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Robin Burrowes, the guy in charge of  Xbox Live marketing in the EMEA region, has left Microsoft for Apple and is now charged with heading the App Store marketing initiatives for iTunes Europe. Burrows led Xbox Live marketing for seven years and was responsible for product, business and marketing management as well as planning, strategy and leadership of Xbox Live across region, according to his LinkedIn profile. Prior to joining Apple, the executive was involved with Microsoft’s MSN online operation as events/B2B marketing manager, British retail chain HMV (promotions manager) and Tennent Caledonian Breweries (brand marketing manager).

Burrowes graduated from University of Strathclyde in 1991. Apple fashionably wouldn’t comment on its new hire. Hiring yet another games veteran indicates Apple’s desire to expand on iTunes gaming initiatives in Europe. Apple’s business in the region and around the world is booming on strong iPhone sales. Interestingly, a recent job listing on Microsoft’s website for a software development engineer possibly hinted at Xbox Live games for iOS devices. A spokesperson for the Windows maker told Forbes they are “working to extend a few of our Xbox experiences and titles to other platforms”.

Burrowes’ LinkedIn profile also states his key achievements that include developing and executing several new business initiatives such as Xtival Free Live Weekend, Summer of Football promotional campaign, entertainment content strategy and a bunch of retail promotions. He also “over-achieved on all subscription and revenue targets from 2008 to 2010, driving notable increases both paid subscriptions and ARPU”. Sounds just like an A-player Apple would love to have on its team. Apple’s been bolstering its App Store talent with other notable industry professionals.

iOS games are continuing to rake in well over an estimated one-third of total App Store revenues. As MCV points out, last year the company hired former Nintendo public relations chief Robert Saunders to promote iOS apps. Another high-profile hire includes former Activision, EA and Xbox public relations head Nick Grange, charged with promoting the hardware side of Apple’s business. Most recent and by far the most controversial hire includes a new retail manager, John Browett, who had been CEO at European electronics retail chain Dixons.

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Sparrow, an efficient and minimalistic email application for the Mac, has been updated today with useful new features, including integration with the popular cloud storage, Dropbox. Upon authorizing your free or paid Dropbox account for use with Sparrow, you can attach and sync any file from your Dropbox by dragging and dropping it onto the compose window. Dropbox integration ensures that email attachments are not lost upon sending. The previous version of Sparrow also brought us support for CloudApp so Dropbox integration is a welcome addition that works towards strengthening the program’s cloud storage capabilities.

Also, if you receive a lot of unsolicited email messages (who doesn’t), you’ll be delighted to know that Sparrow finally lets you block remote images. You can tell Sparrow to display images once, always or choose to load only remote images in messages from specific domains or senders. Finally, improved search with tokens and suggestions enables you to find needle in a haystack in a Gmail-like fashion.

Using tokens means finding the mail you’re looking for in a matter of seconds. You could, for example, search for only the messages from a specific sender received on a specific date by taking advantage of the new FROM and DATE tokens. Sparrow is a ten buck download from the Mac App Store. A free lite version with adverts is also available.

Enterprise has long been the bastion of RIM and its BlackBerry devices, but its been infiltrated by Apple and its challenger, the iPhone. According to a quarterly survey of enterprise companies by commercial Wi-Fi provider iPass, the iPhone has a 45 percent market share of mobile employee usage, passing the undisputed king BlackBerry, for the first time.

iPass’s Mobile WorkForce Report, released Wednesday, gets its data from a survey of more than 2,300 mobile enterprise workers at 1,100 companies between the end of September and the end of October. We know many of the world’s richest companies are on the iPhone bandwagon already — Apple said last month that “90 percent of Fortune 500 companies” are deploying iPhones for their workers. But iPass’s report gives a bit of a broader picture of all different size companies that have iPhones on their network.

iPhones’ popularity for mobile workers is not just a result of taking share from RIM. The overall market is expanding too. From the report:

Today 95 percent of mobile employees have smartphones, up from 85 percent in 2010, with 91 percent using their smartphone for work — a 26 percent rise compared to 2010.

