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With Apple’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference kicking off in San Francisco in less than a month, rumors are starting to swirl about what will be unveiled this year. The conference has traditionally served as the forum for Apple’s announcement of new iPhones, but with the late launch of last year’s iPhone 4S pushing back the release schedule for the next iPhone, it’s not clear what Apple may have up its sleeve.

Of course, WWDC is a software conference, so most of the speculation has centered on iOS 6 and OS X Mountain Lion, both of which are likely to be showcased. Now, however, there are reports that iCloud might be getting a big makeover, too. According to a report this afternoon by the Wall Street Journal, Apple is set to unveil some major upgrades to the service at WWDC this year. Citing “people familiar with the matter,” the Journal reports that most of the upgrades will center on how iCloud handles photos. As it currently stands, iCloud effectively acts as little more than a photo backup. Photos taken with your iPhone are automatically (if you want) uploaded to your Photo Stream. While your friends can see them, there is no way to share or comment or organize the photos into albums. With the new update, Apple will be setting its sights on the kind of photo sharing allowed by Facebook and Instagram.

That, however, is not the only change coming to iCloud. The WSJ’s source confirms what we learned yesterday: iCloud’s web interface will be getting the same Notes and Reminders apps that are currently on iOS, and will be coming to OS X Mountain Lion when it launches later this summer.

Assuming the WSJ’s report is accurate, as seems highly likely, WWDC 2012 will be pretty exciting even without the launch of a new iPhone. Previews of OS X Mountain Lion, iOS 6, and even iTunes 11 are likely. With all that on the (likely) schedule, WWDC ought to be worth watching. When the time comes, of course, you can follow our coverage of the conference here.

Do you dream of living the exclusive life of a Hamptonite? Well, that dream can soon be your reality. ABC and IntoNow from Yahoo! are teaming up for a first-ever, second screen sweepstakes around ABC’s hit prime-time drama, Revenge. One lucky fan will win a get-away for two and live the life of a Grayson for a week, presented by Lexus!

So how do you enter for a chance to win?  Follow these simple steps:

• Fire-up the IntoNow app on your tablet or smartphone while watching Revenge during the last two episodes airing on ABC on May 16, 2012 and May 23, 2012 (10:00-11:00 p.m., ET.) If you don’t have the app already, you can download IntoNow from Yahoo! for free here for iPhone and iPad devices and here if you have an Android phone.
• Simply “tag” the show and voilà, you may enter the contest and be one step closer to becoming a socialite!  With just one tap, IntoNow identifies the show you’re watching using its patented audio recognition technology, SoundPrint.
• While in the app, you can participate in Revenge-themed trivia, engage in real-time conversations with friends and other Revenge fans, and share what you are watching directly to your Facebook or Twitter feeds.

“Devices in the living room are allowing people to engage in TV like never before,” said Adam Cahan, founder of IntoNow and vice president of products at Yahoo!. “Entertainment is social and fans don’t just watch a show passively – they want to talk about it, share their favorite moments, and know what others watching in the show are thinking.  That context opens up powerful opportunities for networks and advertisers by amplifying the brand message from the TV right into the device in their hands.”

This truly interactive companion experience on a prime-time drama is another example of the key role IntoNow and second-screen apps are now playing in TV programming. Earlier this year, ABC partnered with IntoNow for the Republican presidential candidate debate, where viewers engaged with polls, read related news content and discussed the responses.

We already know you keep your mobile device handy in the living room – 80% of you use your tablet while watching TV – so make sure to have yours at hand for the final episodes of Revenge and your chance to experience the Hamptons lifestyle (minus the vengeful subplot.)

All sorts of strange things can happen when a plane takes off. Maybe it’s happened to you: an ink pen bursts from the pressure changes and gets ink all over your stuff; an empty water bottle expands on the way up, then goes back to normal on the way down; you fall asleep at cruising altitude and wake up just before landing to find that your ears haven’t popped during the entire descent (trust me, that’s not fun); or maybe your iPhone cracks, glows red, and starts to smoke.

