SEC Examining False Report on Apple Chief Jobs (Update4)
By Connie Guglielmo
Oct. 3 (Bloomberg) -- The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission is investigating the origin of a false report on a CNN citizen journalist Web site that Apple Inc. Chief Executive Officer Steve Jobs had a heart attack and was hospitalized.
The agency's enforcement unit is trying to determine whether the iReport.com posting was intended to push down the company's stock price. CNN is cooperating with the SEC's probe, network spokeswoman Jennifer Martin said. The report is ``not true,'' Apple spokesman Steve Dowling said in an interview.
My Take:
This should give the whole iReport trend a major shake-up. It's an interesting concept, but the opportunities for media manipulation are too great.
One of the few edges so-called mainstream media have over online media (mostly) is trust. If they lose trust, then it's game over.
LOS ANGELES (AP) -- The federal Copyright Royalty Board on Thursday left the royalty that songwriters receive on sales of CDs and digital downloads at 9.1 cents per song for the next five years.
Both songwriters and music sellers applauded the ruling -- but for different reasons. Apple Inc., which had threatened to shutter its iTunes store if the rate increased, appeared to have scored a clear win.
Now, here's hoping that artists and music publishers stop and think about what they're doing before they try and kill the golden goose again.
Apple Inc. is threatening to shut down its popular iTunes service.
The stark warning comes as the U.S. Copyright Royalty Board in Washington, D.C. is expected to rule Thursday on a proposal from the National Music Publishers' Association to raise rates paid to its members on digital songs from 9 cents to 15 cents a track - a 66 per cent hike.
From CNN Money:
Apple (AAPL, Fortune 500) declined to discuss the board's pending decision or its previous threat to shut down iTunes. But it adamantly opposes the publishers' request. In a statement submitted to the board last year, iTunes vice president Eddy Cue said Apple might close its download store rather than raise its 99 cents a song price or absorb the higher royalty costs.
"If the [iTunes music store] was forced to absorb any increase in the ... royalty rate, the result would be to significantly increase the likelihood of the store operating at a financial loss - which is no alternative at all," Cue wrote. "Apple has repeatedly made it clear that it is in this business to make money, and most likely would not continue to operate [the iTunes music store] if it were no longer possible to do so profitably."
The music industry just doesn't get it. If they jack prices on digital music beyond what the market will support, people will revert to piracy. Then no amount of lawsuits will recoup the hundreds of millions of dollars in lost revenue.
The New York Sun, a six-year-old upstart, is folding:
The New York Sun, the six-year-old newspaper with a conservative mind-set, announced on Monday that it would close after publishing Tuesday’s issue.
The Sun’s president and editor, Seth Lipsky, said a three-week search for new financial backers had failed. Mr. Lipsky announced on Sept. 4, in a front-page “Letter From the Editor,” that The Sun would shut down by the end of the month unless it raised new money.
Mr. Lipsky told editors and reporters who gathered on Monday afternoon in The Sun’s loftlike newsroom in Lower Manhattan that the shutdown was “a logical decision following a hardheaded assessment of our chances of meeting our goal of profitable publication in the near future.”
As he spoke, the stock market was diving toward the largest one-day point loss in the history of the Dow Jones Industrial Average. “Among other problems that we faced,” he said, “was the fact that this month, not to mention this week, has been one of the worst in a century in which to be trying to raise capital, and in the end we were out not only of money but time.”
It’s DRM deja vu all over again. Yet another major purveyor of copy-protected media has alerted the customers that purchased downloads from it that it’s shutting down its DRM servers, thereby crippling the stuff those customers bought. This time it’s Walmart.com and it joins Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo in what’s becoming a really predictable tradition of handling the situation poorly.
Wal-Mart, which has shifted its site’s music store to DRM-free MP3s (good), sent a e-mail to purchasers of its earlier downloads wrapped in Microsoft DRM advising them that it will shut down the DRM server as of October 9th. Once it’s done that, the tunes can no longer be transferred to new computers or devices; Wal-Mart suggests that customers burn CDs to prevent the music from becoming unusable, long-term.
