Apple

Apple may have a real fight on its hands if it believes Mark Papermaster is the right man to nurture the iPhone.

In an age where employees move between companies as often as relief pitchers change teams, noncompete agreements seem an outdated concept. But lawyers say the noncompete agreement that Papermaster signed with IBM is serious business that demonstrates how companies are increasingly looking to enforce restrictions on their most important employees, and that could force Apple and IBM to share valuable information to make their argument stick.

Getting out of a noncompete
clause isn't easy--unless you live
in California.

IBM is suing Papermaster for violating the terms of a noncompete agreement, which he signed in 2006, when he accepted an offer to run Apple's iPhone group in October. He claims that since he'll be working on a product that does not compete with anything IBM offers, that agreement should not apply. But it may not matter: the agreement he signed contains broad provisions regarding where and how Papermaster could seek employment for a year following his departure from the company, and it's very enforceable in New York, where IBM is based.

The two parties are scheduled to have a status conference later Tuesday, and we could learn as early as then just how determined IBM is to send a message to the rest of the tech industry and its own employees. One sign IBM is taking this case very seriously: It's using longtime legal partner Cravath Swaine & Moore, who represented IBM in the SCO trial, to fight the Papermaster battle.

"These cases are prosecuted as a deterrent to others," said John Siegal, a partner with Baker Hostetler in New York. "In case people are going to be following a high-level executive, (a company) is going to impose limitations to get the rest of the staff to think twice or three times (about leaving)."

Don't fence me in
Covenants not to compete (generally known as noncompete agreements) are perfectly valid everywhere but California, where they have been outlawed. They are generally regulated, however, to make sure they are "reasonably limited to time and space," said Robert Scott, a professor at Columbia Law School and director of the Center on Contract and Economic Organization. That means employers can't keep you on the sidelines for 10 years or allow you to work only on the moon.

The central question surrounding Papermaster's noncompete--and really any noncompete--is whether his activities at Apple would harm IBM. "The court has to find that the noncompete is necessary to protect the interests of the employer," Scott said.

Papermaster signed the noncompete (click here for a PDF copy) in 2006 when after a 15-year career at Big Blue, he joined an "elite" team of IBM managers called the Integration and Values Team (I&VT). He claims the information discussed at the three meetings he attended was "high-level" and didn't involve IBM trade secrets. According to IBM's complaint, however, that group is a collection of 300 senior managers at IBM who are responsible for "addressing the most difficult and important issues facing IBM, such as developing corporate strategy and driving innovation and growth, and I&VT members work with the most sensitive strategic information the company possesses."

But according to an interview that IBM human resources executive Randy McDonald gave just before the company filed suit against Papermaster, I&VT seems more focused on solving the "thorniest" problems that IBM's customers are having integrating technology into their businesses, rather than developing any specific technology. "I&VT is about talking business first," McDonald said during the interview.

Nonetheless, IBM will point out that the agreement covers "any entity that engages in, or owns and controls a significant interest in any entity that engages in, competition with the business units or divisions of the company in which you worked at any time during the two (2) year period prior to the termination of your employment."

So, then do Apple and IBM compete because they both make servers, even though no rational observer of the server market would consider Apple a true competitor to IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Dell, and even beleaguered Sun Microsystems? Do they compete because they both design chips, even though IBM's go into servers and game consoles and Apple's will one day go into iPhones?

It all depends on what the judge considers to be the most relevant issues at hand. "What always happens in these cases is that every company in the world thinks that everything it does is a trade secret," Siegal said. "Under the scrutiny of a judge, that gets winnowed down to real specifics, such as whether the guy was engaged in activities and had knowledge of things that would give Apple an advantage in unfair competition."

And that's where this case could get juicy.

Laying down the cards
"It may also be that this litigation serves some ancillary purpose, that in discovery, one or both of these companies is seeking to find out more about the plans and activities of the other," Siegal said.

IBM and Apple may not want to
share their road maps for the next
year in a courtroom.

IBM will likely have to explain to the judge exactly how Papermaster's specific knowledge harms Big Blue's short-term interests by laying out just where those interests lie. Apple could have to do the same thing to prove that it doesn't plan to use that knowledge to start a new business or improve an existing one, even though it had Papermaster sign an agreement that he would not disclose any confidential IBM information to Apple upon joining the company. "Sometimes in these cases, competitors find out a lot about each other," Siegal said.

