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An Apple Inc. iPad 2 in London.

An Apple Inc. iPad 2 in London. Photographer: Chris Ratcliffe/Bloomberg

Jan. 31 (Bloomberg) — Warren East, chief executive officer of ARM Holdings Plc, discusses the company’s product range, deployment and competitive landscape. He speaks with Owen Thomas on Bloomberg Television’s “On the Move.” (Source: Bloomberg)

The iPad faces little competition among corporations such as financial services and pharmaceutical firms. Photographer: Ramin Talaie/Bloomberg

Apple Inc. (AAPL), without much effort on its part, is making rapid headway in selling to corporations.

After years of being the also-ran to Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) in the workplace, Apple has seen its iPad become a standard business tool. According to an IDG Connect survey, 51 percent of managers with iPads say they “always” use the device at work, and another 40 percent sometimes do. Seventy-nine percent of the respondents use the iPad for business when outside the office.

Even as Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN)’s Kindle Fire and other tablets play catch-up in the consumer market, the iPad faces little competition among corporations such as financial services and pharmaceutical firms. Apple’s iPhone, meanwhile, is the top- selling smartphone, forcing businesses to accommodate workers who use it. That has helped set the stage for Apple’s Mac computer to make its own inroads in the corporate world.

“We haven’t seen a single pharma deploy on anything but the iPad,” said Matt Wallach, co-founder of Veeva Systems Inc., a Pleasanton, California-based maker of sales software for drug companies. “I’ve seen a lot of devices come and go over the years. Nothing touches the speed of adoption of the iPad.”

Microsoft and Intel Corp. (INTC) have dominated the office- technology market for three decades, accounting for almost all the personal computers on workers’ desks. The seeds for the “Wintel” hegemony were planted in 1981, when International Business Machines Corp. tapped the two companies to help create its first PC. That fueled an information-technology industry that now generates $3.8 trillion a year, according to research firm Gartner Inc.

Making an Effort?

Microsoft and Intel have struggled in their efforts to compete with the iPad, though that may change later this year when a tablet-friendly version of Windows debuts. Windows PCs also are under attack. While total PC shipments dropped 5.9 percent in the fourth quarter, the Mac grew almost 21 percent, according to Gartner.

The real threat to the corporate-technology industry is if Apple decides to pursue the market more aggressively, said Frank Gillett, an analyst at Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Forrester Research Inc. Apple can take advantage of its popular iTunes and App Store platforms to distribute software to companies in a user-friendly way, he said. That in turn would help promote the company’s hardware products.

Bill Evans, a spokesman for Cupertino, California-based Apple, declined to discuss the company’s corporate strategy.

Big Opportunity

Apple sold 3.8 million Mac computers to companies in the past fiscal year, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. That amounts to 3 percent of the market.

If Apple were to boost that to 18 million Macs a year, similar to the sales level of No. 3 PC maker Lenovo Group Ltd. (992), it would bring in about $23 billion. Given workers’ desire to use Apple products, the company would probably be able to reach that point with far less investment than rivals such as Hewlett- Packard Co. (HPQ) or Dell Inc., said Anand Srinivasan, an analyst at Bloomberg Industries.

Because companies also pay for warranties and additional services, profit margins might be higher than for Apple’s consumer Mac business, he said.

“Apple has lots of room to grow in the commercial space,” Srinivasan said.

In any case, iPad sales to companies will accelerate this year, said Tom Mainelli, an analyst at Framingham, Massachusetts-based IDC, a sister firm to IDG Connect. Many large companies focused in 2011 on testing the device and running trials for ways to use the tablet, he said. Now, those pilot programs are turning into mass purchases by customers.

Corporate Ecosystem

Mainelli expects iPad shipments into commercial markets, which includes education and health care, to rise to 52.6 million in 2013 from 38.3 million this year. The device was a common sight at last week’s World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Apple’s iPhone also has pushed into the business world, often supplanting Research In Motion Ltd. (RIMM)’s BlackBerry. The company shipped 37 million of the phones last quarter, making it the market leader in smartphones.

