Apple’s Latest Acquisition Gives a Hint Towards its Future - TIME

Apple’s Latest Acquisition Gives a Hint Towards its Future

Posted: 22 Aug 2016 06:42 AM PDT

Apple has acquired a California-based startup that’s been working on a platform for users to store and manage their personal health data, Fast Company reports. The acquisition happened earlier this year; the company is just now confirming it.
The startup, Gliimpse, was relatively small, having only $1 million in funding since launching in 2013, according to CrunchBase. And Apple did not reveal terms of the deal, instead offering FastCo the company’s boilerplate acquisition comment: “Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time, and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans.”

That said, Apple’s interest in the firm is another signal of the company’s growing interest in personal health and wellbeing. The company has already rolled out health software like HealthKit (which aims to provide users a one-stop-shop for their personal health data) and ResearchKit (designed to let researchers gather data from subject’s devices). The Apple Watch, meanwhile, is rumored to be getting a big health-oriented revamp in the coming weeks.
What explains Apple’s healthcare projects? The company’s CEO, Tim Cook, has offered two reasons in recent interviews. First, the death of former Apple CEO Steve Jobs clearly impacted Cook on a personal level, perhaps driving the company’s efforts. “I know this sounds probably bizarre at this point, but I had convinced myself that he would bounce, because he always did,” said Cook of his predecessor in an interview with The Washington Post. (Cook volunteered to donate a piece of his liver to the ailing Jobs; Jobs refused the offer.)
But Cook also spies a business opportunity in the nearly $3 trillion healthcare industry as the company faces flagging hardware sales. Here’s an excerpt from another recent Cook interview, this one with FastCo’s Rick Tetzeli:

As we’re saying our goodbyes, Cook and I stumble into discussing health care, and he perks up again. “We’ve gotten into the health arena and we started looking at wellness, that took us to pulling a string to thinking about research, pulling that string a little further took us to some patient-care stuff, and that pulled a string that’s taking us into some other stuff,” he says. “When you look at most of the solutions, whether it’s devices, or things coming up out of Big Pharma, first and foremost, they are done to get the reimbursement [from an insurance provider]. Not thinking about what helps the patient. So if you don’t care about reimbursement, which we have the privilege of doing, that may even make the smartphone market look small.”

Mao Zedong memorial cncert canceelled in 2 Australian cities - Reuters

A statue of late Chairman Mao Zedong is pictured at Beijing University of Chemical Technology in Beijing, China, August 4, 2016. REUTERS/Jason Lee/File Photo

By Byron Kaye | SYDNEY

Australia's two biggest cities Sydney and Melbourne canceled concerts commemorating the death of former Chinese communist leader Mao Zedong, with one citing safety concerns, after Chinese Australians complained the content was insensitive.

The incident signifies the continued divisiveness of Mao among Chinese, both at home and abroad, four decades after his death.

In China there is a quiet resurgence in popularity toward Mao, with his image adorning banknotes and his embalmed body attracting hundreds, if not thousands, of visitors a day to Beijing. But there is also continued criticism among Chinese of his reign, under which tens of millions died.

For weeks, Chinese in Sydney and Melbourne complained that the "Glory and Dream" concerts, scheduled for September in both cities' town halls, lionize a leader they see as responsible for millions of deaths.

On Thursday, a spokesperson for the City of Sydney said in an email that after consulting police, the council had "concerns regarding the potential for civil disturbance, patron-to-patron conflict and staff-to-patron conflict" and canceled the event.

The spokesperson said the concert organizers, who booked the venue and arranged the concerts without council involvement, had also determined that the event was "at high risk of disruption and elevated risk to personal safety".

A spokeswoman for City of Melbourne said the concert was also canceled in that city, but declined to give a reason saying it was the decision of the organizers.

An organizer of the events, Sydney property developer Peter Zhu, said in a telephone call that he was only the "sponsor" and declined to comment further. The other organizer, a group called the International Cultural Exchange Association, did not respond to emails and calls.

Mao, who died in 1976, remains a polarizing figure in China.

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While the ruling Communist Party has acknowledged Mao made mistakes, there has yet to be an official accounting for the chaos of the Cultural Revolution or the millions of deaths from starvation during the 1958-61 Great Leap Forward.

But he has also become a potent symbol for leftists within the Communist Party who feel that three decades of market-based reform have gone too far, creating social inequalities like a yawning rich-poor gap and pervasive corruption.

The divisions over Mao are especially pronounced in Australia, home to one of China's biggest offshore communities, where more than a million of the country's 24 million population are either Chinese-born or identify as having Chinese heritage.

In Australia, an online petition calling for the councils to withdraw the venues for the concerts, attracted support from about 3,000 people by Thursday afternoon.

(Reporting by Byron Kaye; Editing by Michael Perry)