The investigation found no evidence that Apple did anything illegal..

Yahoo just unveiled a completely redesigned website for Flickr, and it looks great. What makes it even better is that each user now gets 1 TB of free storage and 3 minutes of 1080p video. The new look is very image-centric, as it should be. Profiles are collages of photos in a scrollable list with [...]

Apple CEO Tim Cook is scheduled to appear before the U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee tomorrow as part of a probe into tax evasion strategies among American corporations. Apple released its official testimony for the hearing earlier today, noting that is is one of the biggest taxpayers in the country. Among the witnesses tomorrow will be Apple [...]

How loyal are you to Apple? New research shows that Apple has the most loyal and devoted customer base in the computer business. Forrester recently conducted a survey to determine how loyal the average computer owner is to a given company. While 85% of worldwide customers don’t claim loyalty to a certain brand (defined in the [...]

Since it was revealed that FaceTime over Cellular was coming to iOS 6 last summer, AT&T has been gradually rolling out the feature to different segments of its subscriber base. At first, you had to be on a “Mobile Share” plan, and then it was opened up to LTE iOS devices on a traditional tiered [...]

Alongside Yahoo’s $1.1 billion acquisition of Tumblr today, the social network also released a big update to its iOS app. There’s a “fancy” new interface interface for selecting a certain kind of post to create. If it looks familiar, that’s because you’re thinking of Stacks in OS X, the crescendoing lists of apps you can [...]

External battery packs are one of the least sexy aspects of the mobile age. They’re the equivalent of the plastic gas can in the back of your trunk: stinky, unsexy, and probably empty when you need it. Helix by Lenmar Category: Battery pack Works With: iPad, iPhone, iPod touch Price: $100 Lenmar’s Helix battery pack [...]

When I opened iBooks on my iPad mini the other day, I tapped the Collections button, and selected “Purchased Books” as my filter option, to see what I had in my account that I wanted to read. Oddly, I saw a ton of the same book, over and over, sitting on the shelves. For some [...]

Apple CEO Tim Cook is scheduled to appear before a Senate committee tomorrow morning to talk about Apple’s off-shore cash that’s now worth over $100 billion. Last week, Cook stated that his company believes the entire U.S. corporate tax system needs to be overhauled to encourage companies like Apple to bring earnings from overseas back [...]

    It was just last Fall that Apple announced the 13-inch MacBook Pro with Retina display but Apple is already facing some competition from the likes of Google’s  Chromebook Pixel and now Samsung is getting in on the game. This morning Samsung announced that it is manufacturing a 13.3-inch display that will have higher pixel [...]

AT&T on Monday said it plans to more broadly enable the use of Apple’s FaceTime for users over its cellular network in the next few weeks, and by year’s end plans to allow video chat apps use over its network by all customers. This latest position on FaceTime and similar apps represents total shift from its position almost a year ago.

AT&T’s statement to the Verge on Monday notes that “by mid-June, we’ll have enabled those apps over cellular for our unlimited plan customers who have LTE devices from [Apple, Samsung and BlackBerry].” Besides FaceTime, Samsung and BlackBerry’s pre-installed video chat apps will also be included.

And more will be coming for all of its customers before the end of the year: “Throughout the second half of this year, we plan to enable pre-loaded video chat apps over cellular for all our customers, regardless of data plan or device; that work is expected to be complete by year end.”

When Apple updated its mobile video chat app to work over cellular last summer, AT&T came under fire when it announced subsequently that only customers who subscribed to one of its Mobile Share plans could use it. Several open internet groups threatened to file complaints with the FCC, calling the carrier’s policy a violation of net neutrality. Several months later, AT&T opened the service to anyone with an LTE device.

Based on broadness of the statement, it sounds like video chat apps like Google’s new Hangouts app, available for both iOS and Android, will also be free to operate over AT&T’s network later on this year.

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Often times, the best way to to get a sense of your data is to look at it. A bunch of of numbers or words might not mean anything sitting within a table, but they start to make a lot more sense when they’re turned into a chart. In fields like mass cytometry, though, where doctors might want to analyze dozens of biological markers for each of tends of thousands of cells in a tissue sample, creating an easy-to-understand chart is easier said than done.

That’s why a group of researchers from Columbia University and Stanford University developed an algorithm that can do just that, turning those cells into something that resembles your social graph. This lets researchers see how the various cells are related to each other so they know , for example, where to focus cancer treatment and what to track as that treatment progresses.

