Check out this video of an SNES emulator running on a jailbroken iPad complete with a Wii Remote acting as the controller. The game being played is Super Mario World on a jailbreak app called SNES4iPhone.

The new iPad jailbreak has been released. The Spirit jailbreak works with the latest iPad OS.
We have posted a video walkthrough of the iPad jailbreak, please visit the post here:

iPad 3.2 Jailbreak Video

The Spirit jailbreak for iPhone 3.1.3, iPod touch 3.1.3, and iPad 3.2 was released today, and uses a userland exploit that Apple can easily patch, so take advantage of this jailbreak while you have the chance!

As with all jailbreaks, there are some specific instructions to follow and you should carefully read the developer’s website to ensure that you have all of the necessary information before beginning.  From the SpiritJB.com website:

• Spirit is an untethered jailbreak for iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch on the latest firmwares.
• Spirit is not a carrier unlock.
• If you currently are using a tethered jailbreak, you have to restore to use Spirit. Do not upgrade if you use an unlock on an iPhone 3G or 3GS. (You can, however, restore to 3.1.2 if you have SHSH blobs for that version.)

Remember! Back up your SHSH First!!

Download the Spirit Jailbreak 3.1.3 here

More details regarding the price-plan Apple intends to use upon the launch of its iAd platform came out today in a Wall Street Journal article, indicating the company will charge upwards of a $1 million for certain ad-buys.

To be among a select group of advertisers at launch, however, could cost $10 million or more, the article suggests.  Ad executives say they’re used to paying between $100,000 and $200,000 for similar mobile deals, but Apple is certainly putting a premium price on it’s so-called premium mobile advertising opportunities.

Apple is planning to charge advertisers a penny each time a consumer sees a banner ad, ad executives say.  When a user taps on the banner and the ad pops up, Apple will charge $2.  Under large ad buys, such as the $1 million package, costs would rack up to reach the $1 million mark with the various views and taps combined.

Read on at http://www.mobilemarketingwatch.com/apple-to-charge-a-premium-for-premium-mobile-advertising-6270/

2003: Apple opens the iTunes Music Store and starts to revolutionize the music-recording industry, one song at a time.

Between the mid-1980s and late 1990s, the media were undergoing a massive conversion from analog to digital. The music industry hated it.

Much to the chagrin of the Recording Industry Association of America, internet users quickly caught on to digital music as a free alternative to paying for albums. In fear of declining album sales, record labels filed lawsuit after lawsuit against online services Napster and MP3.com for hosting digital music, as well as Diamond Multimedia, a Korean company that released an MP3 player called the Rio. Clearly, for the recording industry, change wasn’t easy.

In stepped Steve Jobs. The Apple CEO harbored a vision in 2002 of an online music store hosted by Apple that would be easy to use, complete in selection and reliable in performance. These factors, Jobs thought, would be enough to convince customers to pay for something they could otherwise obtain for free illegally. The store, then, would enable record labels to compete with pirates rather than pursue a futile attempt to destroy them.

But in order for online music to work, Jobs believed his store would have to allow customers to purchase music in a completely different way: a la carte. Convincing labels was hardly easy.

“When we first approached the labels, the online music business was a disaster,” Jobs told Steven Levy, author of The Perfect Thing. “Nobody had ever sold a song for 99 cents. Nobody really ever sold a song. And we walked in, and we said, ‘We want to sell songs a la carte. We want to sell albums, too, but we want to sell songs individually.’ They thought that would be the death of the album.”

Jobs started his talks with the big players first: Warner Music and Universal. Apple flew the firms’ teams up to Cupertino, California. In a boardroom at One Infinite Loop, Jobs proceeded to present his plan.

Jobs first reeled in the labels with one crucial proposal: Apple would sell songs through iTunes, music-player software that was then available only for Macs. After all, how could Apple, whose Mac operating system held only single-digit market share, ruin the record business if the iTunes Store took off?

After a series of long and painful negotiations, the two labels ultimately agreed they would play, but only after Apple agreed to bake in some restrictions (aka digital rights management): iTunes-purchased songs would be limited to being playable on three “authorized” computers, and a playlist could only be burned on a CD seven times.

