Welcome to the fourth episode of “The Mediatwits,” the new revamped longer form weekly audio podcast from MediaShift. The co-hosts are MediaShift’s Mark Glaser along with PaidContent founder Rafat Ali. This week’s show is obsessed with all things Apple — and iPhone. Apple had a blow-out earnings quarter, nearly doubling its profits and selling more iPhones than ever with the new Verizon iPhone. But the creepy part is the finding by scientists that your iPhone (and iPad) knows your location and has been storing that in a secret file since last June. (Update: Today the Wall Street Journal found that Google is also tracking Android phones.)
Our guest this week is Neal Augenstein, the first major-market radio reporter to give up his bulky equipment and use just an iPhone to do audio and video reports for WTOP-FM and wtop.com in Washington, DC. Plus, there are two new news aggregators and apps, Trove and News.me, that needed a quick take.
Check it out!
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Intro and outro music by 3 Feet Up; mid-podcast music by Autumn Eyes via Mevio’s Music Alley.
Here are some highlighted topics from the show:
Apple’s blowout quarter
3:30: Apple by the numbers
5:30: iPod going into the sunset?
7:00: Mark enjoys freedom from AT&T
iPhones tracking you
7:50: Background on consolidated.db file
9:15: Rafat says it will be shut down
10:40: WSJ series What They Know
12:10: Do people care?
Neal Augenstein interview
13:40: Neal details all the old gear he used to carry
16:10: The app Neal uses on his iPhone for audio editing
17:50: Audio is about 92% as good as before
20:10: Figuring out best practices as he goes along
23:40: RIP Flipcam
Trove and News.me
25:30: Mark’s experience with News.me
27:40: News.me is a Twitter replacement or enhancement?
29:20: Flipboard gets $50 million in funding
More Reading
Apple clobbers estimates, iPad sales fall short at Fortune
AT&T Boosts Subscriber Rolls Even as Verizon Gains IPhone at Bloomberg
With iPhone, everybody wins: Verizon, AT&T and Apple at Computerworld
Got an iPhone or 3G iPad? Apple is recording your moves at O’Reilly Radar
Researcher: iPhone, iPad track users’ whereabouts at CNET
iStalk: Apple’s iPhones, iPads revealed to be tracking user data at NY Post
Apple, Google Collect User Data at WSJ
News.me, the iPad News Aggregator Blessed by Big Publishers, Gets Ready to Launch at AllThingsD
What They Know series by Wall Street Journal
Holy Crap, Flipboard Just Raised $50 Million At A $200 Million Valuation at Business Insider
Weekly Poll
Don’t forget to vote in our weekly poll, this time about the iPhone tracking your movements:
Mark Glaser is executive editor of MediaShift and Idea Lab. He also writes the bi-weekly OPA Intelligence Report email newsletter for the Online Publishers Association. He lives in San Francisco with his son Julian. You can follow him on Twitter @mediatwit.