MacRumors

Apple plans to introduce full-screen video iAds for apps on the iPhone and the iPad later this year, reports AdAge. The new ads, described as "interstitials," will allow developers to opt into ads that play in between levels within a game or in between articles in a news-style app.

Full screen ads will mark a departure from Apple's typical advertising style, which has limited iPhone iAds within the App Store and iTunes Radio to less obtrusive banners that must be clicked for a video ad to be played. iTunes Radio also features audio ads, but full video ads within apps are arguably more interruptive.

Some free-to-play apps already feature full-screen third-party video ads. Zynga's Draw Something on iPad, for example, requires users to watch a video ad before allowing them to move on to the next level, a task that takes several seconds away from gameplay. Apple currently permits full-screen video iAd advertisements within some iPad apps, but today's report suggests the ads could also be extended to other iOS devices.

Since its 2010 introduction as a way for developers to make money on the iOS platform, iAd has been largely unsuccessful attracting developer interest and revenue. Apple has, however, been attempting to revive iAd with a new focus on iTunes Radio.

The in-app video ads may be a way for Apple to rekindle advertisers' interests in its fancy-but-flawed iAds. The ad product line was unveiled in 2010 with all the pomp and circumstance of a new iPhone, but they've struggled to gain traction in the market. Advertisers were initially asked to drop $1 million for the rich-media units, which more closely resemble a mobile microsite than a banner. That price tag has dropped to $100,000 over the years, even as Apple has added features like maps.

Few details are available on the video ads, including how Apple plans to sell and price the spots, but they may be positioned as a way to further entice new advertising partners to advertise via the service. The introduction of iTunes Radio, which has the potential to bring in quite a bit of revenue, already garnered Apple several major advertising partners, including McDonald’s, Nissan, Pepsi, and Procter & Gamble.

Apple's ad sales, which were at just $125 million in 2012 according to IDC, have lagged significantly behind those of other companies, including Google, but the new video ads along with revenue from iTunes Radio may shift those figures considerably in the years to come.

Cloud gaming company OnLive was revived today with the announcement of two new gaming services, including CloudLift and OnLive Go. CloudLift is a subscription service that allows users to play digital games, such as those from Steam, on any device, while OnLive Go for developers is designed to bring MMOs to mobile devices.

With CloudLift, OnLive is able to link games purchased from Steam or other services to OnLive, uploading the games and their metadata to the cloud to be played anywhere on any PC, TV, or mobile device, continuing where a save left off.

Users only need to purchase a game from a distributor once in order to play it with the OnLive service, which streams the games as a video of game imagery from the cloud to the device. Games are delivered in 720p at 60 frames per second.

At the current time, CloudLift is limited to 20 launch titles such as The LEGO Movie Videogame, Batman: Arkham Origins, Scribblenauts Unlimited, LEGO Lord of the Rings, and Saints Row IV.

OnLive Go is similar to CloudLift, but it is designed to allow massively multiplayer games such as War Thunder or Second Life to be accessible on any device without having to wait for long installs. Players can access MMOs on mobile devices and can launch cloud versions of games while waiting for downloads on Macs or PCs.

OnLive's first Game Service was introduced in 2010, but issues with Internet connections, latency, and video compression caused it to receive unfavorable reviews. In 2012, the company was forced to lay off most of its employees, later being sold to Lauder Partners for just $4.8 million.

The company has now hired former IGN Chief Mark Jung as executive chairman and hopes to make a comeback with its new services and an expanded set of data servers. In an interview with VentureBeat, Jung said the company is aiming to deliver a higher value service to users.

"In this last year, we have been repositioning the company and redesigning our services for a positive business going forward," Jung said. "We have rearchitected it to deliver a much higher value proposition for the users."

The CloudLift service is currently available on Macs, PCs, and Android devices. OnLive has plans to bring connectivity to iOS devices, but the company told Pocket-Lint that getting the technology right around Apple's limitations is a difficult task.

