Courtesy HeartMath

The Inner Balance app coaches you through breathing exercises designed to reduce stress.

In a classic “Seinfeld” episode, George’s father adopts what’s supposed to be a stress-reduction technique. Except that, instead of reciting it softly to himself, he bellows to the rafters: “Serenity now!”

The Inner Balance Trainer is a $99 device from a company called HeartMath that’s supposed to help achieve the same goal without the bellowing.

After you download the free Inner Balance app, you clip the sensor to your earlobe and connect it to the dock connector of your iPad, iPhone or iPod touch. (IPhone 5 and fourth-generation iPad users will need an adapter to use it with Apple’s new Lightning connector.)

The app then coaches you through breathing exercises designed to reduce stress, while recording data from the sensor on how you’re doing.

One screen features a brightly colored circle that pulses at the pace you’re supposed to breathe. Another has a soothing photo of a waterfall that you can replace with one of your own. You can also select music from your collection to accompany your sessions. I decided on the Beatles’ “Across the Universe,” which seemed appropriately New Age-y.

It turns out that, according to the Inner Balance, I’m sort of a whiz at “coherence” — the synchronization of heart, brain and nervous system that’s the centerpiece of HeartMath’s stress-reduction approach. Or at least, I’m a whiz at “Quick Coherence,” at the lowest level.

As you progress with your training — sessions can be as brief as three minutes, though five to 10 minutes somehow seemed more appropriate — you can ratchet up the level of difficulty. At the end of each session, you get a report on how you did, including an overall score as measured in “coherence points.”

You can even post the results of your training to Twitter and Facebook, so you can have coherence contests with your friends. Sort of like competing to see who can yell “Serenity now!” the loudest.

Original post is Inner Balance Promises Stress Relief for IPhoners: Rich Jaroslovsky by Tech Blog.

Courtesy Moshi

Moshi, formerly an Internet telephony company, has found a big business in selling accessories for devices such as the iPad.

Technology startups are notorious for making dramatic product changes, whether that means moving from hardware to software or from an ad-supported business to one based on subscriptions. In Silicon Valley, it’s called the pivot. But few companies have pivoted the way Moshi has.

Founded in 2003 as Aevoe, the company developed technology for Web-based telephony, a market that would eventually be won by Skype and Vonage. Eight years later, Moshi is one of the leading sellers of Apple accessories, such as iPod cases, iPad sleeves and patented iPhone screen protectors — called iVisors — that eliminate the annoying air bubbles found in rival products.

While Moshi is still in a highly competitive market and has to fight to stay in Apple’s favor, business is booming. Moshi has sold more than 5 million iVisors for various mobile devices, and its MacBook keyboard protectors are also popular. Apple’s online store lists 31 of the company’s products for sale and three of its products are sold in physical stores, said Moshi Executive Director Jon Lin.

The company recently opened a San Francisco office, where it plans to more than double its staff next year to 40. It has over 100 employees globally, with products sold in more than 10,000 stores in 45 countries, Lin said. It’s a reality that would have been unthinkable five years ago, when Aevoe was still trying to slog it out in the telecom world.

Back then, the company had moved to Taiwan from Silicon Valley and cut its staff from 20 to four. With no venture capitalists willing to fund the business, Aevoe started developing soft microfiber pouches for iPods and other electronics under the brand name Moshi just to bring in a little revenue. After some success, they then built keyboards for MacBooks and followed that up with keyboard protectors that were thinner than similar products made from silicon.

“We took a big detour,” Lin said.

By 2008, Aevoe only existed as the corporate name with all of the company’s resources focused on the Moshi accessories business. The company reopened its U.S. operations in 2009 in Sunnyvale, California, and moved its headquarters to San Francisco a month ago.

Now, as it competes in a market that includes companies such as Belkin and Incase, Moshi is using its growing money pile to fund new products, including an audio line with earbuds that range in price from about $40 to $200.

“Apple consumers are willing to pay a premium for products that are unique, well-designed and well-made,” Lin said. “We’re never going to make me-too products.”

