Normalkid:Arnold Kim

It was obvious it was going to happen, but that didn’t stop people from jumping on the bandwagon.

After Apple’s aggressive defense of the iPod-related domain names, it seemed obvious they weren’t going to let people get too comfortable with the many iPhone domain names.

Vincent Nguyen of MyiPhone.com writes that he was excited to meet Steve Jobs at D: All Things Digital, but that excitement quickly turned to a sickening feeling:

Turns out, Steve isn’t such a great fan of MYiPhone as we are about the phone itself. His comment to me about the site was “I recommend you changing the name, we have a team of lawyers to go after that kind of stuff.”  Well, you could’ve knocked me over with a Mac mini. He mentioned that we should change it to anything other than iPhone in the name.

Apple has been aggressively pursuing commercial websites using the “iPod” as part of their domain. The most prominent move was iPodLounge moving to iLounge. While I have no official confirmation that Apple “forced” this particular move, Apple’s interest in the iPod name was certainly a factor.

Financial analysts are a funny thing in the Apple rumor world.

With increasing media coverage of everything Apple, as well as the impressive growth of their stock, it seems financial analysts are covering Apple in increasing detail and frequency.

I won’t claim to know the business side of these analyst publications, but they have become a frequent topic in the Mac rumor world since analyst reports frequently predict Apple’s future plans.

However, from a rumor-analysis standpoint, these analyst reports tend to offer very little new information and introduce a fair amount of confusion.

My major problem with analyst reports is that they never cite their sources and intermix speculation into their predictions. It then becomes impossible to determine the original source of the information and its credibility. Frequently it seems they are simply reciting information that has already been reported on the internet. This may not be important to financial customers (admittedly, their target audience) but from a predictive standpoint, makes their information next to useless.

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Valleyway is reporting that Amazon is looking to purchase iLounge.com. iLounge (formerly iPodLounge) is one of (if not the) largest iPod sites out there.

Now to put this in context, Amazon just purchased DPReview.com, a digital photography review site.

Purchasing highly ranked content sites make a lot of sense for a company like Amazon who is primarily an online retailer. Internet consumers typically start at content/review sites before making purchasing decisions.

You have to wonder how this will affect the day-to-day functionality at these sites. However, according to DPReview’s announcement, they will be able to retain their “quality and independence.”

Engadget published a report today claiming that Apple was delaying Leopard until Jan 2008 and the iPhone until October.

We hesitatingly republished this report with some caveats.

As it turns out, the report was wrong, but I don’t necessarily blame Engadget. The circumstances surrounding this rumor were unusual, to say the least. Someone actually managed to spoof an email to Apple staffers through an official Apple email distribution list. As a result, it must have seemed quite legitimate.
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