At our Mobilize conference in September a panel of mobile IT execs declared 2011 the year that smartphones cemented their place in the enterprise. “2011 was the year mobile IT was born,” Bob Tinker, CEO of MobileIron, said at the time. “It was the year the IT industry figured out mobile, and it’s the year that mobile figured out IT … Every small, medium and large enterprise around the world is going to be deploying smartphones and tablets at scale over the next 12 to 18 months.”

Tablets, according to iPass, are on the rise, but have a ways to go to be at the smartphone level of penetration in the enterprise, with 44 percent of those surveyed using an iPad at work, compared to 33 percent in the second quarter of this year.

The reason mobile devices are surging in adoption among enterprise workers is not necessarily because IT budgets are expanding. According to iPass:

This is due in part to the adoption of “bring your own device” policies by enterprises. Currently 42 percent of mobile employees use individually-liable smartphones for work, up from 34 percent last year.

BYO smartphone policies have grown rapidly in the last year thanks to IT departments being faced with people wanting to use their own iPhone or Android phone from home for work, something RIM never figured out. “RIM never got people to want to pay for the device themselves,” Julie Palen, SVP of enterprise telecom expense management company Tangoe, said in September. “That’s what Apple brought. And Android and Google followed.”

To learn more about the needs of the mobile work force, be sure to attend our Net:Work conference in San Francisco on December 8.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Connected world: the consumer technology revolution
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Apple has introduced an update for the iOS version of GarageBand that makes it compatible with iPhones and iPod touches, too. The now universal app is available as a free update for owners of the iPad version, or it’s $4.99 if you’re buying it for the first time.

The iPhone version is pretty much the same as its iPad cousin, with the same multitouch and smart instruments, eight tracks of editing layers and audio export capabilities. But Apple has taken the opportunity to refine the product with some new tools and features, too.

Smart instruments gain custom chord support, so that you can make your own to strum. This allows seasoned musical pros to get off the beaten path and produce some pleasant and more unique sounds, and amateurs like me to do terrible things that no one should be forced to listen to. You can also change time signatures to 3/4 and 6/8, change the key of your currently active song and export to iTunes as AAC or AIFF format. There’s also an Arpeggiator (tones in a chord played in rapid succession, not all at once) option for the Smart Keyboard.

All the new tools seem designed to provide more fun for the experienced set, while maintaining the low barrier for entry that makes GarageBand such a generally appealing app to begin with.

My initial unskilled hands-on reveals a product that doesn’t lose much appeal compared to the iPad version, though the smaller screen might feel a little more cramped to some. Apple does a good job of simplifying control interfaces, however, to avoid making the on-screen space feel claustrophobic.

If you’ve been left out of the iOS GarageBand party before now because you didn’t own an iPad, now’s the time to add your voice to the chorus, even if you can’t carry a tune or even keep time to save your life. Note that you’ll need a device at least capable of running iOS 5 to use the app, even though the software requirements actually only need iOS 4.3 or higher.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
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Apple is trying to fast track the training of retail employees in the proper use of iOS 5 and iCloud ahead of their early October debuts, Cult of Mac has learned.

According to one of our sources, corporate managers are currently visiting select Apple Retail stores ahead of a prospective October launch of the next iPhone.

While Apple is tight lipped about upcoming product plans even amongst its retail staff, these corporate managers are making a point of telling Apple Store employees to get their RetailMe courses on iOS 5 and iCloud done by the end of September.

RetailMe is Apple’s proprietary in-house communications and training client, which offers bulletins, information about products and training videos for retail employees.

These nudges to Apple Store employees would seemingly confirm reports that Apple will unveil at least one new iPhone model in early to mid October, the iPhone 5.

In addition, it is rumored that Apple may release a slightly modified version of the iPhone 4 called the iPhone 4S to address the low cost and pre-paid markets.