"iOS is a big platform. We're not sitting here ignoring it," he said. "It's the same thing with Surface. We want to be platform agnostic. We continue to grow and we'll focus on growing across all of those."

OnLive's new CloudLift service is available for $14.99 per month, while OnLive Go is variably priced with Second Life gaming available for $3 per hour. Both CloudLift and OnLive Go require a solid Internet connection of at least 2 megabits a second.

OnLive is also offering its PlayPack subscription service, which provides users with 250 games, for $9.99 per month.

Apple's new chip partner Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) has begun production on the next-generation A8 chip destined for the iPhone 6 later this year, according to a report [Google Translate] from Taiwan's Commercial Times picked up by AFP.

The world's leading contract microchip maker last month started producing the A8 chip, which is tipped to power the expected iPhone 6, the Commercial Times reported.

The report, which cited supply chain sources, said TSMC had won most of the manufacturing orders for logic and power management integrated chips for the new handset.

The report claims that the new 20-nanometer A8 will include a quad-core 64-bit processor and quad-core graphics, and that an earlier start to chip production compared to the previous years could give Apple the flexibility to comfortably launch the new iPhone in the third quarter of this year.

Samsung has been Apple's exclusive manufacturing partner for A-series chips, but Apple has long been reported to be trying to shift orders to TSMC. After years of rumors, Apple and TSMC reportedly struck a deal in mid-2013 to begin chip production in early 2014. TSMC and Samsung were initially reported to be splitting the production load for the A8, but Samsung is now said to have dropped out due to low yields.

As Apple continues work on its much-rumored iWatch, the company is placing a significant focus on expanding Siri's ability to interface with third-party apps, according to a report from The Information summarized by TechCrunch.

With input methods for the iWatch limited due to the device's size, Siri's voice capabilities may be one of the best tools for Apple to leverage, and that means improving Siri's capabilities.

The report points out how the Siri of today can’t do things like book a car rental or make a hotel reservation, or use a messaging app other than Messages to send a text. The improvements to Siri would potentially enable those types of things, enabling third-party integrations that don’t require one-to-one business arrangement between Apple and the external company. Current integrations like those with OpenTable and Wolfram Alpha do involve those direct deals, which limits the pace at which new third-party powers can be added to Siri.

The report also claims that Apple is working on technology to dynamically adjust what content is being shown on a device's display, offering the example of a running app automatically being shown when the user begins jogging. The technology would obviously be useful for a device such as the iWatch with very limited display size and input capabilities.

Apple has been rumored for several years to be working on a smart watch project, with the company reportedly placing a strong focus on biometrics to include health-related data tracking for the iOS ecosystem.

Corning Glass senior vice president Tony Tripeny spoke critically of sapphire as a material for displays during a question and answer session at the recent Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom Conference (Via Seeking Alpha and CNET). His responses reiterate the company's earlier opposition to sapphire crystal.

Morgan Stanley's James Fawcett asked Tripeny about sapphire versus glass now that "there is one large handset and device maker that people suspect maybe looking at Sapphire." This one large manufacturer is obviously Apple, which is building a plant in Arizona to manufacture sapphire for "a secret project," possibly the iWatch or the next generation iPhone. Tripeny didn't hold back in his criticism of the sapphire crystal material.

When we look at it, we see a lot of disadvantages of Sapphire versus Gorilla Glass. It's about 10 times more expensive. It's about 1.6 times heavier. It's environmentally unfriendly. It takes about 100 times more energy to generate a Sapphire crystal than it does glass. It transmits less light which it means either dimmer devices or shorter battery life. It continues to break. I think while it's scratch resistant product it still breaks and our testing says that Gorilla Glass, about 2.5 times more pressure that it can take than Sapphire on. So when we look at it, we think from an overall industry and trend that is not attractive in consumer electronics.

Fawcett continued to query Tripeny on the material with the Corning executive hinting that Apple is looking at sapphire for its marketing appeal as the material "has got a very sexy name." Tripeny also mentions the extra cost and lower manufacturing yield of sapphire crystal when compared to Gorilla Glass.

