Games for the weekend: Tank Riders

post from Apple on 27 January 2012 02:03:53 PM. © Apple

Games for the Weekend is a weekly feature aimed at helping you avoid doing something constructive with your downtime. Each Friday we?ll be recommending a game for Mac, iPhone or iPad that we think is awesome enough to keep you busy until Monday, at least.

Tank Riders ($1.99 Universal, $3.99 Mac) is a good cross between a maze, puzzle and third-person shooter game that can be really fun in the right circumstances on the right devices. Thanks to well thought-out maps, Polarbit has done an amazing job at keeping the gameplay interesting enough in single-player mode, while also making multiplayer competitive and fun.

Tank Riders

Tank Riders has just two basic controls: one for steering your tank, and one for shooting. As the levels progress, you’re faced more challenging level puzzles barring your way to the finish line, and more bad guys trying to stop you from getting there. Along the way, you can pick up extra health and special weapons. But with the start of each level, you get set back to your tank’s starting configuration.

Tank Riders

As mentioned, the maps are what make this game shine. In single player mode, crumbling walls and destructible crates make for a delightfully changeable environment.

What’s great about multiplayer mode is that you can have multiple online accounts on your iPhone, iPad and Mac to play against visiting family and friends. So if you happen to have more than one Apple device at your disposal, you can set up a tournament in the comfort of your own home.

Tank Riders

Tank Riders isn’t without problems. On the iPhone in particular, the screen is just too small to spot the enemy, navigate your tank, and shoot your gun turret all at the same time. I did, however, find that using the iPhone like a traditional game controller while playing the game on my HDTV through my Apple TV over AirPlay was a perfect solution to that problem. On the iPad and Mac, you won’t have the same problem, and the Mac’s controls make the experience far easier. So if you plan on going head-to-head with your friends in multiplayer mode, get the Mac version to gain the competitive advantage.

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For Apple, iCloud is just the beginning

post from Apple on 27 January 2012 02:03:53 PM. © Apple

No one can doubt the sheer awesomeness packaged in Apple’s recent quarterly performance. However, for me the real story is the company’s iCloud and CEO Tim Cook’s assertion that with 85 million sign-ups in three months, Apple is only getting started with iCloud. “It’s not just a product, it’s a strategy for the next decade,” Cook declared. The recent elevation of Eddy Cue to SVP of Internet Services and his generous stock options are a sign of how serious Cook is about iCloud. The $1 billion data center in North Carolina is more proof of the company’s seriousness.

So the question is, What plans does Apple have for the cloud? Given recent history one can easily assume that the company would build more cloud apps that enhance existing services, like iTunes Match and Photostream. But those are small potatoes. The real opportunity for Apple is to offer a series of network services for its developers and millions of iPhone and iPad and Mac owners: network services such as storage, location data, voice command and control, notifications, and messaging.

Storage. ICloud is already a place to access your photos, songs and contacts remotely from any iOS device or OS X Lion machine. But what about making your desktop files and apps available everywhere too? Take the way Apple is going with its MacBook Air, a huge hit for the company. A logical next step to make even thinner and lighter machines with very little room for storage is to make a cloud-centric MacBook. Imagine opening up your laptop that has little local storage and being able to access any of your documents you have saved, anywhere you are. We know Apple has been sniffing around this area: Steve Jobs offered to acquire Dropbox several years ago, telling its founder, Drew Houston, that it was really “a feature, not a product.” So a cloud-based storage service that perhaps developers could use for their own apps? Doesn’t sound too far out there.
Location. Apple bought mapping companies PlaceBase in 2009 and Poly9 in 2010. We also know the company is hiring for mapping-related positions. That sparked speculation that Apple is indeed building its own location-based service. It has some location services in action already, like Find My iPhone and Find My Friends. An interesting step would be if Apple opened up such a service as an API to its developers.
Voice control. Siri is still in beta, which means it is not even a finished product. What will Apple do with it in years to come? A good bet is it will integrate it into more Apple devices. The future of device interfaces is more nontraditional methods of control, like voice and gestures. In other words, Siri is not an anomaly or a cute, little experiment: It’s the future. A good place to look for clues about how Apple might implement more voice control services is a patent filing Apple made, showing its interest in putting Siri in everything from Macs to cars.

It is true that Apple is not a company that has historically had great success with web-based services. Embracing networked services and the cloud means Apple inherently understands that even hardware companies that extract gazillions of dollars in profit right now can?t go another decade without this. In a way, Apple also has no choice but to pursue this. If it wants to continue to build the post-PC dream, it has to have iCloud and other connected services that connect all of its apps, services and devices.

