Dr. Dre is now a Hip Hop billionaire. Apple has reportedly agreed to a deal to purchase Beats Electronics – including both the electronics and streaming service – for $3.2 billion. According to reports from the Financial Times, the deal could happen as early as next week. Apple and Beats already had a strong relationship, as Beats showcased their Dre headphones and speakers inside the Apple Store. Many suggest that the move is mostly geared towards acquiring the now-popular Beats Music streaming service, as iTunes Radio has all but flopped. The acquisition of Beats would ensure that Apple gets its hands on a popular streaming platform, one that it could properly leverage to deliver music to consumers in new and different ways. In that sense, the move isn’t surprising at all, and expect to see Apple’s intervention into the service soon.
Tag: apple
Beats Comes To Apple’s Store
Beats’ new streaming service has, for the most part, stayed clear of traditional app stores. Today, though, they’re reversing that policy in what amounts to a concession that Apple’s app store has a reach beyond that of Beats’ present capabilities. With that reach and power, though, comes a hefty fee: Apple usually keeps about 30% of the purchase price on whatever users buy. For Beats, whose subscription is $10/month, it means giving $3 of that fee to Apple every month for every subscription sold through iTunes. Nonetheless, it opens Beats up to a market presently occupied by Rdio and Rhapsody, and to an app store that attracts millions of eyeballs and potential customers. The goal, here, is clearly to boost subscriber numbers as quickly as possible. It’s not to ultimately say that Beats music is failing, or that streaming music is going downhill – it’s simply to say that Beats is looking to expand its numbers to compete with bigger competitors like Spotify.
Google And Apple Fight For Mobile Games
New reports indicate that both Apple and Google are trying hard to get exclusive games into their mobile stores. According to The Wall Street Journal, Apple and Google are rewarding outlets like Electronic Acts, Gameloft, and ZeptoLabs prominent placement atop their respective app stores for loyalty and exclusive content. The companies haven’t been offered direct financial incentives, but they essentially have been by extension; prominent placement in the app store is the equivalent of many more purchases and, by extension, financial success. The joint push by Apple and Google comes on the heels of increasing awareness of each others’ app store successes by trying to get exclusives and continuously being aware of what the other offers. In the end, both are pushing hard to break through as the clear leader in the mobile gaming space, and neither are winning just yet.
CarPlay Comes To Pioneer
Apple’s Healthbook Will Work Beyond Traditional Fitness
Apple’s Healthbook is the fitness and health tracking app that will, reportedly, interface with an Apple smart device. Many have speculated that Apple are working on an all-in-one smart-watch plus fitness tracker, and the latest Healthbook leaks serve to confirm those rumors. Resembling the Passbook design, the app appears to track almost all health parameters, from heart rate to blood sugar levels. Users will enter some of their own data – like what they’v eaten – but much of the data will have to come from third party sources (that, ideally in Apple’s world, use the M7 motion processor), which is where the speculation around an iWatch comes in. Rumors of the Healthbook started earlier in 2013 when Apple met with the FDA, and this serves, in large part, as confirmation that a full suite of tracking functions are coming to one of the most popular mobile operating systems in the near future. Fitness tracking is here to stay – and is only gaining momentum.
Apple Pushes Streaming Video At SXSW
Apple announced that it will stream SXSW events via VEVO, a rare partnership with Google-related products that banks heavily on streaming video and SXSW’s popularity – particularly in light of streaming’s rise in popularity and YouTube’s attempt to break into streaming music and video services with auto play. For SXSW, Vevo apps presently available on iOS and Apple TV will allow users to watch the festival live across devices. As with past years viewers will be able to watch through the iTunes store. It’s a sign of the times, really, that Apple needs to get its content across as many devices as possible, to get to viewers wherever it is that they want to be watching. As we’ve seen at SXSW so far, content that puts audiences first is winning.
Apple To Roll Out Video iAds
Apple announced that it is rolling out new video iAds this year that will automatically play full-screen within iPhone and iPad apps. At present, mobile users need to click on a brand’s mobile banner for the iAd to be activated, whereas the new ads are “interstitials,” and will likely feature at moments of transition – between different levels of a game, for instance. Because the system is so new, it remains unclear how Apple intends to sell these ads; it has been rumored that Apple wants to launch an ad exchange, but details are scarce. iAds have been a contentious feature for Apple since their inception, and the price-per-unit has dropped over the years from $1 million to $100,000. Apple is surely looking enviously at Google’s $243 million in ad revenue in 2012, as compared to their own $125 million; it’s not a quick fix however, as advertisers will likely look to test into the medium slowly but surely. Nonetheless, this represents a big step forward for mobile ads in perhaps the most coveted space of digital advertising.
Apple Testing Smartwatch Power Solutions
As hardware companies begin to jump onto the smartwatch trend, it’s only a matter of time until Apple launches its own. Consistent with Apple’s traditional emphasis on elevated product design, it appears the hardware giant has begun tackling a major pain point of wearable tech: power. A new report from the New York Times reveals that wireless induction charging, and methods for incorporating solar panels into displays, are in the testing phase for eventual inclusion in an Apple wearable. These technologies are unlikely to be included in an Apple smartwatch, should it be released later this year, but they address a major concern for wearable tech, and could make widespread adoption of smartwatches a closer reality upon their implementation.
Apple TV To Replace iPod In Apple Store
In a sales call to talk about Apple’s numbers over the past quarters, Tim Cook acknowledged an increasingly prescient fact: iPod’s are in decline. iPod sales dipped precipitously by 52%, while revenues dropped by 54%. That means the iPod accounts for merely 2% of Apple’s overall income. Cook wants to focus on the Apple TV instead, and has immediately done so by listing the Apple TV in its own section, upgrading it from what Steve Jobs called a “Hobby” to a full-fledged product line. The new section of the store also features Apple TV accessories, old refurbished versions of the device, and a Q&A section. The dedicated product section very likely means that there will be substantial upgrades coming to the device soon, and that persistent rumor of a new Apple TV with a TV tuner, additional gaming, and wireless router options could just come to pass.
Reports Suggest Apple Will Enter Mobile Payments Space
According to The Wall Street Journal, Apple is looking to expand its presence into the mobile-payments space as Apple’s senior vice-president, Eddy Cue, has begun making inquiries into the possibility of Apple handling payments for physical goods and services. Though services like Square, PayPal and Stripe have dominated the space thus far, Apple’s note-worthy lack of NFC adoption has always meant that they’d have to come up with their own technology or their own software solutions. They tried – and largely failed – with Passbook, much like Google Wallet, but the iTunes store has a cache of over 400 million credit card accounts that are active, so if Apple can figure out a good method to leverage this wealth of knowledge, it could become a major player in the mobile payments space very quickly. With the combination of TouchID to verify users’ identities, and the new iBeacon BLE technology, Apple may have already laid the foundations, technologically speaking. Knowing Apple, they’ll take some time to put all of the pieces together, but when they do it could be a very potent medium.
