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When the Palm Pre debuted, one of its most useful features was its ability to sync with Apple's iTunes software. Unfortunately, how it went about doing this was a little bit underhanded: it pretended to be an iPhone. The most recent version of the hack - yes, there were several - was made possible by Palm's use of Apple's USB hardware vendor code provided by the USB Implementers Forum, an industry standards group. The Pre simply used Apple's code so that iTunes would see the Pre as an Apple device. Apple of course, was not happy, and purposefully broke this functionality in subsequent iTunes software updates. Palm responded by complaining to the Forum, but the group took Apple's side.

Now, finally, the Apple/Palm war seems to have ended. With the latest update to Palm Pre's webOS software, the company has come up with a new tactic altogether: forget about iTunes, use Amazon instead.

Even though Apple launched a major redesign of iTunes yesterday, searching the iTunes App Store is still a bit of a hassle, especially because iTunes lacks convenient options to filter apps by price, category, or release date. Given the amount of apps available in the store, even Apple's new Genius feature for the App Store isn't likely to make finding new apps much easier. UQuery, however, sets out to change all of this by indexing all the apps in the store and making this index available through a web-based search engine.

Steve Jobs returned to a standing ovation at Apple's annual iPod event today, where Apple introduced version 3.1 of the iPhone OS and the next version of iTunes. With iTunes 9, Apple introduces a Genius-like recommendation feature for apps and 30,000 premade ringtones for $1.29 in iTunes. Version 9 of iTunes has also seen a major redesign. The application and the iTunes store now look much cleaner. Apple also introduced 'iTunes LPs' that will bring liner notes and artwork to digital albums (the much rumored 'Cocktail' feature), as well as app management for the iPhone and iPod touch that is built in to iTunes.

Paul McCartney's whooping encouragement, Lennon's calm breaths and Harrison's pensive plucking - if you're a Fab Four fan, you already know that tomorrow marks the official launch of the Beatle's remastered catalogue. But to further fan the flames of excitement, Yoko Ono spilled the beans that the discography will also finally appear in the iTunes store. According to 9 to 5 Mac, Ono told Sky News that the entire Beatles back catalogue will be available for download in conjunction with tomorrow's Apple event. While the post has since been removed, Twitter has been a aflutter with rumors. The long awaited event will also happen with the release of The Beatles: Rockband.

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.

An unconventional wedding march in Saint Paul, Minnesota, sent sparks across the web. Not only was it a celebration of couple
Jill Peterson and Kevin Heinz's eternal union, but it was a shift in how copyright owners can interact with unlicensed content users. After being uploaded to YouTube only 12 days ago, an elaborate wedding dance routine to Chris Brown's "Forever" has already garnered more than 12 million views. And according to the YouTube blog, rather than blocking usage of their unlicensed property, Sony instead used Google's tracking tools to monetize.

In an unsurprising move, Apple is said to be working with major record labels to provide an "interactive album" to consumers. The company is rumored to be working with EMI, Sony, Warner and Universal to bundle photos, lyric sheets, liner notes and videos with album purchases in the iTunes store. According to the FInancial Times, the move is meant to increase album sales. Nevertheless, a number of critics have already argued that the attempt will be ill-fated. While it's true that "interactive" music material has already been executed in various iterations, Apple's move may have a extremely positive affect on the music industry as a whole.

Earlier today, Apple announced that iPhone and iPod touch users have now downloaded over 1.5 billion applications. According to Apple, there are now also over 100,000 developers in the iPhone Developer Program and over 65,000 apps in the store. The number of actual iPhone developers might be a bit lower than Apple reports, as a lot of people only joined the paid version of the program to get their hands on the betas of the iPhone 3.0 OS, but there can be little doubt that the App store is a runaway success, both for Apple and developers. Given this huge success of the App Store, it is worth thinking about the factors that contributed to the App Store's success and what Apple could do to make the store even better.

