Apple suppliers to work during Chinese New Year as high demand for iPhone 5 and iPad mini continues

“Taiwan’s United Daily News (via Brightwire) claims that Hon Hai Precision Industries and Flexium Interconnect will keep certain production lines open during the Chinese New Year to keep up with demand for Apple’s newest iDevices,” Mikey Campbell reports for AppleInsider.

“For 2013, China’s most important holiday will start on Feb. 10,” Campbell reports. “A move to keep production facilities online during the holiday would be an indication that supply is just barely meeting demand, as evidenced by the U.S. Apple Online Store’s one-week wait time for all iPad mini models.”

Read more in the full article here.

Shut up, you’re not Apple

“At first, it was funny to hear insurers, IT firms, and startups with no revenues compare themselves to Apple,” Steve Faktor writes for Forbes. “Since the iPod launched in 2001, I’ve seen hundreds of presentations… Drenching slides (or products) in an iconic brand’s juices won’t transmit innovation, like some benevolent plague. If that were possible, we’d never stop harvesting and packaging Brangelina extract. It’s time for an intervention. Here’s why brands must find their own voice (and scent)…and keep those synthetic Apple fumes from turning into laughing gas.”

“I know I’m not alone. We’ve all been to the same Apple-laden meetings… er, orchards. How did those comparisons work out? Did that company become the most valuable in the world? Did that product become iconic and emulated by every company in Korea? Or, did it live and die in its sad PowerPoint tomb,” Faktor writes. “Using Apple as a model is the business version of ordering jeans after seeing them on Kate Upton. They might not look the same on you. Like Kate, Apple is a unicorn. It defies so many conventions that deconstructing its lessons is silly… It’s not that your company can’t be Apple. It’s that your company absolutely, positively will never be Apple. I’m not discounting your skill or vision. I’m simply acknowledging that Apple’s success is a witch’s brew of leadership, timing, technology, and culture. All those variables can’t be replicated.”

Much more in the full article here.

Card Lust: A Beautiful Excuse to Send Digital Notes

Yesterday you got some sweet new gifts. Now it’s time to write thank you notes. Card Lust is an easy, thoughtful way to do that.

What does it do?

Lets you choose from 12 different beautiful cards handpainted by artists Elspeth Tremblay and Sara Hingle to send to friends or family via Facebook, email, Instagram, or text.

View the gallery Why do we like it?

There’s no replacement for a hand written note, but sometimes it’s hard to find the time—or a stamp. And it’s better to let someone know you’re grateful than saying nothing at all. These cards are digital watercolors and they’re unique and really quite lovely. Thus, you have no excuse to get on those thank you notes.

Card Lust

Download this app for:

• iPhone, $1.99

The Best:

Lovely cars

The Worst:

Hand-written is always better

Japan Tsunami’s Floating Debris to Keep Hitting the Pacific Coast This Winter

Authorities expect more debris from the March 2011 Japanese Tsunami to wash up on the Pacific Coast this winter. Seasonal changes in ocean currents and North Pacific winds will push the 1.5 million tons of debris still out there towards our shores.

Just last week, authorities in Washington State were nervously tracking the massive dock in the image above. It had been spotted floating in the Pacific Ocean before authorities found it crashed into the beach of Olympic National Park on December 18th. The confirmed tsunami wreckage spent nearly two years at sea.

The tsunami that devastated Japan has left its mark on North American soil in the form of tokens large and small washed ashore on its beaches: A soccer ball inscribed in Japanese characters, a Harley Davidson motorcycle, and earlier this year, yet another massive dock. This one was 66-feet long and landed in Oregon in June:

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, estimates that five million tons of debris washed ashore as a result of the devastating tsunami, of which, about 3.5 million most likely sank shortly after the event. According to NOAA’s models, a majority of the remaining debris is still scattered north and east of Hawaii. In other words, it’s headed for the Pacific Coast. The expected range of landfall for this flotsam is from Southern California to Alaska.

