Note that this doesn’t count as news, as Apple has already said iTunes Radio would show up on Apple TV.

But now there is proof!

Here’s a short version:

And here’s one that goes 9 minutes. It’s narrated, presumably, by Isaac.

Back? Okay. What would be truly interesting, of course, would be if Apple opened up Apple TV to the rest of the world, so that screen full of apps was replicated many, many times over. Just like Roku does with its Web TV platform.

But note that, contrary to a last-minute flurry of hopeful rumors, Apple did not open up Apple TV at its WWDC conference this month. Just like it has not done for several years now. Instead, there are just a handful of apps from outsiders, like Hulu, Netflix and the Wall Street Journal (which, like this site, is owned by News Corp.).

We still don’t know why Apple hasn’t opened up Apple TV, and it’s a little bit vexing. After all, opening up the iOS platform to outsiders was a crucial step in the iPhone’s evolution.

On the other hand, note that HBO Go did finally come to Apple TV this year, but there’s no HBO app on Apple TV; instead HBO subscribers can beam their shows from their phones and tablets to their TVs using Airplay.

That’s not quite as easy as clicking on an app on the box (for starters, it means you can’t do anything else with your phone while you’re streaming “Game of Thrones” to your TV) but it does point out a way that Apple can flesh out its experiment while it waits to get really serious about this TV thing. One day.

Today, T-Mobile announced that it would be the exclusive carrier for Sony’s flagship Android smartphone. It should be available in the coming weeks with T-Mobile’s Simple Choice plan, but an exact release date and pricing were not disclosed at this time.

First introduced at Mobile World Congress, the Xperia Z features a five-inch, 1080p HD touchscreen, a rear 13-megapixel camera, and is water-resistant. The smartphone will also support T-Mobile’s 4G LTE network, which just went live in seven markets, including Washington, D.C., Las Vegas, Phoenix and Houston.

On paper, the Xperia Z compares nicely to other high-end Android smartphones on the market, like the HTC One and Samsung Galaxy S4. But Sony faces an uphill challenge, particularly in the U.S., where it has struggled to make a name for itself in the mobile phone business — something Hirai readily admitted at D11.

“We still have a lot of stuff to do here in the market. There is no question about it,” said Hirai.

Part of the problem is that many of Sony’s smartphones haven’t been available through a U.S. carrier, so customers have had to pay a few hundred dollars for an unlocked version. Bringing the Xperia Z to T-Mobile is a step in the right direction, but keeping it an exclusive will limit its reach. The Galaxy S4 and HTC One are available from multiple carriers.

Hirai said that the company is increasing marketing efforts around the phone, and believes that Sony’s history in making top products in other parts of the electronics business can help it make better phones. The Xperia Z, for example, uses technology found in Sony’s TVs and cameras.

“I firmly believe the DNA is there to be back in that position,” said Hirai.

We’ll update you as soon as we have more information about release date and pricing. Till then, customers can sign up for email updates here.

On Monday, Microsoft said it would cut the price of the 32 gigabyte Surface RT in half for any school that purchases the tablet between June 17 and Aug. 31, 2013. So, for the next few months, K-12 and higher-education institutions can purchase the $499 Surface RT for just $199, the $599 Surface RT with Touch Cover for $249, and the $629 Surface RT with Type Cover for $289. With no minimum order requirement, that’s a potentially compelling promotion for a tablet that ships with Office — particularly for schools dealing with a death-by-a-thousand-cuts budget crisis.

According to Microsoft, the rationale for the discount is its “long tradition of offering special pricing to education customers,” and a “mission in education … to help schools, students and educators realize their full potential.”

But more practically it’s an easy way to juice sales and whittle down inventory of a tablet that has been slow to gain traction in the consumer market. According to research firm IDC, Microsoft shipped about 900,000 Surface RT and Surface Pro tablets in the first quarter of this year.

That’s a piddling amount. And if Microsoft’s first Surface RT production runs were as large as rumors say — three million to five million in the fourth quarter — then the company may be sitting on some serious inventory. That alone may be enough to justify offering a fire-sale discount like this to the education market, particularly if there are some next-generation Surface tablets in the pipeline.

But there’s likely another rationale at work here, as well. To compete with a product like the iPad, Surface needs evangelists, people who will use it daily. People who will travel with it, take it to cafes and parks. People who will bring it out into the world. And the education market is potentially a wellspring of such users.