Labels BMG and EMI soon followed, and later Sony hopped on board. Apple opened the iTunes Music Store on April 28, 2003, with 200,000 songs. (Simultaneously, Apple released its third-generation iPod.) In the first week, iTunes Store customers bought more than a million songs. Six months later, Apple convinced the labels to allow iTunes to be shared with Windows users.

Apple announced at its final Macworld show Jan. 6, 2009, that iTunes would cease selling songs encumbered by DRM restrictions. Though a significant step for Apple, Jobs was not present to make the announcement — he was on medical leave. The Wall Street Journal later revealed that Jobs successfully underwent a liver transplant. He resumed his post in June 2009.

The iTunes Store has expanded to include movies, TV shows and the App Store providing third-party software for iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad customers. To date, the iTunes Store has served more than 10 billion songs, 200 million TV shows, 2 million films and 3 billion apps.

Sources: The Perfect Thing: How the iPod Shuffles Commerce, Culture and Coolness, by Steven Levy; Wikipedia

Photo: Apple CEO Steve Jobs (June 2007)
Jon Snyder/Wired.com

Read More http://www.wired.com/thisdayintech/2010/04/0428itunes-music-store-opens/#ixzz0mOdMgIsx

Kyle Conroy put together an aesthetically, if not financially, appealing spreadsheet showing what your worth would be if you had bought Apple stock instead of Apple products… the results are interesting, to say the least…

See the original post at http://www.kyleconroy.com/apple-stock.php

Large retail stores in Japan were ordered a week ago to stop selling Apple products online (Google translation; Japanese original). The comments in the Japanese business newspapers suggest that Apple believes online shopping confers an aura of ‘cheapness’ on their products; but some say that killing the Apple store’s competition must have entered into the calculation.

As of today, most of the largest retailers have notices on their Apple catalog pages asking you kindly to visit the shop if you want to acquire a piece of magic. It seems that for the moment the campaign is aimed at the big fish, as smaller shops still seem to be selling Apple products.

A number of bloggers are today reporting a noticeable change to Facebook’s website when viewed from the built-in Safari web browser on the Apple iPad: videos now work. Previously, videos appearing in a user’s News Feed wouldn’t play on the iPad due to Facebook’s use of Adobe Flash technology, which is not supported. Apple has, somewhat notoriously, banished Flash from its mobile devices, including the iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch, in favor of supporting the HTML5 web standard instead.

Although still in development, HTML5, the latest revision to the markup language used to create web pages, offers a feature that allows videos to play in a web browser without the need for a plugin like that used by Adobe Flash.

But has Facebook actually implemented HTML5 on its site?

ReadWriteWeb’s Jared Smith provided essential technical perspective for the writing of this report.

Transcoding, Not HTML5

In our tests this morning, it appears that Facebook isn’t actually using HTML5 to display the videos. Instead, what appears to be going on is that Facebook.com is detecting that you’ve arrived to the website via the Safari web browser on the iPad. When you then attempt to play a video on the iPad, it doesn’t play inline (something that would have been a clear confirmation of an HTML5 implementation). Instead, Facebook is linking out to the actual video, transcoded to MP4, a video format that plays on Apple devices.

We confirmed this by uploading a video file to Facebook in WMV format (a non-iPad compatible video format) and then attempting to play it on the iPad. It played as an MP4 file.

Still Being Rolled Out

Also interesting: this implementation of transcoding (converting one format to another) appears to be still in the initial stages of rollout.

We went to one user’s News Feed (belonging to our own Marshall Kirkpatrick, in fact) and discovered he had uploaded two video files last night using iCamcorder. On the iPad, the earlier video played, launching as a full-screen MP4. The other, when clicked, informed us that we needed Flash in order to view it.

From http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/facebook_testing_html5_video_for_ipad_apparently_not.php

A sample of a " shanzhai" or imitated reproduction of iPad running Microsoft Windows is seen inside a computer shopping mall in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen. Hefty and thickset with three USB ports and a more rectangular shape than the original, this knock-off with iPad aspirations, which runs a Windows operating system, looks more like a giant iPhone.

