Author: Erica Ogg

A small update to iBooks on Tuesday has some pretty big implications for Apple customers in Japan: with iBooks 3.1 they can now purchase ebooks rather than just download free or public domain content.

The update notes for 3.1 say, “The iBookstore in Japan now has hundreds of thousands of books available for purchase, including fiction, manga, light novels and more.” In addition, the update says there are reading improvements for “a number of Asian languages,” though the specific languages are not specified.

The iBooks update is out now and can be downloaded via the App Store.

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It seems rather clear, based on multiple reports, that Apple is actively studying how to get on the wearable computing train with an iOS-based smart watch. Now that we’re pretty sure it exists, the debate turns to what it might do: it will probably run iOS, will do some health-monitoring basics, and let you accept or decline phone calls with caller ID.

But this is likely just what the earliest iteration of such a device could do. Apple may start small, but it tends to think pretty big: after all, it launched the iPhone without third-party apps while internally debating whether or not Apple should offer developers access to the phone — and that worked out pretty well. It’s not a stretch to assume Apple would want to offer access to its most important basic services — from FaceTime and iMessage to Notes, Reminders and notifications — to any wearable device, like it has to the iPhone, iPad and Mac.

And it’s at this point that iWatch could really stretch what Apple is capable of delivering as far as internet services. Few doubt that Apple will make a really beautiful piece of hardware. But a future version of an iWatch could, like MobileMe did in 2008 and like Apple Maps did last fall, further reinforce the notion that Apple is still very weak when it comes to implementing web-based services.

However, the promise of an iWatch connected to the cloud could finally push Apple to get its web-based act together.

The promise of Siri

The dream of an iWatch is to (eventually) do many of the things we rely on our mobile devices for, but on a small computer resting on our wrists: browse the web, get mapping directions, send text messages, and in the case of the iPhone, use alternate interaction and communication methods, like a video call on FaceTime or voice-controlled Siri to get tasks done.

Siri, in particular, seems especially ideal for a device that will likely have pretty small display and no hardware buttons. Initially this may be unnecessary if you’re simply using the watch for checking your heart rate or tapping to answer a call. But when an iWatch becomes more capable, voice control might be the quickest way to add something to your calendar or even send a text message. Siri’s going to have to get a lot better for that to be a selling point for an iWatch someday, of course.

In my personal experience, Siri is one of those “nice to have” features but it doesn’t play into my use of my iPhone or iPad on any kind of regular basis. This is mostly because it’s just slow. I love the idea of dictating a text message when I’m driving; the reality is that by the time Siri understands what I actually want it to do, sometimes it takes much longer than it should. This is somewhat understandable because the service is still technically in beta. (But that brings up a whole other point of why a service Apple has been actively advertising as a key iOS feature is still in beta nearly 17 months later.)

iWatch and the cloud

And then there’s the general reliability of Apple’s cloud-based services. iCloud, which is Apple’s solution for keeping users’ content accessible from different Apple devices, is no stranger to outages; there was a half-day episode just last week that took down iCloud backup, Photo Stream and Documents in the cloud for some users.

But its other internet-based services that also operate in the cloud (i.e. not iCloud) aren’t always reliable either. Siri, iMessage, FaceTime, Maps and GameCenter are all services that have gone offline at one point or another or experienced major usage issues. An iWatch could add millions of more access points for these services at the same time that Apple will presumably be growing its user base through the sale of iPhones, iPads and other devices too.

Even if the iWatch does arrive before Christmas 2013, as some outlets have reported, it doesn’t appear like there will be many of Apple’s cloud-based services included right away. So Apple has some time to get there.

But an iWatch — if and when it arrives, and if and when it is integrated with Apple’s cloud services — could either help Apple’s internet services teams shine or further tarnish their reputation. Google Glass may be dorky, but no one worries about whether or not Google will be able to deliver useful and compelling web services to its wearable computer.

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The drumbeat of rumors regarding an Apple-made smart watch continues this week. This time it’s The Verge and Bloomberg saying that an iOS-based “iWatch” should arrive some time before the end of 2013.

