After nearly nine months of research and development, bluetooth lighting startup BlueBulb is finally ready to ship a small batch of initial units to customers in a bid to bring remotely-controlled, multi-color lighting into the mainstream.  ...

A week after announcing its first drop in quarterly earnings in a decade, Apple is selling $17 billion in bonds to fund a $100 billion buyback program for its stakeholders. The sale will be the largest non-bank bond deal ever. The move was somewhat unexpected coming from a company with an infamous $145 billion in cash on hand and no debt, a rarity among tech companies. However, only a relatively small portion of that cash pile is available in the U.S. An estimated $100 billion of it is stored in offshore accounts.

TUAW notes that low-cost European airline Easyjet is now offering boarding passes in Passbook. While this is commonplace for US airlines, Passbook adoption in Europe has been very much slower, with just a handful of companies supporting it at present.

Boarding passes are loaded into Passbook via the free Easyjet app.

//

Apple Inc. sold the largest corporate-bond deal in history Tuesday, a $17 billion offering investors hungrily gobbled up.

Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Deutsche Bank AG sold the debt for Apple to investors in all corners of the credit markets, from buyers overseas to municipal-bond investors to portfolio managers who typically prefer ultrasafe government debt. Pension funds, insurance companies and hedge funds also joined in the scramble.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

Michael Copeland, two weeks ago writing for Wired:

Marc Andreessen has a thought exercise for you.

Let’s say we all grew up in tech world where we only used
tablets and smartphones. Then one day, someone comes up to you
with a 27-inch display hooked up to a notebook. You could have
everything you have on your tablets and smartphones, and then
some. Except you don’t have to download anything or update it.
Everything is the latest and greatest, and just one click away. If
you are a software developer, there are no gatekeepers telling you
if your latest creation is approved, or when you can add the
latest flourish.

“We would be like, wow, that’s great,” Andreessen says from
his office at venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. “It’s
why in the long run the mobile web is going to dominate native
...

Q:

You recently mentioned the HTC One as being priced at $200. I’ve just been on the phone with my carrier T-Mobile, which offers me the HTC One for $100 down and $20 a month for 24 months. They explain they “no longer offer discounted phones” under their new world order or whatever. Can you explain?

A:

In the U.S., carriers traditionally subsidize the price of mobile phones and then make back the money by requiring buyers to sign a two-year contract, so they don’t defect before the carrier has made back the subsidy from them. Under this formula, the HTC One is indeed $200 at AT&T.

But T-Mobile recently announced a new approach under which it won’t subsidize the phones, but will charge something close to what the phone maker charges it, spread out in monthly payments. In return, it won’t require a two-year service contract. In the case of the HTC One and some other high-end...

[ See post to watch video ]

Welcome to my spring laptop buyer’s guide. It should be an easy time for laptop buyers, now that we’re six months past the introduction of Microsoft’s redesigned Windows 8 operating system and laptop makers have had time to get into a new groove. Alas, I’m sorry to report, it’s still pretty confusing and frustrating to buy a new laptop, and it might be best, if you can, to wait until the fall.

After the big buildup in October around Windows 8, laptop makers stumbled. They continued to offer mostly nontouchscreen models, though the new Windows was designed for touch. And the touchscreen models they built were clustered around $1,000, far more than consumers are used to paying for Windows laptops. Plus, Windows 8 itself proved confusing, because it combines two interfaces — the tabletlike “Start Screen” and the traditional Windows desktop.

Two touchscreen models: The Acer Aspire S7, top, and an Asus S200 series model, middle. Bottom,...

This is cool.

∞ Read this on The Loop

GDC is the Game Developers' Conference that happens every year up in San Francisco, and the company also hosts a number of other GDC events all over the world. Usually, they do GDC Online in Austin, TX every fall, but that conference has recently been changed into two different conferences, both of which are set to take place later this year in Los Angeles. One half of the conference will be called GDC Next, and will focus on the future of gaming development, featuring things like the new Ouya console, cloud gaming, and next generation platforms. And the other half is now called the App Developers' Conference, and will focus on not just game development, but mobile app development as well.

