Apple SDK Terms Block Turn-by-Turn Navigation on iPhone 3G (Try Hosted Kerio Email by Inftek Hosting)

Apple SDK Terms Block Turn-by-Turn Navigation on iPhone 3G
MSNBC reports some rather interesting news about Apple’s iPhone SDK terms and the potential inclusion of Turn-by-Turn Navigation on the iPhone 3G. Previously, MacBlogz has reported that GPS features were possibly seeded with iPhone Firmware 2.1. Additionally, a crafty find regarding some expanded Core Location items, which could in theory allow for turn by turn GPS [...]

MSNBC reports some rather interesting news about Apple’s iPhone SDK terms and the potential inclusion of Turn-by-Turn Navigation on the iPhone 3G.

Previously, MacBlogz has reported that GPS features were possibly seeded with iPhone Firmware 2.1. Additionally, a crafty find regarding some expanded Core Location items, which could in theory allow for turn by turn GPS navigation were discovered, but still, we haven’t seen anything remotely close to turn-by-turn GPS Navigation like our Garmin touting friends experience.

“Sal Dhanani, co-founder of TeleNav, a GPS software maker, said as soon as Apple announced its “Software Developer Kit,” the company obtained it and started working on a GPS program,” MSNBC explains. “Just like every other developer, we signed up for the program and downloaded the SDK, even though there were some specific clauses in the developer agreement that said you can’t write GPS navigation applications,” he said.

TomTom explains: “We have made our navigation system run on the iPhone; it looks good and works very well,” said Dutch-based company TomTom, in a statement to msnbc.com. “We will have to look more closely to Apple’s strategy before we can say more about what kind of opportunities this will bring us.”

“When I spoke to Apple, they didn’t say such applications would be prohibited,” said Avi Greengart, Current Analysis’ research director for mobile devices. “What is clear is that there aren’t any available yet.”

MSNBC continues to explain that “Dhanani said TeleNav has proceeded ahead with its GPS program, TeleNav Navigator, for the iPhone, and found that it works quite well on the device “which is more than capable of providing an application like this,” he said. “The GPS worked really well.”

“But the if and when is a different matter. It’s “hard to say, because Apple does have to update their agreement for navigation to happen,” he said. “We figured it’s a big category, navigation, and Apple will change their stance, because there’s going to be a lot of consumer demand for it.”

While Apple may be developing their own solution, Apple’s vice president of Hardware Product Marketing Greg Joswiak described voice-based, turn-by-turn navigation apps as “complicated.”

Apple did not respond to a question regarding their own navigation app.

Read - iPhone Atlas
Read - MSNBC

Russia to expect iPhone 3G Sooner than Later?
A recent Bloomberg report notes that the iPhone 3G may make an appearance in Russia sooner than previously expected. We have previously reported about an official notice that the device will indeed make its way to Russia, yet further details had remained unclear. Now, we have learned that OAO VimpelCom and OAO MegaFon, Russia’s [...]

A recent Bloomberg report notes that the iPhone 3G may make an appearance in Russia sooner than previously expected.

We have previously reported about an official notice that the device will indeed make its way to Russia, yet further details had remained unclear. Now, we have learned that OAO VimpelCom and OAO MegaFon, Russia’s second and third largest mobile operators respectively, may sign deals with Apple to begin selling the handset later this week.

Part of the agreement remains that Apple is insistent that each carrier interested in offering the device, must purchase between 1 and 1.5 million units, as reported by Russian newspaper Vedemosti.
While Russia has been known as a hotbed for black market iPhones, the country does make up a sizable potential user base, which will definitely be in Apple’s best interest to tap.

Check out our new dynamic iPhone world map to explore the device’s global impact.

Additionally, if your Russian is up to par, feel free to provide any further insight in the comments below.

[via Bloomberg]

The Planet Web Hosting Provider, to Manage Atitude Digital Media Hosting

Houston, Texas - (The Hosting News) - August 18, 2008 - Privately held dedicated web hosting company, The Planet, has been selected by Brazil’s Atitude Digital Media, to manage its mission-critical IT infrastructure.

Helder Conde, Chief Technology Officer of Atitude Digital Media noted. ”In our business, our Webcasts are live, with several hundred people online for each event. Nothing can go wrong with the level of clients we serve. Our reputation is earned every time we conduct a Webcast, so uptime, stability and security are critical to us.”