Fidelity Investments has developed iPad applications that let clients check mutual funds and retirement accounts without having to boot up a PC, said Richard Blunck, executive vice president of digital distribution at the firm. At pharmaceutical companies, salespeople use iPads to show product information to doctors on a moment’s notice. During Apple’s quarterly conference call last week, Chief Financial Officer Peter Oppenheimer cited Royal Dutch Shell Plc, Credit Suisse Group AG and Nike Inc. (NKE) as companies that have issued iPads to employees.

Android Software

For companies considering tablets, the main alternatives are devices that run Google Inc. (GOOG)’s Android operating system. Many chief information officers are concerned that Android isn’t as secure as Apple’s iOS software, said Santiago Becerra, CEO of MeLLmo, a corporate app developer.

Companies also have to go through a lengthy testing phase before letting a device access its networks, and it’s easier to qualify the iPad than each of the many Android tablets on the market. For now, MeLLmo only makes apps for the iPad.

“There are so few CIOs looking at Android that it’s not worth it for us right now,” Becerra said.

Microsoft could still slow Apple’s momentum. Tablets with the new Windows 8 may have an easier time running Microsoft Office, a staple for most office workers. That could give Windows 8-based tablets a big advantage, since Microsoft hasn’t created an iPad-compatible version of Office.

Doing Nothing?

Apple has succeeded with corporations without building a large sales force or a corps of consultants and field technicians. Wallach, who sold pharmaceutical-sales software for years before co-founding Veevo, says he has only dealt with one person at Apple who focused on his industry.

“It would be strong to say they’re doing absolutely nothing, but it’s pretty close,” Wallach said.

According to Apple’s website, the company is now seeking a salesperson dedicated to pharmaceutical companies in eastern Pennsylvania.

“If Apple is starting to hire reps around the country focused just on accounts in their region within one industry, that would be a definite signal of their intention to sell with a stronger vertical focus,” Wallach said.

About 10 other corporate-focused positions are listed on Apple’s website, including sales positions in New York, Seattle and Austin, Texas, as well as a “B2B Quality Coach,” to help Apple salespeople “deliver exceptional business-to-business experiences.”

Apple has made other moves to ease corporate buying. The company rolled out a volume purchasing program, letting businesses place large orders for iPad apps, rather than requiring each employee to go to iTunes and enter a code and their own credit card number.

Not every company wants Apple to focus more on their needs. Fidelity’s Blunck would rather have Apple continue to make breakthrough consumer products that create new ways for its customers to use Fidelity’s services.

“I’ll take that all day long, versus having them spend all their time on enterprise’s needs,” he said.

To contact the reporter on this story: Peter Burrows in San Francisco at pburrows@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Tom Giles at tgiles5@bloomberg.net

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Apple’s reimagining of multicam features automatic sync and can handle up to 64 different camera angles of varying formats, resolutions and frame rates at once. Other new features in 10.0.3, which follows a small bug fix last November, include a chroma keyer with advanced controls, the ability to manually relink projects and events to new media, and support for layered Photoshop files. Apple has also improved the functionality in FCPX’s new version of XML, paving the way for several simultaneous third-party device, App and plug-in releases that take advantage of the NLE’s new architecture.

One such App, a $9.99 XML translator from Intelligent Assistance called 7toX, will be a godsend to editors with existing FCP7 projects. Developed by Philip Hodgetts and also available today in the Mac App Store, the tool converts FCP 7 XML to the new flavor of XML in Final Cut Pro X—itself updated to version 1.1 in this release—letting you bring projects forward from Final Cut Pro 7 directly into Final Cut Pro X. “When we first released Final Cut Pro X, we talked openly about the fact that we were not going to attempt conversion between XML versions because we knew the fidelity wouldn’t be perfect,” Apple’s Richard Townhill, senior director of applications product marketing, said yesterday. “We knew it would be impossible because of all the differences between 7 and X, from the fact that projects and the timeline are approached completely differently to the fact that we have a new and improved effects engine and completely different effects plug-ins. Phil Hodgetts really impressed me with the work that he’s done. He’s gotten astonishingly accurate conversion from FCP 7 XML to FCP X XML and we’re very pleased to have that App available at the same time.”