After reporting last month that a team of 100 people were working on a smart watch at Apple, Bloomberg is back with a few more details about the device’s capabilities. It says Apple is considering adding caller ID to the iWatch (or whatever the device is called), a pedometer and heart rate monitor, and the ability to make calls and check points on a map.

The Verge also reports a few more details about the current state of the project:

• That battery life is a big concern: Apple wants the battery to last four to five days on a single charge, but the current prototypes are only lasting “a couple of days.”
• The operating system would likely be the full version of iOS scaled down to fit on a watch-size display.
• But iOS isn’t properly equipped for that just yet, and needs more work to make it adaptable to an iWatch.

Buzz surrounding an Apple-made smart watch spiked early last month when several publications reported simultaneously that the company was working on such a device. A former Apple interface designer also laid out a case for why Apple is prepared to develop a device now, and speculated on what such a device could do.

This enthusiasm surrounding a new product category is welcomed by Apple investors, who are becoming impatient for Apple to enter a brand new product category three years after it introduced the first iPad.

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The U.S. district court judge that presided over the landmark patent trial between Apple and Samsung last summer has slashed $450.5 million from the $1.05 billion Apple was awarded by the jury, Bloomberg reported Friday. In addition, the judge said some Samsung products included in the previous ruling should get a new trial.

Judge Lucy Koh removed the $450.5 million from the award because they correspond to 14 Samsung devices that she says should get a new hearing as to whether they did infringe on Apple’s mobile patents. Those devices include, according to FOSS Patents:

Galaxy Prevail, Gem, Indulge, Infuse 4G, Galaxy SII (AT&T), Captivate, Continuum, Droid Charge, Epic 4G, Exhibit 4G, Galaxy Tab, Nexus S 4G, Replenish, and Transform

If these products are still found to infringe on Apple’s patents in a new trial, Apple could win back that $450.5 million in damages, or perhaps get even more depending on what the new jury determines.

Updated with more detail at 12:55 p.m. PT.

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There’s a new rule at Apple: if you’re an executive or board member, you’re not allowed to let your holdings of Apple shares get below a certain threshold. The company recently instituted new requirements that CEO Tim Cook to hold stock work 10 times his base salary, that other executives hold three times their base salary, and that members of the board of directors who are not Apple employees keep Apple stock worth five times their annual retainer, according to new company stock ownership guidelines published in February.

Cook’s annual base salary is $1.4 million; which means he’ll be required to keep a minimum of $14 million in stock as long as he’s chief executive. Apple’s proxy statement identifies the following as “executive officers”: SVP of Internet Software and Services Eddy Cue, SVP of Software Engineering Craig Federighi, SVP of Technologies Bob Mansfield,  CFO Peter Oppenheimer, SVP of Hardware Engineering Dan Riccio, SVP of Marketing Phil Schiller, General Counsel Bruce Sewell and SVP of Operations Jeffrey Williams.

The timing of the rule change is interesting because it came right before Apple shareholders voted down a broader proposal earlier this week that would have required Apple senior executives — as opposed to executive officers — to keep a certain amount of company stock on hand. And it comes in the midst of a six-month-long stock slide from just above $700 to around $430.

Apple’s stock has been slipping, and while he never comments on the stock price, Cook actually told investors at the annual meeting that he “didn’t like” Apple’s falling share price.

The new rule’s insinuation is that Apple must prove its executives are as invested in Apple’s stock value — and by extension the future of the company — as the rest of the investors who own stock in the company. Which seems unnecessary and odd. If anything, Cook’s been remarkably sensitive to shareholders’ concerns — far more than his predecessor, between reinstating Apple’s dividend last year, to public promises to consider schemes cooked up by publicity-hungry hedge fund managers. But it’s extremely unlikely that being personally sensitive to the stock price is going to somehow change what Apple executives are doing on a regular basis right now.

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Fresh off of his winning an injunction against an Apple shareholder proposal he didn’t like, hedge fund manager David Einhorn of Greenlight Capital has dropped his lawsuit against Apple. A New York federal court closed the case after a Thursday filing, according to MarketWatch.

