Daisuke Wakabayashi and Kana Inagaki for the Wall Street Journal:
Japan’s Softbank Corp. said Monday it will buy a 70% stake in U.S. mobile carrier Sprint Nextel Corp. for about $20 billion in the biggest-ever overseas acquisition by a Japanese firm.
Softbank is one of Japan’s largest mobile carriers, and acquiring Sprint would give the company a big push into the United States. The company hopes to close the deal by mid-2013.
New Xbox Music service brings streaming, subscription and music store to Xbox 360 and Windows 8 PCs, tablets and phones with cloud-based storage.
Whether you like App.net or not, Shawn is right, the reasons presented in the article don’t make sense.
Love it.
This week’s Saturday Night Live featured a segment called “Tech Talk,” in which host Christina Applegate paired off tech journos whining about the iPhone 5 with very unsympathetic Chinese factory workers.
You can view the video on the SNL Web site.
(Don’t be surprised if you have trouble viewing this outside the U.S.)
Risky, but all of the best stories are.
Many thanks to Jump Desktop for sponsoring The Loop’s RSS feed this week.
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It is the easiest, the fastest and most secure way to get to your computer.
WIRED:
For most of the demo, we were running between 5 and 10 watts of power into the LS Concerts — all that’s required to drive the speakers this light and fast. Even at that level, they were loud. Like, really loud. We were pushing roughly 120 decibels out of the LS Concerts, and the sound was absolutely glorious.Tim reluctantly turned it down a few notches when a candle came tumbling off the fireplace mantle.
Holy crap. I’d never pay that kind of money for “just” a set of speakers but I’d really like to hear what they sound like in that kind of environment.
The majority of top decision-makers at the Federal Trade Commission believe that an antitrust case should be brought against Google Inc, meaning the search giant could soon be headed into tough negotiations, three people familiar with the matter said.
Om Malik is in Amsterdam and stopped by Heineken. I’m so jealous.
Amazon Chief Executive Jeff Bezos confirmed on Thursday that the online retailer sells its Kindle e-reader “at cost”, with profit coming instead from sales of online content.
That’s one way to do it I suppose. Or you could just design great products and make money on all of it.
NextGuide, my personal favorite TV Guide app (that I built at the company I run), is now updated to include Amazon Prime and Amazon Instant Video alongside live TV, Hulu Plus, iTunes, and Netflix. It’s really a great experience to browse all providers simultaneously and to search for shows and actually know where they are watchable.
Looks very interesting.
Just in case you had any doubt that the old guys can still rock.
Video’s really cool, too.
CNET:
To encourage repeat viewings of his latest flick, writer-director Rian Johnson released an audio commentary track that you can listen to on your iPod.The director of the sci-fi action movie “Looper” wants you to bring an iPod into the theater to listen to details of how each scene was filmed.In a Tumblr post, Johnson, who also directed the AMC TV show “Breaking Bad,” provides a downloadable MP3 file to be played during the movie.
This is a really interesting idea and I wonder if it will catch on. I’m a huge fan of commentary tracks on DVDs.
Huffington Post:
There are large phone bills and then there are insane phone bills. Solenne San Jose, a woman from Pessac, in the Bordeaux region of France, received an utterly insane one.After she terminated a contract with the phone company Bouygues Telecom early, San Jose was told that she would have to pay a cancellation fee. The bill she received was for a mind-blowing €11,721,000,000,000,000, the Herald Sun reported. That’s around $15 quadrillion.
The best line in the story is, “San Jose had a hard time convincing the phone company that was the case.” WHY!? How hard should it be for even a mindless bureaucrat to acknowledge that the bill might just be incorrect?
ThinkGeek:
A Candwich Canned Sandwich is one tasty DIY treat, just waiting for you to crack it open. When you pop the top of your Candwich Canned Sandwich, you’ll hear an audible hiss of magic, and out will spill the contents to make one yummy sandwich. And best of all, each Candwich Canned Sandwich has a 1 year shelf life…
I almost threw up just reading about this.
I don’t think so, and the TechBargains.com survey strongly suggests iPad mini is a foolhardy endeavor.
Don’t blame me when your head hurts. Even his own readers make fun of him.
Larry Magid:
…but let’s not get too excited about Apple once again catching up with its competitors.
Wait, Apple invented the modern tablet and yet they are catching up to the competition?
I’m predicting a snooze fest not because of lack of interest in the product or lack of theatrics during the announcement but because I’d be very surprised if we see anything incredibly revolutionary relative to what we’ve seen in other tablet announcements.
