Apple Inks Deal with EMI, Cloud Music Almost Finalized

Cnet reports tonight Apple has inked a deal with EMI over the upcoming launch of the rumored cloud music service that is expected to be unveiled at the WWDC in June. Cnet also claims the last two remaining deals with Sony and Music Entertainment and Universal Music Group (Warner Music Group reportedly signed a deal last month) could be signed as early as next week.

Apple has signed a cloud-music licensing agreement with EMI Music and is very near to completing deals with Universal Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment, multiple music industry sources told CNET.

The negotiations between Sony Music Group and Universal Music Group could be wrapped up as early as next week, the sources said. What this means is that signed contracts with all four of the top four record companies will be in Apple’s hip pocket on June 6 when Apple kicks off the company’s Worldwide Developers Conference. The sources who spoke with CNET did not know when Apple would announce the deals or roll out the cloud service.

With Apple signing the four major music labels in the United States, the cloud music service the company has been working on might include a subscription-based system where users simply stream music they don’t actually own (like in Spotify), the possibility to automatically beam to the cloud purchases from the iTunes Store or then again, as many suggest, Apple may be simply looking to having full support from the music industry in order to avoid possible lawsuits and debates surrounding cloud products from Google and Amazon, also recently launched.

Cloud is rumored to be a big part of iOS 5 and OS X Lion, set to be previewed on June 6 at the WWDC.

WordPress iOS App Updated with Stats, Quick Photo, Fixes

The official WordPress app for iOS, available for iPhone and iPad and often criticized by many (including me) for its proverbial instability and lack of poweruser-oriented features, has been updated earlier today to include a new button to quickly insert a new photo – they call the feature Quick Photo – as well as stats for your WordPress blogs. The new Quick Photo functionality only works on the iPhone for now, and WordPress notes in the 2.8 changelog this may be the last update that supports older systems running iPhone OS 3. Quick Photo is clearly oriented to those users who maintain a photo-centric blog, as it’s meant to let you snap a picture as quickly as possible without even selecting the destination blog first. Stats, on the other hand, are a welcome addition that are enabled by default on WordPress.com blogs, but require the installation of the standalone plugin or Jetpack on self-hosted WordPress.org blogs. The WordPress developers write on the iOS blog:

Finally you’re able to check your blog’s statistics on the go. There are charts for Daily, Weekly, and Monthly page views, swipe over them to see the others. You can also see Daily Views by date, as well as top Post Views, Referrers, Search Terms, and Clicks for the past 7 days.

Last, the update also introduces localizations for 10 languages (Japanese, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish, Hebrew, German, Dutch, French, and Croatian) and bug fixes. WordPress says they’ve fixed 3/4 of the problems reported by users in the previous version, released in March. Get the app here.

Yahoo Messenger Updated, Brings Video Calling to iPad 2

Yahoo Messenger, the online communication tool that allows you to connect with your friends using Yahoo for real-time voice and video chat, free text messages and photo sharing, has received a major update on iOS that brings the app to version 2.1 and introduces official support for the iPad, with specific functionalities built for the iPad 2. The app now comes with a native iPad UI based on the usual standard of a landscape sidebar showing the buddy list, and main content on right to chat and send photos or videos through some icons in the top toolbar. More importantly, Yahoo is bringing voice and video calling to the iPad 2, though the company doesn’t specify on iTunes whether they also work on 3G. Other tools like fring certainly do, and pretty well. Yahoo does list, however, the devices compatible with the new features:

Voice is available for the iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad. Video is available for the iPhone 3GS/4, iPod Touch 4, and iPad 2.

The Yahoo Messenger app was updated back in October to include video calling on the iPhone. The new version is available now in the App Store, for free.

Angry Birds Reaches 200 Million Downloads→

Angry Birds Reaches 200 Million Downloads

At the paidContent Mobile conference today in New York City, Rovio “Mighty Eagle” Peter Vesterbacka announced Angry Birds has reached a total of 200 million downloads on all platforms. This figure includes the Angry Birds, Angry Birds Seasons and Angry Birds Rio games available on the iPhone (free and $0.99 version), iPad (free and $4.99 version) and Android handsets (free, ad-supported). BusinessInsider also reports other announcements from Vesterbacka, which will possibly extend the popularity of Rovio’s brand even more:

On top of the app’s success, Vesterbacka says an Angry Birds book will launch this summer with distribution through Barnes & Noble, Amazon, and Google. Plus, the company is working with animators for its own Angry Birds movie.

And then there’s the merchandise. Rovio has deals with manufacturers in China for Angry Birds gear such as lunchboxes and toys.

The number is impressive and I’m pretty sure it makes Angry Birds the most downloaded mobile game of all time, or at least the most download App Store title ever. In the past months, Rovio reported other notable figures such as 10 million downloads for Rio in 10 days, or the 200 million minutes people spend playing Angry Birds every day.

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OS X 10.6.7 Changes Finder Sidebar Behavior→

OS X 10.6.7 Changes Finder Sidebar Behavior

Adam C. Engst at TidBITS:

With Mac OS X 10.6.7, Apple not only messed up (and then fixed) font handling (see “OpenType PostScript Fonts Troublesome in 10.6.7,” 27 March 2011, and “Apple Releases Snow Leopard Font Update,” 26 April 2011), they also changed the way you remove items from the sidebar. Now, instead of just dragging items out, you must either Command-drag them out or Control-click them and choose Remove from Sidebar.

