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The Magic Money That Apple Made From Thin Air→

The Magic Money That Apple Made From Thin Air

Jeff Price of TuneCore is happy and a little surprised, finding out their first royalty payments from the new iTunes Match came in at $10,000. He writes in a blog post that “this is magic money that Apple made exist out of thin air for copyright holders”. The service has effectively monetized the existing behaviour of consumers, giving more money to artists and copyright holders whilst the consumer just continues to listen to their music, not doing anything “new”.

A person has a song on her computer hard drive.  She clicks on the song and plays it.  No one is getting paid.  The same person pays iTunes $25 for iMatch.  She now clicks on the same song and plays it through her iMatch service.  Copyright holders get paid. Same action, same song, one makes money for the copyright holder, and one does not. This is found money that the copyright holders would never have gotten otherwise.

It may not be a complete windfall as Jeff points out, but it has something - something that if iTunes Match didn’t exist, you wouldn’t get at all. Something is better than nothing.

The music industry needs innovation. Services like iMatch, Spotify, Simfy, Deezer and others are bringing that innovation—it will take some time to learn which are the ones consumers want.  But in the interim, seeing an additional $10,000+ appear out of the thin air for TuneCore Artists by people just listening to songs they already own is amazing!

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More Tweetbot→

More Tweetbot

With the launch of Tweetbot 2.0 for iPhone and Tweetbot for iPad, the team at Tapbots has once again set new standards for Twitter clients on iOS. We have taken separate looks at the two apps, but you can also check out other in-depth reviews at The Next Web, iMore, and Wind on a Leaf. David Chartier makes a good point:

Speaking of lists, Tweetbot is one of the few clients I’ve used that truly integrates Twitter lists and makes them useful.

As for the iPad app’s launch, the app is currently #5 in the Top Paid iPad Apps chart, up from #9 only a few minutes ago. Tapbots has already confirmed this is the fastest growing launch of their apps ever:

Tweetbot for iPad is the at #20 in the Top Paid iPad apps. That’s faster than we’ve ever gone on the iPhone side of things.

The Next Web’s Matthew Panzarino has published a great interview with Tapbots’ Paul Haddad. I particularly liked this bit:

I think the biggest problem is that Google chooses to develop iOS apps using web technologies. This might work well on Android but it just makes for a crappy feel on iOS. If you want people to use and love your apps on iOS they should be tailored for iOS and should feel like an iOS app. You can’t just hack together some cross-platform Javascript and HTML and expect it not to feel like something that was hacked together.

On top of this they are an engineering focused company without a great history of design. This works really well on the Web where you just want to go in, search for some results and get out. But on an iPhone the interaction is much more intimate, people want something that looks and feels just right, the front end is more important than the back end.

Last, make sure to check out Rene Ritchie’s fantastic side-by-side comparison of Tweetbot, Twitter for iPad, and Twitterrific over at iMore. Rene goes in great detail to show all the differences between the three apps, and why one of them might be more suitable to your needs. Tweetbot 2.0 and Tweetbot for iPad are available for download on the App Store.

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Siri Accounts for 25% Of Wolfram Alpha Queries→

Siri Accounts for 25% Of Wolfram Alpha Queries

Following last night’s announcement of Wolfram Alpha Pro, coming tomorrow at $4.99 per month, The New York Times’ Steve Lohr reported in his piece about Siri’s integration with the service. Apple’s voice-based assistant accounts for 25% of all Wolfram Alpha searches four months after the launch of the iPhone 4S, which embeds Wolfram-powered results directly into the Siri interface.

The subjects in the Wolfram Alpha database are now more useful to the average person. Type in “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy showtimes,” and Wolfram Alpha delivers the schedule for local theaters. The movie times, Dr. Wolfram notes, come not from scouring the Web, but from a specialized information service.

Siri accounts for about a quarter of the queries fielded by Wolfram Alpha, whose staff has grown to 200. Several large companies in health care, financial services and oil and gas recently hired Dr. Wolfram’s private company, Wolfram Research, to do tailored corporate versions of Wolfram Alpha for them. Microsoft also licenses Wolfram Alpha technology.

With 37 million iPhones sold in the last quarter and the iPhone 4S being the most popular model among them, I assume a good percentage of new 4S owners are using Siri regularly to file requests through Wolfram’s knowledge engine. The question is, how regularly? Whilst some have already dismissed Siri as a “passing fad”, I’m hearing of people using it on a daily basis for things like quick reminders, alarms, and data lookups (queries like “how many people live in France?” are perfect for Wolfram Alpha). Saying Siri is not a fad because we heard our friends are using it is just as tricky as claiming the opposite, so it’s nice to finally have some actual insight (in the form of user adoption) by Wolfram.

