02/13, 4:00pm
RIM director Martin justifies slow turnaround
RIM director Roger Martin in an unusual interview with the Globe and Mail defended RIM's decision to hold for years before bringing in a new CEO. He saw there being no option for an outside CEO until RIM had groomed one from the inside, with outsiders being "morons from the outside" who would inevitably gut the BlackBerry designer. Martin went so far as to liken the departing Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis to the late Steve Jobs, insisting that only the two were talented enough and that RIM couldn't afforded an involuntarily exodus.
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02/12, 12:30pm
Eddy Cue, Yo-Yo Ma tribute Jobs at Grammys
The Recording Academy in its annual pre-show ceremony gave Steve Jobs its promised Lifetime Achievement award. The posthumous award was accepted on behalf of Jobs and family by Apple Senior VP Eddy Cue. In the acceptance speech, Cue highlighted how music was a central part of Jobs' existence; he was an outspoken fan of The Beatles and Bob Dylan, and often made music a focus of Apple's work.
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02/10, 10:35am
Also had top secret clearance in Pixar era
The US Commerce Department has confirmed that Steve Jobs did in fact serve on the President's Export Council during the George Bush Sr. administration, according to the Associated Press. This week the FBI published a 191-page file on Jobs from 1991, dealing mainly with a background investigation for an appointment to the Council. The AP remarks that Export Council members are unpaid, and meet a minimum of twice a year.
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02/09, 11:25am
Jobs 'deceptive,' with 'questionable' character
The FBI has released a 191-page file on former Apple CEO Steve Jobs, Gawker notes. The document actually dates back to 1991, when Jobs had long left Apple, but was being considered for an appointment to the President's Export Council in the George Bush Sr. administration. It also makes reference to an earlier bomb threat against Jobs, dating back to 1985.
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02/05, 3:50pm
Calpers wants Apple board policy change
California's public sector retirement system, Calpers, is hoping to push Apple to give it and other shareholders more control over the company's board of directors. The organization told the FT [reg. required] that it wanted a "governance upgrade" where board members are elected or rejected directly based on majority votes. At present, votes can't actively oppose a member, and only one vote is needed in favor to keep a board member in place if no one is contesting the seat.
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02/05, 11:00am
Google takes Apple director Simon Prakash
Signs that Apple and Google are honoring laws barring no-poaching deals may have surfaced this weekend after new tips that Google had hired away one of Apple's veterans. VentureBeat understood that Simon Prakash, Apple's senior director for product integrity, had been hired away to work on a "secret project." He would reportedly start on Monday.
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02/02, 6:25am
Taiwan company does strange take on the late Jobs
A bizarre commercial has surfaced from Taiwan promoting a new Android tablet showing Taiwanese impersonator taking on the trademark Steve Jobs black turtleneck and blue jeans look. In the ad, embedded below, the character is equipped with angel wings and a halo promoting the new tablet on stage with a slideshow in the background, much as Jobs’ would have in launching a new Apple product. It concludes with the Jobs-like character saying ‘Thank God I finally get to play with other tablets.’
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01/31, 4:10pm
Neil Young contends Jobs wanted better audio
Musician Neil Young in an interview at the D: Dive Into Media conference made the contentious claim that Apple's late chief Steve Jobs would have been pushing hard for improved audio quality. The "Needle and the Damage Done" creator claimed that Jobs, despite creating the iPod for digital music, preferred to listen to vinyl records at home. Apple's co-founder would have allegedly been working on higher quality devices, not just formats like Apple Lossless, to improve audio quality.
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01/30, 11:30pm
Memorialization continues for late co-founder
memorial posters and quotes from former CEO and co-founder Steve Jobs have started to appear around the Apple headquarters building in Cupertino, with photos of the late Jobs spanning across his Apple career and quotes that can be seen as inspirational or motivational, reports a recent visitor. The company is also continuing to run a special memorial page on its website that scrolls remembrances from Apple fans worldwide, and his last projects are being rolled out over the course of the coming years.
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01/27, 7:20pm
iPad has firm footprint two years on
Friday signaled the second anniversary of the iPad's introduction and what has since been interpreted as the start of a shift in the entire computing space. Apple's tablet was unveiled this day in 2010 at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco by its late co-creator, Steve Jobs. It would only go on sale April 2, but it proved to be polarizing from its unveiling, even for Apple loyalists.
