The economy may wax and wane, but overheated tech rhetoric lives forever. Today's how news: The internet apps for Apple's internet phone will soon be bigger than the internet. What?
It doesn't take a particularly creative publishing executive to imagine a big opportunity in the new iPhone software Apple showed off today.
Your baby daughter is wailing. You'd really like to quiet her down, but you don't want to have to actually interact with her to make it happen. What to do? Let your cell phone do the work, naturally! As one dad tells it, when his infant daughter starts to get "fussy" in the car or during a walk, he simply turns on the free iPhone app "White Noise Lite" and drops it into her carrier. "It immediately relaxes her," he explains, which is nice since that makes two of them.
In your warming Wednesday media column: Steve Forbes is in your pocket, insulting your bosses in your competitor's paper may damage your career, somebody fucking finally does not write an Obama book, and much more!:
Congress is debating whether journalists should be subsidized. But hey, did anyone know that we're already coddling J-school students by letting them take federal loans for iPhones?
In a much needed antidote to the jealousy even those of us with minimal tech skills harbor toward people who have made a fortune inventing iPhone applications, many disgruntled developers are venting about how unfair it is that their apps didn't make it into the Apple store. On Wednesday, Apple dropped the "Baby Shaker"—users had to shake their phones to get a digital baby to stop crying; last year's "I Am Rich" app, which served no purpose but still cost $999, was initially accepted by Apple but then pulled shortly thereafter. So what other juvenile pleasures are iPhone users being denied by Apple's inscrutable screening process?
Hackers have broken into Salma Hayek's email, revealing the actress's iPhone-app obsession, designer-clothes habit, travel plans, and more. (Her billionaire husband, François-Henri Pinault, who's throwing a second wedding for her this weekend, pays the bill!)
In the past, when science fiction writers imagined how machines would be our faithful servants, they mostly envisioned robots performing useful tasks like making breakfast and doing laundry. They had no idea that in the post-millennial age, the finest technological minds would be working tirelessly to provide multiple solutions to a single issue of immeasurable import: How can insentient devices protect us from our embarrassing propensity to drunk dial/email/text?
