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Apple has fallen behind Google in launching a music streaming service: Google’s Play Music All Access service is already live and costs users $10 per month. But why did Google beat Apple? The Verge decided to find out.

As we previously reported, Apple’s offer didn’t receive a positive response from music publishers. In fact, according to available sources, the largest publisher, Sony/ATV, has rejected Apple’s terms. Furthermore, Warner joined Sony and is still awaiting a better offer from Apple. So far the latter has raised its offer to 12.5 cents per 100 tracks streamed.

The Verge has learned that even BMG Rights Management, the fourth largest music publisher, shares Sony’s and Warner’s position.

Universal Music wants to see the iRadio launch as soon as possible. So what is holding these music publishers back, and why did they reach an agreement with Google?

The catch is in the subscriptions service model that Google and Apple chose to adapt. Google opted for a well-established business scenario?a Spotify-like service? So the terms could be determined smoothly.

Apple, however, chose to pioneer a hybrid web and radio service, which means the licensing terms need to be created from scratch. And when you mention Pandora to music publishers, their answer is a categorical “no.” Not that Apple wants to create another Pandora. According to The Verge’s information, it resembles Pandora.

“It’s very important that new digital services pay songwriters and music publishers a fair share of the money,” said David Israelite, president of the National Music Publishers Association, which is not involved in the negotiations but has been vocal about what he believes are the inequities in compensation between the labels and publishers. “We can not repeat the disaster that was Pandora where songwriters were asked to take a tiny fraction of the revenue.”

But in the end, Apple’s and Google’s approach to music publishers brings benefits to both parties and they are aware of that. The question of “how much” will be answered very soon.

Apple’s iRadio Subscription Model Holding Back Major Labels is a post from: iPhone in Canada Blog – Canada's #1 iPhone Resource

Want to reminisce about the olden days of talking on a phone? You can now with the Coco Retro Handset. This retro phone plugs into any 3mm jack and will work on your iPhone or iPad to take calls and is available in black, red, white, orange and pink. Time to start answering calls like a boss.

[Related deal: Name Your Own Price Mac Bundle 2.0]

Normally priced at $40, this handset is on sale for 62% off at just $15 (shipping is $4.95 to Canada/USA). If you’re tired of putting in headphones or a Bluetooth headset, this just might a great alternative and also make the perfect gift too.

Click here to jump on the Coco Retro Handset while it’s still available.

This Retro Handset Takes your iPhone Back in Time [Deals] is a post from: iPhone in Canada Blog – Canada's #1 iPhone Resource

A court filing obtained by The Verge reveals the new trial date of the ongoing Apple–Samsung patent litigation. On November 12, though, the judge will decide the fate of the $450.5 million of damages awarded by a jury to Apple should stand — originally it was $1.05 billion, but later cut down by judge Lucy Koh.

It came like a bolt from the blue back in March when Apple’s $1.05 billion jury award was reduced by more than 40%, and Judge Lucy Koh ordered a new trial to determine damages.

The document obtained by The Verge reveals that the new trial will take place between November 12 and 18.

In addition, the filing reveals new tweaks, namely that Koh re-awarded the nearly $40.5 million the jury granted the Cupertino company for infringement in connection with the AT&T variant of the Galaxy SII.

Samsung requested the court to put a new damages trial on hold, pointing to two Apple patents called into question, but Judge Lucy Koh rejected the request.
However, she did write into the order that Samsung is entitled to request a stay on the damages until the re-examination process of the patents in question reaches an end.

The South Korean tech giant’s lawyers, on the other hand, fear that Apple might obtain the same or even bigger jury award in damages as a result of the new trial.

Apple and Samsung Head Back to Court on November 12 is a post from: iPhone in Canada Blog – Canada's #1 iPhone Resource

AppShopper, a popular app discovery network (sister property of Apple rumours juggernaut, MacRumors) has announced it has returned to the App Store, after being removed by Apple last December over a conflict of rules introduced with iOS 6.

