Jeremy Allaire, Founder, Chairman and CEO of Brightcove:
Apple will not anytime soon launch a competitive subscription video product to cable.(but)…the iPhone and iPad in your pocket or handbag is the next-generation TV set-top box, and it is both highly personal and highly social and capable of bringing hundreds of thousands and soon millions of rich interactive applications and experiences onto your TV set.Apple will release a new Apple TV add-on product, though I expect that rather than using the current “puck” design it will instead be a thin black bar, perhaps 1 inch tall and 3 inches wide, that can easily mount to the top of almost any existing HD capable TV set. Like the existing Apple TV, it will have HDMI and power jacks on the back, but it will also include a high-def camera built into its face, as well as an embedded iOS environment that provides motion sensing and speech processing.
Very interesting analysis and, I believe, almost exactly the way Apple’s future on your television will be.
Apple continued to lead the market with nearly 65% of worldwide units and surpassed 67 million cumulative shipments in its first eight quarters of availability. iPad can’t claim the highest mobile broadband (3G/4G) attach rate for media tablets, though Apple retains its title of shipping the most 3G-enabled tablets by outpacing the number two competitor by a factor of eight.
The concern has to be that rather than seeing the net adds growing–as they have for two years with only two contiguous months of decline–Android net adds have been falling for four months.
iOS held steady and that’s just with the iPhone. Imagine the growth if they included the iPad.
Headed to WWDC next week? Leave your business cards at home for shimming tables. Take Meechu with you on your iPhone and connect to all the cool people you meet quickly and easily.
When you meet someone, open Meechu and tap the broadcast button. Anyone else running Meechu will automatically exchange information with you. There’s no ceremony, no extra services to sign up for. It’s quick, easy and simple.
Meechu is on sale for $1.99 in the App Store through the end of WWDC.
Ryan’s son Tyler missed school to see his dad introduce the president, so Obama wrote him what just may be the best absence note ever collected by a 5th grader. Try punishing the kid for truancy now.
I have a confession to make – I’m a iOS photography app junkie. Show me an app that has even a little bit of cool to it, and I’ll drop a few bucks on it in a heartbeat. Consequently, I have a couple hundred photography apps!
A downside to many apps is you have to take a picture first and then run various filters on the app, never knowing exactly whether or not the filter is suitable for the image or vice versa. Thanks to David Chartier, I found a new app this morning that solves that issue – it runs filters on a live image!
It’s called Paper Camera. It’s really clever and original and I highly recommend it.
(As Erik Veland points out in the comments, “You know Instagram also runs filters on a live image, right? As does Path.” I did not know that. Thanks for the addition/correction)
Jayse is a freelance visual artist working remotely from Las Vegas, NV for film and television. He has built a solid reputation in the industry as a creative-art director for print, web and motion design with clients ranging from Symantec to MTV and Fox. His latest work has been in the niche area of fictional UI and data design for feature films like 2012, Rise of the Planet of the Apes and The Avengers. For The Avengers, Jayse worked on the heads up display, or HUD, that you see any time actor Robert Downey Jr’s face is inside the Iron Man helmet. He also worked on the various computers used on the bridge of the S.H.I.E.L.D. Helicarrier, its mobile command post.
There’s a method to Jayse Hansen’s designs in The Avengers involving research, consultation with an A-10 fighter pilot, and understanding the director’s intent and what the script says. Hansen also discusses his tools of the trade, which include software like Illustrator, Cinema 4D and After Effects, and hardware like a Wacom Cintiq tablet.
My guess is that Apple will keep things simple with at least the initial Facebook/iOS integration. Beyond authentication, there will probably be a Facebook button in the existing share screen which will allow you to share something to your Facebook Wall.
Vinyl Tap brings the golden age of music listening to your iPad. Beautifully re-imagined turntables allow you once again to experience music the way it was intended.
Remember the joy you felt when you pulled out that beautiful, black record from its sleeve and placed it gently on to your player, listened for that comforting crackle of the needle in the grooves as you lay back and closed your eyes? Vinyl Tap will enable you to enjoy reminiscing or have the vinyl experience for the first time using your iTunes library.
Depending upon whom you ask, Friday, June 1 is the best or worst thing to come to the Mac App Store since it opened its doors in 2011. As of now, new and significantly updated apps submitted to Apple’s Mac App Store must implement sandboxing.Sandboxing refers to compartmentalizing what data and features a specific app is granted access to; apps each can metaphorically play exclusively in their own sandbox, accessing only that data which Apple has granted that app entitlements to see. The plus side of sandboxing is that it means, in theory, that your apps will become safer and more trustworthy: Your Mac prevents them from accessing files they shouldn’t access.But that security comes with a price, at least in some cases.
In Facebook parlance, it was a sponsored story, a potentially lucrative tool that turns a Facebook user’s affinity for something into an ad delivered to his friends. Amazon is one of many companies that pay Facebook to generate these automated ads when a user clicks to “like” their brands or references them in some other way. Facebook users agree to participate in the ads halfway through the site’s 4,000-word terms of service, which they consent to when they sign up.
This is an interesting reminder that when you get to use a service like Facebook for free, you are, in fact, the product that’s being sold – whether you like it or not.
A carnage-soaked racing game is going to make an appearance on iOS devices soon. Stainless Games has announced that their classic game Carmageddon is headed to iPhone, iPod touch and iPad this summer. What’s more, it’ll be free, at least initially.
