WebProNews

Tag: D10 Conference

  • LinkedIn Parodies Commercials in its D10 Interview

    LinkedIn Parodies Commercials in its D10 Interview

    Kara Swisher’s interview with LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner and LinkedIn Chairman Reid Hoffman detailed LinkedIn’s very stable roadmap for building its social network while also making it profitable for investors. There were no surprises or big LinkedIn announcements, but the heads of LinkedIn did bring a parody video that shows the social network for professional networking actually has a pretty good sense of humor. In the video, television commercials for products such as cars and medications are parodied, while the most inane focus group ever imagined grades the ads. Oh, Weiner and Hoffman also make an appearance turning down an overzealous brand marketing executive. There’s a lot going on, but the dry humor contrasting the ridiculous parodies makes the whole thing worth watching.

    Perhaps Weiner could give Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg some tips on keeping things light and funny. Zuckerberg is going to need a good sense of humor if he hopes to take all of the current criticism of his company’s recent IPO, much of it personal, in stride. It’s too late for Zuckerberg to ask Weiner for advice on how to successfully launch an IPO the way LinkedIn did, but perhaps some advice about how to double revenue over the course of a year and greatly impress analysts could still be helpful.

    The D10 conference is a yearly conference organized by The Wall Street Journal’s All Things Digital website. The conference features interviews with influential media and technology figures. D10 tries to differentiate itself from other tech conferences by eschewing scripted presentations and marketing pitches.

    (via All Things D)

  • Tim Cook Thinks U.S. Patent System Is Broken

    Tim Cook Thinks U.S. Patent System Is Broken

    Often in the tech world it seems that you can hardly go a day without hearing about some new lawsuit where one company is suing another for violating its intellectual property. Whether it’s non-practicing entities (i.e., patent trolls) going after companies like Apple or Microsoft to make a quick buck, or it’s companies like Apple, Samsung, Microsoft, Motorola, or Google going after one another, the patent wars have gotten pretty crazy.

    In an interview with Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg during the opening session of AllThingsD’s D10 Conference, Apple CEO talked at some length about these lawsuits, and expressed some pretty strong opinions. When Swisher asked whether Cook thought patent litigation was a problem for innovation, Cook responded “well, it’s a pain in the ass.”

    He went on to echo comments he made during Apple’s quarterly earnings call last month. He stressed his belief that “it’s important that Apple not be the developer for the world.” He went on to draw an analogy between Apple’s innovation and art:

    We can’t take all of our energy and all of our care and finish the painting and have someone else put their name on it. We can’t have that. The worst thing in the world that can happen to you if you’re and engineer and you’ve given your life to something is for someone to rip it off and put their name on it. And so what we want to accomplish is that we just want people to invent their own stuff.

    Mossberg replied that there are companies that accuse Apple of ripping them off, and have therefore sued Apple. In response, Cook pointed out the difference between ordinary patents and standards essential patents. He said that “the vast majority of those [suits] are over standards essential patents.” A standards essential patent covers anything that is necessary to build a certain kind of product – Cook used the example of a kind of technology that is necessary to access a 3G data network. As Cook pointed out, owners of patents that are considered standards essential are legally obligated to license those patents on fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory (FRAND) terms.

    Companies that refuse to do so, Cook said, are basically trying to cash in: “they’re in essence telling you that they’re not going to license it because they want to go get an injunction.” Cook called the use of standards essential patents in litigation “an area where the patent system is broken today.” The suits that certain companies (Cook avoided using names, though Motorola is notorious for this) file over standards essential patents represent an attempt, Cook said, to use the court system “in a way that it wasn’t intended.”

    He went on to say that Apple does not file lawsuits over the standards-essential patents it owns, “because we view that it’s fundamentally wrong to do that.” Such suits, he said, were “never the intention of a standards essential patent.”

    Getting back to the original question of whether patent litigation is a problem for innovation, Cook said that it “is maddening, it’s a waste, it’s a time suck. However, does it stop innovation? It’s not going to stop us.” Cook concluded by expressing hope that “some of the regulators and so forth will charge at this and begin to fix it.”