Based in Sao Paulo, the 20-year-old company provides webcasting services to some of the world’s largest companies, including Pfizer, Schering-Plough, AstraZeneca, Novartis and Avon, as well as a number of medical societies.

In the past four years, the company has conducted more than 700 Webcasts with thousands of hours of live content to thousands of people in more than a dozen countries. A customer of The Planet since 2005, Atitude previously used dedicated hosting services for managing the company’s complex infrastructure.

Mr. Conde noted, ”We’ve grown rapidly, and we were looking for a company that provides all the services and technical expertise of Planet Northstar. Their Anticipation Advantage methodology helped determine exactly what we needed to create a top-notch infrastructure that could scale with our growth, and at a budget that was workable for us. We expanded our footprint to include additional servers, load balancers, firewalls, SAN storage, managed backup and database management. At Atitude, our core values include being responsive, trustworthy and committed to our customers, and I’m impressed our dedicated account team shares these values.”

Steve Kahan, Vice President of marketing and product management with The Planet added, ”Our development of the Anticipation Advantage enables customers to thoroughly plan their IT infrastructure beyond their needs just today. The methodology also provides key process indicators about when they need to begin scaling, which eliminates the worry and frustration many organizations experience in the face of rapid growth. Equally as important, the account team of highly skilled and seasoned experts is always available to customers so they have the confidence that a knowledgeable partner who knows their business is always available to help.”

In its 20-year history, Atitude has kept a keen eye on emerging market trends. The company was originally known for creating high-quality, computer-generated slides and transparencies for corporate presentations, as well as multimedia productions. Today, it is Brazil’s leading provider of Webcasting services, hosting on average more than one each day from three studios in its Sao Paulo offices.

Mr. Conde continued, ”In the last four years, the Internet has emerged as the best platform for communications, and our client base has moved rapidly for both internal and external audiences. Our clients require extensive training both for sales representatives and physicians, and they’ve found Atitude as the perfect solution to meet these needs.”

The company manages the entire event for clients. They work directly with presenters to host the event, sending notification and reminder e-mails to participants, generating reports on results, providing on-demand access afterwards, as well as maintaining extensive databases for each company. According to Conde, the presentations continue to add value for the companies since each one is typically viewed by at least four times the number of live Webcast participants.

Mr. Conde observed, ”In years past, these companies sponsored semi-annual meetings for their sales forces, but today as new studies emerge or competitive products are announced, it’s critical that they have new data immediately, so they rely on our services to meet that demand. At the same time, if one of these companies hosts physicians at an event anywhere in the world, they can Webcast with us from any venue, and we can support the requirement since our bandwidth connections are incredibly robust. With our capabilities, we make their lives much easier.”

The costs for hosting in the U.S. are five to six times lower than those in his native country. While bandwidth costs are slowly declining, ADSL is more common and far less efficient. In addition, because taxes on hardware are approximately 70 percent, hosting provides far better economic sense for his growing business.

Mr. Conde concluded, ”Making the decision to host overseas was difficult. As our international business grew, I knew it was the right direction for our company. We’ve seen other companies emerge in Brazil, and they appear to do a good job, until the participants begin to load. It’s there they fail. Our speed and reliability set us apart, which makes our offering highly competitive.”

Ultimately, The Planet’s goal is to provide:

• High levels of network capacity and speed to deliver peak performance
• Instant scalability to handle even the largest spikes in network traffic
• Parallel, redundant, multi-tiered network routing and switching architecture to assure reliability and stability
• Multiple layer network security that prevents Delayed Denial of Service (DDOS) attacks from harming businesses
• Knowledgeable experts with a passion for excellence and a commitment to operate the best networks in the business

The Planet hosts over 22,000 small and medium-size businesses and 7.7 million Web sites worldwide. The Planet Alpha division provides the widest array of self-managed dedicated servers and advanced services backed by 24×7x365 support. The Planet Northstar Managed Hosting division combines a proactive methodology and seasoned IT experts to deliver a fully managed hosting solution. With the best choice of servers, software tools and world-class support, backed by state-of-the-art facilities and an enterprise-class network, The Planet turns IT into a powerful competitive advantage that enables customers to grow their businesses.

For more about The Planet, please visit: www.theplanet.com.

iPhone 2.1 Beta 4 Seeded by Apple; Push Notification Service Pulled
Developers have been seeded iPhone Firmware 2.1 Beta 4 by Apple. The content of the update is described by Apple as “bug fixes.” It is being reported that Apple has removed the push notification service in this current release. Apple says it is being pulled “for further development.” Push notification was announced at Apple’s Worldwide Developer’s [...]