Taking its inspiration from cult car racing movies like Death Race 2000, Carmageddon is a 3D racing game originally released in 1997 that puts you behind the wheel of wild cars, pitting you against computer-controlled drivers in a race against the clock. Along the way you can pick up massive bonuses by performing “Cunning Stunts,” damaging your competitor’s vehicles and hitting pedestrians. The game was banned or censored in various countries for its graphic violence.
Stainless Games is wrapping up a Kickstarter fund raising campaign for Carmageddon: Reincarnation, a brand new game based on the classic franchise planned for multiple platforms including OS X. And with only a few days left to go and more than 12,000 backers already pledging money, they’ve significantly exceeded their ambitious $400,000 goal.
The company updated their Kickstarter page with a surprise note indicating that a couple of their programmers have been working on the iOS project “for just a few months.”
The game will appear as a Universal app, running in native sizes on iPod touch, iPhone and iPad. It will include several input control methods, including a gesture system to affect repair and recovery of your vehicle. An Action Replay mode will let you capture movies of your greatest feats, which you can upload to YouTube, and Game Center support will be included.
Stainless Games plans to release Carmageddon for iOS for free for the first 24 hours when it debuts this summer. An Android version is also planned.
As an aside, I spent many hours playing Carmageddon on my Bondi Blue iMac back in the day; I even outfitted the iMac with a 3Dfx-equipped graphics accelerator plugged into its mezzanine slot so I could see the game in glorious accelerated 3D. Outside of Baldur’s Gate, which is also due for an iOS resurrection this summer, I can’t think of many older game ports to iOS I’ve looked forward to more.
I can appreciate why Google is working on all kinds of new technologies like the self-driving car, but I think it’s time to fix some of the things it’s been ignoring for a long time. The big one for Web publishers is FeedBurner.
Google does offer quite a few services to assist Web publishers — Analytics, Webmaster Tools, and even search. As a publisher, I thank Google for these tools. However, that doesn’t give them a pass on ignoring one of the most important tools we have.
The problem is that there are no real alternatives 1 to FeedBurner and Google has made it clear they don’t really care about adding features or even making FeedBurner work properly. Often times FeedBurner stats are empty because it didn’t track anything that day.
That’s not acceptable. You can’t offer tools for publishers and just let them languish. Google offered real-time stats in FeedBurner for a short time, but then turned them off with no explanation.
If Google has no interest in FeedBurner, they should sell it to someone who does. At least give the millions of publishers that want to use the service 2 the opportunity to get the most out of it.
What Google is doing with FeedBurner is a disservice to the publishing community.
Yes, I am aware of FeedBlitz, but I don’t want to go through the hassle of changing all of my subscribers just because Google wants to ignore FeedBurner. ↩
I would even pay a monthly fee for an improved FeedBurner. ↩
For people with mild OCD we’re always trying to make sure the volume level is set at an even number – say 14 or 28. Some people need it to feel even “more even” at 10 or 20.
It’s amazing how many times we do this — set the volume based on a number instead of how it sounds. But what happens when your new car doesn’t show you the volume level?
Rene Ritchie wrote a very in-depth piece on some of the things Apple could improve on with iOS 6. He didn’t just look at elements of the current OS, but also what Apple could learn from Android, webOS and Windows.
Earlier today Cricket Wireless announced that it would bring pre-paid plans to the iPhone 4s and iPhone 4.
“By making iPhone available on pre-paid plans through Cricket Wireless, we are making the best smartphone more accessible to an even broader market in the US,” Apple representative Natalie Harrison told The Loop.
Cricket is the first company to make pre-paid wireless plans available for the iPhone. According to Cricket, the plans cost $55 per-month and include unlimited talk, text and data plan. The data plan does contain a fair use policy of 2.3GB 1.
Personally I think it’s wrong for companies to advertise unlimited data plans, but then cap them. ↩
Steve Jobs was a frequent guest over the years at the D: All Things Digital events – six times, to be precise, from 2003 to 2010. Now they’ve assembled video and audio podcasts of his appearances in a single place for you to download, if it interests you.
I joined Gene Marques and Chris Stanton on their Geek It Up Radio podcast this week. The episode is entitled “Bloody Sock Blues.”
On it, we rant about the failure of game developer 38 Studios (founded by former Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling, who famously pitched with a bloody sock, hence the title). We also talk about about the return of Toonami on Cartoon Network, the pending zombie apocalypse and more.
It was a fun diversion from the usual Apple tech-centric podcasts I do – I had a great time and hope to talk with them again soon.
This month, I glanced at my historical watch. HyperCard will soon be 25, I noticed. What ever happened to it? I searched around and found venture entrepreneur and coder Tim Oren’s 2004 eulogy for the program, written the week that Apple withdrew the software from the market. HyperCard’s problem, he argued, was that Apple never quite figured out what the software was for.
HyperCard, for the uninitiated, was an early software app for the Mac created by Apple programmer Bill Atkinson that enabled users to create stacks which could contain everything from fields of data to pictures, buttons which could execute scripts and more. Part database software, part multimedia system, the software predicted hyperlinking on Web pages and many techniques that we take for granted today.
The app syncs quotes between the iPhone and iPad using iCloud, which I love. For me this app would be used just as much for capturing song ideas and lyrics as it would for quotes.
“Our customers want the best products available and we are excited to bring iPhone to our pre-paid consumers with an industry leading $55 per-month service plan,” said Doug Hutcheson, president and chief executive officer, Leap Wireless International, Inc. “Launching iPhone is a major milestone for us and we are proud to offer iPhone customers attractive nationwide coverage, a robust 3G data network and a value-packed, no-contract plan.”
