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2011年5月6日星期五

Bits: A Tool to Harvest iPhone Location Data

openpaths.cc A sample map uploaded to Openpaths.cc allows users to divide views based on time of day.

A lot people got upset about Apple collecting location data on iPads and iPhones. The company just issued an update to the devices’ software in part to tamp down the reaction.

But that data could be as useful to regular people as it is to Apple.

Developers in The New York Times Company Research and Development Lab released a Web-based tool on Thursday that they hope will corral the location data Apple had been collecting and make it available to customers and researchers.

The Times Company’s Research Lab calls the project OpenPaths.cc, and describe it as a tool to “securely store, explore, and donate your iOS location data.”

People who participate in the project are asked to upload location information from their phone, which is then made anonymous and added to a database with the data from every other upload. People can then browse their own location data on an?interactive?map. At a later date researchers will be able request access to the collection of location uploads.

Michael Zimbalist, a company vice president and the director of the research lab (where I used to work), said his staff decided?to create the tool to help people recapture the data they have created and to get it into the hands of? researchers.

“When our personal data becomes accessible to us in a useful form, all kinds of things become possible,” said Mr. Zimbalist in an e-mail interview. “But more importantly, we can become active collaborators in the quest for solutions to important problems in fields such as public health, genetics and urban planning.”

“Data is becoming the exhaust product of daily life,” he said. “Yet much of the data we generate is inaccessible to us.”

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2011年4月29日星期五

Jobs Says Apple Made Mistakes With iPhone Data

“We haven’t been tracking anybody,” Mr. Jobs said in an interview on Wednesday. “Never have. Never will.”

Mr. Jobs said that Apple would fix the mistakes in a free software update that it would release in the next few weeks.

Mr. Jobs, who is currently on medical leave, addressed the issue along with two Apple executives — Philip W. Schiller, the senior vice president of worldwide product marketing, and Scott Forstall, the senior vice president of iPhone software. A week ago, two researchers reported that they had discovered a file in Apple’s devices containing what appeared to be data of the locations visited by users over the previous 12 months. The discovery raised fears that Apple was tracking its users and prompted investigations by various European governments and demands for explanations from United States lawmakers.

Earlier on Wednesday, Apple posted a statement on its Web site explaining how its system used the file to pinpoint a phone’s location.

Mr. Jobs defended the timing of Apple’s response to the controversy, saying that “rather than run to the P.R. department,” it set out to determine exactly what happened.

“The first thing we always do when a problem is brought to us is we try to isolate it and find out if it is real,” he said. “It took us about a week to do an investigation and write a response, which is fairly quick for something this technically complicated.”

He added, “Scott and Phil and myself were all involved in writing the response because we think it is that important.”

Some privacy advocates who were harshly critical of Apple last week praised the company’s response, saying it was a step in the right direction.

“Apple acknowledged a mistake and they fixed it,” Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, said in an interview. “That’s a good thing.”

Confirming speculation from some security researchers, Apple said in the statement posted on its Web site that the file in people’s iPhones was not a log of their locations but rather “the locations of Wi-Fi hot spots and cell towers surrounding the iPhone’s location, which can be more than one hundred miles away from the iPhone.”

Apple said it used the data, which it called a cache, to calculate a device’s location more quickly than through GPS satellites.

But Apple acknowledged that it had made mistakes, which it attributed to programming errors, in storing the data for a long time, keeping the file unencrypted and storing the data even when users had chosen to turn off location services.

“The system is incredibly complex,” Mr. Forstall said. “We test this carefully but in such a complex system there are sometimes places where we could do better.”

Apple said it would reduce the location cache on the iPhone to no more than seven days. The company also said it would stop backing up the cache onto people’s computers and would delete the cache entirely when users turned off location services.

Apple also said that it updated its database of Wi-Fi hot spots and cell towers by using its customers’ phones as sensors. But it said that it could not locate users based on the file on the phone, and that it collected the information in an anonymous and encrypted form. The company cannot identify the phone user from the data, it said.

While some security experts have known about the existence of the file for some time, the issue made headlines last week after the researchers reported their findings at a technology conference in San Francisco. Apple came under heavy criticism for its silence after the discovery.

The location report attracted attention from some government officials, including Senator Al Franken, Democrat of Minnesota, who sent a stern letter to Apple asking why it was “secretly compiling” the data and what it would be used for. Congressman Edward Markey, a Democrat from Massachusetts, and Lisa Madigan, the Illinois attorney general, also sent letters to Apple asking for an explanation of the issue.

Google acknowledged last week that it, too, collected data about the location of Wi-Fi hot spots and cell towers from its users.

