A new study by Nielsen about mobile device users revealed some interesting statistics about Apple iPad owners. First, they tend to be younger men, and second, they tend to be more susceptible to advertising than most (which may be how they ended up with an iPad to begin with).

To complete the study, Nielsen surveyed over 5,000 owners of portable devices, including the Kindle, smartphones, netbooks and more in addition to the iPad. Of those polled, 400 owned an iPad, and the majority of those 400 were young males: 65 percent were male, and 63 percent aged 35 or younger.

Surprisingly, they weren’t among the most wealthy respondents, despite having enough disposable income to drop on Apple’s fairly pricey tablet. That honor went to Kindle users, 44 percent of whom made $80,000 or more. Only 39 percent of iPad owners fell into that bracket, and 37 percent of iPhone owners.

Despite being slightly less well-off, iPad owners were more likely to interact with an ad. 39 percent of iPad users said the found ads on the device “new and interesting.” They’re also more likely to buy something based on advertising found on-device. That’s great news for newspaper and magazine publishers, who are hoping that iPad versions of their publications (and subscriptions for those) will revitalize their ailing industry.

Advertisers targeting the platform really couldn’t ask for a better audience than relatively wealthy, young men who are receptive to your message. With stats like these, the iPad could be the key to finally unlocking the massive potential of online advertising. Make no mistake, in terms of mobile advertising endeavors, iAd is the one to watch.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d):

• How to Measure Social Media Advertising
• Unlocking Social Media Ad Spending
• Report: U.S. Mobile Venture Capital Investment, Q2 2010

View full post on TheAppleBlog

Image courtesy of iFixit.

iFixit did one of its legendary tear-downs today – analyzing the hardware of a freshly-shipped Apple TV — and guess what they found? 8 GB of Flash storage. Apple hasn’t publicly revealed how much Flash storage the device is packing, mostly because it’s marketed as a streaming media player.

Users are supposed to rent streams straight from Apple or play back local content from their Mac or PC, with an option to stream videos straight from an iPad coming in November. But they’re not supposed to hoard these files on their Apple TV.

So why would the device have 8 GB of storage? For apps, of course. Eight GB isn’t all that much if you want to store HD video files, but it’s plenty to save apps. In fact, most iPhone app developers try to keep their apps under 10 MB, because anything larger would have to be downloaded via Wi-Fi, as opposed to through AT&T’s 3G network. Apple TV app developers obviously won’t have to deal with constraints like these, but the current iPhone / iPad app space shows you can do plenty with very little.

iFixit also found there is space for another Flash memory chip for future models. Furthermore, the hardware of the Apple TV is remarkably similar to that of the iPad, featuring the same processor, Flash memory chip and Wi-Fi chip set.

This means the Apple TV is technically capable of running apps similar to those currently available on the iPad, especially given that the Apple TV does, in fact, seem to run the same OS as the iPad. Members of the jailbreak community were able to confirm yesterday that Apple TV runs a flavor of iOS 4.1.

Related content on GigaOm Pro (subscription req’d):

• Mobile Operators’ Strategies for Connected Devices
• Strategies for the Future of Digital Content Storage
• How to Market Your iPhone AppL A Developer’s Guide

View full post on TheAppleBlog

Daimler Chairman Dieter Zetsche enjoys the party and looks to the future.

It's been customary of late for Mercedes Benz to kick off the Paris Motor Show (sorry Renault) the night before the doors open to the press.

Mercedes throws a little party at its Champs-Elysees showroom and on Wednesday night it was filled with guests and media.

The highlight for those of us still working is a quick interview – much quicker this time – with Daimler Chairman Dieter Zetsche who is in a buoyant mood and smiling broadly under his signature white handlebar mustache.

And why not? Mercedes sales and revenue have rebounded this year.

Zetsche admits luxury sales have been better than he could have hoped this year and says that Mercedes is increasing its market share within the segment.

At last year's show the luxury and super luxury makers were all cautiously optimistic.

After all, the high end of the auto market is not usually hurt by recession, given the rich don't suffer as much.

But like the airline industry, car makers have seen welcome sales increases, in part due to government support no doubt.

Zetsche notes that Mercedes, like Ford, cut costs enormously during the economic crisis, making it that much easier to post profits when sales increased.

This show is also about the electric car.

We will see mass produced models that are ready to hit the showroom rather than the concept electric cars that have been a staple at these shows for years.

The question is, will you the consumer buy one?

Zetsche told me it would be "optimistic" to say that Mercedes could see even five percent of it sales coming from its electric offerings by 2015, even though it plans to offer an electric version of most models.

