Apple 'Celebrating Steve' event video now streaming online

Apple Inc. celebrated Steve Jobs' life in a companywide but private event Wednesday, and now video of the tribute is streaming online on Apple's website.

The video, which runs about 80 minutes in length, starts off with Apple CEO Tim Cook speaking of Steve Jobs' life and introducing Laurene Powell Jobs, Steve Jobs' wife, to a crowd of thousands of Apple employees in an outdoor ceremony at Apple's headquarters in Cupertino.

Huge banners hung from Apple's buildings featuring photos of Jobs throughout his life.

Cook, in his remarks to the crowd, shared quotes from Jobs, including one in which the leader said, "My model for business is the Beatles. They were four guys who kept each other's kind of negative tendencies in check. They balanced each other and the total was greater than the sum of the parts. That's how I see business. Great things in business are never done by one person, they're done by a team of people."

Cook also said of Jobs, Apple's co-founder and longtime CEO:

I personally admire Steve not most for what he did or what he said but for what he stood for.

The largest lesson I learned from Steve was that the joy in life is in the journey, and I saw him live this every day.

Steve never followed the herd. He thought deeply about almost everything and was the most unconventional thinker I have ever known. He always did what he thought was right, not what was easy. He never accepted the merely good. He would only accept great -- insanely great.

Cook, who took over as Apple's CEO when Jobs resigned in August, also noted that Jobs told him that he didn't want Apple to fall into trying to make decisions based on what he would do once he was gone. Instead, he told Cook: "Don't ask what I would do. Don't ask what I would want. Just do what's right."

Apple's lead designer Johnathan Ive spoke at the event, as did former U.S. Vice President and Apple board member Al Gore. Singer Norah Jones and the band Coldplay performed at the event.

Apple temporarily shut down its retail stores for a few hours Wednesday to allow company employees to watch live video of the service, allowing for Apple as a whole to take part in remembering its late leader.

Jobs died on Oct. 5 in his Palo Alto home at age 56 of respiratory arrest and a pancreatic tumor.

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-- Nathan Olivarez-Giles

twitter.com/nateog

Images: A screenshot of Apple's 'Celebrating Steve' event streaming in the Safari web-browser. Credit: Apple Inc.

Amazon Kindle Cloud Reader app bypasses Apple's rules

Amazon's new Kindle Cloud Reader is exactly the sort of iPad app Apple isn't allowing in its App Store.

Built in HTML5, running on the Web and not just iOS, the Kindle Cloud Reader Web app enables Kindle users to not only read e-books they buy from Amazon but buy books from within the app itself.

Unlike Amazon's native iOS Kindle app, Kindle Cloud Reader skips the App Store and iTunes. No downloads required. All that needs to be done to get the Cloud Reader on an iPad is to open Safari and type the right URL, www.amazon.com/cloudreader.

But while users may see a big advantage in being able to read a book from the cloud (i.e. the Internet) and buy a new book all in the same app -- as Kindle Cloud Reader offers -- the real winner here could end up being Amazon.

That's because anything sold through Apple's App Store or iTunes gives Apple a 30% cut of revenue. Amazon, the world's largest online retailer, isn't too keen on forking over a portion of its sales, and Kindle Cloud Reader gives Amazon a book-selling iPad app that it can have full control over.

Apple doesn't allow the buying of digital content (books, video, music, etc.) from within an app unless that content is sold through iTunes and the App Store -- unless that content is delivered in a subscription, as magazines or newspapers are. Apple's iOS app rules don't allow an app to link to an outside website where users can buy anything, which is why Amazon removed a link to its Kindle store from its iOS Kindle app and Barnes & Noble did the same with its Nook app.

The HTML5 app, which also works with Apple's Safari and Google's Chrome browsers on Macs and PCs (no Firefox, Opera or IE support yet), gives Amazon and its customers a way to get around the App Store restrictions.

Amazon isn't the only company looking to HTML5 for an App Store workaround -- Wal-Mart's Vudu is doing the same with its video storefront and Rdio last week skipped the "Apple tax," as some call it.

As HTML5 becomes more popular for building websites and Web apps, we can probably expect to see more Web apps to pop up that also set their own rules.

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twitter.com/nateog

Image: A screen shot of the Amazon Kindle Cloud Reader HTML5 app on an Apple iPad. Credit: Amazon /Apple

Apple adds 'do not track' tool to Safari browser in Mac OS X Lion, report says

Apple has included a "do not track" feature to its Safari web browser that will block advertisers and other websites from tracking a user's surfing habits, according to a report.

The feature hasn't been rolled out to the public yet, but it has been added to Safari in the latest release of Apple's in-development operating system, Mac OS X Lion, which is currently only available for now to Apple-certified programmers, according to a report from the Wall Street Journal.

Apple officials were unavailable for comment on the report Wednesday afternoon.

Mac OS X Lion, and an updated version of Safari along with it, are set to be released this Summer. Apple has said Lion will include many new features that will bring its user experience a bit closer to that of its iOS operating system, which runs on the iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch.