Apple says that support for more languages will come in 2012 to Siri, and it will be interesting to see whether Wolfram will be supported internationally by then.

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Wolfram Alpha Launching $4.99 A Month “Pro” Service This Week→

Wolfram Alpha Launching $4.99 A Month “Pro” Service This Week

Knowledge engine Wolfram Alpha is one of our favorite web tools here at MacStories. We use it on a daily basis to look up all kinds of information – from stock prices to a specific country’s population and growth of a company over time – and since Apple integrated it with Siri on the iPhone 4S we (and many others) have come to rely on Wolfram as a trusted source for fact-checked and curated information and data analysis. The Verge takes a look at Wolfram Alpha Pro, a $4.99 a month service launching this Wednesday:

On Wednesday, February 8th, Wolfram Alpha will be adding a new, “Pro” option to its already existing services. Priced at a very reasonable $4.99 a month ($2.99 for students), the new services includes the ability to use images, files, and even your own data as inputs instead of simple text entry. The “reports” what Wolfram Alpha kicks out as a result of these (or any) query are also beefed up for Pro users, some will actually become interactive charts and all of them can be more easily exported in a variety of formats. We sat down with Stephen Wolfram himself to get a tour of the new features and to discuss what they mean for his goal of “making the world’s knowledge computable.”

The additions to the service sounds fantastic, and as I’ve already mentioned to the company, I hope the official iOS apps will be getting access to these new functionalities as well – especially if users will be able to create accounts and save favorites, it will be nice to be able to access those on the go. I particularly look forward to trying the Bring Your Own Data system, and checking whether Pro will make it easier for writers to embed data sets and reports on webpages.

Wolfram’s new Pro product should become available on Wednesday, February 8th, with a $4.99 subscription. For those who have never tried Wolfram Alpha: here’s an example query for “Apple revenue in 2011”, and Wolfram’s results for the company itself.

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Why Apple’s A5 Is So Big, And Siri Is 4S-only→

Why Apple’s A5 Is So Big, And Siri Is 4S-only

Stephen Shankland at CNET reports on a possible explanation as to why Apple decided to make Siri an iPhone 4S exclusive:

Apple’s A5 processor includes noise-reduction circuitry licensed from a start-up called Audience, and a chip analyst believes that fact resolves an iPhone 4S mystery and explains why the iPhone 4 lacks the Siri voice-control system.

Audience revealed details of its Apple partnership in January, when it filed paperwork for an initial public offering (IPO) of stock. Teardown work from iFixit and Chipworks revealed a dedicated Audience chip in the iPhone 4, but the iPhone 4S integrates Audience’s “EarSmart” technology directly into the A5 processor, the company’s S-1 filing said.

Audience confirmed in its filing that Apple signed an agreement to pay royalties for the intellectual property used in the A5 processor in the “three months ended December 31, 2011”, suggesting that only the iPhone 4S version of the A5 (the A5 CPU is also used on the iPad 2) supports Audience’s technology. Audience also said that Apple is a licensee for the next-generation IP, although they won’t be contractually forced to use it; iPhone 4-era technology from Audience also has advanced noise-reduction, but it was only with the second-generation product (the one on the A5) that Audience perfected recognition/reduction at arm’s length – thus allowing for features like voice control through Siri.

Integration of Audience’s EarSmart on the iPhone 4S’ A5 could explain why Apple decided to not offer Siri on older devices, and why it will likely only feature the voice-based assistant on newer devices going forward. A number of unofficial hacks to enable Siri on older devices surfaced in the past months, albeit with mixed results.

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As (Some) Expected, Apple Clarifies iBooks Author EULA→

As (Some) Expected, Apple Clarifies iBooks Author EULA

Megan Lavey-Heaton at TUAW reports Apple issued today an update to iBooks Author which includes a slightly revised end-user license agreement (EULA). The Next Web takes a closer look at the updates:

Apple has updated its iBooks Author app in order to clarify the language of its End User License Agreement. The changes to the EULA clarify that Apple does indeed intend the packaged product to be sold on the iBookstore only, but also makes it clear that it does not lay claim to the content that you use to create the book, nor does it try to limit what you can do with that content elsewhere.

Two weeks ago, I wrote:

…we know that Apple is a company that in the past months hasn’t been afraid of reversing a couple of unpopular decisions.

The Next Web also notes:

This change in wording should make it clear, as many right minded people have assumed…

Anyone with a bit of intellect would have guessed since iBooks Author’s day one that the poorly worded EULA was set to be updated soon. Anyone who knows how Apple deals with damage control could have reminisced that the company doesn’t like rushed press released or having executives making jokes on Twitter, or, even better, could have produced a level-headed analysis of the issue. History, after all, taught us that the Apple of the most recent years has always addressed online turmoils in one way or another.

But, you know, Apple wants your content.

