MacRumors

Apple's iBeacons have a lot of potential for inclusion in location-based games, according to The Tap Lab CEO Dave Bisceglia, who spoke to Re/code in an interview. Currently, iOS game developers who want to incorporate location into gameplay are limited to determining location via Apple's internal GPS system, which is not designed to deliver precise information, especially indoors.

iBeacons, on the other hand, are physical Bluetooth low-energy transmitters that are able to provide micro-location information to nearby apps, with an accuracy range of a few feet. For this reason, iBeacons could be incorporated into a whole new category of games that offer multiplayer interactions and other features at specific real-world locations.

Bisceglia's company, for example, is behind a location-based game called Tiny Tycoons. In the game, the idea is to travel around the world and claim real-world locations, kind of like a cross between a city building game and Foursquare.

Rule the REAL WORLD! Tiny Tycoons is the first location-based tycoon game on the App Store. Build your fortune, travel the globe and claim your favorite real-world places before someone else does!

RISE TO THE TOP: In Tiny Tycoons, you can be a Celebrity Chef at a 5-Star Restaurant, the Lead Barista at your favorite Café, or a Millionaire CEO with offices around the world. The choice is up to you!

The company is currently testing an internal version of Tiny Tycoons that takes advantage of Apple's iBeacons, which are used within the game to alert people when they enter a building "owned" by another player. For example, in the video below, Bisceglia enters a Starbucks and gets an iBeacon-based alert from Tiny Tycoons providing the name of the player who owns the location and a prompt to purchase it.

Bluetooth LE, which iBeacon is based on, is also a promising technology for upcoming games. Pkpkt, a game released in mid-December, utilizes Bluetooth LE to let users steal virtual currency from one another in real life, in a futuristic game of tag. Knock, an app released in November, also uses Bluetooth LE in a unique way, allowing the iPhone to unlock a Mac. While iBeacon technology is promising for location-based gaming, Bluetooth LE itself could result in a whole new crop of interactive, multiplayer games and apps.

Nintendo's handheld 3DS gaming device uses a wireless-based system that is somewhat similar to iBeacons to allow two devices to communicate with one another. It also utilizes hotspots around the world to deliver game information, and iBeacons could work similarly, albeit more simply as they would not require a user to connect to Wi-Fi.

First introduced during the 2013 Worldwide Developers Conference, iBeacons allow iPhones and iPads to wirelessly communicate with physical beacons via Bluetooth LE, with the beacons able to deliver specific information to apps when a user is nearby.

iBeacon technology gained some popularity towards the end of 2013 and has been utilized in multiple unique ways. For example, Shopkick and Macy's teamed up to deliver location-based notices when customers passed by products, and Apple has implemented iBeacons in its retail stores to provide product information to browsing customers. A cafe has used iBeacons to deliver free publications, MLB plans to integrate them into stadiums, and most recently, an iBeacon scavenger hunt was held at CES.

Apple has posted three new job listings for the data center the company is constructing in Prineville, Oregon. Apple is seeking two Data Center Maintenance Technicians, along with a Data Center Chief Engineer, a position the company has been trying to fill since early 2013.

While the chief engineer would be responsible for overseeing, testing, and monitoring the data center, as well as implementing new projects, the maintenance technicians would identify and repair potential issues quickly.

Apple has been hiring for the 338,000 square-foot Prineville data center since shortly after construction began in October of 2012, and has maintained a temporary modular data center on the site to house employees. With the new hirings, as well as rumors of a solar farm coming to the site, it appears the Prineville data center may be growing closer to completion.

According to a recent statement by Prineville mayor Betty Rope, Apple is planning to add a solar farm to the Oregon data center, just as it has done in North Carolina.

Mayor Betty Roppe says those agreements were with Apple. She says the company's enterprise zone agreement defers taxes on improvements to the land for a period of 15 years.

"My understanding is that they will create the solar farm and then they will sell that back to the companies that they actually get their electricity from," said Roppe.