Floating ocean debris can be monitored from NOAA’s main marine debris information site, as well as from its Tsunami-related debris hub. According NOAA it has “received approximately 1,432 official debris reports, of which 17 have been confirmed as definite tsunami debris” as of December 13th.” Last month, the Japanese government donated $5 million to the US to help with marine debris. In July, NOAA donated $50,000 to each of Alaska, Washington, Oregon to support the effort. Any debris is mostly likely not radioactive but you should contact the proper authorities if you have information about any. [AP and NOAA ]

Images via Rick Bowmer/AP, Ecology WA

ReMax Agent effortlessly estimates the worth of your house

For those home owners who want to the value of their property, ReMax agent has introduced an app that can be run of iPad, iPhone, Android devices and online sites. The ReMax agent’s new app is designed to estimate worth of the property with few simple clicks.
In today’s technological era, there are many web based tools that assess the worth of the property on the basis of area it covers. However there are also other crucial aspects which must be considered before notifying about the value. This becomes reason for showing hundreds or even thousands of less prices than the actual worth. Also, there are some apps that can estimate worth of the house by employing Multiple Listing Services or MLS. For estimating the worth through MLS system, home owners must have their property listed in this.In order to eliminate frustration of the home owners ReMax agent has introduce iE. This app provides instant and reliable information on fingertips so that users can easily make their home buying and selling decision. iE understands the individuality of each property and it has unique evaluation system for assessing prices.

iE is an app that is functional, efficient, interactive and easy to use. The valuation system of iE is leveraged under 90,000 expert ReMax agents and associates from the world. They are held responsible to analyse property by reviewing it on the real estate statistics.

For this, iE requires basic information from the home owners including address, square footage, type of property, year of construction, and numbers of bedroom and bathrooms in many cases it demands at least three photos of the home so to know condition of the home. Download your app to know the actual price of your property and make your decision making process easier.

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Add structure to the data published on site without touching codes by Google new data highlighters

Google wants to provide opportunity to the website developers to insert as much structured data as possible so to enhance their search visibility and Knowledge graph boxes with rich snippets including review, event listing and other information. Adding metadata to the sites is not trivial and many businesses do not need to employ experts to include RDFa markup and Microdata to the sites.This will not let you fiddle with the codes to report data to Google. Point and click tool has been offered by New Data Highlighter of Google for tagging the sites with specification without actually changing the codes.

For this time period, this above mentioned tool is only available for structured data about events including sports, concerts, exhibition and it can only support English language. Later, Google is planning to expand the project for other languages and data types.

For working on it, web developers just have to visit Google Webmaster Tools and they can start tagging sites.

The best part of this tool is when developers have listed multiple events in consistent format, the Data Highlighter tool will mechanically recognise these going forward. Google says that almost 5 to 10 manual tagged pages are sophisticated enough for machine learning algorithm in order to develop understanding with similar pages of the site. After working with this tool, developers will simply require to publish and Google with automatically crawl the sites for the listed events and will add them in the search results.

However this will not guarantee against appearance in the search results. This is due to the fact that Google has noted that each and every product has rules for deciding how to display data. For example, only legitimate and near future events will be displayed as the rich snippets. Google has also warned web developers to not to employ Data Highlighter for promoting non-event related services and products.

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Celebration for the Mac users- actual shipping thunderbolt docking station has went on sale

MacRumors has disclosed that after lengthy delay, the final agreement for purchasing the Thunderbolt for expansion of dock is ready. The Matrox DS1 revealed first in June and update in September is now being shipped at $249 price tag.
DS1 is designed to provide Gigabit Ethernet port to the Mac devices. Along with Ethernet, it will provide two additional USB 2.0 ports, dedication audio for in and out 3.5 mm jacks, one USB 3.0/2.0 port and either DVI or HDMI out depending upon the model of choice. For the first time USB 3.0 over Thunderbolt is being announced, so it is quite interesting to utilise. Moreover other alternative elements like Thunderbolt Cinema Display can be availed, but this will require additional $250.The product manager of Matrox, Charles Amyot shared that there are huge numbers of engineering challenges involved in availing the DS1 docking stations to the market. Macs have showed off ports of Thunderbolt since 2011 and exception of external hard drive resulted little uptake in consumer accessory market. These appear to be quite expensive, entitled as SSD toting models. In the most notebooks, a bevy ports have been added, especially for the office and home docking station. Now the simple storage will be cheaper in the USB 2/3 incarnations.

Belkin- The big name of accessory developer is undergoing the Thunderbolt expansion dock. It has also offered second Thunderbolt port for the daisy chaining, Firewire of 800 ports and USB 3.0 ports in addition of DS1 to the tablets. This was supposed to make its way in summers of 2012, yet it has being late because of push of Q1 2013.

