Apr 28

-The big hubbub that arose last week around location tracking within the iPhone has now received its due response from Apple itself. Firstly, the Cupertino company claims it does not, and has no plans to, track users' iPhones. What it's actually doing is "maintaining a database of Wi-Fi hotspots and cell towers around your current location," which are then used to provide speedier calculation of your position when you want to use the device's maps or other location-based services. The data collection that was recently brought to the public attention represents, according to Apple, the location of WiFi hotspots and cell towers around you, not your actual iPhone. Still, the fact iPhones have been shown to store as much as a year's worth of data is considered a bug by Apple, who plans to limit that period to a week in a future software update. The additional issue of data being collected after users turned off Location Services is also a bug, also to be fixed by Apple in that upcoming update.

Apple is planning on releasing a free iOS update in the next few weeks that performs the following:

1. reduces the size of the crowd-sourced Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower database cached on the iPhone,
2. ceases backing up this cache,
3. deletes this cache entirely when Location Services is turned off.

-Apple white iPhone is officially launched on Apple website.

-Mobile payment startup Square confirmed it received a strategic investment from Visa. Square produces a credit card reader that connects to the headphone jack of an iPhone, iPad or other mobile platform. The Square application on the device accepts the credit card information from the reader and processes the payment on the fly. It's an easy way for small businesses to accept credit card payments with minimal hardware requirements and a small 2.75% per transaction fee.
The company is growing -- in the first quarter of 2011 alone, Square processed US$66 million in payments and predicts it will triple that figure to an astounding $198 million in Q2. Square also expanded its retail footprint and is now available online from Apple and in Apple retail stores in the US.