Banned in Cupertino
Add one more headache for whoever is running Apple's App Store approval process: edgy books.Books aren't a huge part of the App Store, but there are more than 600 titles for sale, ranging from classics to Japanese comic books. CNET's own David Carnoy has a new detective thriller out called Knife Music, but you won't find it on the App Store.That's because when Carnoy enlisted a software developer to submit the book to the App Store, Apple rejected the book for containing "objectionable content," citing a clause in the iPhone SDK that states: "Applications must not contain any obscene, pornographic, offensive or defamatory content or materials of any kind (text, graphics, images, photographs, etc.), or other content or materials that in Apple's reasonable judgement may be found objectionable by iPhone or iPod touch users." You've got two basic choices if you want to buy a book on the App Store; you can buy an application like Stanza or eReader and then download the books themselves from a Web site, or buy a book with self-contained e-reader software, which is how Carnoy's book was submitted.In its rejection letter, Apple singled out the passage in question, which we actually can't print either. Let's just say it involves a teenage girl telling a detective that she overheard her friend asking a gentleman caller to "love me like you mean it," just with a slightly more emphatic verb.Carnoy's developer, Alex Brie, believes Apple is checking for objectionable content using word-matching software, as it would be hard to believe that the company hired someone to read every book submitted to the App Store."Apple's staff shouldn't be allowed to refuse to publish works of literature based only on word matching. Even more, what would happen if I (a Romanian) would publish an ebook filled with Romanian obscenities? - would Apple's staff need to learn Romanian...and read the entire ebook...to make sure this doesn't happen?" he said in an e-mail.Trying to determine the exact definition of terms such as obscene, pornographic, and objectionable is always a controversial issue. And Apple is within its rights to dictate what it will sell on its store.Right from the start of Apple's decision to open the iPhone up to third-party applications, CEO Steve Jobs singled out "porn" as one of the things that would be prohibited from the App Store, but Carnoy's book, while racy in parts, would not be described as "porn" by any reasonable observer.Apple's definition of "objectionable" has been questioned before. After initially balking, Apple finally relented to the extremely influential fart joke lobby last week and permitted applications such as Pull My Finger and iFart Mobile (ranked 3rd and 10th, respectively, among paid App Store applications at the moment) under what was described as a "Mature" section.Joel Comm, the developer of iFart Mobile, said in an e-mail that he was told Apple had decided to rate his app "Mature 17+," and that would-be downloaders would have to certify their age before purchasing the application. But that wasn't the case when I tried to download the app Friday, and there is nothing in the description of iFart Mobile that indicates it is only suitable for those over 17. Nor is there any section of the App Store labeled as "Mature 17+" at the moment.Once again, we're realizing just how overwhelmed Apple has become serving as the exclusive gatekeeper for iPhone applications without clear rules and regulations for its inspectors to follow--and developers to heed--in making calls about what can stay and what must go. Apple representatives did not return several calls seeking comment; as far as I can tell, Apple has never commented on the App Store approval process, six months after its debut.Apple offers plenty of movies that a lot of people would consider "objectionable" over in the iTunes Store, but movies have a well-known and widely accepted rating system. (For what it's worth, Apple does not offer NC-17 movies on the iTunes Store.)There is no such standard for rating books. Valuable pieces of English literature contain the word that appears to have killed the chances of Knife Music making it into the App Store. And equally well-regarded books have dealt with the subject of teenage sexuality in frank terms.If Apple really wants to offer books on the App Store, it is going to have to strike a balance between a desire to keep out-and-out porn off the App Store while avoiding comparisons to a modern-day Anthony Comstock. Apple doesn't have to sell erotica if it doesn't want to, but simply rejecting books because they use one of George Carlin's seven favorite words is going to exclude an awful lot of literature.