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01/27, 6:55pm
Disclosed as part of 'no poaching' civil case
An unredacted letter from Steve Jobs to Google head Eric Schmidt in March of 2007 reveals that Google was attempting to recruit an Apple engineer, which resulted in swift repercussions after Schmidt was notified. The letter is part of a court case that alleges that informal "no poaching" agreements between Apple, Google and five other tech companies amounted to a conspiracy to limit opportunities and keep compensation low.
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01/27, 1:10pm
No war ever existed, says Gates
Former Microsoft head Bill Gates wrote Apple CEO Steve Jobs a letter shortly before the latter's death, according to a report from UK newspaper The Telegraph. "I told Steve about how he should feel great about what he had done and the company he had built. I wrote about his kids, whom I had got to know," says Gates.
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01/26, 3:25pm
Apple co-founder may have been too involved
Apple's iAd network may actually be in a position to improve without Steve Jobs as company CEO, according to a Business Insider source described as "familiar with the situation." The person says that Jobs used to make many of the decisions at iAd, and that as he became sicker, it became increasingly difficult for the iAd team to accomplish anything. With Jobs gone, Eddy Cue is said to be free to properly take charge of iAd, and make decisions on issues like pricing and technology that weren't discussed while Jobs was alive.
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01/25, 3:40pm
Apple co-founder 'every bit as intense' as Gates
Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates talks briefly about Apple co-founder Steve Jobs in a new Nightline interview on ABC, reports note. Gates comments, for instance, that it was strange for someone as "vibrant" as Jobs to die so relatively young. "It makes you feel like, 'Wow, we're getting old.' Yet you look back and think about the great opportunities we had," he says.
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01/24, 10:20pm
Obama State of the Union policies touch on Apple
President Obama during his 2012 State of the Union address directly touched on the importance of companies like Apple while also pointing towards policies that would change how Apple itself behaves. With Steve Jobs' widow Laurene in attendance, he wanted to foster an employment culture of talent and innovation that would create "the next Steve Jobs." Among the fixes were addressing the lack of engineers and scientists at a time when many were still looking for work.
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01/24, 3:40pm
Former husband likely to be mentioned by Obama
Steve Jobs' widow, Laurene Powell Jobs, is on the official guest list for tonight's State of the Union address by US President Barack Obama, according to the White House. She will watch the speech from First Lady Michelle Obama's box in the House of Representatives. Laurene is likely to be mentioned by the President in light of Steve's death on October 5th, but the invitation may also reflect an expected educational agenda in the speech.
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01/24, 12:05am
Steve Jobs said to have talked with Lytro on cams
Apple's Steve Jobs may have discussed long-term plans to use Lytro's light field cameras in future iPhones and other devices. An advance excerpt from 9to5 of the book Inside Apple claims that Jobs reached out to Lytro founder Ren Ng during 2011 to talk design and cameras. After meeting in Jobs' neighborhood of Palo Alto, Ng was asked for three points of collaboration between Lytro and Apple.
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01/23, 8:00pm
Uses a favorite quote taken from Stanford speech
Virgin America airlines has christened one of its Airbus 320 aircraft with a saying quoted by Steve Jobs (originally taken from The Whole Earth Catalog) as a way of honoring the late co-founder of Apple. The plane uses the "Stay hungry, stay foolish" mantra that Jobs said "I have always wished ... for myself" that he quoted as part of his memorable 2005 Stanford commencement address. The choice won an internal plane-naming competition.
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01/22, 12:05pm
Jobs family to keep stake but not board seat
The Walt Disney Company in its 2012 proxy statement (below) indirectly confirmed that the late Steve Jobs' family or his trust won't be seeking a board position at the Disney shareholder meeting on March 13. Although the family is the largest individual shareholder with a 7.7 percent stake, no mention is made of them in the filing beyond their investment. It also shows that Jobs' option holdings were gone at the end of Disney's fiscal year.
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01/20, 8:55am
DOJ shows no hiring conspiracy, but small deals
Newly publicized evidence in the wake of an agreement to stop no-poaching deals among Silicon Valley technology companies has shown that several firms did ultimately have deals but stopped short of colluding on a larger level. Although short on details of the supposed Apple-Google agreement, an e-mail message from Adobe Senior VP of human resources Theresa Townsley confirmed that Adobe and Apple had an informal rule against hiring each other's staff. At least in 2005, Adobe chief Bruce Chizen and Apple's Steve Jobs had blocked attempts to get each other's staff.
