The claims are set out, in part, in a letter last week from Apple’s law firm that urges US District Judge Denise Cote to reveal information about its pricing as well as “internal discussions about the inferiority” of its Kindle e-reader compared to the iPad. Apple also says the redacted information will help expose the “fiction” that Amazon was “forced” to adopt a new pricing system as a result of a 2010 arrangement between Apple and five big publishers.

This arrangement — known as “agency pricing” — resulted in publishers requiring retailers to sell ebooks on a commission basis, in which publishers could set the price. This led the Department of Justice, state governments and class action lawyers to sue Apple and the publishers; the latter settled the cases and agreed to pay out millions but Apple is holding its ground.

Apple argues that the Department of Justice is wrong to portray Amazon as a victim, along with consumers, of a conspiracy to raise prices. Instead, the company claims that Amazon was contemplating agency pricing too and was pleasantly surprised when the publishers took it up on their own. Apple is also using colorful emails obtained from Amazon executives to make its point:

 ”I guess what we never figured in was the idea that five publishers would band together and insist on receiving worse terms,” the email said. “And then Amzn would be ‘cornered’ into accepting them.”

“Hysterical, isn’t it?” the Amazon executive replied. “Jedi Mind Tricks here in Seattle.”

The email exchange was reported by Reuters legal reporter, Alison Frankel, whose recent analysis portrayed Amazon as the “elephant in the (court)room.” Her report adds that Judge Cote stated that she doesn’t want the trial “distorted by a larger battle between two commercial giants.”

What do others think? Apple’s view is likely to find support in at least some quarters. The publishing community continues to fume about Amazon’s enormous clout in the book business. Meanwhile, some copyright lawyers have joked to me in the past that Amazon should send US Attorney General Eric Holder a holiday card for suing Apple and the publishers.

Amazon will get to offers it own views directly; its executives, along with publishing executives, will be among the witnesses testifying on behalf of the Department of Justice.

For now, Judge Cote has decided that the evidence Apple is seeking will remain redacted. But the issue will not doubt arise again if the trial, scheduled to begin on June 3, goes ahead as planned. There is a pre-trial conference planned for later this Thursday — we’ll let you know if any new twists emerge.

Here’s the letter from Apple’s law firm:

Amazon to Disclose (Request)

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Mailbox for iPad is the first new product from the company since its Dropbox acquisition, which Om’s sources put above $50 million and potentially closer to $100 million. No matter the exact price tag, it was a significiant deal for the small company, and CEO Gentry Underwood said the transition to working within Dropbox has been remarkably smooth.

The new iPad app will look pretty similar to the existing iPhone app, with a few minor changes to account for the larger screen. Underwood said designing for the iPad is actually a significant challenge, since if you look at it one way it’s an overzized mobile phone, and another way it’s a small computer. Figuring out how to accomodate for the size of the keyboard (or wireless external keyboards), as well as not overcrowding the screen, is tricky.

“We’re trying to create an experience that’s as consistent as possible, that doesn’t misuse all that extra space,” he said, noting that it would be easy to see the larger size of the tablet and cram it with features. “And sometimes it’s like a luxury-sized mobile device and sometimes it’s a desktop replacement.”

Seemingly as soon as Mailbox launched, users were clamoring to download the app, which limited signups and put most people on a reservation list. The full app finally launched to everyone and Mailbox removed the signup list last month. At that point, it was delivering more than 100 million messages a day, and while Underwood said they are reluctant to continue releasing numbers, he said the growth remains strong, and that 40 percent of users hit inbox zero every week.

Mailbox for iPhone and iPad are available in the Apple iTunes store, and a full review of the iPhone app can be found on the GigaOM Pro blog.

Underwood said the company is working on an Android app (the iPad app was in the works before the acquisition), but he wouldn’t say when Android would launch. The company decided to go with iPad first since it was an often-requested feature, and because much of the code was the same for iPad, even if it presented new design challenges, whereas Android would be something of the opposite.

“There’s always this constant tension between, ‘This is great,’ and ‘Oh, there’s so much more we want to do.’”

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This is possibly due to a new feature dubbed auto tagging: Once turned on, Shazam will automatically listen to everything within reach of the iPad’s microphone, generate an acoustic fingerprint every few seconds and ping Shazam’s servers to look for matches. Identified songs, TV shows and ads are automatically sent to a personal queue within the Shazam app.

Users can then browse through these finds, add songs to their favorites, buy them on iTunes or stream them through Rdio. What’s interesting about this feature is that it also works in the background, while you’re doing something in another app or even when the iPad’s lock screen is enabled. iPad users will know that auto tagging is enabled through the red bar on the top of their screen, just like you’re used to seeing when you’re switching to another app during a Skype call.

The red bar means: Shazam is listening. For the next song.

That red bar is meant to warn users that their microphone is recording sound — but Shazam EVP of Marketing David Jones wasn’t all that happy about that notion when I talked to him Wednesday about the app update. “We are not recording or storing anything,” he said, adding that the app was “just borrowing the mic.”

Shazam’s new iPad app is one of a growing number of apps and devices that always keep the microphone running in order to react to speech, or in this case music; others include the new Xbox One. It’s a concept that will make some privacy-conscious consumers nervous — but Jones said that there are huge upsides to this approach.

Instead of making users scramble to find and activate the tagging app on the mobile device, auto tagging will let them come back to the music they heard throughout a TV show, or even at the end of a day. To illustrate it, Jones told me that he had his iPad in the car a few days ago, listening to radio program while he was driving. And when he got to work, he had a full queue of recognized songs waiting for him. “My entire commute’s music was sitting there,” he said.

