According to an interview published  by paidContent, music streaming service Rdio will soon expand in “all countries” in Europe, making its digital music catalog available to more users outside the US, Canada, Germany, Brazil, Portugal, Spain, Australia, New Zealand, and Denmark, where it is currently available.

There are some major competitors in Europe,” Rdio’s partnerships and internationalisation VP Scott Bagby tells paidContent. “We are a couple of years behind others in terms of expansion there.

“But Europe is an immediate focus. We’ll be expanding in all countries in Europe – within the next few months, you’ll see several pop up.

Like competitors Spotify, MOG, and Deezer (the latter very popular in Europe), Rdio allows users to pay a monthly fee to gain unlimited access to a vast library of songs and albums by artists whose labels and publishers have agreed to make music available for streaming. That isn’t always the case, as some notable exceptions have showed in the past, but new data from the US music industry suggests that music subscriptions are growing, proving to be a viable alternative to standard digital downloads. Rdio, however, puts greater focus on the social aspect of music discovery and collection, allowing its users to “follow” other Rdio subscribers and build playlists they can share and collaborate directly on the site, or using the native apps the service has developed for iOS, Android, and OS X. With the recent launch of New Rdio, the company has set out to fundamentally rebuild the way users interact with the service, making it easier to access playlists, recommendations from the network, and people to follow.

Like with most streaming services founded in the US, Rdio hasn’t been able to obtain rights to launch internationally since Day One, preferring to stagger launches in other countries throughout the past year. According to VP Scott Bagby, no timeframe has been set, but Asia will be another focus for the company after a wider European rollout.

As part of today’s Apple announcements, the company has now updated its online Store with a new Micro USB adapter, which will allow you to use third-party micro USB cables to charge an iPhone 3G, 3GS, iPhone 4 or iPhone 4S.

The Apple iPhone Micro USB Adapter allows you to use third-party micro USB cables and chargers to sync or charge your iPhone. Simply connect your iPhone to the Micro USB Adapter, then connect a micro USB cable or charger to the Micro USB Adapter.

The iPhone Micro USB Adapter is available here and ships in 8 business days. The iPhone 4S will be released on October 14th, with pre-orders starting this Friday. The Micro USB Adapter has been made available on several European stores, presumably following a decision of the European Commission last year. This new little dongle is £8 in the UK, and €9 in other countries. Currently, the US Apple online Store hasn’t been updated with the iPhone Micro USB Adapter.

Apple just posted a press release confirming that the iPad 2 will launch in 25 more countries this Friday, thus denying the rumors of a delay we heard in these past days. The iPad 2 will be available at Apple retail stores and authorized resellers at 5 PM, with online orders starting at 1 AM. The device will be released in Hong Kong, Korea, Singapore and “other countries” in April.

Apple® today announced that iPad® 2, the second-generation of its third post-PC device, will go on sale in 25 additional countries this Friday, March 25. iPad 2 will be available at Apple retail stores and select Apple Authorized Resellers at 5 p.m. local time, and online through the Apple Store® (www.apple.com) beginning at 1 a.m. Apple today also announced that all models of iPad 2 will be available in Hong Kong, Korea, Singapore and additional countries in April.

This is the Italian pricing (and hopefully the same of other countries with Euro currency): €479,00 for the WiFi 16 GB model, €579,00 for the WiFi 32 GB model and €679,00 for WiFi 64 GB. The WiFi + 3G models will be available for €599,00, €699,00 and €799,00.

UK pricing: £399.00 for the 16GB model, £479.00 for the 32GB model, £559.00 for the 64GB model. Wi-Fi + 3G  models will be available for £499.00, £579.00 and £659.00.

Australian pricing: iPad 2 WiFi: 16GB – $579;  32GB – $689;    64GB – $799;  iPad 2 WiFi + 3G: 16GB – $729;   32GB – $839;    64GB – $949.

Overall, it seems like the iPad 2 is cheaper than the iPad 1 across Europe and Australia, a clever move considering Apple priced the iPad 2 just as the iPad 1 in the United States. Press release below.

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Last week several blogs noted that on Apple’s Czech website the iPad 2 was set to launch on April, rather than March as Apple had previously announced at the iPad 2 media event. On the website, Apple wrote “V prodeji od 25 dubna”, which roughly translates to “Coming April 25″. That was a month after Apple’s promised release date, and many speculated it was a sign of the company delaying the launch of the iPad 2 across Europe due to supply constraints.

But it looks like it was just a translation error by Apple’s website design team. The webpage has been updated and now reports “V prodeji od 25 brezna” — which is March 25. The release date that Apple announced and, apparently, was never meant to change.

The iPad 2 will come out later this week in 25 countries (launch was delayed in Japan) and, from what we’re hearing, it’ll follow the steps of the US launch with afternoon availability on Friday and same prices of the original iPad.  [Thanks, Krystian]

The iPad 2 will be released on March 11 in the United States. Other countries will follow on March 25. Prices start at $499 for the base model, same of iPad 1. Table below.