If Microsoft’s new education promotion works as intended, we’ll see more Surface units in the wild. And that’s important. Because it’s hard to accept Surface as an alternative to the iPad or Galaxy Tab if you don’t see other people using it. Microsoft’s new Surface ads poking fun at Siri and the iPad are great. But they’re sticks and rags in a world in which you board a flight from San Francisco to New York and there are dozens of passengers with their faces obscured by iPads and Kindles, and nary a Surface in site.

Marketing only goes so far. Microsoft desperately needs to put Surface in more hands. Maybe this new initiative will help it to do that.

Microsoft declined comment on its education market discounts for Surface.

Well, Jay-Z is way too smart for that!

The brand-endorser/value-adder/Beyonce’s husband/musician has a big deal with Samsung to give away free copies of his new album to people who download an app to their Galaxy devices.

So it would totally be embarrassing if he tweeted about that from an iPhone, right?

No problem! As Amanda Lucci notes, sometime between April 3 and today, Mr. Z, or whoever social-messages on his behalf, switched his Twitter account over from iPhone to Android. Disaster averted!

Jay-Z has switched from iPhone to Android since his last tweet, HOW CONVENIENT pic.twitter.com/93ddm7Vos0

– Amanda (@alucci) June 17, 2013

Bonus Jay-Z handset info: As our intrepid Mike “Tats-a-plenty” Isaac notes, Mr. Z, or whoever social-messages for him, wasn’t that attached to iOS, anyway. A little more than a year ago, he (or whoever) was still using a BlackBerry to tweet.

Luckily, because Mr. Z (or whoever) is an infrequent Twitter user, we can see exactly when he switched over: September 2012.

Still! If you’re the kind of person who has an intense interest in all things Apple, you might have found items of interest during Cue’s testimony at Daniel Patrick Moynihan United States Courthouse in lower Manhattan. Particularly the parts where Apple’s attorney asked Cue to talk about Steve Jobs.

I’m not sure why Apple lawyer Orin Snyder wanted Cue to spend time discussing his late boss, because I can’t see how it has any bearing on the case. But, then again, my legal training consists of watching some “L.A. Law” back in the ’90s.

So, in any case, for the record: Apple wants you to know that Steve Jobs wasn’t just into the idea of iBooks and an iBookstore, but was intimately involved in its product design and launch in the fall of 2009 and early 2010.

For instance:

• The “page curls” in the iBook app, which show up when you flip an iBook’s page? That’s Steve Jobs’s idea.
• It was Jobs’s idea to pick “Winnie-the-Pooh” as the freebie book that came with every iBook app. Not just because Jobs liked the book, Cue said, but because it showed off iBook’s capabilities: “It had beautiful color drawings, that had never been seen before in a digital book.”
• Jobs was also specific about the book he used to show off the iBook during his initial iPad demo in January 2010. He picked Ted Kennedy’s “True Compass” memoir, because the Kennedy family “meant a lot to him,” Cue said.

Again: Will any of this have any bearing on the trial’s outcome? Seems unlikely. But we are approaching the end of this process. Closing arguments are scheduled for Thursday.

The company has introduced a mobile app that allows the “talent” listed on Thuzio to record quick, personalized video messages by request, for $99 a pop.

This includes quick game tips from pro athletes, birthday messages from their coaches, or, maybe, perhaps, a belated Happy Fathers Day message, straight from the source to Dad.

Thuzio, which officially launched last fall, is the brainchild of Mark Gerson of Gerson Lehrman Group, former New York Giants running back Tiki Barber, and Jared Augustine, who serves as CEO and previously worked at Seamless.com.

Gerson and Barber have said they saw an opportunity in the talent-booking market to create a more transparent marketplace — whether athletes are being booked for personal engagements or corporate events (it should be noted that the majority of Thuzio’s bookings are still corporate gigs).

About half of the thousand athletes on Thuzio are currently sending personalized messages through the video app, available through either the iPhone 4, 4S, 5 or iPad. A majority of these athletes are retired, while about a quarter are still currently playing in their respective sports leagues.

Five hundred athletes is a pretty solid number to pick from, considering that Thuzio launched just about eight months ago, and names like Lawrence Taylor, Daunte Culpepper and Gary Payton are ready and willing to tape and send a quick video by request.