Both shows are being held in Los Angeles on November 5-7, 2013, and both shows are now open for submissions for panels and talks. ADC is obviously looking for app makers who...

Some day, when people ask Apple why it offered up a multi-billion dollar bond, it’ll tell people it was young and needed the money. Of course, if you believe one competitor’s CEO, that’s because Cupertino’s tablet business is going belly up sooner rather than later. And it’s time for the latest edition of “I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Sponsored Tweeting!” The remainders for Tuesday, April 30, 2013 have a nasty habit of surviving.

Apple wows market with record $17 billion bond deal (Reuters)

Apple’s making the largest non-bank bond deal in history, putting up $17 billion for sale in order to fuel its ambitious share repurchase...

Outside the United States, Passbook-supported apps are a rarity. That's why it's especially exciting that uber-popular European discount airline easyJet has just added Passbook support to their iPhone app.

The move comes days after easyJet announced that it is eliminating check-in desks at airports. Now all easyJet passengers will be required to print or download their boarding passes before they leave home.

But that shouldn't be much of a hassle for iPhone owners. With version 2.0 of the free easyJet mobile app, fliers can download and store boarding passes in their Passbook. Currently easyJet is trialing mobile check-in and boarding passes at six airports: Amsterdam, Edinburgh, Manchester, Nice, Southend and...

Let's offer a salute to clever game developers, especially Patrick and Daniel Klug, the cofounders of GreenheartGames. When they released Game Developer Tycoon for Mac, Windows, and Linux, they decided to put a cracked version of the game for pirates to steal on bittorrent, but they did so with a twist: players playing the cracked version of the game will find that piracy drives them bankrupt.

Jack Lumber is an excellent game that arrived on iOS last year. It's reminiscient of Fruit Ninja, in that you drag your finger around the screen to chop through wood, though I think it's an improvement on Halfbrick's formula -- it's got a more complex meta game, and the mechanic is a little deeper as well (the action slows down when your finger touches the screen, allowing for different types of cuts and slashes). Jack Lumber is still available on iOS, but just in case you'd rather use a mouse than your finger, the game has just arrived on Steam as well.

The Steam version will work on your Mac, or on PC or Linux as well, and it's SteamPlay-enabled, so if you buy for one platform you own them all. Currently, the game is on sale for just $5.02, and...

Shares of Apple Inc. continued their rally on Tuesday, rising more than 2.9 percent, helped in part by news the company successfully completed a US$17 billion bond sale. Apple plans to use the money to finance a larger dividend for shareholders and an aggressive stock buyback plan.

It has been busy in the App Store with a handful of new apps like FocusTwist, Circles and Delicious Scanner landing on iOS and OS X. Take a few minutes and check out our list of other standout apps from the past few weeks!

iOS Apps

iLuv Drawing Vehicles HD [iPad; Category: Education; $1.99] Perfect way to introduce drawing skills to kids who love cars, trucks, planes and trains!

My Agenda [iPhone; Category: Productivity; $0.99] An...

It's the TUAW Daily Update, your source for Apple news in a convenient audio format. You'll get all the top Apple stories of the day in three to five minutes for a quick review of what's happening in the Apple world.

You can listen to today's Apple stories by clicking the inline player (requires Flash) or the non-Flash link below. To subscribe to the podcast for daily listening through iTunes, click here.

No Flash? Click here to listen.

Subscribe via RSS

Daily Update for April 30, 2013 originally appeared on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Tue, 30 Apr 2013 17:15:00 EST. Please see our...

I'm usually very good about turning around reviews; usually within a week or two of receiving a review device or accessory I've had a chance to try it out, take photos, and write it up. But there are two things that have been sitting in my office unopened for a few months, and I finally decided to get going on them. One item is a Parrot AR.Drone 2.0 that I'll be writing up shortly now that the weather in Colorado is cooperating (except for the winter storm hitting tomorrow...), but today's focus is on what's in the big box in the corner of my office -- the Behringer iNuke Boom Junior iPod/iPhone speaker dock.

