Apple has reportedly bought what's being described a key technology in the arms race. The former Wall Street Journal reported Jessica Lessin, who is now gearing up to start a brand new news outlet, exclusively reported Thursday that the iPhone maker in recent months purchased Silicon Valley-based wireless chip developer Passif Semiconductor...
Bob Mansifeld, Apple's Senior Vice President of Technologies, has been removed from the company's Leadership web page without explanation.
This is newsworthy because rarely does it slip Apple to pull corporate description of a high-ranked executive without announcing a leadership change beforehand.
Hopefully, Apple wouldn’t just take his description page down without an announcement so this could be some sort of a slip up, though the chances of that are very slim.
Update: a Reuters reporter has an official statement from Apple...
As part of its never-ending efforts to improve working conditions at overseas plants where its devices are being assembled, Apple has enlisted help of eight professors from top U.S. universities to establish an academic advisory board for its Supplier Responsibility program.
The academics will provide guidance and advice to improve working conditions within Apple's worldwide supply chain and help provide "safe and ethical working conditions wherever its products are made"...
As pointed out by multiple outlets and tweeted by several reporters, Apple has acquired an online navigation startup HopStop.com to improve its troubled Maps offering, Bloomberg just reported. HopStop makes a free iPhone and Android transit app that features detailed subway, bus, train, taxi, walking and even biking directions.
This is exactly the kind of data Apple's Maps need in order to become a viable alternative to Google Maps. The HopStop software also features real-time transit information via the HopStop Live service, the official transit maps, nearby station search and station-to-station schedules in over 600 cities throughout the US, Canada, Europe, Australia and New Zealand, including 140 major metropolitan areas...
Despite concerns about a shrinking pool of U.S. cell phone owners who have yet to upgrade to smartphones, Verizon Wireless announced it activated 3.9 million iPhones during the second quarter, an increase of 44 percent surpassing analyst forecasts of 3.5 million iPhone subscribers.
In other words, of the 7.5 million smartphones Verizon activated in the June quarter, over 50 percent were iPhones. Smartphones now account for more than half of Verizon Wireless customers, rising to 64 percent from a previous 50 percent, according to the official earnings results the carrier posted Thursday...
After acquiring a controlling stake in the U.S. mobile and fixed wireless broadband communications services provider Clearwire in October 2012, wireless carrier Sprint the following month announced it would buy out the minority of Clearwire shareholders for $2.2 billion. Sprint, the nation's third-largest telco, this morning has officially confirmed the completion of the transaction, meaning it now has a 100 percent ownership stake in the Bellevue, Washington-headquartered Clearwire...
In an age of demand for simple, inexpensive smartphones, big is not always better. The latest example is Samsung, viewed until recently as the Asian Apple, it's Galaxy smartphones keeping Android from sinking into mediocrity. After snickering at the iPhone maker's spate of bad luck on Wall Street, Samsung Friday lost 3.6 percent of its stock value amid a disappointing quarterly forecast.
With 70 percent of its profits coming from mobile devices, Samsung is in the same leaky boat as Apple. Addicted to high profits from sales of expensive smartphones built cheaply, Samsung Friday forecast $8.3 billion in profit during the second quarter, lower than the $8.9 billion Wall Street expected.
Since early June, the South Korean firm's stock value has lost $34.2 billion, the market capital of Sony and LG combined, according to one report...
A filing Monday by NV Energy with the Public Utilities Commission revealed that Apple will pay for construction of an 18-megawatt photovoltaic solar plant to power its northern Nevada data centre. The company has now officially announced the facility in its 2012 Environmental Footprint Report, writing it will be "every bit" as environmentally responsible as its data center in Maiden, North Carolina. The Fort Churchill Solar Array, as it is called, could create hundreds of jobs during the construction period...
If you thought Apple's done hiring, think again. Just as we've digested news that the California firm hired Hulu executive Pete Distad to help its executives negotiate content deals with media and cable companies like Time Warner Cable, earlier today AppleInsider claimed the company hired Paul Deneve, a former CEO of the luxury French fashion label Yves Saint Laurent, to work on special projects as a Vice President reporting directly to Apple's boss Tim Cook...
There's no stopping Yahoo lately. The ink hasn't dried yet on the Internet giant's $1.1 billion acquisition of the world's #2 blogging platform Tumblr and today Marissa Mayer & Co. have acquired another startup. This time around, Yahoo set its sights on Qwiki, a NYC-based startup behind an iPhone app of the same name.
Qwiki launched in alpha testing mode on January 24, 2011 after winning the TechCrunch Disrupt Award in 2010. The ingenious iPhone software turns images and videos from your Camera roll and turns them into short and beautiful movies. Apple named Qwiki its Search and Reference application of 2011 and it received Apple’s Editor’s Choice.
Yahoo dropped a cool $50 million on Qwiki and promised to continue to support the Qwiki app. The Qwiki team will join Yahoo's New York city office "to reimagine Yahoo’s storytelling experience." More tidbits right after the break...
Apple's clever accounting practices are again under scrutiny after the iPhone maker paid no UK corporate taxes in 2012, despite three units of the California firm making more than $100 million, according to a British financial newspaper Monday. According to the Financial Times, Apple used tax-deductible employee share awards (essentially stock dividends) to "wipe out the corporate tax liabilities of the UK subsidiaries" during 2012 up to September...
This is quite interesting. Just as Apple has taken the wraps off iOS 7 which has undergone a major facelift under the guidance of Apple's Jony Ive, the design guru's official title on the company's Leadership section has been tweaked, going from Senior Vice President of Industrial Design to just Senior Vice President of Design.
The subtle but signifiable change of nomenclature is for sure meant to signal Ive's tremendously important and much broader responsibilities at Apple, that now encompass both hardware and software design across the company...