But there are some limitations. The first is that the mobile app is for the athletes only; Thuzio fans still have to book their athlete appearances through the website, which can be cumbersome. The site is heavily skewed toward male athletes.

Also, I ran a quick search for a few athletes — the San Antonio Spurs’ Danny Green, who broke an NBA finals record last night with his sharp shooting, and Hall of Fame quarterback Joe Montana, who our boss, Kara Swisher, has admitted to not recognizing in the past (and she lives in San Francisco) — and Thuzio came up short. Green isn’t offering video messages, although you can get him to make an appearance somewhere if you’ve got $6,200 on hand; Joe Montana isn’t even on Thuzio.

Not surprisingly, other marquee players are missing, too. It doesn’t look like you’ll be lunching with LeBron James, Shaquille O’Neal or Michael Jordan anytime soon through Thuzio.

But Thuzio says that as the platform grows, more and more athletes are joining of their own accord. The company says it processes dozens of transactions per week, with 20 percent growth month over month in both transactions and revenue.

It’s also starting to slowly expand to areas beyond sports, with around 30 Broadway stars currently listed on the site, and there are plans in the works for other talent verticals.

Samsung co-CEO JK Shin said today that the company has developed a modified Galaxy S4 that supports LTE-Advanced. This next-generation 4G LTE standard supports significantly speedier data rates — theoretically up to three gigabits down and 1.5Gbps up — though real-world speeds are expected to top out between 150 megabits per second and 300Mbps.

“We’ll be the first with the commercial launch of the advanced 4G version of the smartphone,” Shin told Reuters, adding that he expects the device to be a crucial part of its product portfolio. “The new LTE-Advanced (4G) phone will be another addition to our high-end segment offerings that ensure healthy profit margins.”

And there’s certainly a good chance that it will be, someday. But not for a while. A slick LTE-Advanced smartphone isn’t much good without an LTE-Advanced network to run on, and right now such networks are pretty sparse. Russian carrier Yota has one, and AT&T plans to begin rolling one out later this year. Verizon and T-Mobile are working on LTE-Advanced deployments, as well. But it will be some time before we see the sort of ubiquitous coverage necessary to get the best use out of this new Galaxy S4 that Samsung’s planning.

The Web video service will have exclusive worldwide first-run rights to a new batch of original programming from the studio, though it isn’t spelling out exactly what that programming will be.

The idea: DreamWorks will mine its existing movie portfolio, along with upcoming movies, to create more than 300 hours of new shows. If I were betting, I’d expect to see a “Shrek” series, for starters.

The context: Kids’ shows are a big deal for Netflix, and it used to get a lot of them from Viacom’s Nickelodeon, but that deal expired last month. Now Amazon has exclusive rights to lots of Nick shows like “Dora the Explorer.”

Meanwhile, Netflix has been building up a library of replacement stuff, like a deal to bring Disney shows like “Jake and the Never Land Pirates” to the streaming service.

This is the third deal Netflix and DreamWorks have announced in recent years.

In 2011, the two companies announced a deal to bring DreamWorks movies to Netflix after they appeared in theaters, replacing a deal the studio had with Netflix rival HBO (that will formally kick in next year, when “The Croods” shows up on the digital service). And in February, Netflix announced that DreamWorks would bring a spinoff show from its upcoming “Turbo” feature to the service in December.

The plans will kick into effect on June 21, and start at $25 a month for 250 minutes of nationwide calling and unlimited messaging, with an option to add 50 megabytes of data for $5 a month. For $40 a month, you get 500 minutes of voice calls, unlimited messaging and 200MB of data (an additional 100MB of data is available for $5 a month).

The $50 monthly plan offers unlimited everything, with the caveat that unlimited data be consumed over Wi-Fi only. Finally, the $60 plan gets you unlimited calls, text and 2GB of data, with the option of adding another 50MB of data for $5 a month.

The new plans bring some savings compared to the current offerings, but also eliminate some flexibility for adding more data. For example, compared to the current $65 monthly plan, the new $60 deal offers double the data at a lower price. But previously, customers could select additional buckets of data for either $5 for 50 gigabytes, $15 for 200MB and $25 for 1GB. Now, they’ll only be able to choose from the options noted above.

AT&T spokesperson Mari Melguizo said the company did this based on customer feedback and to help simplify it offerings. “We now have clear choices for customers with more, moderate or less data needs. Customers can add incremental data to their plan if they need to, or they can step up to the next plan,” she said.