Though he got what he wanted in regard to the shareholder proposal, this is not the end of Einhorn’s spat with Apple, whom he recently compared to a Depression Era grandmother because of how conservative the company is about keeping cash around.

Einhorn owns about 1 million shares of Apple stock. He sued the company because he disagreed with a proposal that would have required Apple to get shareholder approval before issuing any kind of preferred stock. He won an injunction from a federal judge who said Apple had wrongly “bundled” the proposal regarding preferred stock with other tweaks to the company’s charter in one proposal. As a result, Apple was forced to take the proposal off the shareholder ballot, which was voted on this past Tuesday at the company’s annual meeting in California.

Einhorn has meanwhile taken his plan for Apple to offer a preferred stock he’s dubbed “iPrefs” — that would pay a 50 cent quarterly dividend forever — public. Apple CEO Tim Cook has promised to review the proposal, but hasn’t yet offered a public answer to Einhorn.

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If iCloud has been acting up for you today, know that it’s not just you. At least three iCloud-based services are currently experiencing problems, according to Apple’s own system status page on Thursday morning. The current issues extend to Documents in the Cloud, Photo Stream — the service that syncs photos across Apple devices — and iCloud backup.

The outage has been going on for seven hours. As of this posting, the iCloud hiccup is affecting three percent of users, according to Apple’s status report. But earlier reports Thursday indicate iCloud had an even bigger issue.

Anyone having problems with iCloud mail ?—
Krzysztof Zabłocki (@merowing_) February 28, 2013

9to5Mac took a screenshot of Apple’s system status page about two hours earlier, which showed that there were issues with all iCloud services, from Mail to Calendar, Find My iPhone, iTunes Match, account sign-in and more. That was said to affect more than one in 10 iCloud customers.

Apple’s cloud service has taken off pretty quickly: it opened in October 2011, and as of the beginning of 2013 had 250 million users. But Apple’s struggled at times to keep iCloud running smoothly as more users signed up and as the company has integrated iCloud with more of its software.

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As good as it might sound, you can’t possibly spend every moment of the baseball season planted on a couch or a bar stool in front of a TV or at the stadium. You’ll have to go on about your daily life and responsibilities, but it doesn’t mean you  have to miss much of the action. MLB produces its own mobile app for fans to follow each game from their smartphone or other mobile device and this year’s edition, At Bat ’13, just arrived.

It comes with a few new features this year, including access to a lot of classic game footage. There are a couple of different subscription levels and pricing available, depending on your interest level/obsession with the game.

Here’s a video overview of what’s new in At Bat for the 2013 season.

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Apple’s iTunes U education initiative hit 1 billion cumulative downloads, the company said Thursday. The service, which provides free access to lectures, videos, and course materials to teachers and educational groups, has been around since 2007. But it got a boost a year ago when Apple introduced a dedicated iTunes U app to go along with its iPad-oriented educational initiative, which included an iBooks authoring tool that would help textbook companies and educators create learning material.

Compared to some of Apple’s other software, 1 billion downloads in nearly six years may not seem like such a big deal. (The iOS App Store hit 40 billion downloads this year, less than five years in.) But the service is picking up steam. Apple released some other numbers as well that illustrate the size and scope of iTunes U:

• More than 1,200 colleges are using iTunes U
• 1,200 K-12 “schools and districts” are using it
• There are 2,500 public courses in use and “thousands” of private courses
• Some courses have more than 250,000 enrolled in them
• Access is available to students in 30 countries
• About 60 percent of iTunes U app downloads come from outside the U.S.

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Shareholder meetings are typically colossally boring affairs, and Apple’s annual meeting Wednesday morning in Cupertino, Calif. didn’t deviate from this truism of the business world.

And this was despite fireworks over the weeks leading up the meeting: a federal judge issued an injunction on one of the company’s shareholder proposals after a hedge fund sued; the same firm, Greenlight Capital, publicly laid out a case for a new class of Apple stock, and another investor fanned rumors of a stock split.

FLASH: Quorum present at Apple shareholderZZZZzzzzzzzz—
John Paczkowski (@JohnPaczkowski) February 27, 2013

Instead, when all was said and done Wednesday, nothing of huge significance actually took place. But some things did happen.

