Posts tagged Idiots
Pulse iPad App Gets Steve Jobs’s Praise in Morning…Then Booted From App Store Hours Later After NYT Complains About It
3OK, there are some things that Apple do which are just stupid. There are many other things that they do which I can never really understand. This is an example of one of those things.
Yesterday morning, the pair of Stanford University graduate students who made the hot news-reading iPad app, Pulse News Reader, were ecstatic to be mentioned first–for being among the most promising developers for the new tablet device–by Apple CEO Steve Jobs in his keynote speech at the Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco.
But by the afternoon, that flush of entrepreneurial success had turned sour, after Apple (AAPL) informed the two that Pulse was being pulled from the App Store after it received a written notice from the New York Times Company (NYT) declaring that “The New York Times Company believes your application named ‘Pulse News Reader’ infringes The New York Times Company’s rights.”
In an unusual coincidence, the Times Web site was on prominent display on a huge screenshot of the iPad during Jobs’s speech.
Ironically, the Times wrote a big wet kiss about Pulse last week in a blog post titled “The iPad Pulse Reader Scales the Charts,” by tech writer Brad Stone.
“Pulse is a stylish and easy-to-use news aggregator,” wrote Stone. “News organizations still puzzling over their iPad strategies can perhaps derive some hope from Pulse’s success–or at least its price tag.”
Im thinking here that the NYT doesn’t understand trully what an RSS feed is, especially as if you were to visit the newspaper website itself, you would be presented with the same content. Needless to say after this, the developers will pull the publicly available NY Times feed and re-release the app without it. The only loser here is the NY Times, who now lose thousands and thousands of daily website visits, advert placements, and many regular readers. It wouldn’t be surprising if they go after other popular apps who utilize the same system.
While Apple have to comply with the requests of the times, its still a bit stupid on their part to do this after it has just been catapulted to the limelight by the very guy who owns Apple. Hopefully, this will all be rectified soon 🙂
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