Mozilla's Firefox 4 and Microsoft's Internet Explorer 9, two other popular Web browsers, already have similar "do not track" features.

So far, Google's Chrome browser has yet to add such a consumer tool, but third-party plug-ins have been created and are free for download online and Google has promised such a feature will come soon.

In February, Rep. Jackie Speier (D-Calif.) introduced a bill into Congress that would create a law giving the Federal Trade Commission to right to create regulations that would force online advertisers to not record a consumer's online behavior if that person doesn't want to be tracked, similar to the Do Not Call Registry created in 2003.

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-- Nathan Olivarez-Giles

twitter.com/nateog

Photo: The blue compass icon for Apple's Safari browser is displayed in the dock of an Apple computer running an older version of Mac OS X. Credit: aditza121 via Flickr

Android vs. iPhone: which has the faster web browser? Two studies disagree

Android phones vs. iPhones -- it's the smart phone equivalent of the Boston Red Sox vs. the New York Yankees.

And two recent studies on which has the speedier web browser -- two studies that contradict each other -- are providing more fuel to the fanboy/girl fire.

According to a new study released today from Blaze Software, web pages load 52% quicker on the Samsung Nexus S running Google's Android 2.3, also known as Android Gingerbread, than the Apple iPhone 4 running iOS 4.3 -- both the latest phones running the latest versions of their respective operating systems.

Blaze, based in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, provides services that make websites load faster on mobile devices -- such as smart phones.

The company said in announcing its study that it ran more than 45,000 webpage loading tests, across the websites of Fortune 1000 firms, on both Android 2.3 and iOS 4.3 to get its results.

"First of all, we found that Android's browser is faster," Blaze said. "Not just a little faster, but a whopping 52% faster. Android's Chrome beat iPhone's Safari by loading 84% of the websites faster, meaning Safari won the race only 16% of the time. While we expected to see one of the browsers come out on top, we didn't expect this gap."

And, in spite of the optimized JavaScript engines in the newest releases of Android and iOS, browsing speed wasn't improved when compared to previous versions of the two mobile operating systems.

"Both Apple and Google tout great performance improvements, but those seem to be reserved to JavaScript benchmarks and high-complexity apps," Blaze said. "If you expect pages to show up faster after an upgrade, you'll be sorely disappointed."

But, as PC World magazine pointed out on its website, the Blaze study contradicts a report released last month from Gomez, a Lexington, Mass., company and owned by Detroit-based Compuware.

Like Blaze, Gomez offers technology to help make websites and apps load faster on mobile devices.

The Gomez study found that Apple's iPhone loaded webpages an average of 17 seconds faster than phones running Google's Android OS.

For its study, Gomez used data from its own customers and looked at 282 million webpages loaded across 200 websites.

While Apple fans could point to the Gomez study and Goolge devotees could tout the Blaze report, PC World said both prove that mobile browser tests are overall unreliable.

"With real-world testing, there too many variables, such as network congestion and server problems," PC World said. "Closed networks and benchmarks, on the other hand, aren't really representative of what real users will experience. In any case, if you're complaining that your super-futuristic smart phone renders pages a second or two slower than the competition, you may want to step back, take a walk and rethink your priorities."

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Top Photo: Samsung's Nexus S mobile phone, the first smartphone to use the Android 2.3 "Gingerbread" operating system, is displayed at the GSMA Mobile World Congress in Barcelona on Feb. 15, 2011. Credit: Albert Gea/Reuters

Bottom Photo: The Verizon iPhone 4 is demoed at a launch event in New York on Jan. 11, 2011. Credit: Brendan McDermid/Reuters

HTML5 logo unveiled by the World Wide Web Consortium, with help from Microsoft

The World Wide Web Consortium -- also known as the W3C -- released its logo for HTML5 on Tuesday, with the help of Microsoft.

The World Wide Web Consortium is a collaboration of sorts in which corporations including Apple, Google, Microsoft and Opera and nonprofits such as Mozilla contribute to international Internet standards. In all, the W3C has 322 member organizations.

The W3C's HTML5 logo, the group hopes, will be placed on websites built using HTML5, the programming language and technologies that are still in development but becoming an increasingly popular standard for the Web.

The logo, an angular orange shield, was designed by the W3C with input from Microsoft. And Microsoft is already helping to promote the logo's use.

Jean Paoli, Microsoft's general manager of interoperability, wrote in a blog post that "the logo links back to W3C, the place for authoritative information on HTML5, including specs and test cases. It's time to tell the world that HTML5 is ready to be adopted."

The logo can be downloaded and used or tweaked by anyone as he or she sees fit, under a Creative Commons license.

The W3C is giving away HTML5 logo stickers and selling logo t-shirts that read, "I've seen the future. It's in my browser."

"It stands strong and true, resilient and universal as the markup you write," the W3C wrote in introducing the logo. "It shines as bright and as bold as the forward-thinking, dedicated web developers you are. It's the standard's standard, a pennant for progress. And it certainly doesn't use tables for layout."

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-- Nathan Olivarez-Giles

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Images: HTML5 logo and HTML5 logo T-shirts. Credit: World Wide Web Consortium