As a result, these cases rarely proceed to trial, since the preliminary stages tend to drag on and often the "secrets" at issue aren't worth the prolonged involvement by upper management. Papermaster's hope is that the judge agrees with his claim that nothing in his proposed role at Apple overlaps his role with IBM.

"The court (could then) put restrictions on his conduct for Apple that falls short of an outright prohibition on his working for Apple," Siegal said, satisfying the letter of the noncompete by prohibiting him, for example, from running the XServe group or the P.A. Semi chip team for a year but allowing him to run the iPhone group.

Noncompete clauses don't appear to be going anywhere, despite California's decision to ban them earlier this year. If anything, companies are getting bolder about their use of restrictions like noncompete clauses, Siegal said, which could start to affect more and more of those executives looking to move on from deteriorating situations. And if you refuse to take that next great job because the company requires a noncompete, the employer will likely find somebody who won't hesitate.

"While most states' laws say they are disfavored as a matter of law and policy, the fact is they are very often enforced," Siegal said. "I'm not certain there is a (growing) trend toward enforcement, but there is a trend toward using these agreements and seeking to enforce them."

If your new MacBook's glass trackpad was having problems recognizing your clicks, Apple has a fix available.

(Credit: Apple/Josh Lowensohn)

Apple has released a firmware update for new MacBook and MacBook Pro owners bedeviled by their glass trackpads.

The update is designed to fix an issue with the new trackpads unveiled by Apple in October, which replace the traditional trackpad/mouse button combination with a trackpad that also serves as the button. The first few owners of those systems, however, reported a persistent problem in which clicks on the trackpad would not register.

Let us know if the firmware solves your problems or if you have any problems installing the update, which should be appearing in Software Update for owners of the new systems as we speak. Apple's release notes for the update can be found here.

Adobe Systems CTO Kevin Lynch touts Flash for mobile phones at the Adobe Max conference.

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET Networks)

SAN FRANCISCO--Inspired by a new generation of smartphones, Adobe Systems has begun a new, higher-power effort to spread its Flash technology to mobile devices.

The company has worked for years on a lightweight incarnation of its Flash technology for mobile phones, but it now is working to bring the full-fledged Flash Player 10 to higher-end smartphones, Chief Technology Officer Kevin Lynch said at Adobe's Max conference here.

"We are midst of evolving Flash Player 10 for mobile," Lynch said. "We're taking the full Flash Player and making that run on the higher end of the mobile market."

Adobe naturally isn't the only company that wants to supply the plumbing for applications that run on mobile devices as well as PCs. Sun Microsystems has had some success spreading Java to mobile phones, and it's been working for months on a fancier alternative called JavaFX. And Microsoft, which also has legions of programmers familiar with its technology and development tools, is working hard on Windows Mobile.

Still no Flash for iPhone
Lynch demonstrated Flash Player 10 on devices running Nokia's Symbian operating system, Microsoft's Windows Mobile, and Google's Android operating system. But the quintessential example of the new family of smartphones, Apple's iPhone, so far remains only on the wish list.

"This needs a little more baking. We need to pass the taste test of Apple's head chef," Lynch said as he retrieved an iPhone from a pan full of mobile devices, turning enthusiastic whistles and cheering from a crowd of thousands into a disappointed hubbub. But Adobe is working on it, he said.

Naturally, nobody from Apple shared the stage with Lynch. Google Android leader Andy Rubin, by contrast, made an appearance after Lynch's demonstration of Flash on a T-Mobile G1, the first phone powered by Google's mobile operating system.

That Adobe was able to bring its software to Android affirms Google's strategy of building an "open platform (intended) to give a better Internet experience on cell phones," Rubin said. "Today, seeing Flash 10 makes me feel really warm. It was exactly what Android was built for."

Flash is used for YouTube's streaming video, and Lynch demonstrated a Windows Mobile phone playing a video hosted on the Google service. (The iPhone can show YouTube videos, too, but only after they've been transcoded into a different streaming format.)

Fresh AIR
Flash got its start as a Macromedia technology that could give Web sites animation and basic games. Adobe acquired Macromedia and embraced its vision of turning Flash into a much fuller computing foundation. One key to that foundation is what's called AIR, the Adobe Integrated Runtime, a downloadable software package that lets people run Flash applications outside the browser and when offline.

