AppleMagazine #164

The uber-trendy Seoul neighborhood made famous by the “Gangnam Style” K-pop hit is known for status-conscious people, plastic surgery clinics and Ivy League prep schools. Now it’s making a name as a bustling center for tech startups. Many young South Koreans, some educated overseas, are going to Gangnam to start mobile or Internet businesses. Venture capitalists from Silicon Valley and Japan are opening offices in the area to find promising Korean services or apps to bet their money on. Hardly a day passes in Gangnam without a meeting or event related to startup businesses. As one of the most wired places on earth, Seoul has been a crucible for several startup scenes. The government is even aiming to make a town south of Seoul a Korean Silicon Valley. But it…

The computer scientist credited with inventing the World Wide Web says affordable access to the Internet should be recognized as a human right, as a report showed that billions of people still cannot go online and government surveillance and censorship are increasing. Tim Berners-Lee said Thursday the Internet can help tackle inequality - but only if it comes with the rights to privacy and freedom of expression. The Briton, who launched the Web in 1990, made the remarks as he released his World Wide Web Foundation’s latest report tracking the Internet’s global impact. The Web Index found that laws preventing mass online surveillance are weak or nonexistent in more than 84 percent of countries. It also said that almost 40 percent of surveyed countries were blocking sensitive online content to…

THE FINANCIAL TIMES RECOGNIZES HIM EVEN IF TIME DOESN’T It has been a year of undoubted success for Apple CEO Tim Cook. Not only has 2014 seen a host of product and service launches and unveilings - including the iPhone 6, iPhone 6 Plus, Apple Pay and Apple Watch - that have put the tech giant’s critics in their place, but Cook also saw his company hit $700 billion market capitalization and, on a personal note, came out as gay. This year was also the one in which Apple completed its $3 billion purchase of Beats and lured Burberry CEO Angela Ahrendts to head up the firm’s retail channels. But was that enough to make him Time’s Person of the Year, after he was named among such nominees as Taylor…

Despite all their wealth and brainpower, technology companies realize they need help identifying and recruiting more women, blacks and Latinos who can write computer code, design websites and build mobile applications. Some of the entrepreneurs and activists eager to assist them showed up Wednesday at a diversity summit organized by longtime civil rights leader Jesse Jackson and his Rainbow Push organization. They want to build on the momentum Jackson created this year when he got Silicon Valley leaders such as Google, Facebook and Apple to acknowledge that they haven’t been doing enough to make their workforces look more like the overall population. Here’s a look at a few catalysts for change: TECHNOLOGY DRILL SERGEANTS When Gregorio Rojas was interviewing people for engineering jobs at TMZ.com in Los Angeles, he was…

One of the “E.T.” Atari game cartridges unearthed this year from a heap of garbage buried deep in the New Mexico desert has been added to the video game history collection at the Smithsonian. Museum specialist Drew Robarge made the announcement Monday in a blog post. He included a photograph of the crinkled cartridge along with the official serial number assigned to the game by the city of Alamogordo, New Mexico. The game was one of hundreds recovered at the city’s landfill last spring as a team of documentary filmmakers investigated a decades-old urban legend that centered on Atari secretly dumping the cartridges. The “ET.” game had the reputation of being the worst game ever, and it contributed to the demise of the company. Robarge said the Smithsonian has some…

DIRECTOR SIR PETER JACKSON LOOKS TO END ON A HIGH If there is one man other than J. R. R. Tolkien who is responsible for leaving us intimately acquainted with Middle-earth, it has to be the British director and producer, Sir Peter Jackson. As the main man behind The Lord of the Rings film trilogy from 2001 to 2003, followed by The Hobbit trilogy - the first movie of which was released in 2012 - it’ll be odd to see his association come to an end with the final installment, The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies. The latest addition to the iconic series of epic fantasy adventure films based on Tolkien’s 1937 novel The Hobbit - and serving as George Lucas-style prequels to The Lord of the Rings…