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Mozilla Working On Web Push Notifications for Firefox→

Mozilla Working On Web Push Notifications for Firefox

Ryan Paul at Ars Technica reports about Mozilla’s “web push notification” project, which, in theory, would allow Firefox users to stay on top of websites like Twitter, Facebook, or Gmail using a push notification system similar to iOS:

Mozilla is developing a push notification system for the Firefox Web browser. It will allow users to receive notifications from websites without having to keep those sites open in their browser. The system will also be able to relay push notifications to mobile devices.

It’s important to note that this push notification system is distinct from the existing desktop notification mechanisms that are already defined in pending standards. The desktop notifications that websites like GMail and Seesmic Web display to Chrome users, for example, will only work when the website is left open in a tab. Mozilla’s push notification system moves beyond that limitation.

Jeff Balogh has written more about the project here, describing how notifications could be sent to any “Firefox device” including iPhones running Firefox Home:

Once the notification is in the system, we’ll deliver it to the recipient on all the devices they have Firefox installed, but we’ll try not to show duplicate notifications on different devices.

There’s a lot at stake here. On the one hand, desktop browsers have largely failed at delivering the kind of real-time connections and up-to-the-minute social/news updates you can expect from mobile apps on iOS and Android. Sure, there are extensions and add-ons, but they’re not nearly as integrated and “part” of the system. Push notifications almost seem “meant” for mobile devices. Furthermore, notifications are an area of mobile development both Google and Apple have been focusing on during the past years; on the desktop, apps have to rely on their own notification system or third-party apps, but browsers like Firefox sport no built-in push notification technology whatsoever. As far as “web notifications” go, Boxcar has been up to some interesting stuff including the desktop.

On the other hand, one could argue that we have enough notifications on our mobile devices, and having to see the red badge in our desktop browsers would be a terrible idea. I believe Mozilla’s project is worth of attention nevertheless, especially on the iOS side considering the existing Firefox Home app, and I look forward to seeing a first implementation, which hopefully will be available before Firefox 25 ships.

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Matthew Panzarino’s Bing Impressions→

Matthew Panzarino’s Bing Impressions

The Next Web’s Matthew Panzarino tries Bing search on his iPhone for a month and reports back with his real-life impressions:

The design is largely cleaner and more attractive than Google’s more cluttered results, and more preview text helps you decide on which link to follow. But, if you’re even reading this article there’s a good chance that Bing isn’t really being made for you.

Instead, Microsoft seems to be heavily targeting the ’99%’ of mobile searchers. Those who will be looking for a restaurant close by, seeing what Lady Gaga is up to now or what the score is on the game. This is smart, because it’s exactly who Apple is targeting with the iPhone.

The whole article is worth a read and offers real-world scenarios for what a search engine should be able to do on an iOS device. I’ve always thought Bing would be a good alternative to Google on the iPhone, and I was also surprised to see Microsoft ship a good dedicated iPad app last year (what’s up with decent search apps for the iPad?).

Actually, since I started using DuckDuckGo in my daily workflow I’ve noticed just how much Google’s search and services are tied to iOS, and how big of a deal it is to be the default engine on a device that sells millions every week. In forcing myself to use a standalone app for search – or type in an address in Safari, then search – I’m noticing how frustrating it is, really, to automatically launch Safari, hit the search box, and remember that Google is in there. Or Bing, if you went through the effort of changing the default search engine in Settings.app. Think about it: not only do Google and Bing benefit from all the iOS users that manually open Safari to search – they also get all the incoming links from third-party apps that forward web pages to Safari, the default browser.

Read Matthew’s Bing impressions, including what he thinks of Maps (likely something even Apple is working on), here.

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A Complete Timeline Of Every OS X Release To Date→

A Complete Timeline Of Every OS X Release To Date

Here’s a useful resource I’ve found via @danfrakes following the release of OS X 10.7.3 earlier today: Rob Griffiths has been maintaining since November 14th, 2005, a complete list of every OS X major version and software update released to date. Starting with the first Mac OS X Public Beta all the way up to the latest Lion update, Rob’s list comes with dates, intervals of days, and a link back to Apple’s support documents for each release.

Below the break is a table showing all major releases of OS X from the public beta through the latest public version, which is OS X Lion 10.7.3 as of February 1, 2012. Note that this release marks the 63rd release of OS X (counting both major and minor versions, and skipping two ill-fated updates). Wow.

Rob notes that, as of today, it’s been 4,158 days since the first OS X Public Beta was released; Apple has thus released an OS X update every 66.00 days on average, with the shortest period of time between two releases being the interval between 10.6 and 10.6.1 (13 days). The list is full of other interesting details and nuggets of information, and I’ve made sure to save it in Pinboard for future reference.

Check out the complete timeline here. [image via]

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