Original post is Moshi’s Mega Pivot: From Web Telephony to Apple Accessories by Tech Blog.

Photograph by Miquel Benitez/Getty Images

Apple has more than 435 million iTunes accounts stored in the company’s database, according to Talal Khan, an analyst.

Google, Facebook and even Yahoo have been hailed as visionary companies that aren’t just disrupting old media, they’re replacing it. That conjecture hasn’t applied as readily to Apple, which after all deals in high-end hardware, not eyeballs or advertising.

A closer look, however, reveals that Apple not only has a significant media business, it’s bigger than most major media companies — and possibly at their expense.

By itself, Apple’s iTunes (which was just updated) and App stores, which hawk everything from movies and music to books and newspaper subscriptions, make more money than The New York Times; Simon & Schuster, which publishes the best-selling “Steve Jobs” biography; Warner Bros. film studios, which owns the popular Batman film franchise; and Time Inc., the largest magazine publisher in the U.S.

Combined.

Apple’s media storefronts took in more than $8.5 billion for the fiscal year ending in September. Put together, the revenue of the above-mentioned media companies only adds up to $8.2 billion for the same period, about $300 million less than Apple.

To be sure, a fair amount of those sales include apps unrelated to entertainment or media. The company doesn’t break out those sales versus media or entertainment purchases, but the primary draw for consumers has long been iTunes’s ever-growing media library, which started with 99 cent song downloads and now includes $455 annual subscriptions to the New York Times.

The irony here is that the maker of the best-selling iPad and iPhone doesn’t make any content. Instead, it relies on the media industry’s willingness to sell their precious movies, TV shows, newspapers and books through Apple in an arrangement that’s allowed the iTunes and App stores to outpace the very companies supplying them.

Mobile Mania

The media companies, after a period of hesitation, realized they needed to make their products available on those must-have mobile devices that so dominate consumer culture today — despite whatever costs that may add to the future of their business.

CBS, for example, while the most-watched TV network in America, still makes less money than Apple’s media division. Marvel? Universal? 20th Century Fox? Disney’s film studios? All beat. The division is six and a half times larger than Paramount film studios. Newspaper and magazine publishers barely register compared to Apple’s media store on which they now partly rely for new circulation revenue.

Of course, Apple’s content business doesn’t compare to many of the vast holding companies that sit behind these studios and television businesses. News Corp., owner of Fox News and FX and led by Rupert Murdoch, generated $33.88 billion in sales during Apple’s fiscal year, while Disney, owner of ESPN and ABC, took in more than $42.28 billion, which includes its lucrative parks and resorts.

Apple’s media business, nonetheless, is growing faster than any of those entertainment behemoths, around 35 percent annually. At that rate, iTunes will be bigger than Viacom Inc., which owns Nickelodeon, MTV and Paramount, by 2014.

Tom Neumayr, a spokesman for Apple, declined to comment on Apple’s media business.

Apple’s Slice

The late Steve Jobs long espoused the need for Apple to make entertainment easier to use, find and buy. But that didn’t necessarily mean buying the content itself. Apple’s media income comes almost entirely from the 30 percent commission it receives from sales in its iTunes and App stores.

Charles Wolf, analyst with Needham & Co. in New York, estimates it’s a “modestly profitable business” for Apple since the primary cost to them is the credit card transaction fee. Apple takes about 30 cents for every 99-cent song downloaded, with credit card companies charging Apple around 25 cents for each transaction, according to Wolf. The explosion of higher-priced media, however, from $15 books and $20 movies to $500 annual newspaper subscriptions, has vastly increased Apple’s media margins.

Marvel’s “The Avengers” movie, owned by Disney, for example, is available on iTunes for $14.99. Apple stands to make around $4.25 on each download after paying the credit card transaction fee. That “Steve Jobs” biography published by Simon & Schuster? $16.99 in iTunes. Apple keeps $4.85.

But Apple’s real influence over media markets comes from the more than 435 million individual iTunes accounts stored in the company’s database, according to Talal Khan, analyst with Credit Suisse Group AG in New York.

