Music fans have now downloaded and purchased more than three billion songs from the iTunes Store, and “we’d like to thank all of our customers who have contributed to this incredible milestone,” said Eddy Cue, Apple’s vice president of iTunes. The world’s most popular online music, TV, and movie store, iTunes features a catalog of more than five million songs, 550 TV shows, and 500 movies, and it recently surpassed both Amazon and Target to become the third largest music retailer in the US.
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Did you know that you could use your Apple Remote while giving a Keynote presentation? We show you how in the Quick Tip of the Week. Just visit the Small Business site to see this and other tips that will make you more productive on your Mac.
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Ethics. It’s a subject that has been spoken about by almost everyone.You are probably thinking “Oh no! Not another ethics conversation.” Well, maybe. The goal of this article is to go through a few of the basics of business ethics and how it ties into our last article, credibility.
When dealing in the SME and SMB circles, there are a number of “views” about your business that are paramount to success and building your business. The one that immediately comes to mind is ethics. Tied hand in hand, a combination of …

“After more than a week of using it—as my only personal phone—I’m still gushing,” reports Stephanie Angelyn Casola (hometownlife.com) of her new iPhone. It provided “the most painless set-up for a new cell phone I’ve ever experienced.” Casola explains that she easily assigned “pictures to my contacts. Then, when someone calls, I can see instantly who it is.” “The ease with which this is accomplished makes it easy to see why iPhone is so revolutionary. It’s not just the combination of uses, it’s the way Apple has managed to make …

Seven years after Gavin Strange left college life behind—”I couldn’t wait to get out there and get involved in design”—Strange attained an “international reputation as a cutting-edge young talent, with retail lines of skateboards, designer toys, clothing and other products, along with his mainstay business of web design and illustration.” As he explains, ”I use my MacBook Pro for absolutely everything. “The fact I can take it anywhere I like, but it’s as powerful as a desktop, is the winner for me.”
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Posting revenue of $5.41 billion and net quarterly profit of $818 million, or $.92 per diluted share, Apple today announced its financial results for its third fiscal quarter, ending June 30, 2007. The results, representing the highest June quarter revenue and profit in company history, compare to revenue of $4.37 billion and net quarterly profit of $472 million, or $.54 per diluted share, in the year-ago quarter. Apple shipped 1,764,000 Macs (a new company record by more than 150,000 computers) and sold 9,815,000 iPods, a 21% growth over the year-ago …

At the Kellman Corporate Community School in Chicago’s North Lawndale area, teachers and administrators have witnessed first hand the dramatic changes that can result when each student has his or her own wireless Apple notebook to use in school and at home. “From the moment we handed out the Apple notebooks,” notes Technology Director Helen Ross, “our students just jumped into learning with both feet. Every one of them has a new sense of pride and a sense that they are truly blessed to have this technology.”
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“I’m closing in on 30 days as an iPhone user and am still impressed,” reveals Bob LeVitus (Houston Chronicle). Now his “one and only phone,” he uses “it all day for music, telephone, Internet access, contacts and appointments, and I have yet to run out of juice before 9 p.m.” Levitus enjoys the map application and thinks the “built-in Safari Web browser is terrific. When the TV commercials tell you iPhone offers the real Internet, they’re not kidding.” In fact, LeVitus confesses that “after living with this review unit for …

If you’ve ever wanted to grab a screen shot, you’ll definitely want to watch the video Quick Tip of the Week. It shows you the keyboard shortcuts you can use to capture a single window, the entire desktop, or a portion of it that you define. From creating PDFs in any application to using the built-in Dictionary to viewing multiple Inspectors in Pages, the Quick Tip of the Week shows you how to get more out of Mac OS X, iWork, Mail, iLife, and other Mac applications.
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It took more than a year of planning and execution for 1741 Films to create the spectacular, attention-grabbing trailer for “Resident Evil: Extinction.” But as creative director Jim Read explains, using the Mac just made “the process a lot more enjoyable.” Compared to other systems they might have used, the Mac “manages memory better, and it feels more natural to use. And in our day-to-day work with Creative Suite, the Mac feels nicer. The interface is intuitive and easy to navigate; it lets us do things a little bit …

