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Well, that was fun while it lasted. The big news for Monday was the announcement that News Corp is shuttering The Daily, its iPad news magazine published each day which debuted to much fanfare two years ago. Although the publication eventually expanded to Android and even the iPhone, it failed to find a paying audience, despite the popularity of the iPad. Read on to find out the details on the closure and a few other items of note you may have missed!
News Corp. Calls It a Day on The Daily
The virtual presses will be rolling to a stop for News Corp’s The Daily come December 15. According to Talking Points Memo, the closure of the two-year-old, iPad-only publication comes amidst a series of changes at News Corp, but ultimately it was the search for a paying user base that sunk the ship. “Although we have over 100,000 passionate paying subscribers, unfortunately we have not been able to build a big enough audience fast enough to make our business model work,” editor-in-chief Jesse Angelo and publisher Greg Clayman explained in a memo to staff on Monday. The company will publish a “farewell issue” on December 15, and then it’s lights out for The Daily and its staff of 100, many of whom will move on to other News Corp properties such as The New York Post.
Text Messaging Turns 20 This Week
AllThingsD is reporting that SMS text messaging turned 20 years old on Monday. Two decades ago, the first Short Message Service missive was used to send “an early Christmas greeting” from a PC to a cell phone belonging to Vodafone’s Richard Jarvis — in 160 characters or less, naturally. After going unchallenged for more than a decade, text messaging faces plenty of obstacles in the future, not the least of which is from Apple’s iMessage and even VoIP services such as Skype. But as the report notes, SMS has one advantage these services lack: They’re on every phone, even basic ones, and it’s often proved more reliable in a crisis.
Apple Seeds Third iOS 6.1 Beta to Developers
Not much to say about this one, but MacRumors is reporting that Apple pushed out a third build of iOS 6.1 to developers on Monday, weighing 105MB as an over-the-air update and containing “bug fixes and improvements.” The release arrives as Build 10B5117b and follows the previous 10B5105c from November 12, so it appears Apple is picking up the pace with the betas, which includes similar builds for the Apple TV as well as Xcode 4.6 Developer Preview 3.
Firefox Gets Social with Facebook Messenger
The Mozilla Blog has announced new social integration with Facebook Messenger for Firefox, part of the organization’s new Social API for the Web. To get started using it, simply update to the latest Firefox 17.0.1, then visit the Facebook Messenger for Firefox page and click “Turn On.” Mozilla even has a short video on their blog post to show how it all works, essentially adding a social sidebar with your Facebook chat and updates, including new comments and photo tags. The sidebar will also provide notifications for messages, friend requests and more, all of which can be acted upon right from the same toolbar. Mozilla is promising even more features as well as support for multiple providers in the future.
Apple Still “Hard at Work” on Next Version of Logic Pro
It seems like every so often, rumors bubble up that Apple is going to ditch this or that product, only to be quickly dismissed by those who know better. Such was the case last week with Logic Pro, Cupertino’s pro audio software which was the target of a rumor claiming the team behind the title had been “decimated.” MacRumors reported Monday that a concerned customer pinged Apple CEO Tim Cook to get the 411 on Logic Pro and soon heard back from Xander Soren, the company’s music product marketing chief, who was happy to set things straight. “I want to assure you the team is still in place and hard at work on the next version of Logic Pro,” Soren replied in a brief email. It’s widely expected that the company will soon debut Logic X, a Final Cut Po X-style reimagining of the prod audio app, which hasn’t received any major updates since mid-2009.
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