Apple Cuts iPhone Price by $200
Apple said Wednesday it is scrapping the 4GB iPhone in favor of a single 8GB model, while dropping the price substantially. The surprise announcement came after news of new iPod models, including the iPod Touch. The iPhone will now cost $399 USD.
At that price, the iPhone will only cost $100 more than the 8GB iPod Touch and the same as the 16GB iPod Touch. Although Apple could see a sales boost from those who felt the iPhone was too expensive at $499 and $599, the price cut may have the unfortunate effect of upsetting current customers, who paid $200 more just two months ago or less.
Apple Introduces Wi-Fi iTunes Store
With its new iPod Touch sporting wireless capabilities, Apple on Wednesday introduced the iTunes WiFi Music Store, which will allow users of the device to purchase and download songs directly to the device. The service will not only work with the Touch, but also for the iPhone through an update that will be provided later this month. For Starbucks aficionados, new integration could prove a godsend.
When near a Starbucks with Wi-Fi, Touch and iPhone users would be able to see the songs that are playing and download them through a special Starbucks section that would appear. Additionally, users would be able to view the last ten songs played and also be able to buy those songs as well.
iPod Classic, Meet iPod Touch
With typical Steve Jobs flair, Apple introduced on Wednesday an entirely new player called the iPod Touch, while relegating its current high-end iPod to "Classic" status.
The Classic model is much like today's iPod, except with more hard drive space. It's thinner than today's 5.5-generation iPod, but comes in sizes of 80GB and 160GB. Pricing for the two models will stay the same as they are currently, at $249 and $349 USD respectively.
iPod Shuffle Goes (RED), New Nano Appears
At an event for press and analysts on Wednesday, Apple CEO Steve Jobs announced that the Shuffle would be joining the Product (RED) movement, while introducing a completely new iPod nano.
The Shuffle will now include a Product (RED) model, as well as silver, light blue, teal, and green models. However the bigger changes came to the iPod nano, and will mark the biggest advancement for the line since its debut in September 2005.
iTunes Chugs Along, Adds Ringtone Capabilities
iTunes continues to chug along at full speed, with the service now number one in all 22 countries that it operates in, CEO Steve Jobs said at a press event on Wednesday. All of the stores include six million tracks in their libraries, and customers have bought more than 3 billion songs. With over 600 million downloads sold via iTunes, the volume of songs downloaded has been enough to propel it to the third largest music store in the US.
Wednesday brings a new version of the popular software, and Apple's first entry into the lucrative ringtone business. 500,000 songs will be available as ringtowns initially and Apple would charge 99 cents to create one from a song. The user would have control of what 30-second segment of the song would be used. At this time, it only appears that the ringtones would be compatible with Apple's iPhone.
Yahoo Acquisition of BlueLithium May Help Close Analytics Gap
It's very clear now that one of Yahoo's principal goals in this latest reorganization, led by once-and-future CEO Jerry Yang and newly elevated President Susan Decker, is to distinguish itself from Google rather than catch up to it. Last week, those efforts culminated in executive reassignments to shore up its content business. This week, they resulted in the company acquiring British advertising firm BlueLithium, perhaps closing one of the most oft-noted gaps in its arsenal: a smart analytics tool.
Boasting of a higher overall audience reach than Google Search, AOL, MSN, or eBay by virtue of the sites it targets, BlueLithium positions itself as an advertising network in much the same way Right Media - last year's Yahoo acquisition - positioned itself as an advertising network.
NBC to Sell Shows via Amazon Unbox
It didn't take very long for NBC Universal to find a new outlet for its programming following its break with Apple. The channel's shows will now be available through Amazon for the same price they were on iTunes.
The programs will be sold through Amazon's Unbox service for $1.99 USD per episode. Like iTunes, episodes will be available the day after they air on the network, however Amazon has agreed to let the company bundle programming together.