Aside from auto-tagging, Shazam is also adding TV content recognition, social functionality and a mapping feature that shows where people are listening to which songs. Shazam has retired its old, standalone iPad app and is rolling out the update as a universal app, but the iPhone will only get the mapping feature for now.

Jones said that the iPhone is going to get auto-tagging later this summer. It’s unclear yet when Android is going to see auto-tagging, but other features of the new iPad app will find their way to the tablet version of Android within the next two months.

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From Google’s blog post about it:

“You can now speak your searches into the omnibox. Touch the microphone, say your search query aloud and see your results (in some cases spoken back to you), all without typing a single letter.”

Unlike Siri, this is not integrated into the operating system, and can only be accessed through the Chrome app.

Little by little, Google has been fine-tuning and improving its products that run on Apple’s operating system, and it’s having the effect of creating a Google layer on top of iOS.

Not only are all of Google’s major properties accessible in app form on iOS — from YouTube to Google Maps to Mail, Drive, Chrome, Search, Google+ and more — they often best what Apple has to offer. In addition, Google is finding ways to interconnect its apps, so iOS customers can jump from Google service to Google service fluidly. Earlier this month Google introduced a new setting for iOS developers that can enable app users to choose to set links in the Gmail iOS app to open in YouTube, Chrome or Google Maps, as appropriate, by default.

In April the company updated its Google Search app for iOS with Google Now, an assistant app that offers suggestions automatically based on behaviors and preferences expressed across Google’s apps and properties, all of which are on iOS.

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Zite outlined the changes in a blog post. CEO Mark Johnson has been pretty vocal about how he doesn’t think Zite should be like Google Reader, and told me the new features Zite has added to its iOS app are those that “enhance the user experience both for Google Reader users and the reading population in general.” Articles will now “gray out” after they’ve been read, users will be able to save sources as favorites and Zite’s algorithm will pay more attention to obscure content:

“One of the biggest problems with Google Reader is that RSS feeds which publish many stories per day tend to dominate your feed, so the obscure blog you found a few years ago that publishes every three months can be drowned out in the noise. Zite’s algorithm will more aggressively highlight rare content, so feel free to ‘like’ publishers that you enjoy, no matter how popular or rare.”

An Android update is coming soon.

Zite’s also added seven new publishers to its publisher program, bringing the total number of publishers it works with to 24. The new publishers are GigaOM, Atlantic Media (with The Atlantic and Quartz), Business Insider, Fast Company, Salon, Say Media (Remodelista and ReadWrite) and Serious Eats, and they join existing publishers like CNN (Zite’s parent company), the Huffington Post, and the Chicago Tribune. Zite publisher partners share their “best-of” content in their own sections of Zite’s app, and can run their own ads against their content.

“We are also starting to look at ways to monetize publisher content,” Johnson said. That’s something Zite’s competitors are already doing: The New York Times makes content available to paying subscribers through Flipboard, and the Wall Street Journal has a similar arrangement with Pulse.

Here’s a video of Johnson speaking about the future of content personalization at paidContent 2013:

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That would mean that users could sign in with their Flickr and Vimeo accounts within the Settings app on their iOS device, just as they can now with Twitter and Facebook. Then when the user hits the share button in an app, the menu will include the services that they’ve registered.

iOS is expected to be detailed by Apple at its Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco in June. 9to5Mac noted that the decision to include two additional social services could be reversed before any announcement is made. But the report does make a lot of sense.

Such a move could be read as a bit more anti-Google maneuvering from Apple. After all, the company last year shed all iOS-Google tie-ins in iOS 6 with the exception of keeping Google search as the default option in mobile Safari. YouTube is available as a third-party app from the App Store, but it’s no longer the default video service in iOS. Apple could also take up the move to support Vimeo in response to Google allowing iOS developers to enable a setting in their own apps that automatically opens YouTube videos in the YouTube app, instead of mobile Safari.

But it’s also just as likely that Apple is simply increasing feature parity between iOS and Mac OS X. OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion has built-in Flickr and Vimeo integration, as well as Twitter and Facebook. Facebook integration also began on OS X and moved to iOS, so Yahoo’s photo service and Vimeo’s social video service could be following that same path.

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But Cook, for his first time offering public testimony before Congress, acquitted himself quite well despite the scolding his company faced, which makes sense if you think about it: Sen. Levin is probably nowhere near as scary as Steve Jobs. Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer and its head of tax operations Phil Bullock were tasked with explaining the details of Apple’s accounting, while Cook extolled Apple’s virtues, the jobs it creates and its values as an American company.

Apple normally gets to choose how it’s shown in the spotlight. So it was an unusually defensive position for the company and its chief executive, known for its preference for privacy, to be in and have the nitty gritty of its corporate accounting practices exposed for all to see.

But Cook did indeed choose to go to Washington. He probably could have sent a senior vice president, but he showed up to speak for his company. And in doing so, he continued to rewrite our expectations of an Apple CEO. While his predecessor met privately with public officials, Apple was not in the spotlight in years past the way it has been recently. As profits have soared and some of its corporate practices both abroad and at home have come to light, Cook has had to face increased public scrutiny in a way Apple didn’t see quite as much during Jobs’ tenure as CEO. (With the exception of the stock-options backdating controversy, though the penalties for that were minimal.)