    You can watch the full video with Cook’s remarks below:

  • Tim Cook: Apple May Kill Off Ping

    Tim Cook: Apple May Kill Off Ping

    Speaking to Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher at last night to kick off AllThingsD’s D10 Conference, Apple CEO Tim Cook revealed that Apple is exploring the possibility of killing Ping.

    Wait, you may be saying, what’s Ping? Considering how little attention Ping has gotten over the last couple of years, you could be forgiven for not knowing what it is. The next time that someone tells you that everything Apple touches turns to gold (or cash, or increased market value, or whatever), you can point to Ping. Launched in 2010 as part of iTunes 10, Ping is Apple’s attempt at its own social network centered on music. Ping promised to let users “[f]ollow your favorite artists and friends to discover the music they’re talking about, listening to, and downloading.”

    Ping

    While it may have seemed like a good idea at the time, Ping was an epic flop, to put it bluntly. The simple fact is that almost nobody used it. During the question and answer portion of last night’s interview, an audience member asked about Ping, and whether Apple would continue to experiment in the social media space. Cook’s reply neatly avoided discussing Ping directly: “Apple doesn’t have to own a social network, but does Apple have to be social? Yes.” He pointed to the integration of Twitter into iOS 5 last year, and into OS X Mountain Lion later this year. Earlier in the talk he suggested that Facebook integration may be coming soon, too.

    Cook wasn’t allowed to get off that easily, though. When asked again about Ping directly he responded that Apple had tried Ping, and the customers just weren’t interested. He said that Apple would look at killing it, though Swisher suggested selling it to Google+.

  • Tim Cook Promises Improvements To Siri Coming Soon

    Tim Cook Promises Improvements To Siri Coming Soon

    Even if you don’t have an iPhone 4S (or a jailbroken iOS device running Spire), you know what Siri is. It’s the voice-activated “killer app” for the iPhone 4S, introduced in October. It’s the focus of pretty much every ad for the iPhone 4S you’ve ever seen (including some recent ones with celebrities).

    Siri is also, however, a subject of some controversy. While most iPhone users like it, others hate it. Some of those even claim that Apple’s ads are deceptive and are suing Apple for false advertising.

    Whatever else Siri may be, though, there’s one thing that Apple has emphasized from the beginning: as cool as Siri can be when it’s working properly (like in Apple’s ads), the feature is still in beta. Unfortunately, that means that Siri won’t always work like it’s supposed to.

    Speaking to Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher last night at AllThingsD’s D10 Conference, Apple CEO Tim Cook acknowledged Siri’s problems, and promised that the personal assistant software would be getting some big improvements in the future.

    Mossberg pointed out that “when Siri works, it works really well, it’s kinda like magic.” He went on to say, though, that “a lot of times it actually doesn’t work, and that’s not what a lot of people have come to think about Apple products.” He wondered whether Siri was up to Apple’s standards. Cook replied by pointing out Siri’s popularity with users of the iPhone 4S, which is “the most popular selling phone in the world.” Nevertheless, he acknowledged that “there’s more that it can do.” He said that Apple has “a lot of people working on this,” that they had “some cool ideas about what Siri can do, and that “I think you’ll be really pleased with some of the things that you’ll see in the coming months on this.”

    Swisher then asked Cook whether voice interaction would be critical to the phone industry moving forward. Cook replied that “Siri’s proven to us that people want to relate to the phone in a different way.” Siri, he said, represents the first real innovation in mobile technology interface since the touchscreen (which, of course, was brought into the mainstream by Apple with the original iPhone in 2007). Cook said that what makes Siri amazing is its ability to understand the context and intent of what’s being said, “not just voice recognition, voice recognition’s been around for a long time.” Siri’s best feature, Cook said, “is that she has a personality, she becomes many people’s best friend.” When Mossberg jokingly asked if that wasn’t actually kind of sad, Cook replied “hey, I’m not a judge.”

    Getting more serious again, Cook said that Siri “is something that people dreamed of for years, and it’s here.” He went on to say that “yes, it can be broader and so forth, but we see unbelievable potential here.” He concluded that “you’re going to be really happy with where this is going, we’re doubling down on it.”