Sometimes procrastination is a good thing. I found out pretty quickly while starting to do research for this review that Behringer is no longer making this speaker dock, which was designed to be an affordable mini version of the 10,000-watt, 700 pound, US$30,000...

Other World Computing announced today the OWC Envoy Pro EX ultra-portable Solid State Drive solution. Clad in anodized aluminum to match modern Macs and PCs, the Envoy Pro EX fits easily into a coat pocket, backpack, or briefcase for rugged mobile high-performance storage or backup capacity....   ...

Apple CEO Tim Cook will be interviewed on opening-night of AllThingsD‘s D11 conference in May. Cook’s interview with Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg will be his second as the Apple CEO spoke at the conference last year as well. The conference runs in California from May 28th until May 30th. (Image via ATD).

//

I am living goddamn proof of this people.

∞ Read this on The Loop

The popular Nest Thermostat has updated its internal software to version 3.5, and pushed out a new iOS app to control it. Most people should have had their thermostats updated automatically at some point yesterday. The software is being billed as summer enhancements to the thermostat aimed at better handling of high temperatures.

Gallery: Nest updates iOS app

The new software allows the thermostat to make sure that sun shining on the hardware does not create false indoor temperature readings. The thermostat also has enhanced fan controls. The auto-...

When Apple was awarded a US$1.05 billion judgement against Samsung last Summer, you might have assumed that Samsung would promptly cut Apple a check and focus on any number of their other ongoing legal entanglements with Apple.

Oh, if only things were that simple.

Back in March, US District Judge Lucy Koh found that the jury, in calculating Apple's damages award, had made a number of mistakes.

The Verge noted at the time:

Koh found two main errors in the way the jury calculated the damages awarded to Apple. They used Samsung's profits to determine the amount the company owed for infringing some of Apple's utility patents - a practice only appropriate when calculating damages owed when design patents have been...

A week after seeding build 12E36 to developers on April 23, Apple has just pushed out OS X 10.8.4 beta build 12E40 to developers. Apple is once again asking developers to focus on WiFi performance, Graphics, and Safari. We’ll update this post if developers have anything new to report. Thanks, Anonymous!

//

Apple has erected special displays promoting the iPhone 5 outside of its first Berlin Apple Store, scheduled to open May 3rd, notes German site ApfelPage. The displays -- featuring mock, oversized white iPhones -- are unusual for an Apple Store, but may be necessary to help draw attention to the outlet. Although the building the store is housed in has an elaborate facade, the only other signs of Apple's presence are two small logos by the doorways....  ...

By now this should be celebrity endorser rule No. 1: Make sure that when you tweet your love for a phone, you do it from that phone.

But, once again the rule has been broken, this time by Spanish tennis player David Ferrer, tweeting his affection for Samsung’s Galaxy S4, and doing so from an iPhone.

According to AppleInsider, the tweet was quickly deleted and replaced with one not sent from an iPhone.

But, of course, the change came only after people noticed, saved a copy of the tweet and began pointing out the obvious contradiction between stated opinion and the real world.

Ferrer is in good company with other celebs who have made similar moves, including...

Belkin's Thunderbolt dock turns one port into many.

Belkin

After many delays, computer peripheral manufacturer Belkin finally put its long-promised Thunderbolt docking station up for sale on its online store for $299. The peripheral was originally announced way back in 2011, and a near-final version was showed off at this year's CES, but this is the first time the peripheral has been offered for sale.

The dock offers a gigabit Ethernet jack, three USB 3.0 ports (each capped at 2.5Gbps, about half of the theoretical maximum), a FireWire 800 port, audio-in and audio-out jacks, and two Thunderbolt ports. One of those ports is used to connect the dock to your computer, and the other can be connected to a display...

AT&T will roll out a new trade-in program tomorrow allowing its customers to upgrade to a new high end (i)Phone with $100 of free spending money if you give them your old phone (restrictions apply).

Beginning May 1, consumers who trade in their current smartphone to AT&T* will be eligible to receive at least $100 off the purchase of a new smartphone, including the new Samsung Galaxy® S 4, BlackBerry® Z10 or 32 GB HTC One®.  These devices are normally $199.99 with a qualifying two-year agreement** but, with this limited time promotion, they will be available for $99.99.

