Cuts, interface and RIM craziness
Thursday, 16 February 2012
Apple cutting iAd pricing to boost uptake — Apple has once again cut prices on its iAd system for rich in-app advertising on iOS applications, according to a report, as ad buyers continue to balk at the up-front cost of participating in Apple’s vision of how mobile advertising should work.
AdAge reported Tuesday that Apple is now asking advertisers to commit just $100,000 in order to place advertise within iAds, down an enormous amount from the $1 million required when the program was first unveiled in 2010 and a significant discount from the $500,000 spend that Apple was asking for as recently as last year. According to the report, Apple also now plans to let developers keep 70 percent of the revenue they generate through advertisements within their ads and has dropped a cost-per-click charge, reverting to the familiar cost-per-thousand-impressions model.
Learning Japanese — Rumours of added Siri language support have been swirling. As it turns out, the digital assistant herself thinks she can already speak Japanese, despite the fact the language isn’t officially supported yet.
Apple has said it is adding Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Italian and Spanish support in 2012. Siri can already speak in English (with UK and Australian dialect versions), French and German. Language preferences can be configured in the iOS 5 Settings app on the iPhone 4S, and Japanese is not on option.
It’s interesting that Apple would leak such a detail this way. You can ask Siri “What languages do you speak?” or “Do you speak Japanese?” and find out for yourself.
Gesture-based App really impresses — The innovative thing about Clear is that it is entirely gesture-based in execution. There are no visible buttons or sliders; you use a series of gestures to interact with it, and that is what makes it stand apart from other iPhone list apps and task managers.
[Developers are really taken with this – expect many apps to change how they work.]
RIM 'deluded' — Ryan Faas writes, in a piece called 'The Lunatics Are Running The Asylum, "In one of the biggest delusions of grandeur that I’ve ever seen (which is saying something considering I was once the IT director for a mental health services agency), the company’s executives and board apparently think things are fine, that Apple is on the verge of death, and anyone outside the company is a moron. At least that’s the picture one RIM board member painted in an interview with Canada’s Globe and Mail recently."