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Apple buy Hollywood Not a chance

post from Apple on 27 January 2012 02:03:53 PM. © Apple

With about $100 billion just lying around, Apple’s received a number of suggestions for how it can spend that cash. The latest comes from Erick Schonfeld at TechCrunch, who argues that Apple could use that money to invest in a new type of subscription TV service to compete with Comcast, Time Warner Cable and the like. But that suggestion overlooks a few very important facts about Apple, and about the economics of today’s pay TV business.

What Apple does and doesn’t do

For a clue into how Apple approaches the video market, you need look no further than how it’s dealt with every other part of the media ecosystem to date: It creates good user experiences across an ecosystem of great products that publishers can sell their content on.

It introduced the iPod and iTunes and allowed the music industry to sell their songs on the platform, and it took a cut. It introduced the iPhone and the App Store and allowed developers to create games, utilities, productivity tools and the like, and it took a cut. It introduced the Apple TV for the Hollywood studios and TV networks to rent and sell their movies and shows to consumers, and it took a cut. It introduced the iPad, iBooks and the Newstand and allowed book and magazine publishers to sell digital versions of their titles to consumers, and it took a cut.

You notice a trend here? Product, platform, revenue share. That model has been extremely profitable for Apple, in part because it’s had to bear little risk to collect whatever revenues and profits come from its partners’ content sales. What Apple does not do is pay upfront to have the luxury of carrying content and then shouldering all the risk while attempting to create a sustainable new business model for its partners.

The economics of the situation

But let’s talk about the actual economics of subscription pay TV. Time Warner Cable announced in its earnings Thursday that it paid somewhere around $25 a month per subscriber in content costs last quarter. Think Apple could do better? It can’t. Any new entrant to the pay TV market acquiring content licenses does so at rates higher than what others have previously negotiated. This was true when the satellite TV companies entered the business, it was true when Verizon and AT&T began offering IPTV services, and it will be true for anyone that attempts to create a virtual cable company.

Starting costs for Apple — or anyone else for that matter — to build a subscription TV service will be in the mid-$30s at the very least. Which means it’s not going to roll out a $25 or $30 subscription service or undercut your local cable company on price anytime soon.

You know how every quarter analysts dissect however many billions of dollars Microsoft has lost in its Internet services business? That would be Apple TV’s media business, quarter after quarter, if it decided to go down this road. Sure, Apple has a lot of money. And sure, Apple could bear those costs. But why would it? What’s the actual benefit for Apple or its investors?

The misplaced dream of a la carte

“But what if I don’t want all of the channels? That’s where Apple could really disrupt things!” It’s a familiar refrain to hope and wish and pray that someone like Apple will be able to do what others have failed at so far, and negotiate a la carte pricing for individual networks. That sure sounds good, and I’m sure consumers would love it! That is, until they saw the price tags associated with each of the networks that they would want to buy.

Even if Apple were able to convince Disney, for instance, to separate ABC, the Disney networks and ESPN’s sports networks from the bundle, it would be just like breaking up any other bundle: the cost to sell each network separately would be egregiously expensive. Prohibitively so.

As a consumer, would you pay $5 just for ABC? Another $5 each for CBS, NBC and Fox? $15 or $20 for ESPN? $25 for HBO? It’s not like these guys are just going to give those channels away at a small premium over what they get from cable. If they’re going to break the subscription bundle, they’re going to want to get paid to do it. In that world, how many channels do you think you could buy before the cost became more than what you already pay for a cable subscription each month?

The actual market opportunity

Put all that aside, though, and the truth of the matter is that streaming video is still a relatively niche market. How many people are out there who actually have an interest in a streaming TV service? In theory, the addressable market is every broadband household that also pays for cable service. But take a look at the number of Apple TVs that are out there (just 4.2 million) or the connect rate on smart TVs today, and you see that very few people are actually taking advantage of broadband-delivered video. That could change with the introduction of the mythical iTV, but it seems pretty tiny today.

Sure, Apple created the modern smartphone market with the iPhone or the tablet market with the iPad. But it’s not into creating new services. And it seems unlikely that Apple would introduce a new service like this, especially one that is likely to be risky, unprofitable and targeting a market segment that doesn’t yet exist.

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Nova Development Launches the Mac SuperBundle
Winter 2012

post from prMac on 27 January 2012 01:55:00 PM. © prMac

The Mac SuperBundle Winter 2012 launched Jan. 25th for 14 days only. It's Nova Development's biggest Mac bundle ever and best consumer deal yet. It offers 10 Mac OS X 10.7 compatible apps perfect for new and existing Mac users for $49. It includes the #1 selling virtualization software, Parallels Desktop 7 for Mac, a $79 value alone. Also bundled are easy-to-use creativity, home finance & other utility apps. Separately, the apps total $470 . At $49 - it's an 89% savings and an incredible value.