It has returned now as AppShopper Social, a brand new app with iPhone 5 screen support to enable users to once again keep a Wish List of apps but also introduces new social features, such as adding and following friends. Your main stream will then show apps your friends have added to their own lists. Twitter integration allows you to add AppShopper friends on the social network.

The app retains some features of the original app such as push notifications for price changes and updates of your favourite apps, but previous lists of ‘What’s New’ and ‘Top 200′ are absent, but could be coming back soon. An iPad version hasn’t been updated yet but it will be coming along with universal support.

Click here to download AppShopper Social–it’s free. It’s one of the best ways to discover new apps in the vast sea known as the App Store.

‘AppShopper Social’ Launch Brings AppShopper Back to the App Store is a post from: iPhone in Canada Blog – Canada's #1 iPhone Resource

Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple with Steve Jobs, has said that Apple’s current share price may be “disappointing” but he’s confident that the Cupertino giant will come out with products which would “surprise and shock us all” and the company’s stock price will eventually bounce back. Having previously broken the $700 barrier, Apple stock (AAPL) dipped below the $400 mark a couple of days back, the lowest intraday price ever since December 2011.

While speaking at the Login technology conference in Vilnius, Lithuania, Woz said that Apple’s current stock price is very disappointing because looking at the amount of cash that Apples holds, that cash translates to one to two hundred dollars per share of stock just in cash form. However, he added that the profits of the whole industry are still with Apple and “profits are all that really matter in the long run”. According to Woz, Apple is very well prepared and working on new things that are going to “surprise and shock us all”.

“[Apple's]stock price is a little low right now. Over time I’ve seen Apple go up or down 2x over a few months. It’s very disappointing […]

Apple’s business model tends to be new products, even products that didn’t exist before and doing well out of them and not re-making the same thing, as eventually that just gets a little bit stale. So I would guess that Apple is very well prepared, and working on new things that are going to surprise and shock us all. And I honestly don’t know [what].”

Woz also reminisced about his time with Steve Jobs and hacking together hardware projects for friends.

“The iPhone 5 is one of the hottest products today. Back then, the HP35 hand-held calculator was the iPhone 5 of its day.”

Apple’s Stock Price Will Bounce Back With A Surprise, Says Wozniak is a post from: iPhone in Canada Blog – Canada's #1 iPhone Resource

A little humility can go a long way — and result in better PR. In the face of an incessant media campaign against its customer service policies in the China and a week or so of being called “arrogant,” Apple chose a response that included a small change to iPhone warranties and a big apology — from its CEO himself, Tim Cook. The effect was nearly instant: just a day later, China’s government-controlled media outlets and a government agency are singing Apple’s praises.

Reuters reports the reactions:

“The company’s apology letter has eased the situation, softening the tense relationship between Apple and the Chinese market … Its reaction is worth respect compared with other American companies,” wrote popular tabloid the Global Times, published by Communist Party mouthpiece the People’s Daily.

The Foreign Ministry praised Apple for “conscientiously” responding to consumers’ demands.

“We approve of what Apple said,” spokesman Hong Lei told a daily news briefing on Tuesday.

It’s quite a change in tune. Over the past two weeks, Apple has been the subject of an orchestrated campaign that included local celebrities bashing Apple’s return and repair policies on social media; a series of editorials calling the company arrogant; and a demand for new warranty policies, including upping the standard one-year warranty to two years for the iPad.

Apple’s decision to have Cook put his name on an apology for the inconsistent warranty and repair policies in the country isn’t unprecedented — he’s apologized for the Apple Maps fiasco, and Steve Jobs apologized for the iPhone 4 antenna — but it’s rare. The outcome was positive for Apple this time: the apology had the immediate effect of changing the increasingly bad PR the company was getting in China. But it will be interesting to see what kind of precedent this sets for how Apple gets along in its No. 2 market with the Chinese media, and more importantly, the Chinese government.