The idea of representing large or complex data as a graph is nothing new, but it has taken on more prominence thanks to the rise of social media and those ubiquitous social graphs that map out who’s connected to whom. As we highlighted recently, however, graph analysis is becoming more popular outside the realm of social networks, and is being applied to problems that are more complex than just figuring out simple relationships within a network. In cases such as medical research, especially, graphs can provide a very effective way of seeing how potentially hundreds of thousands of data points spanning perhaps hundreds of variables are similar to each other.

That’s exactly what the team at Columbia and Stanford has done with a new algorithm that they’ve demonstrated within the realm of mass cytometry. According to a press release announcing the research (which is available via paid download at Nature Biotechnology):

“The method, called viSNE (visual interactive Stochastic Neighbor Embedding), is based on a sophisticated algorithm that translates high-dimensional data (e.g., a dataset that includes many different simultaneous measurements from single cells) into visual representations similar to two-dimensional ‘scatter plots’ ….

“The viSNE software can analyze measurements of dozens of molecular markers. In the two-dimensional maps that result, the distance between points represents the degree of similarity between single cells. The maps can reveal clearly defined groups of cells with distinct behaviors (e.g., drug resistance) even if they are only a tiny fraction of the total population. This should enable the design of ways to physically isolate and study these cell subpopulations in the laboratory.”

I assume they say similar to scatter plots because the algorithm is analyzing data across more than two dimensions, although the resulting chart is essentially the same (i.e., data points with similar characteristics will form clusters).

The results of viSNE, showing cell densities in diagnosis and relapse samples.

Whether or not they’re technically similar, this research seems similar to what Ayasdi is doing with its new data-analysis software based on a technique called topological data analysis. In both cases, though, the algorithms aren’t necessarily concerned with how data points interact with one another (like in network graphs), but rather what similar characteristics the points share. Ayasdi’s software has been used in cancer research, too, including on datasets spanning hundreds of patients and tens of thousands of variables.

In theory — although not likely in practice considering the complexity of the datasets medical researchers are dealing with — these approaches are similar to clustering approaches that are also popular among data scientists working with web companies. In areas such as e-commerce or email management, for example, where there isn’t a strong social element, companies can broadly break customers into distinct groups based on their behavior or interests.

A sample cluster of MailChimp subscribers.

Of course, curing cancer is a slightly more compelling — and difficult — goal than targeted advertising. The algorithms have to be precise so as not to miss similarities hidden within the mass of data. In the case of viSNE, the researchers say they’ve been able to spot small groups of cells (like 20 out of tens of thousands) that might be able to survive chemotherapy and increase the likelihood of a recurring tumor.

But we probably shouldn’t bee too quick to discount the work that web companies do as somehow less valuable than that of cancers researchers, for example. The big data era arguably started with the web, and web companies have generated some of the most important data-analysis techniques and technologies around today (see, for example, Google’s Jeff Dean, with whom I’ll be speaking at our Structure conference next month). As medical researchers start generating more and more data via cytometry, genome sequencing and even electronic medical records, it will be critical for individuals in all fields to keep track of what data scientists in other fields are doing and figure out how that might apply to their own work.

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Apple CEO Tim Cook is going before Congress on Tuesday to defend his company’s tax-paying practices. On Monday, the company published his planned testimony, including his recommendations for “a dramatic simplification of the corporate tax system.” Cook will argue that his general suggestions for an overhaul will benefit the economy by encouraging U.S.-based companies like his own to bring more of their foreign profits back to their accounts in the U.S.

Cook will call for a revenue-neutral reform of the corporate tax code that does away with all tax expenditures, lowers tax rates and establishes a “reasonable” tax on companies’ earnings from overseas. It’s not in the planned testimony, but in an interview last week, Cook made it clear that he does not believe that a tax rate of zero is a reasonable number. In his testimony before the U.S. Senate’s Subcommittee on Investigations, he will say that Apple supports this simplification of the tax code despite the likelihood that it will mean Apple’s overall corporate taxes will go up. The current corporate tax system “applies industrial era concepts to a digital economy” and “undermines U.S. competitiveness,” Apple believes.

Before Cook gets into his specific suggestions for fixing how U.S. businesses are taxed on foreign earnings, he’s going to spend most of his time going over why he’s being called to testify in the first place: Apple’s accounting methods. Apple keeps at least $100 billion in foreign earnings outside of the IRS’s grasp because it doesn’t wish to pay the 35 percent tax it would incur by bringing that money home. Many other businesses follow similar practices.

