Apple flambé? Exploding iPod reports hushed up

July 23, 2009 • They got that boom boom OW! -- After years of trouble and seven months of investigation, a report by KIRO-TV reporter Amy Clancy unearthed an 800-page Consumer Product Safety Commission report detailing a disturbing number of iPods that overheated and either burst into flames or started smoking.

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Move over Microsoft. Apple can claim big, big market share numbers, too. According to NPD, in June, nine out of 10 dollars spent on computers costing $1,000 or more went to Apple. Mac revenue market share in the "premium" price segment was 91 percent, up from 88 percent in May.

By the way, Apple's command of the premium market is way up from first quarter 2008, when, according to NPD, Mac revenue share was 66 percent. Gee, and it seemed so high when I broke that story.

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A friend and I were talking the other day about how people are by and large not just oblivious to, but downright hostile about, the simplest security practices -- in fact, the simpler the request, the greater the level of grumbling. What to do, besides don a bandolier of tasers and a t-shirt that says "GO AHEAD, ASK ME AGAIN WHY YOU CAN'T MAKE YOUR PASSWORD THE SAME AS YOUR USERNAME?"

To cheer me up (yes, I have been troubleshooting a family member's computer; how did you guess?), my friend told me about a corporate-cultural tradition at a firm at which he recently consulted. The rules around that office require that anyone leaving their desk log out of the system. And if they don't? Their machine is fair game for co-workers, who by tradition go into the culprit's e-mail and send out a "cc:all" message announcing that they're going out for tacos, and would anybody else like some?

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Today, Amazon announced that it will be acquiring popular Internet clothing and footwear store Zappos.com for approximately $807 million. The closing price of Zappo's stock will actually drive the deal up to around $880 million when it closes this fall. Additionally, Zappos employees will receive $40 million in cash and restricted stock. The company was voted #23 in Fortune's Hundred best companies to work for in 2009 poll.

Zappos will retain the same management team that's helped the brand get as popular as it has. The company's CEO, Tony Hsieh issued a statement today saying, "Over the next few days, you will probably read headlines that say 'Amazon acquires Zappos' or 'Zappos sells to Amazon'. While those headlines are technically correct, they don't really properly convey the spirit of the transaction. (I personally would prefer the headline 'Zappos and Amazon sitting in a tree...') We plan to continue to run Zappos the way we have always run Zappos -- continuing to do what we believe is best for our brand, our culture, and our business. From a practical point of view, it will be as if we are switching out our current shareholders and board of directors for a new one, even though the technical legal structure may be different."

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In a statement to Betanews this afternoon, a spokesperson for Intel confirmed that the company has filed an appeal of last May's European Commission ruling, in which the company was fined the equivalent of $1.4 billion for what it found to be antitrust violations. According to spokesperson Chuck Mulloy, Intel's theory for its appeal is that the EC was prevented from seeing critical and possibly exculpatory documents, on account of an order of the court trying AMD's civil case against Intel in Delaware.

"As we said in the fall of 2008, we had asked the Court to require the Commission to get evidence from AMD that would be exculpatory," Mulloy told Betanews. "The Court said it was premature to rule on that and said we could bring it up on appeal. The documents [in question] are AMD documents that exist in the Delaware litigation, but we are not allowed to give them to the Commission because of the protective order in Delaware."

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The final validation checks for build 7600 of Microsoft Windows 7 were met today, reports Microsoft blogger/evangelist Brandon LeBlanc. Yesterday may have been the day that the marketing team was planning for release to manufacturing (RTM), since the text of Microsoft's code rollout announcement went live anyway about 24 hours ago.

This officially means that the development of the latest installment in the sixth generation of Microsoft's Windows operating system (the first installment having been Vista) has now concluded.

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In the PC industry, it's the OEMs that are the first to feel the effects of a recovering global economy, as demand for PCs from four of the world's top five producers has picked back up. It could actually be a good holiday quarter for HP and Acer. So if Dell or anyone else is still feeling negative impact, analysts are coming to the conclusion that the economy isn't to blame this time.

For CPU manufacturers, the economy works a little differently. With parts inventory having built up already, PC manufacturers have to sell through their existing product lines before they start ordering new replacement parts. Those "new" parts may actually be a little old, which is why AMD has a few more 65 nm parts on hand than it had planned. Getting rid of those parts means cutting prices, which is one reason why gross margins -- today's key indicator of a producer's relative health -- came in at lower than expected for AMD's second quarter of 2009.

