International and US Apple store sites down
By this time today, I was expecting the US Apple Store site to be down, instead it is the exact opposite. The US site as well humming along just fine (for now) as all the international sites are down.
It is widely expected that Apple will announce the iPhone 2 at WWDC today with a couple of other announcements. Steve Jobs always has “one last thing” and many Apple fans are wondering what that could possibly be.
It’s been rumored there could be iChat for Windows or it may be something else entirely. An early version of the next version of Mac OSX is expected to be shown off, dubbed “Snow Leopard.”
The next version of the iPhone/iPod Touch firmware is also set to be announced and may even be made available later today but we’ll have to wait and see on that; just a few hours now. Owners of the iPod Touch will very likely have to pay for the upgrade.
No other company can build this much excitement for its products, that much I can tell you. If Apple made a trash can and charged $350 for it, people would buy it. I can see it now, the iCan, throwing out your trash was never so easy, available in black, white or aluminum. I’m not saying this is a good or bad thing, it’s just Apple.
At some point, the US Store has to go down, it’s just a matter of time. When/if it does, this post will be updated.
[UPDATE:] The US Apple store is down.
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June 9th, 2008
With all eyes in the mobile world on Apple this week I thought the time was right to talk about what we believe is the best way to conduct a mobile web search on a device like the iPhone…a device with a rich, full screen, touchscreen only. Namely: Voice search. You say it, our speech recognition (running on a server) produces text, the text automatically dumps into the search engine that’s the subscriber’s choice (Google, AOL, MSN, etc.), the search engine returns results. Or via voice, search for any content from your local iTunes playlists.
Using the Apple developer kit, we’ve been hard at work developing impressive technology that make the iPhones capabilities even more powerful. Voice search. Song search and selection. At the touch of a button and simply by saying the word. Over the next few days – as the excitement mounts for the WWDC – we’ll be sharing more and more details here on our blog. For now though, I think all of us should sit back, relax and enjoy the show.
Of course, we believe the most powerful use of speech would be running on the iPhone itself (vs a remote server) and made available to the developer community via iPhone’s SDK APIs.
-Nuance (www.nuance.com)