According to our source, Apple Store employees also believe that the next iPhone will come early next month. Making sure all of their employees are trained to answer questions certainly seems to hint in that direction.

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Personally, we’re pretty impressed by Windows 8 — at least the Metro parts — but we’ve got to admit, we snickered.

We’re not quite sure where this came from, so if you know, let us know so we can give proper credit.

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Wait, is this a joke?

The people responsible say no, but still: I have my doubts.

CLOO claims to be something like AirBnB, but for bathrooms. The idea is that in a big city, you’re more likely to be within reach of a bathroom belonging to a friend of a friend than near to a public one that’s actually worth making use of.

With the Cloo app on your phone, you search for nearby bathrooms, alert the owner that you need to pee, and hopefully they accept and invite you inside before it’s too late. Afterwards, you even get to rate the experience.

Just imagine: “Great bathroom! A++++! Good selection of magazines! Would pee again!”

The thought of strangers coming into my house and using my bathroom gives me the creeps, quite frankly. Who knows what they might even get up to? Euw. I don’t even want to go there.

Here’s the promo vid:

CLOO’ from Hillary Young on Vimeo.

So far, this appears to be just an idea. Don’t bother searching the App Store for it, even if you’re using your iPhone on the toilet (DON’T DENY IT, WE ALL DO IT).

If you need a half ton of salt to take this story with, I have some stored in my bathroom. Let me know if you need it.

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Update: DVICE has a review up with the following notes:

1. It is a 30 pin dock connector, not Bluetooth.  It runs on the iPads battery and gets 8-10 hours of battery life (pretty efficient!).  The downside to that: Portrait playing only
2. The Atari Arcade is scheduled to drop on October 2 at Target and then in November at Toys “R” Us and Walmart for $60.

Coming soon to DiscoveryBayGames, a new Atari controller that will go head to head with the popular iCade box.  The appliance was discovered in the Atari’s Greatest Hits update by MacRumors.

What’s New in Version 1.3

Hello Atari fans! We’ve been paying close attention to your feedback and have made a ton of improvements:

• New and improved control schemes
• OpenFeint integration
• Optimized iPad layouts with larger playfields
• Better multiplayer connectivity
• Compatibility with the Discovery Bay Games Duo Controller
• Play with the official Atari® Arcade – Duo™ Powered joystick. http://bit.ly/atariarcade

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The latest version of Apple’s Photo Stream beta app has a new icon for “taking a photo with your iPhone”… one that appears to feature an iPhone 5 with a larger screen and elongated, capacitive home button. You know, just like all the rumors and cases have been suggesting.

Art gaffe, or can we just all take as read the look of the iPhone 5 now that icons for it are creeping into other products?

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Having previously requested ownership with no success, Jay Freeman, known to the jailbreaking community as Saurik, the creator of Cydia, has now filed a lawsuit in a bid to obtain the Cydia.com domain from its current owner.

Freeman, who own Saurikit LLC, believes the owner of Cydia.com is infringing the Cydia trademark and would like the domain to be transferred into his ownership.

Freeman originally requested ownership of the domain back in March, but lost the dispute under the uniform domain name dispute resolution policy (UDRP) because the current owner registered the domain six years ago — long before Cydia was introduced to our iPhones. However, Freeman argues that as things stand, visitors to Cydia.com could be confused by the name and led to believe that Cydia is affiliated with Apple.

DomainNameWire reports:

The company’s in rem lawsuit against the Cydia.com domain name alleges that the owner of the domain name changed the content of the page from a parked page to one about Apple products after it contacted him.

In addition to the Cydia.com domain, Saurikit LLC is requested damages for legal fees.

At present, the Cydia.com website is down:

Due to massive malicious attacks and overwhelming spam activities recently by hackers, our forum unfortunately has to be temporary suspended for major maintenance, please check back later. We are sorry for the inconvenience.

[via The Next Web]

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