Engadget has Creative Zen Vision about Microsoft "breaking some new ground" with a… Battlebot (?!) walking around with Sony Ericsson's new W600 Walkman Phone and chatting up how the Nintendo Revolution won't support HD.

AdJab covers AutoTrader's attacks, on Heinz one-liners, marooned on Gilligan's Island and then

Bill Gates launched a bunch of new products today in Los Angeles at the "Digital Entertainment Anywhere" event. It was basically an event aimed at killing iTunes, which as we all know is locked down (i.e. you can't take your iTunes music anywhere you want—not by a long shot).

Engadget has a ton of coverage, including a recording I made (aka an MP3, aka a Podcast) of the event here: http://www.engadget.com/entry/6832728859549251/

From the "Music is a Platform"

" Panel at the Web 2.0 conference.

The panelists:
Hank Barry, Partner, Hummer Winblad
Mike Caren, Senior Vice President of A&R, Atlantic Records
Eddy Cue, Vice President, Applications and Internet Services, Apple
Danger Mouse
Michael Weiss, CEO, Streamcast

DJ Danger Mouse (right) talked about using sony's Acid software to make the grey album. I'll have the Mp3 of this discussion up in a little bit. DJDM talked about using a cracked version of the software and making the Grey Album because he had nothing to loose if he got sued.

Micheal Weiss is pitching a new website called Neonet (can't find the domain) that he says is a next generation P2P search technology.

Here is part one of the discussion in MP3. Part two is coming up.

... more to come… the panel is still going on….

Apple said they had 70% of the legal market. Apple thinks the marketplace wants an a la cart downloads. Hank pointed out that artists get 10-14% of retail (i.e. a la cart) sales, all you can eat licenses mean the labels have to pay the artists half. So, the labels don't want to do it.

From the Web 2.0 conference:

Hank Barry just went off on fighting the INDUCE ACT, following Mark Cuban's comments last night.

Here is the MP3 of his comments.

PT's How To Tuesday's over at Engadget.com takes on Apple's DRM (digital rights management) technology and explains how people are freeing up the music they have paid for.

The purpose of hymn is to allow you to exercise your fair-use rights under copyright law. It allows you to free your iTunes Music Store purchases from their DRM restrictions with no sound quality loss. These songs can then be played outside of the iTunes environment, even on operating systems not supported by iTunes. It works on Mac OS X, many unix(-ish) variants and on Windows.

More info on iTunes DRM from hell posted at LawGeek.

I had no choice but to post this… the Onion rocks. 

WSJ on Apple's recent quarter:

Apple Computer Inc. reported a sharply higher fiscal second-quarter profit on strong revenue growth, helped by sales of its iPod music player.

The Cupertino, Calif., personal-computer maker posted net income of $46 million, or 12 cents a share, up from $14 million, or four cents a share, in the year-ago quarter. The recent quarter, which ended March 27, included a restructuring charge of $7 million; excluding the charge, the company had a profit of 14 cents a share.

Revenue climbed 29% to $1.91 billion from $1.48 billion a year ago.

In January, Apple said it expected earnings of eight to 10 cents a share and revenue of about $1.8 billion.

Apple said it shipped 749,000 Macintosh computer units and 807,000 iPod music players during the quarter. Gross margin was 27.8%, down from 28.3% a year ago. International sales accounted for 43% of revenue.

"We experienced growth in most areas of our business — most dramatically in selling a record 807,000 iPods, up more than 900% over the prior year," said Steve Jobs, Apple's chief executive, in prepared remarks.

Used BitTorrent a little bit when it first came out and was a bit underwhelmed. It didn't work, there weren't a lot of places to find files, etc.

I decided to take another look at it when a designer friend of mine was telling me that he has the latest version of every single piece of design software on his Mac compliments of bit torrent (yes, I know it's wrong… not the point I'm trying to make, the point is coming :-).

Part I: I installed bit torrent and immediately noticed an amazing new trend (prob. not new to all of you) of people posting dozens of albums in one RAR file for download. Huge file sizes in the 500 to 4,000 meg size range. The last season of seven seasons of Southpark, every Nirvanna album and here is another file with every Howard Stern radio show from March in one file.

In one click you grab one really well organized, clean and deep sets of files—scary.

Part II: A couple of month ago I got the Gateway Connected DVD player. For $195 it connects via WiFi to my desktop and I can hit the My Music or My Videos button on the remote control and pull up those directories on my hard drive (in the other room).

Part III: Today I moved into my new apartment in Santa Monica and was faced with the standard $100 month cable/dish bill and I'm thinking "dang, I only watch less then a half dozen TV shows and they are all here on bit torrent… maybe I should save the $1,200 a year and just download the shows and watch them via my Gateway Connected DVD player?"

The Point/Question: How soon before you'll be able-with one click-download every prime-time TV show or last year's top 500 CDs in one click?!

(Note: This is not a trick question, I have yet to find a file containing that much content—however, I did find a file with last weeks top 100 singles that someone put together in one nice package).

As many of us heard at SXSW.COM this week Andrew is working on pulling together RSS feeds of files with the P2P file sharing system Bit Torrent. It would be cool if someone I trusted with music advice started an RSS feed called "Song a day" that would go find me the song that the person mentioned. The person making the RSS feed would not be involved in the crime of downloading the song, just making the list. Then the people reading the Feed would be saved the step of cutting and pasting the song names, launching their P2P software, finding the files, etc.

Andrew Grumet, a freelance Web consultant, posted instructions for his demo system on his weblog. Grumet's demo consists of one small piece of software: an upgrade for the Radio RSS reader that enables it to use BitTorrent to automatically download enormous files — in the case of Grumet's demo, a set of public-domain music recordings listed on the LegalTorrents website.