Okay, maybe that last one is pretty rare. But it has actually happened. Back in November passengers on an flight from Lismore to Sydney, Australia were dismayed to find that an iPhone carried by one of their number had begun to glow red and emit dense smoke. The rear panel of the phone even cracked – and lost part of the glass.

At the time, it wasn’t clear what had caused the problem. The iPhone is hardly a perfect device and certainly has its fair share of flaws and glitches, but you can usually trust them not to spontaneously combust in your pocket. Well, ZDNet is reporting that the cause of the malfunction has been revealed. After the incident, the phone was sent to the Australian Transport Safety Bureau for examination. It seems that not long before the incident, the phone’s owner had gotten the iPhone’s screen replaced by an unauthorized third-party. When the replacement was done, a screw from the bottom of the phone, near the dock connector, was not sufficiently tightened. That screw managed to work its way all the way up to the top of the phone and punch through the casing surrounding the battery.

As you might expect, poking something metal through the housing of a battery is not a good thing. In this case it caused a short circuit that in turn cause the phone’s battery to drastically overheat, producing the red glow and the smoke. In the photo you can see an x-ray image of battery compartment and the offending screw.

So it looks like the moral of the story is that if you want repair work done on your iPhone, you’re probably better off to just pony up and have Apple do it. Otherwise your phone could catch fire, apparently.

Just as our eyes need light in order to see, our minds need ideas in order to conceive.
Napoleon Hill

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2560×1600px | 2560×1440px | 1920×1200px | 1680×1050px | 1440×900px | iPad (w/o calendar)

iPhone (w/o calendar)

Sorry about the slow update. I will make posts of the future gadget concepts soon.

Decades ago, Snow White’s evil stepmother gazed into a magic mirror and said words you no doubt know by heart: “Mirror mirror, on the wall, who’s the fairst of them all?” Now, imagine that instead of a magic mirror, the evil queen had been using an iPhone. Got it? Now imagine that instead of answering “Snow White,” the mirror iPhone had answered, “Certainly not you. Aren’t you due for your rabies shot? Woof!” If you can imagine that, then you’ve got a pretty good idea of what Ugly Meter for iPhone is all about.

Using your iPhone’s front-facing camera, Ugly Meter does pretty much what the name tells you: it rates how ugly (or hot) you are. It rates you on a scale of 1-10. Contrary to what you might expect, being a 10 is not a good thing. It turns out that the ugly meter is kind of like golf: the lower your score, the better. Of course, the app isn’t content to give you your score and leave you to wallow in your misery. Oh no, Quasimodo, you’re not that lucky. Just for good measure, it pours a little salt in the wound with messages like “You’re so ugly, when your mother went into labor the doctors went on strike,” or “Wow you’re ugly, is your doctor a vet?” or “If ugliness were bricks, you’d be the Great Wall of China.” I, apparently, am “so ugly you couldn’t get a date off the calendar.”

Of course, the app doesn’t appear to actually measure anything. Or, if it does, it doesn’t use any standard of beauty that actual people use. The Daily Mail put the app through its paces and found that while Angelina Jolie scored a 2 (remember, low is good), other similarly attractive people fared far worse. Brad Pitt, for example, scored a dismal 8, while British Prime Minister David Cameron beat him with a 7. Meanwhile, singer Cheryl Cole and actress Dannii Minogue got pretty dismal scores.

So basically, the app is a random insult generator that pretends to look at your face for a few seconds. No big surprise there. Unfortunately, however, not everybody is pleased with the results they get. It seems that the creator of the app, Joe Overline, has been on the Howard Stern show a couple times talking about his creation. As you might expect, the first appearance gave the app a huge boost, prompting over 220,000 downloads, which earned around $400,000.