Microsoft Drops Zune Price, Talks Zune Phone
Microsoft has decided to drop the price of the Zune in an effort to spur sales, while indicating it hadn't completely ruled out a Zune phone.
Effective Wednesday, the price of Microsoft's competitor to the iPod is now $199 USD. The company said the price cut was something it had been planning to do for months, and was part of the normal product cycle.
Palm Cancels Foleo Project in Response to Customer Concern
It may go down in history as a noble experiment that was wisely aborted just prior to perhaps going down in flames: Palm yesterday announced it has decided it won't be launching a little Linux laptop computer after all, devoting its entire marketing efforts instead to what many believe will be a smartphone called Centro to take on the RIM BlackBerry.
"In the course of the past several months, it has become clear that the right path for Palm is to offer a single, consistent user experience around this new platform design and a single focus for our platform development efforts," wrote Palm CEO Ed Colligan for his company's blog yesterday.
Silverlight 1.0 Released, Linux Version Coming
Wednesday marked the final 1.0 release of Microsoft's new Silverlight platform for building interactive Web experiences à la Flash, but the big news is that Redmond will extend official support to Novell's Linux port of Silverlight.
Silverlight was first unveiled earlier this year, promising to make it easier for developers to build rich Web applications without delving into the complexities behind AJAX or suffering its limitations. This space is growing increasingly crowded with Adobe's new AIR runtime and Sun's JavaFX.
Microsoft: Removal of Group Policy Tool from Vista 'Not Significant'
As part of a request to help modify its apparent stance on the upcoming removal of Group Policy Management Console from Microsoft's Windows Vista Service Pack 1, a company spokesperson told BetaNews, "The removal of the GPMC tool with Service Pack 1 is not significant to the majority of Windows Vista users."
This despite the continued presence of remnants of the GPMC campaign, which touted its inclusion in Vista as a boon. "The Group Policy Management Console, or GPMC, was available as a download for Windows XP and Windows Server 2003," reads one TechNet page.
What the Microsoft Standards Battle is Really About
Microsoft's purpose for suggesting its Office Open XML suite of formats become adopted as an international standard is not so it can leverage its seal of approval from the ISO in selling its Office suite to large businesses and to the public sector. Its purpose is to enable the company to be perceived worldwide as cooperating with businesses and with nations in the drive for interoperability, especially for the benefit of the European Commission which maintains that Microsoft is an unfair competitor.
For that reason, whether or not OOXML is eventually adopted by the ISO come February is not as important as whether Microsoft is perceived as trying to play fair. OOXML could still be rejected, but if Microsoft handles this right, it could still argue it's striving for interoperability and fair competition even in the face of that loss. And being able to maintain that argument is of principal importance.
Corel to Integrate Office With Word Perfect Lightning
Corel said Tuesday that it had created a new module for its WordPerfect Lightning product that would allow users to import the information they have collected into Microsoft Office, and vice versa.
Lightning was first introduced in February as a free compact version of its regular word processing product and is only 16MB in total size.
Google PowerPoint, Wiki Software on Tap
Google could launch its online presentation and wiki tools at the Office 2.0 conference in San Francisco this week, news reports indicate. With the addition of those two products, Google is able to offer users a complete suite of productivity applications at no charge. It also puts the company into direct competition with Microsoft's Office suite.
It was at last year's Office 2.0 event where the company unveiled its Docs and Spreadsheets applications, which came out of its acquisition of Writely and its own work on an Excel-like application. The company said earlier this year that it would be using technology acquired from Tonic Systems to work on a
P2P Remains Alive and Well, BitTorrent Surging
Preliminary results of a study on peer-to-peer file sharing show that on the average, the technology still makes up anywhere between 50 and 90 percent of Internet traffic, with BitTorrent surging in popularity.
The full results of the study will be released at the Emerging Technologies Conference to be held September 25-27 at MIT. Even though P2P dominates much of the bandwidth on the Internet, other technologies have begun to make their mark.
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