The formation takes about 4,000 times longer than Gorilla Glass at a significantly higher melting temperature. Its hardness makes machining more difficult and costly. Then the cost per unit increases exponentially because when you have defects in boundaries in the crystal growth process, you essentially cut them out and so unlike glass where we have developed technologies so that we can have very large pristine pieces of glass, when you have that on crystals, what you end up doing is always having a yield issue. So it is really those items that make things more expensive.

Corning now is manufacturing Gorilla Glass 3 for use in smartphones and tablets. Announced at CES 2013, the material is three times more damage resistant than its predecessor Gorilla Glass 2. The company earlier this year also announced a new shaped Gorilla Glass product for devices that require a curved display and a version of its Gorilla Glass with antimicrobial properties.

Last October, Apple filed a motion seeking sanctions against Samsung and its outside lawyers, accusing both of unlawfully sharing sensitive data about Apple's 2011 patent license agreement with Nokia. Specifically, the motion stated that a Samsung executive informed Nokia that the terms of the patent settlement were "known to him", and used that information to negotiate other patent agreements in Samsung’s favor. The license terms between Apple and Nokia were marked "Highly Confidential - Attorneys' Eyes Only", but were shared with other Samsung employees.

In January, Judge Paul S. Grewal ruled against imposing sanctions on Samsung, instead choosing to solely penalize the company's law firm, Quinn Emanuel. Now however, FOSS Patents is reporting that Apple released its confidential license terms with Nokia and the NEC while seeking sanctions against Samsung for its role in the leaks.

The license terms were viewable in a publicly accessible court proceedings document on the Internet for four months before they were removed, as Samsung has filed a new motion asking the court to reduce the penalties against its law firm:

Apple's and Nokia's scorched-earth approach to Samsung's inadvertent disclosure, and the amount of the concomitant fees Apple and Nokia incurred in pursuing those efforts, must be juxtaposed against the fact that Apple had simultaneously posted (and Nokia neglected to notice) this information on the Internet for all the world to see. The fee award should be reduced accordingly.

Samsung also added in its filing that Apple should now be required to provide information as to what happened based on "transparency and evenhandedness." A hearing on Samsung's new motion against Apple is scheduled to take place on April 8, as the company also states it may seek further sanctions against Apple after reviewing other information about the situation.

The new motion comes before a second patent infringement lawsuit between Apple and Samsung is set to begin on March 31, 2014. Samsung will only have four patents claims to bring to the upcoming trial, as Judge Koh invalidated two of its patent claims in January.

Apple will cease production of the 13-inch non-Retina MacBook Pro later this year in favor of its thinner Retina notebooks, according to a new report from DigiTimes. The 13-inch non-Retina MacBook Pro, which last saw an update in June 2012, has remained as Apple's only MacBook Pro without a high-resolution screen after the 15-inch non-Retina MacBook Pro was discontinued last year.

Apple has been expected to discontinue its standard MacBook Pros for quite some time in favor of an all Retina lineup. After Apple announced and subsequently released updated Retina MacBook Pros last October, the company cut the price of the entry level 13-inch Retina model to $1,299 - just $100 more than the non-Retina version.

The company is also expected to update its 13-inch and 15-inch Retina MacBook Pros in the future with Intel's forthcoming Broadwell chips, however the exact timing of those updates remains uncertain and differs for both models. While chips for the 13-inch Retina MacBook Pro are not expected to launch until the first quarter of 2015, chips for the 15-inch models are expected to be released at certain points throughout 2014. Rumors have also suggested that Apple is working on a 12-inch Retina notebook for the middle of this year.

Apple's much-anticipated iOS 7.1 update could come any day now, according to new information from John Gruber of Daring Fireball. Gruber has heard that Apple has plans to release an iOS 7.1-reliant app that will stream the iTunes Festival performances at SXSW, and as SXSW will begin on March 11, iOS 7.1 will need to be released to the public ahead of that date.