This...

That’s one way to drain to the battery of the iPad.

∞ Read this on The Loop

Jawbone is increasing its push into the fitness tracking market by announcing it has purchased BodyMedia. The acquisition of another manufacturer of wellness devices comes at the same time as Jawbone opens up its API to developers, allowing for other apps to be able to use data generated by the wrist-based lifestyle monitor, the Up....  ...

There are times when the iPad or iPhone user needs a stylus. And because stylus technology has come a long way in terms of the design, craftsmanship and the nib material, they're even more fun to use. The LYNKtec TruGlide Pro, with a 5 mm microfiber tip, is the best pure stylus John Martellaro has ever used. Here's his review.

That little camera-flipping icon in the bottom left corner is brand spanking new.

Vine, the app from Twitter that lets iPhone owners create and share six-second videos, scored a few updates on Tuesday. It’s easier now to make videos that star you, and Twitter-style mentions are now supported, too.

No longer are challenging hand contortions required when you want to film yourself. With the 1.1 update, Vine now supports using the front-facing camera while you shoot video. You can, of course, switch back and forth between the front- and rear-facing cameras in the same video.

The new support for mentions means that Vine users can, in video descriptions and comments, use Twitter’s @-notation to reference their friends.

The updated Vine app also includes improved people search and assorted minor fixes.

...

This week, MacMall.com has lowered the price on the 27-inch iMac from $2,949 down to $2,899 with free shipping. That's a savings of $49, making this the lowest price on this iMac brand new. This iMac features a 3.4GHz Intel Core i7 processor, 16GB of RAM and a 3TB Fusion Drive with NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680MX graphics processor and two Thunderbolt ports. Included with it are an Apple wireless keyboard, Magic Mouse, and one-year warranty on parts and labor from Apple....  ...

Over the past few weeks, shares of Apple have been trading at 52-week lows. Earlier this month, shares of Apple dipped below US$400 a share for the first time since 2011. Shockingly, Apple had a P/E ratio lower than Dell's for a few days last week.

Over the past week, however, shares of Apple have rebounded nicely and are now trading in the $436 range. As for what's fueling the latest Apple rally, it's likely that the company's recently announced capital return program is being viewed rather favorably by investors.

One man who's particularly bullish on Apple future prospects is Alisher Usmanov, Russia's wealthiest man. Usmanov has an estimated net worth of $19 billion and recently invested $100 million in Apple, believing strongly that the stock will rebound.

"I believe in the future of this company even after Steve Jobs," Usmanov...

BlackBerry CEO Thorsten Heins wants the world to know that he's a visionary. By 2018, he sees a future that's so advanced it's gone all the way back to 2009 because by then this whole tablet thing will have gone the way of the dodo. 

Apple’s original iPhone, released in 2007, will soon enter “obsolete” status in Apple Retail Stores, according to an internal document. The switch will occur on June 11. Obsolete status means the original iPhone will no longer be supported at bricks and mortar Apple locations, though AppleCare and Authorized Service Providers…

The World Wide Web was given to the world 20 years ago on April 30, 1993 with an announcement from CERN stating that the technology supporting the system was available to all, and royalty-free. Since then, the Web has grown at an astounding rate. The very first website was hosted on Tim Berners-Lee's NeXT computer, and now CERN is working to restore the original site and its URL, along with the original Web servers. It's an amazingly cool project, and until it's completed you can at least see what that first site looked like 20 years ago. It isn't quite as flashy as sites today, but it is definitely Flash-free.

...

According to the latest Consumer Reports reader survey, Apple tops the list of brand-name computer manufacturers for the quality of its tech support, far surpassing other large companies. The report points to “ease of contacting staff, clarity of advice, technical knowledge, patience, and time for follow-up” in the phone and online support areas. Service at the Genius Bar rates equally highly. In addition, Apple improved on its own scores from last year’s survey.