• All Apple board members were re-elected and two proposals put to shareholders did not pass: one on a requirement that executives hold a certain amount of company stock, and another that would require a board committee for human rights.
• You’ll be shocked — shocked! — to find out CEO Tim Cook also doesn’t not like that Apple’s stock has been dropping over the past few months.
• Cook did address the Greenlight Capital lawsuit, and reiterated his earlier comment that the suit was a “silly sideshow” even after losing that battle in court.
• There was no announcement regarding any additional plan to return more of its $137 billion in cash to shareholders. But Apple is “in very, very active discussions” about that possibility, Cook said.

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Update, 9:53 AM PT: Amazon’s updated the Kindle iOS app to fix the bug, and the updated app is in the App Store now.

After fielding complaints from users of its iOS Kindle app of reset reading settings and missing books following an update, Amazon is now cautioning its iOS users against downloading the latest software update to its ereader app.

TUAW spotted the warning from Amazon Wednesday morning. Amazon posted a note on the app’s page in the iOS App Store that read “There is a known issue with this update. If you are an existing Kindle for iOS user, we recommend you do not install this update at this time.”

Complaints lodged by users who downloaded the update include one who said the “upgrade erased all content on my iPad, including all of my bookmarks” and another who said the “update deleted all books from my iPad, and I had to register again, creating a second name for the same iPad. It’s like starting all over again. Now I have to upload over 130 books from the cloud.”

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Amazon’s streaming music service, Cloud Player, has been available on iOS for more than six months, but designed for an iPhone or iPod touch screen. But as of Wednesday, it’s now optimized for both the larger display of the iPad and the slightly smaller iPad mini, Amazon announced Wednesday.

The service lets you stream music you already own from the cloud or store songs locally. The first 250 songs can be stored for free, but for $25 a year users can store up to 250,000 songs.

Cloud Player was once only available for Android users. But the company has expanded its music app’s reach to iOS, as well as to cars. In January Ford announced that it was adding Cloud Player to its FordSync connected car platform.

The Cloud Player app is free on iOS and the latest update is available in the App Store as of Wednesday morning.

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Social navigation app Waze is pushing an update to iOS and Android users on Wednesday that will let users report road closures. If enough people use that capability, it could start automatically helping to route other users around the closure.

Waze, you might recall, is one of the apps Apple CEO Tim Cook recommended last fall that dissatisfied Apple Maps users try until the Apple product improved. But it’s been around for two years, and Waze’s maps are available in 45 countries. The free app has been downloaded 40 million times, the company said Wednesday.

Waze is already used to report speed traps, the cheapest gas stations and accidents that other users can see in real-time and plan their routes around. But road closures is the newest crowdsourced feature and will automatically influence other drivers’ directions. It will work like this: if a road is closed due to snow or ice, if construction pops up, or a street is closed for an event, a user can report it and the app will automatically re-route the user around that road. But if a certain number of people report the same closing, then the app will automatically start re-routing everyone around that road.

That “certain number” isn’t the same for every kind of road. Two people can’t report Highway 101 as shut down and cause the app to re-route, for example. Waze won’t say exactly how many, but it would have to be a lot more than a single-digit number of reports to take effect. By contrast, a rural county road may be routed around and considered officially closed after a much smaller number of closure reports.

Waze will automatically detect when a road is back open too — as soon as someone drives through that point and doesn’t report the closure, the app considers the road re-opened.

Waze says it got a taste of the utility of its real-time crowdsourcing after being asked for help by the White House and FEMA to help in the aftermath of Superstorm Sandy last fall. Waze asked New York area Waze users to mark on the map the gas stations they came across that were open, the length of the lines, and how long the gas was expected to last at that location.

“Sandy gave us confidence,” Waze spokesman Michal Habdank-Kolaczkowski told me. ”We’re not trying to turn Waze into a crisis-solving app, but as a driver you should know what’s happening on the road,” he said, whether that’s snow, a street fair or construction. “There’s a lot of reasons a road can close, not just a crisis.”

