Instead, it was an Apple iPhone that the couture coder, fresh off her latest fashion-mag spread, showed to TechCrunch's Robin Wauters backstage at LeWeb:

Wauters: By the way, thank you for showing me your Google Phone backstage.



Mayer: (laughs) I didn't, that was my iPhone. And you know I can't comment on speculation.

Google's most stylish executive (by a mile) using the iPhone when she could lug a Droid, running Google's Android OS, or the mythic G-Phone, expected to be branded by Google directly? That's comment enough right there.

(Pic: An earlier incident of iPhone brandishing: Mayer shows off her Jesus-phone in 2007, when the device was brand new and Google had yet to release its Android phone OS. By Tamar Weinberg.)

As our colleague Brian Lam at Gizmodo has reported, Apple — and presumably CEO Jobs — is trying to woo magazine, newspaper and texbook publishers to provide content for Apple's forthcoming tablet device, rumored to resemble an overgrown iPhone. It must have been humbling for magazine publishers, a notoriously egotistical bunch, to be summoned to Apple's Cupertino campus to submit their vision of the future to Jobs, as Lam reported.

So it's not entirely surprising that a backlash is said to be forming. Here's how one newspaper executive described Jobs and his previous iTunes Store deals, in Ad Age: "People put their hands out and let him put the handcuffs on them... The same thing now is happening with the publishing industry. They are afraid to do anything, to say anything. At the same time, they're saying, 'Let's see what other options we have.'"

The dissident publishers are talking about putting their own storefront app on the tablet, selling content from all the different publishing companies, according to Ad Age. That way, their thinking goes, the content doesn't become a "commodity" eclipsed by the device, as happened with Apple's music store and iPod.

Never mind that the iTunes Store has provided the only significant source of digital revenue for the struggling record labels, and became the largest single music retailer in the U.S. this year, according to an NPD estimate, moving 25 percent of units and turning about 70 percent of the gross proceeds over to content creators.

It's entirely likely print publishers will be able to create their own Apple tablet storefront if that's what they decide to do. After all, Apple recently enabled the selling of content within iPhone Apps, and there's no reason to think the situation wouldn't be the same on an iPhone-like tablet, particularly with Apple under government scrutiny about apps it vetoes.

But withholding print content from Apple's own store would be like the self-destructive act of a petulant, confused teenager. Consumers are already running searchers within the iTunes Store for music, movies, TV shows, e-books, audio books and other media; if newspaper and magazine publishers are in the mix, they get the chance to sell related content in the search results. Assuming a reasonable revenue split can be reached, why wouldn't publishers want to be where the media consumers already are? It's not like they've been irrationally lashing out at the internet lately. (Ahem.)

Jennifer 8. Lee of the New York Times gave the app a "yikes" for the "ching-chong voice" used to read the captions. We found the gong and clichéd string refrain similarly distasteful. But some commenters thought we were being too sensitive; people consulted by LuckyFortune developer "FunVid Apps" apparently felt the same:

We have no intention of making fun of Chinese people. In fact, prior to its release we showed the application to a few Chinese-Americans and asked them if they found it offensive and they all thought the application was fun and were not offended at all. One person that I showed the app actually said, "You know Chinese people have a sense of humor too!"

Yes, well, this app isn't going to start, like, personally disenfranchising Chinese Americans any time soon, and there is a certain hilarity in its complete and utter descent into total caricature. But this isn't Eddie Murphy in whiteface, or even Robert Downey Junior in blackface. More like Ted Danson, in that it is fairly unredeemed. LuckyFortune comes not so much to parody Chinese stereotypes as to revel in them, and in the service of the fairly lame goal of reading cheesy fortunes lifted from Phantom of the Opera lyrics. If that's uplifting to you, then you can at least take comfort that, although you may be taking enjoyment from a caricature, you're not doing business with a racist, because, judging from its statement, FunVid Apps is certainly not that.

The company's full statement follows below. (It is signed in the company name. Yesterday we emailed Charles Hill, to whom the FunVid domain is registered; this is the first response we've received.)