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01/16, 3:30pm
'Immense pressure' from Apple, Jobs' family
Saying he still believed "that we have not overstepped any legal boundaries," Tandy Cheung of In Icon announced that it wills top the offer, production and sale of the eerily photogenic Steve Jobs action figure it had offered earlier this month, reports PC World. In Icon had come under "immense pressure" from lawyer representing both Apple and Jobs' family and had originally said he would defy Apple's wishes and produce the figure anyway.
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01/13, 8:15pm
Friend Lee Clow will present legendary ads
The One Club, a non-profit professional organization for recognizing excellence in the advertising and design industries will induct Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, along with creative talent Paula Green and commercial director Joe Pytka, into its Creative Hall of Fame on January 17th at a ceremony in New York City. Chiat/Day and TBWA/Media Arts Lab pioneer Lee Clow, himself a Hall of Famer, will present some of the 100 Apple ads or designs that have received One Club awards.
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01/13, 9:35am
Newton was '15 years too early'
In a new interview with the BBC, one-time Apple CEO John Sculley gives fresh commentary on several Apple-related topics, among them the prospect of an Apple-made TV set. "I think that Apple has revolutionized every other consumer industry, why not television? I think that televisions are unnecessarily complex," he says. "The irony is that as the pictures get better and the choice of content gets broader, that the complexity of the experience of using the television gets more and more complicated. So it seems exactly the sort of problem that if anyone is going to change the experience of what the first principles are, it is going to be Apple."
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01/06, 12:15pm
Image rights typically expire postmortem
The InIcons Steve Jobs figurine is actually legal in most US states, leaving Apple with little support for its threatened lawsuit, a report argues. paidContent notes that there is no federal law governing rights to personal likeness, and that in most US states, those rights expire after a person dies. The few exceptions are Indiana, Illinois, Texas, Connecticut, Georgia, Florida, California, Ohio, Virginia, Washington, New Jersey, Nevada, Nebraska, Kentucky, Tennessee and Oklahoma.
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01/05, 12:00pm
Claims copying Jobs' likeness may be criminal
Apple is threatening to sue Hong Kong company InIcons over its Steve Jobs figure, says UK newspaper The Telegraph. The product is set to go on sale next month for $100, and copy many details of Jobs' signature look, from facial features down to his sneakers. Apple, though, is reportedly claiming in a letter to InIcons that it has the rights to Jobs' likeness, along with more standard likenesses such as logos, products, and names.
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01/02, 9:30pm
Impressive likeness but unlikely to ever ship
A new action figure doll of Steve Jobs has been produced by a toy company called "inicons" and features an impressively realistic cast of the late Apple co-founder's face, particularly the eyes, but is unlikely to ever actually ship due to being unauthorized. Pre-orders are being taken for the $100 set, which comes in a box that mimics Jobs' official biography (further decreasing its chances of ever actually going into production). The model is built to one-sixth scale.
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12/30, 8:25pm
Jonathan Ive becomes Knight Commander in UK
Queen Elizabeth II finished 2011 by knighting Apple's Senior VP of Industrial Design Jonathan Ive. Sir Jonathan is now a Knight Commander of the British Empire for fostering the UK worldwide and his direct contributions to design. He had already been named a Commander of the British Empire in 2005.
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12/30, 6:45pm
Says it will be 'rejecting these type of apps'
Photo-calendar app developer Nushka Labs says it has had a free "tribute calendar" dedicated to Steve Jobs rejected by the company, with a note saying that although "we appreciate your effort honoring Steve," the company "has decided to honor his life in other ways and will are not accepting these types of apps," implying that other apps commemorating Jobs will also be or have been rejected. The app maker will instead post the tribute images on its Tumblr blog.
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12/29, 4:45pm
Earlier auction reportedly hit $26,000
A fourth-generation iPod shuffle signed by Steve Jobs is now back on auction at eBay, its seller remarks. eBay is said to have accidentally ended the original sale, even as bidding reached up to $26,000. Although the company reportedly apologized to bidders, a new auction was needed. Bidding on the Shuffle is so far back up to $9,995 with over nine days left.
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12/29, 11:00am
Material originally intended for Apple museum
An Associated Press report has exposed some of the contents of Stanford University's Apple Collection, a part of the Silicon Valley Archives. The material was originally preserved by Apple with the intention of creating a corporate museum, but shortly after the return of Steve Jobs as CEO in 1997, the company contacted Stanford about donating to the SVA. In all Stanford collected two moving trucks' worth of books, photos, documents, software, marketing, and videos from Apple's Cupertino headquarters.