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For the 2013 baseball season, Major League Baseball is more than tripling the number of stadiums that will accept mobile tickets via Apple’s Passbook app. This year there will be 13 stadiums that will enable paperless ticketing via Passbook, MLB announced at a fan event in New York City Tuesday night. That’s up from four last season.

The teams that will start accepting Passbook tickets for the first time are the Minnesota Twins, Baltimore Orioles, Milwaukee Brewers, Oakland A’s, Pittsburgh Pirates, Detroit Tigers and Chicago Cubs. The New York Mets, San Francisco Giants and Kansas City Royals, which began accepting Passbook last September, will again offer the service this season. MLB says there are three more teams that will enable iOS tickets this season, but that are not yet ready to make an official announcement.

MLB was among Apple’s first launch partners for Passbook, which went live with iOS 6 when it launched in September. That surely wasn’t a surprise to baseball fans who know MLB as the most tech-savvy league of all major professional sports. Major League Baseball’s Advanced Media Office, which is the digital arm of the league, responsible for MLB.com, MLB.TV and the At Bat apps, is run by CEO Bob Bowman — who’s speaking at paidContent Live 2012 in April. Bowman has made MLB a frequent and early partner of Apple when it’s come to mobile tech.

Last week, MLB debuted the 2013 edition of its At Bat app for Android and iOS, which included more live, archive and embedded video content, and a new deal to include free game audio access.

He stays ahead of the tech curve by trying to anticipate what the next generation of fans — the kind that grew up with ubiquitous internet access — will want in a mobile experience and how they prefer to interact with their team. The smartphone “is the first screen, not second screen” for them, he told me Tuesday. That means a mobile offering “has to have everything. [The app] has to be slick. If it isn’t hip, cool and easy to use, [fans] are not going to use it.” That’s why “everything we write and plan this is on the first screen.”

That includes using your phone instead of a piece of paper to get into a game, as well as using it to sort stats or watch classic video. But MLB’s mobile efforts are not all iOS all the time. MLB At Bat is also on Android, a platform Bowman said is growing rapidly for MLB.

Right now, he said, iOS users account for 70 percent of the free version of At Bat. But that’s “shrinking every day” as Android has grown — he says thanks to Samsung’s good mobile hardware and its growing cool factor, as well as the Google Play store being better curated by Google.

However, when it comes to users that pay for At Bat — which is $20 per season — 85 percent are still iOS. But that’s changing too, he said. “Slowly.”

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After some iOS apps using HTML5 first-party cookies as a way of tracking users were rejected during Apple’s app review process, a recent report declared the move was the beginning of a broader policy push to get developers, publishers and advertisers to start using Apple’s Advertising Identifier. But that might not be the case.

The apps in question were rejected by App Store reviewers because of a user interface problem, not expressly because of the use of HTML5 cookies in apps, according to a source familiar with the situation. And there is no change in Apple’s policy, no new enforcement and “no crackdown” on cookie tracking at all, this source said.

Techcrunch reported on Monday that the rejections “signaled a push to its own identifier technology” and compared this move to how Apple began enforcing the move away from unique device identifiers (UDIDs) in late 2011. That was when Apple began to reject some apps that were using UDIDs, which are an anonymized number connected to an iOS device that publishers and advertisers could use to track user behavior and better target ads to those users. But UDIDs weren’t as anonymous or private as people thought; with just a bit more information like the user’s birthdate, gender or email address, which some apps were tracking, his or her location and identity could be resolved.

That’s why in September 2012 Apple introduced the Advertising Identifier, which let users have more privacy and gave them more control over what publishers and advertisers know about their use of apps. But Apple, so far anyway, is not forcing anyone to use it.

There are a handful of different tracking methods in use right now, said Craig Palli, vice president of business development at mobile app marketing company Fiksu. UDID has been officially phased out by Apple and few apps continue to use it, but there are five or six other methods also in use, including cookie tracking and the use of MAC addresses.

The apps in question (which have not been officially named and which sources were unwilling to relay) were rejected over clause 10.6 in the App Store guidelines, I’m told. That rule (rather vaguely) states, “If your user interface is complex or less than very good, it may be rejected.” These apps, once launched, briefly kick a user over to mobile Safari before bringing them back to the app — in other words, an experience that is not Apple’s ideal user interface for a native app. The company has “always rejected” apps that do that, this source said.