According to the published testimony, Cook will going into detail about how the company accounts for profits earned in the U.S., how investment in its foreign assets is taxed, how it shares R&D costs with an Irish subsidiary and more. (It’ll probably be a snoozefest for everyone except those who get a thrill out of spreadsheets.) Most of it is Cook on the defensive, explaining how what Apple does is within legal limits. Cook plans to assure the committee it’s not cheating on its taxes with any special tricks and “does not have a bank account in the Cayman Islands.”

He will underscore his point about Apple being on the up and up by laying out how much the company pays in taxes. Last year it paid $6 billion in taxes to the U.S. and this year, Cook has said it will pay $7 billion.

Tuesday’s testimony will be Cook’s first appearance before Congress. The company’s tax practices came to light a year ago when the New York Times highlighted some of the methods Apple has used to keep its overall taxes at a minimum.

Update 2:43 p.m. PT: Later on Monday the Senate released the results of its own investigation into the Apple’s tax-paying practices. It found that Apple’s convoluted system of subsidiaries has allowed it to avoid paying $44 billion in U.S. taxes over the last four years. However, it also noted that Apple did not break any U.S. law in doing so, according to a report in the Los Angeles Times. Expect many questions during Tuesday’s hearings about how the company uses its subsidiaries in Ireland to do this.

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If Marissa Mayer is on a mission to teach kids about her company, which was founded before some of them were even born, buying Tumblr isn’t a bad way to do it. But in all the discussion of Yahoo’s new deal, too many people are writing about Yahoo buying a blogging site, comparing Tumblr to WordPress, when in fact Tumblr is more of a photo site for the youngs.

While buying Tumblr isn’t necessarily a bad deal for the two companies, as my colleague Mathew Ingram wrote, there’s another photo site out there that might have been an even better deal: Pinterest.

In many ways, Pinterest is also building a mobile-friendly photo site just like Tumblr, but Pinterest is also in the midst of constructing the underpinnings for a potentially much more lucrative native revenue experience. Pinterest is oriented around commerce and consumers craving particular items. That’s good for business.

No, buying Pinterest wouldn’t help Yahoo discover its inner tween. It’s a well-known fact that Pinterest is populated mainly by adult women — not exactly the demographic Yahoo needs to attract. And no, considering Pinterest’s valuation as of its last funding round, such an acquisition probably wouldn’t have come cheap. Acquiring the company would require a much bigger departure from Yahoo’s current mass-market advertising into the world of e-commerce and affliate links. It could be a harder sell to the company’s investors, and a bigger transition for everyone.

But if Yahoo is looking to shell out the big bucks for a site with viral growth, visuals to compete with Facebook, and a devoted community of users, Pinterest might have been the better choice. According to a Pew report in December, out of all online adults (which is basically anyone with an internet connection), just six percent of those people visited Tumblr on a regular basis, compared with 13 percent on Instagram (which isn’t exactly for sale), and 15 percent on Pinterest — only Twitter comes in at 16 percent ahead of the others and behind behemoth Facebook at 67 percent.

Less than a year out of beta, Pinterest is a dominant force on the web; a place where women of all ages collect photos of things that inspire them or things that they want to remember or create. For many, it’s a digital wish-list. And because of that, Pinterest sends huge amounts of traffic to online retailers. To be the intermediary between the people and the stores is a good place to be — you’re a crucial link that drives the sales, without any of the hassle of shipping or orders or user acquisitions that come with e-commerce.

Pinterest CEO Ben Silbermann at the company’s new offices in San Francisco.

Pinterest has no business model in place right now — the site is free to join and for brands to integrate with — but that’s just right now, and it likely won’t last. The company just announced yesterday that it is starting to connect photos of items back to the brands who sell them, and it’s not hard to image how this could play out.

Tumblr does have a business model right now based on ads, and it just started rolling them out on mobile users in April. But the company has been reportedly burning through cash and not yet making a lot of revenue, hoping to bring in $100 million this year. But people are usually pretty unhappy about a free product suddenly peppering them with ads — especially if those ads are dropped into a feed that users have created (just ask anyone how they feel about Facebook ads.) CEO David Karp said at our paidContent event just last month that he wants advertising on the site to be native and unobstrusive.