What is catastrophic about this app?

• It is a mere "weekly sampler."
  
• It is a "weekly sampler" from "all [annoying] branches of the [Eggers/]McSweeney's family" (emphasis added), including The Believer, McSweeney's Quarterly, and the DVD quarterly Wholphin, plus books by various annointed authors.
  
• It is a "weekly sampler" that you pay $6 for.
  
• It is a "weekly sampler" that you pay $6 for that nevertheless expires after six months.
  
• It is officially called "The Small Chair." Oh, so cute.
  
• Typing "Small Chair" into iTunes gets you nothing, because this app is actually just called "Mc Sweeney's."
  
• The app bills itself as "a half-year of surprises, delivered straight to your pocket."
  
• From the FAQ: "Q. Why do I swipe right-to-left to turn the page, but then the page flips upwards? A. Yeah, that's kind of weird."
  
• Ibid.: "Q: Why do some pages scroll and other pages flip? A. We're trying to echo the original format of the content, with a balance between convenience and design. Text from the Internet Tendency (and other informational bits) scroll; books and stories flip."

How much do we have to pay to make sure no McSweeney's ever gets on our iPhone? Is There An App For That?

We downloaded the app after it was flagged on the personal blog of Jennifer 8. Lee, the Chinese American New York Times reporter who wrote a book on the evolution of the fortune cookie. In a post titled "Now You Can Get Fortune Cookies on Your iPhone with a Ching Chong voice," Lee writes that the voice in the app "definitely doesn't sound like a native Chinese speaker, just what someone who thinks a native Chinese speaker would sound like in English... Yikes."

Yikes indeed. In addition to the ridiculous voice (see our brief video above), there's also the sound of a gong, and a brief string refrain that's become the calling card of all-too-many caricatured "Chinese" moments in film and television. We've emailed app author Charles Hill to get his thoughts, and will update this post if we do. For now this app looks pretty unredeemable. Of course judging by the popularity of stupid "ching-chong" poses among Olympic athletes and teen celebrities, the app should still enjoy some decent sales until Apple yanks it.

The drawn-out confusion about why Apple rejected the Google Voice telephony application from its iPhone App Store has been agonizing to anyone who has followed it. Apple sources spread the rumor the call-forwarding system was rejected due to objections from Apple partner AT&T. This proved completely false, Apple was the one with issues. Apple then insisted, in a public letter to the FCC, "Apple has not rejected the Google Voice application, and continues to study it." The letter went out July 31, at least a full month after Jobs resumed his CEO duties.

Google has now made public its own FCC response. And, go figure, it offers specific details on how Apple did, in fact reject, Google Voice, directly and repeatedly. Apple marketing honcho Phil Schiller delivered the news, according to Google (click any image to enlarge):

Here are the reasons Apple gave:

Apple, we predict, will try and explain this contradiction away as a miscommunication, either between Schiller and Google or between Schiller and the Apple team that prepared the response to the FCC. That puts a lot of heat on Schiller, but it wouldn't be the first time Jobs has allowed one of his underlings to take the fall for misleading outsiders.

UPDATE: Now Apple says it's Google that's not telling the truth. John Paczkowski of All Things D quotes an Apple spokeswoman saying "Apple has not rejected the Google Voice application and we continue to discuss it with Google." Fun!

On the bright side, regardless of what Apple has told Google in the past — now subject of a "he said/she said" dispute — Apple does seem to be sticking by the idea that it could at some point approve Google Voice. And for Google Voice users that's at least a nice thought.

After spotting some stray tweets about the incident, Todd Bishop of TechFlash dug up the tale: At yesterday's annual Microsoft meeting at Safeco Field, Ballmer was making his entrance when a 'Softie tried to snap his picture with an iPhone. Bad idea!

Ballmer grabbed the Apple device from the employee and made some funny remarks as everyone booed. Then he put it on the ground and pretended to stomp on it, before walking away... during his presentation on stage, Ballmer referred to the episode again, teasing the person and making it clear that he hadn't forgotten what happened.

