Apple’s Commitment to Customer Privacy

Apple has released a statement about its commitment to customer privacy after the whole NSA & Prism reporting in the media over the last few days.

Apple has always placed a priority on protecting our customers’ personal data, and we don’t collect or maintain a mountain of personal details about our customers in the first place. There are certain categories of information which we do not provide to law enforcement or any other group because we choose not to retain it.

For example, conversations which take place over iMessage and FaceTime are protected by end-to-end encryption so no one but the sender and receiver can see or read them. Apple cannot decrypt that data. Similarly, we do not store data related to customers’ location, Map searches or Siri requests in any identifiable form.

Apple keeps everything simple

I loved this quote from Troy Mcilvena (@mcilvena) on App.net

“Apple keeps everything simple by making decisions on behalf of users, like installing apps through a music player. And to make things even simpler, they preinstall the same app on your phone but it doesn’t play music or install apps.”

Flipkart’s Flyte MP3 Store is Shutting Down

NextBigWhat is reporting that Flipkart will be shutting down Flyte, their online Music store for the Indian market.

Mekin Maheshwari, Head – Digital Media and Payments, Flipkart told NextBigWhat

“We have realized that the music downloads business in India will not reach scale unless several problem areas such as music piracy and easy micro-payments etc are solved in great depth. Which is why, we feel that at present, it makes sense to take a step back from Flyte MP3s and revisit the digital music market opportunity at a later stage.”

I wouldn’t say this is surprising at all. Indians paying for their music is like an Eskimo paying for ice. There’s plenty of free stuff around you.

Update: Medianama tells us why.

The New Kinect Sensor in the Xbox One

Peter Rubin from WIRED brings an exclusive preview of the new Xbox One and its new Kinect sensor.

Watching the keynote last night and then the reactions on Twitter after, I noticed a lot of hate towards the announcement. No games, no backwards compatibility, no pricing and release info, etc. But watching this video blew my mind. I’m not gamer, yet I feel like grabbing the Xbox One when it comes out just to play with the Kinect sensor and the new games built for it.

Share My Dabba

This is great stuff. The Share My Dabba (Share My Tiffin) initiative is a joint effort between Happy Life Welfare Society and The Dabbawala Foundation that makes use of leftover food from the tiffins and is shared with hungry street children.

Read more about the Dabbawalas here.

Orbit App for App.net

Orbit App for App.net

Over the last few months, App.net has been maturing into much more than just a “Twitter alternative”. The team behind the service has been slowly rolling out some impressive features and updates to it, making it a very solid product that stands on its own and makes it very different from Twitter. Even though the Alpha web app works very much like twitter, the core of App.net & the API that it offers is much more advanced and includes many different features for users — the most notable being the 10GB of File Storage for every account & the corresponding Files API.

One of the first few apps to make explicit use of this Files API by App.net, is Orbit. The app, designed and developed by Joel Levin and Andy LaVoy, is a tiny menubar app that lets you easily manage your files stored on App.net. Similar to Droplr or Cloud App, you can drag your files onto to the app icon in the menubar. Orbit automatically uploads the file and returns a URL that you can share with anyone.

Clicking on the menubar icon reveals a tray that displays a list of all the files in your account. You can drag any file out of the tray to save it and double clicking a file opens it in the default browser. You can hit ⌘+C (or right click) on a file to copy its link manually or ⌘+Delete to delete the file. At the bottom of the tray, Orbit shows you how much space you’ve used from your quota. You can toggle between values displayed either in MBs or percentage by clicking on them. Orbit also includes the option to upload Screenshots automatically, which makes it very easy to quickly share something.

Orbit is the perfect little utility to manage files in your App.net File Storage. It stays out of the way, but is very nifty when you do need it. Orbit is a Free app and can be downloaded from here.