This is the single biggest flaw wih DRM: access to music that individuals have purchased can be restricted by the retailer years after the sale. No one would stand for it if Wal Mart executives showed up at your door and took your CD collection back three years after you bought it, but doing the digital equivalant seems to be a-okay.
Wal-Mart.com's move to shut down its DRM servers without doing anything for its customers is garbage, plain and simple.
I still remember all the hype in the late 1990s that online retailing would replace so-called bricks and mortar - i.e. - real, physical stores.
But it didn't happen.
In fact, one of the most technologically-savvy firms in the world, Apple, has done the exact opposite. Apple Inc. first developed an online retail presence to sell its wares directly to customers. It then began an aggressive plan to launch its own branded retail stores.
They now have more than 200 retail stores of various sizes in either the premium shopping malls or in the cases of so-called flagship stores, in elite shopping districts as standalone buildings.
I've been to Apple Stores in Las Vegas, Virginia and most recently to three in Canada - two in Toronto and one in Montreal.
While spartan by design, these stores are absolutely packed most hours of the day. The stores highlight the importance of human interaction as customers deal with knowledgeable sales staff - who are commission-free - and technical experts called Mac Geniuses.
Apple provides an interesting example of a multi-pronged marketing and sales effort that combined the best use of web-based communications tools and absolute highest-quality real world retailing. Apple Store's aren't simply a place to buy some tech, ala Futureshop, they're designed to be an extension of the Apple experience.
The Apple experience - from the elegant hardware and robust, yet simple to use software along with excellence in online and real world sales and marketing - is what Microsoft is competing against with its latest $300 million ad campaign.
And it's a key reason the Microsoft campaign won't likely make a dent in Apple's growing influence among computer users.
A quick post this morning just to note that I've seen a dramatic improvement in battery life following the update of my iPhone 3G to the 2.1 software. I've also seen a signficant improvement in signal strength. If you haven't updated, you should consider doing so as 2.1 eliminates many, but not all, of the iPhone 3G's shortcomings.
A collegue sent me a link to this morning (from CNet news):
There will be plenty of hullabaloo on Tuesday when T-Mobile unveils the first phone powered by Google's Android operating system. But the event is only the beginning of a long effort to rewrite the rules of the mobile communications industry.
The phone, a somewhat chunky model called Dream built by HTC, is expected to cost about $200 from T-Mobile and go on sale in October. Until other partners in the Google-spawned, 34-member Open Handset Alliance bring their Android products to market, this small piece of electronics will shoulder a lot of ambitions.
For T-Mobile, an Android phone could bring some Google buzz to the scrappy carrier, helping match what AT&T got from Apple's iPhone. It also could potentially persuade customers T-Mobile's new 3G network is worth paying give T-Mobile new revenue from online application sales.
For Google, Android is a tool to spread Internet-savvy phones far and wide. People with powerful networked phones use the Internet much more, and Google wants to be the top company supplying the information they demand online.
This is going to be interesting for a couple of reasons:
1) Open source versus tight, vertical control of hardware and software. The question is, which one can provide the best overall user experience. My money? Apple, hands down.
2) Application diversity. It's the applications, stupid. (A take off of the famous "It's the ecoonomy, stupid). While a smartphone's look and feel is important, its true power lies in what you can do with it both from built-in applications and third-party programs. Apple's iPhone 3G wins hands down against any other smartphone and particularly any touch phones when it comes to look and feel. Its App store is also a leader in building a diverse software ecosystem. But Apple's tight control over developers and seemingly random App Store policies could be a major handicap in the brewing battle with Open Source Android. Edge on this one to Android, for now.
3) Marketing. Let's face it, the best widget doesn't always win. VHS versus Beta, electric cars versus internal combustion engine. Why don't the best mousetraps win? Because the other mousetraps had better marketing. Google and Android are going up against Apple, the 500-pound Gorrilla of marketing. Advantage: Apple.
