This is the week that was

Wow. I com­plain that the tech news week is slow, so what hap­pens? Stuff. iPad spec­u­la­tion, high-tech worms, a new tab­let com­puter from RIM and much, MUCH MORE! Apple I Own An iPad, So What Do I do With It? NPD has released the second in its series of iPad sur­veys. While the first looked at buy­ing…


Wow. I com­plain that the tech news week is slow, so what hap­pens? Stuff. iPad spec­u­la­tion, high-tech worms, a new tab­let com­puter from RIM and much, MUCH MORE!

Apple

I Own An iPad, So What Do I do With It?
NPD has released the second in its series of iPad sur­veys. While the first looked at buy­ing inten­tions pri­or to the launch this one is more focused on what the cur­rent own­er­ship looks like and how those own­ers are using their iPad. In con­junc­tion with the press release we thought we would add some col­or around the iPad exper­i­ence, bypassing some of the more con­ten­tious product based dis­cus­sions out there. The sur­vey provided some in-depth inform­a­tion on all aspects of the iPad, but today we are going to look at two dis­tinct areas. First, is what own­ers like and dis­like about their iPads, and second is how con­sumers are using their iPad.

iPad own­ers: young­er and more male.
As part of Advert­ising Week’s Mobile Ad Sum­mit Tues­day, the Nielsen Com­pany released the res­ults of a sur­vey of 5,000 con­sumers who own a tab­let com­puter, eRead­er, net­book, media play­er or smart­phone – includ­ing 400 iPad own­ers. The sur­vey found some curi­ous demo­graph­ic differences.

Apple shuts flag­ship Beijing store as iPhone 4 scalp­ers run amok
We repor­ted earli­er this month on the quaint habit of iPhone pur­chas­ing for a profit all across Lon­don, as vari­ous folk pick up units to send into the luc­rat­ive Chinese grey mar­ket for the device — today we learn that Apple had to close its Beijing Apple store yes­ter­day because grey mar­ket buy­ers were suck­ing all the store’s sup­ply.Seems that Apple bumped up the sales lim­it on iPhone 4 from two to unlim­ited in Beijing’s flag­ship store, draw­ing an imme­di­ate huge crowd of eager cus­tom­ers — but these folks were buy­ing iPhones in large quant­it­ies to resell on the grey mar­ket, which caused such a com­mo­tion secur­ity even­tu­ally shut AAPL’s flag­ship Chinese store down.


Apple TV review
You’ve been wait­ing, and it’s finally here: the Apple TV review. Months before Steve Jobs announced the new set top box at Apple’s annu­al fall event, we had been report­ing on news that the com­pany would strike out again into the TV mar­ket, offer­ing a small, low-cost box that had more in com­mon with the iPhone than the iMac. When those rumors came to fruition, we were presen­ted with the com­pletely revamped Apple TV — a tiny black puck of a device priced at a stag­ger­ing $99, and centered around a hand­ful of com­pletely new ideas (for the folks in Cuper­tino at least) about get­ting con­tent onto your TV screen.

Gold­man Sachs says Apple plan­ning thin­ner iPad with cam­era, mini USB
A team of ana­lysts for invest­ment bank Gold­man Sachs said Monday that their sources lead them to believe Apple will intro­duce a second-gen­er­a­tion iPad dur­ing the spring of 2011 that will fea­ture a cam­era, mini USB and a light­er design. Cit­ing sup­ply chain checks, the ana­lyst duo of Henry King and Kev­in Lu said they believe that Hon Hai will remain the sole man­u­fac­turer of the new 9.7‑inch mod­el, explain­ing that the Cuper­tino-based elec­tron­ics maker remains unde­cided on a second part­ner to help build the tablets.

Google

Google’s May­er cri­ti­cizes con­tent “locked” inside Facebook
Marissa May­er, Google’s vice pres­id­ent of search and user exper­i­ence, mostly dodged ques­tions on-stage today about the company’s future plans, includ­ing rumors of some sort of social net­work­ing ser­vice in the works. Both May­er and Google chief exec­ut­ive Eric Schmidt made sim­il­ar com­ments at the Tech­Crunch Dis­rupt con­fer­ence in San Fran­cisco over the past couple days. They said Google is work­ing to add social fea­tures to all of its applic­a­tions rather than build­ing a stan­dalone social net­work. But May­er also talked about how she sees Face­book, and about wheth­er or not it’s a competitor.

Microsoft

WordPress.com and Win­dows Live part­ner­ing togeth­er and provid­ing an upgrade for 30 mil­lion Win­dows L…
Over the last few weeks, we’ve spent a good bit of time talk­ing about our approach to part­ner­ing with the web, and as part of that, how we’re deeply integ­rat­ing with the lead­ing con­sumer ser­vices that you find most valu­able. Earli­er today, I had the oppor­tun­ity to get on stage at Tech­Crunch Dis­rupt, and with Toni Schneider, CEO of Auto­mat­tic (the par­ent com­pany of WordPress.com), announce an excit­ing part­ner­ship between our com­pan­ies.

