Dell just announced its quarterly earnings:
Income: Down Revenue: Down Enterprise: Down Government: Down Small and medium businesses: Down And Consumer: You guessed it, down.
Oh and stock price: Down
Despite all of that, Dell posted “better than expected second-quarter earnings.”
Autoblog:
Miimo is an autonomous robotic mower that Honda will be selling in the European market only (for now) starting in 2013.Miimo runs on power supplied by its lithium-ion battery pack and, just like a Roomba robotic vacuum, will return to its charging station for a fresh batch of electrons when it runs out.The mower can operate in a random pattern, a directional mode where it mows back and forth in lines, or a combination of the two. As for safety, Miimo has bump sensors so it won’t break any potted plants, and if lifted off the ground, its blades will automatically stop and starting up again requires entering a unique PIN number.
As a kid, sweating behind an old fashioned push-blade mower (no – I’m not that old. My father was that cheap!), I would have saved my allowance and bought one of these!
Columbia Journalism Review:
The big market news today is about Apple’s gargantuan market capitalization reaching a new, stunning high. There’s a big problem with all of the headlines: They’re all false.Apple is not the biggest or most valuable company in history—not by a longshot. That’s because the press is overlooking reality for the apparently irresistible pull of a headline that includes “Apple” and “record” = pageview gold.Apple’s $622 billion market cap is a nominal record, which means “in name only,” or alternatively, not really. That’s because it’s a record only if you don’t adjust Microsoft’s 1999 market cap for inflation.
Keep this story in mind next time you read of something or other achieving “record” status. Always question the numbers and where they come from.
The Moscow News:
Gadgets manufacturer and darling of the hipster set, Apple Computers plans to sell its products in Russia without the use of middlemen, bringing the price of its trendy equipment down.Apple has registered a company Apple Rus and assigned Vitaly Morozko, the corporation’s local legal advisor, as its director general, Kommersant reported.According to an unnamed manager of an Apple distributor, the company could start direct sales in Russia in 2013, but it is unclear when first Apple Stores will open.
“darling of the hipster set…”? Hipsters didn’t make Apple the most valuable public company in the world.
I’d love to have one of the Strats.
Adweek:
David Beckham is bigger than ever, in almost every way, now that Spellbound Media and Zenith Optimedia have unleashed giant silver statues of the footballer around three U.S. cities for H&M. Three statues have gone up outdoors in New York—one in front of the Apple Store at 58th Street and 5th Avenue; one near the Flatiron Building; and one at the South Street Seaport. The outdoor figures will remain up through Sunday.
Goodrich, who worked for Jobs since 1998, was promised by late chairman of the world’s most valuable company in a one-on- one meeting in May 2005 that he would always have a job at Apple, according to the complaint. The conversation took place after Jobs’s return from medical leave to receive treatment for pancreatic cancer, Goodrich said.
Just playing devil’s advocate here, but aren’t things like this said all time? “You’re good, you’ll always have a job here.” Things change.
We’re re-doubling our efforts to bring you an all-new version of Twitterrific: one that complies with Twitter’s new guidelines and makes reading and posting to Twitter even easier and more fun.
Great news. I’m glad to hear that the guys will continue one of the great Twitter apps on the market.
A new cool Mac app from Matt Gemmell. I just picked it up.
The jurors have to answer 700 questions in the Apple v. Samsung case.
The website of a Moscow court that convicted three members of punk band Pussy Riot to two years in jail each for belting out a profanity-laced anti-Kremlin song inside a cathedral was hacked on Tuesday.A slogan denouncing President Vladimir Putin was posted on the site as was an appeal for the trio’s release along with a video clip of one of the band’s latest anti-Putin songs and a clip by Bulgarian singer Azis, local media reported.
Respect to Pussy Riot.
The Princess Merida’s hair was almost a three year process to get correct. Earlier hair such as for the characters in The Incredibles had much more groomed hair, but here the character’s hair simulation needed to solve how to get this messy, tempestuous and unpredictable look while still looking attractive and flowing nicely with the animation.
It’s the details.
Blake Patterson for TouchArcade:
Rantmedia Games will soon be releasing Vectrex Regeneration, a universal Vectrex emulator that comes bundled with the entire original game library — nearly 30 titles. Beyond this, a number of feature packs will be available as in-app-purchases to enable extended functionality.
The Vectrex was a video game system from the same era of home consoles that spawned the Atari 2600 and the Mattel Intellivision. It sported its own built-in monitor, which displayed vector graphics (think “Asteroids” or “Tempest”) instead of the traditional blocky color graphics that were standard for the era. It died an ignominious death in the early 1980s with a paucity of games available, but anyone who’s ever handled one will tell you how cool it was.
At the Loop, we love our pets – Jim and his family have two awesome dogs, while my family and I have a cat and a goldfish (and of course, Jim’s beard has a human pet). So a new Tumblr gallery called Dogshaming drew our attention. Owners of dogs frustrated with their canine’s inappropriate behavior take photos of their pets – preferably at the scene of the crime – with a card or paper that (often hilariously) describes the pet’s infractions.
If you’ve ever had a dog, this will make you laugh.
Everett Rosenfeld for Time.com:
The Dub the Dew campaign must have seemed like such a good idea at the time. After all, letting the Internet choose the name for a green-apple infused soft drink is great marketing and helps build brand loyalty, right? What could possibly go wrong? But promoters forgot just what they were dealing with when soliciting the opinion of the masses — these were, after all, the same people who exiled rapper Pitbull to a Walmart in Alaska. As could have been expected, the results of Dub the Dew were so offensive and useless that the entire promotion needed to be shut down.
