
The significance of Napster has not escaped even the current proprietors of the Na brand. In a post commemorating the anniversary, CEO Chris Gorog admits the industry is still trying to recapture the “excitement” of the original Napster.
Indeed the current service is trying to bring back “free” with its new offering that allows you to listen to an unlimited amount of music and offers five free MP3s on top of that. But you’re still paying $5 a month either way.
Chris may have used the anniversary to “pimp” his new offering as one commenter put it — but he is right about one thing. Without the original Napster, we’d be far behind where we are now. The service made the entertainment industry realize that consumers want more power, and the current state of digital entertainment — and a move back to DRM-free content — owes a lot to Mr. Fanning and that P2P software that swept the world one June day 10 years ago.