Whether customers will take to the changes remains to be seen, but the good news is added support for AT&T’s 4G LTE network, which is now live in 278 markets. New and current GoPhone subscribers can bring their own 4G smartphone to use with the service, or they can pick up the new 4G-enabled Samsung Galaxy Express.

The Android Jelly Bean device has a 4.5-inch Super AMOLED touchscreen and a five-megapixel rear camera and front-facing 1.3-megapixel camera. It’s powered by a 1.5GHz dual-core processor and has 8GB of internal storage with a microSD expansion slot.

The Galaxy Express will also be available on June 21 for $250.

But, like it or not, there’s plenty of evidence that consumers’ mobile habits (or obsessions) are causing a shift in the traditional game industry. Last month, U.S. retail sales of videogame hardware, software and accessories fell 10 percent from a year ago, according to the NPD group, extending a slide spurred by gamers moving to mobile gadgets.

With this in mind, we asked executives from the “big three” console makers this week — Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft — for their thoughts on the mobile shift. Here’s the gist of what each had to say:

Sony: Sony president Jack Tretton dismissed the notion that mobile is drawing gamers away from console gaming. In a five-question Q&A with AllThingsD, Tretton said: “The one thing I think our announcement did was quell any notion that the console was on its way out, which is what people who aren’t really into gaming think is happening. Turn to anyone, any of the gamers here in this crowd [at E3], and ask them if they’re turning to smartphones and tablets over consoles. And then run.”

Nintendo: Nintendo president Satoru Iwata was characteristically resistant to the idea that mobile is having an impact on Nintendo’s gaming audience. “I am not of the opinion that the spread of smart devices has been impacting the videogame industry,” Iwata said in a candid interview. He also doesn’t envision Mario, Luigi and the gang ever coming to, say, the iPhone. “Nintendo has no intention to provide smart devices with our games — at all. Our IP is the most important asset with which we can attract people to our own platform.”

Microsoft: Only Yusuf Mehdi, senior vice president of Microsoft’s Interactive Entertainment division, conceded that mobile games have been impacting the core game industry — but he insisted that it’s a positive thing. In an interview with AllThingsD, Mehdi said that, overall, “[Mobile] brings more people to games. Look at how long the tail of the Xbox 360 has been — I think now you have more people identifying themselves as gamers that just wouldn’t call themselves that before.” When asked whether he believes casual games such as Candy Crush, Words With Friends and the like could actually be gateway games to consoles, Mehdi said he believed they could be, and cited the success of Minecraft — which originated as a PC and mobile game — as an example.

And there you have it — straight from the mouths of the guys heavily invested in traditional console gaming.

In truth, core console gamers are still critical to the health of the industry. And they’re still outspending their mobile gaming counterparts, according to NPD’s recent 2013 Gamer Segmentation report (if only for the obvious reason that console games cost a lot more).

But the group that NPD calls “free and mobile gamers” is a rapidly growing segment that’s likely not going anywhere anytime soon.

But what do you think? Are casual, mobile games taking away from core gaming, or enriching the industry?

(Feature photo courtesy of Sofia Samme/Flickr Creative Commons)

A week ago today, Jefferies analyst Peter Misek said his channel checks showed that the Q10 has been pretty well-received by consumers, and said he expects Q10 sales to offset a slowdown in sales of its touchscreen-only predecessor, the Z10.

Then, on Thursday, Societe Generale analyst Andy Perkins raised his rating on BlackBerry to “buy” from “sell,” saying Q10 sales will reach almost one million in the fiscal first quarter. Add those to the four million Z10s that Perkins expects BlackBerry to sell, and that’s five million BB10 handsets total for Q1, which is above the current consensus of three million to four million units for the quarter.

Today comes more good news: Wells Fargo analyst Maynard Um has issued a positive note on BlackBerry, observing that Q10 sales may help the company beat expectations for its fiscal first quarter. Um said his channel checks in the U.S. reveal that the Q10 is off to a good start. “[There has been] Good Q10 customer interest and demand,” Um said. “The Q10’s launch has been much more successful than the Z10 launch, which is consistent with our view that the die-hard BlackBerry installed base of 76 million loyal to the keyboard presents a strong upgrade opportunity.”

Like his colleagues at Jefferies and Societe Generale, Um, too, sees the potential for first-quarter upside over consensus estimates, though he notes that the timing of the Q10’s launch — 14 countries in mid-May; U.S. in June — could limit it.