“That’s what gives Apple the power to come into media companies and ask for terms,” he said.

It’s a state of play Google and others are trying to disrupt — with limited success — and that traditional media companies have largely accepted. In many ways, Apple has become our de facto entertainment repository; the endless trails of consumers who line up for Apple’s latest tablets only reinforce this view. After all, what are they going to do once they rip open the Cellophane and boot up their latest screens? Buy more media.

Original post is Apple’s ITunes Would Be One of World’s Biggest Media Companies by Tech Blog.

Photograph courtesy of Apple

The new iPad has a faster microprocessor with enhanced graphics and improved Wi-Fi antennas.

Oh, yeah, there’s a new iPad.

Normally, the release of a new version of Apple’s tablet is the occasion for mass salivation on the part of the faithful. But it’s safe to say there won’t be lines of fans outside the store for the fourth-generation iPad.

Not that there’s anything wrong with it. In fact, it’s got a couple of nice new features on top of the ultra-sharp 9.7-inch Retina display and other enhancements that were unveiled in the third-gen iPad only seven months ago.

But this one is much more a refresh than a revamp. It completely replaces the previous model in the Apple lineup: same price (starting at $499 for a 16-gigabyte Wi-Fi-only model), same options (ranging up to $829 for one with 64 gigabytes and capable of running on the AT&T, Sprint or Verizon cellular networks), and same choice of color (black or white).

From the user’s standpoint, the biggest difference is probably the replacement of the traditional 30-pin connector with Apple’s new Lightning port, the same one found on the iPhone 5, latest-generation iPods and the new, much-more-anticipated iPad mini that’s also reaching the shelves today.

I like the new connector. It’s much smaller and the cable is reversible, meaning there’s no wrong way to plug it in. At the same time, as with the iPhone 5, it renders existing peripherals obsolete unless you buy Apple’s adapters, which aren’t cheap. (It’s $29 for the adapter alone, $39 for the version with a cable.)

The other changes in the new model are real, but not nearly enough to lead anyone with a third-generation iPad to rue their purchase, let alone induce them to upgrade.

The most visible difference I encountered comes in the front-facing camera, which has gone from 0.3 megapixel to 1.2 megapixels. From a practical standpoint, that meant a visibly sharper image for people on the other end of my FaceTime video calls.

The new version also has a faster microprocessor — Apple’s new A6X chip — with enhanced graphics and improved Wi-Fi antennas. In side-by-side tests, I found the new one ever-so-slightly faster at doing things like launching apps. But most people, I think, would never notice in everyday use, at least until new apps come out to take advantage of the greater power.

And by then, of course, we may well be on to the fifth-generation iPad.

Original post is Apple’s 4th-Gen IPad Is a Refresh, Not a Revamp: Review by Tech Blog.

Photograph by Peter Burrows/Bloomberg

At $329, only one in five iPad minis will be purchased instead of a larger iPad, said Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster.

A few hours ago, I got the chance to play with the newest member of the Apple family — the iPad mini. My first impressions: It’s really light and really appealing, but it also feels a bit like a tweener.

When I first held the iPhone 5 back in September, I blogged about how amazingly light and comfortable it was. It felt like a product my hand had been expecting. Unlike those larger smartphones from competitors, the iPhone 5′s display was bigger but didn’t feel that way, mainly because the device remained thin enough to fit easily in your hand.

The iPad mini didn’t feel as comfortable.

I felt I was holding Apple’s version of a Kindle. Sure, the software is slicker and the production values are higher and the hoopla — wow, what hoopla – is unmatched. Yet it feels like an e-reader, not something entirely new nor (to me, at least) necessary to own. In fact, it felt slightly ungainly — too big for me to get a tight grip on with one hand, yet so small and light that it felt a tad insubstantial. Maybe it would feel better with one of those smart covers, or maybe someone should invent some kind of rubber handle to afix to the back cover. Accessory makers, you listening?