A report by RegHardware based on data from service StatCounter reveals that Apple’s iOS is still dominating the smartphone usage in Europe, in spite of its “gentle decline”. StatCounter isn’t of course installed on any website available on the internet, but it provides good indication of trends in the mobile space thanks to its 3 million tracked webpages.

Europe as a whole clearly favours iOS – its market share has run between 50 per cent and 45 per cent between January 2010 and January 2011 – which is well ahead of nearest rivals Symbian, BlackBerry and Android.

It’s no surprise to see the decline in Symbian usage – any more than it is to see the rise in Android mobile browsing, but BlackBerry usage certainly appears to have peaked, hitting 18 per cent and then falling back. And while Apple’s share is trending downward, it’s a very gentle decline.

UK stats provided by StatCounter also gives us a glimpse at the rapid increase of Android’s marketshare, while BlackBerry OS surpassed iOS’ web traffic in the last few months of 2010 in the UK. iOS and Android are clearly shaping up to be the two most important and relevant mobile platforms for years to come, with RIM’s BlackBerry and Nokia’s Symbian now left behind to generate lower numbers.

The number of tablets coming out in the next months running Google’s Android and Nokia’s adoption of Windows Phone 7 for its future handsets will likely affect the overall OS usage in the mobile environment, but analysts expect iOS to remain dominant throughout all 2011 with the release of the next-generation iPhone and an eventual price drop of the current-gen iPhone 4.

Apple’s recently announced subscriptions for content-based iOS apps have caused a stir in the publishing and development community due to the 30% cut the Cupertino company takes off every recurring payment and the impossibility for publishers to insert in their iPhone and iPad applications links to alternative web stores.

The Wall Street Journal reports U.S. and European antitrust enforcers “have begun looking at” Apple’s new subscription policy, and whether it may violate laws that regulate the sell of digital subscriptions in online marketplaces. This renewed interest in Apple’s iTunes payment platform may not evolve into a formal investigation or “action against the company”, the WSJ reports, but it appears that Apple has attracted regulators across the United States and Europe.

A spokeswoman for the European Commission, the European Union’s executive arm, said Thursday that the commission was aware of the new subscription service and was “carefully monitoring the situation.

Apple and representatives of the FTC and Justice Department declined to comment. The new subscription system, officially announced by Apple earlier this week, allows content publishers to set up recurring weekly, monthly or yearly subscriptions in their iOS apps. Users can subscribe with just one tap through their iPhones and iPads and manage subscriptions from their mobile devices and iTunes account, which relies on the same credit card information used to purchase songs, movies, books and apps sold by Apple in its iTunes Store. Several companies have expressed their concerns this week regarding Apple’s 30% commission on every transaction.

Antitrust officials in the U.S. and abroad may be hard-pressed to conclude that Apple’s 30% commission is excessive, antitrust experts said, partly because it will be difficult to determine a benchmark commission rate for digital subscriptions. “The European Commission has been reluctant in the past to second-guess pricing as it is a complex exercise, and the commission does not want to become a price regulator,” said Damien Geradin, a professor of competition law at Tilburg University in the Netherlands.

Last year, the FTC was reportedly looking into Apple’s App Store guidelines that forced developers to create applications for iPhones and iPads using only the provided programming tools, but no formal action was taken afterwards.

Back in August, the European Commission formally approved a policy that required all smartphones to adopt a standard, universal micro-USB charger instead of dedicated ones shipped by all major smartphones companies such as Apple, LG, Nokia and Samsung. Today, the European Standards Organization Cen-Cenelec-Etsi officially approved the request from the European Commission (Ansa news agency, italian) and published the standards that smartphones makers will have to adopt in Europe starting January 2011.

The European Commission is now expecting the first generation of standard micro-USB-enabled smartphones to become available “in the first months of 2011″. This includes devices from the 13 companies that signed the agreement in 2009: Apple, Motorola, LG, Nec, Nokia, Samsung and Sony Ericsson are among those companies.

Put simply, this change will allow users to charge their smartphones using a single, universal micro-USB connector. According to the European Commission, this will lead to a better user experience and less environmental damages thanks to the lack of multiple and different chargers.

It is unknown whether Apple will introduce a micro-USB charger in the next generation iPhone and iPad 3G (data-enabled devices are included in the new policy, too), although it seems likely at this point. Apple might as well delay the availability of universal chargers in its devices until 2012, but the European Commission seems to believe all major companies will agree to the policy and update their charging systems. If Apple will have to introduced a micro-USB charger in Europe, we speculate that the U.S. market will face a similar change as well.

Even though I still haven’t managed to see the popular Renault iAd in any app (yet I grabbed some screenshots of the Tron one yesterday), it looks like Apple keeps on signing advertisers for its European iAd service.

According to MarketingWeek, Unilever’s Lynx Excite (a body spray) will go live with a “fresh” new campaign on Apple’s iAd next week. We assume it’ll be an iPhone campaign, as the one Disney launched for Tron on the iPad was a “demo” of interactive advertisements to come on the tablet in 2011. You may remember Unilever was one of the partners Apple mentioned when they announced iAds were coming to Europe. (more…)