In the same manner he smoothly handled outrage at the practices at Apple’s Chinese manufacturing partners and offered solutions, Cook used his particular experience at Apple to talk about taxes. As the company’s former operations officer, he ably explained pricing transfer and other complex accounting practices his company uses, and laid out suggestions for how to reform the U.S. tax code to encourage more companies like his to bring more of their foreign earnings home.

Grilling Apple

Two experts on tax law testified earlier in the morning how Apple allocates some income to a holding company and subsidiaries in Ireland that don’t file corporate tax returns in the U.S. or anywhere else. But as was oft-repeated, what Apple has been doing doesn’t break any U.S. laws. (Sen. Rand Paul twice decried Apple being “harangued and bullied” by the committee and repeatedly made the point that if Apple weren’t minimizing its tax burden, it would be irresponsible to its shareholders.)

Cook defused some of the more pointed insinuations made by the committee diplomatically, using the same brand of charm and salesmanship we see from him during keynote speeches at Apple events. “We pay all the taxes we owe, every single dollar,” Cook said during his testimony. “We comply with the laws but also the spirit of the laws.”

Many of the senators present Tuesday admitted to being big fans and users of Apple products. But the reason the company they all admire was being grilled wasn’t completely explained. It did appear Apple was being used as an example of common corporate accounting practices because it is the largest corporate tax payer in the U.S. — and, as Sen. Tom Carper noted, because of the current political climate surrounding the national deficit. Apple and many other U.S. companies have been operating in this manner for years, but in the shadow of the “sequester,” several members present acknowledged that Congress is looking for tax revenue that it’s not getting.

In the end, Apple’s presence seemed to serve as an intermediary for the senators to argue amongst themselves about how out-of-control the U.S. tax code is. The hearing itself seemed mostly a pointless exercise, as these hearings tend to be, with little promise of any real change. Apple will likely go home to Cupertino and keep doing what its doing, and Congress will continue to disagree over how to appropriately tax businesses.

Meanwhile, Cook gets to continue to raise his public profile as an elite American businessman and cement his company’s stature as critical to the American economy and the overall tech industry.

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AT&T’s statement to the Verge on Monday notes that “by mid-June, we’ll have enabled those apps over cellular for our unlimited plan customers who have LTE devices from [Apple, Samsung and BlackBerry].” Besides FaceTime, Samsung and BlackBerry’s pre-installed video chat apps will also be included.

And more will be coming for all of its customers before the end of the year: “Throughout the second half of this year, we plan to enable pre-loaded video chat apps over cellular for all our customers, regardless of data plan or device; that work is expected to be complete by year end.”

When Apple updated its mobile video chat app to work over cellular last summer, AT&T came under fire when it announced subsequently that only customers who subscribed to one of its Mobile Share plans could use it. Several open internet groups threatened to file complaints with the FCC, calling the carrier’s policy a violation of net neutrality. Several months later, AT&T opened the service to anyone with an LTE device.

Based on broadness of the statement, it sounds like video chat apps like Google’s new Hangouts app, which is available over AT&T’s cellular network now for some iOS customers, will work over cellular for Android customers later on this year.

This post was updated on 5/21 to clarify that the iOS version of Google Hangouts is available for use over cellular networks now.

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Cook will call for a revenue-neutral reform of the corporate tax code that does away with all tax expenditures, lowers tax rates and establishes a “reasonable” tax on companies’ earnings from overseas. It’s not in the planned testimony, but in an interview last week, Cook made it clear that he does not believe that a tax rate of zero is a reasonable number. In his testimony before the U.S. Senate’s Subcommittee on Investigations, he will say that Apple supports this simplification of the tax code despite the likelihood that it will mean Apple’s overall corporate taxes will go up. The current corporate tax system “applies industrial era concepts to a digital economy” and “undermines U.S. competitiveness,” Apple believes.

Before Cook gets into his specific suggestions for fixing how U.S. businesses are taxed on foreign earnings, he’s going to spend most of his time going over why he’s being called to testify in the first place: Apple’s accounting methods. Apple keeps at least $100 billion in foreign earnings outside of the IRS’s grasp because it doesn’t wish to pay the 35 percent tax it would incur by bringing that money home. Many other businesses follow similar practices.

According to the published testimony, Cook will going into detail about how the company accounts for profits earned in the U.S., how investment in its foreign assets is taxed, how it shares R&D costs with an Irish subsidiary and more. (It’ll probably be a snoozefest for everyone except those who get a thrill out of spreadsheets.) Most of it is Cook on the defensive, explaining how what Apple does is within legal limits. Cook plans to assure the committee it’s not cheating on its taxes with any special tricks and “does not have a bank account in the Cayman Islands.”

He will underscore his point about Apple being on the up and up by laying out how much the company pays in taxes. Last year it paid $6 billion in taxes to the U.S. and this year, Cook has said it will pay $7 billion.

Tuesday’s testimony will be Cook’s first appearance before Congress. The company’s tax practices came to light a year ago when the New York Times highlighted some of the methods Apple has used to keep its overall taxes at a minimum.

Update 2:43 p.m. PT: Later on Monday the Senate released the results of its own investigation into the Apple’s tax-paying practices. It found that Apple’s convoluted system of subsidiaries has allowed it to avoid paying $44 billion in U.S. taxes over the last four years. However, it also noted that Apple did not break any U.S. law in doing so, according to a report in the Los Angeles Times. Expect many questions during Tuesday’s hearings about how the company uses its subsidiaries in Ireland to do this.