The New York Times is working on an AIR application that will let people read the International Herald Tribune in a format that looks more like newspaper and less like a Web page. It includes keyboard navigation controls, a browsing mode for the equivalent of flipping through the paper, a crossword that could be filled out, and video advertisements.

The application checks for new content every few minutes, but it can be used offline, too, with the stories and photos that already have been downloaded, said Michael Zimbalist, vice president of research and development at the Times.

Adobe released AIR 1.5 Monday, a version that inherits Flash Player 10 abilities such as better text rendering, support for right-to-left text scripts such as Arabic, multichannel audio, and 3D effects.

Like Flash, AIR is headed for the mobile world. Lynch also demonstrated AIR 1.5 running on a Linux-based Aigo miniature computer--what Intel likes to call a MID, or mobile Internet device. It was using an Intel Atom processor, and the same New York Times application ran on it.

Making Flash Lite easier
Although Adobe has elevated the status of the full Flash Player 10 on mobile devices, it's still working on Flash Lite.

Lynch acknowledged that it's hard to actually run Flash content with existing technology. Now, though, Flash Lite applications can be shared as a simple Web address, he said, and if Flash Lite isn't installed, it can be retrieved automatically.

"You can package your application built with Flash and deploy it to smartphones like Windows Mobile and Symbian, and we hope to get to Android as well," Lynch said. "If you don't already have Flash Lite, it will detect that and install it on your mobile phone over the air."

Flash includes auto-update technology so users generally have a current version installed, and Adobe plans to keep that philosophy with its push into the mobile realm, he added. Partners to help enable that update process include Cisco Systems, NTT DoCoMo, Verizon, Comcast, Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Motorola, Qualcomm, and ARM.

Lynch also boasted that Adobe is exceeding its goals for Flash on mobile phones.

"Our goal (was to make) a billion phones Flash-enabled by 2010," Lynch said. "We're actually going to get 1 billion Flash-enabled phones by 2009."

Click here for more news on Adobe's Max conference.

Fewer people are expected to buy iPhones and iPods this quarter, but Mac shipments may hold down the fort for Apple.

(Credit: CNET)

Even Apple may not be immune if consumers continue to sit on their wallets this holiday season.

Piper Jaffray, usually able to find the bright side of any Apple news, predicted Monday that iPhone and iPod sales are set to decline in the coming weeks amid what is expected to be the worst holiday season for the PC and consumer electronics industries in quite some time. Mac sales seem healthier thanks to Apple's latest crop of notebooks, but aren't growing as fast as they were last year.

Piper based its outlook on surveys it performed inside Apple retail stores around the U.S. during a 25-hour period in November, counting the number of Macs and iPhones sold inside each store. It supplemented those expectations with data from market watcher NPD for sales of both the Mac and iPod for the month of October.

With $24 billion in the bank, no debt, and products that still appear popular with the public, Apple is in excellent shape to ride out what is expected to be a rough couple of quarters for companies that depend on consumer spending. The company's several-year run of double-digit percentage increases in revenue and profit may be coming to an end, however, as most such runs eventually do.

Let's take a look at the numbers:

iPhone
Piper's data suggests that Apple will sell 6.4 million iPhones during the September to December quarter--Apple's first fiscal quarter--compared with the last quarter, when the company blew away expectations by selling 6.9 million units. The handset market in general tends to enjoy a 15 percent sequential boost in the holiday quarter compared with the June-September quarter, though this won't go down as a typical holiday season.

Apple retail stores were each selling on average 98 iPhones a day in July, when the iPhone 3G was released. In November they were only selling around 28 per store, which looks like a 71 percent decline and helps explain reports that Apple was cutting iPhone production heading into the current quarter.

However, those numbers don't tell the whole story, according to Piper. There was obviously pent-up demand for the iPhone 3G following a quarter in which Apple was sold out of iPhones for almost six weeks. And Piper also notes that Apple's retail stores are not the only place to find iPhones this quarter. AT&T obviously sells a few, and Apple added Best Buy as a distributor during the quarter.

When you factor in the increased number of countries selling the iPhone this quarter as well, Piper only expects a decline of 8 percent. Not that that's good news for Apple, of course, given how important the iPhone has become to its finances.

