According to inside sources, Apple will announce its Apple TV with the new iPad next week at the company’s scheduled event in San Francisco.
“We initially reported that Apple would be releasing two major new products in early March, and then believed the product would be a new Apple TV due to mounting code-based evidence for such a product with simultaneous supply constraints,” comments 9to5 Mac. “Now, sources have outright said Apple is launching this J33 (the new Apple TV’s codename) alongside the new iPad.”
“The new Apple TV is rumored to include a faster processor, possibly a variation of the dual-core A5 chip,” adds the post. “The dual-core A5 chip has been said to be required for the Apple TV to finally stream 1080p quality video, but Apple is also working on an ‘A5X’ chip that is dual-core, which also includes an improved graphics engine. Those two components of the chip would likely deliver the smooth video playback that Apple would include in such a product.”
It is rumored the Apple TV will also include Bluetooth 4.0 remote control, Siri support and host a new 1080P movie service from the iTunes Store.
Additionally, Apple will be revealing three new iPad variants, not one (if the sources are correct).
HBO Co-President Eric Kessler reports that 75 percent of all viewing on HBO GO is dedicated to original programming with movies only accounting for 20 percent, and sports programming taking up the last 5 percent.
This announcement aligns with a trend that rival Netflix has been seeing where the majority of the viewing on its streaming service involves TV content, not movies.
Of the movies viewers watch on HBO GO, 80 percent were new releases. Here, HBO has the advantage over Netlfix, which has a very limited selection of new films.
“Netflix still has a large lead in the device world, however, which is something that HBO is trying to change,” GigaOM reports. “HBO GO recently became available on Roku streaming players and Samsung TVs, and Kessler announced that the service would launch on the Xbox 360 on April 1 — which coincides with the season opener of HBO’s ‘Game of Thrones.'”
A press invitation from Apple announces an iPad-related event in San Francisco on March 7. In true Apple fashion, the invite doesn’t explicitly state the reveal of an iPad 3 but shows an iPad with the words, “we have something you really have to see. And touch.”
“Apple has not officially confirmed any details about its next iPad. However, people familiar with the product have said that the third-generation iPad would include an improved display and a faster processor, and essentially be the same shape and size as the iPad 2,” reports The New York Times.
Other sources report that the new iPad will be compatible with the 4G LTE networks of AT&T and Verizon.
In an earnings call, CEO Tim Cook says he expect the tablet market to eclipse the PC market, saying “we’re going to continue to innovate like crazy in this area, and continue to compete with anyone that is currently shipping tablets, or that might enter in the future.”
The loss of its Starz contract may not actually hurt Netflix as much as originally thought. Now, more that half of all Netflix viewing is dedicated to TV, not films, presenting an opportunity for the company to compensate for the loss of movies.
“Analysts say the prioritizing of television partly explains why the company has been able to retain about 21.7 million streaming subscribers in the United States — totaling one in four households that have broadband — despite complaints about an inadequate feature film selection. It’s a transition that Netflix has made rather successfully in the last six to 12 months,” reports The New York Times.
The new-release movies from Starz only account for 2 percent of all Netflix viewing, a fairly big drop from 8 percent a year ago.
Even so, people remain critical of Netflix’s selection of films available to stream. An analyst firm Piper Jaffray reported only four of the 2011 top-50 grossing films were available on the site, and one of them — “Gnomeo and Juliet” — will be removed Wednesday.
Netflix continues to offer popular newer films through its DVD service but is placing more focus on TV with original content and expanding with older, cheaper TV content offerings.
“Are the carriers throttling because of wild and crazy unlimited users hogging enormous bandwidth, or are the carriers throttling as essentially a tactic to get grandfathered unlimited users to hurry up and switch to tiered data plans?” asks monitoring firm Validas in a report concerning data throttling.
“The company analyzed data from more than 55,000 cell phone bills, and concluded that customers on unlimited plans aren’t actually using any more data than everybody else,” reports TG Daily.
“When we look at the top five percent of data users, there is virtually no difference in data consumption between those on unlimited and those on tiered plans — and yet the unlimited consumers are the ones at risk of getting their service turned off,” says Validas.
AT&T is starting to limit speeds for users in the top five percent of data usage, but according to the report, throttling doesn’t significantly help network bandwidth issues.
Dropbox released their Android app that enables users to wirelessly upload pictures to the cloud from their smartphones. CEO Drew Houston said he hopes third-party developers will expand upon the app to include photo editing or manipulation features.