At $14.50, BlackBerry shares are trading up today.

Software giant Microsoft released a version of its Office application for Apple’s iPhone today. It has been the subject of a lot of speculation, and apparently there were some contentious issues between Apple and Microsoft regarding the split of revenue.

A few things to know about this app: First, in order to use it, you must have an existing Office 365 subscription — so you can’t just use it as a one-off app — and you can access documents stored in SkyDrive and SharePoint, and you can only save documents to those services. Second, you can create and edit Word and Excel documents, but not PowerPoint decks, including PowerPoint decks, and there is a feature for displaying them and showing them off in “presentation mode.” It also opens Office documents attached to email messages. (Update: Microsoft says you can edit PowerPoint decks. My mistake there.)

Microsoft is positioning this as the optimal way to see and use Office documents on the iPhone; this is, for now, an-iPhone only app. Charts, animations and other elements are supported. There’s no iPad version yet, though obviously it will run on the iPad. Offline editing is supported.

Two features only work if you have Office 365 running on a Windows PC: Recent Documents shows documents you’ve read recently on your computer, and Resume Reading keeps track of where you left off reading a document on your computer, and brings you back to that point.

Here’s the official screenshot from iTunes:

Companies’ stated reasons for this renewed interest in physical toys for games are all over the map. But it’s impossible to begin without addressing the commercial success of Activision, which is prepping a new entry in its toy-game hybrid series Skylanders. To date, the company has reportedly grossed more than $1 billion since 2011 from that family-friendly franchise.

How does a kids’ game do so well? By selling add-on toys to the initial virtual experience. To see every last bit of last year’s Skylanders: Giants, you’ll need to spend something like $125. Those toys have RFID chips so that the game “knows” just what it’s able to unlock for you, and what’s still off limits until a trip to the First National Bank of Mom and Dad (not a member, FDIC).

Disney is getting ready to release its own game, Disney Infinity, which brings together characters from multiple Disney franchises and seems inspired in equal parts by Skylanders and Minecraft. If you put toys of, say, Jack Sparrow and Buzz Lightyear together on some included figurine-reading hardware, then Jack and Buzz will appear side by side in a “Toy Box” mode that lets players play inside an infinite, franchise-bending world.

John Blackburn, CEO of Disney-owned Avalanche Software, said that although comparisons to Skylanders come early and often, work on Disney Infinity began in 2010, “before I’d even heard of Skylanders.” Activision’s first game in the series, Skylanders: Spyro’s Adventure, came out in 2011.

However, Blackburn added that physical figurines were not always part of the plan. The idea of creatively mashing up different Disney universes was in the original pitch, he said, but Pixar/Disney Animation CCO John Lasseter was the first person to suggest real toys. According to Blackburn, Lasseter — himself a toy collector — also rejected the initial idea of differently sized and styled toys.

“I want to be able to put these [toys from the game] on my shelf side by side,” Blackburn paraphrased Lasseter as saying.

As a result, live-action characters like Tonto from “The Lone Ranger” got more cartoony, while the giant furry Sulley from “Monsters, Inc.” and “Monsters University” was shrunk and smoothed down.

With both Skylanders and Disney Infinity, the idea is that players are willing to pony up for new figurines because they carry both physical and virtual value. So, a collector like Lasseter who doesn’t play games might still want to get all the Infinity toys, which Disney plans to roll out in new packs in the coming months and years.

Rolling in the opposite direction is Lionel Trains, maker of model railroad toys. The company says old people — er, sorry, consumers of an advanced age — know the Lionel name well, but that starting under age 30, brand awareness drops precipitously. So, Lionel came to E3 with an iOS game, Battle Train, which is aimed in part at encouraging the younger set to want to buy the real thing.

A much quieter example of the trend is Swappz Interactive, which is prepping physical-virtual hybrid toys that work in tandem with mobile games. The one-year-old Toronto-based company is planning to launch a line of figurines this summer that, when scanned by a phone’s camera, unlock new characters in games based on the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Smurfs and Power Rangers.

Swappz CEO Bobby Stewart said the idea for Swappz arose from a glut of low-quality games made to accompany physical toy franchises. His hope is that a toy of Leonardo from the latest incarnation of TMNT on Nickelodeon is more enticing when it can be scanned to deploy Leo into a game that’s actually fun.