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Looking for a Final Cut Server Alternative

post from Manage This on 27 January 2012 01:04:45 PM. © Manage This

[...]

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Samsung probably sold the most smartphones in
2011

post from Apple on 27 January 2012 01:04:42 PM. © Apple

Trying to count who sold the most smartphones is a difficult business. That’s mostly due to Samsung’s decision to stop releasing unit sales figures for its smartphone sales. The company has taken to releasing sales growth percentages, and it is on these figures that market research firms are basing projections of how many phones Samsung shipped last quarter and all of last year.

On Friday, IHS iSuppli is the latest to weigh in. The firm says that while Apple came in first place in the last calendar quarter of 2011 in smartphone sales with 37 million, Samsung actually took the crown of world’s largest smartphone vendor of the year with 95 million shipped. (That’s not “sold,” so this is not a great way to compare, as we’ve previously discussed, but it’s what we’ve got.) Apple sold 93 million iPhones during the year.

IHS iSuppli is basing its Samsung numbers on information gathered when the company announced its quarterly earnings earlier Friday. I asked iSuppli analyst Wayne Lam how he arrived at the number and he said he was basing it off the “approximately 30 percent growth” figure that Samsung publicly announced. He interpreted that as “under 30 percent but over 27 percent.”

Lam added, “Since we have been tracking Samsung earnings for a while now, we’ve build up a history of our best estimates for their performance. The 95M figure represents our best estimate of their performance this year based on this new data point and our historical record keeping.”Strategy Analytics also agrees that while Apple won the fourth quarter, Samsung reigned for the year as the largest supplier of smartphones. All in all, does it matter who’s ahead? Not really. The main takeaway is the growth of this industry: between just the two companies last year, they’re accounting for almost 200 million smartphones, a huge bulk of the devices sold every year. It’s safe to say that these two are going to be battling it out for a while.

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The Fashion World Awaits You, Now on the Mac App
Store

post from prMac on 27 January 2012 12:40:00 PM. © prMac

Teyon revealed today that Fashion Advisor, a unique hidden object puzzler with clever fashion mini-game tie-ins, is now available worldwide in the Mac App Store for a low price. Step into the glamorous world of fashion as Lilly, a creative director at an advertising agency. Her duties consume most of her free time and there's not much time left for her passions; Shopping and creating her own fashion creations, but Lilly's about to get her lucky break.

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Why the iPad is a salesperson’s best friend

post from Apple on 27 January 2012 12:04:04 PM. © Apple

Recent studies from Forrester and Good Technology show that Apple’s iPad is doing very well in the enterprise, with new activations soaring. One company just deployed 1,300 of the Apple tablets across its salesforce, because combined with the right software, it believes there’s no better tool a salesperson can carry.

A recent report at InformationWeek details the story of Level 3 Communications, which recently equipped its entire sales workforce iPads, loaded with apps that provide access to pricing information, presentation creation and display, corporate email, customer records and inventory checks. The iPad proved more than up to the task of supplementing, and mostly replacing laptops.

InformationWeek goes into much more detail about what the iPads meant for Level 3, but the advantages for salespeople on the ground can be boiled down to three main categories:

1. Instant on. The iPad’s ability to instantly wake from sleep and pick up right where a user left off exceed that of even the fastest, SSD-equipped notebooks, and only sips power in tiny amounts in order to provide that functionality. That, combined with its superior portability, makes it the perfect tool for doing “quick checks between meetings, at an airport, or in a taxi,” InformationWeek says. With a laptop, five minutes in a taxi might not seem like enough time to make powering up worth your while; with the iPad, that’s a non-issue.

2. Connectivity. The iPad (at least the 3G models) provides always-on cellular network access, so long as you’re within coverage range. Some laptops can offer that, but the process is still often more complicated than just tapping the wake button and being ready to surf, email or chat. But it’s not just cellular radios that make the iPad great for sales; built-in GPS positioning means salespeople can get locally relevant information, like clients or potential clients in the immediate area, in only a few short steps via task-specific software.

3. On-device demo. A laptop is an ineffective replacement for a catalog, and presenting a slide show on one is awkward. Using an iPad as a presentation tool, on the other hand, is natural. The tablet is easily passed around, can be read like a magazine, and can also output to external displays with less hassle and fewer steps than a laptop. And apps like OnLive Desktop and Iongrid make it even easier for iPads to sub in for notebooks capable of running desktop presentation tools.

Level 3 isn’t the only company to realize the value of iPads in the hands of a salesforce. Sears, of all companies, announced in October it’ll begin rolling out iPads in 450 stores in October, and TUAW noted at the time that Lowes and Pacific Sun were also expanding iOS deployments.

