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I'll never forget when I first discovered Napster. I was in high school and had heard about it from a friend. As an avid music fan, I was delighted to suddenly find myself with access to a seemingly limitless trove of songs, some of which were previously available only on $40 CD-R bootlegs in the back of record shops where they also sold paraphernalia strictly designed for smoking tobacco and only tobacco.

I never abandoned purchasing music all together, but the MP3 struck me as a far more convenient format than the compact disc, and Napster gave me quick and easy access to a world of MP3's. When Radiohead's "Kid A" showed up on Napster weeks before the CD was available in stores, what was I supposed to do? Ignore it?

Three years after being bought by Best Buy, online music subcription service Napster has been acquired by rival company Rhapsody. The financial terms of the deal have not been disclosed.

The acquisition will give Rhapsody Napster's paying subscribers as well as "certain other assets" including Napster's IP portfolio. The companies' announcement did not divulge the current number of Napster subscribers, but it's understood to be at least half of Rhapsody's 700,000 subscribers.

Amazon has just launched a suite of music products that allow users to store their tracks online and them stream them over the Web or to any Android device courtesy of the Amazon MP3 mobile application. The launch has the tech world abuzz, not only because Amazon beat Apple and Google to the punch, both of whom are reportedly working on digital lockers of their own, but because Amazon hasn't even received the record labels' permission to host these tracks on its servers as of yet.

But is Amazon's cloud-based music storage service really all that innovative? Some journalists and analysts are saying it's not. Do you agree?

Former Napster employee and serial entrepreneur Wayne Chang recently discovered a security glitch on Twitter that had left 1.5 million support tickets exposed, complete with names and passwords. Chang worked with the team at Twitter to resolve the problem but the story is a lesson in why customers should be proactive with particular sensitivities to the risks in using Twitter or any general, free service.

It also shows the benefits of working with services that use third party support programs such as Zendesk that track issues in case a flaw is discovered.

"It's not lost on me that the future of innovation is in the minds of the people sitting in this room," said angel investor Ron Conway, addressing a crowd full of entrepreneurs at Startup School today. One of the 11 speakers at today's event, co-sponsored by Y Combinator and Stanford University's BASES.

Known as the premier angel investor, Conway admitted that he had fretted about what the content for today's lecture should be, but with some urging from YC's Paul Graham, Conway opted to simply tell a few stories of how he had met a number of today's strongest tech companies: Napster, Google, Facebook, and Twitter.

Napster, the once peer-to-peer music sharing service turned pay service, has finally entered the mobile music market for Apple users with today's release of a Napster app for the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch.

Though it's entering the market a bit later than some competitors, it comes with a larger catalog than some and features similar to those that have tipped the scales for other services.

Apple plans to shut down Lala, the cloud-based streaming music service it bought in December 2009. Lala stopped accepting new users today and will close on May 31. Thanks to its unlimited music locker and innovative pricing scheme, Lala had long been a favorite of ours. Rumor is that Apple will revive the service is some form under the iTunes.com label, but as with all things Apple, this is just a rumor until Steve Jobs walks on stage and announces it.

While Spotify CEO Daniel Ek didn't say much about his company's timeline for launching in the U.S. during his SXSW keynote interview, it definitely looks like the popular streaming music services is putting all the pieces for a U.S. launch together. In an interview with Bloomberg earlier today, Spotify's senior vice president Paul Brown noted that the company is "buying server space in random parts of the states and there are licensing discussions too." According to Bloomberg, Spotify its planning to launch in Q3 2010.

Everybody piled into the ballroom today at the Austin Convention Center to hear Spotify CEO Daniel Ek give the final keynote interview of SXSWI of 2010 fully expecting to be blown away with the release of the peer-to-peer music player.

Instead, we got somewhat evasive and allusive answers on when to expect a U.S. version and were left looking to yesterday's announcement of MOG's move to mobile, with full knowledge that Napster is nipping at its heels.

Yahoo! announced plans today at the 2010 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) to spread its tentacles deeper into the Internet-connected TV market, inking new deals with TV, media player and processor manufacturers, as well as releasing its widget development kit and signing on with new content partners.

When we looked at the rebirth of the Web TV last year, we had one major reservation - would people really buy a new TV just for the widgets? "Probably not," we said. This year, Yahoo! is bringing the Internet into our other devices, so we don't have to.