Bryan Chaffin

New Zealand's parliament is considering a bill that rethinks software patents. The bill, while not explicitly banning software patents per se, instead declares software alone as not eligible for patent protection because there is no “inventive step” involved. In other words, since all software builds on prior software, and thus are not true inventions. This…

The CharityBuzz auction for a coffee date with Tim Cook has risen to US$605,000. This is the first increase in the price of the auction in several days, and comes with eight days left in the bidding. The auction is for an hour (that amount of time is not promised) with Tim Cook on the…

Apple is getting ready to retake control of the narrative, according to Barclays analyst Ben Reitzes, and doing so could help the company's stock regain momentum. Mr. Reitzes raised his price target for $AAPL to US$525 from $465, sparking a rally. In the early afternoon session, the stock was trading at $460.928, up $10.948 (+2.43…

Let's offer a salute to clever game developers, especially Patrick and Daniel Klug, the cofounders of GreenheartGames. When they released Game Developer Tycoon for Mac, Windows, and Linux, they decided to put a cracked version of the game for pirates to steal on bittorrent, but they did so with a twist: players playing the cracked…

It took Beethoven four years to write that symphony. Some things can't be rushed. Good music and good wine. Paul Masson's emerald dry. Delicious white wine. Paul Masson's wines taste so good because they're made with such care. What Paul Masson himself said nearly a century ago is still true today, 'We will sell no…

AMD has hired Raja Koduri away from Apple some four years after Apple hired the graphics engineering executive away from AMD. This is the second GPU wonk that AMD has reclaimed from Apple, with Jim Keller having returned to the processor firm in August of 2012. Apple first hired Raja Koduri in April of 2009.…

Time magazine has released its annual list of the 100 most influential people in the world, and Apple's designer-in-chief, Jony Ive, was named one of the most influential artists. U2's Bono, who counted the late Steve Jobs as a friend, did the write up on Sir Jony for the magazine. Sir Jonathan Ive Bono's description…

A petition hosted at Change.org is asking Verizon to follow in T-Mobile's footsteps and drop contract requirements for customers. The petition has already gathered more than 79,000 signatures out of a goal of 150,000. [Update: We added Verizon's statement.] Change.org Image for Petition Earlier in April, T-Mobile announced its “Uncarrier” plans that let customers buy…

Eric Schmidt has apparently found religion on privacy, and he's here with a message: mini-drones need to be regulated. We can't have folks and terrorists and such using these things to spy on each other, he said, that's for governments and Google to do. OK, I added the bit about Google, but that's what kept…

I love this one: some folks may not remember, but rumors started up in 1996 that Steve Jobs might team up with Oracle Larry Ellison to buy Apple, or maybe Mr. Ellison was simply going to buy Apple so his buddy could run it again. Many people thought this sounded awful. Steve Jobs was kind…

Former Apple VP Ron Johnson Former Apple retailing VP Ron Johnson has been fired from JC Penney, the company he left Apple for in 2011. Mr. Johnson had been hired to turn JC Penney around, and he promised to reinvent the shopping experience. Customers were slow to embrace change, and sales, profits and JC Penney's…

In a sign of both Apple's increasing clout in China and growing consumerism in that country, representations of Apple products have become a top offering to the dead. NBC reported that cardboard representations of iPhones, iPads, and iMacs have joined more traditional offerings of fake money, food, and bags of clothes as offerings to the…

Facebook offered up its big reveal on Thursday, taking the wraps off of “Home,” a new Facebook app for Android. Or, at least some android devices. Home puts Facebook services front and center by taking over your home and lock screens and giving you quick access to status updates and messages from your Facebook friends.…

A review of Apple's so-called overscroll bounce patent has invalidated a key claim. Though the review processreaffirmed three of the patents claims (14, 17, and 18), claim 19 was at the heart of (some of) Apple's legal victory in Apple v. Samsung in which Apple won more than a billion U.S. dollars in damages. This…

The HTC One earned a 1 out of 10 Repairability Score from iFixIt on Friday, the first time a device earned such a score. Will that result in legions of Apple critics leveling their wrath on HTC? Don't count on it. The HTC One is one of the most highly-regarded Android devices on the market.…

Justin Long is playing Steve Jobs in iSteve, the newest Steve Jobs biopic. Unlike Ashton Kutcher's jOBS or Aaron Sorkin's in-progress adapatation of Walter Isaacson's Steve Jobs biography, iSteve is a comedy made by Will Farrell's Funny or Die. iSteve Movie Poster The New York Times reported that the movie's script was written in three…

Samsung launched the Galaxy S4 on Thursday at a launch event called SamsungUnpacked. The event featured awkward plays, bad executive presentations, and a celebrity MC, but the takeaway is that the company is distancing itself from Google and Android with the new device. SamsungUnpacked was packed full of awful, awkward mini-plays Samsung introduced a variety…

 Phil Schiller Apple vice president Phil Schiller took the offense on Wednesday, the day before Samsung launches its long-awaited Galaxy S4 smartphone. Mr. Schiller gave an interview to The Wall Street Journal where he dismissed the user experience on Android and called fragmentation on the platform a fact, “plain and simple.” Speaking of The Wall…

Everyone knows that Android has all the market share in smartphones and has achieved near parity or parity with Apple's iPad in tablets, but I want to know what the heck people are doing with those devices. Every single data point that I've seen shows again and again that at the very least Apple's iOS…

A UK judge who was very critical of Apple, going so far as to question the company's integrity, has invited controversy by taking a job from the firm that benefitted from his ruling. The situation is complex and nuanced, but it begs the question, “WTF were you thinking?” The situation began when another judge ordered…

The Service Employees International Union (SEIU) used Apple's annual shareholder meeting Wednesday to protest an Apple contractor. Members picketed, chanted, played drums, and shook rattles in protest of Security Industry Specialists, Inc. (SIS), which provides some security services to Apple. A representative of three unions with stakes in Apple also used the question and answer…