Despite offering more lucrative revenue splits for app developers than competitors Google and Apple, many of the largest digital media properties in the U.S. and makers of the most-popular tablet apps have decided that developing apps for the Surface — and the Windows app store in general — is not yet worth their time.
Developers are key to the success of any platform.
Nilay Patel:
And as more and more speech takes place on the internet, the answer becomes more and more important: the future of free speech might have more to do with corporate censorship than the First Amendment.
Amazing how many people don’t understand the distinction.
There’s a couple of classics in there.
Nice. […]
It’s just $500,000.
Jack Shafer:
To place The Daily venture in scale, the last attempt to start a national, general-interest print newspaper from the ground up—USA Today—lost $600 million over the course of a decade before turning its first profit in 1994. (In today’s money, that’s more than $1 billion.) The National, the national sports daily, lost $150 million (about $250 million, corrected for inflation) in 18 months before closing in June 1991. In the late 1990s, when Murdoch was trying to crash the China satellite TV market, he had invested $2 billion and was losing $2 million a week according to his former right-hand man in that enterprise. So, please, let’s not obsess too much over Murdoch’s squandering of $30 million a year on a failed experiment. In the history of journalistic bets, this was a trivial gamble.
This is great news for Apple. Mac Rumors has a full list of the new countries.
Greg Pierce did a great job redoing a number of the ringtones. Available for download if you want them.
With Bon Scott.
Conrad MacIntyre tells the holdouts to call it what it is and not use the artistic excuse. Good point.
At some point you just have to ask yourself why.
Jeff Sonderman for Poynter:
Being the first-of-a-kind is as dangerous as it is exciting in the technology world. With few or no prior examples to learn from, you’re left to try stuff and learn the hard way. With the benefit of hindsight, there seem to be at least two major lessons from The Daily’s failure.
Musicians of all kinds use Anytune to learn, transcribe and practice their favorite songs!
Check out Jim’s guitar stylings in a rare solo version of a theme that fans of The Loop should recognize. Something unexpected happened when tuning the track that hints at the source of Jim’s power… You’ll have to watch the video on this page to find out what it might be.
Music Practice Perfected.
Ben Brooks takes an interesting look at some of the most popular sites for tech news hounds and how much of their Web site is dedicated to the reader and how much is useless junk.
Gabe Weatherhead:
RSS is time-shifted news. It’s closer to a newspaper than a radio station. I visit a news feed when I have time to read. Like a newspaper, the value comes from being judicious in using my time. I can’t read everything but, I want to read every good thing.
I use RSS everyday and find it very useful — that’s why I offer an RSS feed for The Loop and a full text feed for members. Sometimes it does get out of hand though, so maybe these tips will help you.
Brett Terpstra offers some advice for new developers on how to release and market their app.
Scary when this happens.
Fascinating when you see all the things that go into making up a Web site design.
Van Halen was a surprise guest on “Beat It,” the album’s third single. His blazing guitar solo lasted all of 20 seconds and took half an hour to record. He did it for free, as a favor to producer Quincy Jones, while the rest of his Van Halen bandmates were out of town.
Eddie is one of the greatest guitarists that has ever picked up the instrument.
Big news for holiday shoppers and Apple’s financial quarter.
Many thanks to Pixel Research Labs for sponsoring this week’s RSS feed on The Loop with Ringer.
Ringer for iOS and Mac. Effortless iPhone ringtones, text tones, and alert tones. Easily select just the right part of your song to turn into your ringtone. See the waveform for your media so you can quickly find the spot you are looking for. Control fade in and fade out. Choose the gap between rings. Auto volume balance keeps ringtones from being too loud or too quiet. Ringer on the Mac lets you use just about any media including video and automatically imports tones into iTunes, ready to sync to your iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch.
David Barnard, founder of App Cubby, explains and apologizes to users of Timer for one of his decisions.
Much respect David.
A new report released on Friday from market research firm comScore shows Apple outgrew all other handset makers in the lucrative US mobile market. […]
This week, however, a Swisscom spokesperson told Telecoms.com that: “Apple only enables 4G access after testing their device on an operator’s live network.”
[…]
It proved, he said, “who is running the industry”, adding: “Apple have put themselves in the driving seat; it’s really changing the game quite a lot.”
Apple has exerted more control over carriers than any other handset maker. Before Apple, carriers had the control, and still do in a lot of cases.
Apple today announced the Wi-Fi versions of iPad® mini and fourth generation iPad with Retina display will be available in China on Friday, December 7, and iPhone 5 will be available on Friday, December 14.
This is huge for Apple.
You can now buy the unlocked iPhone directly from Apple, although it will cost more.
This is just terrible. Not Apple’s fault, but there definitely has to be a way to track this.
Give a gift that gives back this holiday season with Starbucks iTunes (RED)™ eGift basket. You can send loved ones a thoughtful gift of two digital eGifts—$15 eGift to Starbucks and $15 eGift to iTunes—for $30. With every purchase, Starbucks and iTunes will each donate 75 cents to the Global Fund. With the convenience of a Starbucks Card, Starbucks Card eGifts can be used for purchases in-store at participating company-owned and licensed stores in the U.S. and online. This unique and meaningful eGift basket can be purchased online.
Since launching our partnership with (RED) in December 2008, Starbucks has contributed more than $11 million to the Global Fund to help those living with HIV/AIDS. Starbucks continues to support and drive contributions to the Global Fund while raising awareness toward an AIDS Free Generation by 2015.
I test quite a few iPhone, iPad and Mac apps. Some I like, others I don’t really care about and a very limited number, I love. Fantastical for iPhone is an app I love. […]
A San Francisco judge on Wednesday granted a temporary restraining order compelling Twitter to continue providing access to its “Firehose” – the full daily stream of some 400 million tweets – to PeopleBrowsr Inc, a data analytics firm that sifts through Twitter and resells that information to clients ranging from technology blogs to the U.S. Department of Defense.