It is very possible that Apple will eventually want to move all apps over to the Advertising Identifier. But whatever is happening now isn’t really comparable — at least yet — to what happened with UDIDs, according to the source. Developers have not been told specifically by Apple to either use Advertising Identifier or not use other tracking methods like cookie tracking they way they were told in 2012 to stop using UDIDs.

Apple did not comment on whether the company would begin enforcing use of Advertising Identifier.

Palli, who is also quoted in the original story, notes that he personally knows of 10 apps — which he did not name — that use cookie tracking and were approved by Apple in the last month. “Some very large brands have been rejected, but those [app] rejections are not pervasive across the ecosystem,” he noted. In other words, there’s no real pattern yet in the rejections, perhaps other than a user interface rule violation.

Thumbnail image courtesy Shutterstock user Cienpies Design.

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Apple has about 400 stores in 14 countries, and they are at peak traffic — 370 million people walked through their doors last year.  But as the data below shows, while Apple is selling more iPhones, iPads and Macs than ever, it’s having a hard time keeping up on the retail store front. Horace Dediu at Asymco pulled together the data in a chart that shows how Apple isn’t building new stores fast enough relative to its expanding sales.

Credit: Asymco

Apple’s net sales have taken off since the dawning of the iPhone era. New store ribbon cuttings were at their highest in 2008 — 47 opened that year — when net sales were at about $10 billion. But since then, Apple’s net sales per year have reached $40 billion and store openings haven’t been opening at the same rate.

Also during that time, Apple’s revenue from sales in its own stores is compared to its revenues from third-party retail partners have been shrinking: Asymco notes that five years ago its own retail revenue was about $4.7 billion, or about 17 percent, while last year its $19.1 billion in retail revenue represented 12 percent.

Apple Stores are not just a place to sell things, of course. They’re customer service counters, customer education classrooms and show rooms for Apple style and culture. And they’re continuing to bring more customers into Apple’s ranks. But its expanding sales show that it needs more stores.

One of the things CEO Tim Cook mentioned as a priority in 2013 for Apple is that it will be investing “like crazy” in retail, specifically international retail stores in new countries. So far, however, it looks as though he’ll be doing that all without someone dedicated to guiding the retail ship.

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You can use remote gestures to control your laptop, your video game console and your TV. So why not the device you use more than any other?

In a similar fashion to how Microsoft’s Kinect brought gesture controls to the Xbox, PointGrab, using a different technology, is trying to bring hands-free, gesture-based control to iOS games and apps. Gestures can be easily learned and perhaps even more natural than learned input mechanisms like tap to zoom or pinch to enlarge, PointGrab CEO Assaf Gad argues.

“The same way we as people interact with each other, we can allow devices to understand our body language,” he told me via Skype from PointGrab’s headquarters in Hod Hasharon, Israel last week.

For example, he said, all children know the finger-to-lips “shush” gesture that means “quiet down.” So, rather than hunting for a button or volume menu to lower the volume, why can’t our devices know that action means we want the sound muted?

Motion control can be natural and fun — hands-free Angry Birds, anyone? — but occasionally necessary too: devices that understand remote gestures would let you, for example, scroll down the recipe you have open on your iPad while your hands are still wet or covered in raw egg.

How it works

PointGrab doesn’t require additional hardware to make this happen — it uses the device’s own camera. PointGrab’s technology uses motion-detecting algorithms to identify the X and Y coordinates of a person’s hand through the camera. Gad says the software can detect a single finger up to 17 feet away. Here’s a video Laptop Mag shot at CES 2013 of a free app PointGrab created simply to demonstrate its technology on an iPhone or iPad.

You can also download that app, called CamMe, from the iOS App Store yourself. I tried it out and it works as promised although it’s occasionally a bit slow: if you want a self-portrait or group photo but don’t have Inspector Gadget arms, you can use this by setting your device on something, raising your hand to turn on the camera from a couple feet away and closing your fist when you’re ready. The app counts down three seconds before snapping the photo. The downside is you’re using the front-facing camera, which isn’t as good as the iPhone’s rear camera.