“Kids today are so different than they were 10 years ago,” Stewart said. Show them a toy that’s just a toy, he added, and a common reaction is, “So what?”

Do you still want your MTV? And, if so, do you want it on your iPhone or iPad?

Then here you go. This is the second “TV Everywhere” app from corporate owner Viacom, following on the heels of a Nickelodeon app it launched this spring.

Like the Nick app, the free MTV app will let some pay TV subscribers watch some of the channel’s shows for free. And, like the Nick app, there are extra goodies, too.

In MTV’s case, there is a set of “second screen” features, like Twitter filters, that you’re supposed to use while watching MTV broadcasts on your TV. And a bunch of non-TV content, produced by something MTV is calling its “connected content lab.”

On deck: Versions that will work on Android, and later Xbox 360, as well as more apps for other MTV/Viacom channels, like VH1 and CMT.

The most important thing to note is that this is another small step from promise to reality in the evolution of “TV Everywhere.” The promise, recall, is that people who pay for cable TV (or satellite TV, or telco TV) should be able to watch TV shows on any device they want, whenever they want.

We’re still a long way from that because of a mix of contractual, business and tech issues. And even moves like this are only partial steps. MTV/Viacom says that about 50 million pay TV customers will have access to the programming on its apps. But subscribers to at least three different major pay services — Comcast, Dish and Charter — won’t be able to watch the shows (for now).

And even if you have a pay channel that does have a deal with Viacom, you won’t be able to see everything the channel has put out. Remember that it has different “windows” of content with other distributors — like Amazon — which means that different outlets will have different catalogs at different times.

Meanwhile! The extra video goodies that MTV has added in here are kinda fun. MTV is branding a group of them as “MTV Other,” which in my mind reads as “You think ‘Vice’ is cool? Well look at this raunchy stuff we would totally put on TV if the TV guys weren’t such squares.”

Here’s a sample, which you won’t want to look at if you don’t like swearing, or unpleasant use cases for hot dogs. (On the other hand, if you’re a fan of Minnesota’s own Har Mar Superstar, you should definitely watch.)

The Web TV startup would like to raise a big investment round, or find a buyer. It has been looking for cash or an exit since February, when it hired media banker Allen & Co., according to people familiar with the company.

Boxee has raised around $30 million since 2008. Its most recent funding round was more than two years ago, when it picked up $16.5 million.

When the company first hired Allen, it was looking for another $30 million, hopefully from a strategic investor. Alternately, the company has been pitching itself as a software/hardware solution to potential buyers like cable and satellite TV providers.

You can make a case for a deal like that in broad terms: Lots of pay-TV companies are looking at new ways of getting their programming on TV sets, and some have started to do it. Comcast subscribers, for instance, can now get their TV via an app on Microsoft’s Xbox 360; earlier this year, Time Warner Cable and Roku announced a distribution deal.

And Boxee’s most recent product, a “cloud DVR” box, works along those same lines. When the company rolled it out last fall, it positioned the device as a way to store and play broadcast TV, which users could get for free with an antenna. But sales have been tepid, and the company has concluded that its only real chance for success would be via partnerships with pay TV providers, who could offer users a full compliment of programming.

Any kind of link-up with a traditional TV provider would make for an awkward press release from Boxee, since the startup, based in New York and Israel, has spent years positioning itself as a tool for cord-cutters and cord-nevers. But if you can’t beat ’em …

To show off a pushup tracking app, for example, which counts reps using the proximity sensor on the iPhone, Gschwandtner drops to the floor in the kitchen area of my office. Then he switches to the squats app, which uses the accelerometer to count. (Perfect form, of course.) Then he switches to the heart rate app, which uses the camera sensor. (Okay, well, everybody has a heart rate.)

There’s no question there are now a lot of fitness apps — Nike+, RunKeeper, Endomondo, Noom — but I haven’t seen a demo quite like this before.

I generally try not to objectify the people I write about, but Gschwandtner invites it. He calls himself a “fitness fanatic” and said he spends three to five days per week in the gym in addition to three to four runs per week — usually while carrying four phones to test new apps. Since he’s in San Francisco for meetings this week, Gschwandtner will run the half-marathon here this weekend. He’ll also be featured in the August edition of “Men’s Health” in Germany.

Runtastic was founded by Gschwandtner and three of his college buddies three years ago in Austria. Its 15 apps have been downloaded 30 million times, and 10 million users have created accounts (they’re not required). Each app is translated into seven languages.