Apple has committed to running all of its data centers with 100% renewable green energy, an initiative that it embraced for its massive Maiden, North Carolina data center. In Maiden, Apple has two operational solar farms, providing 42 million kWh of clean, renewable energy.

According to Apple's environmental site, the Oregon data center is designed to be as environmentally responsible as the site in North Carolina, though at the current time, the Oregon data center is much smaller in scale. While Apple has not specifically outlined plans to install a solar farm in Oregon, it has pledged to purchase renewable energy directly from two local utilities and other local renewable energy generation providers.

Back in September, Apple did look into purchasing an additional 96 acres of land near the Prineville, Oregon site, which could be the home of a future solar farm.

In North Carolina, Apple's massive solar farms generate approximately 40MW along with another 10MW from fuel cells, and at times of peak energy, Apple produces power for Duke Energy, the local utility company. The NC solar farm consists of more than 50,000 panels on 100 acres of land and will likely serve as a blueprint for solar farms in other areas.

Along with the solar farms at its Maiden, North Carolina data center, and the possible solar farm in Oregon, Apple is also planning to build a solar farm at its Reno, Nevada data center.

In line with yesterday's report claiming that the iPhone 6 will retain an 8-megapixel rear camera while focusing on other aspects such as image stabilization to improve performance, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office yesterday published an Apple patent application (via Unwired View) outlining a system for implementing optical image stabilization (OIS) with improved autofocus (AF) capabilities in miniature camera such as those found on iOS devices.

Apple's iPhone 5s introduced last September includes software-based image stabilization, a system that involves taking four photos in quick succession and then combining the best parts of each to produce a final image minimizing noise, subject motion, and hand shake. Optical image stabilization, found in some smartphones and many standalone cameras, allows the actual camera lens to move slightly, buffering against hand shake and other small movements.

The newly published patent application from Apple describes a method for integrating optical image stabilization into the voice coil motor (VCM) actuators used for autofocus in miniature cameras.

An embodiment of the invention is an actuator module suitable for use in a camera, more specifically, a miniature camera. The actuator module may include a mechanism to provide an AF function and a mechanism to provide an OIS function. [...]

The combination of the AF mechanism and OIS mechanism within a single actuator module allows the actuator module to modify the position of the lens relative to the image sensor along five different axes (i.e., 5 degrees of freedom (DOF)). Representatively, the lens may be shifted or translated along at least three different axes and rotated about at least two different axes.

Apple's patent application, filed in October 2012 and based on a provisional patent application filed in July of that year, credits a sole inventor, Richard Topliss. According to his LinkedIn profile, Topliss joined Apple as a senior camera technology specialist in January 2012 after spending over a decade as chief technical officer of Cambridge Mechatronics in the UK. That company currently focuses on OIS actuators for smartphones, and today's patent application makes clear that Topliss immediately brought that expertise to bear at Apple.

Cambridge Mechatronics began sampling its latest OIS actuators to customers last August, with the modules expected to begin appearing in smartphones early this year. It is unclear whether Apple is working directly with Cambridge Mechatronics on lens module projects, but the two companies are clearly working on very similar technology and have a natural connection through Topliss.

Apple saw its U.S. PC marketshare rise from 9.9 percent to 13.7 percent in the holiday quarter year-over-year, according to data just released from Gartner. The 28.5 percent rise shows a substantial increase in Mac sales, largely at the expense of HP and Toshiba.

Dell and Lenovo are the only other PC firms who saw significant rises in marketshare in the quarter.

In the U.S., PC shipments totaled 15.8 million units in the fourth quarter of 2013, a 7.5 percent decline from the fourth quarter of 2012 (see Table 2). Despite a 10.3 percent decline in shipments, HP continued to be the No. 1 vendor in the U.S., as it accounted for 26.5 percent of shipments.

"Holiday sales of technology products were strong in the U.S. market, but consumer spending during the holidays did not come back to PCs as tablets were one of the hottest holiday items," said Ms. Kitagawa. "We think that the U.S. PC market has bottomed out. A variety of new form factors, such as hybrid notebooks, drew holiday shoppers' attention, but the market size was very small at the time. Lowering the price point of thin and light products started encouraging the PC replacement and potentially some PC growth in 2014."

