Charity auction offers lunch with Apple’s Eddy Cue at the company’s new HQ

Just last month, Apple CEO Tim Cook took part in a charity auction to have lunch with the highest bidder (plus a companion) at the new Apple Park. He was able to earn over US$680,000 for the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights, which broke his previous auction earning of $610,000. This time, Charitybuzz is launching an auction to have lunch with Apple’s services head Eddy Cue at Apple Park in Cupertino, California. The proceeds will go to the National Association of Basketball Coaches Foundation in Kansas City, Missouri. Cue is known to be a longtime basketball and Golden State Warriors fan.

The auction has an estimated value of $50,000 and bids can be placed from now until June 28^th at 12 p.m. Pacific Time. The lunch will be set at a mutually agreed upon date by June 30^th, 2018. The winning bidder needs to be 18 years old or older. And just like with Cook’s lunch, the meal and gratuity are included but travel and accommodations aren’t. It also can’t be resold, re-auctioned, or transferred. It also won’t include a formal tour inside Apple Park and photos will not be permitted.

Source: MacRumors

Apple meets with top podcasters to discuss the format, share issues

There’s been a resurgence of interest in podcasts lately and Apple knows they have to take advantage of its popularity. What the tech giant did is talk to the top podcast producers about the issues they have with Apple when it comes with the format. The exact details weren’t disclosed but things like how iTunes has fallen behind to supporting the medium were talked about. These include how producers aren’t able to earn revenue from subscription downloads or the lack of data and analytic tools when it comes to number of listeners and duration of plays. There are also poor sharing and promotion features for social media and the producers only have a single employee to contact when it comes to solving issues or working on promotions with iTunes.

Apple hasn’t made any promises for the podcast creators to hold them on but the representatives who were at that meeting then talked to iTunes chief Eddy Cue afterwards to relay the feedback. Cue said in a statement to the NY Times, “We have more people than ever focused on podcasting, including engineers, editors and programmers. Podcasts hold a special place with us at Apple.” We may or may not see changes soon. We’ll just have to wait.

Source: New York Times | Via: SlashGear

Home Sharing to make a comeback in iOS 9

You might not have noticed that Apple took out Home Sharing from iOS 8.4, probably so you can make full use of Apple Music subscription. But don’t worry, the feature will be coming back in iOS 9. According to Eddy Cue, they are working on bringing it back in the upcoming version of their mobile operating system. Home Sharing lets you share your media library for up to five computers, iOS devices, and Apple TV while in the same network. For now, you’re going to have to make do with Apple Music.

Source: Gizmodo

Eddy Cue: Apple has ‘best product pipeline’ in 25 years coming up

Walt Mossberg, Kara Swisher, Eddy Cue, and Jimmy Iovine

Apple’s senior vice president for Internet software and services Eddy Cue isn’t playing coy with his recent statement. The iCloud and iTunes chief said the company is introducing its best products later this year in the past 25 years. “Later this year, we’ve got the best product pipeline that I’ve seen in my 25 years at Apple,” Cue said.  He made this statement at the Code Conference in California, where he appeared on stage with Beats co-founder Jimmy Iovine. As we all know, Beats has just been bought by Apple.

It has been a relatively quiet year of refreshes and product updates for Apple so far, so we can’t wait to see what products Cue is talking about. We should probably start seeing some of these at Apple’s upcoming developer conference. Stay tuned for our live coverage from WWDC next week!

Source: Mac Rumors