The performance didn’t blow me away, either. One note-taking/drawing app they had loaded onto the device crashed once and then took a long time to load. People who have grown used to a Retina display will not be overly impressed by the iPad mini’s non-Retina screen resolution. I won’t judge it on network performance, as there had to be more Wi-Fi- and 4G-enabled devices in that crowded demo room than anywhere on the planet.

Of course, my first impressions (or likely anyone else’s) won’t prevent this product from being a hit. Wall Street didn’t like the $329 price point, which leaves some room under the umbrella for Amazon and Samsung with their tablets, which start at around $200. But I’d bet that most of the iOS faithful would rather pay more to be able to get their personal media and apps on one more Apple screen. And if Apple had priced it at $200 or even $250, I’d likely be writing instead about whether this device would cannibalize sales from the full-size iPad.

At $329, only one in five iPad minis will be purchased instead of a larger iPad, said Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster. While chatting with him on the way out of the demo room, he noted that while Apple owns 85 percent of the 10-inch tablet market, smaller size devices have grown to become 20 percent of the overall market. Now that Apple has gotten into that game, he thinks the company’s overall tablet market share will rise from 70 percent to 80 percent within a year, continuing its iPod-like dominance.

“Their market share is going to go up,” he said.

Original post is Hand(s) On With the New iPad Mini by Tech Blog.

Please refresh your browser every few minutes to see my updates.

11:11 a.m. Cook is back on stage and has wrapped up. Now it’s off to the demo room.

11:08 a.m. The biggest applause of the day just came, not for the iPad mini, but for the TV ad for it. It shows an iPad and an iPad mini playing a duet of chopsticks. I’ve been critical of Apple’s advertising of late. But this is a great ad. It humanizes the products in an endearing way, and will no doubt talk to current Apple customers — just one more way for the company to sink its teeth into consumers’ holiday budgets.

11:03 a.m. They are showing a video about the iPad mini, with Jony Ive and Dan Riccio talking about how they created a product that is not a diminished version of the flagship, but a “concentration” of what’s good about it.

Now the drumroll moment: the price is $329.

Preorders start on Oct. 26. Hey, that’s the day Microsoft is introducing Windows 8. Well, what do you know about that!

Photograph by Marcio Jose Sanchez

Phil Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of worldwide product marketing, introduces the iPad Mini.

10:55 a.m. Schiller points out that you can’t just make a tablet smaller for it to work. He is comparing it to the Nexus. The iPad mini’s screen is more than a third larger, it’s lighter, even though its made with aluminum rather than plastic. And there are 275,000 apps designed for this screen, rather than “a stretched out phone app.”

The iPad mini has an A5 chip, with a 5-megapixel iSight camera on the front and an HDTV front-side camera for FaceTime.

There’s no drop from the ten hours in battery life of the iPad. He’s selling this device pretty hard. Suggests to me they’re not viewing this as a defensive model to hold off Amazon and Samsung et al. Apple doesn’t play a whole lot of defense, though, once it creates a new product.

10:50 a.m. Here it is: the iPad Mini. It weighs .68 lb., “as light as a pad of paper.” It’s 7.2-mm thick, about a quarter thinner than the iPad.

The screen is 7.9 inches diagonal, with the same pixel count. That’s a big deal, since iPad apps will run on it as is.

10:44 a.m. Here comes a new version of iBook texts, so authors can add mathematical formulas and book upgrades.

In the corporate market, he says “nearly every single company in the Fortune 500 is experimenting with the iPad.”

Now, he calls Schiller back on stage to introduce new iPads. Just six months after the third gen, “I can’t even see them in he rear view mirror” thanks to a 2x increase from the A5x processor and a new digital signal processor.

They have upgraded the LTE performance – and even mentioned Sprint as one of the partners. Finally, some love for Sprint.

The price is $499. That’s a nice upgrade to keep the flagship iPad cooking. But here comes the star of the show.

10:38 a.m. Cook is back on stage, talking iPad. They have sold 100 million iPads. Unbelievable. He says that despite all the competition, 91 percent of web traffic on tablets is on iPads.

Now he’s talking about education — just as my colleague Adam Satariano predicted the company would.