Electric cars and electric batteries will be the talk here in Paris. It's not clear if enough buyers will want them though.

View full post on Business 360

Tiger Woods and Devon James.

It had to happen sooner or later.

One of Tiger Woods’ alleged mistresses is shopping an alleged sex tape she says she made with Tiger Woods.

“The tape is 62 minutes long and 37 minutes of it is us having sex,” Devon James told RadarOnline.com on Wednesday, placing its value at $350,000.

James said she was meeting with adult video distributor Vivid Entertainment to talk turkey.

PHOTOS: The Women Linked to Tiger Woods.

The notoriously press-friendly porn company refused comment.

“We can’t comment at this time,” Vivid president Steve Hirsch told the gossip site.

James’ mother, Sandra Brinling, doubted her daughter’s veracity.

FOX411: Devon James’ Husband Says Wife Slept With Woods.

“My daughter is nothing but a pathological liar… there was no relationship with Tiger Woods,” she told RadarOnline.com.

James previously asked a Florida judge to rule Woods was the father of her nine-year-old son.

The judge refused.

Woods divorced from his wife Elin Nordegren in August after news of numerous affairs surfaced following a fender bender outside is Florida home last Thanksgiving weekend.

Woods is currently competing in golf’s Ryder Cup in Wales.

View full post on Entertainment

So much for “Hilly-Milly”.

Just last year U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gushed to Vogue magazine about  former British Foreign Secretary David Miliband,  calling the young diplomat a dashing addition to the international scene.

“Well, if you saw him it would be a big crush. I mean, he is so vibrant, vital, attractive, smart. He’s really a good guy. And he’s so young!” Clinton said in remarks that provoked a spate of joking British tabloid headlines about the new “special relationship” between the United States and Britain.

Well, absence doesn’t appear to have made the heart grow any fonder. Asked on Wednesday if she had any advice for Miliband following his decision to bow out of frontline politics after losing a Labour Party leadership contest to his younger brother, Clinton was brief.

“I have no advice for anyone in politics. I’m out of politics. I obviously wish him well and I am very intrigued by the interesting political dynamics that are occuring inside the United Kingdom,” Clinton said, before launching into a positive assessment of the state of relations with Britain’s current government.

Asked again if she had any farewell words for Miliband, Clinton finally managed a few: “I enjoyed working with him and wish him well.”

It was left to visiting German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle to sum up Miliband’s exit from the international diplomatic round robin, where new faces appear in the wake of every big election.

“No, we will miss him, of course. He was an excellent colleague,” Westerwelle said.

“We really appreciated his work — but one door was closed and other doors will get open.”

Photo credit: Reuters/Stefan Wermuth (Clinton waves as she stands with Miliband on Jan. 28)

View full post on Global News Journal

My main computer for the past 19 months has been a Core 2 Duo unibody MacBook. It’s fast, has an excellent LED backlit display, is quiet, attractive and reliable. Nevertheless, I still log some three to four hours per day on average with my 10-year-old Pismo PowerBooks.

My Pismos are both substantially tricked out, with G4 processor upgrades, 8X SuperDrive DVD burner optical drive modules, maxed-out RAM, larger capacity hard drives, and more, which is a big part of why at more than a decade old they’re still going strong as useful work computers. It’s the degree of component modularity incorporated in the Pismo’s design that’s kept it in the game as a decent-performing tool much longer than will be the case with any subsequent Mac laptop design, including my MacBook.

Long Service Life

The superb reliability and amazingly long service life I’ve experienced with my Pismos have convinced me beyond doubt that if I could design my ideal computer it would be easy to take apart, upgrade, and repair, and composed of modular components as much as possible. The Pismo is not 100 percent perfect, but it comes closer than any other Mac laptop has before or since. From hard drive to RAM to expansion, it’s truly a hardware geek’s dream.

But the long life comes with a price for Apple: less frequent notebook replacement, which means fewer sales. Hence a deliberate move away from modularity.

Deliberately Difficult to Work on and Upgrade?

In my ideal laptop, not only the hard drive, but all of the major circuit board components would be modular and easy to replace. Apple has at times seemed to at least partially embrace the idea of modular components, but has evidently lost interest in this sensible and value-enhancing way of doing things. Recently, Apple seems bent on making Macs and its other hardware difficult to work on or upgrade beyond adding memory and storage capacity: CPUs hard-soldered to the logic board, lack of expansion bays (other than ExpressCard and/or SD Card slots), and the switch to built-in batteries are all cases in point.

