Charlotte Henry

LONDON- Apple’s Beats and Japanese fashion brand, Sacai are coming together to create BeatsX. The specially designed headphones are going to initially go on sale in a pop-up store in Paris on March 4th, AppleInsider reported. They come in three different colours, and they are not going to be cheap.

To buy a pair, at least initially, people will have to turn to a pop-up store launching in Paris on March 4. The product will also cost about $200 — a premium of more than $100 over normal BeatsX models. Apple is no stranger to treating Beats products as fashion accessories, often focusing more on their style than sound quality or features. The company regularly pays to insert Beats products into music videos or sports sponsorships to lure in a young audience.

MWC in Barcelona is drawing to a close. We’ve seen foldable phones and a lot of talk about 5G. Another of the hot topics was Huawei, and the U.S. governments ongoing bid to claims that the company spies on behalf of the Chinese state. The New York Times has a rundown of what happened at conference.

American officials were left to hold a hastily called news conference on Tuesday at a booth operated by the Spanish government. They didn’t present any new evidence against Huawei. The conference previewed many of the hottest mobile trends, particularly the capabilities of new hyperfast 5G networks. For years, the technology has had more promise than actual uses. Executives said the faster networks would debut this year, with wider adoption coming in 2020 and beyond.

There has been much discussion in recent times about what social media companies and online platforms are doing to monitor content. For example, Facebook has moved to moderate Anti-Vaxxer content on its platform. Apple News is, of course, curated by editors. We often hear from the heads of companies about moderation, but not from the people who actually do it. Medium’s s Head of Trust and Safety spoke to people who have been on the frontline of this at a variety of tech companies. The conversation sheds a light on how decisions about content get made.

This is where the trust and safety team comes in. Most companies operating an online platform have one. It sometimes goes by other names — “content policy” or “moderation” — and comes in other flavors, like “community operations.” Whatever the name, this is the team that encourages social norms. They make platform rules and enforce them. They are at once the judges and janitors of the internet. This is not the job of a few dozen techie randos, but tens of thousands of workers, both full-time employees and contractors.

A Facebook clear-history tool is going to be with users by the end of 2019. That’s according to its CFO David Wehner, who spoke Tuesday at the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom Conference 2019 in San Francisco, CNBC reported. CEO Mark Zuckerberg originally announced the features in 2018. Mr. Zuckerberg promised in a post that the tool, when it arrived, would be “a simple control to clear your browsing history.”

The feature will allow users to see information about apps and web sites they’ve interacted with and delete this information from their Facebook accounts. Wehner said the feature will make it harder for Facebook to use data collected by third parties to target ads to users. “Broadly, [clear history is] going to give us some headwinds in terms of being able to target as effectively as before,” Wehner said.

We seem to be living in a golden age of television thanks to streaming services, and The writers behind some of our favourite shows are getting well rewarded for it. Fast Company looked at how Netflix kickstarted “a $1 billion arms race” for TV writing talent. With Apple stepping into the field, and spending serious cash on the likes of Oprah, the fees look like they are only going to go one way.

In the last 18 months there have been so many jaw-dropping deals with the people who dream up TV shows–and the numbers for those deals so staggeringly high–that reports of another TV writer getting piles of cash thrown at him or her by a network, studio, or streaming company has become almost numbingly de rigueur. The starting gun that set off this phenomenon can be traced back to Netflix’s announcement in the summer of 2017 that it was poaching Grey’s Anatomy and Scandal creator Shonda Rhimes from her longtime home at ABC in a deal worth $150 million.

The promotion of Deirdre O’Brien to Senior Vice President of Retail and People following the announcement of Angela Ahrendts’ impending departure surprised a lot of people. Surely running Apple HR was a big enough job? How could anyone take on doing that and running retail too? A blog post from Dr. Drang from earlier in February, which has just come to my attention courtesy of Daring Fireball, explained it really well. Firstly, lots of people work in Apple retail, and secondly, SVPs at Apple have often had rather lose roles.

But if you look at Apple’s most recent Equal Employment Opportunity filing, you’ll see that Sales Workers make up 31% of Apple’s employee base. Only Professionals, a hair higher at 32%, beats it out, and no other employee category is even close. So a lot of Apple HR is already devoted to Retail. The duties of Apple’s top people have often been broad and seemingly unfocused.

14 members of Congress wrote to Apple CEO Tim Cook and his Google counterpart Sunder Pinchai, demanding their firms remove the Absher app. Insider published an investigation into the government-run app, reported on by TMO, earlier in February. It found that Absher has access to a database of women in the country. Men can use it to monitor the whereabouts of female relatives and even stop them leaving Saudi Arabia. The 14 representatives included Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, Katherine Clark, and Jackie Speicer. Following the initial report, both Apple and Google said they would investigate Absher, but have since failed to comment.

In Thursday’s letter, the signatories said Google and Apple need to remove Absher as it “serves as [a] tracking device” used to “prevent the free movement of Saudi women.” They said: “Twenty-first-century innovations should not perpetuate sixteenth-century tyranny. “Keeping this application in your stores allows your companies and your American employees to be accomplices in the oppression of Saudi Arabian women and migrant workers,” the letter said.

World-renowned investor Warren Buffet said Monday that he is holding his Apple stake. However, the Berkshire Hathway founder told CNBC’s SquawkBox that his firm is not increasing its holding at the moment. He has previously said that his company “would love to see Apple go down” so it could buy the shares for a bargain price.

“If it were cheaper, we’d be buying it. We aren’t buying it here,” Buffett said in an interview with CNBC “Squawk Box” co-host Becky Quick. “I don’t see myself selling – the lower it goes, the better. I like it, obviously.” Buffett has made Apple a keystone of his expansive holdings and highlighted his own use of the company’s products. Buffett has made Apple a keystone of his expansive holdings and highlighted his own use of the company’s products. He said at his annual shareholders’ meeting in Omaha last May that “we would love to see Apple go down in price,” so he could buy more at a bargain.

Apple is set to ask the federal court to reconsider a case that resulted in it being told to pay VirnetX $439 million. A court in the Eastern District of Texas found Apple had infringed the internet software firm’s patents. Apple wants that case reconsidered. The legal battle between the two firms has been running since 2010. AppleInsider provided an update on the latest developments.

In a continuation of a long and costly legal battle between Apple and VirnetX, following its failure to convince the U.S. Court of Appeals that it should not have to pay a high cost for patent infringement, Apple is taking a new tactic in attempting to change the result. Rather than going to a higher court, Apple is asking for a reconsideration.  According to Law360, Apple petitioned the entire Federal Circuit on Thursday to rehear a panel discussion that upheld the $439 million Eastern District of Texas jury verdict.