10:35 a.m. Apple is introducing a new “fusion drive” that gets Apple into the hybrid hard drive and flash market. There is no optical drive, but one available for “those stuck in the past.” The price for the new iMac starts at $1,299. Take that, PC companies. That will make this Christmas evn tougher for Wintel than it was shaping up to be.

10:27 a.m. Now, the Mac reveal of the day: a new iMac — the side edge is just 5 mm thin, using “friction stir welding” that melds molecules … well, somehow. He’s showing how they removed a 2-mm air gap between metal and glass, by laminating metal directly to the glass. Besides making it thin, it gives better optical clarity because text and images are closer.

10:23 a.m. Now here comes a new $599 Mac mini, with a server version for $999. “You knew there’d be something with the word “mini” in this presentation,” he jokes, getting a big laugh.

10:21 a.m. “The most exciting thing about this computer is what you can’t see,” he says, including up to 7 hours of battery life due to new internal design.

10:16 a.m. The best-seller is the 13-inch MacBook. “So in typical fashion, we’re going to offer something much better,” says Schiller. It’s 20 percent thinner, and only 3.5 lbs. and but has a retina display. With 4 million pixels, it has denser resolution than any other 15- or 17-inch laptop (except Apple’s 15-inch).

The new 13-inch MacBook Pro will start at $1,699.

10:12 a.m. New iBooks have continuous scrolling, and easier ways to share highlighted quotes. It’s available now in the Bookstore.

Now to the Mac. It’s outgrown Wintel for six years running. He claims Apple has the No. 1 desktop and laptop in the U.S. (It helps if you only sell one model.)

Now, Schiller is out to talk about supposedly big changes in the Mac line.

10:05 a.m.  200 million devices are already on iOS 6. “This is the fastest growth of any new software were aware of,” Cook says.

iCloud is taking off, with more than 300 billion iMessages. That’s 28,000 a second,  ”maybe even more by now,” Cook jokes. Then he makes the obligatory shout out to Gamecenter. Wish they’d stop pretending its working like their other products.

App Store: over 35 billion apps have been downloaded. Payout to developers is $6.5 billion.

10:02 a.m. It begins. Tim Cook says the iPhone was the fastest-selling iPhone in history. Also, more than 3 million of the new iPods were sold.

9:34 a.m. The press gathers in the courtyard adjacent to the California Theatre.

9:32 a.m. I’m here at the California Theatre in downtown San Jose — a truly gorgeous movie palace built in 1927 — for what’s likely to be the debut of the iPad mini. The last time I was here was in 2004, when Bono and The Edge played a great set after the company introduced a special iPod U2 model. Those were the days when we in the business press were forever chattering about which “iPod killer” — someone’s smartphone or a MP3 player built on Microsoft’s “Plays for Sure” software — was going to end Apple’s dominance of the market. None ever did, obviously. If the iPad mini is what most expect — 7-inch screen, with lesser graphics but also a lighter price — it could mark a similarly tough day for all the reputed “iPad killers” out there, such as Google’s Nexus 7 or Microsoft’s Surface.

Original post is Live-Blogging From the Apple Event by Tech Blog.

Photograph courtesy of Beats Electronics

Played at a high volume, the Pill has much less distortion than the Jambox.

Ever since its release, Jawbone’s Jambox has set the standard for grab ‘n’ go mobile-device speakers. Now it has a new competitor: the Pill from Beats Electronics, purveyors of the ubiquitous Dr. Dre-endorsed stereo headphones.

It’s an interesting time for Beats, which is controlled by Dre and celebrated music producer and executive Jimmy Iovine. Earlier this year, Beats began to unwind its successful partnership with Monster Cable, which had manufactured and distributed its products. Meanwhile, Taiwanese cell-phone maker HTC briefly took a majority interest in the company, only to sell back much of it.

Now Beats is charting its own course, with the Pill as one of its early post-Monster product-line extensions. (The company is also releasing a new set of noise-canceling headphones called Beats Executive to take on Bose.)

The Pill has a lot in common with the Jambox. They both cost $199, are colorful and are compact and light enough to toss into a computer bag or suitcase.

