Apple has emailed an invitation to media outlets for a special event to be held in Apple's Town Hall on the company's Cupertino campus on Tuesday, October 14th at 10am.
Unlike past invitations, there is little ambiguity in the image. It's Mac notebook time, folks!"
Now, I was having a really good week before this announcement. It just turned into a fantastic week. I've been waiting for months for a refresh of Apple's MacBook Pro line-up.
Research In Motion is showing off its latest device, the Storm.
The device has a few notable features (mechanical-like feel when typing on the touch screen) and has an appealing look.
But it lacks some surprising basics - it doesn't have Wi-Fi, which is odd because the Blackberry 9000 (Bold) already has that capability.
The device will work on Telus' and Bell's EVDO networks (I believe Telus may be the exclusive carrier in Canada).
The good news is the Storm isn't as lame as the Samsung Instinct. The bad news is we don't know the price points yet. I don't think its much of a threat to the iPhone for a couple of reasons:
1) UI - The Blackberry UI is okay, but it's not as sleek as the iPhone's
2) iTunes - The combination of iTunes iPod (Or iPhone) still hasn't been beat by any competitor. The iPhone works so well as a product because of both the hardware and the software.
3) App Store - Will as many developers care about the Storm as the they do the iPod Touch / iPhone market? What about mobile games.
SEC Examining False Report on Apple Chief Jobs (Update4)
By Connie Guglielmo
Oct. 3 (Bloomberg) -- The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission is investigating the origin of a false report on a CNN citizen journalist Web site that Apple Inc. Chief Executive Officer Steve Jobs had a heart attack and was hospitalized.
The agency's enforcement unit is trying to determine whether the iReport.com posting was intended to push down the company's stock price. CNN is cooperating with the SEC's probe, network spokeswoman Jennifer Martin said. The report is ``not true,'' Apple spokesman Steve Dowling said in an interview.
My Take:
This should give the whole iReport trend a major shake-up. It's an interesting concept, but the opportunities for media manipulation are too great.
One of the few edges so-called mainstream media have over online media (mostly) is trust. If they lose trust, then it's game over.
LOS ANGELES (AP) -- The federal Copyright Royalty Board on Thursday left the royalty that songwriters receive on sales of CDs and digital downloads at 9.1 cents per song for the next five years.
Both songwriters and music sellers applauded the ruling -- but for different reasons. Apple Inc., which had threatened to shutter its iTunes store if the rate increased, appeared to have scored a clear win.
Now, here's hoping that artists and music publishers stop and think about what they're doing before they try and kill the golden goose again.
Apple Inc. is threatening to shut down its popular iTunes service.
The stark warning comes as the U.S. Copyright Royalty Board in Washington, D.C. is expected to rule Thursday on a proposal from the National Music Publishers' Association to raise rates paid to its members on digital songs from 9 cents to 15 cents a track - a 66 per cent hike.
From CNN Money:
Apple (AAPL, Fortune 500) declined to discuss the board's pending decision or its previous threat to shut down iTunes. But it adamantly opposes the publishers' request. In a statement submitted to the board last year, iTunes vice president Eddy Cue said Apple might close its download store rather than raise its 99 cents a song price or absorb the higher royalty costs.
"If the [iTunes music store] was forced to absorb any increase in the ... royalty rate, the result would be to significantly increase the likelihood of the store operating at a financial loss - which is no alternative at all," Cue wrote. "Apple has repeatedly made it clear that it is in this business to make money, and most likely would not continue to operate [the iTunes music store] if it were no longer possible to do so profitably."
The music industry just doesn't get it. If they jack prices on digital music beyond what the market will support, people will revert to piracy. Then no amount of lawsuits will recoup the hundreds of millions of dollars in lost revenue.
The New York Sun, a six-year-old upstart, is folding:
The New York Sun, the six-year-old newspaper with a conservative mind-set, announced on Monday that it would close after publishing Tuesday’s issue.
The Sun’s president and editor, Seth Lipsky, said a three-week search for new financial backers had failed. Mr. Lipsky announced on Sept. 4, in a front-page “Letter From the Editor,” that The Sun would shut down by the end of the month unless it raised new money.
Mr. Lipsky told editors and reporters who gathered on Monday afternoon in The Sun’s loftlike newsroom in Lower Manhattan that the shutdown was “a logical decision following a hardheaded assessment of our chances of meeting our goal of profitable publication in the near future.”
As he spoke, the stock market was diving toward the largest one-day point loss in the history of the Dow Jones Industrial Average. “Among other problems that we faced,” he said, “was the fact that this month, not to mention this week, has been one of the worst in a century in which to be trying to raise capital, and in the end we were out not only of money but time.”
It’s DRM deja vu all over again. Yet another major purveyor of copy-protected media has alerted the customers that purchased downloads from it that it’s shutting down its DRM servers, thereby crippling the stuff those customers bought. This time it’s Walmart.com and it joins Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo in what’s becoming a really predictable tradition of handling the situation poorly.
Wal-Mart, which has shifted its site’s music store to DRM-free MP3s (good), sent a e-mail to purchasers of its earlier downloads wrapped in Microsoft DRM advising them that it will shut down the DRM server as of October 9th. Once it’s done that, the tunes can no longer be transferred to new computers or devices; Wal-Mart suggests that customers burn CDs to prevent the music from becoming unusable, long-term.
This is the single biggest flaw wih DRM: access to music that individuals have purchased can be restricted by the retailer years after the sale. No one would stand for it if Wal Mart executives showed up at your door and took your CD collection back three years after you bought it, but doing the digital equivalant seems to be a-okay.
Wal-Mart.com's move to shut down its DRM servers without doing anything for its customers is garbage, plain and simple.