The U.S. PC market fared slightly worse than the global market, dropping 7.5 percent in unit sales, from 17.07 million units last year to 15.8 million units this year. Continuing a trend from the last several quarters, tablets have continued to eat into PC sales and though hybrid tablet-notebooks have appealed to some shoppers, the market size for those devices remains very small. As a result of the demand for tablets, the overall PC market saw its worst unit decline in history.

It's important to note that this data is preliminary -- last year, Gartner revised its preliminary Apple numbers from 12.3% down to 9.9%, likely because last year the newly introduced iMac was in extremely short supply.

Apple's US PC marketshare has seen consistent growth over the past seven years, rising from just under 5 percent to the current 13.7 percent.

Update: IDC has released its own estimates of PC shipments for the fourth quarter of 2013, painting a very different picture of Apple's performance. According to IDC, Apple shipped only 1.6 million Macs in the U.S. during the quarter, compared to Gartner's estimate approaching 2.2 million units. IDC's estimate puts Apple's share of the U.S. market at 9.3%, with the company falling into fourth place after being passed by Lenovo.

Apple will report its official earnings for the quarter on January 27, providing some insight into whether Gartner's or IDC's estimates are closer to reality.

Apple is seeing increased success in selling its wares to large corporations thanks to the iPhone, reports The Wall Street Journal. A number of Apple products have acted as "halos" over the years, selling to first-time Apple owners and seeing that penetration lead to sales of more products.

The iPod helped drive Mac adoption with consumers, particularly amongst college students, but the iPhone is the most successful product in Apple's history and has driven tremendous amounts of Mac and iPad sales. One-quarter of Cisco's company-provided notebooks are Macs following that company's decision to allow employees to choose which platform they preferred.

Many companies are deploying custom applications for iPhones and iPads, with the iPhone often being Apple's first foothold in a business.

LG&E and KU Energy LLC, Kentucky's biggest electric utility ... approved the iPhone for employees in 2010. It then introduced iPads, and built apps such as one to help its helicopter patrollers survey 5,500 miles of high-voltage power lines. Using an iPad's global-positioning system, patrollers can pinpoint the location of a problem and select from a menu of common issues, such as a damaged pole or an overgrown tree.

"For years, we looked for some way to automate this and we heard all sorts of fairy tales, but we could never find anything," said Robby Trimble, LG&E and KU's manager of transmission-line services.

Now, the utility's engineers who run power plants use iPads to record how much electricity is generated. Warehouse managers use the tablet to scan bar codes and track the utility's tools and materials.

Forrester says Apple accounts for 8 percent of global business and government spending on computers and tablets -- that number does not include the iPhone -- and could rise to 11 percent by 2015.

Apple executives frequently mention enterprise adoption and custom app development in earnings release conference calls with analysts, touting large corporate adoptions of iOS devices and how companies are using internally developed apps. The company also has large websites profiling how businesses are using both the iPhone and iPad.

Apple supplier Pegatron is expected to win a contract that will see it manufacturing half of Apple's iPhone 6 supplies, according to a report from Taiwan's Liberty Times [Google Translate] as shared by AFP. Currently, Pegatron is responsible for assembling Apple's iPad mini and iPhone 5c while main Apple supplier Foxconn manages iPhone 5s assembly.

The report does not specify which supplier will take care of the other half of iPhone 6 orders, but it is likely that responsibility will fall to Foxconn. It is also unclear how manufacturing of the iPhone 6 will be split, as it is not yet known if Apple will continue on with its bifurcated product lineup that currently includes both the flagship iPhone 5s and the mid-range iPhone 5c.

Rumors have suggested that Apple could produce two versions of the iPhone 6 in two different sizes ranging from 4.7 to 5.7 inches and likely at two different price points, keeping with its new two-phone lineup.

While Pegatron has long been a manufacturing partner for Apple, the Cupertino-based company shifted iPhone 5c production to Pegatron in 2013 in order to improve supply chain risk management, allowing Apple to expand its product lines and prevent potential supply chain disasters. Pegatron will reportedly build a new plant in Kunshan, China to keep up with demand.

