Filed under: Portable Audio

Now that Apple’s lawyers have scared the pants off of small entrepreneurs selling products like the Profit Pod and TightPod — items that have nothing to with portable audio in any way, mind you — it seems that the next targets are companies that have the audacity to use the word “podcast” in their names. Wired’s Listening Post blog is reporting that Steve’s legal eagles have sent one of those scary cease and desist letters to a company called Podcast Ready, whose premier product, myPodder, gives users an automated way to download ‘casts to their portable devices. CEO Russel Holliman claims that he’d consider changing the name of the program if necessary, but seems to be justifiably reticent about rebranding his entire business, considering the fact that “podcast” may not be “owned” by Apple nor even a derivative of “iPod” in the first place. Robert Scoble — whose own company, PodTech, may be at risk in this witch hunt — has weighed in on the issue by suggesting that the tech community as a whole adopt other terms like “audiocast” and “videocast” (or alternately, “audcast” and “vidcast”) to describe this type of content, while other folks feel that fighting Apple and generating a ton of negative press for Cupertino is the best solution. Our take? Apple should be happy that its golden goose is getting so much free publicity, and if it isn’t, we know of several companies that probably wouldn’t mind if zencast, zunecast, or sansacast became the preferred terminology.

Update: BBHub’s own Russell Shaw delves into this issue a little further over at ZDnet, and finds that Apple is having trouble getting certain iPod-related phrases trademarked, including the word “iPodcasting.”

Read- Apple’s nastygram
Read- Scoble’s take
[Via calacanis.com]

 

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Filed under: Portable Audio, Portable Video

Nothing starts the day like a freshly squeezed Apple rumor, right? Well you’re looking at 10 supposed iPod (and one iPhone?) “redesigns” which AppleInsider extracted from the bowels of a European trademark and design office. Credited to Andre K. Bartley, an Apple interface designer with several iPod-related patent filings in the US and Europe under his belt, these designs were registered in January 2006 without any descriptive data. We don’t doubt the authenticity of this filing, however, what’s hard to stuff down the ol’ pie-hole is the idea of Apple walking away from its much loved, and oft imitated, click-wheel interface for the iPod as AI suggests. And certainly not in favor of a Gigabeat e(S)que cross-hair controller or uh, Creative’s scroll strip. Considering Apple’s long history of litigation over interface design, we’re probably just looking at some legal maneuvering here. Next.

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Filed under: Gaming

We love Sony, so naturally we tend to give 'em a hard time. It's nothing personal, that's just the pecking order; we just hold them in such high regard that when the slip up, say something stupid, or just do that thing they always seem to do to piss off their customers, we're there to give 'em a slap on the wrist -- just like we would other company. This time we're going to have to give them the benefit of the doubt -- we want to give them the benefit of the doubt, because we really don't want to believe Sony would drop the infinity sign (which, of course, closely resembles an toppled figure 8) between the P and S (we presume for PlayStation) in a supposed trademark application they filed for their PlayStation controller with the Japanese patent office. We can't prove this is actually legit, but that's the word on the street according to GameFront.de, whose PooS logo image (above) doesn't even look close to the regular PlayStation / Spiderman type we know they've become so anal about using everywhere. Our advice: don't believe the infinite amounts of hype, until further notice we're calling BooS on this one.

[Via Digital Battle]

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