Apple

Apple and Google have reportedly joined forces to bid for Kodak’s imaging patents. The joint bid is thought to be in the region of $5oo million and both companies hope it will be enough for them to get the patents out of bankruptcy. The news comes from Bloomberg who has been talking with people who have knowledge of the situation.

Last night, US television network NBC ran the first ever official television interview with Apple CEO Tim Cook. Unfortunately if you're outside of the United States or were out for the evening, you may have missed it. Luckily some kind sole has captured the complete interview and shared it on YouTube. As it is not an official release, it may get taken down fairly quickly so if you are interested in what Tim Cook has to say, don't hand around to watch it.

"Next year we are going to bring some production to the U.S. on the Mac. We’ve been working on this for a long time, and we were getting closer to it. It will happen in 2013. We’re really proud of it. We could have quickly maybe done just assembly, but it’s broader because we wanted to do something more substantial. So we’ll literally invest over $100 million. This doesn’t mean that Apple will do it ourselves, but we’ll be working with people, and we’ll be investing our money."

iCloud was meant to make data ubiquitous -- to magically handle syncing everything that really needs syncing between iOS and OS X devices, so users simply have the most up-to-date stuff, backed up and available, all the time and everywhere, without worrying. And it is. Except when it isn't. And when it isn't, it's almost as opaque to developers building against its APIs as it is to users wondering where their stuff is. So what to do?