It’s worth noting that the promotion wasn’t Mountain Dew’s dewing doing – it was a pizza restaurant, apparently.
Anyway, some of the names the griefers came up with are absolutely hilarious, totally inappropriate and wrong. I’m still chuckling.
Note to Jim: Never, ever leave it to our readers to decide anything about the site. Heaven only knows what they’ll come up with.
Eric Slivka for Mac Rumors:
Microsoft’s market capitalization peaked on December 30, 1999, reaching an intraday high of $119.94 per share. With Microsoft having documented 5,160,024,593 outstanding shares as of October 31, 1999 in its quarterly earnings report, the company would have had a market capitalization of $618.89 billion on December 30.Apple’s most recent quarterly filing listed 937,406,000 outstanding shares as of July 13, 2012, and with the company’s stock price hitting $660.73 today, its market capitalization reached $619.37 billion.
Impressive.
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Apple opened its 374 and 375 retail store worldwide this weekend in Canada. While meeting with Apple, I was able to get a few details about how the retail operation is going overall.
According to Apple, the company has seen almost 300 million worldwide visitors so far in its fiscal 2012, which started in October 2011. To give you some type of comparison, by July 2011, the population of the United States was estimated to be 311 million people.
There is also an interesting data point from Apple’s retail Genius Bar. According to the company, 50,000 people get serviced at a Genius Bar around the world, every single day. That’s a lot of appointments.
The Apple store in Halifax, Nova Scotia featured over 125 unique hands on opportunities in the store for customers. Those include computers, iPhones, iPads, and other products throughout the store. Of course, this number will be unique for every store depending on the size, but an interesting point nonetheless.
Updated: Made it clear that I was talking about the fiscal calendar year, starting in October 2011.
Ben Brooks:
Twitter has turned it’s back on the very users that not only made the service popular, but that came up with the very features that Twitter is now using to try and profit from. And that bugs me.In my mind Twitter took the easy way out: venture capital and eventually paying that money back by slapping ads everywhere.
I don’t think anyone minds that Twitter makes money, but do it respectfully and don’t screw your users and developers along the way.
It is a typewriter for the ipad. Users can enjoy the old feeling of typing and also the lastest technology.
Seems accurate to me.
Forbes:
One Apple product, something that didn’t exist five years ago, has higher sales than everything Microsoft has to offer. More than Windows, Office, Xbox, Bing, Windows Phone, and every other product that Microsoft has created since 1975. In the quarter ended March 31, 2012, iPhone had sales of $22.7 billion; Microsoft Corporation, $17.4 billion.Now when we say “worth” there’s a number of different things that we can mean.
Agreed. “Worth” may be a bit misleading but there’s no argument about the sales numbers.
Microsoft Surface vs the iPad Retina.
iPhoneArt.com and the Santa Monica Art Studios presents the LA MOBILE ARTS FESTIVAL. Los Angeles celebrates pioneers of iPhoneography and the underground mobile arts movement with nine days of interactive digital art–iPhone imagery, sound- and video-based works, sculptural and performance art installations at the historic Santa Monica airplane hangar turned cutting-edge arts community.
I wish I was in LA, I’d definitely stop in to this festival.
Two possible pyramid complexes might have been found in Egypt, according to a Google Earth satellite imagery survey.Located about 90 miles apart, the sites contain unusual grouping of mounds with intriguing features and orientations, said satellite archaeology researcher Angela Micol of Maiden, N.C.
I want to see the pyramids one day.
Some things you might not know about beards.
Katie Fehrenbacher for GigaOm:
Facebook’s data center here is one of the most energy efficient in the world. The social network invested $210 million for just the first phase of the data center, which GigaOM got a chance to check out during a two-hour tour. Building No. 1 is where Facebook first started designing its ultra-efficient data centers and gear, and where it wanted the first round of servers that it open sourced under the Open Compute Project to live.
Apple isn’t the only company building giant data centers. It’s interesting to see what Facebook is doing, especially since energy efficiency is a cornerstone of its design philosophy. If server farms excite you at all, the sheer scale of this is stunning.
We just released some new magic on the Dropbox website. Now when you make a change to a file on your computer or phone, the Dropbox website instantly updates to reflect those changes. You no longer have to hit refresh as you wait for your friend to share those super-important files or worry about getting out of sync. The latest files just automatically appear on your page. After all, every second counts!
Great news.
This is great.
Apple on Saturday responded to reports of a vulnerability to SMS spoofing that can be done to users of the company’s iPhone.
“Apple takes security very seriously. When using iMessage instead of SMS, addresses are verified which protects against these kinds of spoofing attacks,” an Apple representative told The Loop. “One of the limitations of SMS is that it allows messages to be sent with spoofed addresses to any phone, so we urge customers to be extremely careful if they’re directed to an unknown website or address over SMS.”
There is a key point in what Apple told me. A lot has been written in the press about how the “iPhone” has this problem, but Apple isn’t alone.
The vulnerability is not with the iPhone, but rather with the SMS technology. The iPhone is not alone in being susceptible to this type of attack — all phones that use SMS can be tricked in the same way. That’s why the verification and security of using iMessage is so much better.