Mac
Apple can take comfort in the fact that the Mac numbers don't appear to be cratering, according to Piper's numbers. Piper is predicting that 2.6 million Macs will be sold during the quarter, which would be flat compared with last quarter's totals.

Last year in a healthier economy, Mac shipments increased by 7 percent in the first fiscal quarter compared with the fourth, so this year's totals are a bit off but still growing at a solid pace year-over-year. If Apple sells 2.6 million Macs during the holiday quarter, that would be a 13 percent improvement over the 2.3 million Macs shipped during the year-ago period.

On the last Apple earnings call, COO Tim Cook said he thought Mac sales were a little weaker than expected during the July to September quarter because potential buyers delayed their purchases of new notebooks, knowing that new models were around the corner. NPD's data seems to suggest that theory was on track following the launch of the redesigned MacBooks, recording a 28 percent jump in Mac sales in October compared with October 2007.

Still, Piper expects Mac demand to slow down in November and December. No new models are expected between now and Macworld in January, and the rush of buyers who upgraded in October are likely done buying Macs for a while.

iPod
Apple's best-selling product looks set to take a hit during the quarter, which is traditionally a blowout quarter for the iPod division. Shipments are expected to decline about 15 percent compared with last year's holiday quarter, coming in between 18.5 million units and 19 million units this time around.

There's no way to know at this point whether that is a reaction to Apple's latest crop of iPods unveiled in September or another symptom of an economic slowdown. A key number to watch will be the revenue growth or decline associated with the iPod group: Apple has been heavily advertising the iPod Touch as the "funnest ever" (and currently most expensive) iPod, and if revenue growth comes in slightly down or even flat against a 15 percent decline in unit shipments, the upselling strategy is probably working.

Competitive outlook
Apple's competitors aren't expected to fare much better during the quarter. Intel may not be a bellwether for tech anymore, but it is most certainly a bellwether for PC demand, and the $1 billion shortfall between Intel's previously expected fourth-quarter revenue and what it now expects indicates that the HPs and Dells of the world aren't expecting a stellar quarter.

On the handset side, Research In Motion could capitalize if iPhone shipments do decline, with the Storm and Bold making their way onto the stage. But it's unlikely that RIM will have a standout quarter itself, given the epic slowdown in business tech spending that usually accompanies one of these recession things.

And seven years on, there still doesn't seem to be a major competitor to the iPod. Apple is pushing the iPod into new territory as well, taking on portable gaming systems from the likes of Nintendo and Sony.

Apple's ability to post consistently strong growth figures quarter after quarter looks like it's coming to an end. If it's any consolation to fanboys and investors, however, at least it wasn't the company's fault.

Apple's iPhone man-in-waiting, Mark Papermaster, has filed a countersuit against his former employer in a dispute over a noncompete agreement.

InformationWeek spotted the court documents filed late Thursday in federal court in New York claiming that IBM's noncompete agreement with Papermaster shouldn't apply to his potential employment at Apple, since the two companies are not competitors in the arena where Papermaster will be employed. In October, Apple hired Papermaster to replace outgoing iPod executive Tony Fadell and lead the development of future versions of the iPhone, but IBM is suing to prevent him from working for Apple for a year.

Papermaster's counterclaim focuses on the clauses of the noncompete agreement, arguing that it is too broad and would not permit Papermaster to work for any technology company anywhere in the world for a year following his departure from IBM.

The "Business Enterprise" restriction is unreasonably broad in that it purports to restrict Mr. Papermaster from going to work for any company that engages in competition with his former business unit to any extent, even if Mr. Papermaster will not be working for the part of the company that does so. Likewise, the "significant competitor or major competitor" prong purports to restrict Mr. Papermaster from going to work for one of these companies even if the work that Mr. Papermaster will be doing is completely unrelated to the work he was doing at IBM. These provisions are not necessary to protect any legitimate interests of IBM.

The Noncompetition Agreement is also unreasonably broad in that it purports to impose an unreasonably lengthy time limitation. In the world of technology, any trade secrets that Mr. Papermaster possesses would lose their value prior to the expiration of a year. The purported geographic scope of the "Restricted Area" is similarly unreasonable. Mr. Papermaster has resided and worked in Austin, Texas for the past 17 years, yet the language of the Noncompetition Agreement purports to restrict him from working anywhere in the world based on the global scope of IBM's business. Again, these restrictions are not necessary to protect any legitimate interests of IBM.

