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In case you weren’t following our WWDC keynote coverage live earlier today, you missed — well, a lot. The event — which ran about two hours — was packed with information. Thousands of articles have already been written covering some of the bigger numbers and features. So I thought I’d highlight some of the smaller (or quickly mentioned) things you may have missed from the keynote. Warning: if you’re all Apple’d out, you will absolutely hate this post. (So just skip to the comment section and talk gibberish about why Android is so great.) The rest, read on: - There are now 54 million active Mac users.
- 73 percent of those Mac users are now using notebooks instead of desktops
- Photo Booth in OS X Lion has face tracking for targeted facial enhancements (like big eyes, or birds over your head)
- The Mac App Store is already now the number one channel for buying software (beating Best Buy)
- Starting with OS X Lion, Mac App Store apps can gain Push Notifications and In-App purchases
- Updates will also now be delta updates — meaning you’ll only have to download what’s new, not the entire app
- OS X Lion will only be available in the Mac App Store. Want a disc? Too bad, they’re extinct.
- OS X Lion will weigh in at a svelte 4 gigabytes (not much bigger than an HD movie)
- 25 million iPads have been sold in just 14 months
- 15 billion songs have been sold through iTunes now
- Apple has 18 million songs in their total iTunes Store library
- 130 million iBooks have been downloaded in a little over a year
- There are now over 425,000 apps in the App Store — 90,000 of them are built for the iPad
- 14 billion apps have been downloaded in less than 3 years. (Yes, that will very soon surpass total song downloads.)
- Apple has paid out $2.5 billion to third-party app developers — that’s up $1.5 billion from a year ago.
- There are 225 million iTunes accounts (with credit cards attached and ready to spend)
- 100 billion Push Notifications have been sent
- With Newsstand, magazine and newspaper apps can now download new content in the background when your device is inactive
- With the Twitter integration deal, it’s now a bit more clear why Scott Forstall has an account. He appeared to use it on stage during a demo, but he didn’t actually. Still 0 tweets and still only following Conan.
- The Twitter integration can update your contacts’ photos with their avatars in your Address Book.
- 2/3rds of all mobile web browsing is done through mobile Safari
- Apple brought the Reader feature from Safari in OS X to the iOS version
- iOS 5 Safari for iPad has tabbed browsing
- The new Reminders app allows you to set a geo fence to send a notification when you enter or leave a place
- The iPhone 4 is about to become the most camera overall on Flickr (we pointed this out weeks ago)
- Double-clicking the Home button on the lock screen now brings up a camera icon to jump right to that app
- That feature even bypasses an iPhone lock code, but you’ll only be able to take and view new pictures that way
- The volume-up button has been reworked to act as a shutter button when in camera mode
- There is now a way to enhance photos on the phone with one tap
- You can now flag messages in the new email app (does that mean Gmail starring too?)
- When reading email on the iPad in portrait mode, you can now swipe from the left to bring up your list of messages (instead of the pop-over)
- The iBooks built-in dictionary now works system-wide
- The iPad keyboard can now “rip” into two so you can more easily type with your thumbs
- Software updates will now come over the air, and they too will be delta updates (much smaller)
- The iPhone iPod app has been broken into Music and Videos apps (just like the iPod touch)
- The iPad Music app has been entirely redone
- After just 9 months, there are 50 million Game Center users (Xbox Live has gotten 30 million in 8 years)
- Turn-based games (like Scrabble) are now fully supported in Game Center (previously developers had to do a lot of work to make these function)
- iMessages has an option for “read receipts” — you can see that a person has read your message and at what time (sort of creepy)
- iMessages work over WiFi and 3G (the carriers may be pissed off about that)
- iMessages was built on the Push Notification infrastructure.
- iOS Weather can now get hourly updates
- Stock updates now come in real time (and both of these are widgets in the Notification pull-down)
- The LED flash on the iPhone 4 can be set to visually show you when you have a message or call
- You can now wirelessly mirror the iPad 2 to your TV (previously you needed an HDMI adapter for this)
- WiFi sync is finally here for iTunes (this will backup your device as well)
- There is a new gesture in iOS 5 to flick between open apps
- Developers are also being granted access to the LED flash on the iPhone 4
- Developers are also now able to change the backlight setting (like iBooks — apps like Instapaper previously made their own solutions)
- With iCloud, there will be shared, collaborative calendars
- Email will feature “no ads” (a shot at you-know-who)
- You can wirelessly back up your devices to iCloud. This happens once a day automatically when you’re connected to WiFi
- Documents in the Cloud even remembers what slide you were last looking at when you open it elsewhere
- iCloud will have storage APIs that developers can use
- This will work for Mac and PC apps too for seamless integration
- Photo Stream is built into existing apps (Photos in iOS, iPhoto in OS X)
- Photo Stream is also coming to Apple TV
- Up to 10 devices can be used with iTunes in the Cloud
- Apple provides 5 gigabytes of storage in iCloud for free. This can be used for backups, documents, and email. Purchased music and Photo Stream do not count towards this limit.
- You will be able to purchase more storage if you need it. (Details aren’t yet set.)
- If iTunes Match can’t find your music on the iTunes server, they will upload it for you
- All songs found using iTunes Match will be automatically upgraded to 256 kbps quality AAC
        