In order to compete with the iPhone, you not only have to have a multi-touch interface and a slew of apps, you also have to offer the music and media that the iPhone provides thanks to its ability to sync with iTunes. For Google's Android mobile OS, the music comes courtesy of Amazon's MP3 Store which is preloaded on G1 phones. But more recently, Palm seemingly trumped Android when they revealed how their new Pre smartphone would bring music to the device: it pretends to be an iPod. Apple surely couldn't have been happy about that news and today, they're letting the world know. The Cupertino-based company has just issued a thinly veiled threat to owners of "unsupported third-party digital media players," stating that the players may not work with newer versions of iTunes. Yep, Palm Pre, they're looking at you.

Mufin, a music recommendation service we looked at a few times in the past, just released a stand-alone music player for Windows that combines some of the most interesting features of Mufin's online service and iTunes plugin into one coherent desktop application. While it looks and acts like a standard music jukebox, Mufin Player's most important new feature is that gives you a new way to manage and sort your music collection based solely on the similarity between songs.

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.

The Republic Project, a new online music business, officially launched its service this morning. At its core, the Republic Project reinvents the special edition music box set for the digital age. Users who pre-order albums on the service will get access to exclusive behind the scenes video shot by the band while recording the new album, access to artist blogs, as well as additional 'fan only' content like live chats and access to rare tracks. The albums on the Republic Project will be available as DRM-free MP3s.

Marvel Entertainment - home to characters like Spider-Man, the X-Men, Iron Man, and the Hulk - has announced plans to release a series of "motion comics" via iTunes. Introduced at New York Comic Con, the new format would have the iPod- and iPhone-bound digital books taking on characteristics of both print and animation with audio and motion enhancing the typical panel-based format of print.

Apple's App Store within the iTunes store has revolutionized the way users expect to find and install applications on their mobile phones, but it is also a bit of a resource hog and it often takes quite a while before pages finally load.

Now, however, thanks to an online version of the App Store which scrapes the content of the store in iTunes, you can quickly browse for applications, read reviews, and see screenshots from any computer that has access to the Internet without ever having to open iTunes.

From the R&D Labs at Ricoh, there comes a new QR code creation tool called iCandy. With this application, you can easily create QR codes that automatically launch and begin playing your music in iTunes. If you don't already own the song, scanning the QR code will prompt you to purchase it from either iTunes, Amazon, or Rhapsody. In addition to iCandy's music-related features, the app can also create codes that take you to any web site with a URL, perfect for bands wishing to promote their MySpace page, Facebook fan page, YouTube video, or anything else on the web.

Welcome to the first Weekly Wrapup of 2009 - and a very happy new year to all of our readers! First up we look back at our top web products of 2008, then we look forward to 2009 with our annual Web Predictions. In product news this week, Apple announced it will remove DRM from iTunes, Twitter had a major security scare, and we spotted some Semantic Web technology in Google search results. In the first RWW Live of 2009 we discussed how startups can survive in a down economy, Alex Iskold wrote about the growing importance of the digital world, and we looked at a report showing Apple's dominance of the Mobile Web. Also check the latest in our Enterprise Channel and Jobwire, our new product which tracks hires in tech and new media.

At the Macworld 2009 keynote today, Apple announced that by the end of this quarter, all 10 million songs available on iTunes will be DRM free [Digital Rights Management]. As of today, 8 million songs will be DRM free, with the other 2 million done by end of Q1 09. This is long overdue, especially considering that Steve Jobs wrote an open letter to the music industry in February 2007 asking them to abolish DRM. Since that time, many of Apple's key competitors have gone DRM free or have significantly loosened the restrictions - Amazon in September 07, Rhapsody in June 08, Yahoo Music in July 08, and Walmart in October 08, to mention just some. So it's great to see the market leader in online music, Apple, actively killing off DRM too.

These days, everybody's talking about cloud computing - the notion that computing's future lies in web-based applications and services and not in software tied to the desktop. After years of web app releases, we now have many solid alternatives to desktop tools ranging from office document creation tools to photo editors. Yet still, some programs remained tied to the desktop with seemingly no plans to move elsewhere. iTunes is one of those programs.

We don't really expect Apple to create a web-based iTunes anytime soon. Why should they? The company's iPods and iPhones dominate the mp3 player market and are locked down so that they, in theory, could only work with the company's iTunes software.

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.