Webware

Apparently, Apple is willing to make concessions to the film industry to bolster iTunes' lackluster movie offerings.

BusinessWeek is reporting that Apple is close to signing distribution deals with most of the top movie studios that would give Apple access to newly released films.

The Financial Times reported last month that Apple has already signed an agreement with Twentieth Century Fox. BusinessWeek now says the company is nearing deals with Warner Bros., Paramount Pictures, and Lionsgate. The magazine suggested that some of the deals may be announced at the Macworld conference, which starts January 14.

While Apple has dominated music, it's been slow going in video.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs has had to overcome fears in Hollywood that the movie industry could end up like the music industry: handing over too much control to Jobs. Perhaps the best known example of this is the music industry's inability to get Jobs to allow flexible pricing for songs.

But according to BusinessWeek, Jobs is winning over the studios by sweetening the pot. Jobs once capped the price he was willing to pay for each movie sold through iTunes at $14, the magazine reported. He has now agreed to pay closer to the $17 wholesale price that Wal-Mart and other physical retailers pay.

Up until this point, iTunes hasn't offered iPod owners, with the video-equipped devices, much in the way of newly released moves. On iTunes, one can find new releases from Disney for $14.99 and older titles from other studios for $9.99. BusinessWeek is also reporting that Apple plans to charge $3.99 for 24-hour rentals.

In addition to the trouble with movie studios, at least one major TV network has also balked selling through iTunes. Late last year, NBC Universal announced that it would stop offering digital downloads via the iTunes store.

Looks like the "$240 million poke"--also known as the high-profile stake in Facebook that Microsoft acquired on Wednesday--may not have been the only deal-making. Forbes' Elizabeth Corcoran posted a quick blog entry saying that she'd heard two New York-based hedge funds had each handed over about $250 million to the cash-fueled social network. The Silicon Alley Insider notes that this makes sense, as rumors had pointed to a $750 million goal for the financing round in the first place.

Facebook representatives declined to comment on the matter.

Additionally, Fake Steve Jobs (who is really a Forbes reporter himself) also reported that the "hedgetards" are in on the deal, which would be unremarkable were it not for his coining of the hilarious term "hedgetard" (you know, in the same vein as "frigtard" or "freetard").

Vuvox is a handy slide show service we've taken a look at before, and yesterday it launched a new tool called Cut-Out Express that lets you cut away at pictures to add embedded photo slide shows. Like the rest of its tools, you can add shots from your hard drive or pull them in from other services like Flickr, Picasa Web albums, or any old RSS feed with photos in it. What makes Cut-Out neat, though, is its lasso tool, which intelligently lets you wrap around a shot like you would using a high-end photo-editing application. It doesn't have a "magnetic" mode, but there's a helpful vertical and horizontal line that tracks the pointer to help you guide around whatever you're lassoing.

The end result is a pleasingly cheesy open area where your photos will fade from one to the next--sure to be a hit with the social-networking crowd, or people who feel like having a little fun with shots of friends, family, or celebrities. Speaking of which, I've embedded a Cut-Out of a Steve Jobs keynote after the break using pictures of historically faked Apple products (via Macrumors Guides). The service also recommends you do the same with your pet's mouth, billboards, and graffiti. Cute.

On a side note, if you're planning on using Vuvox for photo sharing with your family, the service has a neat feature that lets you privatize your content channel. So unlike a service like Flickr, there's no registration or mutual friendships necessary on your recipient's behalf to see your pictures, while they remain unseen by everyone else. All you need to send out is the URL. Unfortunately this can't be done toggled on individual slide shows (yet), but you can add a separate public channel, letting you group together slide shows you'd like to keep separate from your openly shared work.

[via Go2Web2]

Cutout bits and pieces from your photos and add other photos inside them with Vuvox Cutout Express.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

The iPhone could be big. You heard it here first.

(Credit: James Martin/CNET News.com)

Today, during his keynote at WWDC 2007, Steve Jobs may have done the smartest thing in iPhone prehistory.

With two announcements that didn't receive any of the hype normally associated with the iPhone, Apple may have actually made good on its promise that the iPhone will be revolutionary. Much more revolutionary than pretty looks, a touch screen, a wide-screen iPod, or even visual voice mail.

So revolutionary, in fact, that it may have an impact on much more than just the mobile-phone industry. And they seemed so relatively unimportant at first glimpse...

The two smartest announcements in iPhone prehistory

1. A version of Apple's Safari browser has been released for Windows. (Download here.)

2. The "third-party iPhone apps" Steve Jobs alluded to weeks ago would be Web-based applications, not apps that run natively on the iPhone.

The second of these announcements sounded like a cop-out at first. After all, when Jobs mentioned opening the iPhone up to third-party applications, everyone got the impression he meant they'd actually run on the iPhone, not on a browser.

But here's why it looks so smart after a closer look.

... Read more

Apple's iTunes store began selling DRM-free songs from EMI on Wednesday.

DRM (digital rights management) software prevents owners from copying or freely using a digital file across multiple devices.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

As expected, all the songs from music label EMI that are sold on iTunes are now available in DRM-free versions. Shoppers have the option to purchase either a 256kbps AAC-encoded DRM-free song for $1.29 via iTunes Plus, or the usual 128kbps AAC-encoded DRM-version for 99 cents.

"We expect more than half of the songs on iTunes will be offered in iTunes Plus versions by the end of this year," Apple CEO Steve Jobs said in a statement. No one at Apple was available for live comment on Wednesday morning.

Previously purchased EMI songs can be upgraded to the DRM-free version for 30 cents per song, or $3 per album.

EMI artists in the deal include Coldplay, The Rolling Stones and Frank Sinatra. The deal excludes Beatles songs.

In February, Jobs released an open letter asking that record companies consider going DRM-free. Apple and EMI announced in April that a DRM-free deal was in the works and that it would exclude Beatles songs.

In order to use iTunes Plus, people must download iTunes 7.2, the latest version of the software.

eMusic already offers DRM-free songs, but its catalog has been limited to mostly independent labels.