Compared to Hodgetts’ earlier Project X27, which Scott Simmons covered on our blog in October, the new translation tool takes full advantage of the expanded fidelity in FCPX’s improved data transport functions, which now let you do color correction and audio keyframes via XML. “Final Cut Pro X XML is just richer overall than Final Cut Pro 7 XML, and it’s a lot easier to move your media from less rich to more rich than it is to go the other way around,” said Townhill. The App also takes advantage of FCP 10.0.3′s new relinking tool, smoothing out, and in most cases, shortening tasks that took much longer to do in FCP7.

To coincide with the release, Apple has updated its 30-day Final Cut Pro X trial and “Final Cut Pro X for Final Cut Pro 7 Editors” white paper it made available in September when the first FCPX update was released.

New Chroma Keyer and Multicam Editing

The tweaks to Final Cut Pro X’s original chroma keyer, used on air this season by Saturday Night Live and Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, offer up more controls to fix edge problems that result from sloppy greenscreens. “People wanted to make adjustments and for that they had to go to Motion,” said Townhill. “A lot of the feedback we got was that as editors, they really didn’t want to leave Final Cut to clean things up. So we stuffed those controls back in 10.0.3 so you can pull a near-perfect key without leaving the NLE.”

It may have been conspicuously absent since June, but FCPX’s new multicam editor, now that it’s here, is a point of pride for the Apple product team. “We think we have the industry’s best implementation of multicam,” said Townhill. “We can now deal with 64 different angles, which means you can cut between 64 sources with different resolutions, codecs and frame rates, something you won’t find in other NLEs. And with the magnetic timeline, you can skim through each angle individually.” A new angle editor lets you adjust or rename the angles as you go and even apply FCP or third-party effects to your angles.

The key to getting a good multicam, added Townhill, is keeping everything in sync, and this gets tricky when cutting source material from DSLRs or the GoPro, neither of which have timecode. “Final Cut Pro X lets you use date and time, so you can pick up the date-and-time metadata from inside the video stream and synchronize based on that,” he said. “But if the date and times aren’t set properly ahead of time, you won’t get what you planned on. We wanted to make this aspect really, really easy so we went one stage further, letting you sync your camera angles based on audio waveforms. In most cases you’re shooting your four or six or more angles with cameras that have scratch audio, even if you’re recording the clean audio (which can also be one of your angles) to a broadcast recorder. To fine-tune your sync, FCPX will analyze the audio waveforms and match them so that all the camera angles synchronize.”

Broadcast Monitoring and Effects

While Townhill stressed the importance of the update’s new features— “not just moved forward into a new architecture but greatly improved upon”—he was quick to point out the critical role third-party developers have always played in Final Cut’s evolution. “One of the reasons for Final Cut’s historical success is because of the vibrancy of our third-party ecosystem,” he told said. “It’s that open nature of Final Cut that has allowed and continues to allow the development network to build some really cool tools. I’ve been in this industry a long time and I can honestly say our developer ecosystem is vaster and more vibrant than I’ve ever seen it before.”

Broadcast monitoring, officially still in beta while manufacturers like Matrox and Blackmagic Design ready their drivers for release (AJA released a compatible PCI-express card last Friday), will get additional boosts over time as Thunderbolt devices roll out.