Apple's first iTunes Festival in the U.S. starts a week from today at SXSW in Austin. Apple is going to stream the performances to iOS devices using an app, but I've heard from a little birdie that the app requires iOS 7.1 (which explains why the app isn't out yet). That means iOS 7.1 should ship any day now.

iOS 7.1 has been in testing since mid-November, and has seen five different developer betas thus far with the last beta coming on February 4. The operating system update includes a number of visual tweaks, including revamped shift and caps locks keys on the keyboard, refined icons for the Phone, FaceTime, and Messages apps, and a new look for several aspects of the Phone dialer.

Details on features in past beta releases can be found in our previous beta posts: Beta 1, Beta 2, Beta 3, Beta 4 and Beta 5.

A mid-March release date for iOS 7.1 is in line with several previous reports that have pointed to a March launch for the operating system. Apple has yet to seed a Golden Master build to developers, however.

Coldplay, Imagine Dragons, and London Grammar kick off the SXSW iTunes Festival with a performance on March 11 that begins at 7:30 PM CST.

Apple's newly unveiled CarPlay iOS vehicle integration system, which allows an iPhone to take over the in-dash display of a car, has been designed to work with BlackBerry's QNX operating system. The QNX Car Platform powers many in-car infotainment systems and includes a mobile connectivity framework that supports many mobile development environments, including iOS.

In a statement made to Lucas Atkins of N4BB, BlackBerry's Paul Leroux confirmed that CarPlay works alongside the QNX systems installed in many cars.

Connectivity to smartphones and other mobile devices is a key strength of QNX Software Systems' platform for car infotainment systems, and many automakers and tier one automotive suppliers use our platform to implement smartphone/head-unit integration in their vehicles. We have a long-standing partnership with Apple to ensure high-quality connectivity with their devices, and this partnership extends to support for Apple CarPlay.

CarPlay, which requires an iPhone to function, can be likened to Apple's AirPlay, mirroring the iPhone's display and functionality to the existing in-car infotainment system.

Since CarPlay was announced yesterday, multiple manufacturers, including Volvo, Ferrari, and Mercedes-Benz have shown off vehicles with CarPlay integration. Other manufacturers, such as Honda, Jaguar, Hyundai, and more, are expected to launch vehicles with CarPlay support in 2014.

Following yesterday's announcement of Apple's new CarPlay iOS vehicle integration and the release of promotional materials from launch partners Volvo and Mercedes-Benz, more details are arriving today with Apple participating in Ferrari's launch at the Geneva Motor Show.

As shared by macprime.ch [Google Translate], Apple's iOS marketing chief Greg Joswiak joined Ferrari chairman Luca di Montezemolo to introduce CarPlay integration with the Ferrari FF. Apple representatives were also on hand to provide demos of CarPlay, with Engadget sharing a video walkthrough of CarPlay's features.

The first thing we noticed is how speedy everything is. Apps load quickly, and Siri's contextual algorithms hastily recognized our voice commands and responded appropriately. Apple has also implemented safety features to ensure services do not draw your attention away from the road and push forward its "hands-free" theme. For example, when we sent or received a message from a contact, Siri would only read the message back to us and we never once got the chance to see its contents.

For its part, Mercedes-Benz has released a seven-minute B-roll overview video, shared by iFun.de. While the clips are repetitive and disjointed as they are meant to be edited together for promotional purposes as needed, the video shows how the system can be controlled without directly touching the screen, using a combination of Siri and a physical control knob.

Finally, Jalopnik has a hands-on video of Volvo's CarPlay implementation. While the video is of fairly poor quality, it does show somewhat better responsiveness than seen in the Ferrari.

Apple has promised new CarPlay-compatible vehicles from a number of manufacturers in 2014, including Ferrari, Honda, Hyundai, Jaguar, Mercedes-Benz, and Volvo, with a dozen other manufacturers signed on as partners with unspecified launch timeframes.