Apple's Retail VP To Be New J.C. Penny CEO

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Joshua Schnell writing for Macgasm:

J.C. Penney has a new CEO today, and they’ve poached him from Apple Inc.. Ron Johnson, the man responsible for Apple’s retail experience, will now be occupying the CEO position at J.C. Penney. Think about that for a second, J.C. Penney could become cool again. Okay, probably not. But, It seems like Ron Johnson is putting his money where his mouth is today, according to the J.C. Penney press release he has committed to making a personal investment of $50 million in the Company “through the purchase, at fair market value, of 7 1/3-year warrants on 7.257 million shares of J.C. Penney Company stock.” Putting his money where his mouth is. If he can do for JC Penny what he did for Apple, this is a huge gain for J.C. Penny.

A Dramatic Reading Of The iTunes EULA By Richard Dreyfuss

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Rafe Needleman for CNET:

This Friday's Reporters' Roundtable is on a topic that vexes us all: why are end user license agreements and terms of service so long and convoluted? To get ourselves in the mood for this show, we asked CNET fan (and Academy Award winner) Richard Dreyfuss if he'd help us out by doing a dramatic read of the Apple EULA. He said yes. So, without further ado, we present to you,Dramatic readings from the iTunes EULA by Richard Dreyfuss Go listen. Make sure you listen to "Effective Until".

Steve Jobs Presents Plans For New HQ At Cupertino City Council Meeting

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While WWDC is still going on, Steve Jobs made an appearance at the Cupertino City Council meeting to present to the council Apple's plans for their new headquarters office they plan to build in Cupertino, not far from their old headquarters. Jobs wants to build one building that will hold 12,000 Apple employees on the former Hewlett-Packard property. Alexia Tsotsis, writing for Techcrunch:

Jobs began the presentation referring to the fact that Apple is growing “like a weed,” and that its current campus at D’Anza and the 280 isn’t enough — fitting only about 2,800 people. Apple currently rents buildings to house its other 6,700 employees in the area. The new building will augment the current campus. Paving the way for these plans, Apple purchased about 100 acres from Hewlett Packard in 2010 and added them to the 50 it owns adjacent. Jobs says he has corralled “some great architects … some of the best in the world” to come up with a design that will house 12,000 people in one four story high building on the property. The area is now mainly apricot orchards. With the futuristic design Apple apparently is relying heavily on its experience building retail stores, and it will be creating one massive piece of curved glass if the proposal goes through. “There’s not a single straight piece of glass in this building,” Jobs says. The parking will be underground. Jobs also wants the building to function as its own power source, with an “energy center” as its primary source of power (“with natural gas and other ways that are cleaner and cheaper”), using the grid as a backup. The campus will include amenities like its own auditorium similar to Apple’s current Town Hall (“We’ve got an auditorium, cause we put on presentations, much like we did yesterday but we have to go to San Francisco to do them.”) and a cafeteria that will feed 3,000 people at one sitting. “We do have a shot at building the best office building in the world,” Jobs told the Council members, “Architecture students will come here to see this.” Ideally Apple wants to move into the campus in 2015. The individual members of the Cupertino City Council seemed like they were in awe the entire time the infamously charismatic Apple CEO spoke (which isn’t surprising), asking Jobs for free Wifi and iPads for constituents as well as for an Apple store that’s actually in Cupertino and not in the Valley or Los Gatos. Jobs shyly responded to the requests, “I think we bring a lot more than free Wifi.”

The Dangerous Three-Way Dance at NYC Street Intersections

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Jason Kottke:

3-Way Street is a fascinating video by Ron Gabriel that highlights bad interactions between cars, bikes, and pedestrians at a typical NYC street intersection. There are lots of ways to show these interactions...the overhead view and highlighting are particularly effective design choices. Well done.

Video created by vimeo user ronconcocacola:

By summer 2010, the expansion of bike lanes in NYC exposed a clash of long-standing bad habits — such as pedestrians jaywalking, cyclists running red lights, and motorists plowing through crosswalks. By focusing on one intersection as a case study, my video aims to show our interconnection and shared role in improving the safety and usability of our streets. The video is part of a larger campaign I created called '3-Way Street'. Please see blog.ronconcocacola.com for more details. Music: Peter Gunn Theme by Art of Noise, available on iTunes

Demoted

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John Gruber writing at Daring Fireball:

This is a fundamentally different vision for the coming decade than Google’s. In both cases, your data is in the cloud, and you can access it from anywhere with a network connection. But Google’s vision is about software you run in a web browser. Apple’s is about native apps you run on devices. Apple is as committed to native apps — on the desktop, tablet, and handheld — as it has ever been. Google’s frame is the browser window. Apple’s frame is the screen. That’s what we’ll remember about today’s keynote ten years from now. I think John has the best "big picture" take on yesterday's announcements.

Apple's Social Networking Choices

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When Ping was first released last year, very briefly, it was possible to connect your Facebook account to your Ping account to share your Ping activities or find new friends on Ping. This feature was pulled at the eleventh hour due to breakdown in negotiations between Facebook and Apple. Ping launched without support of a major social network to piggyback off of for friend recommendations. Sometime over the past year, and I'm not sure when as I only noticed it recently - which goes to show how often I use Ping, Twitter was added to Ping. Under your Ping account, it is now possible to connect Ping to Twitter to have it share your Ping purchases & likes. Clearly this would not have happened if Apple & Twitter had not formed some sort of relationship and began working together. This brings us to yesterday's announcements where Apple revealed that Twitter will now be deeply integrated into iOS 5. Twitter now sits on the main settings menu alongside items like Mail, Phone and Safari. On the details screen of the Twitter menu, users can log into their Twitter account directly or, if they don't have it, click a button and install Twitter's official Twitter client. That is huge. Apple clearly has doubled down on Twitter. They've integrated Twitter on various send menu's throughout iOS such as in the Camera app or Maps app. Notice they didn't even mention Facebook once during the whole keynote. To me, this sounds a lot like what happened when the original iPhone came out. Apple knew they needed a carrier to launch the iPhone on. They approached Verizon. Negotiations fell through. They turned and found AT&T more receptive and went with their second choice. Apple approached Facebook. Negotiations fell through. They turned to the second biggest social network and found Twitter more receptive and went with their second choice. The only part of the story we don't know yet is, will Facebook come crawling back to Apple in 3 years asking for equal treatment that Twitter got? Maybe. Maybe not. I'm not sure this is as an important issue as being able to carry a handset on your mobile network, but the whole situation just seemed oddly coincidental to me. I think if someone with proper sources could ever discover the details behind all of this, it would make for a good story.