Entertainment hourly.
For about a month this fall, Starbucks and Apple are teaming up to bring customers free music. Between October 2 and November 7, Starbucks customers can receive "Song of the Day" cards redeemable on iTunes for a complimentary song that has been selected by Starbucks Entertainment. According to Reuters, "Starbucks said it will give away 1.5 million downloads per day for a total of more than 50 Read more
Here's something we didn't know earlier this week when we were talking about the spat between NBC and Apple's iTunes Music Store. According to Variety, Apple has been telling TV networks and studios that it would like to cut the price of episode downloads to 99 cents, essentially half of their current $1.99 price tag. That would make an episode of "The Office" cost the same as the latest Kanye Read more
Although Kane Kramer developed the first MP3 player in the 1970s, it wasn't until 20 years later that MP3 players hit the consumer market. For that we have Nathan Schulhof to thank. In the early 1990s, he envisioned a "portable device [that] would allow the selection, retrieval, storage, and playback of audio content delivered to the device via the Internet." The founder and CEO of Audio Read more
The iTunes store offers lots of content, but with the separate pages for movies, TV, apps, and books, it can be a pain for a casual user like Mom to navigate. This Mother's Day, help Mom make the most of her digital media with a walk-through of the iTunes Store's most important functions. Update Mom's iTunes: If Mom's still running on 6.0, the first step is updating the program to its current Read more
After years of speculation about a storage product, Google announced today its cloud storage solution — Google Drive. In an effort to seamlessly blend use for those already entrenched in Google Docs, documents are automatically built into Drive so that files can be collaborated on in real time. Users can give feedback on anything shared, including PDFs or video files, not just Google Docs; all Read more
Steve Jobs introduced iCloud at today's WWDC keynote presentation, which promises to move the center of your digital life to the cloud. Essentially, all of the info you receive on your iDevices (iPhone, iPad, iPod Touches, and MacBooks) is sent to the cloud first then gets pushed down into your devices, so you're completely synced at all times. Further, iCloud "just works" with all of your apps. Read more
Steve Jobs introduced iCloud at the Worldwide Developers Conference to an excited audience earlier this week. We've been waiting for a cloud-based service from Apple ever since it bought Lala back in 2009, and while iCloud isn't exactly what we had expected, it certainly has its finer points. iCloud allows you to automatically sync all of your digital info (including photos, books, music, Read more
I got my invite for Google Music Beta last night and took a quick tour around to get my feet wet. In case you missed it, Google Music Beta is a cloud storage service that works across Android devices. Awesome features include wireless syncing (from your computer, to laptop, to smartphone, to tablet, all of your music syncs automatically without the need to plug in and upload), and iTunes Read more
We've gotten giddy over Libratone's sleek speakers before, but since the goods were only available in the UK, we could only dream of a Scandinavian-influenced home stereo experience. Design geeks will be happy to hear Libratone has officially brought its minimalist look to the US with the launch of the wireless Live and Lounge speakers. They use Apple AirPlay technology to stream music from their Read more
We've been waiting for Apple and Google to launch cloud music services for a while now, but Amazon beat them both to the punch last night with the launch of Amazon Cloud Drive and Cloud Player — an online storage system for your music, movies, photos, and documents. Coming with 5GB of free storage, you can upgrade for $1 per GB ($20 for 20GB a year), but Amazon is offering a pretty sweet deal Read more