Townhill also highlighted visual effects plug-ins Red Giant Magic Bullet and GenArts Sapphire Edge, both of which have imminent releases of new versions compatible with Final Cut Pro X v10.0.3. “They are probably two of the most popular visual effects plug-ins that people are using in Final Cut right now,” says Townhillhe said. “And these two companies have been able to do things with the new architecture that they simply couldn’t do before, like on-screen control, which takes advantage of all the pipelines we’ve got under the hood.” (Red Giant did, however, publicly express concern this summer about a bug in OSX 10.7 Lion that caused Final Cut to ignore custom data in Looks and Colorista II; Townhill said that bug has been fixed and Magic Bullet will be now fully compatible with OS X Lion and Final Cut Pro X v10.0.3.)

Transitioning to FCP 10.0.3

Radical Media’s CTO Evan Schechtman, a Final Cut Pro X beta tester and by his own reckoning likely the earliest adopter of Final Cut Pro X, calls this update an even bigger deal than the original release. Radical Media cut HBO’s Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory, the West Memphis 3 documentary now nominated for an Academy Award, on Final Cut 7 and Schechtman says the New York- and LA-based facility is ready to transition completely to Final Cut Pro X now that broadcast monitoring and multicam editing are in the mix. “The executives on up to the CEO are all are behind the move. We plan to do some TV shows in the first or second quarter completely within FCPX, and then go into DaVinci and Smoke for finish,” he said. He used a recent project for the Gagosian Gallery, an iPad App featuring 360-degree video of Richard Serra sculptures, as a test balloon for Final Cut Pro X and got great results. “We shot full-frame 360-degree videos that come out as 4K distorted files,” he said. “We had to do color-correction. I thought, ‘Let me see what happens.’ I drop them into FCPX, I played them back in real time from my internal drive, I applied four or five layers of color correction and then I exported. That’s 4K color-correct on nonstandard format in real time. Without FCPX, I would have had to go first to DaVinci Resolve and transcode those files.”

Schechtman was trying out Intelligent Assistance’s 7toX App for the first time yesterday when I reached him at his office. “I was sitting in front of a job earlier today and started relinking my media the old way, by opening up a Final Cut 7 project,” he said. “It was just old and slow and the media is a mess. I was having a really hard time relinking. So I thought I’d see how the App could get me out of my mess.” With an old drive connected, he started to relink his media to Final Cut 7, he said, “thinking I had to and then realizing I didn’t have to. I did my XML export and I dropped it on the 7toX. It opens up Final Cut Pro X and it relinked everything automatically, whereas Final Cut 7 couldn’t do that. I took a series of audio files offline on purpose because I wanted to use the update’s new relink tool and the relink tool is telling me things the old version (7) didn’t. It was effortless and it looks gorgeous. I’m looking at nine tracks of audio and four tracks of video, clip connections are maintained and things that were turned off are hidden. And while this is a shorter piece than many we do, it’s fairly complex, and it played back with no problem. I think a lot of people are going to eat their words when they start using FCPX this way.”

While not every Radical Media project is multicam, the majority are. Schechtman said he particularly likes the way FCPX’s multicam “synchronizes clips together, but also uses audio for fine synchronization to refine based on timecode, time of day or even markers. The cool thing is, you can put markers in by a sync point, but it doesn’t even have to be frame-accurate. It will just hone in where the audio needs to look for fine synchronization.” These are not revolutionary features for a nonlinear editor, he admitted, but they are “unique in their implementation because of the groundwork that was laid. And this is still within year one.”

Radical Media also has “an enormous XSan implementation, with another 280 TB literally sitting in boxes” to add to it, bringing the facility’s storage capacity to nearly a Petabyte. “In our workflow here, we see FCPX as a really good digital asset manager. If you look at just the organizer window almost as an application unto itself, it’s going to help us get through more media faster than any program. People are going to be able to get to their basic rough cut and story cut, in my opinion, faster than in any other editing system. Now once the cut is polished, we will export to DaVinci Resolve for color correction and Pro Tools for audio. We still will use their exporter with various Roles, because that is how we will do language and other versioning for broadcast. Even internally, how we show an agency or a client different cuts, this will be automated by metadata.”

