iPhone Thefts: ‘Apple Picking’ on the Rise

                                                                                 Credit: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

Cities across the country are on alert as officials warn of an uptick in stolen Apple products, dubbed “Apple picking.”

According to the Federal Communications Commission, 30-40 percent of robberies in several major cities involve cell phones, including 38 percent in Washington, D.C. and 40 percent in New York City.

Las Vegas police broke up two rings of cell phone thieves on September 6.

“What this started with, we had a normal report of a theft. Somebody stole someone’s cell phone,” said Bill Cassell of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Dept. “Our officers started investigating and realized there were a lot of other similar instances.”

The LVMPD connected these robberies because they all seemed to target similar victims.

“They were all targeting people in fast food restaurants, coffee shops, people walking on street,” Cassell said. “The victims all had a similar profile too. They were all focused on their cells phones, inattentive of their surroundings and looked like they wouldn’t put up a fight.”

The thieves, many of them juveniles, would either ask to borrow the victim’s cell phone and run off with it or simply grab it from their unsuspecting victims.

“We tracked down some of the individuals involved and in doing this, realized there were two groups of people doing the same crime the same way. But they weren’t associated,” said Cassell.

One of the groups was charged with 14 cell phone thefts. The other has been charged with seven thefts, but according to Officer Cassell, the investigation of  20-30 thefts is still on-going.

The recent increase in cell phone thefts has prompted action from both the government and major wireless carriers.

In April, FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski, along with  Washington, D.C. Mayor Vincent Gray  and U.S. Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., announced new initiatives to combat the thefts.

Genachowski announced the creation and implementation of a database to prevent the use of stolen smartphones. With this new system, which is expected to launch in the coming months, a cell phone user can report their device stolen and their carrier will block the device from being used.

Officials believe that the registry will cut cell phone thefts.  Even more dangerous is the threat of stolen personal information stored on smartphones.

“That’s what we’re most worried about, the tremendous amount of information these people are stealing,” Cassell said.

Beyond monetary consequences, many people are injured or even killed during robberies.

Hwangbum Yang, 26, a chef at a restaurant in Manhattan’s Museum of Modern Art, was shot and killed during a cell phone robbery on his way home from work in April.

In 2011, 17-year-old Prince Watson was charged with the murder of Sally Katona-King, 68, when he shoved her down the stairs in an attempt to steal her iPhone, according to ABC Chicago affiliate WLS.

And device thefts are not limited to the street or coffee shops.

Last week, a California man was accused of driving his SUV through an Apple store in Temecula and stealing thousands of dollars worth of display items. The investigation is still on-going.

Source : abcnews[dot]go[dot]com

Forget Samsung, Apple now suing Polish grocery store for infringement

First Samsung, now an online grocery store in Poland. Apple lawyers in the European country have reportedly filed a complaint against online store a.pl, accusing it of trademark infringement on several fronts.

Less than a month after being awarded more than a billion dollars by a US court at the conclusion of its US patent infringement trial with rival tech giant Samsung, Apple lawyers have now turned their attention to a Polish online grocery store. Yes, you read it right – a Polish grocery store.

Before you scratch a large hole in your head wondering what on earth an online grocery store in Poland has to do with a company like Apple, keep in mind that it’s not just infringements relating to the design and technology of its mobile devices that Apple is concerned with.

According to a Reuters report, the grocery store is in a pickle on two fronts – first, its name and web address, a.pl (pl is the domain extension for Poland), sounds too similar to the name of the Cupertino company, so say Apple lawyers. Second, a logo (shown above) used by another online store, owned by a.pl, is said to too closely resemble Apple’s logo.

Speaking to Reuters about Apple’s trademark-infringement filing, Adam Taukert, a spokesperson for the Polish patent office, said, “[The] Apple brand is widely recognized and the company says that a.pl, by using the name that sounds similar, is using Apple’s reputation.”

In other words, the iPhone maker is concerned that the online grocery store is trading off Apple’s famous name and image, or even possibly attracting customers to its website who, thinking they were going to buy a 32GB iPad, end up purchasing a variety of fresh fruit and veg. Or something like that.

A.pl’s chief executive called the accusation of infringement “ludicrous.” A date for an official hearing has not yet been set.