So let me get this straight. If Apple sells a gazillion new tablets and people are excited, it will be a snooze fest? But if they don’t sell any, it will probably be a failure, right?
The only snooze fest is that article.
The Verge (via Daring Fireball):
Apple has agreed to pay the Swiss national railway (SBB) for use of its iconic clock design in iOS 6’s Clock application.
Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed.
The iOS 6 clock design was unmistakably the same as the Swiss national railway’s design. Glad to see Apple do the right thing.
New research from 451 Research/ChangeWave Research shows that demand for Apple’s new iPhone 5 is strong and will remain that way.
The survey of 4,270 primarily North American consumers shows an “unprecedented degree of consumer interest” in the iPhone 5. Results show that one-in-three people are “Likely” to purchase the new iPhone, while 19% are “Very Likely” and 13% said they were “Somewhat Likely” to buy the iPhone 5.
To put these numbers in perspective, Changewave did the same survey when the iPhone 4S was released and 10% said they were “Very Likely” and 11.5% said they were “Somewhat Likely” to buy.
Even though some reporters made a big deal out of Apple’s change to the Lightning connector in the new iPhone, consumers don’t agree. The majority of respondents said it was “Not Much of a Problem” (31%) or “No Problem At All (26%),” according to the survey.
Of course, the biggest knock on the iPhone 5 so far has been with Maps, but again consumers had a different view. Nine-in-ten users (90%) reported it was “No Problem at All” or they “Haven’t Experienced Any Problem”, while 3% characterized it as a “Very Big Problem” and 6% said it was “Somewhat of a Problem.”
New short film by Pixar. You’ll see it in theaters if you go to see Finding Nemo 3D.
John Paczkowski:
People familiar with Apple’s plans tell us that the company will unveil the so-called “iPad mini” on Oct. 23 at an invitation-only event.
Yep.
Jon Fingas for Engadget:
For all of the many directions Ubuntu One’s cloud storage has gone, it hasn’t headed the Mac’s way. Official clients have been the province of Linux devotees (naturally, Ubuntu is recommended) and their Windows friends across the aisle. A newly available Mac beta puts all three major desktop platforms on an even keel, very literally — the OS X port is almost identical to what you’d get in Linux or Windows, including a few rough points where other interface concepts clash.
Ubuntu One is a cloud service integrated into the Ubuntu Linux operating system. Similar to iCloud, SugarSync, Dropbox and other services, Ubuntu One lets you synchronize data between multiple devices. The service is free to sign up for and gives you 5GB of storage (additional storage is available for a fee).
After some time away from it, I recently installed Ubuntu 12.0.4 as a virtual machine on one of my Macs, and I’m really pleasantly surprised with how far it’s come. Canonical deserves a lot of credit for turning Linux into a user-friendly alternative to OS X and Windows.
I like it. I’d never do it, but I like it.
I like this. Lennart Ziburski didn’t just do a shrunken iPhone, but a whole new concept.
The Guardian:
Scientists from Newcastle University have drawn up a table of the least pleasant sounds we may encounter as part of everyday life.They tested reactions to 74 different noises both in outward response and more closely via small changes in the brain.The results are published in the latest issue of the Journal of Neuroscience and show, among other things, that acoustically anything in the frequency range of around 2,000 to 5,000 Hz was found to be unpleasant.
I’m not going to tell you what they are – you’ll have to click through to see for yourself. Then, you will be forced to listen to them out of curiosity. Then you will find yourself in pain – just like I was.
New York Times:
Zipping around on a motorcycle can be fun, but being in a downpour or an accident on one is not. Driving a car is safer and more comfortable, but traffic and parking can be annoying. What if you got rid of the bad parts of both?You might end up with something like the C-1, an electric motorcycle that looks as if it came out of the movie “Tron.”
As a rider myself, I have a hard time calling this thing a motorcycle but as a “single person urban transport vehicle”, it’s kind of interesting. Make sure you watch the video from the company to see how the fascinating gyroscopes work to keep the “rubber side down”. It will be interesting to see if this ever becomes a real shipping product.
The gadget maker has hired Jim Mergard, a 16-year veteran of Advanced Micro Devices who was a vice president and chief engineer there before he left for Samsung. He is known for playing a leading role in the development of a high-profile AMD chip that carried the code name Brazos and was designed for low-end portable computers.
John Kirk with a message for Eric Schmidt:
The proof is in the profits. If you don’t the have profits, you don’t have the proof. And if you don’t have the proof, then please, just stop talking.
Schmidt also said that the majority of TVs would have Google in them by now too. How’s that working out for you Schmidt?