Among the startups competing for attention (and funding) at Monday's opening round of the TechCrunch Disrupt Startup Battlefield, one unusual social app for iPhone stood out. SharePractice, from physician Andrew Brandeis and his team, aims to connect physicians to each other and give them access to the best professional advice regarding conditions, treatments and symptoms.

Although he's a full-time practitioner at San Francisco's Care Practice community clinic, this isn't Dr. Brandeis's first go-round with mobile technology; he worked with iHealth on the rollout of the company's iOS-powered blood pressure cuff in 2011. In his career, he's formed the opinion that the difference...

The richest man in Russia, Alisher Usmanov, recently bought $100 million in Apple shares, Bloomberg reports. While cautioning that "nothing is eternal," he argues that Apple is a "very promising investment" for the next three years, pointing to the company's plan to return $100 billion to shareholders by 2015. Usmanov's $19.8 billion fortune is based mainly on two websites, Alibaba and Mail.ru, as well as a Facebook investment that yielded over 10 times his initial input....  ...

It's time to save some of that hard-earned cash with our Daily Deals, featuring a handy list from Dealnews and our own hand-picked selections that include some sweet deals on iOS and OS X software (all prices are USD).

Deals from Dealnews

• StackSocial: [Mac Software] The Mac Productivity Bundle 4.0 for Mac downloads for $50
• Other World Computing: [Computer Accessories] OWC 2012 Featured Move 'em Out: RAM, accessories, HDDs, more
• StackSocial: [Mac Software] Cloak WiFi Security for Mac, iPhone, and iPad for $60
• ...

Apple Inc. is widely expected to sell billions of dollars in new bonds Tuesday, according to investors familiar with the offering.

The company kicked off a series of meetings with large investors Monday ahead of the deal, these investors said.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

Apple last week announced that it would embark on a massive stock repurchasing plan whereby it will purchase US$60 billion worth of its own shares by the end of 2015. In a press release on the matter, Apple called it the "largest single share repurchase authorization in history."

What's more, the company also announced a 15% increase to its quarterly dividend, upping the payout from $2.65 to $3.05 per share.

Taken together, Apple's capital return program is designed to return a total of $100 billion to shareholders.

That's a lot of dough, but with upwards of $145 billion in the bank, there's no denying that Apple has the cash to make that happen. There's just one slight problem -- the bulk of Apple's cash is overseas and would be subject to a corporate income tax rate of 35% should Apple try and bring it back to the U.S.

That...

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Read the full article at TidBITS, the oldest continuously published technology publication on the Internet. To get a full-text RSS feed, help support our work and become a TidBITS member! Members also enjoy an ad-free version of our Web site, email delivery of individual articles, the ability to make long comments with live links, and discounts on Take Control orders and other Apple-related products.

via guardian.co.uk

Your Vine stream will probably start to include a lot more faces, for better or worse, as the Twitter-owned video-sharing app received an update today to include support for the iPhone’s FaceTime camera as well at mentions:

Today we’re introducing an update to Vine that we think you’ll love. Over the last few months, we’ve asked for your feedback on a lot of things, from reporting bugs to suggesting new features. We’ve been...

The CEO of the seemingly reinvigorated BlackBerry doesn't have much faith in the long-term potential of the tablet sector, saying in an interview that in five years there might be no reason to have a tablet at all.  ...

(Updated with order book rumors, value of bonds) Apple's planned bond sale involves a six-part offering, according to a filing discovered by Bloomberg. Some floating-rate notes are set to mature in 2016 and 2018, while fixed-rate securities are due in 2016, 2018, 2023, and 2043. The filing confirms Goldman Sachs and Deutsche Bank as the institutions managing Apple's sale....  ...

Apple and Samsung are scheduled for a due-over in their ongoing patent infringement fight now that Federal Judge Lucy Koh has set a date for a new damages trial for November 12. The trial will determine damages owed to Apple as part of a court victory from August 2012.

The Mac Observer Spin:
Don't expect this to be the end of Apple's patent fight with Samsung over last August's ruling. Samsung is appealing the overall ruling, and will likely appeal whatever ruling comes from the damages retrial. That's a lot of R&D dollars going to lawyers instead of cool product designs.