Gad emphasizes that this isn’t supposed to replace a touchscreen altogether but is for use in certain cases: “We’re extending a user interface for specific scenarios in mobile.”

A gesture-controlled future

But there’s growing momentum in this space. In the living room, it’s already moved from futuristic fantasy to Thing Normal People Use, thanks to Microsoft’s success with the Kinect. And Samsung, the world’s largest TV maker, wants to replace your remote with your hand when controlling its new smart TVs.

But the most high profile up-and-comer now trying to make gesture-based computing happen for a broader user segment is Leap Motion, whose mission is to bring 3D motion control to computers. (Its website contains the rather cheeky phrase, “Typing? Seriously? That’s fine for writing a novel.”) It recently got $30 million in venture funding to try to pull this off.

PointGrab, meanwhile, has been around since 2008. Its gesture-control software has been in Fujitsu laptops since 2010, and the company has worked with Asus and Samsung on laptops too. But PointGrab is looking past laptops now; it wisely sees the future is more mobile and is attempting to get developers interested in using the technology in their iOS apps.

The thing LeapMotion has going for it that PointGrab does not yet is active third-party developer interest — there are 12,000 developers working with LeapMotion’s SDK. But PointGrab hopes to change that soon. This week at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, PointGrab is for the first time opening up its SDK to anyone who wants to give it a whirl.

Gad is particularly hoping for forward-thinking developers who aren’t satisfied with only touch or voice-based control of the iPhone or iPad. “I think existing applications always try to find another way for interaction or another way to suggest new features to the user. I believe our technology will ad another capability.”

PointGrab’s SDK will be free at first for those who have “good ideas” for how to apply the software to their apps.

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The battle over Proposal No. 2 on Apple’s proxy statement may be “a silly sideshow” to CEO Tim Cook, but Apple has been defeated anyway. On Friday, a federal judge granted an injunction that will block an Apple shareholder vote scheduled for Wednesday, the Wall Street Journal reported.

The proposal included three amendments to the company’s charter, concerning language describing directors’ terms of office, eliminating Apple’s ability to issue “blank check” preferred stock, and setting par value company stock. The judge granted Greenlight Capital CEO David Einhorn’s request on a technicality: the proposal “impermissibly bundles ‘separate matters’ for shareholder consideration.” But the preferred stock issue is the one Einhorn is after.

Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

As a quick refresher of how we got here: Einhorn, whose firm owns more than a million shares of Apple stock, two weeks ago went public with a conversation he’d been having with Apple’s executives since last year. He had pressed them on a scheme for offering preferred stock as a way of boosting investor confidence in Apple and as a way to keep its cash from piling up even more rapidly. When Apple proposed eliminating its ability to issue preferred stock, he sued the company.

The ruling comes a day after Einhorn garnered a bunch of publicity for what he’s really after: that Apple issue a new class of preferred stock he’s dubbed “iPrefs” that would pay a 50 cent quarterly dividend forever. Apple has yet to publicly respond to the specifics of the proposal other than a promise to consider it.

The company’s annual shareholder meeting is scheduled for Feb. 27.

Upcoming: paidContent Live, Apr. 17, 2013, New York, Save $100, Register by 3/22 More upcoming conferences.

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David Einhorn isn’t the only Applel investor who thinks Apple is doing it wrong. As its stock activity has shown over the past several months, shareholders are worried Apple is losing its way, isn’t innovating enough to compete with challengers like Samsung and isn’t being thoughtful enough about its huge cash pile. And now after plenty of complaining about this, there are signs Apple’s most vocal investors might actually get their way.

One of the top Wall Street analysts covering Apple, Morgan Stanley’s Katy Huberty, had a meeting with Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer on Thursday. And as communicated in a note to her clients afterward, she got the impression Apple is going to make an iPhone that could better appeal to the lower end of the mobile market, and double the existing dividend it’s already offering in an attempt to return some of its $137 billion in cash to shareholders.

