I sent an SMS to the world, I sent an SMS to the world, I hope that someone gets my, I hope that someone gets my, message on my Facebook…
If Sting had started his career this past decade
Category: Uncategorized
As per the news from Stephen Hackett at forkbombr, Apple has moved to decommission Apple Online Stores in Indonesia and Vietnam. No reason was given for the decision although at least for Indonesia, the writing has been on the wall for quite some time. Those who bought personalized iPods from the online store will no longer be able to receive personalized replacements should they need to exchange them under service terms.
Apple Online Store for Indonesia first opened for business in November 2008 along with several other Southeast Asian store fronts though without much fanfare. The Southeast Asian stores were established as extensions of the Singapore Apple Online Store with all orders processed and managed from the city state.
It’s Not A Mirror, It’s A Crystal Ball
Aside from a few tweets, I’ve mainly stayed out of the latest TechCrunch brouhaha. These things tend to flare up every few months, and they ultimately end up meaning nothing. But I would like to address one thing in particular, because The New York Times’ David Carr names me specifically in his article on the matter today.
More generally, it occurs to me that a lot of these posts are based around a fundamental misunderstanding of how TechCrunch actually works. Journalists seem to think they can write about TechCrunch as if they’re looking in a mirror. That is to say, they think our operation runs in a similar manner to theirs and they use that as a jumping off point for misguided (but predictable) outrage. In reality, what they’re looking at when they look at TechCrunch is a crystal ball.
So gather ‘round everyone, to learn how TechCrunch actually works.
Apple would love us to believe it’s all “Eureka.” But Apple produces 10 pixel-perfect prototypes for each feature. They compete — and are winnowed down to three, then one, resulting in a highly evolved winner. Because Apple knows the more you compete inside, the less you’ll have to compete outside.
Comparing your Mac’s raw performance with other Macs
The benchmark is a PowerMac G5 1.6GHz at 1000 points, measured using GeekBench. You can switch between 32-bit and 64-bit performances.
My late 2007 2.2GHz MacBook scored 3281 for 64bit performance, just 50 points ahead of the same speed MacBook Pro released earlier in the same year, which means it’s just over three times more powerful than the baseline PowerMac G5. The base model 2011 MacBook Air with Core i5 though, scored 4988, nearly five times more powerful.
Lenovo executive claims Samsung sold only 20,000 Galaxy Tabs
Samsung said at the end of 2010 that it had shipped 1m of its 7-inch Galaxy devices, which were seen as the first real Android competitors to Apple’s iPad. However, according to Barrow, Samsung only sold 20,000 of the tablets. Samsung had not returned a request for comment on Barrow’s claim by the time of publication.
A claim by Samsung’s Lee Young-hee earlier this year that the sales of the first Galaxy Tab Android tablet was “smooth” was apparently misheard as slow. If what Andrew Barrow of Lenovo said is true or close to the truth, slow and smooth apparently mean the same thing to Samsung. Also, how many people you know would describe sales performance as smooth?
Lenovo executive claims Samsung sold only 20,000 Galaxy Tabs
It was more than frustrating,” the former White House aide said. “Here we were, this young hip administration, and we were using stodgy BlackBerrys and old Microsoft programs. A lot of us were starting to get iPhones and iPads and we couldn’t really use them.
The White House is running a pilot program to get Apple’s mobile products approved for official use – Politico
Those #SMWTF tweets
Social Media World Forum Asia was held in Singapore earlier this week. All kinds of people with interest in social media were there from various parts of the world talking essentially about using so called social media for marketing, promotions, brand building, and stuff like that which is probably a fancy way of saying they’re trying to figure out how to sell stuff to people without looking like they’re selling anything.
Mr. Brown, the ever influential Singaporean that he is, took the chance and turned it into something a little more entertaining.
Apple claims Android has roots at Apple
Before you go all crazy and accuse me of fanboyism or Apple being ridiculous (or both), go read the piece from Florian Mueller. In one of Apple’s filing against HTC, it says that when Andy Rubin worked at Apple in the 90s, his superiors were the ones who came up with a patent that Rubin later used to create Android, which means he may have been a contributor to the patent that Apple owns. If the ITC judge holds up Apple’s argument, this clearly will not bode well for Android.
Rubin worked at Apple long before the iPhone – even long before the iPod. If Apple had just claimed without particularity that Android started at Apple, most people would dismiss such an allegation as complete nonsense. But Apple now asserts – in a filing with the ITC, which means Apple has a legal obligation to make truthful representations of fact – that Rubin’s superiors at Apple were the inventors of that realtime API patent and he worked for them at the very time they made that invention. He worked as a low-level engineer while the inventors were senior people. It’s possible that he then contributed to the implementation of the claimed invention.
What’s going on with Michael Arrington?
At the beginning it looked like Arrington simply wanted to go back to investing since that’s how he got into this blogging business in the first place and even more so recently when he put money into a number of startups.
The way AOL is going about the news from today however, is a lot less clear. AOL had committed Arrington for three years as part of the TechCrunch acquisition which means he’s still got about two years to go but if AOL wanted him out of TC, they could be shifting him aside to another arm outside of the Huffington media group.
Here’s a summary by Dan Primack at Fortune:
It told the NYT that Arrington would still have a (reduced) role with the site, and continue reporting directly to Arianna Huffington. Then AOL said he would report to AOL Ventures. Today it says that he is no longer employed by the company, but can continue contributing to TechCrunch as an unpaid blogger. In other words, AOL is acting like AOL typically acts: Scattershot.
It’s been less than 24 hours so the flurry of news is still coming in and even news out of AOL itself isn’t clear. Nobody seems to have a straight story to tell.
Meanwhile, not a peep from TechCrunch but a monster rant from Kara Swisher.
[update] Paul Carr has his say on the matter. Yes, AOL screwed up in announcing the CrunchFund.
AuliaSays 