What do you think? Has Apple’s recent victory against Samsung gone to its head? Does this smack of a company for whom litigation is the answer to everything? Or is it merely seeking to protect its reputation and prevent confusion among consumers?

[Image via Business Tech]

Source : digitaltrends[dot]com

Digital Manifest Destiny: August sales mark the continuing decline of video game retail

The NPD Group's report on August video game sales demonstrates the dire future for video game retailers across the country.

The sky is falling! The sea is boiling! Generations of darkness, studio closures, Final Fantasy turned into a social game, Grand Theft Auto re-imagined as a co-operative corridor shooter where the game is free but every bullet must be purchased with real money! We should have seen the signs when Nintendo released Nintendogs + Cats for 3DS last year because IT LITERALLY MEANS DOGS AND CATS ARE LIVING TOGETHER! There’s no hope left, the video game industry is over.

Don’t jump to conclusions everyone. The intrepid analysts at the NPD Group released their monthly report on the US video game market on Thursday and the outlook for the industry-in-flux isn’t pretty. August video game, console, and accessory sales were down a whopping 20 percent year-on-year, plummeting to just under $517 million from over $647 million during the same period in 2011.

Even though sequels in best-selling franchises hit the top ten, they fell behind previous entries. Kingdom Hearts 3D: Dream Drop Distance for example moved 180,000 copies across August, well behind the 225,000 copies 2010 PSP game Kingdom Hearts: Birth By Sleep sold in its first month. The same for Transformers: Fall of Cybertron, which sold 105,000 copies in August, well behind its June 2010 precursor War for Cybertron which sold nearly 170,000. 

Consoles are plummeting as well. The Xbox 360’s resurgence over the past two years thanks to its slick redesign and the Kinect has worn off as Microsoft sold just 193,000 consoles, a drop of more than -37 percent from last year. In the Madden NFL month, that’s a troubling figure. NPD’s Anita Frazier reported that total console sales were down -39 percent year-on-year. “The current hardware systems are showing their age, so it goes without saying that it would be great to have new systems breathe life into traditional retail industry sales.”

August’s woes are nothing new, though; the retail video game industry has been contracting for four years straight. Look at the full year totals: In 2008, the US retail game business generated $22 billion in sales. Then $20 billion in 2009, $18.6 billion in 2010, and $17 billion in 2011.

Again: The sky is falling, etc.

The sky isn’t really falling though. It’s important to remember how misleading the NPD Group’s data is if looked at as representative of the full industry. Consider this: Up until June of this year, the NPD Group’s retail analysis didn’t incorporate sales from Walmart at all, meaning that its tallies were lacking data from one of the biggest game retailers in the country. Additionally, as Frazier was quick to point out in this month’s report, NPD sales tracking is retail only. It doesn’t account for any digital sales, not from closed networks controlled by platform holders like PSN and XBLA, not PC services like Steam, or mobile services like Apple’s iTunes. Frazier’s report claims that the digital and mobile market generated $391 million on its own. “You can’t talk about the gaming market without taking into consideration the growth in the number of mobile gamers on smartphones and tablets,” she told Market Watch.

There’s the truth: The sky isn’t falling on the video game industry, it’s falling on video game retail. Game retail may have totaled $17 billion last year, but people actually spent $25 billion on games in 2011 according to the ESA. The money isn’t gone. It’s just moved.

Source : digitaltrends[dot]com

Google Translate now translates images too

Ever been in a foreign country with no idea what a sign says? Google Translate now lets you snap a picture of it, and then translate the text.

This is a great timesaver as it doesn’t need you to enter in the text to translate manually.

The app runs on Android versions 2.3 and up, and allows you to select exactly what you would like translated. This is especially convenient if there is a large amount of text on the page, or more than one language in the image.

Unfortunately, you have to specify which language you want translated (autodetect doesn’t work in camera mode), and not all 64 languages supported by Google Translate can use the new camera translate feature. Also, if you exit out of the camera translate interface, it doesn’t retain the image you just took and makes you start all over. Hopefully, this will be fixed in the next patch.

Either way, it had no problems with translating the Polish language description on our Intel processor box. You can find Google Translate for Android in the Play Store here.

Source : blog[dot]gsmarena[dot]com