When word started spreading around yesterday that Pulse was about to be acquired by a "major platform" company, I would have guessed it was either Yahoo or Microsoft. The popular news reader app seems like it would be a great fit for either firm.
But according to the latest reports, the buyer is actually the social networking site for business professionals LinkedIn. The company has allegedly already sealed a deal with Alphonso Labs, the maker of Pulse, worth between $50-$100 million...
Twelve South makes some of the finest and most beautifully designed accessories for Apple gear, such as its highly-regarded BookBook case series for the MacBook Air, iPad mini, iPhone 4/4S and iPhone 5, the premium, nearly invisible SurfacePad iPhone sleeve or the charming PlugBug charging kit.
Today, Twelve South announced an iPad mini variant of its iPad stand. The arc-shaped BookArc stand looks like a piece of sci-fi furniture and is designed (like its MacBook Air counterpart) to support your iPad in either portrait or landscape on a bunch of flat surfaces...
Apple wants to get into social networking, but not as a rival to Facebook or Twitter. Instead, the iPhone maker envisions a way to better protect mobile users against spammers and stalkers.
Tuesday, the United States Patent and Trademark Office approved a 2010 application for a friend service of sorts which could underlie current social networks.
The patent titled "Apparatus and method for efficiently managing data in a social networking service" describes methods for maintaining three databases which oversee friends within a network, handles for out-of-network contacts and a third to log changes. Among the potential advantages: preventing a flood of friend requests and ignoring contact attempts by stalkers...
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has just approved a merger between Deutsche Telekom-owned T-Mobile and MetroPCS, an American mobile phone service provider formerly known as General Wireless. Though FCC head Julius Genachowski clearing the merger, it still has to be approved by MetroPCS shareholders to become official.
The FCC told Bloomberg that the merger will "benefit millions of American consumers and help the US maintain the global leadership in mobile it has regained in recent years." At any rate, it should help bring T-Mobile's struggling 4G LTE network online sooner than later...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bDeibFpJk3U
Want a Harlem Shake on your Springboard like we showed you in yesterday's post? Then head over to Cydia right now, because Harlem Shake is now available to download for free. To activate the tweak, simply assign an Activator gesture to Harlem Shake, and have at it.
Today at SXSW, Vevo announced a 24/7 channel coming to your traditional television via the Roku set-top box and the Xbox gaming console, but also to the Vevo web site and mobile platforms like Apple's iOS, Google's Android, Microsoft's Windows Phone. As you know, Vevo streams official music videos licensed from record labels, both through its web site and via a dedicated YouTube channel, where most of its 52 million monthly uniques come from.
Vevo's mobile apps will be updated with an around-the-clock curated experience of original programming, including live concerts and television shows. The experience is being described as multicast, meaning everyone gets to watch the same programming at the exact same time, regardless of the platform they're accessing it from. Vevo TV will even feature a 24-hour schedule of static programming blocks, just like your regular dumb-ified tube...
An analyst with a terrible track record wrote in a note to clients issued Tuesday that Apple won't release a standalone HD TV set in 2013 after all. As much as Apple wanted to, the report has it, the company has allegedly found ultra high-resolution 4K panels to be prohibitively expensive.
You should take this particular analyst's observations with a healthy dose of skepticism: the same guy called for an Apple-branded HD TV announcement at last year's WWDC, later mulling full iTV production for August 2012. He repeatedly said iTV was "imminent" (calling it the iPanel), having also missed with an Apple TV related media event (and a bunch of other things that never came to be)...
Australia's largest airline, Qantas, Tuesday confirmed that it will be handing out iPads to its passengers who will be able to use the device as an in-flight entertainment solution providing easy access to more than two hundred hours of music, movies and television programming. The solution entails iPads connecting to the plane's onboard Wi-Fi network to access the airline's Q Streaming in-flight technology. iPads will be deployed on Qantas flights between Sydney and Honolulu on 767 aircraft, available for all classes...
Another report surfaced this morning that gives us more reasons to believe that Apple is indeed looking to diversify its chip making contracts which thus far have been an exclusive Samsung domain. The somewhat accurate Asian trade publication DigiTimes quoted "institutional investors" who believe that chip giant Intel has been contracted to produce about ten percent of Apple's planned capacity for a next-generation iPhone and iPad processor, the A7 chip.
Moreover, Apple is apparently spreading those orders across Samsung, Intel and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC). Samsung will reportedly build about half of Apple's A7 orders, TSMC should take care of an additional 40 percent while Intel will get the remaining ten percent of orders. Rumor mills have been reporting for at least a year that Apple has been looking to move its chip biz away from rival Samsung, which currently builds all iPhone, iPad and iPod processors at its Austin, Texas plant...
Users of the popular blogging site Tumblr will be happy to hear that a fairly significant update for the iOS app has just posted. The update includes an all new camera interface and a handful of new features.
Perhaps the most notable addition is the ability to create Photosets from within the app. Tumblr released a standalone app for Photosets last fall, and it's finally decided to roll the feature into its official client...
Continuing its crusade to overhaul its iOS application, Rdio has released yet another update for its music streaming client. This is the app's second update in just under a month, and it brings the software to version 2.1.3.
There are a handful of changes listed in the release notes, but iPhone users will notice two of them right away. Both the album and playlist views have been revamped, making the app more attractive and easier to use...
Evasi0n received another minor update today, this time to fix a crash that occurs during the jailbreak process on Windows boxes. The release — Evasi0n 1.5.3 — is now available for download.
The previous version of Evasi0n — version 1.5.2 — was just released a few hours earlier to address localization needs for additional languages. If you downloaded that version, it's highly suggested that you purge it, and download this latest version instead, especially if you're running Windows.