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When Silverlight 3 debuted nearly two weeks ago, Microsoft also premiered the release candidate of Expression Blend 3 with SketchFlow, a new interface prototyping tool, and one of the premier features of Expression Studio. Microsoft promised that the rest of the Expression family would be delivered in 30 days.

Just ahead of schedule, Microsoft today announced that all of its Expression 3 products are now available for download, including updates to Expression Web, Design, and Encoder.

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Pakistan's new Cyber Crime Act has come into force and includes provisions that make "indecent, provocative and ill-motivated and concocted stories through e-mails and text messages against the civilian leadership and security forces" a criminal offense.

The Act is very similar to the Prevention of Electronic Crimes Ordinance (PDF available here) introduced by the Musharraf regime in 2007, which put the country's Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) in charge of investigation and enforcement of electronic fraud, forgery, data theft, cyberstalking, and cyber-terrorism.

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Synaptics, the creator of touchscreens already embellishing the iPhone and G1 Android phone, today rolled out new multitouch technology for mobile gizmos which rivals that of Microsoft-'s table-sized Surface.

The "Three-Finger Crumple" and "Two-Player Tennis Lite" are just two of the new offerings likely to show up on new mobile devices at year's end through Synaptics' introduction of the ClearPad 3000 Series touchscreen solution.

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Wireless-N draft users, get ready for a router firmware update because rumor has it that the IEEE has sent its latest 802.11n draft standard off to the Standards Board Review Committee (RevCom), which reviews draft proposals for their final vote on standardization. If this were a roller coaster, this would be the slow hill climb before the final drop. RevCom's quarterly meeting will be from September 9 - 11, and if approved, the final vote could take place in November.

The first draft of the multi-antenna wireless standard took nearly two years to complete, and it was promptly shot down in the first vote. While it is typical for the earliest versions of a standard to not make it far in the standardization process, IEEE hadn't anticipated the flood of almost 12,000 comments on the first ballot, meaning the process of revision had the potential to be long and arduous.

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The dream of a completely free platform for online video has run up against a significant roadblock, and it's another drama that Microsoft appears happy to watch play out from the sidelines. That dream is that Web developers can embed video into their sites using the <VIDEO> element of HTML 5, without being encumbered by anyone's proprietary technology. If it works, those sites can be assured of being able to stream to browsers' native codecs, rather than requiring users to install usually proprietary plug-ins like Adobe Flash or Apple QuickTime.

The problem with online video is that the technology behind it -- encoding, decoding, streaming and distribution -- is typically owned by somebody. That means it can't freely be distributed in an open source package. The exception here is Ogg Theora, the leading open source codec, and the hope of the community for a royalty- and penalty-free Web video platform. Yet its underlying technology may not only be outmoded, some are arguing, but may also actually still be owned by someone who has yet to assert patent rights.

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Your reporter has a theory about suicide, which goes: No one knows why the hell anyone does anything. That said, if your employer searches your home, puts you in solitary confinement, and uses "inappropriate interrogation techniques" on you, maybe 25-year-old Sun Danyong's decision to jump off a 12-story building makes sense to you. And if you're the company (Foxconn) and the alleged infraction involves a missing top-secret iPhone prototype, well... A little Foxconn history in a moment, but first, gather the family 'round the PC.

Windows 7 to be offered in "family pack"

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Apple has once again defied the economic gravity pulling some tech companies' earnings into a black hole. For fiscal 2009 third quarter, the company posted, again -- isn't this getting tiresome -- strong year-over-year revenue and earnings growth.

Strong Mac and iPhone shipments contributed to a quarter that surged past Apple's guidance and Wall Street analysts' inflated estimates. Apple described the results as being its best for a non-holiday quarter. That's a remarkable claim given that second calendar quarter typically is the slowest for PC shipments and economic recession afflicts all Apple's major sales market.

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In her company's earnings report on Tuesday, Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz declared herself not to be in the economic-indicator business: "Overall we are seeing less fear in the market, but it's too early to call... We'll leave the economic predictions to others." The company is busy, they explained, being "Internet kingmakers and the center of the online ecosystem."

Big talk? It got bigger. Bartz said on the call that Yahoo is the largest online media company in the world, with one out of two Internet users using one Yahoo property or another. When news breaks, "our home page continues to be the big dog. And in that kingmaker role, Bartz (relating a recent event in which a link on the Yahoo front page drove nearly 9 million viewers to a story on the New York Times in under three hours) "in the end we work with [news] publishers, not against them" -- a not-so veiled reference to Google News' ongoing conflicts with news outlets that feel that that service's aggregation goes too far.

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