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Facebook requires more than simple privacy controls for growth

User’s who do not trust Facebook, will share low amount of data. Facebook is now at aim to educate the users about its privacy laws released by Zuckerberg. The main aim and growth of Facebook underlies with more and more data sharing.
Having Facebook account is the need of time and matter of staying social with friends. If user is thinking to deactivate account, his or her friends have to extra mile to contact them, as there will be no wall posts, messages and invitations to the events.Losing trust on Facebook simply means sharing less.

This will result in sharing incomplete profiles, so that Facebook ads cannot target you on the basis of country, workplace, relationship status, age or gender. You may not share your pages by liking them with your friends.

This will also ensue in less toggling with the privacy settings for sharing sensitive piece of information. These sharing are quite essential if you want your friends to frequently visit your profiles and feed it thoroughly.

For this reason, Facebook is trying to active its privacy education by giving better understanding to the users about privacy controls. Facebook cannot afford to have scared users; it has to get their satisfaction back.

Facebook has come up with privacy shortcuts which allow you to decide who can contact you, who can watch your posts and now it will let you easily block people from the drop down menu at the top right of the screen. In account settings, you can easily find privacy settings as well. Apps before sharing your information will ask you for permission.

Facebook has also removed the feature for not to appear in the search results, so that it won’t keep you fooling that stranger’s can navigate you through your friend’s list. Activity log for hiding the things now have more filter ways to encounter hide, share and reporting multiple items. It also has more sophisticated ways to ask the friends to remove embarrassing images and post from your wall.

The Zuckerberg’s law of social sharing tells us about Y=C * 2^X. in this equation X is time, C is constant and Y is sharing data. This depicts that now you will be able to share more frequently data with limited audience by considering your sensitive content.

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Amazon’s Kindle Fire: Still the ‘fruitcake of tablets’

“Amazon’s Kindle Fire is not selling as well as expected, says Pacific Crest analyst Chad Bartley,” Jay Yarow reports for Business Insider. “Bartley is cutting his estimate for the holiday quarter to 6 million units, down from 8 million, according to Tiernan Ray at Barron’s who has the note.”

“For next year, he’s projecting sales of just 10.5 million units, down from his previous estimate of 12.5 million,” Yarow reports. “Why is Bartley calling for such a low 2013 prediction? He tells Ray over email that demand for the Kindle Fire is very weak and ‘the Fire seems to be a highly seasonal item.’”

Yarow reports, “This is something we observed last year… We called the Kindle Fire the ‘fruitcake of tablets.’ A lot of people bought Kindle Fires during the holidays because they were relatively inexpensive, but nice-seeming presents. But when it was time to buy a tablet for themselves, they didn’t buy a Fire because it’s not actually all that good.”

Read more in the full article here.

MacDailyNews Take: People don’t want pretend iPads or iPad minis. The want real iPads and iPad minis.

Don’t give iPad roadkill as a Christmas present unless you hate the recipient.

USPTO tentatively – and likely temporarily – declares Apple’s ‘pinch-to-zoom’ patent invalid

“A couple of hours ago Samsung proudly informed Judge Koh of the fact that the United States Patent and Trademark Office USPTO has tentatively rejected, in a first Office action dated December 29 (mailing date), all 21 claims of U.S. Patent No. 7,844,915, which I consider to be essential to the pinch-to-zoom feature,” Florian Mueller reports for FOSS Patents.

“Since the spring of 2011 I have been saying till I was blue in the face that first Office actions are non-final,” Mueller explains. “These are ex parte reexaminations (triggered by a request, which can be and in each of these cases was filed anonymously (by a law firm not disclosing any client), for which the hurdle is (even after last year’s patent reform bill) that the request must raise a substantial new questoin for patentability.”

Mueller writes, “Of the three Apple multitouch software patents that have given rise to tentative rejections in the form of first Office action, I believe the ’915 patent is most likely to have some surviving claims when all is said and done… Depending on how long this process goes, we will at some point also hear about procedural steps (including reconsiderations, appeals etc.) in which some of the tentative rejections are retracted. It will take time, but it will happen. There will be some back-and-forth and some roller coaster rides, and in the meantime, tentative rejections don’t affect the enforceability of a patent claim.”

Read more in the full article here.

MacDailyNews Take: Standard procedure. Expect a FUD blitz and mis/disinformation campaign preying on the low information ignoranti who do not understand the facts of the matter.