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class="alignright size-full wp-image-114548" title="Tamagotchi L.i.f.e." src="http://www.technologytell.com/apple/files/2013/03/tamagotchilife.png" alt="Tamagotchi L.i.f.e." width="259"
height="460">I never had a Tamagotchi, so my memory of them is a bit fuzzy. I’ve never had an Android device, either, so I couldn’t refresh my memory when the Tamagotchi L.i.f.e. app was released
on that platform last month. More than 600,000 downloads later, Namco Bandai and Sync Beatz Entertainment have brought the “behavior and parenting” game to iOS.

Tamagotchi L.i.f.e. recreates the classic Tamagotchi that became a sensation when introduced in 1997, which means:

The iOS App … offers players two distinctive…

Continue reading Tamagotchi comes back to L.i.f.e. on iOS

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Daring Fireball’s John Gruber claims that Apple allows its employees who leave the company, to come back after two years and also keep their seniority, notes Business Insider. He says that the company lets its employees quit, and if they decide to come back in two years, “it’s like nothing ever happened”.

The source further details this interesting policy that even though the employees don’t get credit for two more years of work, they get to keep their rank at Apple. However, the employee has to have been at Apple for 10 years, says Gruber. In contrast, a company like Bloomberg would tell its employees to shun anyone that leaves the company. Seth Mnookin says, “if employees (at Bloomberg) left to work for a competitor, they’ve become bad people. Period.”

Apple is a secretive, insular place so one might suspect its policy would be closer to that of Bloomberg. Instead, it’s “enlightened” in the words of Gruber. It gives people a chance to try something else and not burn out on Apple.

Gruber says Apple doesn’t have sabbaticals, so this two-year leave policy is a quasi-substitute.

When Steve Jobs came back to Apple, he banned sabbaticals. A lot of people were taking their two year sabbaticals and then quitting. So, Apple just says, quit up front. And if you change your mind, then come back.

Gruber calls it a smart strategy since one of the biggest threats for Apple is a brain drain, and if it’s easy for Apple’s employees to return, “it’s less of a threat”.

Apple Employees Who Quit Can Come Back & Keep Their Ranks After 2 Years is a post from: iPhone in Canada Blog – Canada's #1 iPhone Resource

CNBC’s Squawk Box hosted Berkshire Hathaway’s Warren Buffett this morning (via Fortune), who added his voice to the hype around Apple’s stock price and cash pile.


During the special three-hour segment with Becky Quick, Warren Buffett was asked about Apple and about his position on the company’s current situation. Buffett’s advice was to basically ignore all of it:

“I don’t own any Apple and I haven’t, though I did talk with Steve Jobs a few years ago about what they might do with the cash. The best thing you can do with a business is run it well, and the shares will respond. There have been all kinds of times when people have criticized us [Berkshire], saying you could do this thing or that thing.”

As for Einhon’s “silly sideshow” pressure for Apple to issue preferred shares, the prominent investor said he would ignore Einhorn as well:

“I would ignore him. I would run the business in such a manner as to create the most value over the next five to ten years. You can’t run a business to push the stock price up on a daily basis. Berkshire has gone down 50% four times in its history. When that happens, if you’ve got money you buy it. You just keep working on building the value. I heard form people each time [Berkshire shares went down], saying why don’t you do this or that. Pay a dividend. I think Apple’s done a good job of building value. They may have too much cash. Now one reason they have so much cash is two thirds of it has not yet been taxed.”

Buffett even recalled a discussion he had with Steve Jobs some while ago, on the stock buyback topic.

“When Steve called me, I said, Is your stock cheap? He said, yes. I said, Do you have more cash than you need? He said, a little. [laughs] I said, then buy back your stock. He didn’t. Now, when our stock went from $90,000 to $40,000 to $45,000, I wrote about, we wanted to buy the stock. We didn’t quite manage to. But if you could buy dollar bills for 80 cents, it’s a very good thing to do.”