The G3 Series PowerBooks have their CPUs and RAM mounted on an easy-to-remove daughterboard that facilitates easy upgrades. My ideal laptop would definitely have a processor daughterboard, as well as a slide-in/out motherboard, easily removable and replaceable video cards, sound cards, and power manager units — all user serviceable. Video RAM would be upgradable too, a feature no Apple laptop has ever supported to date.

Removable Device Expansion Bays

My dream MacBook would also have a removable device expansion bay, even two, like The Wall Street G3 PowerBooks did (the Wall Street supported batteries as well as 3.5″ removable devices like optical drives or hard drives in its left bay, and both 3.5″ and 5.25″ devices in its right bay).

Expansion bays on all of the G3 Series PowerBooks also support loading up two batteries for long computing sessions (I can get 10 hours plus on two extended life batteries with my Pismos) away from plug-in power, and you can carry spares. Unfortunately, battery flexibility is the polar opposite of Apple’s apparent notebook power trajectory.

More Commodified — Almost Disposable

Now, to be fair, my originally 500 MHz G3 Pismos sold new for $3,499, or $1,200 more than even the most expensive current Mac notebook model, the 17″ MacBook Pro, so that has to be considered when making overall value comparisons. The $999 MacBook far outclasses even my hot-rodded-to-the-limit Pismos in performance. Notebook computers have become a lot more commodified over the past decade, and at the lower-to-medium end of the price spectrum are now almost “disposable” products — cheaper to replace than repair.

Personally, I still find the concept of things that are built to last tremendously appealing. How about you? Would more modularity, expandability, and upgradability justify higher laptop purchase prices?

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d):

• Mobile Operators’ Strategies for Connected Devices
• Is the Opt-Out Model the Future of Home Energy Management?
• Transient Apps: The Consumer Influence on Enterprise Mobility, Part 2

View full post on TheAppleBlog

Colin Montgomerie has concerns over his players Tweeting during the Ryder Cup.

As everyone with two digits and a keyboard is aware, the Twitter phenomenon is ubiquitous, and in sport it’s no different.

Unfortunately, however, it’s also become a double-edged sword. On the positive side, tweeting and other forms of social networking does bring the fans closer to the players, helping sports men and women develop an individual platform that’s good for business.

PGA Tour Commissioner, Tim Finchem, said as much when I spoke with him recently at the Tour Championship.

“Anything that creates more interest, more exposure, things that people can talk about or relate to, that’s in our interest.” he said.

However, while social networking can be an enhancement tool, it can also be a distraction and worse.

“I thought I was the captain of a golf team not a tweeting association,” said European Ryder Cup Captain Colin Montgomerie, in response to press inquiries as to whether or not he had banned his team from Tweeting.

It was a good humored quip from the Scot, but a real fact of life for managers and coaches of every team or player to consider. How much information is too much information? Who needs to know? And how focused can a player be if he’s planning his next bon mot while he’s supposed to be attending to the job in hand?

Granted, as European Ryder Cup team member Graeme McDowell said: "You’re talking about adults who should be capable of setting their own social networking boundaries in order to remain professional."

And in most cases that’s true. But such is the immediacy of Tweeting, in which every waking thought, however profound or inane, can be slapped down and rushed out unedited to the world, there’s always the danger of a slip.

Take the current case involving former Indian Premier League cricket chairman, Lalit Modi, who’s just been removed from all involvement in Indian cricket in the wake of corruption allegations against him. What sparked the allegations and the resultant investigation? A Tweet giving ownership details of a new IPL franchise which embarrassed a minister in the Indian government, whose then girlfriend had been given a free stake in the new team. Lalit going from hero to zero in 140 characters.

And he’s not the only one. England footballer, Darren Bent, got himself into hot water last year by using Twitter to slam the chairman of his then club, Tottenham, over negotiations on a move to Sunderland. Bent at least saw the error of his ways though, and subsequently vowed to stop using Twitter, which he was doing 50 times a day, after a discussion with his new boss at Sunderland, Steve Bruce, who longs for the days when in-house spats stayed in-house.

Of course, it’s not just team members who get into trouble Tweeting. Heavyweight boxing champion, David Haye, recently attracted a storm of protest after Tweeting that his title-bout with Audley Harrison will be “as one sided as a gang rape.” And his Twitter response to the outrage didn’t help his image much either, when he Tweeted that if he were to apologize for all the stupid things he said he “wouldn’t have time for anything else during the day.”