One steep learning curve remains, however. “Now there’s a different kind of responsibility put on the assistants to come up with a specific set of naming conventions on the head of a job,” said Schechtman. “That’s going to be a new set of standards we’ll be working in but as of today, now that I’ve had a chance to really bang on the new version, we’re ready to take the plunge.”

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All-Time Record iPhone, iPad and Mac Sales 
CUPERTINO, California—January 24, 2012—Apple® today announced financial results for its fiscal 2012 first quarter which spanned 14 weeks and ended December 31, 2011. The Company posted record quarterly revenue of $46.33 billion and record quarterly net profit of $13.06 billion, or $13.87 per diluted share. These results compare to revenue of $26.74 billion and net quarterly profit of $6 billion, or $6.43 per diluted share, in the year-ago quarter. Gross margin was 44.7 percent compared to 38.5 percent in the year-ago quarter. International sales accounted for 58 percent of the quarter’s revenue.

The Company sold 37.04 million iPhones in the quarter, representing 128 percent unit growth over the year-ago quarter. Apple sold 15.43 million iPads during the quarter, a 111 percent unit increase over the year-ago quarter. The Company sold 5.2 million Macs during the quarter, a 26 percent unit increase over the year-ago quarter. Apple sold 15.4 million iPods, a 21 percent unit decline from the year-ago quarter.

“We’re thrilled with our outstanding results and record-breaking sales of iPhones, iPads and Macs,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO. “Apple’s momentum is incredibly strong, and we have some amazing new products in the pipeline.”

“We are very happy to have generated over $17.5 billion in cash flow from operations during the December quarter,” said Peter Oppenheimer, Apple’s CFO. “Looking ahead to the second fiscal quarter of 2012, which will span 13 weeks, we expect revenue of about $32.5 billion and we expect diluted earnings per share of about $8.50.”

Apple will provide live streaming of its Q1 2012 financial results conference call beginning at 2:00 p.m. PST on January 24, 2012 at www.apple.com/quicktime/qtv/earningsq112. This webcast will also be available for replay for approximately two weeks thereafter.

This press release contains forward-looking statements including without limitation those about the Company’s estimated revenue and earnings per share. These statements involve risks and uncertainties, and actual results may differ. Risks and uncertainties include without limitation the effect of competitive and economic factors, and the Company’s reaction to those factors, on consumer and business buying decisions with respect to the Company’s products; continued competitive pressures in the marketplace; the ability of the Company to deliver to the marketplace and stimulate customer demand for new programs, products, and technological innovations on a timely basis; the effect that product introductions and transitions, changes in product pricing or mix, and/or increases in component costs could have on the Company’s gross margin; the inventory risk associated with the Company’s need to order or commit to order product components in advance of customer orders; the continued availability on acceptable terms, or at all, of certain components and services essential to the Company’s business currently obtained by the Company from sole or limited sources; the effect that the Company’s dependency on manufacturing and logistics services provided by third parties may have on the quality, quantity or cost of products manufactured or services rendered; risks associated with the Company’s international operations; the Company’s reliance on third-party intellectual property and digital content; the potential impact of a finding that the Company has infringed on the intellectual property rights of others; the Company’s dependency on the performance of distributors, carriers and other resellers of the Company’s products; the effect that product and service quality problems could have on the Company’s sales and operating profits; the continued service and availability of key executives and employees; war, terrorism, public health issues, natural disasters, and other circumstances that could disrupt supply, delivery, or demand of products; and unfavorable results of other legal proceedings. More information on potential factors that could affect the Company’s financial results is included from time to time in the “Risk Factors” and “Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations” sections of the Company’s public reports filed with the SEC, including the Company’s Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended September 24, 2011 and its Form 10-Q for the fiscal quarter ended December 31, 2011 to be filed with the SEC. The Company assumes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements or information, which speak as of their respective dates.