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Apple has started introducing trade-in offers that are particularly favorable to students. ZDNet reports:

Students who trade-in their old smartphones while upgrading to an iPhone will get 7,777 rupees (US$144). Non-students will be paid 7,000 rupees (US$130).

That’s in addition to an incentive for customers who use an American Express credit card to buy a new iPhone on a payment plan. Those customers will get 10 percent of their purchase back. Apple doesn’t have its own retail stores in India, but sells through a network of local, authorized retailers, many of whom only sell Apple products.

It’s a bit unusual for Apple to wheel and deal. But the iPhone maker has been tweaking its pricing strategy and incentive offerings in markets where smartphone ownership has only recently begun to take hold. Earlier this year, Apple introduced low and no-interest payment plans for iPhone buyers in India; similar to what it is offering in China. India is a country bearing huge potential — it is an example of what CEO Tim Cook means when he notes the potential of billions of people who have yet to own a smartphone. And as Om noted recently, there are 900 million mobile connections, and so far there are just 2.5 million iPhones in use.

As the iPhone matures especially in established markets, Apple is turning to fast-growing regions whose people are just now joining the smartphone revolution. It knows it can’t sell $600 smartphones to everyone. And so little by little we’re seeing Apple customize its approach to different markets, including selling older model iPhones through carriers, allowing brand-conscious young people to pay for the cachet of the iPhone brand in installments, or reaching customers through deals with local institutions.

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Here are the apps and devices I used that made my life a lot easier during this process.

Practice, practice, practice

One of the nice things about being the person everyone points to and says, “pick some songs” is, well, the songs I picked I already pretty much knew. However, there’s a huge difference between kinda knowing the song, and knowing it enough for a rehearsal. The first thing I did was create an iTunes playlist with the tunes. When I was driving around, I played nothing but those songs to get them stuck in my head.

When it came to actually putting my fingers to the fretboard, I used AmpliTube on my iPad for 90 percent of my practice — the other 10 percent were with my live rig to get the sounds right. One nice thing with AmpliTube is it will load the songs from my Music.app playlists and let me play along to them, as well as speed up and slow down parts. If there was a part I found particularly tricky to learn, I used Riffstation on OS X to loop that segment while I used the AmpliTube Orange amps to play along. For the first set of rehearsals, I also didn’t worry too much about getting the solos note-for-note, and instead focused on catching the feeling of the solo. I used my Fender Squire USB guitar for most of my practicing since it easily plugs into my iPad and Mac.

For what I was doing, I didn’t really care about my overall guitar sound; I just wanted to balance the volumes so I could hear both the song and my guitar equally. Then, I practiced. A lot.

Charting

I was asked by the bass player to chart the songs for a cheat sheet during rehearsal. While there are plenty of programs that will let you chart songs, I found them to be too advanced for my needs. What I really just needed to do was have the lyrics and then put the chord changes over it.

So, I used Pages ($19.99).

I went to a lyric website, cut and pasted the lyrics into Pages, and then added the chords and beat markers over the lyrics. This worked fantastically. In addition to giving the bass player a cheat cheat, I also had something I could reference during rehearsals. If I couldn’t remember how the chorus went, I had my own little cheat sheet. I printed out charts for her and the drummer, and had my iPad ready for my reference.

Running the rehearsal

Generally, I frown upon singers who use cheat sheets live, but in practice, obviously they are fine. Plus, I’m just filling in until we get a real singer (hopefully soon, I really can’t sing). I needed cheat sheets where I could see them while standing up, and I didn’t have a music stand that went that high. Plus, I wanted them right in my face.

For my cheat sheets, I used the iKlip 2 ($39.99) from IK Multimedia. It’s a mic stand holder for your iPad 2, 3 or 4 in a fairly secure fashion. Note: it slides into the holder, so I’d be a cautious using it during gigs. Not because it’ll fall out, but it’d be easy for someone to just snag the iPad during breaks. So, if you use it, make sure you take the iPad off when you walk off stage.

I was able to position my iPad with the iKlip so I could read the lyrics while warbling. A minor pet peeve is that I can’t get the iKlip to hold my iPad in the portrait position on the boom portion of the stand. Instead, I had to clip it on the main stand just under the boom.

If a note about how we played something came up, I just edited the Pages document with the note. Usually, this is how long the solos were, or if we wanted to change how a bridge went.

Final thoughts

I’ve written before about how I continue to be amazed at the way technology continues to improve how I approach music. It’s been 20 years since I’ve run a rehearsal. Back then it involved a lot of cassette tapes, CDs and photocopies. While OS X continues to be a starting point for my music, I find now when it comes to rehearsals, everything I need is on my iPad. I also have all my music theory and chord books in the Kindle app, so if I need to learn a chord I’m not familiar with, it’s very, very easy.

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Skylanders Cloud Patrol ($1.99, Universal) is a carnival-style shooting game where you tap to shoot at your target to win coins. The targets you are shooting at are mischievous trolls that have broken out of prison.

In this game you play one of a number of different Skylanders. As a Skylander you are responsible for hunting down and eliminating the escaped trolls. To shoot a troll, or anything else for that matter, you simply tap on the screen at the target you want to hit. You can also swipe your finger up, down, across and in a variety of pattern to lock on to a series of targets in quick succession. When shooting in such a manner, the game has the same interactive feel as Fruit Ninja. And like Fruit Ninja there are targets on the screen, in this case mines, that you must avoid shooting at all costs. If you shoot and hit a mine, it will explode and end the game.