And that’s the problem with Twitter, there is no safety net, which is fine if you’re Joe Public without a platform to build or an image to uphold, but not if you’re a sporting celebrity with responsibilities to your club, team, fans or sport.

So is banning tweeting by athletes the right thing to do? Well, that might infringe their civil rights. But if I were an authority figure within the world of sport my message would be simple -Twitter away on what you had for breakfast or what color pants you’re wearing today, but as far as your sport is concerned, tweeting should be strictly for the birds.

View full post on CNN World Sport

Germany will mark the 20th anniversary of its reunification on October 3 — but not everyone in Germany will be celebrating two decades together.

German unity has been a shaky marriage. That may seem like a surprise to people outside Germany. But opinion polls inside Germany show widespread discontent, especially in the formerly Communist east. Chancellor Angela Merkel has called it a success and other political leaders will be singing the praises of unification in their lofty speeches and German media interviews this weekend. But for many in the east, like straight-talking Brandenburg state premier Matthias Platzeck, German unification in 1990 was not a merger of equals but instead an “Anschluss” (annexation) with West Germany taking over East Germany.

Many easterners have endured change, hardship, upheaval and various negative developments – including sometimes being evicted from their houses that people who fled during the Cold War returned to reclaim. Free speech and freedom to travel have been great but the price has been high: millions lost their jobs, their homes as well as the fabric of their society and their way of life. Many are still struggling to come to terms with life in reunited Germany – and are understandably nostalgic about life in East Germany, to the great irritation of western Germans who have helped pay  1.6 trillion euros to rebuild the east. 

Reasons for their disenchantment can be seen everywhere: The eastern population has shrunk by about 2 million, unemployment soared, young people are moving away in droves and what was one of the Eastern Bloc’s leading industrial nations is now largely devoid of industry. Did it all have to happen like that? Platzeck thinks not. There are no ghost towns in the east yet but some cities with dwindling populations have torn down thousands of flats on their outskirts and let the forests grow back around them.

It should come as little surprise, then, that an opinion poll published in Stern magazine on Wednesday found 67 percent of easterners do not feel like they are part of a united country and only 25 percent said they felt like “ein Volk” (one people) – by contrast 47 percent of the westerners surveyed feel that the two parts of Germany have overcome what divided them in the last 20 years. Another poll found that one in 13 easterners would have preferred if the Berlin Wall were still splitting the two Germanys.  Another survey found 25 percent the situation in the east has worsened in the last 20 years.  It is also hardly surprising that eastern Germans vote for different political parties than their western brethren.

 We had the chance to talk to Platzeck, a leader in the centre-left Social Democrats and probably the most popular leader in eastern Germany, about his “Anschluss” comment – a loaded term that is usually associated with Nazi Germany’s annexation of Austria in 1938.  This is what he had to say: 

“There was an ‘Anschluss mentality’ at the unification negotiations. There is a lot that went wrong in those talks. We tried to explain (to West German negotiation partners) that when a society takes on a new form with a small group joining a larger group, it’s important to include some elements or symbols from the smaller group for the sake of harmony. That way the smaller group won’t feel like they’ve been overwhelmed and run over. But there was nothing the smaller group (East Germany) left in united Germany. …It was like ‘Look, children. We’ll take you in, we’ll pay for it all, but forget your demands’. That’s the attitude I was talking about.

 “It would have been easily achievable to save a few symbols, a few structures – there are some aspects of the way East Germany handled medical care that are coming back now as good ideas 20 years after they were discarded, some aspects of education like the 12-year school system or pre-school care from a very young age. All these things were thrown out of the unification talks because of ideological reasons. Just taking over one of these things would have been enough. But there was nothing. The rule was: what’s from the west is good what’s from the east is bad.

“Today, 20 years later, all the surveys in the east show that 50 percent of the people don’t feel like they’re part of united Germany – in their minds and their hearts. Everyone in the west is baffled by that. They ask: ‘Why don’t you feel like you’re part of one country after all the money we spent for you?’ My answer to them is always: ‘Just imagine you’re from a society that completely disappears and there’s nothing left’. You would also feel to a certain extent homeless. Some people got back on their feet but many never did.”

Platzeck also thinks it’s more than just a shame that there is hardly any industry left in the east. He said eastern leaders urged the Treuhand agency that was tasked with selling off East Germany’s state industries to “be careful about selling some of the more competitive companies to western German rivals. There was a near-complete de-industrialisation of the east in the 1990s. In Oranienburg, there was a steel plant that was competitive. It was sold by the Treuhand to Krupp. They bought the steel plant and shut it down six weeks later. We allowed these mistakes to happen in the 1990s. We could have held on to more of the industrial base in the east.” 