They also both use Bluetooth to wirelessly stream music, video soundtracks and game sound-effects for those times when you just want to listen out loud. And each can double as a two-way squawk-box for calls on your smartphone.

While pairing a Bluetooth speaker to your mobile phone or tablet isn’t especially hard, the Pill boasts a feature that’s supposed to make it even easier: a Near-Field Communication chip. Just tap an NFC-equipped phone to the speaker, and you’re ready to go.

That’s the theory, anyway. When I went to pair it with a Samsung Galaxy S III, I got one of those gloriously geeky “unknown tag type” Android error messages. Turns out the feature only works with a tiny fraction of devices that both have an NFC chip and are running the latest “Jelly Bean” version of Android.

But I had no problem pairing it with the Galaxy — as well as an iPad and iPhone — using plain old-fashioned Bluetooth.

The Pill also differs with the Jambox in a couple of key areas. The biggest one is sound.

The Pill — so named for its tubular shape — has four drivers, as opposed to the two on the Jambox. And played at high volume, it has much less distortion than the Jambox. If you really want to crank things up, this is the Bluetooth speaker for you.

On the other hand — and somewhat oddly, given its parentage and Beats’s reputation for thumping, insistent bass in its headphones — the Pill is a little light on the lower end of the sonic spectrum. In fairness, bass is really hard to do in a package this small. But it’s one of the Jambox’s strong suits.

Those issues aside, the sound quality of the Pill was very good for casual listening, and I could easily see making use of it, say, in a hotel room where I want to watch a movie without wearing headphones, or listen to my own music while getting ready in the morning.

Not to mention blasting it loud enough to wake the people in the next room.

Original post is Beats Moves From Headphones to Listening Out Loud — Really Loud by Tech Blog.

Photograph by David Paul Morris/Bloomberg

Rather than remain the big fish in a shrinking pond, the iPod Touch could become a star overnight as an iPad.

iPhone 5, iPad mini. iPhone 5, iPad mini. They’re all you hear about. It’s almost as if the reliable old iPod Touch no longer existed.

Maybe it shouldn’t — at least in name. A couple of Apple analysts said the company could retire the iPod Touch name and reposition the device as the smallest of three versions of the iPad. Besides the full-size model, Apple is expected to introduce an iPad with a 7.85-inch screen by the end of October.

Why do it? For starters, the iPod Touch fits naturally into the role. With its touchscreen and ability to run software downloaded from Apple’s App Store, it has more in common with the iPad than it does with the iPod.

“The iPod Touch really isn’t any different than an iPad,” except for the lack of a cellular radio, said Roger Entner, founder of telecommunications consultancy Recon Analytics LLC. “It would give Apple a lot more flexibility by calling it an iPad.”

Apple could further streamline and strengthen its already powerful marketing. The iPod Touch is still a huge seller, with 46.6 million units sold in the U.S. since 2007, according to documents released during the Apple-Samsung trial. Still, it’s not a primary growth driver for the company. In 2007, before the iPhone took off, iPod sales made up 34 percent of Apple’s sales. In fiscal 2011, iPods accounted for less than 7 percent.

If Apple made the iPod Touch an iPad, it could treat the iPod category as what it is: a slowing market on auto-pilot. After all these years, there’s still no real competition in dedicated portable music players, and therefore no pressing need for Apple to continue to invest much in this brand. Rather than remain the big fish in a shrinking pond, the iPod Touch would benefit from — and contribute to – Apple’s massive iPad marketing campaign.

It would fill out Apple’s iPad lineup, giving consumers more reason to think about jumping aboard Apple’s platform rather than Amazon’s cheaper family of mobile devices.

Sterne Agee & Leach analyst Shaw Wu doesn’t think Apple needs to reposition the iPod Touch, but agrees that morphing it into an iPad would bring some advantages. “They could go either way,” he said.

The most obvious challenge would be the pricing, which needs to fit logically into Apple’s product lineup. The iPod Touch sells for $199 to $399, while the full-sized iPad sells for $499 to $829. That doesn’t leave much room for the rumored mini iPad, so Apple might need to charge less for the iPod-turned-iPad.

