Apple updated the developer center and streamlined the developer subscriptions. The name has changed to member center and there is a single mac developer subscription (79€ per year) that replaces previous membership subscriptions. Developers are required to agree to new terms of use and must complete a lengthy survey.
Your ikangai team
In recent years, we have witnessed what can be called a “copy and paste attitude”. What is partially to blame is obviously human laziness – or the minimax principle, if you will: to get the most with minimal effort. A prominent and currently much discussed example is the book of a german teenager who copied considerable parts of the book from an internet blogger – without citing the source. When confronted with this allegation, she stated that basically that there is no originality, but authenticity.
However, she later apologized for the copying but maintained her initial claim of originality.
Maybe this is just a precursor of more things to come. With the arrival of the internet of user generated content, we can expect to experience more cases like this in the future. As noted by Lawrence Lessig in his book, we need a culture that respects sources; if a person tries to make money from works of other people by remixing them, it should be a matter of course that the original sources also get their fair share. The same goes for software: copying and pasting source code from various Web pages without crediting the source of the work is common. The problem is to find a mechanism to share the revenue on a large scale. The Xanadu project from the late sixties tried to build something like this: a system consisting of hyperlinked documents where each linked part was available only once. There would have been no copies and it would have been possible to track every portion of a hyperlinked document to its originator. In combination with a kind of information franchise, this would have given the content creators a stream of revenue. However, the project ran into a lot of troubles and the developers never created a functional prototype.
On a related note, albeit on a different level, the Liquid Pub Project shares a similar goal: to build highly reusable and composable content for university lectures and publications.
We, from ikangai, also gave this some thought. In a nutshell, we suggest to build information communities where every member shares his or her content. If the content is used in a commercial manner, the revenue is split between the community members and the person making profit. We envision something like 20 per cent for the community and the rest for the person making the profit. However, there are considerable obstacles to overcome. For example, what to do with freeloaders that are just members without sharing anything at all? A potential approach to solve this issue could be the use of a mechanism that only splits among actively contributing community members. Well, these are merely initial thoughts and we will continue to think and blog about this very interesting topic.
One final note on the Axolotl case: it’s a somewhat bitter irony that the girl’s work is now protected by copyright law, so anyone who uses the content of the book in the same manner as the author will be sued by the publisher.
Your ikangai team
We tried to enter the Apple analyst business by speculating about unannounced products. Like a lot of other analysts, we got things partially right and in contrast to other analysts we are willing to state this explicitly. So, here is our reality check:
iPhone OS 4.0 beta will be introduced
Well, almost. It’s version 3.2 beta. But we got the beta part right, right 
?
New iPod Touches will be introduced
Nope. Completely wrong 
.
We won’t see a new version of the iPhone (later this year though)
Yesssss! We totally got this right. Well, actually it’s quite easy to speculate about things not to happen .
Yes! We think that a Tablet prototype will be shown (released date June)
Another hit! Well we don’t know the exact release date yet, but we are definitely close .
Ok, so we have 0.5 points for claim one (the beta should be worth half a point), zero points for claim 2, one point for claim 3 and 0.75 points for claim 4 (-0.25 points for the release date), which gives us a total of 2.25 points out of 4. Wow! We’d say, we made the cut for analysts .
Your ikangai team
Apple was always careful with the selection of it’s enemies and alliances. The famous 1984 commercial showed an IBM dominated world where only the use of an Macintosh could guarantee freedom. During the nineties, the Think Different campaign put Apple user at the same level with people like Ghandi, because he would have used a Mac for his work to bring freedom to his people. The current Get a Mac campaign shows cool Apple users and boring, business stereotypes that are not able to handle the simplest tasks like making a Web page without a lot of trouble.
A central motive in all the ads is the role of Apple as a David that takes on a fight with a Goliath (IBM, Microsoft).
But, who is going to be the next target of Apple? Or put differently, who is the next Goliath? Well, this might actually be Google. Apple recently bought Quattro Wireless, a company that is specialized in mobile marketing. Google is certainly interested in the mobile advertisement market and offers the Google Phone with Andriod. So, both companies are in the same market and will compete for the same customers. It’s only a matter of time, when we will see Apple ads that present Andriod phones as poorly designed and difficult to use and keeps on pestering the users with permanent advertising.
your ikangai team
MacRumors Readers are special
Monday, February 8th, 2010The well known rumor site macrumors recently posted an article about a
paper do-it-yourself- iPad. The reaction to this article was (and still is) mixed: some (like us at ikangai) find it funny while others complained about the newsworthiness of such an article. We were wondering, why such negative reactions appear and looked at the comments that were posted to the article. An example of a comment is this:
For us, this comment is rather funny: who expects to find on a rumor (!) site (after all, the site is called MACRUMORS) serious news? And besides, why react so strongly to a gag?
Even more amazing, is the reaction to a speculation (posted at the same day) related to a new MacBookPro which was overwhelmingly positive. This article is pure speculation and no evidence for a new MacBookPro exists (except for some wishful thinking).
We conclude that some of the readers do not have any sense of humor when it comes to Apple related stories. Funnily, these people behave exactly like the PC in Apple’s ads and not at all like cool Macs.
Your ikangai team
Tags: Comments, iPad, Macrumors
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