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The Financial Times would rather not have Apple take a 30 percent cut of in-app subscriptions for its iOS publications, and has launched a HTML5 Web app that enables readers to access content across tablets and smartphones. As part of the Web app’s debut, FT will provide free access during launch week. In a thinly veiled jab at Apple, Financial Times CEO John Ridding comments: "The FT Web App offers our customers flexibility and freedom of choice with access to our global journalism anytime, anywhere, with a single login or subscription. In a world of increasingly digital complexity we want to keep our service simple, easy to use and efficient to offer our customers the best possible experience of FT journalism."
The browser app enables readers to access content when offline by saving a shortcut to articles, receive automatic updates without the need to download new versions of the app and access content exclusively made for tablets. An upcoming feature is ‘Clippings’, a service that will allow users to read articles later, either on their tablet or on their desktop PC. Sound familiar? (look for ‘reading list’) FT acknowledges that the Web app has been initially optimized for the iPhone and the iPad, but says it will also be adapted for Android-based devices and the BlackBerry PlayBook. Accessing FT content is free for up to ten articles per month, if you register. In a few weeks, Apple will start charging publishers 30 percent of revenues while trying to enforce a rule that their content subscribers must sign up through the iTunes App Store rather than directly with them. FT in a Q&A about the new app says there are benefits to a Web app, for one because developing multiple native apps for various products is “logistically and financially unmanageable” and because it allows users too see new changes and features immediately. FT also points out that with a Web app, there is no extended release process through an app store and also offers technical advantages such as access to hardware APIs. The publisher also notes the challenges with creating the HTML5 app: The breadth of tools and documentation available for native apps and even desktop HTML5 development is just not there for mobile-based web app development. In addition the usual testing tools for both functional and performance testing do not exist, so we had to invent our own systems and processes to make sure the app worked effectively.
Be sure to read analyst Benedict Evans’ take on the news. 
        
 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |  More and more, news consumption is happening online and on mobile devices. But there’s so much news on the Web today, many have turned to filters and aggregators to concentrate the fire hose of information. Whether we rely on social mechanisms like Twitter and Facebook or RSS feeds, we’re looking for an enhanced, social, and refined way to consume content from the sites we love, while discovering news that matters to us via sites we may not check as regularly.
XYDO, a startup that launched last month, is getting in on the social news game by combining parts of the visual interface and user experience of Digg and Hacker News to create a full-blown social network for news. But what XYDO is focusing on most intently, which makes it a bit different from other services out there, is offering a news feed that prioritizes the content that matters to you. Today, it’s important for sites of this ilk not just to be news aggregators, but social services that serve you with content that is based on your interests and preferences, curating and categorizing news from your social networks. They have to be ever-refreshing, pulling news from myriad sources, but remain relevant, and allow for discovery of broad news as well as socially relevant topics recommended by friends and peers. Easier said than done. To build a news aggregating network that is more 3.0 than 2.0, XYDO gathers news from tens of thousands of online sources, along with news being shared within the XYDO community, and allows users to authenticate their Facebook and Twitter accounts so that the site can track the articles being shared on these social networks by your friends and peers. Those stories are displayed on your personal news feed and are then scored, prioritized, and organized in groups based on your likes and interests. The goal is an important one in the age of the 24-hour news cycle, and in practice, XYDO’s design is intuitive and familiar. But, as it goes, without some financial support, the service becomes just another social news aggregator. So, today, the company announced that it has raised a $1.25 million round of seed funding led by led by EPIC Ventures, with contributions from angel investors in San Francisco, New York, and Salt Lake City. XYDO will use its funds to create and launch mobile apps, productize, and expand its Utah-based team. XYDO, which was co-founded by Eric Roach (who founded Lombard Brokerage and was previously CEO of Elance.com) and Cameron Brain (founder of ProDeal and Open Box Technologies), is currently processing more than 1.1M Twitter and Facebook user feeds in realtime and has more than 1M contributors curating articles each day. The combination of not only providing users with a prioritized view of articles, editorials, blogs and other news from their social graphs, but also enabling easy tracking of broad global news trends and specialized domain-specific trends, with verticals ranging from startups and Wikileaks to The Onion, is killer. But it will take scaling, a truly simple user interface, and a smooth mobile experience to set it apart from the competition. For a quick rundown of XYDO, check out the video below: 
        
