Itunes News & Articles

The company behind the popular Ubuntu Linux, Canonical, will be bringing a dedicated version for the new era of phone and digital devices. Just don't expect it in 2012.

Millions of Apple iPhone users will be pressing refresh at a rate of knots today, as the new version of iOS 5 and its associated cloud services launch ahead of the iPhone 4S release.

Enterprise resource planning just got easier as Workday's (news, site) iPad application goes live on the iTunes App Store. While Workday's web app has a mobile-optimized version that can be used both on desktop and mobile, this iPad-specific app comes with unique features that make enterprise collaboration and resource planning more intuitive on a tablet interface.

In the runup to the iPhone 5 and iOS 5 launch, Apple's (news, site) new cloud service is live for those with a developer account.

The BBC's iPlayer (news, site) helped drag its home British audience into the video-on-demand age. Now it's going global with both current ouput and decades of classic shows on offer.

Amazon (news, site) has beaten Apple, Sony and others to the punch with an all-cloud music service, so you can play your tunes on any device.

Expected to open this sometime this spring, Apple announced at its annual shareholders meeting that its new North Carolina Data Center will house iTunes and its MobileMe services.

Social media moves so fast, it's hard to keep up. Here are the week's top stories in scan-friendly format:

• MySpace Users Can Now Update Facebook Status Simultaneously
• Twitter Changes Mean Never Giving Your Password Out Again
• Older Adults Taking Up Social Media
• Apple's Ping Launches As New iTunes Social Network

First Microsoft's Interoperability Team announced a PHP Toolkit, then we saw Microsoft throw their support behind the CodePlex.org Foundation, and we hear rumors of a new open source content management system. So now what?

Well the Microsoft Interoperability Team has announced support for the open source IDE Eclipse. At the Eclipse Summit Europe, they offered up a few new solutions in partnership with open source companies Tasktop Technologies and Soyatec:

• An Enhanced Developer Experience for Eclipse on Windows 7
• Windows Azure Tools for Eclipse
• Windows Azure Software Developer Kit (SDK) for Java
• Eclipse Tools for Silverlight

Microsoft provides funding and architectural guidance on the projects.

According to Microsoft, the goal here is to "help developers using the Eclipse platform take advantage of the new features in Windows 7 and Window Server 2008 R2, and reinforce Java and PHP interoperability with Windows Azure and Microsoft Silverlight."

You can get all the details on these four projects on Microsoft's Interoperability blog.

And while these projects sound interesting, there's another one underway that caught our attention: Microsoft has joined up with IBM, Zend Technologies, and others to work on a new open source, cloud interoperability project.

Called Simple API for Cloud Application Services, this project is designed to help create basic cloud applications that will run in all of the major cloud platforms. This would include the Amazon Web Services, even though Amazon is not part of the project. 

Approximately two years ago, online newspapers tore down their walled gardens, exposing many years' worth of content, once available only to those who paid. Year 2007 was a simpler, gentler time.

Then the world exploded into economic crisis.

Electronics superstore Best Buy announced its decision to acquire online music provider Napster for approximately US$ 121 million. The transaction is expected to close by the end of this year.

Apple, with its iPod and iTunes currently holding a big chunk of the digital music market, may soon see some competition.

Social Media moves so fast, its hard to keep up. Here’s the weeks news from the trenches in scan-friendly format.

This week:

• Facebook Flip-Flops Over New Design
• Enterprise Microblogger Yammer Scoops Techcrunch50 Top Prize
• New iTunes is Genius. Especially for those with half a brain.
• Google Apps on Blackberry (as discovered at RWW for Pastors)
• Google Mobile Search with My Location
• The Best of Friendfeed

Facebook Flip-flops Over New Design

The new Facebook UI is splitting opinion down the middle. Half of all users despise it. The other half merely really hate it. So it comes as no surprise that the company has postponed plans to impose the new design on all users from this week, and has murmered something about D-day being postponed for ‘a few more weeks.’

According to a recent Pew Internet and American Life Project study, Internet users are shifting their media consumption habits to downloading more podcasts.

Not many are aware of the immense value of marketing in education — that is, opening up the world of the classroom to the eyes of the public. Yet it’s often difficult to let visitors and prospective students catch a glimpse of what life is like in the labs or in seminars without causing major disruption or offsetting the curriculum.

Enter iTunes.