In order to meet the demand, Pegatron has started building a new plant at Kunshan, a satellite city near Shanghai where all its iPhones are assembled, the Liberty Times said without identifying its source.

The paper said the Kunshan plant is scheduled to become operational in the middle of the year and start mass production late this year, when Apple is expected to roll out its iPhone 6.

Along with a larger screen up to 5.7 inches, Apple's iPhone 6 is also rumored to include a curved display and a faster and more efficient A8 chip. A report from this morning also suggested that the phone will continue to use an 8-megapixel camera sensor. Though it is not known when Apple will release the next-generation iPhone, fall of 2014 is a likely candidate given Apple's past device release history.

Today marks the seventh anniversary of the introduction of the iPhone, a presentation that took place as part of the keynote of Macworld Expo 2007 in San Francisco. While the device would not launch until over six months later, that presentation offered the public the first glimpse of what Steve Jobs introduced as three devices in one: a touchscreen iPod, a phone, and an Internet communicator.

Today, we're introducing three revolutionary products. The first one is a widescreen iPod with touch controls. The second is a revolutionary mobile phone. And the third is a breakthrough Internet communications device. So, three things: a widescreen iPod with touch controls, a revolutionary mobile phone, and a breakthrough Internet communications device. An iPod, a phone, and an Internet communicator. An iPod, a phone...are you getting it? These are not three separate devices. This is one device. And we are calling it iPhone. Today, Apple is going to reinvent the phone.

Late last year, former Apple engineer Andy Grignon, who was in charge of the radios on the original iPhone, gave behind-the-scenes look at how Apple patched together demos for the introduction, with Steve Jobs showing off developmental devices full of buggy software and hardware issues. The iPhone team knew that everything had to go just right for the live iPhone demos to succeed, and they did, turning the smartphone industry on its head even as Apple continue to scramble to finish work on the iPhone.

Apple had actually been interested first in developing a tablet known as "Safari Pad", but as noted by a number of sources including Steve Jobs himself, the company shifted gears once it became clear how revolutionary the multi-touch interface developed for the tablet could be for a smartphone. Apple's tablet wouldn't surface until the launch of the iPad in 2010, three years after the introduction of the iPhone.

Seven years after the famous Macworld 2007 keynote, the iPhone has seen significant enhancements in every area, but the original iPhone remains recognizable as Apple has maintained the overall look of a sleek design with a larger touchscreen and a single round home button on the face of the device.

iPhone camera module supplier Largan Precision saw its stock take a significant dip yesterday amid rumors that Apple will not be upgrading the resolution of the rear camera for the iPhone 6 later this year, reports The China Post.

The report cites analysts from Nomura Securities who indicate that while the iPhone 6 should see some camera improvements such as enhanced optical image stabilization, the device will continue to use an 8-megapixel sensor rather than a higher-resolution sensor in the 12-16 megapixel range.

According to Nomura Securities, Largan's recently lagging performance in the market is caused by rumors that Apple may adopt an 8 mega-pixel (MP) camera with improved optical image stabilization on its upcoming handset, instead of the 16 MP upgrade anticipated by industry observers. Apple's decision is based on the design requirement to retain the handset's more portable form factor, said Nomura Securities. [...]

Largan retains a leading edge among competing suppliers, as even though the camera's pixel count remains the same, the company is among the few companies capable of coping with the complexity of the camera module, said Nomura Securities. The production of smaller-factored camera modules would require significantly improved optical aperture and resolution attributes, which are the company's competitive strengths, said Nomura Securities.

Apple first introduced an 8-megapixel rear camera on the iPhone 4s back in 2011 and used similar modules for the iPhone 5 in 2012 and iPhone 5c last year. Apple's 2013 flagship iPhone 5s model continues to use an 8-megapixel sensor, but achieves significant camera improvements through increased pixel size, a larger aperture, new "True Tone" dual LED flash, software enhancements, and more.