“We focused on higher up in the funnel, the type of advertising that creates intent,” Karp told us in April. “It gives room for the most creative advertisers to create their best work. I think we’ve started to prove it, and see really good examples of it.”

But that’s a hard nut to crack.

Suddenly, the possible Pinterest model of taking a cut on sales and traffic resulting from users creating digital shopping lists looks a lot less disruptive to the core experience, and potentially more lucrative, than trying to solve mobile display ads for the Tumblr feed. Making money off traffic and sales wouldn’t disrupt Pinterest’s core product, and would generally fit in with the company’s existing user experience, just as promoted tweets are fitting with Twitter’s on both desktop and mobile (a profitable venture so far estimated to bring Twitter $528 million in ad revenue this year.)

So no, buying Pinterest wouldn’t make Yahoo all that hip. But buying the site that has potential to become a strong force in modern, social retail? Seems like a good bet — especially since teens might leave you once Mom joins and you become mainstream.

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Cameras are very good at freezing moments in time. Browse through your photo collection, and no doubt you’ll have lots of examples in which a fast shutter speed captured an instant and preserved it, seemingly in amber. What’s missing from photos like those, though, are any sense of drama. If you’re shooting moving subjects – at a car race, a sporting event, or an airshow, for example – then you might want to preserve some of that action. You should learn to pan your camera.

Here’s how to take screengrabs, also known as screen captures, on an Apple Mac.

In a press release, Apple revealed that developers in attendance will be treated to an “in-depth look” at the future of iOS and OS X, which we expect means previews of iOS 7 and OS X 10.9, Apple’s next mobile and Mac operating systems, at WWDC 2013. Here, we’ve rounded up all new Apple products that are rumoured to be in the pipeline, and shared our thoughts about how likely we are to see those products unveiled at WWDC this year.

While Apple’s 15″ MacBook Pro was the first consumer notebook to gain a Retina-level display nearly a year ago, it is no longer the only such offering, as Google’s Chromebook Pixel with its 12.85″ 2560×1700 display and Toshiba’s Kirabook with a 2560×1440 220 PPI display have joined the market in recent months.

Seeking to raise the ante on Retina displays, Samsung and Sharp have both introduced new high-resolution displays in the past week, targeting notebooks and ultrabooks with the latest technology. The new displays from both companies sport 16:9 ratios, making them unfit for Apple’s line of notebooks, which all use 16:10 ratio displays, but they should make Retina displays a mainstream feature in the relatively near future.

Sharp last week announced new 11.6″, 14″, and 15.6″ displays with pixel densities of 235-262 PPI, joining the company’s existing 13.3″ display at 221 PPI. Samsung’s announcement today included a new 13.3″ display with a 3200×1800 LCD panel at an even higher 276 PPI.

For comparison, Apple’s 13″ MacBook Pro with Retina Display has a 2560×1600 13.3″ display at 227 PPI.

While high resolution is the most obvious benefit of these new displays for consumers, some of the screens bring other benefits as well. Samsung says its new 13.3″ display offers 30% power savings over existing displays, something that would be important for a potential MacBook Air with Retina display. That machine is constrained by needs for a super-thin display and battery. And even for Apple’s existing Retina MacBook Pro, advances being brought about by Samsung and Sharp are likely to make their way into Apple’s notebook displays in the future.

Sharp advertises similar energy-saving benefits from its new IGZO displays:

IGZO technology enables smaller thin-film transistors and increased light transmittance. As a result, fine text can be rendered crisply and clearly, and images can be displayed with impressive realism. For example, the 14-inch panel boasts a pixel density of 262 ppi, which represents 1.67 times the number of pixels of full high definition. Increased light transmittance also means lower rates of energy consumption, with IGZO technology reducing the amount of power required to drive liquid crystals during the display of still images. These factors lead to greater energy efficiency and longer battery life on notebook PCs.

Apple has been rumored to be looking at Retina displays for desktop applications as well, but a future Retina iMac would face a different set of issues, including the cost of the panel itself at such large sizes, as well as the immense graphics and connectivity needs to drive such a display.

In a statement to The Verge on the future of pre-loaded apps, AT&T today revealed that it is planning to offer FaceTime over cellular to all of its customers on any data plan by the end of 2013.

For video chat apps that come pre-loaded on devices, we currently give all OS and device makers the ability for those apps to work over cellular for our customers who are on Mobile Share or Tiered plans. Apple, Samsung and BlackBerry have chosen to enable this for their pre-loaded video chat apps. And by mid-June, we’ll have enabled those apps over cellular for our unlimited plan customers who have LTE devices from those three manufacturers.

