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APPLE Shares Hit $300

At that price, Apple is now valued at $274 billion, more than Intel, Hewlett Packard and Google, and within striking distance of the world’s largest company, Exxon Mobil, which is valued at $329 billion. Apple passed archnemesis Microsoft in valuation earlier this year.

While Apple’s stock has been on a tear this year on the strength of iPad and iPhone sales, you only have to go back about a year and a half to when the global economic crisis and concerns about the health of Steve Jobs had the company trading at less than $80 per share.

Ever since Ping launched, there has been a bit of confusion and discontent about how indie artists can get their own Artist Profiles on iTunes 10′s new social network. Today came the answer. “Those interested in creating Artist Profiles on Ping should contact their label or aggregator,” an Apple spokesperson told Hypebot. “iTunes is working directly with labels and aggregators to create Artist Profiles.” In other words, whoever put your music on iTunes has to help you get your Ping Artist Profile. How TuneCore Is Handling Ping: One client who uses TuneCore to distribute their music asked the indie digital aggregator how to get a Ping profile and got this reply: “Thanks for writing! Not only will Ping have ‘People’ accounts, but it will also have ‘Artist’ accounts that allow musicians to upload and create their own pages featuring their pictures, videos, tour dates, music recommendations and a lot more. We were fortunate enough to speak with Apple today to begin working on getting the first TuneCore Artists Ping accounts set up. We will be able to get more and more TuneCore Artists set up over the next weeks as Apple works to authenticate and set up Ping Artist accounts for the millions of artists within iTunes.” According to Mashable, Apple called TuneCore right after Ping launched, asking for a list of artists. Tunecore sent over a list and Apple came back with questions: “1) Artist name? 2) E-mail address of who will be the account holder? 3). Does the artist have a label, a manager etc.? 4). Will they be managing the account or will the artist?”. Then Apple sends a URL which allows the user to log in with their Apple ID and set up a Ping Artist Profile.

TOP TEN PING COMPLAINTS

Ping has incredible potential, but early adopters are trudging through a number of frustrations.  Ultimately, this feels a bit more like v0.1 than 1.0.  Here are ten complaints that top the list…

(1) Band pages are extremely limited, and most artists are currently excluded. Apple has indicated that artists must be invited, and the selection is insanely slim at launch.  If your world revolves around Katy Perry, Diddy, and Lady Gaga, you’re set – otherwise, this was launched too early.  Meanwhile, profiles are geared towards individuals, not groups.  So why not tie artist profiles to those present on the iTunes Store – that is, at launch?

(2) No Facebook connectivity. Maybe Apple and Facebook will eventually make the handshake, but the paint is still drying on this one – and that means…

(3) This is a ghost town. Sure, you can join hands with Jason Bentley, Rick Rubin, and Ted Cohen.  But most of your friends are still coming on board – and probably unaware of the walled-in Ping.

(4) And, not much musical connectivity outside the iTunes walls, for that matter. Increasingly, musical lives are spread across important properties like Pandora, YouTube, MySpace Music, and Facebook.  Certainly, a sizable chunk of the 160 million-plus iTunes users have expressed musical preferences on at least one of these outside services.  So why not build the bridge?

(5) Users can only check three favorite genres for their profiles. Most music fans criss-cross over lots of different genres, and loathe over-categorization.  The iPod collection helped to blur genre buckets, so why reinforce them here?

(6) No usage-based favorites or other listening activity streams. What are you listening to right now?  5 minutes ago?  5 days ago?  What are your top-rated iTunes tracks – purchased or not?

(7) No Beatles or Outkast .  Does a Outkast song define your musical identity?  Well, not on Ping, as favorite songs must be sold in the iTunes Store.

(8) Spam. Already, fake accounts are proliferating (ie, Ben Folds), and Ping could become a giant sandbox for shady characters.  That includes fake accounts, phishing attacks, and other niceties that confront networks like Facebook and Twitter on a daily basis.  Hopefully, Apple isn’t learning on the job.

(9) Where’s my Twitter connectivity? Or, is a tie-in buried somewhere?  Seems like status updates and favorites should cross-pollinate.

