Apple bans Nancy Pelosi bobble head
A Mad Magazine cartoonist's guide to the 111th Congress runs afoul of Cupertino's censors
Illustration: Tom Richmond
UPDATE: Apple relented. App approved. See here.
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Someone at Apple (AAPL) needs to take a refresher course in American history — and maybe a lesson in libel law.
Last summer Tom Richmond, one of Mad Magazine's top illustrators and two-time winner of the National Caricaturist Network's "Caricaturist of the Year" award, began drawing a likeness of every Senator and Representative in the 111th Congress — 540 caricatures in all, including non-voting members from Puerto Rico, Guam, etc.
The idea, he explains, was to create an illustrated database for the iPhone and iPod touch that would allow users to find the name, party affiliation, phone number and website of their senators and congresspeople via zipcode or GPS. Each head was placed on one of 12 cartoon bodies and would bobble when shaken or flicked with a finger.
The project was the idea of Ray Griggs, director of the movie Super Capers (rated PG for mild language, rude humor and brief smoking), for which Richmond did the art. Griggs had shown the finished app around and stirred up some interest. He was booked to appear as a guest on Fox News next week with Glenn Beck and Mike Huckabee.
You can probably guess what's coming next.
Battle of the buzzwords: Apple vs. Microsoft
Apple's Schiller and Microsoft's Turner. Photos: Apple, Microsoft
Apple (AAPL) is awesome. Microsoft (MSFT) is muscular. Apple execs speaks in adjectives; Microsoft's in gerunds. Cupertino wants to show us how cool its products are, and how easy-to-use. Redmond wants us to know how hard it's going to compete to grow its market share.
That's the take-away message from the pair of videos pasted below the fold.
The first — Apple's Sept. 9 "It's only rock and roll" presentation boiled down to just the adjectives — has been viewed nearly half a million times since it was posted last week by justanotherguy84.
The second — which we put together Sunday morning at the suggestion of TechFlash's Todd Bishop — is Microsoft COO Kevin Turner's July presentation to analysts boiled down to just the buzzwords. Turner is, as Bishop promised, a modern master of techno-business jargon.
Let's go to the videos. Each is less than two minutes long.
What did Apple and Google talk about for three weeks in July?
Apple's Schiller and Google's Eustace
In the letter to the FCC that Google (GOOG) released Friday — the one that flatly contradicts the story Apple (AAPL) told the government — there's an interesting timeline of events.
At the heart of the case, for those who haven't been following every twist and turn, is an application called Google Voice that Google had been trying since June to get onto the iPhone App Store. Google says that Apple rejected the app. Apple says it never did.
This would be funny, as Brian Caulfield puts it, if the Feds weren't involved.
What interests me today is the three weeks following the telephone call in which, according to Google's newly un-redacted letter, Apple's top marketing executive — Phil Schiller — told Google's senior engineering guy — Alan Eustace — that Apple was rejecting Google Voice because it duplicated the iPhone's dialing function. Here's the sequence of events, as Google has it:
Google spills the beans on Apple
Image: FCC
"Contrary to published reports," Apple (AAPL) told the FCC back in August in response to a government inquiry about why it rejected Google's (GOOG) famous voice management app. "Apple has not rejected the Google Voice application, and continues to study it.” (link)
What Google had to say about that was unknown because unlike Apple, which made public its response, Google asked that key portions of its letter to the FCC be kept confidential to protect "sensitive commercial conversations" between the two companies.
Now Google has spilled the beans. In a blog post Friday, Google attorney Richard Whitt announced that rather than fight several Freedom of Information Act requests, the company asked the FCC on Thursday to release the unredacted version of its letter.
You can read the full letter on the FCC's website, but the thrust of the previously undisclosed passages is that Apple's top marketing executive personally told Google that its app had been rejected. The key section is this one:
Boiling Apple down to its adjectives
Steve Jobs. Photo: Apple Inc.
Last week we counted how many times Apple (AAPL) marketing chief Phil Schiller used the words "amazing" and "incredible" in his presentation at the "It's only rock and roll event." (Answer: an incredible 15 times each.)
Now someone who calls himself justanotherguy84 has taken the exercise one step further. He (or possibly she) has posted a 2-minute YouTube video of the entire Sept. 9 event stripped of just about everything but the adjectives.
Ever wonder how Steve Jobs and company leave the indelible impression that Apple's products are really great, really easy and just plain awesome?
Check it out below the fold.
Apple's amazing, incredible Phil Schiller
Phil Schiller. Photo: Apple Inc.
The day after Apple's (AAPL) "It's only rock and roll" event, Erik Sherman asked on CBS's BNET why the media missed the strategic importance of the gaming announcements that were made that day.
He has a point. Apple spent nearly a third of the hour-plus long presentation talking about the iPod touch — the "funnest iPod ever" — and how it stacks up against handheld game machines made by the likes of Sony (SNE) and Nintendo.
Yet the attention of the press seemed to be on everything else: the return of Steve Jobs, the video camera on the iPod nano, the camera missing from the iPod touch.
I went back and reviewed the podcast video of the event and I think I've found the reason: Phil Schiller.
Apple's curious PR problem
Senior VP Phil Schiller. Image: Apple Inc.
The tech press is buzzing this week with the news that a senior Apple (AAPL) vice president took the time to e-mail a blogger.
The senior VP was Phil Schiller, one of Steve Jobs' top lieutenants. The blogger was Daring Fireball's John Gruber, one of Apple's staunchest defenders. The issue was Apple's apparent censorship of an iPhone dictionary called Ninjawords that included some four letter words you won't find in Webster's Collegiate.