Users get 500 megabytes of storage following their first upload and are allowed up to 3GB of free space. An iOS version will be released soon, according to Dropbox.
The company faces fierce competition in the cloud from Microsoft, Apple’s iCloud and Google’s Drive.
James Staten, an analyst at Forrester Research said the new app is intended to “secure and solidify their position as the best file-sharing service and trying not to go beyond that, which I think is a smart move.”
Apple just acquired Chomp, an app search and discovery platform. The company plans to streamline the discovery process of the App Store’s 500,000 apps (and counting).
“This is not a cheap ‘acqui-hire,’ Apple has bought the Chomp team and technology and plans to use both to completely revamp App Store search and recommendations,” TechCrunch reports. “And they clearly have the money to do it: Apple has nearly $100 billion in cash (and cash equivalents) in the bank now coming off their monster quarter.”
In two rounds of funding, Chomp had raised just over $2.5 million. The company of 20 or so employees powers all Verizon’s Android-based app searches, a deal that should stay intact, at least for the time being.
“My understanding is that such deals will remain intact for now but are likely to end once the Chomp team and product fully transitions over to Apple,” comments MG Siegler for TechCrunch. “The same is likely true for Chomp’s stand-alone products.”
Although DISH Network still believes the Blockbuster name carries weight, it will close 500 stores by the end of this quarter, a third of its remaining 1,500 locations.
The company hopes to eventually reach a stable store count “that would allow it to use the brick-and-mortar locations to better bolster its mainstay satellite business,” reports The Verge.
Over the past three quarters, the Blockbuster division broke even and DISH has created a Blockbuster @Home on-demand service. DISH saw a 13 percent increase from a year ago and gained 22,000 new customers, boosting it to the 14 million subscriber mark.
In a related story, the Wall Street Journal reports that in order to appeal to customers’ desire for bundled services, DISH Chairman Charlie Ergen says the company needs to offer mobile wireless with its video service to compete with cable operators and phone companies.
According to Ergen, “in the face of a saturated pay-TV market, DISH needs to sell packages of services with more value so it can compete better with pay-TV providers,” WSJ reports.
He believes the company has an 80 percent chance of succeeding as a wireless provider. The FCC has not yet approved DISH’s use of satellite spectrum for building its wireless network.
Pew Research released a report showing social media users are editing their pages more often and upping privacy settings “as they seek to protect their reputations in the age of digital sharing,” Reuters reports.
According to the study, 63 percent of users deleted “friends” (up from 56 percent in 2009), 44 percent said they’d deleted comments on their profiles (up from 36 percent), and 37 percent removed their names from tagged photos (up from 30 percent).
In terms of privacy, 58 percent of those surveyed set their profiles to private for only friends to see, 19 percent allowed friends of friends to view, and only 20 percent of the users kept their profiles entirely public.
“Over time, as social networking sites have become a mainstream communications channel in everyday life, profile owners have become more active managers of their profiles and the content that is posted by others in their networks,” the report states.
The Obama Administration has released its Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights — an initiative to protect online privacy for Americans.
Working with the Federal Trade Commission, the plan is intended to enforce privacy standards to provide better personal control for consumers, encourage innovation from Internet companies and uphold global standards.
The proposal focuses on seven protections against data aggregation: “Consumers should have control over the kind of data companies collect, companies must be transparent about data usage plans and respect the context in which it is provided and disclosed. Companies would have to ensure secure and responsible handling of the data and be accountable for strong privacy measures. The bill of rights also calls for reasonable limits on the personal data that online companies can try to collect and retain, and the ability for consumers to correct their information,” Reuters reports.
The Department of Commerce and the FTC will collaborate with privacy advocates and Internet companies to come up with enforceable privacy policies. The industry has made attempts to self-regulate but some consumer groups and members of Congress believe the situation requires government involvement.
One main privacy concern addressed in the proposal is Internet tracking for targeted advertising. The top Internet browsers have opt-out “do not track” buttons (Google Chrome is still in the process of updating) and many online advertisers agreed to uphold “do not track” requests.
As smartphones are being used for more applications and consumers demand thinner phones, batteries that fit in the form factor are having a hard time keeping up.
At this week’s Mobile World Congress, Duracell will announce plans to make its Duracell Powermat available in public places. They will begin in New York this summer and roll out to Europe next year.