IBM has successfully obtained a preliminary injunction preventing Papermaster from reporting for duty at Apple, but it seems that's a pretty standard decision in cases such as these. The two parties are scheduled to have a status conference regarding the case on Tuesday.

Businesses are gradually getting used to the idea of using iPhones in the enterprise, but Apple has a long way to go.

(Credit: Apple)

Apple has captivated the general public with the iPhone, but has it convinced the business world to take the plunge?

Even after the March preview of the "business-friendly" iPhone 2.0 software for the iPhone released in July, it seems that most iPhones are being purchased by individuals rather than corporations, who still look first at Research In Motion's BlackBerry when it comes to equipping their workers with mobile computers.

But the iPhone is making a guerrilla attack on the business world, brought into the corporate world by influential executives, CIOs rethinking their approach to deploying technology, and younger workers who move seamlessly between their personal and business lives.

There are several high-profile businesses, such as Genentech and Disney (both with strong ties to Apple CEO Steve Jobs, of course), that have declared their intentions to work with Apple on deploying iPhones inside their corporations. That seems to be having the effect of increasing the overall number of business smartphone users, however, rather than turning the iPhone into any kind of "BlackBerry killer."

At Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference in June, Jobs said 33 percent of the Fortune 500 had participated in Apple's beta program for the iPhone 2.0 software. But RIM still dominates the market for mobile devices used for business purposes.

According to data from J. Gold Associates released in September, 65.5 percent of North American businesses that deploy mobile computers say they actively support the BlackBerry, compared with 22 percent that support Windows Mobile devices and just over 10 percent that support the iPhone.

There is some overlap in those numbers, represented by companies such as Chicago law firm Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal, a participant in Apple's beta program.

About half of CIO Andy Jurcyzk's 1,800 employees worldwide use some kind of mobile device, and at the moment, 200 of those people are using the iPhone 3G. Sonnenschein's employees who are deemed worthy of mobile computers can get the company to buy them a new mobile device every 24 months--provided that AT&T carries that device.

"My philosophy is that devices are personal, and it's difficult for organizations to standardize on a single device" given the wide range of preferences people have with mobile computers, Jurczyk said.

Not all organizations feel the same way, and have built up years of expertise managing the BlackBerry inside their walls. Frank Gillman, the CTO for Los Angeles law firm Allen Matkins, says there has been some interest in the iPhone among his constituents but he finds it more cost-effective to stay a BlackBerry shop.

"Our reasons for not doing so have more to do with the age-old issue of having a finite number of internal resources to support our firm's technology. Given our already significant investment in BlackBerry, we cannot make a strong business case for adopting yet another platform."

The BlackBerry is still by far the preferred choice of the enterprise, but the iPhone is gaining ground, according to J. Gold Associates.

(Credit: J. Gold Associates)

That's just part of the uphill battle the iPhone faces in the enterprise. For one thing, Apple's dependence on a single carrier is a nonstarter for some companies that have long existing relationships with a different carrier, and enjoy the discounts that come along with that partnership.

And while Apple's 2.0 software update brought along several business-friendly features that improved the security and manageability of the device, some analyst firms that advise CIOs on how to spend their technology dollars still feel the iPhone's security isn't quite where it should be compared with other options in the market. Gartner, the 800-pound gorilla of IT consulting, gave the iPhone a thumbs-up in July after the release of the 2.0 software but noted that iPhone security isn't strong enough yet when it comes to custom applications on the device.

Jurcyzk is following the recommendations of J. Gold Associates by having his employees access secure corporate data through the iPhone's Safari browser backed by the firm's own security certificate. That way, no sensitive data actually resides on the device, but users can still open documents and view them with "full fidelity," which is a huge plus for traveling lawyers who need to review documents with clients anywhere and everywhere, he said.

There's also the issue that corporations will have to install iTunes on every iPhone user's computer, which might not be part of the standard application list employed by big conservative corporations that grudgingly allow their employees to check baseball scores on ESPN.com from their PCs. And some IT managers also like to lock down a specific collection of software on the mobile device itself, but have no real way of preventing an employee from going home and adding Asphalt 4: Elite Racing to their iPhone.