    Later in the evening, Cook was asked about how Apple names new products, specifically the new iPad (as opposed to the iPad 3). He noted that the iPad naming represents a return to what Apple usually does with its products – e.g., the MacBook Air, iMac, and iPod. He also briefly touched on iPhone naming conventions, pointing out that the S in iPhone 3GS stood for “speed.” He then confirmed what most have long suspected: the S in the iPhone 4S name stands for “Siri.”

    Just as with Facebook integration in iOS, Cook carefully avoided giving any hint of when we might expect the improvements to Siri that he’s talking about. With the WWDC 2012 conference – and the probable unveiling of iOS 6 during Apple’s keynote – just around the corner, though, it’s a fair bet that at least some of these improvements will be coming very soon.

    You can see the video of Cook’s remarks about Siri below:

  • Tim Cook: Apple To “Double-Down” On Secrecy

    Tim Cook: Apple To “Double-Down” On Secrecy

    Every company has its own little quirks: aspects of its operational philosophy – small or major – that give it its own personality. One of Apple’s quirks, if you will, is its devotion to secrecy. Apple keeps every detail of its operations – particularly upcoming products – locked down tight with a vehemence that some would call paranoia.

    Some have thought that Apple’s secrecy was primarily a characteristic of the company’s late founder and CEO, Steve Jobs, and that with Tim Cook now at the helm, Apple’s philosophy on this might change. Any such hopes were dashed last night, however. Speaking at AllThingsD’s D10 Conference, Cook told Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher, with whom he was sharing the stage, that “we’re going to double down on secrecy on products.” While the company would continue to increase its transparency with regard to things like the environment and supplier responsibility, secrecy on new products would remain paramount.

    Later in the evening, during a discussion on Apple’s relationship with Facebook, Cook reiterated that “I feel strongly that being secretive on the product side of our business is so important.” When asked by Swisher about Apple’s practices regarding the purchase of new companies, Cook said that Apple does purchase other companies, but that these purchases are “not ones that we seek to make public.” While some acquisitions can’t be hidden, Cook said that “if I don’t have to [tell you about it] I don’t.”

    [Lead Image Credit: AllThingsD]

  • Tim Cook Hints iOS Facebook Integration May Be Coming Soon

    Tim Cook Hints iOS Facebook Integration May Be Coming Soon

    When Apple unveiled iOS 5 last fall with Twitter integration, the big question on everyone’s mind was “Where’s Facebook?” Apple had reportedly been in talks to bring Facebook integration to iOS since before iOS 4, but nothing had ever come of it. When iOS 5 came out with Twitter integration but no Facebook (a feature that appears to carry over to OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, coming later this year), it raised a lot of eyebrows.

    Last night at AllThingsD’s D10 Conference Apple CEO Tim Cook spent some time on stage with Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher, talking about Apple. During that talk, Cook strongly hinted that iOS would be getting Facebook integration in the not-too-distant future. When asked about the situation by Mossberg, Cook said that he thought the relationship between Facebook and Apple was “very solid,” pointing out that “I saw Sheryl earlier, you can ask her” (referring to Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg). He went on to say that he had “great respect for them,” and that iOS users should “stay tuned on this one.”

    Of course, there have been difficulties between the two companies in coming to an agreement in the past, Swisher noted, pointing out that Steve Jobs said that Facebook was “onerous.” She asked Cook if he thought Facebook was onerous too. Cook paused briefly before saying “they have their way of doing things,” a remark that drew laughter from the crowd.

    Swisher pressed him further, asking whether Apple and Facebook were “must-haves for each other.” Cook replied that Apple’s goal is to “provide customers simple and elegant ways to do the things they want to do,” and that as such he wanted customers to have the best possible experience when using Facebook on their iPhones or iPads, “so stay tuned,” he repeated.

    These remarks echo comments made by Cook earlier this year. Back in February Cook addressed a meeting of Apple’s shareholders. When asked by one whether Facebook is “friend or foe,” Cook said that Facebook is a friend and noted the enormous overlap between Facebook users and Apple customers. He also pointed out how good for Twitter iOS integration has been, and suggested that Apple and Facebook “could do more together.”

    So there you have it. While Cook did not outright promise that Facebook integration would be coming in iOS 6 (or OS X Mountain Lion), it’s pretty hard to avoid the impression that it will at least be coming fairly soon.

    Check out the video of Cook’s discussion of Facebook below: