Posts by John Brownlee

facebookhome

Here’s an interesting fact for you. Facebook Home — the new app that deeply-integrates Facebook into Android smartphones (and probably most notable for its system-wide Chat Heads messaging) — doesn’t work as intended on iOS… but it was actually prototyped on Quartz Composer, Apple’s visual development environment distributed as part of Xcode!

johnson_jobs

Now that former Apple retail chief Ron Johnson has been fired from his CEO gig at JC Penney, there’s a lot of talk about whether or not the man who created the juggernaut of Apple’s retail experience will return to Cupertino, to fill the very role he vacated back in 2010.

In an interview with Bloomberg, former Apple CEO John Sculley was asked about what Ron Johnson should do now. Sculley notes that one of the best things about our business culture is that we allow people to fail, and that hiring Johnson would be a coup by any company.

First headhunter on the list? It should be Samsung, says Sculley.

justin-bieber-teen-iphone

Piper Jaffray has once again asked the teenage blight upon our fair nation to stop popping pimples and sexting for a second to tell them what gadgets they want to buy next year. And, duh, it’s the iPhone.

Having just come back from a weekend wedding in Austin, Texas, I can speak well of it. It is a city where every liquid is beer, every food is meat, and every dog is good.

It is also a city of, as near as I can tell, universally terrible mobile broadband coverage, especially under Verizon. But who needs LTE when you’ve got sickly overpowered broadband?

Good news, Austin. Google is bringing Google Fiber to Austin!

apple-samsung-advertising

It’s no secret that Samsung outspends Apple on advertising by a huge margin. Whether those ads are crap or strokes of genius, of course, is a matter of opinion. But dollar for dollar, the truth is clear: Samsung has to spend more money to get its smartphones noticed than Apple does.

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