During that first appearance, though, the app gave Ronnie the Limo Driver, Stern’s limo driver, bodyguard, and head of security, a score of 0. This, combined with some other comments made by Overline later, made Ronnie a bit… grumpy. Okay, maybe “grumpy” isn’t the right word. Maybe “furious” would be better. At any rate, Overline’s return to the show sparked quite the confrontation with Ronnie, who apparently believes Overline rigged the app to score him a zero, including a little profanity-laden shouting from both sides, and culminating in Ronnie actually spitting in Overline’s face. You can check out a rundown of the show here. You can also hear the audio of part of the confrontation embedded below. Check it out, but be warned: the language isn’t exactly safe for work…

The app is available for $0.99 in the iOS App Store. Go check it out, if you’re brave enough.

Ever since the Pebble watch became an cause célèbre in tech circles for its kickass Kickstarter moves (it’s raised almost $7mm dollars and counting), something’s been nagging me about the company and its product.

It’s now Valley legend that the company had to turn to Kickstarter to get its working capital – more than 46,000 folks have backed Pebble, and will soon be proudly sporting their spiffy new iPhone-powered watches as a result. Clearly Pebble has won – both financially, as well as in the court of public opinion. I spoke to one early investor (through Y-Combinator) who had nothing but good things to say about the company and its founders.

But why, I wondered, were mainstream VCs not backing Pebble once it became clear the company was on a path to success?

The reasons I read in press coverage – that VCs tend to not like untested hardware/platform plays, that retail products have low margins, etc., all sounded reasonable, but not enough. In this environment, there had to be more going on.

Now, I don’t know enough to claim this as anything more than a theory, but it’s a Friday, so allow me to speculate: Perhaps one reason VCs don’t want to invest in Pebble is because they fear Apple.

Here’s why. If you watch the video explaining Pebble, it become pretty clear that the watch is, in essence, a new form factor for the iPhone. It’s smaller, it’s more use-case defined, but that’s what it is: A smaller mirror of your iPhone, strapped to you wrist. Pebble uses bluetooth connectivity to access the iPhone’s native capabilities, and then displays data, apps, and services on its high-resolution e-paper screen. It even has its own “app store” and (upcoming) SDK/API  so people can write native apps to the device.

In short, Pebble is an iPhone for your wrist. And Apple doesn’t own it.

If we’ve learned anything about Apple over the years, it’s that Apple is driven by its hardware business. It makes its profits by selling hardware – and it’s built a beautiful closed software ecosystem to insure those hardware sales. Pebble forces an interesting question: Does Apple care about new form factors for hardware? Or is it content to build out just the “core” hardware platform, and allow anyone to innovate in new hardware instances? Would Apple be cool with someone building, say, a larger form factor of the iPhone, perhaps tablet-sized, driven by your iPhone?

I don’t know the answer to that question (and doubt Apple would answer my call asking such a question), so I’ll toss it out to you. What do you all think? Is Pebble playing with fire here? Would Apple ever change its developer terms of services to cut the new company off?

Just a little while ago, though, Apple released their earnings report for the second quarter of the 2012 fiscal year, and the news was quite good. Apple generated $39.2 billion in revenue for the quarter and sold 35.1 million iPhones, both figures beating Wall Street expectations. As a result, Apple’s stock surged in after-hours trading. The surge not only made up for losses during this morning’s worries over possible diminished iPhone sales, but also for declines earlier in the month.

Here are some other highlights from the earnings call:

Recent data suggests that Androids lead in smartphone market share may not be all it’s cracked up to be. According to analytics data published by Chitika Insights, Android’s share of actual mobile web traffic is far less than that of Apple’s iOS line.

Chitika Insights’s Mobile Dominance tracker measures the amount of web traffic from various devices based on hits to the company’s numerous ads across the web. In the past similar data has been used to measure iOS’s web traffic against OS X’s, and to track the adoption rates of the new iPad in real time. Chitika data showed that the new iPad rapidly came to account for 6% of all iPad web traffic, and more recently demonstrated that the adoption of the new iPad was heaviest in coastal states (where median income is higher).