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12/29, 1:00am
Jobs' obituary was most-read business story
For Apple, 2011 was a momentous year in many ways. It was a record-breaking year in terms of success that saw the company surpass both Google and Microsoft to become the world's most valuable tech company. It was also the year that saw the loss of the company's co-founder and iconic CEO, Steve Jobs. The Wall Street Journal reports that eight of its top 10 most-viewed corporate stories were about either Apple, Jobs or both.
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12/28, 4:50pm
Rubin downplays Android openness in post removal
Google's mobile VP Andy Rubin has raised questions after he deleted the Twitter post touting Android as open. Posted as a response to the late Steve Jobs' assertions that Android openness is disingenuous, it showed the ability to compile an Android kernel and make a custom build. It's not clear when Rubin took the post down or why.
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12/27, 9:30pm
Focuses on Jobs' personality, petulance
A "lightly edited" but complete transcript of the interview between Fortune Senior Editor Adam Lashinsky (who is currently writing a book on Steve Jobs and Apple) and Jobs' biographer Walter Isaacson, which was conducted at a Commonwealth Club of California meeting on December 15th is now available. The transcript shows that the talk focused on darker elements of Jobs' personality and Apple's business decisions, a topic Lashinsky will be exploring in his own book.
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12/23, 12:10pm
Catcher overtime may be iPad 3 clue
A combination of statements and rumors on Friday has hinted that Apple might be pulling out stops to get the iPad 3 released as soon as possible in 2012. With rumors circulating from Taiwan's Economic Daily News that the iPad 3 was being targeted for a wide window between mid-February and late March, Catcher mentioned that some staff would have to work overtime during the Lunar New Year holiday in and around January 23. Informal sources also had other key iPad suppliers trimming back, with Foxconn (Hon Hai Precision Industry) limiting vacations to five days, battery designer Simplo, camera lens maker Genius, and connection builder Amer all having some staff work through the break.
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12/23, 1:30am
Hard-bargaining, suspicious Jobs called a 'joker'
More evidence has emerged of the young Steve Jobs as a difficult, hard-bargaining, secretive entrepreneur who was already convinced he and Steve Wozniak were onto a good thing when a letter written by advertising agency owner Mike Rose to his business partner describing his encounter with the pair in June of 1976 was printed by Bloomberg on Thursday. Jobs had been referred to Rose by Regis McKenna, but Rose was unimpressed with Jobs, calling him a "joker."
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12/22, 12:00am
Tribute to Jobs' early support of Graphisoft
Architectural software firm Graphisoft has debuted its 7-foot-tall statue of Apple's iconic co-founder Steve Jobs in its self-named technology park in Budapest, Hungary, AppleInsider notes. The artwork, commissioned by Graphisoft founder Gabor Bojar and created by sculptor Erno Toth, shows Jobs engaged in one of his most common activities, giving a presentation. Jobs was an early supporter of the company's ArchiCAD software.
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12/21, 9:05pm
Jobs posthumously honored with Grammy for music
The Recording Academy on Wednesday awarded the late Steve Jobs with a posthumous Special Merit Grammy for his contributions to music. He received the Trustees Award for "outstanding contributions" to music outside of performance. In a statement, the Academy praised Jobs for blurring the lines between technology and art through through iTunes, the iPod, and other fields.
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12/21, 2:30am
Purchase changed fortunes of Mac maker
December 20th marked the 15th anniversary of the day Apple announced a buyout of NeXT, the startup technology firm founded by Steve Jobs that eventually provided both the technology and the executive team that formed the basis of Mac OS X, the operating system that set the company on a new path. The $429 million paid for NeXT was until recently Apple's largest-ever acquisition, but the investment has stood the test of time.
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12/19, 4:30pm
Auction already over $10,000
A fourth-generation iPod shuffle with a case autographed by Steve Jobs is currently up for auction on eBay. The seller says that as part of an "innovators of tomorrow" program, he and three colleagues were invited to an internal Apple event, before which they got free Apple products including Shuffles and iTunes credit. The event ultimately gave the seller and his group a chance to talk with Jobs, at which point they convinced Jobs to sign the iPods.
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12/19, 1:35pm
Next Generation Secure Memory standard detailed
A coalition of companies have proposed the Next Generation Secure Memory standard to lock down movies and other content stored on flash memory. Panasonic, Samsung, SanDisk, Sony, and Toshiba are working on a system that would put unique IDs on embedded and removable storage like SD cards and encrypt content based on public keys. The move would let studios offer movies on a non-disc physical format but theoretically keep it from being freely copied without relying on protection in the file itself.
