Apple Enters Busy Field of Streaming Radio

Apple’s Maps app for iPhones was initially so bad the company apologized. Ping, Apple’s social network for discovering songs, was killed because hardly anyone used it. And iCloud, its service for synchronizing user data across devices, has been criticized for being unreliable, though it has not had as many glitches as its predecessor MobileMe, which had an e-mail blackout that disconnected thousands of customers for days.

Now, Apple is giving online services another try, in an area where it has long been the leader: music. On Monday, at the opening of its annual developers conference in San Francisco, the company is expected to unveil an Internet radio service that will stream songs over a data connection instead of storing them on a device, according to people briefed on the negotiations. The service is expected to be free, but supported by ads.

With its Internet radio service, Apple will be following other online music services, like Pandora, Spotify and Rdio. But it could spread this type of music consumption further into the mainstream, some analysts say.

“The genius of iTunes 10 years ago was that they made the mainstream consumer understand what digital music was, and how it all worked,” said Russ Crupnik, an analyst at NPD Group who studies the digital music market. He said Pandora was mainstream, with 200 million registered users, but it was not a dominant global player, and that a similar service from Apple would expose more people to online radio.

The company is also expected to introduce new Mac notebooks and a redesign of iOS, its software operating system for iPhones and iPads, at the four-day developers conference. The conference includes seminars where software developers can get training on the latest Apple software development tools so they can start making apps.

The new operating system will be the first mobile software system made under the company’s lead hardware designer, Jony Ive. Mr. Ive was put in charge of software design after the company fired Scott Forstall, the former head of mobile software development, amid the flurry of negative news reports surrounding Apple’s mapping software.

Before taking over software design, Mr. Ive made it known in the company that he did not like some of the visual ornamentation s in Apple’s mobile software, particularly the use of textures representing physical materials. Under his direction, elements like the yellow-notepad inspired Notes app and the leather borders in the Calendar app for the iPad are expected to be removed from the software. The overall look will be smoother and less ostentatious, according to a person briefed on the company’s plans, who asked not to be named.

For Apple, the expansion into streaming music underscores a competitive issue: one of its chief rivals, Google, has long had robust Internet services, like Gmail and Google Apps, while over the years it has gotten better at designing the software and hardware for its phones and tablets.

But while Apple struggles with Internet services, its stock is down about 37 percent after peaking at a little more than $700 in the fall. The company is still selling tens of millions of iPhones and iPads, but investors are concerned about its growth slowing and profit margins getting tighter. A shift into services like Internet radio could present new opportunities to make money.

But James McQuivey, an analyst at Forrester Research, says he thinks Apple is too late in this game. The company has to present an Internet radio service that is better than what is out there, he said, or people will continue to just buy its hardware and use other companies’ services.

“It’s going to have to innovate,” Mr. McQuivey said. “It can’t just be Pandora with an ‘i’ in front of it or Spotify with an ‘i’ in front of it.”

In the late 1990s, the music industry was in turmoil because many Internet users quickly learned they could download their favorite songs for free instead of paying for albums. Steven P. Jobs, Apple’s late chief, approached the music labels with the idea of a store offering the ability to download songs a la carte for 99 cents a download.

“When we first approached the labels, the online music business was a disaster,” Mr. Jobs was quoted as saying in the book “The Perfect Thing: How the iPod Shuffles Commerce, Culture and Coolness.” “Nobody had ever sold a song for 99 cents. Nobody really ever sold a song. And we walked in, and we said: ‘We want to sell songs à la carte. We want to sell albums, too, but we want to sell songs individually.’ They thought that would be the death of the album.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: June 9, 2013

An earlier version of this article misstated how long the Pandora service has been available. It was introduced eight years ago, not 13.

This post was made using the Auto Blogging Software from WebMagnates.org This line will not appear when posts are made after activating the software to full version.

U.N. Suspends Immunization Field Work in Pakistan After More Attacks

AppId is over the quota
AppId is over the quota
The shootings followed a day of violence on Tuesday in the port city of Karachi during which four female health workers were killed. The attacks Wednesday brought the death toll from the three-day polio immunization campaign to eight people, most of them women.

The World Health Organization and Unicef ordered their staff members off the streets in response to the latest shootings, although some provincial governments continued to immunize children.

The shootings represent the most direct assault yet on an urgently needed public health program in one of the world’s last remaining reservoirs of the polio virus. Pakistan is one of three countries were polio remains endemic — the others are Nigeria and Afghanistan — and it has made strong progress against the disease after a disastrous rate of infection last year.

So far in 2012, officials say, Pakistan has recorded 56 new polio cases, compared with 192 at the same point in 2011. The turnaround is due to a series of nationwide immunization drives targeting children under 5, which can involve up to 225,000 public health workers.

But the unprecedented series of attacks targeting female health workers in recent days threatens to hinder future immunization efforts.

The attacks Wednesday were concentrated in the districts around Peshawar. North of the city, a gunman riding a motorcycle killed a female health worker and her driver. Another driver was seriously wounded in a second episode close to the city center. And in Nowshera, east of Peshawar, four female health workers reported being shot at but not hit.

A spokesman for the Pakistani Taliban denied responsibility for the attacks, although the insurgents have a history of threatening polio eradication programs, claiming they are a cover for American espionage activities.

But the police in Peshawar said that Taliban fighters based in Mohmand tribal agency, north of Peshawar, were involved in at least two of the attacks in the Peshawar area.

One woman who came under fire described the attack, speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals. “Two people were riding a motorbike,” she said. “The one wearing a mask pulled out a gun and fired four shots. We shouted. The bullets whizzed past us, but luckily we were safe.”

The Taliban’s suspicions about vaccination workers were aggravated by the case of Shakil Afridi, a doctor from the tribal areas who was paid by the Central Intelligence Agency to run a bogus hepatitis vaccination campaign near Osama bin Laden’s house in Abbottabad in the run-up to the May 2011 American commando raid that killed the Qaeda leader. Dr. Afridi has been sentenced to 33 years in prison for treason.

But the Taliban have also used the polio campaign — a rare effort by the government to extend its authority into the tribal belt — for raw political purposes. In North Waziristan, Hafiz Gul Bahadur, a major Taliban-affiliated warlord, has banned polio vaccination until America halts drone strikes in the area.

In contrast, the Taliban in Afghanistan have taken a more enlightened approach to polio vaccination, in some cases actively sponsoring the campaign, said Shahnaz Wazir Ali, a senior Pakistani polio official.

“What’s happening here is much, much more sinister,” she said. “And it’s happening right in the heart of our cities.”

Vaccination rounds in Pakistan take place many times each year, with teams of health workers visiting homes and public spaces to deliver polio immunization drops to children.

The three-day vaccination round under way this week, which began on Monday, targeted parts of the country worst hit by the virus — the northwest, the tribal belt, and Karachi — and was due to involve an estimated 135,000 health workers, according to the government.

The lower house of Parliament adopted a unanimous resolution Wednesday condemning the attacks on polio campaign volunteers.

“We cannot and would not allow polio to wreak havoc on the lives of our children,” Prime Minister Raja Pervez Ashraf said on Tuesday.

Ismail Khan contributed reporting from Peshawar, Pakistan.

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