InformationWeek thinks 2012 will be a breakout year in terms of actual iPad deployments, just as 2011 saw a huge uptick in pilot programs; if that indeed comes to pass, we should see Apple easily beat the 40.7 million iPads it sold in 2011.

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What is this App 2 - Crazy iOS puzzle action is
the answer

Massachusetts based BeBop Games today announced the recent update of What is this App? 2 for the iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch. The sequel to the smash hit What is this App?, this mysterious entertainment puzzle challenges players to answer the app title question by unraveling a series of brain teasers, visual puzzles, and other conundrums! What is this App? 2 is no walk in the park, guaranteeing that gamers have hours of riddle action at their fingertips, regardless of the mode they're playing.

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Siri is not a bandwidth hog and users are not the
problem

The sky is falling again in cellular land and this time Siri is to blame. At least that’s the assessment form this opinion article in the Washington Post this morning claiming that Siri not only unleashed a huge new pattern of data consumption on mobiles, but that in return her piggy ways destroy the experience for the rest of us because of the shared nature of cellular networks.

From the article:

And building new capacity isn?t cheap. Everyone ? not just the first-class passengers ? ends up paying for it. So prepare for higher cellphone bills. And in the meantime? Prepare to sit and wait. That call to Grandma might not get through until the congestion clears.
Other alternatives might be less palatable, especially to anyone who wants immediate downloading gratification. We could stay off the grid or utilize fewer data-intensive functions. Or we could put some traffic cops on the beat to regulate our data demands and limit the traffic snarls and bottlenecks.

But if you think Siri is somehow responsible for the data overload, you ain’t seen nothing yet. Siri is the first generation of interfaces that will make is seamless and easy us to surf the Web from anywhere, and on any device or vehicle. So the author’s problem is one that’s only going to get bigger. Thankfully it has a solution which he seems to ignore.

Paul Farhi, the author of the piece, makes a couple of errors (or maybe omissions is kinder) that are worth pointing out to the policy wonks in D.C., especially as they contemplate bills that would gut the FCC’s ability to make spectrum policy in the U.S. for the sake politics. Onto the problems:

Siri as data hog.

Siri, the natural language processing service that Apple introduced on the iPhone 4S doesn’t consume the data that Farhi says she does in his article, “Siri?s dirty little secret is that she?s a bandwidth guzzler, the digital equivalent of a 10-miles-per-gallon Hummer H1.” Siri consumes very little data in sending your voice back to the servers to figure out what you want the phone to do, but what it does is make it that much easier to surf the web. Farhi seems to understand this, but his first characterization is blatantly false. Siri isn’t guzzling data, she’s making it easier for us to do so. We’re the guzzlers.

The airwaves as highways

The second problem with the article is more complicated. Farhi uses the popular highways analogy for how we send cellular traffic and explains that building out more infrastructure takes time (one reason is because it takes about 10 years on average to get spectrum into the hands of carriers thanks to the politics associated with spectrum auctions). But what he misses, and what is crucial to his point, is that there is more than one set of wireless highways. There are multiple types of licensed airwaves that are used for everything from satellite radio to cellular and there are unlicensed airwaves where data is currently sent using Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and soon, WiGig.

When we’re talking over the air there’s not one single highway to get us from Point A to Point B, there are multiple spectrum bands, technologies and costs associated with them. In this age using wireless is like engaging in multimodal commuting. You use cellular to drive to the train station and the high-speed rails of Wi-Fi fly downtown. Meanwhile you are sharing those rails and highways with thousands of other commuters in neighboring airwaves that are the equivalent of bikers, skateboarders etc.

We can keep Siri and still call grandma, here’s how.

And that’s where Farhi missed a big opportunity to tell D.C. that instead of focusing on cars and the single highway that it should look around at all the other technologies out there. Stop listening to the carriers, who actually do have spectrum they can deploy if they want to work a little harder and spend a little more, and start thinking about how Wi-Fi or white spaces broadband (Super Wi-Fi) can play a role in taking congestion off over the air data networks.

Passing a spectrum bill that allows for more unlicensed airwaves would be a start, as would leaving the FCC to deal with the highly technical issues surrounding spectrum auctions. Pushing the FCC to investigate special access fees would also help, as it might lower the rate of bringing a fiber pipe out to areas so ISPS can support large-scale Wi-Fi or White Spaces networks. But first we have to have the understanding of how the wireless and cellular networks work, so we can propose viable solutions, instead of blaming applications that make our lives better for congesting our network.

And since many of those solutions will require action (or inaction) from Congress and the FCC, the Washington Post missed a golden opportunity to educate its readers about possible solutions and push the debate forward with mobile operators about using Wi-Fi more strategically, making it possible for rural areas to use unlicensed airwaves to create broad coverage areas without paying an arm and leg for a gigabyte and helping Congress understand how the industry actually works.

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