Held for the first time back in 1996, the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference, usually abbreviated WWDC, is a conference that is primary used by Apple to showcase its new technologies and software for developers every year since then. WWDC 2007 was the most populated edition so far, with over 5,000 attendees, but I guess that WWDC 2008 will have even more people in the audience...


While WWDC 2007 was the latest conference, and it took place at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, CA on June 11-15 of 2007, this year's edition will be held between the 9th and 13th of June, in Moscone West, San Francisco, CA.

Tickets for this great event start at $1,300, but combo packs, ADC-specific memberships, as well as premium membership tickets are also available. To find out more about this, since it's all official already, feel free to visit Apple's event page, here.

Since in the last few weeks we didn't hear much about Apple's numbers, today the time has come for a new quick peak into their court, especially since a lot of statistics became available these days - iPhone SDK downloads, iTunes profits, and more...


First of all, the iPhone Software Development Kit has been downloaded over 100,000 times, according to Apple, and this is only the statistic for the first 4 days since its launch!

Next, reports about iTunes are also very interesting. Disney's CEO, Robert Iger, announced at the Digital Hollywood Media Summit that iTunes was behind 4 million Disney movies sales, as well as 40-50 million of their videos. Of the above, 1.3 million movies were sold by February 2007, in the first 3 months of operation of the iTunes movie store.

Remaining in the same area, iTunes' profits for 2007 are somewhere around the $570 million mark, according to Billboard's calculations, while Disney's profits for the sales mentioned in the previous paragraph are estimated to be almost $123 million.

These being said, I am sure Apple's 2008 will be another strong year for the Cupertino-based company, from all points of view, no matter who tries to hit them with various copyright infringement suits or other things like that...

If you could sue a notorious company for an imaginary guild, and there's a tiny chance to get some money in the process, would you do it? I hate lawsuits, and I hope I won't ever end up in a court of law, no matter the reason. Well, at least I got something to do, but if you're some obscure company, than if you sue Apple, you may be on the right way to an off-court settlement... if your reasons are backed up by facts, and - obviously- it's all about patents, once again!


The obscure company I mentioned is ZapMedia Services Inc. (please don't sue me for that, at least not before you get a decent website, OK?), and their patent infringement lawsuit is targeting the iTunes site, as well as related media players, basically all the iPods.

According to their news release, ZapMedia tried more than once to solve its problems with Apple the friendly way(I don't even want to think about what they did for that and how their dialogue with Apple went on), but it didn't just work.

Here's what their press release says about this whole deal: "Beginning in the late 1990s, ZapMedia, Inc., the predecessor of ZapMedia Services, created a unique platform and vision for the enjoyment of digital media assets. In connection with this vision, ZapMedia developed a system by which it could provide hardware, software and content to consumers to allow them to gain control over their digital media assets. To protect this intellectual property, ZapMedia has obtained U.S. Patent Numbers 7,020,704 and 7,343,414, each of which is entitled ‘System and method for distributing media assets to user devices via a portal synchronized by said user devices’."

Obviously, the above is only the prelude to their attack on Apple, but here you get that part, too - "In the course of its efforts, ZapMedia met with many major technology and media companies around the globe, including Apple, describing its vision in great detail. Without asking ZapMedia for permission, Apple subsequently unveiled its own system. Apple announced its iPod MP3 player with an integrated iTunes software application in October of 2001 and its iTunes store in April 2003. Dating to June 2006 and continuing through the fall of 2007, ZapMedia made Apple aware of the patents and their availability for license."

Oh, that was all??? Come on, "[...]hardware, software and content to consumers to allow them to gain control over their digital media assets" sounds like thousands possible things to me, so maybe next thing I'll go out and patent my own way of walking on the street, "gaining control over my legs and arms to keep the balance and ensure continuous motion forward, as well as into other directions". What do you think?

The good part about Apple is that software updates can bring you features you never dreamed of having on your iPod or MacBook, but there's also a dark side of these software updates, since it can all end up with data losses, as it happened last year, with a certain iPhone software update. Anyway, today it's not about the iPhone, but about Apple's iPod shuffle and the notorious MacBook Air.


First, we have the SMC Update 1.0 for the MacBook Air, available here, which is supposed to fine tune the speed and operation of the internal fan of Apple's thinnest laptop. This application requires you to download 551KB of data, requires Mac OS X 10.5.1 or later, and will end up in the Applications/Utilities folder.

At last, there's the 1.0.4 firmware for the new 2GB iPod shuffle, delivering various unspecified bug fixes, as well as "enhanced support". This one can be downloader from this page.

Currently, the iPhone is one of the most widely used mobiles when it comes to Internet access and this, no matter if we like or not, also implies accessing adult content. In some cases, you end up on adult Web sites without even having the intention to do that, but I guess this is not a big problem, unless your 10 years old is peaking... and it could get even worse if your kids have their own iPhones, but it seems Apple has something prepared to make everyone's lifes easier!


I won't keep you waiting any longer - as you probably expected to find out, I am talking about parental controls on the iPhone. For now, this seems to be a hidden feature, and probably still under testing, but I wouldn't be amazed to see it fully functional in the next software update for the iPhone.

The list of features that can be turned on or off looks like this:
- Playing explicit songs in iPod
- Website control in Safari
- YouTube control
- iTunes Wi-Fi Store control
- AppStore control

These being said, prepare to see this on your iPhone pretty soon. Unfortunately, this is not official, so it could as well be nothing more than a rumor, although I doubt it.