Apple Protests Hit Six Cities; Siri Soon to Be a Polyglot

Every week, makes news with technology developments, business deals and, more often than not, controversies.

That’s where our weekly "Core Bytes" column on Apple comes in. We’ll relay the past week’s news highlights from our favorite backyard tech giant.

Controversies
Has “Occupy Apple” begun? Protesters armed with petitions gathered at six Apple stores around the world Thursday, calling for reforms of working conditions at Chinese and other international iPhone suppliers. They helped garner 250,000 signatures, critical in part of Chinese factory Foxconn. 

In 2006, the Chinese company Proview International sold Apple subsidiary IP Application Development the rights to use its trademarked iPad for a teeny $55,000. Now they are suing Apple, claiming that it violated the trademark for using the iPad name in China. They argue that it was their subsidiary, not them, that they sold they sold the trademark to.

Innovations
The iPhone 4S’s Siri is quickly learning new languages. Support for Mandarin, Japanese and Russian will be added in March. Siri initially launched in October 2011 with support for only three languages—English, French and German—although more, including Spanish, are slated to become available later this year.

Popular use of 3-D may no longer be reserved for Avatar-esque blockbusters hitting the big screen. The U.S Patent and Trademark Office published a patent this week for an iPhone that will operate with a 3D frame of reference. For example, the position of the sun in the sky would determine how shadows are cast on the screen.

Business Deals and Developments
Apple is continuing to expand its operations, this time to downtown Sunnyvale, where it just rented a 156,000 square-feet office building in the Sunnyvale Town Center. The space, along with Apple’s other rental spaces in Sunnyvale (215,000 square feet at the Sunnyvale Research Center and 1,000 square feet on Benecia Avenue), will host 1,700 Apple employees.

As of Thursday morning, Apple’s market cap ($456 billion) was worth more than that of Google ($198.9 billion) and Microsoft ($256.7 billion) combined. The milestone follows Apple’s best quarter ever, in which it earned $13.6 billion from sales of 37 million iPhones.

Microsoft has found a method to reign in more business: open their stores next to Apple’s. The rule of thumb applies to most of the stores that have opened in recent years, and one that is set to open in Palo Alto.