Macgasm

In today’s connected world, I pretty much assume that an iPad will find its way into every school, job, and politician’s office on the planet, but I have to admit I never once thought about putting iPads directly into shopping carts at a grocery-store.

Sainsbury’s and Sky TV have created a new shopping cart that has an iPad holder and speaker system built directly into the cart. The move wasn’t made to help you shop at Sainsbury’s, and it won’t help you find the food products you’re looking for either. Instead of actually being useful, the iPad will stream Sky TV entertainment directly to your cart.

Hilariously, the company has even included a collision detection system that will audibly notify customers when their carts are getting too close to other carts in the store.

Dumbest. Idea. Ever.

If you can’t spend thirty minutes shopping for food without having to be plugged into your television programming then something is seriously wrong. The last thing I need is a bunch of hapless customers crashing into each other when I’m trying to buy dinner. If you thought the grocery store was packed on a Friday night, just imagine how packed it’s going to be with people slumbering around watching television and trying to buy food at the same time.

Source: The Telegraph
Via: TiPb

If you’re old enough, like I am, you’ll remember when little portable 5-inch televisions were the latest thing. You could pull out this little battery powered thing, yank out the antenna, and tune in to whatever it was that you needed to watch while you were not at home in your living room, usually sports, and by sports I mean hockey.

Well, Elgato announced a new mobile digital TV tuner that will plug into your iPad 2 and allow you to receive Digital TV signals on your iPad 2 and watch live over the air TV signals. At the moment it’s only available in the European market, so before you rush out and order one, make sure that you live in an area where the tuner will work properly. Still, the idea is wonderful, and hopefully it will come to the North American market soon.

[...]

Another year, another chance for Electronic Arts to release a new hand-egg ball video game. Surprisingly American Football (I refuse to cave and call it football) is a popular pastime in North America, and while the rest of us blissfully ignore the sport, the Madden NFL series continues to sell millions of copies (not as many as real-football series, FIFA, ha!) every year.

[...]

The new news-order must be scary for major corporations like CNN. Micro-reporting has become such a huge part of most of our lives that fewer and fewer people seem to be interested in getting brief news clips from a news anchor when they can get in-depth coverage from people actually in the trenches on websites and blogs.

In our opinion, CNN seems to have shown their worries a little today by purchasing the popular iPad magazine app Zite. Zite is pretty much everything that CNN can’t be at this point. The application aggregates news based on your personal preferences and then offers up news based on the things you like to read.

[...]

You know you’re onto something when you’re beating Apple on its own platform. A resignation from a certain someone may have taken centre stage last week, but perhaps more interesting for developers was the news that Apple was phasing out its identification system, the UDID (Unique Device Identifier).

For those not in the know, the UDID number is a unique number assigned to your iOS device so developers can quickly track usage history. It sounds malicious, but it’s more for marketing – offering cross app promotions and deals that are relevant to you. Think of it as browser-cookies for iPhones.

[...]

We’ve always wondered if Apple had a PR team answering Jobs’ email from time to time. But, we grew to love the short, and often frank emails from Steve Jobs while he was steering the ship over the years, regardless of who was sending them. As luck would have it, Tim Cook also seems to be interested in continuing the dialog with the Apple-loveing public, at least in the near future.

According to both MacRumors and iDownloadBlog, Tim Cook has taken up the Twitter-like replies over email just like his predecessor. In both cases the emails took on the same tone as the Jobs emails.

PR team or not, having a direct line to the CEO of the world’s largest company is a pretty great idea, and it’s something I’ve personally made use of when problems arise with some of my products. More often than not I receive a phone call pretty quickly from a manager at some level, who is more than happy to help me with my problem.

What do you think? Actually the CEOs, the PR team, or a little of both?

Source: MacRumors
Via: iDownloadBlog

Have some GPS skills and hoping to land a job at one of the biggest and best tech companies on the planet? Apple’s looking to hire someone with experience in GPS, A-GPS, LBS, and navigation algorithms for an exciting new feature in iOS.

There have been rumors that Apple has been working on smart mapping applications that re-route your path based on environment variables like construction or heavy traffic. There have also been mention from Apple that they were collecting cellular tower information during “Locationgate” for a future product that they’re working on currently. It turned out that Apple was crowd-sourcing tower information to help with some future, unnamed project.

If you need any other reason outside of exciting things being on the horizon in location aware services, then you may want to find another field.

Get applying peeps. We need a source inside Apple!

Source: AppleInsider
Via: MacNN

It’s pretty obvious that the smartphone market is turning into a two legged race between Android and iOS. The next time you’re out on the street or in a bar, take a quick poll of how many iPhones and Android phones you see in your vicinity, then look for a Blackberry or Windows Phone 7 device.

Don’t see any of the latter? That’s probably because almost 70 percent of all smartphone owners are now rocking an Android or Apple handset, according to the latest findings from comScore. Android phones now account for about 42 percent of the market whereas the iPhone is holding steady at 27 percent.

That’s pretty impressive when you stop and think that neither Apple nor Google were in the cellphone industry a decade ago. If you ever need any evidence that being first to market isn’t the be-all and end-all, this may just be it.

Something else worth noting, and we’d be doing a disservice to our allegiances if we didn’t point this out, Apple has one phone on the market (or 4 depending on if you count previous generations), compared to dozens of Android devices. For one phone to hold 27 percent of an entire market is pretty impressive. It also makes the iPhone the single most popular handset on the market, just in case you were wondering.

Source: comScore
Via: TechCrunch