But this isn't really about a bawdy dictionary. It's about a public relations problem that has already triggered a federal investigation and now threatens to spin out of control.
The problem is that Apple Inc. has two faces, and the mask that hides the side that's not so nice has started to slip.
Apple fact check: 50,000 iPhone apps? – Update 2
I was surprised Monday when Apple (AAPL) vice president Phil Schiller announced that there were 50,000 applications available on the iPhone App Store.
He was giving the keynote at the World Wide Developers Conference — a role usually played by Steve Jobs — and he used the statistic to show how far ahead of its competitors the iPhone had drawn.
In the bar graph displayed on the Moscone Center's oversize screens, the iPhone's 50,000 apps towered over the
- 4,900 Google (GOOG) Android apps,
- 1,088 Nokia (NOK) Ovi Store apps,
- 1,030 Research in Motion (RIMM) BlackBerry apps, and
- 18 apps for "somebody else, I can't read it … it's small," Schiller joked, referring to Palm's (PALM) App Catalog.
I was surprised, because I had been waiting for the App Store to hit the 50,000 mark — getting ready to write a post when it reached that milestone. I'd been watching Jeff Scott's automated count at 148Apps.biz — a source that has proved time and again to be considerably more reliable than Apple in these matters.
You see, Scott has a program that scans the App Store every day, counting the apps that are available for download and checking that number against previous counts. He can tell you — for any day since the store opened — how many applications have been approved and how many are still active. He will even send you, on request, a list of the several thousand apps that were approved but are no longer active — including such best-forgotten gems as I Am Rich and Baby Shaker.
I had checked Scott's site on Sunday, the day before the keynote, and I remember that the number of active applications was still stuck somewhere above 47,000.
Could nearly 3,000 apps have been approved overnight?
"These numbers are from this weekend," Schiller claimed at the keynote. "We looked up on the store."
Well, we looked the numbers up on Wednesday morning, two days later, and this is what we found:
Forty eight hours after Schiller made his claim, the number of active applications was still 1,657 shy of that nice round 50,000 mark.
There's no question Apple's App Store has a huge lead over its competitors. And Schiller is perfectly within his rights to ridicule their puny offerings.
But when you have that kind of lead — when you are a giant among pygmies — claiming that you are bigger than you are doesn't show a lot of class.
UPDATE: Reached between sessions at the WWDC, Jeff Scott suggests that Schiller may have included apps available in the roughly 60 overseas App Stores. But that raises other questions.
"One of the problems with the other app stores," he writes, "is that there may be the same app [that's] available here in the U.S. with a different ID due to localization. I'm leaning toward counting these as different apps, but it would be nice to be able to count them as one.
"I have a couple theories about why they announced 50,000 apps. They could be counting all unique apps worldwide across all stores. But my guess is that this would be more than 50,000.
"My main theory is that they just wanted to quote a big number and used that. After all we are likely only a couple weeks away from 50,000 anyway."
UPDATE 2: Sharp-eyed reader Alex Kynikos from Chicago notes that Apple's U.S. store — the one whose numbers they usual report — past 50,000 available apps on Tuesday, nine days after Schiller made his claim at WWDC.
See also:
Live from Apple WWDC 2009: New iPhone, new MacBooks, no Steve Jobs
This is the spot for our live coverage of Apple's (AAPL) World Wide Developers Conference.
The keynote started at 1 p.m EDT (10 a.m. PDT). All times below are EDT unless otherwise indicated.
3:05 And that's a wrap.
There is a new iPhone, coming June 19, about a month earlier than expected. There is a $99 iPhone, available now, which is not good news for Palm (PALM). There are new MacBook Pros and price cuts on the 17-inch MacBook and MacBook Air. And we have ship dates for iPhone 3.0 (June 17) and Snow Leopard (September, a month before Microsoft's Windows 7).
But there is nothing from Apple to compete with those hot-selling $300 netbooks.
And there is no Steve Jobs.
His name never came up and there was no news about his condition or his plans to return to Apple.
I would expect that to get a mixed reaction from Wall Street, and as the keynote ended the stock was trading at $141, down about 3.6 points (2.5%). (It recovered somewhat later in the day to close at $143.85, down 0.82 points, and climbed o.1 points in after hours trading.)
Below the fold: The rest of the keynote.
Apple WWDC 2009 keynote Bingo!
The Apple (AAPL) keynote Bingo game — brilliantly parodied in the famous 2008 IBM buzzword ad (pasted below the fold) — has become a fanboy tradition, although as far as we know nobody has ever interrupted a Steve Jobs presentation to shout "Bingo!"
Marketing senior vice president Phil Schiller, not Jobs, is scheduled to give the keynote at this year's World Wide Developers Conference Monday, but that hasn't stopped the Bingo board makers. We've come across at least two board generators, one from the Netherlands (sample board above), the other from Sweden (sample below).
Here are the links:
This exercise is not entirely frivolous; the game does give developers, reporters and other Apple watchers a chance to consolidate the rumors and share their sense of what Cupertino is cooking up.
The rules are simple: generate a board you like, print it out, mark the squares as phrases are uttered or events occur, and when you complete a row, column or diagonal, call out "Bingo!"
If you dare.
Tune in here at 10 a.m. PDT (1 p.m. EDT) for our live coverage of WWDC 2009.
See also:
- What's Steve Jobs got up his sleeve?
- Analyst: Apple’s WWDC likely to ‘disappoint’
- Infographic: Color-coded iPhone rumors
- Rumor roundup: All about the new iPhone
Below the fold: the Buzzword Bingo IBM ad.