According to the iOS vs. Android data, Android’s dominance in terms of market share does not translate into higher web traffic. Chitika’s data shows that the iOS platform enjoys a huge advantage over the Android platform in that area.

Is it possible that Android is on its way down? Does the difference in web traffic mean that iOS could take market share back from Android? Let us know what you think in the comments.

Apple doesn't often use celebrities in its advertising. (Hodgman and Long don't really count—they were both largely unknown at the outset of "Get a Mac," and they played characters, not themselves.) But now, to freshen things up after 84 mostly product-demo spots, the marketer has injected a little star power into its iPhone campaign.

Two new spots from TBWAMedia Arts Lab, directed by Bryan Buckley, feature Zooey Deschanel and Samuel L. Jackson kicking around their respective homes, chatting with Siri to get things done. In Zooey's case, it's more about not getting things done—she's happily stuck inside on a rainy day, and prompts Siri to get tomato soup delivered and play some music on the stereo. (She also wants to be reminded to clean up her music room—but not until the next day.) Jackson, meanwhile, has a more romantic agenda. He's planning to cook dinner for his wife, and gets Siri to help him with the shopping and cooking. (He then gives this helper the night off.)

The new spots, which broke Monday night, are classic Apple—as clean, simple and classy as ever. But while previous Siri spots were somewhat chopped up, showing various people interacting with Siri, the new ones—by sticking with one person—perhaps give a better idea of how one individual could best make use of the personal assistant over the course of a day.

Deschanel and Jackson are inspired choices, too—the it girl of the moment on the one hand, and one of Hollywood's great personalities on the other. Apple never aims for second best. These spots uphold that tradition admirably.

CREDITS
Client: Apple iPhone (Siri)
Agency: TBWAMedia Arts Lab
Chief Creative Officer: Duncan Milner
Executive Creative Directors: Eric Grunbaum, Scott Trattner
Group Creative Director: Chuck Monn
Creative Director: Chris Ribiero
Associate Creative Directors: Niraj Zaveri, Mark Sloan
Copywriters: Kevin Butler, Brooks Jackson
Agency Producers: Mallory Gordon, Stephanie Gocke, Trang Huynh
Production Company: Hungry Man Films
Director: Bryan Buckley
Director of Photography: Scott Henriksen
Editorial Company: Nomad Editing Co.
Editors: Jared Coller ("Rainy Day"), Glenn Martin ("Date Night")
Postproduction Company: The Mill
Lead Flame Artist: Phil Crowe
Colorist: Adam Scott

It’s nice of Apple to always include a pair of those patented white earbuds with every iPhone and iPod. In a way, having a those two little small white protrusions hanging in your outer ear became a status symbol of The Cool in the aughts. However, for me and several other Apple customers I’ve known, there has always been one persistent problem: the damn things never want to stay in your ears.

AppleInsider discovered today a couple of new patent applications that Apple has filed, but don’t hold your breath because unless there’s some super secret, blindly sophisticated detail in the designs, they don’t appear to be an improvement in keeping the earbuds in your ears. Instead, the patents describe a design innovation Apple’s calling a “unibody” appearance wherein the seams created by all of the connecting parts – wires, jack, different pieces of the earbud itself – will be polished and welded down so as to create a seamless appearance. In other words, the earbuds will just look like one flexible, solid piece.

The second patent that Apple’s filed may have a better utility to its millions of consumers. Simply put, it’s a new design of the part of the earbud where the music comes out of that will hopefully prevent your grody earwax from clogging up the earbud’s holes, thus dampening the sound and clarity of the music.

At least now when the earbuds fall out of your ears while you’re on the treadmill or simply sitting still, nobody will know if you don’t know how to properly clean your ears out.