Throughout the second half of this year, we plan to enable pre-loaded video chat apps over cellular for all our customers, regardless of data plan or device; that work is expected to be complete by year end.

When FaceTime over cellular was announced alongside iOS 6, AT&T initially restricted the service to its customers that subscribed to a Mobile Share data plan. AT&T soon expanded access, first to customers on a tiered data plan with an LTE device, and then to all customers with a tiered data plan regardless of device. Only customers with a grandfathered unlimited data plan were restricted from using the service.

AT&T plans to allow its unlimited customers with LTE devices access to FaceTime over cellular beginning in June, with full access to all customers becoming available by the end of the year.

Apple today released a statement [PDF] ahead of Apple CEO Tim Cook, CFO Peter Oppenheimer, and head of tax operations Phillip A. Bullock’s appearances in front of the U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigation tomorrow.

In the seventeen page statement, Apple notes that it has created hundreds of thousands of jobs in the United States — both directly and through suppliers and contractors. It notes that the company paid nearly $6 billion in federal taxes in fiscal 2012 and the company expects to pay $7 billion in 2013.

The company also says Apple “does not use tax gimmicks”, pushing back against reporting in The New York Times that examined Apple’s international tax strategies.

Apple, a California company, employs tens of thousands of Americans, creates revolutionary products that improve the lives of tens of millions of Americans, and pays billions of dollars annually to the US Treasury in corporate income and payroll taxes. Apple’s shareholders – from individuals and institutions to pension funds and public employee retirement systems – have benefitted from the Company’s success through the appreciation of its stock price and generous dividends. Apple safeguards the capital entrusted to it by its shareholders with prudent management that reflects the Company’s extensive international operations. Apple complies fully with both the laws and spirit of the laws. And Apple pays all its required taxes, both in this country and abroad.

Apple reiterates repeatedly that all of its financial activities are fully legal and in the best interests of its shareholders. The company says it supports comprehensive reform of the U.S. corporate tax system, instead proposing a new system that is “revenue neutral, eliminates all tax expenditures, lowers tax rates and implements a reasonable tax on foreign earnings that allows free movement of capital back to the US.” Apple notes that this would likely result in the company paying even more in corporate tax, but supports it nonetheless.

The document includes an extensive history of the company, as well as fairly extensive details about Apple’s corporate structure and tax practices, including details about Apple’s sales and use tax payments ($1.3 billion in FY2012), state income tax payments ($830 million), and Apple’s contributions to employer payroll taxes ($327 million).

It lays out Apple’s network of foreign subsidiaries, including several located in Ireland which distribute ‘active foreign, post-tax income as dividend payments within Apple’s foreign corporate structure’.

Apple wants to make clear to the Subcommittee that the Company does not use its Irish subsidiaries or any other entities to engage in the following tax practices that were the focus of the Subcommittee’s September 20, 2012 hearing, entitled Offshore Profit Shifting and the US Tax Code. Specifically, Apple does not move its intellectual property into offshore tax havens and use it to sell products back into the US to avoid US tax, nor does it use revolving loans from CFCs to fund its domestic operations. Apple does not hold money on a Caribbean island, does not have a bank account in the Cayman Islands, and does not move any taxable revenue from sales to US customers to other jurisdictions in order to avoid US taxation.

The statement continues in some detail, examining Apple’s various international holdings and how the company uses them to fund international expansion of retail stores and other investments.

It also notes that analysis of its decision to issue $17 billion in debt to fund share repurchases and dividends, rather than repatriating foreign earnings, “was in its shareholders’ best interests”.

Apple CEO Tim Cook and CFO Peter Oppenheimer will appear at 9:30AM Eastern time in front of the U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigation. The hearing, titled “Offshore Profit Shifting and the U.S. Tax Code – Part 2” will be in the Dirksen Senate Office Building. The subcommittee is attached to the U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs.

Other witnesses at the hearing include tax policy experts from the IRS and the Department of the Treasury, as well as professors from Harvard and Villanova.

Note: Due to the political nature of the discussion regarding this topic, the comment thread is located in our Politics, Religion, Social Issues forum. All MacRumors forum members and site visitors are welcome to read and follow the thread, but posting is limited to forum members with at least 100 posts.