As you progress through the game you are presented with a never-ending series of targets at which to aim. Each collection of targets are laid out like individual levels. After you successfully hit all of the targets on a given level, you will be flown to the next level in the cloud and presented with a new collection of targets. These targets can be barrels, boxes, balloons, presents, sheep (yes, sheep) and of course trolls. Things do get progressively difficult as the targets you are aiming to hit do not stay in one place.

The trolls will hide behind shields, duck under rocks and even fly around the screen using propeller caps. It really does resemble a carnival-style shooting game. Some of the trolls are armed with weapons that they will use to shoot at you. You must shoot down the projectiles aimed at you before they get too close and kill your Skylander.

Swirling around the screen intermixed with the trolls are the mines.  The mines always seem to change their pattern and place themselves right in front of a troll as you are tapping on the screen to shoot. There are also magical power-ups, crates packed with explosives that will kill all visible trolls on the screen, and golden coins that you can tap on to collect. When you do finally get overwhelmed and either shoot a mine or get shot by a troll, the game will end. Your score will be tallied, coins will be counted and you will be awarded gems for each of the posted achievements you have accomplished.

The coins and gems collected can be used to buy magic items as well as different Skylanders.  The magic items can be used while playing the game to give you an advantage over the trolls you are shooting.  However, switching out your Skylander for a more powerful Skylander with special abilities can really make a difference in how well you perform.  Between each level, there are in-app purchases where you can buy more gems.  The gems can be traded for gold coins.  This can certainly help you power-up at a faster rate by enabling you to achieve your goals faster.

What really sets the game apart however is that you can also make out-of-app purchases.  This is actually the main reason that the entire Skylander series of games exists.  By purchasing real toy models of the Skylanders at your local toy or hobby store, you can use the web activation code that comes with the toy model to unlock its corresponding Skylander character within the game itself.  Through earning gems and coins in the game, buying gems and coins through iTunes in-app purchase, or buying toy models at a retail store, you can grow your Skylander army.

Rather than exclusively use Apple’s GameCenter, Skylanders also utilizes Activision’s online gamers community, Activate. With Activate you can save game progress and challenge your Activate friends to various Showdowns.  These Showdowns are like goals, and if you win the Showdown you will be awarded with gems and coins.  The interaction between the game and Activate is smooth and reliable.  This weekend is as good a time as any to Activate an Activision online gaming account and start hunting trolls.

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Case in point: Yahoo Weather, which rolled out recently, already has what Onavo CEO Guy Rosen calls an “unprecedented” 3 percent market share among U.S. iPhone owners. That’s about 1.5 million users total which makes it the 91st most popular iPhone app three weeks after release, according to Onavo Insights data. That’s very good for a new app, Rosen said in an interview.

Other Yahoo mobile apps including Yahoo Messenger and the Yahoo app are also doing well. “In general, what we found is that although Yahoo has been quiet on mobile, when we look at the top apps, we see quite a few up there. They have a decent footprint.”

According to Onavo stats, the Yahoo app is the most popular of the company’s suite and among the most popular in the App Store overall. In the past three months, active usage has risen to 9.02 percent from  6.5 percent (or to 4.5 million active users from 3.2 million active users.) Not too shabby.

How does Onavo get to these numbers? It uses data gleaned from its free iPhone (and now Android) apps including Onavo Extend, which compresses data flowing into and out of your phone; Onavo Counts, which watches how much time you actually spend using a given app; and Onavo Protect, which scans traffic flowing into your phone for malware. Then it aggregates that data (minus the personally identifiable bits) and runs statistics to suss out usage patterns. That data forms the core of reports that the company then sells to app developers.

This data is far more useful to app makers than app store download figures because it shows actual engagement. If your app is the mobile equivalent of shelfware, it’s helpful to know that.

Rosen said “millions” of people use Onavo’s iPhone apps but would not specify further. “We use a panel methodology with our user base as the sample and apply statistical methodologies to make sure it’s valid,” he said in an interview.

The current app stats do not yet factor in Onavo’s Android users, although they will be incorporated in time.

Note: This story was updated at 12:38 p.m. PDT with a new chart on Yahoo app usage growth and additional data on that usage.

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The Verge says Apple is still “bogged down in licensing talks” with music publishers. Two of the big ones are still holding out, Sony/ATV and BMG, according to the Verge’s sources. That’s partly because what Apple is trying to do is not the same as Google Play Music All Access. Google’s service is a standard subscription service, like Spotify, and it will cost users $10 per month. It’s also not clear what the music catalog will look like for that service because Google has not yet announced which publishers have signed up.

iRadio is reportedly more complicated because of what Apple is trying to build and how it likes to do business. iRadio won’t be a straight-up web radio service; there will also be some on-demand aspects to it. And Apple also isn’t willing to pay music publishers an advance for access to their catalogs. Instead, Apple has agreed to give them a share of ad revenue, per-play fees and a guaranteed minimum payment, according to the Verge.

Apple already makes billions from its current content service, iTunes. It’s not essential that Apple have its own streaming music subscription service as answer to Google in a few weeks. But the company does need to acknowledge that times and habits have changed when it comes to music ownership. The developers conference seems a perfect place to debut it, but a fall event later this year when new hardware is set to be announced would be fine too; three more months doesn’t make that big of a difference at this point.