But small businesses don't have the same strict security and manageability requirements as larger enterprises, allowing them to move forward with iPhones more quickly than the big guys. Independent observers of that market are seeing more and more demand for iPhones among those types of customers, who fly under the radar individually but could add up to serious revenue for Apple.

While the iPhone may not be the ideal device from a manageability and security standpoint, it does come with high customer satisfaction ratings among business users.

(Credit: CC Cristiano Betta)

And there's a sense inside some corporations that times are changing as mobile phones become computers that aren't just for business, and aren't just for fun. Executives and salespeople--the primary users of mobile computers in the enterprise--are constantly on the go, and an executive waiting for an airplane who pauses an episode of Mad Men to answer an e-mail from a client is a productive, accessible, and satisfied employee.

"Other devices are just hardcore e-mail devices, and even at that they don't render the messages well," Sonnenschein's Jurcyzk said. "I travel a lot and it's nice to have a personal aspect to my life, to look at photos of the family, to listen to music, or watch a movie. It's nice to have that other stuff."

Apple's not the only company adapting to that shift in how we use mobile computers. "The new BlackBerry Storm that is coming out this month from RIM/Verizon brings a lot of the iPhone design and features to the BlackBerry platform. Assuming the device works as advertised, we'll likely offer that as an option for our folks who want those types of features," Gillman said. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has also said similar things about the need for future versions of Windows Mobile to cater to both personal and business tasks.

Before too long, businesses might decide that certain trade-offs regarding the manageability of their smartphones are worth making, so long as their concerns over security are met. Analysts expect Apple to improve the native security of the iPhone over the next several years, and it's also possible that a major third-party enterprise software vendor such as SAP will step forward with a product that does it for them.

Well over 200 business-related applications are available on the App Store that help make the iPhone easier to use in a corporate setting. If Apple finds a way to improve the security profile of the iPhone to allow organizations to develop custom applications that store sensitive data on the device, it will have another feather in its cap.

Still, J. Gold Associates predicts just 16 percent of U.S. corporations to have an active interest in the iPhone in three years. The iPhone isn't going to put RIM out of business just yet. But it is challenging the other company in its backyard, just as RIM doubles down with its efforts to make the BlackBerry more consumer-friendly with models like the Storm and the Bold. And it's making everyone more aware of the trade-offs and needs of mobile computer users in the enterprise, which will make everyone's product better in the long run.

And if Apple proves itself as an enterprise-friendly company with the iPhone, those famously stodgy CIOs might be tempted to take a second look at the Mac.

Apple's initial foray into India hasn't gone as well as it has around the rest of the world.

(Credit: James Martin/CNET News)

There is a huge market for mobile phones in India, but according to the locals, Apple's iPhone hasn't even made a dent.

That's the conclusion of a long story published by LiveMint.com analyzing the first few months of Apple's foray into India with the iPhone 3G. Analysts estimate that just 11,000 iPhones have been sold in India since Apple launched in that country in September, which is probably equivalent to a week's worth of sales at the downtown San Francisco Apple store.

It doesn't seem that Apple ever thought it would make a huge splash in India, allocating just 50,000 iPhones to that market, according to the article. Of the 120 million mobile phones sold in India each year, around 6 million are of the smartphone variety, and Nokia owns the market with between 60 percent and 70 percent market share.

Several reasons are given for the tepid debut of the iPhone in India: price, promotion, and distribution. The authors note that India's mobile market doesn't follow the carrier subsidy model used in most places around the world, and as a result the iPhone is being sold for far more than some had expected after the $199 (9,500 rupees) worldwide price was announced. Still, that doesn't seem to have been the primary reason for the slow sales, since competing phones are priced about the same as the 30,000-rupee 8GB iPhone, although some think that customers thought they would get the cheaper price and were disappointed that it didn't apply to them.

The real reason seems to be that Apple and its carrier partners (Bharti Airtel and Vodafone) didn't promote the iPhone as aggressively as was done in other countries. And distribution in India is a convoluted process involving several different retailers that employ multiple strategies to reach the many different types of customers that are found in India, according to the article.

The article is worth a read for anyone wondering how one of the world's fastest-growing countries looks at the mobile phone market. Considering Apple has yet to make a splash in India, hasn't officially launched in China, and is going to easily surpass its goal of shipping 10 million iPhones worldwide this year, the company would seem to have a lot of room for growth in those two countries next year.