As “a direct result of proof-of-concept testing” indicating that the Washington-based Auto Warehousing Co. (AWC) “can cut costs, increase system reliability and security, and provide expanded IT support services,” AWC “will begin systematically pulling the plug on all Windows-based PCs in its cavernous auto processing shop and power up Macs to execute virtually all of its revenue-generating operations. The move comes on the heels of a quiet wholesale replacement of Windows-based servers for data storage and Web operations, which are now running on Apple Inc.’s Xserve RAID machines,” reports Julia …

The Aperture Users Professional Network invites seasoned and new digital photographers to attend the Aperture Road Tour at one of 15 US cities this summer. During full-day sessions, tour attendees learn “how to take control of their photographic world with Aperture — the photographic ‘post processing’ tool from Apple — and how to efficiently use their images in photographic and multimedia ways they never previously imagined.”
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“The new version of Final Cut Pro is an excellent application and a big welcome to this non-linear editor’s tools,” reports filmmaker and author Heath McKnight in a review of Final Cut Pro for Creative Mac.  “Both seasoned and new FCP editors will find powerful new plug-ins and compatibility, along with tried-and-true ones. Get out and grab a copy of Final Cut Studio 2,” urges McKnight.
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On a field trip last week, I came across an interesting conversation with a potential client. “Credibility”. How to become credible to your clients and how to retain your credibility – particularly in business.
Taken from Wikipedia, the dictionary version is as follows:
“Credibility is the objective and subjective components of the believability of a source or message. Traditionally, credibility is composed of two primary dimensions: trustworthiness and expertise, which have both objective and subjective components. That is, trustworthiness is a receiver judgment based on subjective factors. Expertise can be similarly …

“Apple’s iPhone could emerge as the most successful product introduction of the 21st century, new research suggests.” Conducted by Lightspeed Research, “the research findings are staggering,” reports Jonny Evans (Macworld). “Nearly 90 percent” of the respondents had heard about iPhone, and 32% of those who didn’t already own one intend to purchase one. In a separate survey, Lightspeed Research also learned that “nearly half of those who would like to own an iPhone stated that the benefits of having music, movie, internet and wireless all in one was the …

“iPhone buyers have no regrets,” says Edward C. Baig (USA Today). Baig spoke with Jason Kramer, the chief strategy officer of Interpret, a market research firm that conducted a survey of recent iPhone purchasers. The study found that “90% of 200 owners said they were ‘extremely’ or ‘very’ satisfied with their phone. And 85% said they are ‘extremely’ or ‘very’ likely to recommend the device to others.” The findings, says Kramer “are ‘pretty much off the charts.’”
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For his latest project, ‘Slow Dancing,” David Michalek wanted audiences to experience dance in a way that had never before been possible. So he gathered many of the finest dancers in the world from disciplines that ranged from ballet to Javanese court dance to hip hop to Flamenco; recorded thousands of frames of footage on a high-speed HD camera typically used for ballistic analysis; then used Final Cut Pro and Shake to slow the footage down to such a degree that a five-second dancer’s gesture stretched into a ten-minute film. …

A serial entrepeneur, Roy Caro has launched a handful of flourishing business on three continents. For his latest endeavor, Caro revisited his family’s heritage when he launched the Celadon Collection, an elegant furniture boutique in downtown Montreal, Canada. And his thriving business runs completely on an elegant collection of Mac computers. “A revelation, crucial to our rapid success and development,” Caro attributes that success to the accessibility of the Mac, the availability of such excellent business tools as the intutive Xsilva Lightspeed POS software, and “all the Apple software I …

According to David Needle (internetnews.com), customers of NetSuite’s “on-demand, integrated business management applications” are already using iPhone to take advantage of its web-based services. It was “Apple putting Safari on the iPhone [that] made it a simple process” for the company to extend service to iPhone customers, says Sean Rollings, NetSuite’s senior director of product marketing. Using the built-in Safari browser, says Rollings, “ ‘salespeople will be able to get a lot of their work done on an iPhone. You have the ability to check inventory for the availability of …

Calling its user interface “simplicity itself,” Bob LeVitus (Houston Chronicle) praises iPhone. “It’s easier to use than any phone before it, and it introduces a fantastic new feature known as “Visual Voicemail,” which lets you browse through all of your voice messages on screen and listen to them in any order.” As an iPod, LeVitus adds, iPhone offers “the best video functionality ever in an iPod. Everything — movies, TV shows, photos, video podcasts, and album art — looks absolutely fantastic on the high-res display.” And “speaking of screens, iPhone’s …