This year things are going to be different.  This year, Apple’s holding its big iPhone media event closer to home.

Sources close to the company say the demonstration — currently scheduled for Tuesday, Oct. 4, a date first reported by AllThingsD — will be held at Apple’s campus in Cupertino, Calif.

Why? That’s not entirely clear. Perhaps the release date was too much of a moving target to risk booking a large space like Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA), which has hosted a number of big product unveils in the past. Perhaps, the company felt a more intimate venue was best for newly installed CEO Tim Cook’s first media event. Perhaps YBCA was simply already booked. Whatever the reason, the world will get its first look at the next iPhone at Apple’s Town Hall Auditorium in early October.

UPDATE: As a number of commenters note below, Oracle OpenWorld 2011, which runs from Oct. 2 – 6, likely has a lock on any space that Apple might have chosen for this event.

Outside the Moscone Center in San Francisco, people with blue suits and blue umbrellas rode around on Segways carrying an advertisement from Microsoft, which markets what the industry calls cloud-based software in competition with Salesforce’s. The ad showed a gray-haired man–symbolizing a corporate technology buyer, presumably–said to have favored a Microsoft offering because it works the way he does.

“I didn’t get forced,” the ad’s headline read, in a play on Salesforce’s name.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Does the tech march ever slow down?

Not this week it doesn’t! And Digital Daily’s live-blogger de tutti live-bloggers John Paczkowski will be there to cover every move.

Today, in case you haven’t heard, is the big annual Apple (AAPL) event: The Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco.

The keynote at the Moscone Center kicks off at 10 AM PDT with Phil Schiller, senior vice president of worldwide marketing, along with other Apple execs. They will be presenting to 1,000 developers, at what is now the only major products event for the iconic and innovative Silicon Valley company.

A passel of press, as well as John, will also be there, along with our Web guru (and closet Apple expert) Adam Tow. They’ll be liveblogging and posting photos to the All Things Digital site throughout the event.

It’ll be a lot of iPhone news, according to reports, with possibly an upgraded device and all sorts of new features and software.

But, unless it is their lucky day, Apple fanboys likely to have to wait a little bit longer for the return of Apple’s leader Steve Jobs, presumably astride a steed bearing a giant tablet iPod Touch.

According to The Wall Street Journal last week–whose report is finally, finally, finally the most solid, thus far–Jobs is set to return soon to the helm of Apple after a six-month sick leave.

And that means reports of Jobs’ imminent demise early this year were, as it turned out, quite premature.

Which makes it laughable that those who trumpeted someone’s allegedly fatal illness without even close to adequate sourcing are now–as the specifics of their clear overreaching have faded–they were sort-of right, since, you know, he was sick.

But let me review what was reported then, using a single source: Jobs was “declining rapidly” and “it may be even worse than we imagined” and, quoting the source directly: “Apple is choosing to remove the hype factor strategically vs. letting the hype destroy Apple when the inevitable news comes later this spring.”

Oops, it is June now and Jobs appears to be on the mend, it did not turn out to be worse, even if he was quite sick, and spring has passed without the “inevitable” happening. Close is only right in horse shoes, especially in this case.

Who knows what tomorrow will bring. I certainly don’t, but neither does anyone else, which is why–unless you’re looking at Jobs’ medical reports or hearing from someone who has seen them–it’s pretty much an impossible story to get right either way.

So, no matter how much they try to defend themselves in a recent piece in the New York Times (which was silly enough in its toothless blogger-bashing)–claiming it is fine and dandy to insinuate that someone is at death’s door without, you know, knowing for sure if it were true–it’s just lame all around.

But, lamer still was the climbing-onto-a-very-high-and-precarious-horse reaction to that dopey Times article, by giving these dog-ate-my-homework reporting lapses the even sillier moniker of “process” journalism.

I confess I am utterly flummoxed by this term, because it seems to boil down to:

We have a firm commitment to report it wrong until we, um, get it right or someone, anyone, please hurry, corrects us–not that we’ll ever admit an error, just like mainstream media!

Actually, it sounds more like processed cheese journalism–completely without nutrition and eventually bad for readers’ health. But eat up and get obese on it, because it’s free and cheap and even tasty at times!

But, I digress.

After all the Apple news is chewed and re-chewed up by one and all, Google (GOOG) will be holding an app event tomorrow, also in San Francisco.

Said a Google email: “At this invitation-only media gathering, we’ll announce product news, share perspectives of new enterprise customers, see demos, and review the Google Apps business. You’ll have the opportunity to speak with a number of senior IT decision makers who have moved their businesses to cloud computing, as well as Google executives, and engineering and product managers. We hope you’ll be able to join.”

Paczkowski will, of course, join and be serving up organic liveblogging fare, full of vitamins and minerals and all the good stuff, both fast and accurate!

Process that.

But, fear not, it will also be, as usual, quite tasty too.

And because Walt is so well known among the geek set, naturally, I dubbed him the “Brangelina of Tech.”

Thus, it is also natural that we deliver the same quality time with Waltgelina at Macworld, which was held yesterday in San Francisco and featured the famous annual keynote by his iLama Steve Jobs.

So, here is the first video of two of Walt visiting Macworld yesterday, trailed by our very brave Associate Editor John “Sully” Sullivan (pictured here), who gamely borrowed BoomTown’s Flip video camera to take on the momentous task, since I was at meetings in Silicon Valley all day (there was, in fact, life beyond the Moscone Center yesterday).

Sullivan also did a most excellent job of blogging the Jobs’ keynote here, as Digital Daily’s John “Patches” Paczkowski was indisposed.

In this episode, Walt introduces Sullivan to the floor of Macworld and then gives a first look and public-Walt-handling of the not-the-iPhone-but-cool-anyway MacBook Air subnotebook.

Is Walt impressed? You’ll just have to wait for his review until he puts it through its paces.

In the meantime, here is the video:

Here is Part 2 of Waltgelina at Macworld.