Pandora reports Q1 loss, guidance hits sour note again
Pandora reports Q1 loss, guidance hits sour note again
Pandora Media, the operator of the Web's top radio service, Thursday reported a narrower-than-expected loss in the first quarter, but shares still plunged as the company's outlook for the current quarter again disappointed.Shares fell $2.19, or 7.8 percent, to $26.01 in after-hours trading.It follows Pandora's last report of its biggest quarterly profit since going public in 2011, with the swing to a loss reflecting seasonal slowness and investments to turbocharge its advertising capabilities. With the share price doubling in the last year, investors have generally been patient with Pandora's spending, looking forward to the payoff from a bigger sales force and technology investments to improve the value of the ads Pandora broadcasts. Investors have been less patient with indications that growth in listener hours is slowing, as Chief Executive Officer Brian McAndrews said at a conference in March. Listener-hour growth was 12 percent in the latest period. Comparisons to other periods are imperfect: Fourth-quarter growth in listener hours was 16 percent, but seasonality can skew the metric. And the growth was 35 percent in the year-earlier quarter, but Pandora has shifted the timing of its quarterly calendar, so the dates of the quarters don't line up. Even without an apples-to-apples comparison, the trend is clear: The growth isn't what it used to be. Chief Financial Officer Mike Herring said the law of large numbers -- that it's simply harder to have big growth numbers when your user numbers have grown big themselves -- explains the cooling momentum.Related storiesPandora sued by record labels for copyright infringementIn Q4, Pandora posts highest profit as public company "We had all-time record hours in the first quarter. Listeners are growing; we're at a large number here," he said in an interview with CNET. "Those listeners are listening more than ever before." The number of active listeners increased 8 percent to 75.3 million.Herring dismissed the idea that competition in digital streaming music was having any effect. "We really don't see the competition affecting our numbers," he said. "Pandora is the only one who has been able to effect the numbers over time."Competition in intensifying in Pandora's universe. The company continues to lead the market, but giants like Apple and Google added new services like iTunesRadio and All Access last year. Subscription heavyweights like Spotify and upstarts like Beats' continue to gain users, and Google is said to be rolling out another subscription service through YouTube.Pandora's guidance for the second quarter ranged from breakeven to a profit of 3 cents on revenue of $213 million to $218 million. Analysts were expecting a profit of 5 cents a share on $219 million in revenue. However, for the full year, Pandora raised its guidance thanks to beating predictions in the first part of the year.In the latest three-month period, Pandora posted a loss of $28.9 million, or a 14 cents a share, compared with $38.7 million, or a 22 cents a share, a year earlier. Stripping out unusual items, its per-share loss narrowed to 13 cents from 18 cents. Revenue jumped 69 percent to $194.3 million, while revenue excluding unusual items rose to $180.1 million. In February, the company projected a first-quarter loss of 14 cents to 16 cents a share on revenue of $170 million to $176 million. Update, 1:48 p.m. PT: With executive interview, details of listener growth. Correction, 2:34 p.m. PT: The original article misstated Pandora's bottom-line guidance. Pandora expects it to range from breakeven to a 3 cent profit.
Pandora Media, the operator of the Web's top radio service, Thursday reported a narrower-than-expected loss in the first quarter, but shares still plunged as the company's outlook for the current quarter again disappointed.Shares fell $2.19, or 7.8 percent, to $26.01 in after-hours trading.It follows Pandora's last report of its biggest quarterly profit since going public in 2011, with the swing to a loss reflecting seasonal slowness and investments to turbocharge its advertising capabilities. With the share price doubling in the last year, investors have generally been patient with Pandora's spending, looking forward to the payoff from a bigger sales force and technology investments to improve the value of the ads Pandora broadcasts. Investors have been less patient with indications that growth in listener hours is slowing, as Chief Executive Officer Brian McAndrews said at a conference in March. Listener-hour growth was 12 percent in the latest period. Comparisons to other periods are imperfect: Fourth-quarter growth in listener hours was 16 percent, but seasonality can skew the metric. And the growth was 35 percent in the year-earlier quarter, but Pandora has shifted the timing of its quarterly calendar, so the dates of the quarters don't line up. Even without an apples-to-apples comparison, the trend is clear: The growth isn't what it used to be. Chief Financial Officer Mike Herring said the law of large numbers -- that it's simply harder to have big growth numbers when your user numbers have grown big themselves -- explains the cooling momentum.Related storiesPandora sued by record labels for copyright infringementIn Q4, Pandora posts highest profit as public company "We had all-time record hours in the first quarter. Listeners are growing; we're at a large number here," he said in an interview with CNET. "Those listeners are listening more than ever before." The number of active listeners increased 8 percent to 75.3 million.Herring dismissed the idea that competition in digital streaming music was having any effect. "We really don't see the competition affecting our numbers," he said. "Pandora is the only one who has been able to effect the numbers over time."Competition in intensifying in Pandora's universe. The company continues to lead the market, but giants like Apple and Google added new services like iTunesRadio and All Access last year. Subscription heavyweights like Spotify and upstarts like Beats' continue to gain users, and Google is said to be rolling out another subscription service through YouTube.Pandora's guidance for the second quarter ranged from breakeven to a profit of 3 cents on revenue of $213 million to $218 million. Analysts were expecting a profit of 5 cents a share on $219 million in revenue. However, for the full year, Pandora raised its guidance thanks to beating predictions in the first part of the year.In the latest three-month period, Pandora posted a loss of $28.9 million, or a 14 cents a share, compared with $38.7 million, or a 22 cents a share, a year earlier. Stripping out unusual items, its per-share loss narrowed to 13 cents from 18 cents. Revenue jumped 69 percent to $194.3 million, while revenue excluding unusual items rose to $180.1 million. In February, the company projected a first-quarter loss of 14 cents to 16 cents a share on revenue of $170 million to $176 million. Update, 1:48 p.m. PT: With executive interview, details of listener growth. Correction, 2:34 p.m. PT: The original article misstated Pandora's bottom-line guidance. Pandora expects it to range from breakeven to a 3 cent profit.
