John Lennon on iTunes, DRM-Free

Sixteen of John Lennon’s post-Beatles albums have been released to Apple’s iTunes store for the first time. The albums, created while Lennon was with Capital Records, a divsion of EMI, are available in the regular 99 cents format as well as the $1.29 DRM-free format. In May of this year, EMI became the first major label to sell songs from its catalog without the copy protection software built-into the tracks. In addition to being DRM-free, the tunes are also higher-quality recordings, available as 256 Kbps AAC files. Some of the Lennon albums now on iTunes include "Working Class Hero," "John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band," and "Sometime in New York City." Additionally, two songs - "Lennon Legend" and "Acoustic" - are available for download exclusively on iTunes. This news brings us one step closer to bringing the digital downloads of the Beatles to iTunes, something that was supposedly in the works over a year ago.

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A new social news website, Streamy, has just launched a private beta which is getting a lot of attention. The lucky few to have received the invites are impressed and enthusiastic about what Streamy has to offer. Webware even went so far as to call it a "Digg killer." Why? Maybe it’s because the service is, as they describe, "a hybrid between Digg, Facebook, your favorite instant messaging client, Google Reader, Twitter, and Del.icio.us. By its very name, Streamy is a mashup service. It pulls together a variety of your social streams: be it your favorite blog feeds, news alerts, or friends updates, and rolls them up into a slick package." Oh. Yeah. That does sounds like a digg killer…maybe more. However, despite the beautiful graphics and glowing reviews, Streamy may find it’s hard to get people to migrate away from services they’ve become attached to, services like those they propose to combine and replace. I can’t imagine leaving Facebook, Twitter, or Google Reader behind, no matter what Streamy offers…but then again, I haven’t tried it yet. I have to at least admire them for their gall; it’s a bold undertaking: either Streamy becomes a revolutionary service that leads us all to happily abandon our favorite web 2.0 sites in favor of theirs, or this is yet another social network providing services that we already have elsewhere. The question remains, why leave Digg for Streamy? Do I need an all-in-one mashup? Do I need a Digg + Feeds + News + Links + Friends’ Updates? Do you?

Google Pack, the collection of Google-recommended apps available in one download, has just added Star Office to the lineup. Star Office is Sun’s office suite whose source code became the building blocks of OpenOffice. The office suite includes a word processor, a spreadsheet program, a slideshow creation tool, a database app, and a drawing app. Although similar to OpenOffice, the Star Office suite has a few extra features, including some extra fonts, clip-art, and templates, as well as additional compatibility tools for Microsoft Office migration. At the Google Operating System blog, they propose that "the next step would probably be the addition of a plug-in that lets you synchronize local documents with Google Docs & Spreadsheets," and yet, that functionality is not there. Another thing that is also still not there with Google Docs is the ability for me to email in spreadsheets. It has said "coming soon," for what? a year now? I also can’t upload more than one file at a time to Google Docs. Annoying.

I feel like Google is slowly building this amazing office suite that will be really great one day. However, until they put all the pieces together (star office + docs + storage + upload capabilities + (g)mail-in your docs), I only seem to notice what it lacks, instead of what it does. I sometimes wonder if Google even knows what they are trying to build or if they are making it up as they go along. I would rather wait a year or so and then be floored by a completely inter-operable suite of services than be given these upgrades piece-by-piece and left frustrated with how it doesn’t quite all mesh.

Apple has just launched a new widget platform called "My iTunes," which is a collection of widgets you can add to your blog, social networking profile, or website. There are My iTunes widgets that let you share your reviews, favorite artists, as well as new music, movies, and TV shows from the iTunes Store. The widgets are somewhat customizable; you can’t set them to match the color of your site, but you can choose from a few shades of blue or black. Now that I think about it, I’m rather surprised that this is the first iTunes widget from Apple - boy, have they been missing out! I wonder how long before MySpace blocks them, too? I mean, they do start with the letter "i"…

Mashable! is reporting that some people saw an increase in the size of their Gmail inboxes today. Instead of the 2 GB+ that most of us currently have, it appears that Google is quietly rolling out an upgrade, with some users seeing storage increases to over 9 GB today. This increase is probably in response to Yahoo, who is currently offering unlimited storage for their email users. Even better, this increase appears to be the first step towards the rumored Gdrive as Google is already reporting the amount of storage you currently use for your Gmail and Picassa Web Albums. Without everyone getting their hopes up (oops, too late), this interface hints at a possible Google online storage offering in the future. In the meantime, it’s Microsoft who beat Google to online storage, with their launch of Windows Live SkyDrive. However, with SkyDrive’s 500 MB initial offering, the battle may eventually come down to who offers the most space for free.