I’ve noticed the change too: I was trying to drag a folder out of the “Places” tab, but it wasn’t working. At first I thought I had to restart my Finder for some reason, but that didn’t work either. So I realized maybe something had changed since the 10.6.7 software update, and tried to CMD-drag like I would for items in the menubar. Items in the Finder’s sidebar now share the same behavior of draggable items in the top menubar; Engst believes the change was made after some complaints about accidental removals happening too often, but, frankly, I never removed an item from the Places tab by accident.

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Mac Mini Vault Tries To Host A Webpage On Apple TV 2G

Mac Mini Vault, a colocation service that allows you to host a website (or multiple ones) on a Mac Mini or Mac Mini Server located in their Chicago data center, is running an interesting experiment to see how a single webpage hosted on an Apple TV 2nd-gen would handle traffic and CPU load. The Apple TV isn’t of course meant for hosting webpages and running on high CPU usage, and in fact the device (with iOS 4.2.2) had to be jailbroken using Seas0npass to enable the installation of lighttpd and a web server.

One of the fun projects going on at Mac Mini Vault is our Apple TV webserver. As much as we ‘d love to see how many Apple TV’s we could mount into a data center cabinet, it will never be a sustainable service to offer. This project was a fun way to see how far we could take the A4 powered Apple TV. The Apple TV is running iOS 4.2.2 (obviously jailbroken) with lighttpd for a web server. You can see the webpage we set up by visiting atv.macminivault.com. We’ll keep an eye on the CPU load and watch the analytics to record how much traffic the Apple TV receives.

The Apple TV-powered webpage is available at atv.macminivault.com, and it’ll be interesting to see how the experiment will play out once curious readers hit the direct link.

Apple Opening A New Data Center in Silicon Valley

Data Center Knowledge reports Apple is adding a new data center in Silicon Valley, set to open in the third quarter of 2011 to provide “additional IT capacity” to Apple’s rumored new cloud services that include music, video, storage, and more. The new space, commissioned to DuPont Fabros Technology, is located in Santa Clara, California, and it’s smaller than the massive data center Apple has been building in Maiden, North Carolina, throughout 2010 and 2011.

Apple is expanding its Internet infrastructure with a new data center in Silicon Valley, as it prepares to bring additional server and storage capacity online later this year. The new server space, housed in a third-party facility, will be smaller than the huge iDataCenter that Apple has built in North Carolina.

DuPont Fabros disclosed the Santa Clara lease in its first quarter earnings, but did not reveal the name of the tenant, which is consistent with its policies. In a conference call with analysts, company executives described the tenant as a “Fortune 50 technology company with excellent credit.” But multiple industry sources have since confirmed that the tenant is Apple.

The website suggests that the wholesale data center space model might be convenient for Apple if they’re looking to deploy a new facility quickly in the next few months, “as wholesale space can be delivered more rapidly than building a new data center.” According to Data Center Knowledge, this new lease refers to a 11,000 square feet space, compared to the 500,000 square feet facility in North Carolina, which had been rumored to be set for an expansion at 1 million square feet as well.

DFT’s Santa Clara site will be built in two phases, each with 18.2 megawatts of capacity. When it is completed, the building will span 360,000 square feet, with a total of 176,000 square feet of space on a 42-inch raised floor, which allows cooling capacity for high-density server installations.

It’s not clear whether Apple has any expansion options for additional space at the facility. But many of DuPont Fabros’ largest tenants follow a pattern in which they lease space in the first phase of a data center, and later take additional space once the second phase is available.

It’s not clear at this point how the new data center is going to be used and if Apple is already planning an expansion by ordering more space; more details about DuPont Fabros and the Santa Clara facility can be found in the original report here.

In the past months, speculation had pegged Apple’s data center plans to be focused on a major MobileMe revamp, dubbed iCloud, to be announced at the upcoming WWDC as part of the next version of iOS and Mac OS X Lion. The North Carolina data center powering iTunes and MobileMe services was rumored to be ready for launch this Spring, but no additional details were provided by Apple on the facility’s official opening, leading many to believe work hasn’t been finalized yet. Back in April, a report also claimed Apple had ordered 12 petabytes of storage for iTunes video content, without mentioning, however, whether such a massive storage would be destined to streaming, or the existing iTunes Store infrastructure.

Final Fantasy Tactics for iPhone Launching This Summer, Coming to iPad Too

Originally announced at E3 2010, Final Fantasy Tactics for iPhone (a porting by Square Enix of the PSP game that was another porting from PSX) has gone through a series of “misunderstandings” and delays regarding the release date, which apparently was initially confirmed for September 15, 2010, but was later denied by Square Enix, who went on to say the game would come in Spring 2011. With June approaching and the game still nowhere to be found in the App Store, it looks like Square Enix won’t make it for a Spring launch, but this time the company has posted an update on the app’s official Facebook page, reassuring everyone that Final Fantasy Tactics will land on the iPhone between June and July, and that an iPad “HD” version is also in the works, although it will launch after the iPhone porting.

Assistant producer Shiina writes:

But now the development reaches the final step and we can see the actual schedule. Thus, YES, finally I can tell you when it will be released.

FFT: WoL will be on sale somewhere between late June - mid July. We have announced “It’s coming Spring 2011” last year so we’re now working pretty hard for the release in June because July is not spring anymore.

We’re also making the iPad version which supports 1024x768px HD resolutions.

No details on pricing have been revealed yet, and information on the iPad version is scarce. It’s good, however, to see the game finally approaching public release after a year of waiting – I played both the original FFT on my PSX and FFT:WOL on the PSP, and I can’t wait to see how Square Enix will redraw controls for multitouch, or simply add new content for iPhone owners. [via TUAW]