Apple designs Macs, the best personal computers in the world, along with OS X, iLife, iWork and professional software. Apple leads the digital music revolution with its iPods and iTunes online store. Apple has reinvented the mobile phone with its revolutionary iPhone and App Store, and is defining the future of mobile media and computing devices with iPad.

Press Contact:
Steve Dowling
Apple
dowling@apple.com
(408) 974-1896

Investor Relations Contacts:
Nancy Paxton
Apple
paxton1@apple.com
(408) 974-5420

Joan Hoover
Apple
hoover1@apple.com
(408) 974-4570
 

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Today’s students have grown up completely immersed in technology. iPod, iPad, computer — these are the ways they interact with their world. They need a textbook made for the way they learn.

Textbooks they won’t want to put down.

A Multi-Touch textbook on iPad is a gorgeous, full-screen experience full of interactive diagrams, photos, and videos. No longer limited to static pictures to illustrate the text, now students can dive into an image with interactive captions, rotate a 3D object, or have the answer spring to life in a chapter review. They can flip through a book by simply sliding a finger along the bottom of the screen. Highlighting text, taking notes, searching for content, and finding definitions in the glossary are just as easy. And with all their books on a single iPad, students will have no problem carrying them wherever they go.

Available with a tap. From the iBookstore on any iPad.

Students can find these Multi-Touch books in the Textbook section of the iBookstore. They can download a sample or purchase the entire book with one tap for a fraction of the price of a paper textbook. Textbooks purchased from the iBookstore are immediately available on their bookshelf, right alongside their other books. They can even download updates to textbooks, at no additional charge.

Now that students can truly interact with a textbook, they need a new kind of study aid: one that helps them take notes and review content as they read.

Highlighting and Note-Taking

Use a finger as a highlighter when reading any textbook in iBooks. Just swipe over text and it’s highlighted. Tap a highlighted section and a palette appears. Change colors, switch to underlining, or add a note instantly. Then switch to the Notes view to see all your notes and highlights organized in one place, making it a cinch to search or go back to the highlighted sections of the book.

Study Cards

All your notes and highlights automatically appear on study cards. Flip them over and find the definition of a glossary term or the note attached to the highlighted passage. Choose which highlight colors to review, and include chapter vocabulary from the glossary — automatically. To make sure you really know your stuff, you can shuffle your cards to study.

Textbooks and iTunes U

Educators can include iBooks textbooks in the complete courses they create for the new iTunes U. And the textbooks work seamlessly with the iTunes U app for iPad. For example, students can tap the name of the book in the assignment list to start reading it right away, and notes they take in iBooks will appear along with the other course notes in the iTunes U app.

Learn more about
iTunes U for iPad, iPhone,
and iPod touch

iBooks Author lets publishers easily create incredible iBooks textbooks for iPad.

Create an interactive book. From an app on your Mac.

With iBooks Author, a free app from the Mac App Store, anyone can make a book for iPad — complete with rich graphics, movies, photo galleries, Keynote animations, 3D objects, and more.

Learn more about
iBooks Author

This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you’re reading it on someone else’s site, please read the FAQ at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php#publishers. Five Filters recommends: Donate to Wikileaks.

Today’s students have grown up completely immersed in technology. iPod, iPad, computer — these are the ways they interact with their world. They need a textbook made for the way they learn.

Textbooks they won’t want to put down.

A Multi-Touch textbook on iPad is a gorgeous, full-screen experience full of interactive diagrams, photos, and videos. No longer limited to static pictures to illustrate the text, now students can dive into an image with interactive captions, rotate a 3D object, or have the answer spring to life in a chapter review. They can flip through a book by simply sliding a finger along the bottom of the screen. Highlighting text, taking notes, searching for content, and finding definitions in the glossary are just as easy. And with all their books on a single iPad, students will have no problem carrying them wherever they go.

Available with a tap. From the iBookstore on any iPad.