Berkshire’s Warren Buffett Says Tim Cook Should Ignore Einhorn and Buy Back Stock is a post from: iPhone in Canada Blog – Canada's #1 iPhone Resource

Firefox OS is now going to happen. When it was announced a year ago, the carriers said they were in. Now they’re about to prove it: this summer, Telefonica will roll out handsets in Spain, Brazil, Venezuela and Colombia, and Deutsche Telekom and Telenor will do the same in Europe.

But will it succeed? To figure that out, we need to look at a number of variables, including the OS itself, but mainly what it represents for those all-important carriers.

The promised land

From an open standards perspective, the Firefox OS could not be purer. The whole thing is based on HTML5 – it’s all about escaping Google and Apple’s walled gardens and frolicking freely in the wilds of the open web. Half the code was written by volunteers.

There will be an official Firefox Marketplace but everyone is free to roll their own, from carriers to games specialists. Any payment method can be implemented – that factor is not in the hands of any one platform sponsor. Apps that run on the platform will also be able to run on rivals that implements HTML5, such as Google’s and Apple’s.

The fact that the carriers are lapping this up represents a moment of supreme irony: these are the same companies – largely former monopolies – that were all about walled gardens, the companies that wanted to replicate the portal-first, AOL model in the wireless world. And what happened to break up that scenario? Apple happened.

It was the iPhone that really loosened the carriers’ grip on their product. Suddenly they were just providers of voice and SMS and data, not suppliers of value-added services. The revenue cut from app sales now went to Apple and Google, not to the operators. The walls to their gardens had been obliterated, and someone had set up much more attractive walled gardens elsewhere.

So back we come to this idea of the open mobile web. This is an area where luminaries such as Tim Berners-Lee have been on the warpath, pointing out very real problems with the iOS/Android model. These include the inability to share app-based content in a standardized way, and the inability to search across apps. In short: the loss of the level playing field that web technologies represent.

And so we come back to Firefox OS, which solves all of those problems. Weirdly, we can now witness the former walled garden proprietors genuinely extol the virtues of openness. By promoting Firefox OS, they cannot regain control – however, they hope to prise some control from the hands of Google and Apple.

Not convinced? Consider these quotes from Sunday’s Firefox OS launch:

“Operators will benefit from higher control over the mobile ecosystem and consequently will have the opp to address specific customers.” – Franco Bernabe, Telecom Italia CEO

“This is the beginning of the end of walled gardens.” – Marco Quatorze, CMO, America Movil

The question is, can they get away with it?

In Firefox OS’s favor, it comes readily equipped with many apps, including any mobile website written to behave like an app (think Twitter and Facebook). The fact that so many web apps are out there, and that writing one means addressing most mobile platforms at once, means Mozilla may just achieve its stated goal of getting developers to stop migrating to a purely native strategy.

In my brief hands-on experience with a ZTE Firefox OS phone, performance was slightly but not excessively laggy (bear in mind that the software is still not complete). According to the demonstrator, web apps apparently run better on Firefox OS than on other platforms because there’s less overhead – no Dalvik or anything like that. Will they run better than their native equivalents on iOS and Android? Doubtful, but that’s not the point.

These initial Firefox OS phones are not powerful. They are sub-$100 handsets that will be going up against Nokia’s Asha range and low-end Android devices from Huawei and ZTE. Given that those cheap Android devices are not equipped to handle everything their platform has to offer, Firefox OS may indeed provide a better experience at that price point. Nokia is the player that’s most likely to get hurt here.

Considering that potential performance advantage and the apparent will of the carriers to promote them, these handsets seem to have a fighting chance in the developing markets where they will first be pitched. I find it hard to see them doing well in more mature smartphone markets, but the performance of the finalized software may prove me wrong.

The question here really is the will of the operators to see Firefox OS succeed. There is every reason to believe they are primarily concerned with wringing concessions out of Google, such as better deals on app revenue share. If they get that, perhaps they will pull back on Mozilla’s open platform.

But even if that happens, and the mobile industry achieves greater balance, well, job done.

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