Linked List: July 7, 2011

Thursday, 7 July 2011

Bloomberg: Apple Cutting iAd Rates ★

Adam Satariano, reporting for Bloomberg:

Apple Inc.’s iAd mobile-advertising business has cut rates by as much as 70 percent as some marquee clients are using rival services, two people with knowledge of the matter said, signaling the company is struggling to parlay its technology leadership into success in the ad industry.

Are any developers making good money from iAd? I’m not aware of any.

During his introduction of iCloud in the WWDC keynote, after he revealed that the service would be free of charge and without ads, Steve Jobs said: “We build products that we use too, and we just don’t want ads.” When he said that, I remember thinking, yeah, that’s an obvious shot at Google, but Jobs really sounded like he meant it. He really doesn’t want ads next to his email.

But I also remember thinking that it didn’t sound like the sort of sentiment you’d expect to hear from the CEO of a company running a would-be major mobile ad network.

Apple Brags of 15 Billionth App Store Download ★

Apple PR today:

“In just three years, the revolutionary App Store has grown to become the most exciting and successful software marketplace the world has ever seen,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing. “Thank you to all of our amazing developers who have filled it with over 425,000 of the coolest apps and to our over 200 million iOS users for surpassing 15 billion downloads.”

An interesting number in there: Apple is claiming “200 million iOS users”. At WWDC they claimed to have sold over 200 million iOS devices, but devices and users don’t correlate one-to-one — some people own multiple (or like in my case, many) iOS devices, and some iOS devices (especially iPads, I bet) are shared by multiple family members.

‘I Believe You Are the Greatest Film-Maker at Work Today.’ ★

Solid gold from Letters of Note: Stanley Kubrick, age 31, writes to Ingmar Bergman. Best explanation you’ll ever find of what Kubrick attempted to achieve in his own pictures. (Via Coudal, of course.)

Walter Isaacson’s Upcoming Steve Jobs Biography Gets New Title ★

The previous title was atrocious; the new one is perfect.