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Cook told the Washington Post that he has ideas for how to help convince companies like his own to bring back their overseas earnings to the U.S.:

 “If you look at it today, to repatriate cash to the U.S., you need to pay 35 percent of that cash. And that is a very high number,” Cook said in an interview Thursday. “We are not proposing that it be zero. I know many of our peers believe that. But I don’t view that. But I think it has to be reasonable.”

Apple is set to pay $7 billion in taxes in the U.S. this year, he told the paper. He also said he believes that Apple is “likely the largest corporate taxpayer in the U.S.”

But the company has — along with a lot of its peers — found creative ways to make sure that number is not any higher. Apple has $145 billion in its coffers, and $100 billion of that is from profits derived from sales overseas. But the company has not brought that money back to the U.S. because of the current corporate tax rate. Even when the company decided to issue a larger dividend for shareholders, Apple elected to borrow money rather than use profits from overseas to fund that, partly because of the tax burden.

This will be Cook’s first testimony before Congress, but not his first trip to Washington in an official capacity. A year ago he visited with House Speaker John Boehner, signaling his interest in engagement with Washington and public policy would be somewhat of a departure from his predecessor’s.

Cook also told the Post Apple believes “in good corporate citizenship.” And he has made some good U.S. corporate citizen moves since becoming CEO. In addition to instituting a charitable-giving matching program for employees, he’s also laid out plans to bring production back to the U.S. of one model of Mac. Cook told Politico that it would be an existing product that will be made here. Not only will it be put together in the U.S., he said some of the parts would be manufactured in Arizona, Texas, Illinois, Florida and Kentucky.

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Spoken notifications can come in handy when using your iOS device while working out at the gym, riding a bicycle or attached to your car’s hands-free audio system via Bluetooth.  No need to actually look at the screen and read the message you just received. All you need to do is listen. Here is how to set it up.

Enable the VoiceOver Accessibility setting

The iOS setting that you need to enable is actually an accessibility feature called VoiceOver.  This feature can be used to read all aspects of the screen using Siri’s voice, including notifications that pop up on the screen.  The following steps will also allow you to easily turn on and off the VoiceOver setting, as it may not be a feature that you want enabled all of the time.

• Open the Settings App and navigate to the Accessibility setting located within the General settings.
• Select the VoiceOver settings located at the top of the list, but do not turn it on just yet. Instead scroll down to the bottom of the VoiceOver settings and turn on Speak Notifications.
• Navigate back to the list of all Accessibility settings and scroll down to the bottom of the list.
• Set the Triple-click Home Button setting to turn on VoiceOver and exit out of the Settings app.

That’s it.  Now every time the Home button is triple-clicked, the device will enter into VoiceOver mode.  Once in VoiceOver mode, Siri’s voice will read aloud all of the information on the screen, including notifications. To turn off VoiceOver, simply triple-click the Home button again.

Works with any Notifications-capable app

This VoiceOver feature as configured above will work with any app that takes advantage of iOS’s notification system.  Just be sure to configure the notification setting so that the app you are interested in can display an alert on the lock screen.  Using VoiceOver this way will respect your Do Not Disturb settings.

One app in particular that is useful to use in association with this feature is Twitter.  I have enabled certain news accounts that I follow on Twitter to be able to send me notifications.  With VoiceOver feature enabled, Siri will speak over the music that I am listening to and read the tweet to me.  It’s like adding your own custom news service to your favorite music stream, which I have found to be a very useful feature.

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As someone who spends a lot of time playing with connected home and personal devices this is fabulous news. I had started gathering research for a post about how as an Android user I feel like many of the popular connected devices are leaving me out in the cold with lame apps, while iOS users get sparkly interfaces and more functionality. The Hue app, the WeMo app, the BlueBulb app and the FitBit are all examples of this iOS first and foremost (and sometimes only) mindset. Or when it comes to specific devices such as the Wahoo Blue heart rate monitor my colleague Kevin Tofel wrote about last year, the Android support only extends to a few devices.

But one reason for the focus on iOS for many devices, especially those containing Bluetooth, is that native support and easy integration between the radio and the app wasn’t there. But with this announcement, which means developers will find it easier to build Android-based apps for connecting to Bluetooth devices, all that changes.

Then app developers building software for Bluetooth enabled gadgets no longer have an excuse. Although, as seems to be the case with Hue and WeMo which both work with Wi-Fi, perhaps they just think iOS users are more likely to buy their gear, so they’ve skimped on Android resources for the time being. Hue lightbulbs are also exclusively sold in Apple stores, which may also contribute to the meh nature of its Android app.

Bluetooth is serious about the internet of things.

While the Android news is great for the growing number of people toting those devices, it’s just one element in The Bluetooth Special Interest Group’s plans to make the radio technology ubiquitous for the internet of things. Bluetooth is already making huge strides in personal area networking compared with other standards I covered as far back as Jan. 2011. Bluetooth radios are set to be in 2.5 billion new devices this year, according to Mark Powell, executive director of the Bluetooth SIG, who I met with on Wednesday. That’s one fourth of the 10 billion Bluetooth radios that have shipped in the lifetime of the technology, according to ABI Research provided by the Bluetooth SIG.

Clearly Bluetooth is popular, and the acceptance by Google of the overarching Smart Ready application development framework will enhance the experience for more consumers, but Powell also detailed plans to create a secure end-to-end network layer for Bluetooth. That technology could ensure that communications between certain devices stay private, an important consideration for medical or personal data.