Apple’s statement contained a tidbit about possible future product plans. The company said it also was collecting traffic data from its phones and tablets to build a crowd-sourced traffic database. That would enable Apple to provide real-time traffic information along with navigation advice. Google already uses Android phones to collect real-time traffic information.

Mr. Jobs declined to answer questions about his health or about any plans to return to Apple. Last week, during the company’s quarterly financial report, Timothy D. Cook, the chief operating officer, said, “He continues to be involved in major strategic decisions, and I know he wants to be back full time.”

Nick Bilton contributed reporting from New York.

2011年4月23日星期六

IPhone Sales Help Profit and Revenue at Verizon

Verizon Communications posted strong first-quarter growth in wireless subscribers, helped by sales of the Apple iPhone, but the effect on its earnings failed to impress investors.

With subscriber growth barely beating Wall Street estimates, some analysts complained about profit margins and others said revenue growth was lower than they had hoped at Verizon Wireless, the mobile venture of Verizon and the Vodafone Group.

Verizon Wireless posted net additions of 906,000 subscribers, just slightly ahead of expectations from analysts contacted by Reuters, who had predicted more than 888,000 subscribers.

While Verizon Wireless, the top mobile service, added only slightly more subscribers than it did in the fourth quarter, it was well ahead of its archrival, AT&T, which added 62,000 net subscribers in the quarter.

But a crucial point for investors when comparing the two was that AT&T, even though it no longer had exclusive rights to the iPhone, won more new iPhone customers in the quarter than Verizon.

The expectation had been that hordes of customers would flee AT&T when the Verizon iPhone arrived because popular phones typically experience a surge in sales during the quarter when they are introduced.

“It was a stronger new customer driver for AT&T,” Steve Clement, an analyst at Pacific Crest, said.

Verizon, which put the iPhone on store shelves on Feb. 10, said it sold 2.2 million iPhones by the end of the quarter, compared with the 3.6 million iPhone sales at AT&T, which had the phone for the entire quarter.

About 22 percent of Verizon’s iPhone customers switched from rival carriers, but about 23 percent of AT&T’s were also new to that company. This implies that Verizon won fewer than 500,000 new customers through the iPhone, while AT&T added more than 800,000 iPhone customers from other carriers.

In addition, higher sales of advanced devices like the iPhone came at a high cost for Verizon as its profit margin dipped, Michael Nelson, a Mizuho analyst, said.

Its margin was 43.7 percent, compared with the 46 percent it posted a year earlier, based on earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization.

While the iPhone helped Verizon raise subscriber numbers, its sales were not significantly better than analyst expectations, as some investors had hoped.

“Over all it was a solid quarter, not necessarily a blowout quarter,” Mr. Nelson said.

Verizon earnings rose to $1.44 billion, or 51 cents a share, from $443 million, or 16 cents a share in the same quarter a year ago, when it shouldered hefty one-time charges.

Revenue rose to $26.99 billion, from $26.9 billion in the year-earlier period; the average analyst expectation was $26.86 billion, according to Thomson Reuters.

Shares of Verizon fell 88 cents, or 2.3 percent, to close at $36.91.

Samsung Countersues Apple on iPhone and iPad Patents

SEOUL, South Korea (Reuters) — Samsung Electronics filed a patent lawsuit on Friday against Apple over the iPhone and iPad in a tit-for-tat case after Apple claimed Samsung’s smartphones and tablets “slavishly” copied its products.

Apple filed a lawsuit last Friday accusing Samsung of violating patents and trademarks of its iPhone and iPad, as the popular gadgets are being threatened by the fast rise of rival devices based on Google’s free Android operating system.

The legal battle could jeopardize business ties between the two technology companies. Apple, based in Cupertino, Calif., relies heavily on Samsung for components like chips and LCD displays.

Operating systems have emerged as the crucial battlefield for dominance of the world’s smartphone market. Android became the most popular smartphone software in the United States in the three months ending in February, ahead of the software of Apple and Research In Motion, according to a recent survey by research firm comScore.

Samsung is one of the fastest-growing smartphone makers on the back of the Android boom and has emerged as Apple’s strongest competitor in the tablet market, with models in three sizes.

In a statement, Samsung said on Friday that Apple’s iPhone and iPad infringed its 10 mobile technology patents and it called for Apple to stop infringing its technology and compensate the company.

The suits, filed in South Korea, Japan and Germany, involved 10 claims of infringements mainly involving patents for power reduction during data transmission, 3G technology for reducing errors during data transmission and wireless data communication technology.

“Samsung is responding actively to the legal action taken against us in order to protect our intellectual property and to ensure our continued innovation and growth in the mobile communications business,” the statement said.

Global technology companies are locked in a web of litigation as they try to defend their shares of the booming tablet and smartphone market.