Online

In a Com­puter Worm, a Pos­sible Bib­lic­al Clue
Deep inside the com­puter worm that some spe­cial­ists sus­pect is aimed at slow­ing Iran’s race for a nuc­le­ar weapon lies what could be a fleet­ing ref­er­ence to the Book of Esth­er, the Old Test­a­ment tale in which the Jews pre-empt a Per­sian plot to des­troy them.

Stuxnet Ques­tions and Answers
Stuxnet con­tin­ues to be a hot top­ic. Here are answers to some of the ques­tions we’ve received.

Q: What is Stuxnet?
A: It’s a Win­dows worm, spread­ing via USB sticks. Once inside an organ­iz­a­tion, it can also spread by copy­ing itself to net­work shares if they have weak passwords.

Privately held Face­book in 5‑for‑1 stock split
Face­book, the world’s No. 1 Inter­net social net­work, is split­ting its stock, as shares in the privately held com­pany have surged roughly sev­en-fold in the past 15 months.

WebP, a new image format for the Web
Most of the com­mon image formats on the web today were estab­lished over a dec­ade ago and are based on tech­no­logy from around that time. Some engin­eers at Google decided to fig­ure out if there was a way to fur­ther com­press lossy images like JPEG to make them load faster, while still pre­serving qual­ity and res­ol­u­tion. As part of this effort, we are releas­ing a developer pre­view of a new image format, WebP, that prom­ises to sig­ni­fic­antly reduce the byte size of pho­tos on the web, allow­ing web sites to load faster than before. 

Tim Arm­strong: We Got TechCrunch!
I’m very pleased to announce that we have acquired Tech­Crunch. Details are in the press release below, and I’m sure founder Michael Arring­ton will have a few words to say as well. This is a great com­ple­ment to our con­tin­ued invest­ment in world class content.

AOL’s Wild Acquis­i­tion Day Con­cludes With Thing Labs, Maker Of Brizzly
It’s a Ronco kind of day for folks who cov­er AOL (NYSE: AOL)—you think you’re done and then the com­pany says, but, wait, there’s more. For the last one (today), paid­Con­tent can con­firm that AOL has acquired Thing Labs and its Brizzly social media read­er. It’s also acquir­ing a new man­age­ment team: the Thing Labs team, headed by Google (NSDQ: GOOG) and Blog­ger vet Jason Shel­len, will run AIM, AOL Lifestream and Brizzly, report­ing to Brad Garling­house, pres­id­ent of con­sumer applications

Hard­ware

Change to ‘Bios’ will make for PCs that boot in seconds
New PCs could start in just seconds, thanks to an update to one of the old­est parts of desktop com­puters. The upgrade will spell the end for the 25-year-old PC start-up soft­ware known as Bios that ini­tial­ises a machine so its oper­at­ing sys­tem can get going.
Some Android apps caught cov­ertly send­ing GPS data to advertisers
The res­ults of a study con­duc­ted by research­ers from Duke Uni­ver­sity, Penn State Uni­ver­sity, and Intel Labs have revealed that a sig­ni­fic­ant num­ber of pop­u­lar Android applic­a­tions trans­mit private user data to advert­ising net­works without expli­citly ask­ing or inform­ing the user. The research­ers developed a piece of soft­ware called Taint­Droid that uses dynam­ic taint ana­lys­is to detect and report when applic­a­tions are send­ing poten­tially sens­it­ive inform­a­tion to remote servers.

RIM Gets into the Tab­let Game, Throws Out the PlayBook
Research in Motion co-CEO Mike Laz­ar­id­is had his “one more thing” moment today at the company’s 2010 Dev­Con con­fer­ence. Near the end of his open­ing key­note address, Lazaridis–after mak­ing a num­ber of big announce­ments, includ­ing in-app pay­ments for Black­Berry apps, a Black­Berry Advert­ising Ser­vice and the open­ing of BBM as a social platform–uncrated the Play­Book, RIM’s long-rumored tablet.



This post of is one of many I pub­lish weekly at the Future Shop Techb­log. Read more of my stuff here.


Comments

2 responses to “This is the week that was”

  1. Katharine Avatar
    Katharine

    *grins* Okay, I’ll admit to being a bit imma­ture, here, but I’m a mite sur­prised that iPad own­er­ship is even 35% female, and I won­der how many of those were pur­chased for them by sons or hus­bands , giv­en the mar­ket­ing blun­der with the name. 🙂 I just … I’m just baffled that leav­ing them­selves open to blatant mock­ery did­n’t occur to them.

    1. Brad Grier Avatar

      Heh, I know. That’s such an obvi­ous one that I too won­der how the mar­ket­ing dis­cus­sion went over nam­ing that little item. Someday the truth will come out in a bio­graphy (author­ized or not) 🙂

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