Students can find these Multi-Touch books in the Textbook section of the iBookstore. They can download a sample or purchase the entire book with one tap for a fraction of the price of a paper textbook. Textbooks purchased from the iBookstore are immediately available on their bookshelf, right alongside their other books. They can even download updates to textbooks, at no additional charge.

Now that students can truly interact with a textbook, they need a new kind of study aid: one that helps them take notes and review content as they read.

Highlighting and Note-Taking

Use a finger as a highlighter when reading any textbook in iBooks. Just swipe over text and it’s highlighted. Tap a highlighted section and a palette appears. Change colors, switch to underlining, or add a note instantly. Then switch to the Notes view to see all your notes and highlights organized in one place, making it a cinch to search or go back to the highlighted sections of the book.

Study Cards

All your notes and highlights automatically appear on study cards. Flip them over and find the definition of a glossary term or the note attached to the highlighted passage. Choose which highlight colors to review, and include chapter vocabulary from the glossary — automatically. To make sure you really know your stuff, you can shuffle your cards to study.

Textbooks and iTunes U

Educators can include iBooks textbooks in the complete courses they create for the new iTunes U. And the textbooks work seamlessly with the iTunes U app for iPad. For example, students can tap the name of the book in the assignment list to start reading it right away, and notes they take in iBooks will appear along with the other course notes in the iTunes U app.

Learn more about
iTunes U for iPad, iPhone,
and iPod touch

iBooks Author lets publishers easily create incredible iBooks textbooks for iPad.

Create an interactive book. From an app on your Mac.

With iBooks Author, a free app from the Mac App Store, anyone can make a book for iPad — complete with rich graphics, movies, photo galleries, Keynote animations, 3D objects, and more.

Learn more about
iBooks Author

This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you’re reading it on someone else’s site, please read the FAQ at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php#publishers. Five Filters recommends: Donate to Wikileaks.

If you’re an educator at a university, college, or K-12 school, now you have an easy way to design and distribute complete courses featuring audio, video, books, and other content. And students and lifelong learners can experience your courses for free through a powerful new app for iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch.

The free iTunes U app gives students access to all the materials for your course in a single place. Right in the app, they can play video or audio lectures. Read books and view presentations. See a list of all the assignments for the course and check them off as they’re completed. And when you send a message or create a new assignment, students receive a push notification with the new information.¹Learn more about the new iTunes U app

The iTunes U app integrates with iBooks, iCloud, and other apps to make it easy for students to keep up with your course. For example, new iBooks textbooks² and other books for the course are available right from the app, where students can tap them to start reading the assigned chapter. Notes taken in iBooks are consolidated for easy reviewing in the iTunes U app. If an assignment includes watching part of a video, one tap goes straight to a specific spot in the video. And iTunes U keeps documents, notes, highlights, and bookmarks up to date across multiple devices.

To create a course, simply gather all the materials you need and follow the easy step-by-step instructions in the iTunes U Course Manager — a web-based tool accessible from a browser. Courses can include a syllabus, handouts, quizzes, and other items. All of the course materials that you upload will be hosted by Apple and available to anyone taking your course. You can pull content and links from the Internet, iBookstore, App Store, and iTunes Store. Or you can gather material from among the 500,000-plus resources at iTunes U, including audio and video content from museums, universities, cultural institutions, and more. Once the course is ready, it’s a snap to distribute it to anyone who’s interested in the topic — whether in your class or anywhere in the world.

• Audio and video
• Presentations
• Documents
• PDFs
• iBooks textbooks for iPad
• ePub books
• iOS apps
• Web links

When you create and distribute a course on iTunes U, you’ll join a large and growing community of schools and institutions that are sharing their content with students and lifelong learners all over the world. iTunes U includes Stanford, Yale, Oxford, and UC Berkeley, along with other distinguished institutions such as MoMA, New York Public Library, and more. Students can use iTunes on their computer or the iTunes U app on their iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch to browse and download over 500,000 free lectures, videos, books, and other resources on thousands of subjects.

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