Developers have been seeded iPhone Firmware 2.1 Beta 4 by Apple. The content of the update is described by Apple as “bug fixes.”

It is being reported that Apple has removed the push notification service in this current release. Apple says it is being pulled “for further development.” Push notification was announced at Apple’s Worldwide Developer’s Conference to the delight of many development groups. Applications such as Facebook, AIM (or any chat/messaging client that we’ll see) will surely utilize background process support in upcoming versions or updates.

Only developers who had been accepted into the iPhone Dev Program prior to July 11th (roughly 4,000 people), will have access to the seeds.

A September delivery for the functionality has been promised by Apple.

[via MacRumors]

Turkcell to Carry iPhone 3G in Turkey
As the iPhone 3G will continue its international rollout, Apple has added Turkish cell provider, Turkcell to the long list of carriers. Despite having already come to an agreement with Vodafone to distribute the device in Turkey, Apple has reached an understanding with the country’s largest mobile provider Turkcell, servicing over 35 million people, about half [...]

As the iPhone 3G will continue its international rollout, Apple has added Turkish cell provider, Turkcell to the long list of carriers.

Despite having already come to an agreement with Vodafone to distribute the device in Turkey, Apple has reached an understanding with the country’s largest mobile provider Turkcell, servicing over 35 million people, about half of the country’s total population. Turkcell will offer both pre and post paid service plans and has committed to bringing the device to both kinds of subscribers.

“We’re very excited to be working with Apple to bring the iPhone 3G to Turkey,” said, Lale Saral Develioglu, Turkcell’s chief marketing officer. “iPhone 3G represents the ultimate in mobile device technologies, and we can’t wait to offer this innovative product to millions of mobile customers
later this year.”

While Turkey will not be involved in this week’s roll out, we imagine that they will be seeing the device shortly. With such a sizable amount of subscribers, Turkcell, will offer the iPhone 3G to a large amount of potential users and provide a strong ‘foothold’ in the Middle East.

Don’t forget to check out our new dynamic iPhone 3G worldmap.

[via Macworld]

Apple Campus Fire; $2Mill in Damage, Started by Construction Work
Last week a 3-alarm fire broke out at the Apple Campus in Cupertino, California. Initially, the building thought to have caught fire was Apple’s Reseach & Development Center, however Apple execs have officially confirmed that the building was not an R&D Center. Responding to reports of a potential fire on the roof of the building at [...]

Last week a 3-alarm fire broke out at the Apple Campus in Cupertino, California. Initially, the building thought to have caught fire was Apple’s Reseach & Development Center, however Apple execs have officially confirmed that the building was not an R&D Center.

Responding to reports of a potential fire on the roof of the building at 20605 Valley Green Drive, more than 60 firefighters from the Santa Clara and San Jose and Los Altos Fire Departments battled copious amounts of billowing smoke.

The blaze, which started around 10pm, was finally contained around 12:30am. It burned portions of the roof and the second floor, but thankfully no injuries were reported. The only information we’ve had until now was Santa Clara deputy chief Hal Rooney’s statements about how the fire may have began under an air conditioning unit located on the second floor.

MacBlogz has learned (via PCadvisor.co.uk) that the estimated cost of the damage was near $2 million dollars, according to the Santa Clara County Fire Department.

Additionally, Fire Captain Daron Pisciotta reports that construction work being done on the building may have been responsible for the start of the flames. Specifically, workers welding on the roof of the building.

Former Apple Employee Blogs About Apple Internals (Again)
Former Apple Emlpoyee, Chuq von Rospach has blogged about Apple’s internals before. Having worked on Apple’s email lists for many years, Rospach understand certain aspects of the company, and lucky for us, he blogs about them too. Blogging in response to the on-going 3G Network issues people are having with the iPhone 3G, Rospach had lunch [...]

Former Apple Emlpoyee, Chuq von Rospach has blogged about Apple’s internals before. Having worked on Apple’s email lists for many years, Rospach understand certain aspects of the company, and lucky for us, he blogs about them too.