The company also makes its own hardware, including heart rate monitors and GPS watches, and just started selling them on Amazon.

Venture funding is “nearly impossible” to come by at home, Gschwandtner said, so Runtastic bootstrapped itself without outside money. It has been cash-flow positive since 2011, selling $4.99 pro versions of each of the apps, subscriptions and the hardware. The company currently has 65 employees.

The advantage of the Runtastic system, Gschwandtner argued, is that it works end to end. You can essentially live your digitized fitness life within the Runtastic world of smartphone apps and hardware. That seems to me like a strangely alienating perspective in this day when people have so many other fitness tech options available to them. But Gschwandtner said Runtastic does integrate with a few outside devices and services like FitBit, Withings and MyFitnessPal.

Though Gschwandtner is an intense Runtastic user, he noted there are even better examples. For instance, there’s Gerhard Gulewicz, an endurance road biker who has competed in the 3,000-mile Race Across America seven years in a row, finishing in second or third place four times.

This year, Gulewicz — who happens to also be Austrian — is broadcasting his eighth attempt to win the race via Runtastic. Race Across America just started yesterday, so you can actually track him live here, and click on a little icon to send him cheers, which are amplified live through a megaphone in the Gulewicz team car so he can hear them on his bike.

So far, Gulewicz has made it all the way to Arizona, with an average pace of 17.5 miles per hour over 23 hours. According to the app, he has burned nearly 19,000 calories. And he has received 1,300 virtual cheers.

jnumber9 / Shutterstock.com

Is Time Warner Cable blocking some TV programmers from selling their stuff to online video outlets?

Yes we are, says Time Warner Cable.

Here’s the company’s response to a Bloomberg piece today, which said that one of the country’s biggest cable TV operators had distribution agreements which would penalize TV networks that tried to do deals with “over the top” Web TV providers.*

Short version: “Everyone does it, and we’re hardly the worst offender.” Longer version, via an emailed response from the company’s PR office:

“It is absurd to suggest that, in today’s highly competitive video marketplace, obtaining some level of exclusivity is anticompetitive. Exclusivities and windows are extremely common in the entertainment industry; that’s exactly how entertainment companies compete. This is why, for example, you can only watch Fast and Furious 6 in a movie theater (not in your living room), Sunday Ticket on DirecTV, and the new Arrested Development episodes on Netflix. In fact, the amount and scope of exclusivity and windowing in Time Warner Cable’s arrangements with programmers pales by comparison to that found between other players in the entertainment ecosystem.”

So does this explain why would-be cable competitors, like Intel, have yet to reach deals with programmers?

Not really, according to industry executives I’ve talked to.

Their argument: Time Warner Cable has deals that penalize some programmers from selling to new outlets. But it doesn’t have those deals with the biggest programmers, like Discovery, Viacom and Comcast’s NBCUniversal  – which are the ones that an Intel, or an Apple, or whomever, would need to sign on to launch a competitive TV product.

“Can you imagine [News Corp. COO] Chase Carey signing a deal like that?” said an industry executive familiar with the cable industry. (News Corp., which owns Fox, Fox News and other TV networks, also owns this website).

In general, those programmers are at least interested in selling to new entrants like Intel, because they’d like as many people buying their stuff as possible. They were also happy to sell programming to satellite TV providers when they showed up 20 years ago, and they were also happy to sell to telco TV providers when they showed up 10 years ago.

The gates to new Web TV deals, I’m told, are more basic: Intel, or whoever wants to buy TV from the programmers, will have to buy it the same way everyone else does — in bundles that don’t allow much flexibility. And the programmers expect the Web video guys to pay more than everyone else, because they’re the new kids on the block.

What will be interesting to see is how lawmakers and regulators respond to Time Warner Cable’s admission.

The company clearly doesn’t think they are violating antitrust regulations. Its 12 million subscribers make Time Warner Cable the country’s second biggest cable TV player, behind Comcast; overall there are about 90 million pay-TV customers in the U.S. But if their actions prevent most of the country from watching programming on a new outlet, how will that go over in Washington?

Perhaps John McCain will have something to say about that.

* Bloomberg’s piece followed a research note from BTIG Research analyst Rich Greenfield, who raised the same issue without identifying Time Warner Cable.