Ballmer, at heart a sales guy, perhaps does not cultivate the degree of self-awareness necessary to see the parallels between his relentless — if, in this case, somewhat lighthearted — demonization of his competitors within Microsoft and the tactics of Big Brother from 1984. He is, in short, acting like the very guy Apple has chosen as its ideal foil. But if his Two Minutes Hate at Safeco Field was a clumsy PR move, it was hardly out of character; in fact, as the viral mash-up above shows, there is something about large company functions that seems accentuate the man's insanity.

His employees, at least, are sympathetic...

...sometimes to a fault!

Dot-com address acquisition is a dubious vestige of the first internet boom, when branding reigned supreme over profits and functionality, before entrepreneurs realized people would just look for them on Google. It was also Foursquare's first use of a $1.35 million investment from Fred Wilson's Union Square Ventures and O'Reilly AlphaTech; the software company tells Business Insider it couldn't have switched to foursquare.com from playfoursquare.com without the seed capital.

Investors obviously weren't deterred by the Google theft rumors, either. Some people inside the Googleplex believed Foursquare co-founder Dennis Crowley launched the iPhone service with code from Dodgeball, which Google bought from him in 2005 and then shut down. Crowley apparently told people at this year's South by Southwest conference the same thing, reasoning that Google wouldn't mind since it wasn't using the code anyway. It seems a safe bet that either Crowley was right or the rumors were wrong, since it's hard to imagine O'Reilly and Union Square Ventures sinking in money if Google were poised to sue.

The incentive to dispose of — or ignore — the issue would have been strong; the iPhone bubble is fast inflating, and your typical venture capitalist hates to be left out of a good hype cycle.

(Pic: Crowley, by See-ming Lee)

It seems 42-year old Drudge, who spent many of his early years publishing on AOL, misunderstood the fundamental technology behind iDrudge. He thought the app was reading a pirated copy of the Drudge Report running on someone else's server, app creator Joseph Nardone told iPhone Savior. When it was explained to him that the app just downloaded the Drudge Report from Drudge's regular servers, and neatly reformatted it, he emailed Apple and asked for the app to be reinstated.

At the moment, the app still has not returned to App Store; Apple's approval process can take weeks, so Drudge's initial email is probably seriously cutting into Nardone's income, considering that iDrudge was once the store's number one news app. Imagine: Something inaccurate, written by Matt Drudge, causing people grief. Unprecedented.

Apparently Drudge is not bothered by the lack of advertising on the iDrudge app; as Nardone wrote in a comment we just now saw and approved under our original post, Drudge himself offers an ad-free mobile version of his site:

Hi:

Thanks for the publicity. The intent of the iDrudge Drudge Reader app was not to remove advertising from the Drudge Report. The Drudge Report already has a version with no ads at iDrudgeReport.com. The intention of the iDrudge Drudge Reader was to allow people who would not otherwise be able to view the Drudge Report on an iPhone due to the inconvenience of using the Safari browser to view the site. This should actually increase the traffic to the Drudge Report site and increase it's ability to attract revenue. The iDrudge Drudge Reader is merely a specialized web browser that is preset to view the Drudge Report.

Sincerely,
Joseph Nardone

Take, for example, these excerpts from a MacRumors chat forum about the event. Apple is widely expected to make a fairly routine update to its line of iPod portable music players, adding larger storage capacities and perhaps cameras. But that's not going to keep the fanboys from fantasizing about jetpacks and unicorns!

Or, literally, rainbows:

Or how about a device that lets you keep 10 years worth of Steve Jobs porn video and audio in your pocket?

What could possibly be better than the Beatles showing up? The Beatles and Steve Jobs showing up, and pushing Phil Schiller to the curb, forever:

This guy is very eager to spend $400 so he can run things slightly faster:

This guy wants to see a real, live, humanoid female! Ha ha, good luck with that buddy LOL:

Finally, here are a couple of overlong wish lists involving AT&T subsidizing the return of the LP, via the iPod, with free cable TV, animated album covers (read: free drugs), half terabyte hard drives and alien "OLED" screen technology. OK!