Strong sales of the iPhone and iPad translate into more revenue for Samsung. Apple was Samsung’s second-biggest client after Sony of Japan last year, bringing in around 6.2 trillion Korean won ($5.7 billion) in sales, and is widely expected to become Samsung’s top client this year.

The battle comes ahead of Samsung’s release of a new version of its successful Galaxy S smartphone next week in Korea, a crucial product for it to meet its goal of sales of 60 million smartphones this year.

Samsung Countersues Apple on iPhone and iPad Patents

The legal battle could jeopardize business ties between the two technology companies. Apple, based in Cupertino, Calif., relies heavily on Samsung for components like chips and LCD displays.

Samsung is one of the fastest-growing smartphone makers on the back of the Android boom and has emerged as Apple’s strongest competitor in the tablet market, with models in three sizes.

In a statement, Samsung said on Friday that Apple’s iPhone and iPad infringed its 10 mobile technology patents and it called for Apple to stop infringing its technology and compensate the company.

Global technology companies are locked in a web of litigation as they try to defend their shares of the booming tablet and smartphone market.

2011年4月22日星期五

Apple Lifted by Verizon iPhone Deal and Updates of iPad and MacBook

A surge in demand for its products yielded gains in income and revenue that were impressive even by Apple’s lofty standards. If there is a problem, it is that Apple is having trouble keeping up with some of the consumer demand.

Apple’s deal to make iPhones available on the Verizon Wireless network helped to lift iPhone sales, which more than doubled, to a record 18.65 million. The phones had previously been exclusive in the United States to?AT&T’s network, which many criticized for dropped calls.

“We did actually very well everywhere,” Tim Cook, Apple’s chief operating officer, said in a conference call with analysts.

Apple did not give specific numbers for iPhone sales for Verizon. But overall sales for both AT&T and Verizon increased more than one and a half times in the United States compared with the quarter a year earlier.

The arrival of the iPad2, just before the quarter ended March 26, helped stoke tablet sales. Apple sold 4.69 million tablets in the quarter, including the iPad2 as well as the original version.

Consumers bought so many, in fact, that Apple is having trouble keeping up with the demand, prompting analysts to ask when Apple could ramp up production, and by how much.

Mr. Cook acknowledged the problem, calling it “the mother of all backlogs,” but he declined to be more specific about this quarter’s production. Apple’s Web site says there is a one- to two-week delay in shipping online orders.?

A. M. Sacconaghi Jr., an analyst with Sanford C. Bernstein & Company, said that while Apple’s overall results were extraordinary, the number of iPads sold was a disappointment. “Whether Apple somehow messed up or was unable to secure components is an open question,” he said, but added, “It does sound like production will increase dramatically in the current quarter.”

To underscore his confidence, Mr. Cook reminded analysts that he approved Apple’s introduction of the iPad2 in 25 additional countries in late March and that the device will go on sale in 13 more countries next week. ?

Even Apple’s MacBook laptop computers, an afterthought amid all the buzz around Apple’s phones and tablets, showed big gains after the introduction of updated versions during the quarter. Apple sold 2.75 million laptops, a 53 percent increase.

Sales of Mac desktop computers, however, fell 12 percent, to one million.

Apple’s computer sales defied an industrywide decline of 3.2 percent in computer shipments in the first quarter that was attributed to the disasters in Japan and a lack of better technology that would prompt consumers to upgrade, according to the research firm IDC.

Apple said it did not expect any significant impact on its supplies from Japan, where it gets hundreds of components.

The?iPod, Apple’s music player, was among the few disappointments. Sales declined again, yet another indication of how smartphones, generally incorporating music players, are replacing single-function products. Sales of the iPod fell 17 percent, to 9.02 million.

Apple reported that net income in the second quarter rose 95 percent, to $5.99 billion, or $6.40 a share, from $3.07 billion, or $3.33 a share, in the year-ago quarter.

Revenue climbed 83 percent, to $24.67 billion, from $13.5 billion.

The results surpassed analysts’ expectations of $5.35 a share and revenue of $23.27 billion, according to Thomson Reuters.

Shares of Apple rose 3.1 percent, to $353.02 in after-hours trading after the announcement. In regular trading, shares had climbed 1.35 percent, to $342.41.

Mr. Cook has been in charge of Apple’s day-to-day operations since early this year after Steven P. Jobs, Apple’s chief executive and co-founder, took a leave of absence. Mr. Jobs, who has battled pancreatic cancer, said he needed to deal with health issues.

Asked about Mr. Jobs and his role at the company these days, Mr. Cook said: “He continues to be involved in major strategic decisions, and I know he wants to be back full time.”

Apple said it expected third-quarter revenue of around $23 billion and $5.03 a share. That is below analysts’ forecasts of $23.82 billion in revenue and $5.25 a share in income.

2011年4月21日星期四