Platzeck was on a roll explaining why “Ossies” are so upset at the “Wessies” and did not want to stop: “Keep in mind that 80 percent of the eastern Germans had to learn a new profession after unification, that every second family in the east has been affected by unemployment, and that there were quite a few speculators from the west who came in here and made a killing. That’s caused a lot of discontent.” 

And finally he pointed to the village of Kleinmachnow, just outside West Berlin. Many fled the town for West Berlin in the years just before the Wall fell. Their houses were taken over by the East German state, which sold them to East Germans. But after unification, those who reclaimed their property were given priority over those who had acquired it from the East German state: “Take a look at Kleinmachnow,” Platzeck said. “Nearly 80 percent of the people living in houses in Kleinmachnow were uprooted and had to leave their houses. No one can be happy when they’re told they have four weeks to leave their house because someone whose name was in the property deed in 1946 shows up at the door. It may all be totally legal in united Germany. But that kind of thing doesn’t promote harmony. Go talk to someone who had to move out of their house 20 years ago and now lives in a small high-rise apartment somewhere what they think of unification. If you think of people in their situation, you might be able to better understand why there are a lot of people who are not very happy about the way things have turned out.”

View full post on Global News Journal

A new variant of KTM’s X-BOW model is being developed, and will be called the X-BOW R for 2011. Reports say that testing is going on at the Nürburgring Nordschleife, and some photos have also emerged. A boutique Austrian automaker, KTM focuses mostly on motorbikes and bicycles.

According to initial reports, the X-BOW R will be a sportier version of the current X-BOW, which has been available since 2008. The same 2.0 liter TFSI engine is featured in the new version, as in the Audi S3 but has been dialed up to around 300 PS (221 kW), say the reports.

The vehicle is a homologated, two-seat, open supercar that weighs 790 kgs. It has a carbon-fiber monocoque frame and the standard model features a 240 PS (177 kW) version of that VW Group-sourced 2.0 liter TFSI power plant. The performance-oriented design of the X-BOW for the R version are enhanced by a suspension lowering of the car and a new engine mount set-up that will ensure better handling.

There will be new options packages for the X-BOW R from KTM. These include a road-legal Sport package and a Race kit for a track-only version. The parts included in these packages can be obtained separately from KTM’s PowerParts equipment program. More details and price will come out in early 2011.

View full post on Car Blog | Breaking Motoring News Daily

Blog UNEASYsilence figured out this nifty little way of changing the icons of your iOS apps. It’s simple, works on both Mac and PC, and best of all, you don’t have to jailbreak your device to get it to work. It’s a great way to, say, revert the official Twitter app icon to that of Tweetie 2.

It doesn’t work with official apps (either the default set or Remote.app, etc.), unfortunately, so you won’t be able to completely customize your theme. But at least you don’t have to wait around for developers to change the icons on apps that offer great functionality but dismal aesthetics. Here’s how it works on an iPhone 4:

1. Install iPhone Explorer (free, Mac/PC).
2. Plug in your iPhone and launch iPhone Explorer.
3. Navigate to “phone name/Apps/appname/appname.app,” replacing the italicized values with your own, of course.



4. Backup the “icon@2x.png” file you find there by dragging it to a directory of your choice in Finder.
5. Name your replacement icon (which must be a .PNG file, size 114×114, 72 PPI with no transparency and no layers) “icon@2x.png” (case-sensitive).
6. Drag your replacement to that folder in iPhone Explorer, delete the original file, and manually power down and power back up your iPhone.

If you’re using an iPhone 3G or 3GS, instead of looking for and replacing filename “icon@2x.png,” you’ll be working with “icon.png” and your replacement should be 57×57, not 114×114.

iPhone 4 and latest gen iPod touch users can also use this to replace not-so-nice looking icons that haven’t yet been updated for the Retina Display. Just replace the “icon.png” file with a new 114×114-sized version. That’s what I did with the PicPosterous app for the purposes of this article, and it works great, as you can see in the screenshot.

And for nervous users, don’t worry. As you don’t have root access to your device, you can’t accidentally remove any crucial elements of your device’s OS. You also don’t have to worry about those rounded edges on your icons. Just use a square image and iOS will round the corners for you.

What icons are you looking forward to changing?

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d):

• How to Market Your iPhone App: A Developer’s Guide
• Report: The In-App Advertising Landscape
• HTML5′s a Game-Changer for Web Apps

View full post on TheAppleBlog