(Top pic: Jobs holds a new iPod at Apple's iPod event, September 9, 2008. Getty.)

One would think author Joseph Nardone might have tried to incorporate some of the Drudge Report's advertising, as a nod to the blogger who made it possible for him to sell this piece of software for 99 cents a pop. But he doesn't; iDrudge merely provides an easy way to access the links Drudge so tirelessly culls from the internet. The notoriously reclusive blogger hasn't responded to an email asking if he plans to fight the app, released just a few days ago.

Whatever Drudge thinks of the app, we're already planning to uninstall, and wait for an app that can be configured to focus exclusively on Drudge's most blatantly gay content.

Let's look at the apps released so far, for other phones as well as under prior versions of the iPhone OS: restaurant reviews, taxi and subway information, ATMs, WiFi and houses for sale. Ugh! Way to take advantage of a brand-new paradigm, programmers. This is like looking at the Web in the mid-90s and deciding its best use was for distributing newspaper articles and selling pet food.

We've already though of some vastly superior ideas off the tops of our heads, since that's the sort of thing we do on a Friday in August:

Got any ideas of your own? Post them in the comments. We have a feeling this is going to be the next mini-bubble in tech; might as well get to work inflating it now so the cycle plays out as quickly as possible.

The first was attached to a story by former Valleywag Carlson, now an editor in Henry Blodget's blog stable. The second is for a rebuttal by Dan Frommer, a former Forbes.com reporter who is a senior editor for Blodget:

Frommer writes that Carlson got "irrationally excited" and "falls for half-baked stats sourced from other sites" in his report about an iPhone knockoff threatening Apple's earnings. He continued his second guessing in the comments of both posts:

We eagerly await Carlson's rejoinder, and suggest the title, "If Dan Frommer Is So Smart Maybe He Should Get to Work Earlier." Gasoline on the fire! Pour it!

Jobs is reportedly obsessing over a forthcoming Apple tablet, a top-secret device that is said to look like a giant iPhone. The device went through at least six redesigns, AppleInsider has reported, a tell-tale symptom of Jobs' perfectionism. The tweaking continues relentlessly and annoyingly, staff told the Journal's Yukari Iwatani Kane:

[Jobs] has been pouring almost all of his attention into [the tablet]... Those working on the project are under intense scrutiny from Mr. Jobs, particularly with regard to the product's advertising and marketing strategy, said one of these people... Mr. Jobs's focus on the tablet has been jarring for some Apple employees, who had grown accustomed to a level of freedom over strategy and products while the CEO was on leave, said a person familiar with the matter.

Freedom over strategy and products? What the hell kind of hippie commune were you operating while Dear Leader was gone, Tim Cook? Something tells us you'll be first through Jobs' inevitable reeducation camps, once he gets this tablet shipped out the door.

There is no ambiguity about the facts now: In response to an FCC inquiry, Apple has released a statement absolving its carrier partner, stating, "Apple is acting alone and has not consulted with AT&T about whether or not to approve the Google Voice application." AT&T confirmed, "AT&T had no role in any decision by Apple to not accept the Google Voice application for inclusion in the Apple App Store."

For users, the death of Google Voice on the iPhone — via the removal of some iPhone apps and indefinitely delay of another — meant more expensive text messages and international calls, and more snafus in trying to get friends to use the Google Voice phone number. It kept them locked in close to Jobs and his software, a relationship the Apple CEO guards jealously, some say anticompetitively. Jobs, for example, tried to lock Palm out of Apple's iTunes music jukebox; apparently tried to lock employees out of lucrative offers from competitors like Palm and Google; and tried (successfully) to lock competing browsers and podcasting software off the iPhone.

And yet blame was consistently placed on AT&T over the past few weeks. A Wall Street Journal op-ed, written by a Silicon Valley hedge fund manager, explained excatly "Why AT&T Killed Google Voice" (because "AT&T is dragging down the rest of us... and stifling innovation"). TechCrunch, the Valley blog that broke the Google Voice news, immediately declared that "it's not hard to guess who's behind the restriction: our old friend AT&T."