Update: clicking "update your storage" gives you the option to purchase more storage, so who are the people who received 9 GB for free today? More info here.

Today, Blockbuster announced that they have purchased Movielink, an online movie rental & download service. With the fierce competition offered by Netflix, this move was something that was the subject of much speculation earlier this year. Although Movielink’s prices were decent - $1.99 for a rental or $8.99 for keeps - the service never really caught on with consumers, most likely due to the heavy amount of DRM used. The DRM isn’t surprising, since Movielink needed a way to make deals with major studios, notorious for their fear of piracy (you wouldn’t steal a car, would you?). Those deals paid off, though - Movielink ended up with the rights to more than 3,000 titles, making them the web’s largest digital movie library. However, in a strange contradiction to all the DRM, the company had announced a year ago that they were working on a plan that would allow people to copy films to DVDs that would play in conventional DVD players. There’s no telling whether or not that feature will become available now. Blockbuster has only stated that their intention is to eventually offer the Movielink download service via their website.

Today marked the launch of web 2.0 startup, Spock, another newcomer to the people search genre, joining others in this nearly overcrowded space, including sites like ProfileLinker, Upscoop, Wink, LinkedIn, and ZoomInfo. Unlike its competitors, though, Spock’s doesn’t want to be merely a voluntary, opt-in social network. Instead, Spock’s goal is to essentially become the Google of people search by indexing the web, slowly adding content by sourcing sites like blogs, photo sharing sites, wikipedia, and social networks. Based on the search results, Spock will then auto-generate tags associated with that person. Other users can then vote on whether existing tags are relevant or not. In a brilliant move for quickly establishing a user base, you can login and claim your own profile, thereby giving yourself additional voting weight with your own tags and descriptions. Spocking myself (hmmm…not sure that works as a verb just yet), I find that Spock has my LinkedIn info, but doesn’t seem to know about my websites. I had better go claim myself now…feel free to tag me as you see fit.

Everyone knows that text messaging while driving is dangerous, but sometimes we do it anyway. Now a new, free service called Pinger offers a safer alternative. With Pinger’s voice messaging service, you can easily speak your message into your hands-free headset without having to deal with any ringing, greetings, or lengthy prompts. As efficient as a text or email, but with more personality, Pinger lets you send voice messages to anyone quickly while keeping your hands on the wheel. To use Pinger, you just speak your contact’s name & your message, and then hang up. Signing up for Pinger was easy - once I verified my phone number by calling Pinger and entering the access code they provided, it was only another minute to type in my contacts’ information and add Pinger’s number to my phone. Now I just need to add Pinger to my speed dial, and I’ll be all set!

Anywhere.FM is a cool new service that lets you upload your entire music collection and play it anywhere via the web. To upload your tunes to the service, you can either use the site’s uploader (located in the bottom right corner of the player) or you can use the iTunes Desktop Uploader, which will automatically upload your songs, playlists, and play counts while managing your upload speed so you can continue to surf uninterrupted while it processes the file transfer. The iTunes Desktop Uploader can be downloaded from the "iTunes Uploader" button in the top right corner of the site, only visible once you’ve logged in. When all your tunes have been uploaded to Anywhere.FM, you can then access them anytime, anywhere via the website and play them on the site’s web player. With the social networking feature, you can add friends and listen to the "friends radio" to discover new music. Currently in beta, there’s no limit as to how many songs you can upload nor a fee to use the service, so enjoy!

I just found this amazing, yet simple, application for my Blackberry Pearl. The app is called “ColorPearl” and it allows you to change the color of the pearl’s light on your Blackberry Pearl mobile phone. (Note from the website: The BlackBerry 8800 and Curve/8300 do not have the colored LEDs behind the trackball, so there is no way to make ColorPearl work on them.) To use ColorPearl on your Blackberry Pearl, go to www.geekandproud.net/blackberry-software on your phone and scroll down to the ColorPearl application. Click on the link that says “OTA install” and you will be prompted to download the application to your phone. Select “Download” and wait for the download to complete. Then go into the Options from the Blackberry Pearl’s main menu & you will see a new option in there for “ColorPearl.” Select that option and you will then be able to pick the color you want your Pearl’s pearl to be. You can even make up your own color by typing in a custom RRGGBB combination! The software is a free download but the author would like a donation, and I’d say he deserves one! Nice app!

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