iPhone updates:
iPod touch with camera shows up in Vietnam
Apple loses a second 4th gen iPhone, new insights discovered
iPhone Finder Regrets His ‘Mistake’
Police Raid Gizmodo Editor’s House, Confiscate Computers

Facebook updates:
Facebook Users Plan to Quit the Service on May 31
Senators’ letter to Facebook
Facebook and Others Caught Sending User Data to Advertisers

Google Street View troubles:
Google faces U.S., German probes on data collection

We started by tracking Apple’s stock price this year, beginning with the iPad announcement and following through until yesterday’s report that Apple made over 3 billion dollars in the last quarter.

Using Bing’s finance charts and Google’s time-related search results, we mapped increasing share price and product announcements over the last 3 years.  We found a clear trend – stock prices rise between the announcement of a new product and it’s actual launch.

Also, we realized that much of the pre-launch marketing around Apple products is free – news outlets and bloggers share stories and compete to scoop each other with rumors and insider (mis)information.  This is great news for Apple, since they don’t have to spend all of their money to get the word out.

Now to the rumor of the week – an Apple employee supposedly left a prototype of the new iPhone (to be released this summer) in a California bar.  The device was sold to Gizmodo, which has dedicated an entire portion of their site to stories about this gadget.  This creates more buzz for Apple as other news outlets report on Gizmodo’s reporting.

Students used Google’s real-time “updates” to monitor how many stories are bouncing around the blogosphere and Twitter channels about this story.  While there is a bump in traffic, we don’t think that this story is enough to sustain interest through the summer.  What else will Apple tell us about the new product to keep news outlets interested?

Some students wondered if Apple had “lost” the iPhone on purpose to try and get free advertising from bloggers, newspapers, television and radio.  Some bloggers suggest that Gizmodo got punked by Apple.

One class had an unexpected find during class today, a webpage that simultaneously searches Google and Bing, displaying results side-by-side.  In Firefox, you can actaully set http://www.google-vs-bing.com/ as your default search engine if desired.

Jamal taught himself to use Garageband to create an original rap about his life and how it has shaped his identity.  Judge the results for yourself:

Dragon Dictation (available for iPad and iPhone/iPod Touch) is a free application and it could be a useful tool for students and adults find it difficult to begin writing but are comfortable sharing ideas verbally.  To use the app, you need to be connected via wifi or 3G.

If you are interested in trying out the iPad for free, follow this link for access

We started with the official video that greets visitors to the Apple website.  What does Apple want us to believe about the new device?  How do they use music, backgrounds, demonstrations and interviews to convince us?

Next we broke up into groups to figure out if the iPad is a technological evolution or revolution.  Every group clearly agrees that this is merely an evolution – as Abe pointed out, “it’s just an iPod Touch that won’t fit in your pocket.”

Could the iPad be a replacement for your home computer?

“No way,” said Pearl and a few others.  ”There is no way to connect your digital camera or a printer.” Students also pointed out that you need another computer to efficiently upload contacts, calendars and mail.  Without USB, your limited in the devices you can plug in.

“There is no DVD player” pointed out Rowan. Mason thinks this is because Apple wants you to spend money at their stores to get content.

Student definitions:

The difference between a web browser and search engine has been murky in the past for some students.  We reinforced our Microsoft Excel skills from STeM class to build a comparison chart:

Today we talked about the mighty battle between Verizon and AT&T.  AT&T has the iPhone, and pays Apple money for the right to have this cool device on their network only.  Verizon has the best customer satisfaction rating for service (according to Consumer Reports) as well as a much larger 3G network in the USA.  AT&T is mad about Verizon ads that point this out, so they are suing Verizon and they also made some new tv commercials starring Luke Wilson that say “AT&T is better”.

We talked about tons of interesting marketing ploys, competitive negotiations, and operating system constraints. The most lively discussions focused on:

• Cell phone companies have claimed colors as their own – Sprint=Yellow, T-Mobile=Pink, Verizon=Red, AT&T=Blue&Orange
• Cell phone companies are really becoming data service companies – most people use their phones for way more than just making calls
• Verizon just introduced Droid, a new phone that is supposed to compete with the iPhone.  It runs Google’s Android 2.0 operating system.

Verizon attacks AT&T’s 3G service coverage

AT&T fights back

Students agreed that Apple is a computing company and Google is an advertising company.  They don’t compete for hardware (iPhone, computers, iPod, etc) but they DO  fight for software users (Apple sells software, Google gives it away).

Students pointed out that Google’s web browser (Chrome) only works on PC, not on Apple computers.  This makes us think that Apple and Google will work together to steal users from Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.

However, on January 5th, Google released a piece of software called Picasa for Mac, a direct competitor to iPhoto (the most popular free Mac photo organization/editing software).  What does this mean?  Is Google attacking Apple?

The 6th grade thinks that this will be a tough fight for Google.  Apple computers come with iPhoto already installed, and for people that already use iPhoto, there isn’t a lot of reason to switch.

• Macbook Air
  • OS Leopard
  • $1799-$3098
  • 2GB Ram
  • up to 80GB storage

The competitors were:

• The OLPC XO laptop
  • Linux OS
  • $200
  • 512MB Ram
  • 2GB storage
• Apple’s standard MacBook
  • OS Leopard
  • $1099-$1499
  • 1GB Ram
  • up to 160GB storage
• Alienware’s Area-51 m9750
  • Windows XP or Vista
  • starts at $1699
  • up to 4GB Ram
  • up to 640GB storage

Students came up with some interesting comparisons – looking at price, size, features (webcams, peripheral ports, expansion capabilities, graphic cards, etc).  They also made some surprising decisions when weighing all of the options.  Ask your 6th grader for their opinion.

Microsoft buys stake in Facebook for $240 million dollars. We used this topic to learn about social networking services, how they rely on large adoption to be successful and how they leverage their customer base to create revenue from advertising.

Apple releases new operating system. From this article, we defined the term “operating system” as software that has a set of instructions that tells a computer’s hardware how to talk to each other and tells other software how to talk to the computer. We talked about Apple’s marketing, how they focus on the uses of their products (not necessarily just the hardware specifications) and how they work to generate “coolness”. We watched clips from a 20 minutes introductory video, produced by Apple, and discussed whether the new features were revolutionary, evolutionary, or just good-looking.

Students in one class had enough time to actually play with Leopard and tested Spaces, explored Safari 3 and looked at the new finder, dock and Coverflow features.