Could MetaMirror reflect future of interactive TV-
Could MetaMirror reflect future of interactive TV?
Like to get instant player stats and trivia while watching TV sports matches? MetaMirror, a concept software platform out of Ireland, would overlay such data on a secondary device, keeping your television screen free of extra clutter while you watch the big game.The product would display real-time contextual content over a "mirror" of the television broadcast that simultaneously plays on an iPad, iPhone, Netbook, or other gadget. That might make for some visual cacophony at touchdown time, but Dublin design firm Notion, which came up with the idea, insists that it's a seamless way to connect Web and television experiences, which are becoming increasingly entwined, and make TV more like the interactive devices to which we are all becoming accustomed. "By bringing together live television, real-time contextual information, and an intuitive user interface, Meta Mirror is positioned to update television from unidirectional broadcast to two-way interaction," Notion says. It envisions several models for doing this: For sports events, that giant flat-screen on the wall would be dedicated to the game, leaving the device running MetaMirror to show real-time game info, Twitter updates, and other sports scores, which come in via XML feeds. New forms of online betting (uh-oh)/merchandising/purchasing could also be enabled.Direct links to iTunes, Ticketmaster, Wikipedia, and music Web sites could allow viewers to delve further into the music onscreen (click to enlarge).Notion Music broadcasts could be enriched by track names, album details, and artist information, while direct links to iTunes, Ticketmaster, Wikipedia, and music Web sites could enable viewers to delve further into the music.For lifestyle shows, meanwhile, onscreen objects--that seersucker swatch recommended by Martha Stewart, say--could become clickable and tied in with third-party shopping plug-ins for easy online buying from the couch. The MetaMirror concept does raise a question that popped up as soon as we first got sight of Google TV, a technology that will be built into TVs, set-top boxes, Blu-ray players, and other devices to enable people to search the Web, watch full-screen YouTube videos, find shows on Hulu, and otherwise multitask: why is this better than just sitting in front of a TV and browsing the Web on a laptop or iPad?We'll have to wait to test this product when and if it comes out (Notion is now looking for a partner to help build functioning prototypes, says creative director Ian Walton), but at first glance, the overlay feature could offer a cool way to let viewers shift their eyes from primary device to secondary device without losing sight of their favorite program. It could make for a more smooth interactive-TV experience. And it could give antisocial tube watchers an easy way to ignore their living-room compatriots.
Like to get instant player stats and trivia while watching TV sports matches? MetaMirror, a concept software platform out of Ireland, would overlay such data on a secondary device, keeping your television screen free of extra clutter while you watch the big game.The product would display real-time contextual content over a "mirror" of the television broadcast that simultaneously plays on an iPad, iPhone, Netbook, or other gadget. That might make for some visual cacophony at touchdown time, but Dublin design firm Notion, which came up with the idea, insists that it's a seamless way to connect Web and television experiences, which are becoming increasingly entwined, and make TV more like the interactive devices to which we are all becoming accustomed. "By bringing together live television, real-time contextual information, and an intuitive user interface, Meta Mirror is positioned to update television from unidirectional broadcast to two-way interaction," Notion says. It envisions several models for doing this: For sports events, that giant flat-screen on the wall would be dedicated to the game, leaving the device running MetaMirror to show real-time game info, Twitter updates, and other sports scores, which come in via XML feeds. New forms of online betting (uh-oh)/merchandising/purchasing could also be enabled.Direct links to iTunes, Ticketmaster, Wikipedia, and music Web sites could allow viewers to delve further into the music onscreen (click to enlarge).Notion Music broadcasts could be enriched by track names, album details, and artist information, while direct links to iTunes, Ticketmaster, Wikipedia, and music Web sites could enable viewers to delve further into the music.For lifestyle shows, meanwhile, onscreen objects--that seersucker swatch recommended by Martha Stewart, say--could become clickable and tied in with third-party shopping plug-ins for easy online buying from the couch. The MetaMirror concept does raise a question that popped up as soon as we first got sight of Google TV, a technology that will be built into TVs, set-top boxes, Blu-ray players, and other devices to enable people to search the Web, watch full-screen YouTube videos, find shows on Hulu, and otherwise multitask: why is this better than just sitting in front of a TV and browsing the Web on a laptop or iPad?We'll have to wait to test this product when and if it comes out (Notion is now looking for a partner to help build functioning prototypes, says creative director Ian Walton), but at first glance, the overlay feature could offer a cool way to let viewers shift their eyes from primary device to secondary device without losing sight of their favorite program. It could make for a more smooth interactive-TV experience. And it could give antisocial tube watchers an easy way to ignore their living-room compatriots.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)