UPDATE: Apple's legal representation issued a demand letter Wednesday, claiming “The information [Gawker is] willing to pay for, such as photos of a yet-to-be released product, constitutes Apple trade secrets.” The law firm issued a demand that Gawker "immediately discontinue the Scavenger Hunt” but as of this update the Gawker offer still stands.
Like many who wade through the loose talk and rumormongering that passes for news in the technology press, the staff at Valleywag (gawker.com's tech playpen) is fed up with "trying to follow all the speculation around Apple's impending tablet — how it'll work, its size, the name, the software and whether it will save magazines."
Despite a widely reported "guarantee" Monday by the French head of Orange Telecom that the Tablet will have a built-in webcam (in remarks that some interpreted as pointing to the device's release today), Tuesday the darling Apple pundit of the Internet John Gruber held forth that his sources tell him the gadget won't have a camera, a webcam or "otherwise."
It's all so confusing. And Apple isn't even scheduled to take the wrappers off its next big media event until the week of January 26th, when the company is roundly expected to debut a device that may or may not be everything everyone has been dreaming of.
Perfect timing then, for Valleywag to offer cash money to anyone who can come up with a genuine photo of the thing before its official release. The grand prize in the hunt promises $100,000 to the person who'll let the staff at Valleywag play with one for an hour before the official release. And they guarantee total anonymity for anyone entering the contest too, promising to "go to spycraft-level lengths to prevent anything being traced back" to anyone offering photo or video evidence of the pre-release Tablet.
Of course there are rules and limitations involved and, knowing the notorious flakiness of the technology press, it's not hard to imagine that no one will ever collect any prize money despite what they might submit to gabriel@gawker.com.
For anyone who hasn't been paying attention to the hype surrounding Apple's tablet, the next two weeks promises to be quite entertaining, in a circus, freakshow kind of way.
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lorianne
whirlwind
OS Editor
Christine Macdonald
Bartouche
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Salon.com
Comments
;-)
as one small example, despite the fact Apple has been putting webcams in every notebook computer for several years and stopped producing the iSight camera that used to be the solution for doing video on a mac over the web, iSights regularly sell on eBay for more than the original sales price.
used Mac notebooks also retain a far higher resale value than similarly spec'd Windows machines.
in fact, there is a whole segment of Apple users who wait for new products to be announced so they can take advantage of the price break they can then get on older items.
This doesn't happen with anyone else. No other company and it's products could conceivably spur this kind of activity. Say what you will about Apple, but there is no other company in the history of corporate manufacturing that generates the kind of freakshow activity that goes on around Apple.
You said it, not me. ;-)
Interesting. R
John, I'd be interested to know how it works in the publishing biz. Do people actually solicit for advance copy of work prior to publication? And how do they then profit? I don't see how Gawker might profit -- well, they could probably easily recoup the 10K for a photo based on the flood of traffic they'd get off of it, but I'm generally a bit of a naif about all of this stuff.
I mean I would have thought cartouche and O'Really were two separate people if I didn't already know. Y'know?
I personally don't buy the conspiracy theory. I believe the company does in fact maintain an iron lock on product development and the products it produces are so well made and so well designed and so revolutionary that all of the circus freakshow activity does manifest organically. Just my 2¢.