Prominent Mac-news writer John Gruber was the most certain on his Daring Fireball website. "Trust me," he wrote, "it was AT&T's decision." Gruber cited "an informed source:"

A reliable little birdie has informed me that it was indeed AT&T that objected to Google Voice apps for the iPhone. It's that simple.

Of course, it wasn't. Gruber did not respond to our emails, but so certain did the well-connected indy blogger sound that we can't help but wonder if he wasn't snowed by Apple itself. The company would not necessarily have anticipated that a swift, aggressive and public FCC investigation into the Google Voice incident would have proven AT&T blameless. And it's not like the company's flacks haven't been down this road before; Jim Goldman's sometime source and former CNBC coworker is an Apple flack, and Goldman's Apple sources had him reporting for weeks last fall that Jobs' health was "fine," before Goldman was suddenly forced to acknowledge it was very much not fine. (Gruber pointedly trumpeted CNBC's party-line reporting at the time while pissing on ultimately-vindicated posts from our colleagues at Gizmodo; in the interest of disclosure, we should note that this trend continues to this day, and that we find Gruber as reliably entertaining when he's wrong as when he's right, albeit for entirely different reasons.)

No matter how Apple's defenders were rallied this time around — we suspect, as a rule, that it had more to do with anti-AT&T bias than some pro-Apple whisper campaign — one can only hope this incident will further erode the myth that Apple is fundamentally any less inclined toward spiteful self-defeating authoritarianism than any other corporation of its size, be it AT&T, Google or, only slightly larger these days, Microsoft. Apple is uniquely molded to the whims of a single man, it is true, and already apologists have begun to excuse the Google Voice decision as fallout from Jobs' well-intentioned obsession with control. But Jobs, like his competitors, must be judged on actions, rather than intentions. And this one is pretty disgraceful.

UPDATE, Aug. 26: Gruber responded to our email:

I saw your post, and I think it's great. Totally fair.

My source (a) was wrong, not lying; and (b) from the enlisted ranks at Apple, not an officer. I am strong believer that when anonymous sources go wrong, readers deserve to know as much as possible about why, so, based on a few emails today exchanged with this same source, I plan to write about it briefly on DF. [Summary: The Apple source had his own Apple source, who he misunderstood.]

* * *

As for Goldman, I do not believe that he was spun back in December. Here's the nut paragraph Goldman wrote in December:

"I can tell you that sources inside the company tell me that Jobs's decision was more about politics than his pancreas. Sources tell me that if Jobs for some reason was unable to perform any of his responsibilities as CEO because of health reasons, which would include the Macworld keynote, I should "rest assured that the board would let me know.""

Clearly, we now know, wrong. But wrong about what? It was wrong that there was nothing seriously wrong with Jobs medically. But I am not convinced at all that anyone at Apple or on the Apple board was aware of how dire his condition was at that time, other than judging by his gaunt appearance — which at that point had been obvious for 8 or 9 months.

My hunch is that it is far more likely that Goldman's sources were unaware of Jobs's medical condition in December than that they lied to him about it. Think of it this way: Apple didn't benefit at all from December's "Jobs is fine" coverage, other than in the very short run. Come January, when he was forced to take his medical leave, these reports from just a few weeks prior made Apple's PR situation far *worse* than if they had said nothing at all to Goldman.

I suspect Jobs himself was not aware of the life-threatening magnitude or specific cause — his liver — until January.

That's probably why ABC News last year agreed to pay wages for BlackBerry time during big breaking news events. But fights involving smartphones and wages are growing, the Wall Street Journal reports, as the devices spread. At least, they are among companies that can afford highfalutin' text-based mobile communication, during a recession. Not all can!

[via Business Insider]

(Pic: Eric Havir)

The project was reset at least a half-dozen times... Each time, development was frozen and key aspects of the device rethought, retooled and repositioned...



... Jobs, who's been overseeing the project from his home, office and hospital beds, has finally achieved that much-sought aura of satisfaction.

That's the difficult, obsessive boss we all know and love! How about a few more redesigns, just for fun, Steve? It'll make you feel better!