He also said that in addition to the profiles for data that the SIG had developed for formatting data (for example, it has a running profile that tracks the data associated with steps so an app developer doesn’t have to figure that out), it’s beefing up its service discovery layer. This will become more important as we get more connected devices and want them to talk to each other without human intervention. For example, if you have four connected Bluetooth lightbulbs in a room, you might want to turn them on all at once instead of individually programming them.

This is a concept I explored with Mike Kuniavsky, a principal in the Innovation Services Group at PARC, in a podcast in March. Powell also noted that in addition to the low energy specification the SIG released it’s working on extending the range of Bluetooth in some flavors beyond 100 meters. That means it can be used in the home, and not just as a personal area network, but for devices communicating between rooms. Combine that with the end-to-end security and suddenly my Z-wave door locks look like the wrong choice.

However, I won’t sweat that just yet. Even as Bluetooth beefs up for the internet of things, it won’t become the sole radio technology connecting my gizmos and gadgets to the web any more than Wi-Fi is my sole means of accessing the internet. However, Bluetooth has really grown up and moved well beyond its early days as a connection technology for wireless headsets and computer peripherals. Even if I’m not bullish on the future of the Bluetooth mouse, I’m bullish on Bluetooth.

This story was updated on May 16 to reflect that Bluetooth is extending the service range beyond 100 meters.

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Let’s be positive

Every story I read about Google is us versus some other company or some stupid thing. Being negative is not how we make progress. The most important things are not zero sum.

Except Microsoft is not playing ball

The Web is not advancing as fast as it should be. Certainly, we struggle with companies like Microsoft. We would like to see more open standards and more people involved in those ecosystems. I wouldn’t grade the industry well with where we have gotten to.

And that other Larry is just greedy

We’ve had a difficult relationship with Oracle, including having to appear in court. Money is obviously more important to them than any collaboration.”

Google has been fighting with Microsoft for a while and well, Oracle is a tough adversary, especially when it comes to Java.

While I am complete agreement with Page’s general sentiment about opportunities and the importance of being positive, I think Larry (and all other technology industry leaders) should actually practice what they preach if they want others to follow.

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Mobile devices from Apple, and from other manufacturers, are fast replacing PCs in the enterprise, as workers fuel the BYOD (bring-your-own device) phenomenon. “Smartphones and tablets will be the two most widely used devices for UC in 2013, passing traditional computers and desk phones,” Infonetics Research said in a recent report.

It’s clear that workers want to use their favorite mobile devices in the workplace and they are asking IT managers to help them integrate them.

Responding to this trend, ShoreTel has released a new solution, ShoreTel Dock, to turn Apple iPads and iPhones into desk phones, integrating the convenience of mobile devices with the power of a business communications system. The industry’s first business-grade device, ShoreTel Dock transforms iPhones and iPads into unified communications end points, so that workers can use their Apple handheld devices as their primary business communications tools.

“ShoreTel Mobility is a game changer for companies with leaders who see effective communications as a competitive advantage and who are trying to win by leveraging the power of unified communications. The ShoreTel Dock is a natural extension providing the conveniences of a desk phone for iPhones and iPads,” said Kevin Gavin, ShoreTel’s chief marketing officer.

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Not that Edelstein would exactly describe Haunting Melissa  — the story of a teenage girl who believes her dead mother is haunting her, and then suddenly disappears — as a movie. “I didn’t want to take a movie and stuff it in an app,” he told me. Rather, the goal was to use technology “to push a story out to people in bits and pieces.”

Edelstein’s production company, Hooked Digital Media — which includes investor Kevin Washington as cofounder and MySpace cofounder Aber Whitcomb as advisor — built an iOS platform that pushes content out to viewers over time. Haunting Melissa doesn’t have a predetermined length: Edelstein shot thousands of hours of video, and it will be pushed out to viewers in “chapters,” or segments, on a timeline that can be tweaked on the back end. For example, if a user hasn’t entered the app for a while, he or she might receive a push notification that a new chapter is available.

In addition, the actual video content can be adjusted through the app’s content management system, so new content can be inserted into a chapter after a user has already watched it. The idea is to keep users coming back to the app, checking for new content and seeing what has changed.

The Haunting Melissa iOS app, available in the iTunes Store today, is free, as is the first chapter. If a user shares that chapter on Facebook, he or she gets the second chapter for free. Users can buy a “season pass” for $6.99 (standard definition or $14.99 (HD); if purchased individually, chapters are $0.99 for standard definition and $1.99 for HD.

“We are gambling on the notion that this is going to fit in the diet of people who watch and consume a lot of stuff,” Edelstein said. “This isn’t sitting down to watch X hours of House of Cards. It’s one piece of what you’re going to consume over the course of time.” He imagines that users will dip in and out of the app as new content becomes available — but he isn’t sure, because Hooked Digital Media hasn’t tested how viewers use the app. “We just have to go for it and see how people watch and react,” Edelstein said. “My experience in testing movies is that it’s a total clusterf*ck. Unless you have a sample size that’s over thousands of people, you can’t get an accurate measure of content consumption.”

So the company is waiting to see what viewers do and how they share Haunting Melissa on social media. Edelstein describes the creation of Haunting Melissa as “low-budget independent film making.” He tapped industry connections who wanted to work on a different kind of project and got to test new skills — like iPad color correction — for Haunting Melissa. “Because of that excitement level,” Edelstein said, “I was able to work with people I’d worked with before.” He is now working on a sequel.