Just three weeks after the global launch, bootleg versions of Apple Inc’s hot-selling iPad tablet PCs have begun showing up on the shelves of online and real-world shops in piracy-prone China.

Apple recently delayed the iPad’s international launch after huge demand in the United States caught the maker of trendy iPhones and MacBooks off guard. But Chinese consumers looking for knock-offs of the company’s latest must-have product need look no further than this teeming electronics mall in Shenzhen, the southern Chinese boomtown near the border with Hong Kong.

Here, tiny shops are stuffed with pirated versions of everything: from Microsoft’s newest Windows 7 operating system, a steal at $2 each, to a range of Apple products, from iPhones to MacBooks and the lightweight MacBook Air.

After extensive queries with multiple shopkeepers, one surnamed Lin offered the sought-after item in a dark backroom on the market’s fifth floor away from the hustle and bustle.

Hefty and thickset with three USB ports and a more rectangular shape than the original, this knock-off with iPad aspirations, which runs a Windows operating system, looks more like a giant iPhone. It costs 2,800 yuan ($410), making it slightly cheaper than the iPad’s $499-$699 price tag.

“This is just the first rough version,” says Lin a crew-cut agent speaking in bursts of quick-fire Cantonese.

“While the shape isn’t quite the same, the external appearance is very similar to the iPad, so we don’t think it will affect our sales that much,” he added, explaining the difference was due to the difficulty sourcing matching parts because of the quick two-month turnaround time for the first version’s development.

Hard-working Chinese bootleggers are rushing to fill a vacuum that won’t last for long, created by unexpectedly strong demand for the iPad in its first weeks on the market.

The 10-inch entertainment device, on which one can read books, play music and videos and surf the Internet, sold more than 500,000 in its first week alone, and continued strong U.S. demand has led Apple to delay the product’s international launch to the end of April.

Chinese counterfeiters have rushed to fill the iPad gap.

Taobao, China’s largest online marketplace, contains hundreds of listings for the coveted product, many real but some dubiously labeled as “China goods,” with claims to have even better features than the real deal.

Like the models in the Shenzhen market, these fake iPads also retail for around 2800 yuan each, compared with 4,000-6,000 yuan for those marketed as real.

Analysts and gadget fanatics expect the iPad to do well in Asia given Apple’s strong branding and the rising number of affluent middle class consumers. But few are surprised by the quick appearance of a counterfeit version in a country where pirated movies often appear in markets in the same week of their theatrical release.

“China is basically a market that has the ability to clone everything, so it’s really not surprising,” said Edward Yu, chief executive of Beijing-based researcher Analysys International.

“I don’t think piracy is a bad thing for the iPad given that China has a huge population, maybe the clone iPads will give more of the potential users a look and feel.”

Back in Shenzhen, Lin said factories around China’s Pearl River Delta — the country’s biggest export manufacturing hub — were working hard on an updated version of the pirated iPads to feed strong demand.

“This is just the first rough version,” Lin said. “Eventually, the factories will be able to make a much better copy.”

Copyright (c) Reuters

Brandon Darnell Smith

A suspect in the theft of an iPad in Denver that left the victim short one finger was arrested early Tuesday morning, according to The Denver Post. The arrested man, Brandon Darnell Smith, was one of two suspects that allegedly ripped a just purchased iPad away from the victim and tore his finger off in the process.

Mr. Smith was arrested at 1:14AM and is being held for investigation related to second degree assault and robbery, according to Denver Police spokesperson Sonny Jackson.

Mr. Smith was allegedly one of two men that stole an iPad from Bill Jordan after he left the Cherry Creek Apple Store on April 15. The bag containing the iPad was wrapped around Mr. Jordan’s hand, and when the suspects pulled it away, it tore most of one of his fingers off. The remaining part of Mr. Jordan’s finger was amputated later that day.

There’s no word yet on the status of the second suspect in the robbery.