To keep the price down and maintain the iPod Touch’s appeal to parents who want to give their kids a device for texting without a pricey cellular service, Apple could continue to sell Wi-Fi-only versions for less than $250. A 4G version could be priced at $380.

Or maybe the prices on all the iPads, including the full-sized versions, need to come down given Amazon’s new Kindle Fire HD tablets, which start at $199 for a version with a 7-inch screen.

Original post is Should Apple Rebrand the iPod Touch as a New iPad? by Tech Blog.

Photographer by Jacob Kepler/Bloomberg

Attendees arrive during the Black Hat conference at Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas on Wednesday.

(This post was updated to clarify Microsoft’s involvement with Black Hat in the last graph.)

A few minutes into Apple’s much-anticipated presentation at the Black Hat hacking conference in Las Vegas, it became clear that the secretive company intended on following a familiar script — literally.

Thursday’s appearance marked the first time that an Apple manager appeared on stage in the event’s 15-year history, in a nod to the growing attacks on Apple devices. It was also an opportunity for the company to pitch its products to businesses, many of which paid $1,500 or more to have their information security managers in attendance.

Dallas De Atley, who manages Apple’s platform security team, drew a crowd of more than 500 for his hour-long talk on the security technologies the company has built into iOS, the operating system for iPhones and iPads.

Yet for all of the symbolic significance of having the world’s most valuable company engaging with hackers bent on finding flaws in its products, there wound up being little new information from the presentation.

That’s because De Atley’s talk covered the same ground as a white paper that Apple quietly released on its website in May. And the white paper contained some information that was already known in hacking circles. Some of the topics included Apple’s handling of encryption and how the integration of hardware and software helps detect malicious software on the devices. De Atley didn’t take questions from the audience and left immediately after.

Black Hat is one of the hacking community’s premier forums for researchers to present their findings and for companies whose products are targets to outline the steps they’re taking to improve security. By re-hashing known issues, Apple may have missed a chance to engage on a deeper level with researchers about its efforts to protect users’ data. Yet for a company that has been loath to even acknowledge that its products could have security issues, De Atley’s appearance is a reminder that getting big companies and hackers together is sometimes a process that moves ahead in small steps.

Apple’s nemesis, Microsoft, was at one time leery of hackers as well. Microsoft has now been involved with Black Hat for about a decade, and tonight plans to announce the winner of one of the richest rewards in computer-security research: the $200,000 BlueHat Prize. That’s given to the person who develops the best security technology for preventing a certain type of powerful attack against Windows applications.

Original post is Apple’s Black Hat Talk Draws Crowd, But Breaks Little Ground by Tech Blog.

Photograph by James Whitaker

PriceGrabber found that nearly 14 percent of respondents planned to do back-to-school shopping from their mobile phone.

If you notice more people glued to their smartphones while back-to-school shopping, it might be because they’re looking for a better deal. About 37 percent of consumers said they plan to compare prices on their mobile devices while at brick-and-mortar stores, according to PriceGrabber.com.

That’s up from 27 percent in 2011, said the comparison shopping site, which surveyed more than 4,400 U.S. online consumers in May and June. PriceGrabber also found that nearly 14 percent of the respondents planned to do back-to-school shopping from their mobile phone, up from 10.5 percent last year.

In a separate report, Apple’s iPad is the most commonly used mobile device for payments, beating out the iPhone and devices running on Google’s Android, according to an eight-month internal study by Adyen, which provides Web payment services to merchants including Vodafone, KLM and PopCap Games.

The iPad accounted for 3.6 percent of all payments, compared with 3 percent on iPhones and 1.5 percent on Android devices, Adyen said.

Users of the iPad also spend 20 percent more per purchase than owners of other mobile devices, Adyen’s analysis of global payment trends showed. Daily-deal websites have experienced the most mobile payment usage, with 12.6 percent of all transactions originating from a mobile device, Adyen said.

Original post is More Consumers to Use Phones to Compare Prices While Shopping by Tech Blog.