The Powermat allows one to charge a mobile phone by placing it on the surface. Duracell wants to make its recharging Powermat ubiquitous, providing wireless charging everywhere — cars, homes, offices, even public places like Madison Square Garden.
A Wireless Power Consortium consisting of most of the mobile phone manufacturers (except Apple) is pushing for a wireless charging standard.
The consortium chairman Menno Treffers worries that Apple may create a problem for wireless charging in public places if it continues with its own wireless charging standard.
Another promising Duracell Powermat product: “a back-up battery that can be charged on the Powermat and clicked onto smartphones in an emergency,” the Wall Street Journal reports. “The backup has 1.5 times the energy of a typical iPhone battery… and, importantly, it works with all smartphones including the iPhone.”
An iPad version of the the Microsoft Office Suite has reportedly been in development. “In addition to an iPad-ready version, a new edition of Office is expected for OS X Lion sometime next year,” reported The Daily back in November.
According to sources familiar with the project, the app will be submitted to Apple soon.
“The app’s user interface is similar to the current OneNote app, but it has hints of Metro, the new design language that can be seen in Windows Phone and in the as-yet-released Windows 8 desktop operating system,” The Daily reported this week.
“An exact launch date is unknown, but the design team has since wrapped up the project, meaning it could be released in the coming weeks,” the post states.
UPDATE: “Microsoft may well be working on a version of Office for iPad, but it’s not the one detailed in a report today from The Daily,” reports AllThingsD. “Nor will it soon be submitted to Apple for approval.”
“The Daily story is based on inaccurate rumors and speculation,” Microsoft spokesman Frank Shaw told AllThingsD. “We have no further comment.”
Editor Peter Ha of The Daily stands by the story. In response to a question regarding the screenshots used for the original post, he tweeted: “We did not fabricate either image. A working version of the app was demoed to us by someone at Microsoft.”
Research in Motion released a software update for its PlayBook tablet that includes new features, “some of which frankly should have been built into the device from day one,” reports TG Daily.
“Building on the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet’s proven Web browsing, multimedia and multitasking strengths, the new BlackBerry PlayBook OS 2.0 introduces a range of new communications and productivity enhancements as well as expanded app and content support,” indicates RIM in a statement.
The update enables messaging and a calendar, previously only available to users with BlackBerry phones. Also included is a digital streaming Video Store and professional tools for email and Microsoft Office.
The article says the OS update could have an interesting effect on the new BlackBerry phones to be released by the end of the year.
“But now, with at least six or seven months to wait until this becomes a reality, it may very well be too little too late. By then, Nokia’s partnership with Windows Phone will be in its maturity and the dominance of Android and iOS will only continue to grow on a global scale,” the post states.
South Korean firm Samsung, the world’s biggest supplier of LCDs by sales, “plans to spin off its liquid-crystal display operations into a separate company in an effort to revive its unprofitable flat-panel business, and said it is considering merging the new entity with affiliates within the Samsung group,” reports the Wall Street Journal.
The new company, expected to be launched April 1st with capital of $668 million, will be called Samsung Display Co. and Samsung Electronics will hold all its shares.
The split is part of Samsung’s plan to focus on OLED and gain competitiveness in LCD. The LCD business might be merged with affiliates like Samsung Mobile Display (which holds a 95 percent share of the global OLED market) or S-LCD, an unsuccessful collaboration with Sony.
“(Shifting to OLED) is an inevitable trend now. There’s no reason for Samsung to pour in more investment into its LCD business, and it would rather focus on raising its OLED technology,” said HI Investment & Securities analyst Song Myung-sub, adding that “with the industry’s LCD supply shrinking overall, some Korean players will see a turnaround from the businesses from the third quarter of this year.”
The computing-for-hire division of Amazon called Amazon Web Services (AWS) is offering new products to make it easier to run workflow-based applications on Amazon computers or using its giant computing cloud.
The move is expected to help the division expand its reach to engineers and business people.
“This is a cheap (and probably easy) way for in-house engineers to build and deploy software that does tasks like analytics and billing, or internal financial operations and decision-making. It can even aid in the design logic of multiplayer games,” suggests The New York Times.
“This is a big deal, because it shows AWS moving more decisively into the kind of broad-based computing and software services that will put it in competition with the likes of Oracle and Hewlett-Packard,” adds the article.
“AWS is going from basic but arcane core computing tasks, like setting up storage systems, to well-defined business software. Over the past few weeks, AWS has also started offering practical database software for large-scale corporate operations, and data storage that easily backs up what was on a corporate system.”