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12/16, 7:25pm
ITC finds enough to reexamine Apple exoneration
An administrative law judge at the International Trade Commission said on Friday that it would review one of the patent findings in its determination that Apple didn't violate HTC patents. The examination leaves the possibility that the agency could find Apple violating one of four patents HTC leveled in its countering dispute. It's not clear when the verdict will arrive.
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12/15, 8:15pm
Wants to cover post-death reaction
During a talk yesterday at the Commonwealth Club of California, Steve Jobs author Walter Isaacson mentioned a few small tidbits that hadn't been included in the book, but also brought up the idea that the tome, which has turned into one of the top sellers of the year despite only having come out in late October, could be expanded in future editions. "This is a first or second draft," Isaacson is quoted as saying, "not the final draft."
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12/15, 4:05pm
Kindle Fire trumps iPhone 4S
Three Apple-related search terms have placed among the fastest rising in Google's Zeitgeist charts for 2011. The annual effort catalogs the popularity of various searches, as well as broad trends. The fastest-rising Apple search term in the top 10 overall was "iPhone 5," coming in at number six. "Steve Jobs" was ninth, while "iPad2" closed out the 10 leaders.
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12/15, 1:35pm
Apple co-founder's charity efforts still secret
One of the few subjects Steve Jobs refused to talk about for a biography by Walter Isaacson was philanthropy, according to ISI Group's Brian Marshall. The analyst says he was in attendance at a recent Q&A session with Isaacson at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco. The author explained that during interviews, Jobs would stay mum about charity in general as well as the specific question of how his fortune would be distributed after his death.
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12/15, 4:50am
Bill Gates committed to Foundation
In a wide-ranging interview with the Sydney Morning Herald, Bill Gates ruled out a rumored return to the helm of Microsoft. Gates, who is currently holidaying in Australia with his family, said that he has made the transition from running Microsoft to running the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation full-time. When asked about Steve Jobs and his criticism of Microsoft and Gates personally, Gates brushed the barbs off saying that Jobs was driven by the fact that Microsoft Windows-loaded computers outsold Macs.
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12/14, 3:45pm
Takes less sentimental approach to Jobs
BBC HD and Two are tonight airing a new documentary on Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, titled Steve Jobs: Billion Dollar Hippy. The special goes on at 9PM local time, and is said to include insiders like Steve Wozniak and John Sculley, as well as other personalities like actor Stephen Fry, and an inventor of the web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee. It is however described as presenting a more "ruthless image of Jobs," for instance revealing that Wozniak cried after he learned through a book that Jobs had scammed money from him during a game project for Atari.
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12/14, 1:15pm
Political protesters get nod instead
Former Apple CEO Steve Jobs, who died in October, is conspicuously absent from Time's newly-announced 2011 Person of the Year awards, notes AppleInsider. In November celebrity panel on the topic appeared to hint that Jobs might be a serious contender. The executive has not only lost out on the top award, however, but even a runner-up position.
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12/13, 11:30pm
Live stream will cost $5 to view
Fortune's Senior Editor-at-Large and veteran Apple-watcher Adam Lashinsky will host a talk with Steve Jobs biographer Walter Isaacson at the Commonwealth Club of California in San Francisco tomorrow, December 14th. Although the event is sold out, the website Fora.tv will carry the conversation as a pay-per-view event for a $5 fee. Isaacson conducted over 40 interviews with Jobs for the book, and his biography of Jobs has been one of the year's most popular tomes.
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12/13, 3:45pm
Bids soar despite low attendance
(Updated with new price from Sotheby's) The documents used to found Apple have sold at a Sotheby's auction for $1.35 million, says Fortune. An original contract in the bundledates back to April 1st, 1976, and sports the signatures of Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs, as well as Ronald Wayne, who within less than a month withdrew his partnership, sacrificing a stake that would eventually become worth billions. It was Wayne, though, who preserved the documents and sold them to a manuscript dealer, who eventually sold them to Sotheby's.
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12/12, 1:30pm
Sales great 'in both formats,' company says
Online retailer Amazon has today confirmed that Walter Isaacson's Steve Jobs biography led in combined Kindle and print book sales at its storefront during 2011. "We chose ‘Steve Jobs’ as one of the Top 10 best books of the year, and even though it was published in October, the sales have been phenomenal in both formats," comments Amazon's senior editor for books, Chris Schluep. The title was earlier announced as Amazon's bestselling book of 2011, but that ranking appears to have excluded Kindle editions.
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