Image courtesy of jnumber9 / Shutterstock.com

That’s according to Satoru Iwata, Nintendo’s president and newly appointed CEO of Nintendo of America. Iwata addressed the company’s stance on mobile and slow Wii U sales in an interview at the E3 gaming conference this week.

“I am not of the opinion that the spread of smart devices has been impacting the videogame industry,” Iwata said.

When asked whether Nintendo games would ever come to smart devices, such as the iPhone or Android phones, Iwata also was adamant: “Nintendo has no intention to provide smart devices with our games — at all. Our IP is the most important asset with which we can attract people to our own platform.”

Iwata’s remarks on smartphone and tablet gaming hardly come as a surprise to industry followers. The Japanese game maker has been largely resistant to the idea of mobile apps as a part of its strategy, instead focusing its mobile efforts on its own DS handheld devices. Hardware competitors Sony and Microsoft, meanwhile, have introduced Google Android and Apple iOS apps that act as companions to existing games and game consoles.

Nintendo has been somewhat understated at this year’s E3, having launched its new Wii U console last fall. The company opted to hold a “software showcase” instead of a large press conference, and released news bits and game trailers via YouTube rather than splashing them across big screens onstage.

And at press events held by third-party publishers Electronic Arts and Ubisoft, Nintendo got nary a shout-out.

So yesterday, some of Nintendo’s most respected producers and developers appeared onstage to promote new games in the Super Mario, Mario Kart, Smash Bros., Donkey Kong, Pikmin and Legend of Zelda series. Two men wore cat ears. (Mario turns into a cat in the next version of Super Mario 3D World.)

The move underscores Nintendo’s strategy of using its proprietary software titles to draw consumers to its hardware.

In fact, Iwata said that has been part of the problem with the Wii U, which has been slow to gain traction. (On a month-to-month basis, its seven-year-old counterparts, the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, are outselling the Wii U.)

“The reason why the Wii U has lost the momentum it had during the launch period has something to do with the fact that Nintendo hasn’t been able to provide a strong software lineup, one game after the other, without too many intervals,” Iwata said. “Few people are willing to purchase hardware for the sake of purchasing hardware themselves, so we need to constantly provide the market with software.”

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Sources say that Nokia plans to wind down shipments of Symbian handsets this summer. And while it will continue to sell them in the emerging markets where demand for them still exists, it will do so only until stock runs out.

And, depending on how many Symbian devices Nokia has in inventory, that could take some time. Symbian usage has been dropping off precipitously. In the first quarter of 2013, Nokia sold just 500,000 handsets running the OS. This, despite the mid-2012 launch of the company’s 808 PureView. That handset failed to juice sales the way Nokia had hoped, but with a 41-megapixel camera and somewhat flashy design, it will make a nice tombstone for the Symbian line.

The Financial Times was the first to report news of Nokia’s plans.

Nokia’s abandonment of Symbian is hardly a surprise. The OS has been in decline for years, its looming demise accelerated by Nokia’s leap from its burning platform into Microsoft’s arms. As CEO Stephen Elop said last month, Nokia is a Windows Phone shop.

“In today’s war of ecosystems, we’ve made a very clear decision to focus on Windows Phone with our Lumia product line,” Elop said. “And it is with that that we will compete with competitors like Samsung and Android.”

Nokia refused to confirm Symbian’s now increasingly brief future, but the comment it did offer suggests pretty clearly that it’s moving on.

“We can’t confirm when Symbian shipments come to an end, unfortunately,” a company spokesman told AllThingsD. “In general, though, regarding Symbian, the last Symbian phone we introduced was the Nokia 808 PureView, and that’s fitting. This phone extended the platform’s pioneering tradition, and acted as a bridge for the next wave of innovation now seen in our latest models, like the Lumia 925.”

Deal site Daily Steals is offering the Verizon phone for $25. However, buyer beware: You are mostly paying to own a piece of tech history.

The Kin, which was being developed alongside Windows Phone 7, was designed to target the youth market, with much of its power coming from cloud-synced services to make text messages and photos accessible to the Web. But, with no access to apps and competing against more capable phones, it was scrapped after little more than a month on the market.

Microsoft shut down most of the Kin services shortly after it discontinued the phone. So, basically, buyers are getting a feature phone.

P.S.: The Daily Steals ad says “powered by Windows Phone 7” but don’t believe what you read. Windows Phone 7 apps won’t run on the device.