Innovation Articles on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog

Daily iPhone App: House of the Dead Overkill - The Lost Reels is gross but innovative

by Mike Schramm (May 1st, 2013)

There are some really excellent apps arriving on the App Store tonight (including Firaxis' great Haunted Hollow), but before we tackle that new crop, I did want to mention this app, released last week by Sega. House of the Dead, if you're not aware, is an arcade shooting game, where you take on ...

Samsung: battle with Apple 'a loss' for innovation

by Michael Grothaus (Feb 12th, 2013)

Samsung Executive Vice President David Eun has told All Things D's Kara Swisher that the legal battles between his company and Apple have been "a loss" for innovation. He made the comments at the D: Dive Into Media conference on Monday. He did acknowledge that Samsung makes money off of every ...

HTC exec lauds licensing agreement with Apple

by Mike Schramm (Jan 2nd, 2013)

Ray Yam is the president of HTC China, and he recently said in an interview with the Economic Observer of China that the company's recent licensing agreement with Apple will "pay off" sometime this new year in 2013. HTC and Apple, you may remember, finally settled a longtime patent disagreement ...

Apple remains atop list of innovative companies

by Mike Schramm (Nov 12th, 2012)

For three years in a row now, Apple has landed on top of a list of most innovative companies in the world, according to consulting firm Booz and Company. The list was compiled from a survey of more than 700 companies, and Apple came out number one, with Google and 3M following close behind. ...

Apple named "most innovative" company three years running

by Kelly Hodgkins (Nov 9th, 2012)

Global management consulting firm Booz & Co. named Apple the world's most innovative company for the third year in a row. The report notes that Apple spent less than its rivals on R&D and still trumped companies like Amazon, Google and IBM because of how it invested its money. ...it is ...

Apple and IKEA, two similar retail stories

by Mike Schramm (May 8th, 2012)

There's a fascinating writeup over at Asymco about Apple's retail strategy as compared with another very popular retail chain: IKEA. On the surface, the two brands seem dissimilar. One is a popular computer maker turned mobile device innovator, while the other is a simple and low-cost furniture ...

Fortune says Apple tops them all!

by Mel Martin (Mar 4th, 2011)

This tidbit of news is not a surprise, but it's sure nice to see. For the 4th straight year Fortune says that Apple is the world's most admired company, as it "continues to set the bar high for high tech companies across the board." Citing nearly doubled profits from a year ago, ...

Bump adds music-sharing upgrade

by Mike Schramm (Nov 15th, 2010)

Bump is an older app on the App Store that allowed you to "share" contact information with another local phone not actually by Bluetooth, but by simply placing the two phones near the same location, and then sharing the information across a wireless network. Now, Bump is apparently adding a new ...

Apple awarded new patents

by Matt Tinsley (Sep 3rd, 2010)

This past week, Apple had a host of new patents officially approved by the US Patent and Trademark Office. From streamlining the way images are rendered to preventing the accidental opening of applications, a large chunk of the patents seem to relate to the ways that a user interacts with a device. ...

TUAW's Daily App: No, Human

by Mike Schramm (Aug 30th, 2010)

No, Human is an intriguing little morsel of gameplay for both the iPhone and the iPad. The clever premise is that humans are planning to go out and explore the Universe, and the Universe, in turn, has decided that's not a good idea. So, you're actually playing against humans, lobbing fiery ...

MyTown adds product check-ins

by Mike Schramm (Jul 26th, 2010)

Booyah's very popular MyTown app has updated again, this time bringing some more innovation to the "check-in" idea. Instead of just checking in to locations, the app will now "check-in" to various products with the iPhone's camera. So when you use a certain product, you can use the camera to scan a ...

Low-tech testing on a high-tech iPad

by Mike Schramm (Apr 2nd, 2010)

Here's a little levity on the eve of the iPad launch chaos tomorrow. We're going through release after release today of all of these iPad apps, and after browsing page after page after page in the App Store, it's sometimes easy to forget just how much work went into each one of these things. The ...

Macworld 2010: MyFrogz cases, designed by an iPhone app

by Mike Schramm (Feb 15th, 2010)

There were a lot of case vendors and manufacturers at Macworld, and we didn't have time to run around and talk to all of them (not to mention that most of them aren't all that interesting anyway). But we did make a stop by the iFrogz booth, because we'd heard about something interesting they're ...

Gowalla announces shared trips

by Mike Schramm (Feb 1st, 2010)

There's a growing battle lately on the App Store over "check-in" apps -- Foursquare, Gowalla, and MyTown have all seen big gains in users lately (and a few other contenders have been roaming the periphery), and it looks like we're starting to see some innovation in the mix. Gowalla recently updated ...

Yelp updates with check-ins, Foursquare not happy

by Mike Schramm (Jan 19th, 2010)

Location-based social networking on the iPhone is a tough game to play, apparently -- the popular Yelp app [iTunes link] has recently updated to version 4.0, and along with a friend finder, hooks to Facebook and Twitter, and an updated version of their augmented reality Monocle feature, they've ...