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Japanese online retail juggernaut Rakuten is expanding its reach to South America with the acquisition of a 75% stake in Ikeda, a provider of e-commerce services to many of Brazil's largest retailers. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Founded in 1996 and headquartered in São Paulo, Ikeda provides retailers with a SaaS e-commerce platform, enabling its customers to help build their desired features and provides advisory services to support their online retail operations. Ikeda currently provides services to over 100 major retailers located all over Brazil. Forrester forecasts the e-commerce industry in Brazil to grow at 18% annually, with total sales expected to reach approximately $22 billion by 2016. For Rakuten, it’s a way to expand into South America rapidly. Founded in 1997 and headquartered in Tokyo, Rakuten provides a variety of consumer and business-focused services including e-commerce, travel, banking, securities, credit card and e-money solutions. Rakuten boasts operations throughout Asia, Western Europe and North America and has over 10,000 employees worldwide. The company recently teamed up with Baidu to invest $50 million in an online 'B2B2C' shopping mall for Chinese Internet users, acquired Buy.com for $250 million and subsequently spent the exact same amount purchasing France's PriceMinister.
        
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If you talked to anyone over the age of 50 after Twitter announced its photo-sharing service last week, there was most likely one Twitter photo-sharing story on their lips and it wasn't the launch of pics.twitter.com. Since his mass-publicized confession that he actually did send an explicit Direct Message to a college coed today, we are perhaps the last online news organization to cover the tale of one fateful failed DM and New York Congressional Representative Anthony Weiner. I mean, even Twitter employees were high fiving themselves about it earlier. Techies are fascinated by the #Weiner story because it is the latest train wreck (and cautionary tale) of online communication. Sure most of you aren't going around sending pictures of your crotches to people, but you've probably sent at least one DM or Facebook message or email or text or whatever today that you'd prefer the world didn't see, because private communication is by definition meant to be private. Unfortunately this is increasingly not the case. With their unintuitive "d" syntax, Twitter Direct Messages are slippery — Especially for the less tech savvy. And there are countless tales of DM fails before this one. Perhaps you've even failed at DMing someone yourself and quickly deleted it, hoping no one would notice. And maybe they didn't notice that time, but, as those who leave their party events set "public" on Facebook will discover, what happens online can be magnified a millionfold. Weiner functions as some sort of a modern day Bill Clinton. "”I know for a fact that my account was hacked" is the new "I did not have sexual relations with that woman." Except nowadays you don't need a Linda Tripp covertly recording your intern to get caught, all you need is a slip of the keyboard and an innocent "d" turns into the scandalous "@" taking down your reputation down with it. Or someone forwards one of your IM chats, and so on and so forth. There's a certain naivety bubble in taking photos you don't want the world to see and posting them to Yfrog, or putting something on YouTube or setting an update to public and then being surprised when your life turns into a meme or a media frenzy. Gennette Cordoba, the woman who Weiner accidently sent the DM to, describes her experience as such: "This is the reality of sharing information online in the 21st century. Things that I never imagined people would care about are now being plastered all over blog sites, including pictures of me from when I was 17 and tweets that have been taken completely out of context."
Social media giveth and social media taketh away. What does technology change exactly? Well first of all technology makes it easier to connect people, dredging up the six (!) women Weiner had inappropriate relationships with via Facebook or Twitter. But it also changes the margin for error among communication distribution. What happened to Gennette could easily happen to you if your name started with a G and you made the mistake of following @RepWeiner on Twitter (the DM was actually meant for someone named Ginger). The more we communicate online, the greater the chances are someone will see something not so flattering about us, because we all make mistakes. And if someone compiled all your private communications with others in an effort to embarrass you it would surely embarrass you, even if you weren't going around sharing crotch shots. Giving that this is the case, perhaps Eric Schmidt's unsettling maxim, “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place" is proving to be the golden rule of online discourse in the 21st century? Or at least until Twitter foolproofs DMs?
        
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