Apple probably isn't looking to challenge the two top search engines in the world with an add-on to its Safari browser.

(Credit: Apple )

There's little doubt that Apple has thousands of engineers working on all kinds of crazy stuff down in Cupertino, Calif., but are they really planning to take on Google?

That's the theory sort of advanced by TechCrunch on Thursday, with a post titled "Is Apple building a search engine?" Michael Arrington cites "multiple (if thin)" reports that Apple is working on developing its own search technology, presumably to get around using Google as the default search engine in the Safari browser.

The report, however, debunks itself, noting that Apple has not been hiring search engineers in the volumes that would be required to develop anything competitive with Google. The more likely conclusion, according to TechCrunch, is that Apple is working on a way to present search results more in line with the user interface on the iPhone and iPod Touch. That makes a degree of sense, though it's a far cry from the initial headline.

Updated at 12:20 p.m.: I should have linked to this story from yesterday about Google tweaking its search interface for the iPhone, it points out how the search interface can be made easier to read.

Deep one-day discounts on products such as the new MacBook could be coming this Black Friday.

(Credit: CNET)

Here's a rundown of some of the Apple news making the rounds this Wednesday:

Apple may launch most aggressive Black Friday pricing yet--AppleInsider: On a day when the stock market tanked once again on news of shifting priorities in the government's bailout plan, coupled with pessimistic forecasts from huge retailers like Best Buy, this notion doesn't seem all that far-fetched. Last year, Apple offered $101 discounts on MacBooks and other discounts on iPods on Black Friday, and Ben Reitzes of UBS thinks similar discounts could be applied more broadly across Apple's product line on that particular day.

Apple's iPhone faces off with the game champs--The Wall Street Journal: Is the "funnest iPod ever" something that should have Nintendo and Sony worried? Steve Jobs certainly thinks so, pointing out in this story (paid registration required) that a quarter of all the applications downloaded from the App Store have been games. The iPhone and iPod Touch may not yet be the choice of serious portable gamers, but Sega shared an interesting tidbit on how it views the iPhone: the 500,000 copies of Super Monkey Ball sold through the App Store would be considered a hit if it had sold that many copies of a game for the Nintendo DS or Sony PSP.

Apple focusing on MobileMe improvements in latest 10.5.6 builds--MacRumors: Everyone's favorite whipping-boy in the Apple universe--MobileMe--has received a great deal of work in the next update for Mac OS X Leopard, according to MacRumors. The update will supposedly have improvements to how MobileMe syncs data between MacBooks and the online service, which lets you access contacts, calendars, and other data from any computer.

The genius behind Steve--Fortune: This actually came out earlier in the week, but Adam Lashinsky's profile of Apple COO Tim Cook is worth a read if you haven't checked it out already. There's not a lot of new ground broken--Cook is the obvious short-term solution if Steve Jobs had to step down as Apple's leader, since he's a clear No. 2 and has already run the company once before--but the insights into Cook's personality and working style make it worth your time if you were ever curious about Apple's second-in-command.

The new Google search page on the iPhone packages content better.

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET News)

Google has customized its search results for the iPhone's display, getting around some awkward presentation issues.

"Results are formatted to be neatly displayed on the mobile screen, so there's no need to scroll side to side. Local search results now include easier-to-press 'Get Directions' and click-to-call links. Maps are shown by default in the case of a single listing or accessible by the 'Show map"' link for multiple listings," said Google mobile team programmers Steve Kanefsky and Rob Stacey in a blog post Tuesday night.

The older look can be retrieved by scrolling to the bottom of the search results page and clicking the "Classic" link, but I much prefer the new look.

The new packaging, however, isn't integrated with the iPhone itself, which has a built-in Google search option accessible via the magnifying glass icon at the top of each Web page. Those results are formatted for a much larger screen, at least on my iPhone. To get the fancy search results, you first must point the browser to www.google.com.

The images below show at left, the older iPhone search interface from a www.google.com search, and at right, the search results from using the Safari built-in search feature.

The older 'classic' look for a search from www.google.com on the iPhone.

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET News)

Using the built-in search icon in iPhone's Safari browser doesn't take advantage of the better formatting.

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET News)