Type of Article: MacTech Blog

From everything I’ve seen it’s clear from the performance of Google Voice Search, that Apple is way behind in the area of voice technology.The performance difference between Apple’s Siri and Google’s Voice Search is like night and day.

Plus, Apple’s reasoning for not putting its digital personal assistant, Siri (even in its currently lackluster state), on as many of its devices as possible makes no sense. Apple needs to address this.

An Apple patent (number 20120279780) for a power cable having a security feature feature has appeared at the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office.

The invention is for an pparatus that may help identify unauthorized removal of goods while maintaining a pleasing physical appearance, avoiding theft misidentifications, and allowing a high degree of customer interaction. One example may provide a signal path for conveying a signal that is active when a good or device is removed from a retail or other environment in an authorized manner. The signal path may be wired or wireless.

An Apple patent (number 20120281828) for the protection of audio or video in a playback device has appeared at the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office. It involves a method and apparatus to prevent hacking of encrypted audio or video content during playback.

Hackers, using a debugging attachment or other tools, can illicitly access encrypted data in memory in a playback device when the data is decrypted during playback and momentarily stored in digital form. This hacking is defeated here by methodically “poisoning” the encrypted data so that it is no longer playable by a standard decoder.

An Apple patent (number 20120284422) at the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office shows that the company is working on ways to improve podcasting. The patent is titled “techniques and systems for supporting podcasting.”

This is good news for Apple, not so much for Microsoft: large law firms’ chief information officers are supporting their lawyers’ use of Apple and Android personal devices for firm business, as 88% expect to provide less BlackBerry support over the next 12 months.

However, only 7% of technology managers plan to migrate their enterprise systems to Microsoft’s touchscreen-friendly Windows 8 operating system in the next year.