Blogging in response to the on-going 3G Network issues people are having with the iPhone 3G, Rospach had lunch with someone inside (or who has been inside) Apple: What I was told was that 90% of the disconnects are initiated inside the phone, which would exonerate AT&T. Most of the disconnects are being generated by crashes in the driver code for the 3G chip, which comes from the chip vendor, not something Apple written and outside of Apple’s direct control. Complicating this — even though Apple is handing over “here is the bug, here is the fix, update the driver”, the turnaround from the vendor on driver updates is on the order of 2-3 months. Said, um, lack of urgency not exactly making people inside the projects happy.

The best aspect of this rumor (if true) is that the hardware is fine; once they can get the drivers fixed (or replaced), the units should be fine. Thinking “recall” is unecessary and overkill, the real question seems to be how quickly Apple can beat the fixes out of the vendor.

Rospach goes on to explain that “these rumors found him,” — “he wasn’t looking.”

Neither Apple nor AT&T have made a public statement about any of these issues yet. Infineon has also made no comment in regard to accusations that an immature 3G chipset of theirs, is the culprit causing poor reception issues. One way or another, the wave of bad reception has garnered a fair amount of attention in the last week or so. Apple certainly knows of these issue (they’re probably experiencing them in Cupertino), and they are clearly working to solve the problems. Only time will tell if a software update fix will cure us of the One Bar Blues that we’ve been singing since July 9th.

Read - Rospach’s Blog
Read - iPhoneBlog

Dedicated Server Hosting Software, Provides System, Application Provisioning

Redwood City, California - (The Hosting News) - August 18, 2008 - A new Application Programming Interface (API) has been developed by LinMin Bare Metal Provisioning solution, as Release 5.2.

James Karimi, CTO of IPNetZone, a New York-based provider of security, monitoring and hosting services noted, ”IPNetZone has come to rely on LinMin for both the provisioning and imaging of servers in our various co-location sites. LinMin’s new API will enable us to offer even better responsiveness to customer requests for additional and/or differently-configured Linux and Windows servers.”

Featuring single-command installation, the solution includes numerous feature enhancements and support for the provisioning and imaging of additional platforms. The API is designed to allow customers and partners to integrate LinMin Bare Metal Provisioning into environments that presently cannot do bare metal provisioning of Microsoft Windows, Red Hat, Novell, Ubuntu, CentOS, Fedora or Asianux on physical systems or virtual machines.

LinMin customers requested the API for different business reasons but with common objectives: automation, cost reduction, quality and business agility. Web hosting and dedicated server hosting companies want customer signup and billing software to automatically trigger the provisioning of systems with the customer’s choice of operating system and applications. Corporate data center customers need a way to enable their load balancing, monitoring, discovery/availability or systems management software to quickly repurpose available systems. Providers of Cloud Computing environments need to automate the provisioning of the commodity hardware infrastructure layer and its subsequent repurposing for optimized demand elasticity.

Laurent Gharda, CEO and founder of LinMin Corp. remarked, ”Having a best-of-breed provisioning and imaging solution was a great starting point, but being a standalone product didn’t maximize the potential of LinMin Bare Metal Provisioning. Now, with the new LinMin API, customers can optimize IT resources (physical, virtual and human) around business processes, not the other way around.”

LinMin Bare Metal Provisioning 5.2 also introduces a fully automated installation process. With a single command, LinMin detects all networking attributes, then downloads, installs and configures a database, network services and other required software components, and presents to the administrator a fully configured provisioning and imaging server in about 5 minutes. LBMP 5.2 also supports the provisioning of additional platforms, including 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2, Novell SLES10 SP2, CentOS 5.2, Fedora 9 and Ubuntu 8.04.1.

LinMin provides software that remotely provisions and images Linux and Windows on servers, blades, PCs, appliances and virtual machines. LinMin is based in Redwood City, California.

For more information, please visit: www.linmin.com.

Apple Releases iPhone Update 2.0.2
Apple has released iPhone update 2.0.2 this afternoon. In typical Apple fashion, the update is set to deliver some “bug fixes,” while lacking any further specifics. The update is 248.7MB in size and is only available via iTunes. Some analysts have been speculating that Apple is (or has been) working on a software update to address [...]

Apple has released iPhone update 2.0.2 this afternoon. In typical Apple fashion, the update is set to deliver some “bug fixes,” while lacking any further specifics.

The update is 248.7MB in size and is only available via iTunes.

Some analysts have been speculating that Apple is (or has been) working on a software update to address poor reception issues with the iPhone 3G.

No new settings, or exciting new finds have been discovered in this update (yet). And we can only hope this is a step in the right direction with 3G connectivity problems.

[via Apple Insider]