Ira Glass from This American Life blogged:

We’ve learned that Mike Daisey’s story about Apple in China – which we broadcast in January – contained significant fabrications. We’re retracting the story because we can’t vouch for its truth. This is not a story we commissioned. It was an excerpt of Mike Daisey’s acclaimed one-man show “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs,” in which he talks about visiting a factory in China that makes iPhones and other Apple products.

Mike Daisey is not a journalist. He writes and performs a monologue called “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs.” that includes excerpts of interviews and supposedly first hand observations while he was in China investigating Foxconn. His story was then put up on This American Life and it became one of the top downloads in TAL’s history.

Right after this, the New York Times then released a series of articles The iEconomy which created much hype and anger towards Apple over how workers’ conditions are not monitored and improved even though Apple is having record earnings. Apple responded by putting up a section on their website on Supplier Responsibility and also initiated voluntary audit of factories and workers condition in China.

You can read the full transcript here but spend some time listen to this episode where Ira Glass first interviewed Rob Schmitz, who had investigated Mike Daisey’s story. Next Ira interviewed Mike Daisey himself and you can hear the disappointment with a pinch of anger from Ira Glass. Lastly, he interviewed Charles Duhigg from the New York Times that posted the series of articles – The iEconomy.

• more on Rob Schmitz’s investigation, including his interview with Cathy the interpreter at The MarketPlace
• New York Times’ iEconomy

At March 8, 2am (SG Time), Apple will be unveiling something(s) at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. We have always dream of the day when we actually see such an invite in our mailbox, but as they say: Dream on…

But well, here are some of those who will be there and will be updating with text and photos of the event:

• Macworld live updates
• MacStories live blog
• TUAW live blog
• Engadget live update
• Ars Technica live blog
• The Loop live updates
• Giga Om live blog
• iMore live updates
• AllThingsD live updates
• The Verge live coverage
• gdgt live coverage
• TWiT.TV live broadcast

I will have one browser tab on TWiT.TV as they somehow might be able to find some video or audio stream of the event, and the pundits on the show are one of the best. Hopefully the hospital’s WiFi will be fast enough to stream the videos. Next will probably be the ones from Ars Technica and AllThingsD.

Ready for tonight?

Let’s put things into perspective. If you sat down and counted from 1 to 1 billion, you would take about 95 years to complete. And if you were to find a fishbowl big enough to fit 1 billion goldfishes, you would need a stadium to fit them all. Now double that.

Apple announced last Monday that the app store has surpassed 2 billion downloads from 50 million iPhone and iPod Touch users worldwide. That’s an average of 40 apps per device and according to Steve Jobs, half a billion was downloaded in this quarter alone. The calculators here in iHeartApple don’t have enough room to display enough zeros, so while we buy new ones, AppleInsider has kindly done all the maths for us. In the last 80 days alone, 6.3 million apps were downloaded per day, up from 4.1 million per day in the first 365 days of the app store launch.

That’s a staggering amount considering Singapore’s population barely tipped 4.99 million, as of June 2009.

What does this all mean for us? Well, I think a mobile device is only as useful as what it can do for you. With 85,000 apps to choose from, your iPhone and iPod Touch will give you far better mileage than other mobile devices currently in the market, all packed in a sleek and intuitive user interface Apple is famous for.

This 2 billion downloads is only the beginning. With numbers like this, Apple’s app store is by far the best solution for developers who are looking for a robust distribution infrastructure and this only means we will soon see more and more apps come through as software makers choose this app store over others.

So if you already own an iPhone or iPod Touch, I think we’re on the right boat with this one. If not, you can pick up a new iPod Touch from Apple SG Store and an iPhone from SingTel.

A quick catchup on some news that pops up from my RSS feeds.

Apple reports record revenue of US$10.17 billion and record net quarterly profit of US$1.61 billion

There was general good news at the latest quarterly earnings call from Apple, with recording quarterly revenue and profit. There was a nice percent unit growth for Macintosh sales compared to a year-ago quarter, three percent growth for iPod sales and not surprisingly 88 percent growth for iPhone units sold over the same quarter last year.

Compared these results to what Nokia is reporting – 69 percent drop in profit and and Sony’s first ever US$3 billion loss, there is much for Apple fans to cheer about in this current times.

Also read MacDailyNews top 20 highlights from the conference call for more details.

Pirated copies of iWork’09 may contain Trojan

Intego raised an alert of a Trojan that is hiding within pirated copies of iWork’09 that is being shared via BitTorent and other Warez site. So if went to such sites and did download the iWork’09 do take note. The Trojan acts as a remote access to your Macintosh for malicious use by others.

Moral of the story – pay for the real stuff, or you might get more than you expected.

To deactivate and remove the Trojan, do follow these steps (taken from Macrumors) or download a tool to remove it from MacScan.

1. (open Terminal.app)
2. sudo su (enter password)
3. rm -r /System/Library/StartupItems/iWorkServices
4. rm /private/tmp/.iWorkServices
5. rm /usr/bin/iWorkServices
6. rm -r /Library/Receipts/iWorkServices.pkg
7. killall -9 iWorkServices

Singapore Airlines introduces iPod/iPhone connectivity in all A330 seats

Making flying more enjoyable, Singapore Airlines has included a panel on all classes of its A330 seats that has iPod/iPhone connectivity facility, USB port and AV input. But looking at the photo (click to see enlarged photo), can anyone let me know is that something you can plug your iPod/iPhone to? Or does one plug into the USB port? If the latter, it means you can charge your iPhone/iPod via the USB port, allowing you to have it fully charged when you step out of the plane.

These new In-Ear Headphones are available from the Singapore Apple’s Online Store for a nice price of S$128 and will be delivered between 7-10 days.

These new headphones gives better audio quality and improved sound isolation. It also comes with a remote volume control, music and video control and also has a built-in mic. However, as noted by iLounge, although they can be used with the iPhone, volume control is yet to be supported.

I didn’t like the original In-Ear Headphones from Apple as they didn’t fit my ear canals properly and I had to replaced the silicon ear tips with those from an old Sony headphones for a better fit. If you have these new earbuds from Apple, do let us know how it sounds.

Andy Finnell’s post about pricing of iPhone apps available now in the iTunes Store brings up quite a few issues not just about pricing, but also on known shortcomings of the iTunes Store that Apple should look into.

The problem that you’re likely to have, like most developers, is setting a price that you can live on. The temptation will be to price your app too low, such that developing the application isn’t sustainable. You might have the best of intentions, but in the end you’ll cause the premature death of your business before it even gets a chance. So why might you be tempted to price your iPhone application so low?

To be honest, as consumers, we will definitely prefer to see the continuity of the current pricing situations, aka more $0.99 apps. But as pointed out in Andy’s article, we’ll end up with many apps that stayed at version 1.0 with not much improvements or with developers dropping out of the market with the unsustainable pricing situation now.

Also with regards to the iTunes Store, with only two ways to sort through the apps in their respective categories, it will be difficult for developers to help push their apps to the top of the pile unless they price it attractively (either $0.99 or FREE) or they get the boost from advertising and marketing, which most of them won’t.

So which do you prefer? Should developers price their apps based on their value or keep as it is now and risk going into oblivion?