(10) No Facebook Integration. Oh, sorry, that was #2.

As Palm’s VP of developer platform, part of David Temkin’s job was to build out the app catalog. But now as VP of mobile at AOL (NYSE: AOL), his focus is on Android and iPhone. “We are in a eyeball business. To the extent that Palm (NSDQ: PALM) or Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) turns it around, we’ll pay more attention to it. It’s a two-horse race.”

Today AOL is launching two apps for the Android, including an AOL portal and a stock-tracking site called DailyFinance. It also modernized its mobile site from being accessible on feature phones to being more multimedia-heavy using HTML5. The AOL portal is the first app that’s launched on Android before on iPhone.

As part of the launch, AOL says it will increase its focus on mobile. The statement is a familiar one. It once had offices in Seattle, where it housed properties including Tegic, which created the text input product called T9. It also developed an open-source development platform. Now that office has been closed, and most of the projects have been sold off or discontinued. AOL has centralized its mobile development in Mountain View and Dulles, and instead of being spread out across the company working in different product groups, they are now all working together under one umbrella.

Temkin declined to discuss how much of an investment AOL was making in the area, but said: “We are investing and hiring aggressively and trying to up our game, specifically in smartphones and on the iPad.”

Apple is facing more than just a reception glitch on the new iPhone. Even the most ardent Macheads are growing impatient with Cupertino’s refusal to admit that anything’s wrong with its latest iPhone despite mounting evidence to the contrary. Experts are warning that Apple has nothing less than a PR disaster on its hands. Would a full-on recall help polish Apple’s tarnished image?
The iPhone “death grip” drama began almost immediately after the iPhone 4 launch last month, and escalated Monday after Consumer Reports announced it would not recommend the new iPhone. Its test results confirmed the handset’s widely reported “death grip” woes, in which touching a certain spot weakens the cellular signal.

Over at Cult of Mac, Apple blogger Leander Kahney has lined up a panel of “crisis management” experts who say Apple risks a “Toyota-style PR crisis” (not that bad phone reception is anywhere near as dangerous as a stuck accelerator, of course) unless it ceases its “foot-dragging” and takes some decisive action — something above and beyond the promised software fix for the iPhone’s supposedly wonky signal strength display.

One option: free Bumper cases for everyone, to cover the iPhone’s external steel antenna that Consumer Reports and several other testers say is the root cause of the “death grip.”

Another, more dramatic gesture: a full-on recall, a move that PR expert Matthew Seeger thinks Apple will be “forced to do” if it wants to protect its brand from “potentially devastating” damage, according to Cult of Mac.

Buzz Out Loud co-host Molly Wood takes up the iPhone recall cry at CNET, writing that although a recall would be “expensive and unprecedented,” it would “give Apple major goodwill and prove its commitment to the impeccable quality and design principles it’s always espoused.”

Of course, a recall would entail the extraordinary step of Apple admitting that there’s a fundamental problem with the iPhone’s design — something Apple seems reluctant to do, considering Steve Jobs’ initial, eyebrow-raising response to complaints about the iPhone’s reception (“just avoid holding it that way”) and Apple’s follow-up letter (which blames a “totally wrong” signal display formula for the reception complaints while insisting that the iPhone 4′s “wireless performance is the best we’ve ever shipped”).

For the sake of argument, let’s say Apple did swallow hard and announce an iPhone recall. What would happen next?

If the experts are correct, the iPhone’s reception problems stem from a fundamental design problem: an external antenna, with a sensitive gap separating two antenna segments on the lower-left edge of the phone, right where a user might reasonably want to cradle it. Besides sticking a piece of tape over the gap (which Consumer Reports suggests), Apple may not be able to fix the iPhone’s reception problems without a radical, costly, time-consuming hardware revamp.

Practical matters aside, though, Apple needs to make some kind of real gesture here — be it free Bumpers, an admission of mistakes, an apology or even a recall — before its tarnished image is damaged beyond repair (if it isn’t already). Software update and/or radio silence isn’t going to cut it anymore.