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Later this month, iPhone and iPod application developers can expect to see sales drastically increase by as much as 300 or 400 percent over the course of a couple days.

They'll also be unable to change their applications, change marketing materials or download sales reports during much of this time. iTunes Connect, the interface that allows developers to manage all their applications in the App Store, will be unavailable from December 23 - December 28, 2009.

European music service Spotify is one of the most highly anticipated applications coming to the U.S. The service, best described as a streaming music version of iTunes, consists of both desktop software as well as complementary mobile applications for Apple's iPhone and the Google Android platform. Already, the service is wildly popular overseas in its current markets which include the United Kingdom, Sweden, France, Spain, Norway and Finland where it has accumulated over 5 million users. There, the company offers two versions of its service - a free application and a premium, ad-free subscription version.

According to recent reports, however, Spotify may do things a little differently when it reaches the States. Says Andres Sehr, Spotify's global community manager, the company is considering going the "freemium" route for the U.S. market.

When Radiohead keyboardist / guitarist Jonny Greenwood shrugs off the issue of audio fidelity, indie musicians should take note. Given that Radiohead is perhaps one of the biggest proponents of alternative music monetization, it's ironic that Greenwood is discrediting one of the industry's key price differentiators. Musicians with tracks on iTunes, Amazon and DIY stores like Bandcamp have often chosen to price MP3s at lower rates while higher quality recordings have fetched more per track. In a recent article with The New Yorker's Sasha Frere-Jones, Greenwood admits there is little reason for the MP3 generation to look for a higher quality experience.

Spotify CEO Daniel Ek has the Midas touch. In anticipation of the company's US launch, the on-demand music streaming site is finalizing what is rumored to be a $50 million dollar round of investments. According to the Financial Times, if Spotify closes the round with Wellington Partners and Li Ka Shing Foundation, the Swedish company will be valued at $250 million dollars.

It looks like live streaming could be coming to a future generation of the iPhone and/or iPod devices. We've just come across this IETF submission containing Apple's spec for HTTP Live Streaming which describes a protocol for transmitting unbounded streams of multimedia over HTTP. According to the document, the protocol supports encryption of the media and the provision of alternate versions of the stream. The media data can also be transmitted after it's created, allowing it to be received in near real-time.

Could this mean live streaming is coming to our iPhones?

"The future of 'networked warfare' requires each soldier to be linked electronically to other troops as well as to weapons systems and intelligence sources," says a new report in Newsweek, and the product of choice appears to be the iPod Touch.

According to Newsweek, both the iPod Touch and to a lesser degree the iPhone are increasingly being used by the U.S. military because of their versatility, ease of use and comparative low cost.

Skip the lecture, download the podcast. That's probably not what university professors tell their students, but perhaps they should. New psychological research conducted by Dani McKinney, a psychologist at the State University of New York in Fredonia, shows that students who only listened to podcasts of lectures achieved substantially higher exam results than those who attended class in person.

Earlier this week, the open-source music player built on Mozilla technology, Songbird, finally made its 1.0 release. After being in development for two years, this version feels like the kind of solid media player we've been expecting and hoping for all along. Although nothing is entirely bug-free, this release worked smoothly, with both performance and stability seeming greatly improved. Combine that with its extendibility through the the use of add-ons, and you'll find Songbird has a lot of promise as a worthwhile iTunes replacement.

If you have an iPod Touch, then you know the benefit of finding apps that work offline. But some iPhone owners, too, need offline access from time-to-time. Maybe you spend your commute in an underground subway or perhaps your office building has shoddy cell coverage, or maybe you just want to use your iPhone on a plane...whatever the reason, offline access to apps is still a necessary evil these days.

At Apple's "Let's Rock" special event today, Steve Jobs introduced a new version of iTunes, the availability of HD TV shows for the American market, a new design for the iPod Nano and iPod touch, as well as a major update for the iPhone/iPod touch firmware. According to Jobs, Apple has sold 160 million iPods worldwide and now holds 73.4% of the market in the US.

The iPhone's memory might be too small to carry your complete music collection with you, but thanks to a growing number of streaming music apps, you don't have to rely on your local storage anymore to have an ample supply of new music to listen to.

And thanks to a new application from Simplify Media, you can now even access all that music from your desktop while on the road.

Many of us are wondering what Apple has in store for their annual expo, Macworld, which begins this Monday. Last year it was the iPhone, two years ago it was the Intel iMac, the year before that the iPod shuffle and the Mac mini. Earlier this week Josh Catone wrote an excellent post, listing 9 specific Macworld predictions and assigning a percentage of probability to each.

In the following poll, we've included each of Josh's predictions - and also added some more from RWW commenters.

While CES is raging in Las Vegas, most of us are wondering what Apple has in store for their own annual expo, Macworld, which kicks off a week from now. We've combed through some of the top Mac rumors sites to pick out our favorite Macworld predictions and assigned a percentage of probability to each.

Last year it was the iPhone, two years ago it was the Intel iMac, the year before that the iPod shuffle and the Mac mini. While clearly, not every year is as exciting as the last, Apple always has something in store for us. History would suggest that this year's announcement won't be as earth shattering as the iPhone last year, but one never really knows what the Great and Mysterious Jobs has planned.

A lot of things happened in 2007 that seemed to threaten Apple's stranglehold on the digital music market. Microsoft launched its new Zune MP3 players, which received mostly glowing reviews, and they kept their installed user base happy with major firmware updates for old players. Meanwhile, Amazon launched a major DRM-free MP3 download service at a cut-rate (compared to Apple's). But generally, the facts still point to Apple dominance for awhile to come.