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Apple’s App Store downloads and downloads from the Google Play store became roughly even last fall, as Erica Ogg wrote recently, and then in the first quarter of 2013, Google pulled ahead in sheer number of mobile app downloads worldwide. However, Apple got 74 cents for every dollar spent on apps during the that quarter, according to a report by Canalys published in April, and the 50 billion downloads now puts Apple back with a slight lead.

The company announced the number of downloads on the first day of Google’s I/O conference, as Google announced that its Google Play store has seen 48 billion app downloads since launch in late 2008. However, it’s good to remember that app downloads only tell part of the story — someone could download an app and never use it again.

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Since Android has long been the prepaid carrier’s OS of choice, the vast majority of those devices ran Google’s software. NPD’s Mobile Phone Track service show that year-over-year prepaid smartphone unit sales doubled in the first quarter. Quarter over quarter, prepaid’s overall share of the smartphone market jumped from 22 percent to 32 percent. NPD’s VP of industry analysis Stephen Baker said Q1 marked the twelfth straight quarter of triple digit sales increases in the U.S.

Apple certainly isn’t blind to the trend. In fact, it’s been actively seeking out prepaid carrier partnerships in the last year working with carriers like Cricket Communications, Straight Talk and T-Mobile USA. Though the iPhone’s share of the prepaid smartphone market was only 8 percent, that’s up considerably from last year when it was a mere 2 percent. Samsung share of the prepaid smartphone market is big, 32 percent, but it’s relatively stable, while Apple is on a big growth trajectory.

“For consumers looking at prepaid phones today, value does not equate with finding phones that are cheap or obsolete,” Baker said in a statement. “In fact, the Galaxy S2 and the iPhone 4S, two of the top five prepaid smartphone models in 2013, were among the top-selling phones overall just one year earlier.”

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In a class action suit filed in San Jose, California, Debra Hilton claims that Apple knew about a defect in a flex cable that controls the on-off button, but chose to stay quiet about it so as to sell more phones.

As evidence, she points to Apple discussion forums viewed by hundreds of thousands of visitors on which users complain of “wiggly” power buttons. Hilton also points to a fix-it video on YouTube and comments by a self-described iPhone repairman who says the power button defect is prevalent on the iPhone 4 which went on sale in 2010.

Apple did not immediately return a request for comment.

The lawsuit claims that the defect typically arises shortly after one year at which point the warranty has expired, forcing consumers to pay $149 for repairs.

Hilton is suing under the RICO statute, a federal racketeering law that has become a vehicle for national class actions. The lawsuit also accuses Apple of violating California’s unfair competition laws.

You can read the complaint for yourself here:

Apple Power Button Lawsuit

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Although it may be too late given the rise of successful third-party messaging apps, BBM is also going cross-platform. Surely, the company is gaining momentum, however, it still seems that for now, it’s competing for third place against Microsoft’s Windows Phone platform.

Here are some of the highlights coming out of BlackBerry World taking place in Orlando:

• The BlackBerry Q5. This handset with full keyboard and 3.1-inch touchscreen is targeted at select markets in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Asia (including the Asia Pacific region) and Latin America when it launches in July. It’s really a budget device for emerging markets, but the company can’t ignore this important segment. The current Z10 and Q10 are a bit too high-end (read: high-priced) for these growth areas, and I think the Q5 is a smart play.
• BlackBerry 10.1 software for the Z10. We had hints of this update coming and it adds some nice features to current Z10 handsets: PIN to PIN messaging, an HDR camera mode, improved cursor control and support for custom notifications. Should these have been in the Z10 on launch day? Probably, but BlackBerry was under the gun to deliver and this is a solid follow up.
• BlackBerry Messenger for iOS and Android. This long-rumored expansion of BBM is now reality, or will be later this summer when it rolls out. At first, the software will support the basics: Messaging and Groups. Later, however, a full suite of BBM tools — already available on BlackBerry 10 — will arrive with screen-sharing and voice calls. Is it too little too late though: If you’re using iOS or Android now, how many friends or contacts do you know that use BBM? BlackBerry says that BBM has more than 60 million monthly active users now but that’s well below some popular third-party messaging services.

BlackBerry is also making inroads with apps, claiming 120,000 are now available for the platform. Bear in mind that a good portion of those are Android apps and not native to BlackBerry; for some that won’t matter. If customers can get the mobile apps they want on the platform, they’ll be happy and so too will BlackBerry.

The company is really in the second inning of its BlackBerry 10 ballgame and picking up steam. I don’t expect BlackBerry sales to rival those of iOS or Android any time soon, but they could present a bigger challenge to Microsoft’s Windows Phone than some have thought. I didn’t see much light at the end of BlackBerry’s tunnel last year; however, the company continues to drive forward with everything it needs to compete.

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The app isn’t available just yet. But Realmac put up a website today with a very brief video showing how it works and what it will look like.

Realmac founder Dan Counsell told me via email that the camera app “was built with the same principles of Clear in mind.” That means employing a very simple user interface, flat, uncluttered design and an app that’s focused on one main thing; in this case taking and sharing photos.

Analog Camera is a good-looking app. Yes, it includes filters like every other photo app, but it also allows for a quick succession of shots to be taken. Then there’s a grid for helping to more easily select the best shot taken and best filter.

Analog Camera also includes easy sharing within the app to Facebook and Twitter; so it’s a camera app with social features, but unlike Instagram does not come with its own attached social network.

Realmac expects Analog Camera to hit the iOS App Store “later this month.”

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