On an iPhone mini (via AppleInsider):

That’s why she expects Apple to expand the iPhone lineup, and also to introduce new services that can “unlock significant value” and drive device sales.

She noted that demand for the iPhone 4, Apple’s current low-end handset offering, was surprisingly strong during the December quarter. With a gross margin of 40 percent and a one-third cannibalization rate, she believes a so-called “iPhone mini” would drive incremental revenue and gross profit.

Cook said at an investor conference last week that Apple doesn’t try to hit a particular price point with its products. Referencing the practice of discounting older models, he said the company is ”making moves to or have made moves to make things more affordable” when it comes to the iPhone. It’s not really a confirmation they’re working on a lower-cost iPhone, but it’s not a denial either. And there’s no indication of when such a device could arrive.

On giving investors more money via a larger dividend (via Fortune):

“Our analysis,” [Huberty] writes, “suggests Apple can match the S&P IT sector’s average FCF [free cash flow] payout of 68% if it returns $28B in FY13, implying a 6% total yield. High mix of international cash limited flexibility in the past but raising low-interest debt can help address this issue, in our view.”

Currently Apple offers a 2.3 percent dividend, or $2.65 per share, per quarter. But it’s clearly going to have to do something to fend off the attack from Einhorn — and his unconventional proposal for a class of stock that pays a permanent dividend — and other vocal campaigns for some of that cash. Cook has promised Apple is in “very active discussions” over what to do with its cash. Its annual shareholder meeting is coming up next week, and it seems not unlikely at all that an increase in the dividend would mollify most investors and perhaps give the stock a needed bump upward.

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Greenlight Capital hedge fund manager David Einhorn has a plan for Apple: to increase shareholder value and pump up the downward-drifting stock, why not issue a quarterly dividend of 50 cents — in perpetuity? Based on the conference call he hosted Thursday, Einhorn seems to believe that one of the most conservative companies in tech would get on board with this very unconventional plan to distribute preferred stock shared that he’s dubbed “iPrefs.”

Einhorn is framing the proposal as a way for Apple to avoid having to find other ways of distributing its $137 billion in cash it already has. He said his plan would mean Apple would spend about $1.9 billion per year issuing iPrefs. At the same time, he is trying to defeat a proposal Apple has put before shareholders, that would, among other things, allow Apple to issue “blank check” preferred stock. Last week, Apple CEO Tim Cook called the preferred stock idea “creative” but dismissed Einhorn’s lawsuit to get Proposal No. 2 removed “a silly sideshow.” Apple has promised to consider his ideas.

Here are some observations from Apple followers and finance experts about Einhorn’s strategy:

• The Guardian notes that Einhorn’s plan is meant to reward investors and coax them into boosting the stock: “Einhorn is taking a mathematical route. He believes shareholders will reward Apple for giving them cash by pushing up the price of the stock. ‘Apple wants to keep its cake, and its shareholders can eat it too,’ he said.”
• Fortune said he didn’t make a good case for the plan’s ability to boost the stock value: “Einhorn himself acknowledged that Apple’s common stock would go down when the iPrefs are issued and that a $50 iPref was also likely to lose value as soon as hit the market — undermining all his subsequent calculations for how much of Apple’s intrinsic value his scheme would unlock.”
• Bloomberg quotes investors who aren’t super thrilled with the dual strategy of the iPrefs plan and lobbying against Apple’s shareholder proposal No. 2.: Rich Clayton of CtW Investment Group calls Einhorn’s campaign against Apple “in no way necessary” and says Apple’s proposal “is being hijacked.”
• Bespoke Investor Group, via WSJ, says Apple’s cash hoard isn’t that big of a deal anyway: ”While you might think this is high, back in the early 2000s, Apple’s cash as a percentage of market cap was above 50% for years. And during the financial crisis, Apple’s cash got as high as 37%. Just something to be aware of as you hear all these calls for Apple to do something with its loot.”

As of the close of business Thursday, Apple’s cash was roughly 33 percent of its total market capitalization.

Einhorn said Thursday he would be meeting with Cook and other Apple representatives soon. The shareholders get to vote on the plan on Feb. 27.

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