Trouble at mill for latest member of “Cloud” family…
Swedish company Spotify has recieved much critical acclaim for its music streaming service over the last few months. With a new round of investment valuing it at $250 million, the start-up goes from strength to strength. 
I’m an unashamedly huge fan of spotify, which (for those of you who don’t know) is an itunes-esq desktop music client that uses a mixture of P2P/Direct streaming to place a library of over 3.5 millions tracks at the user’s disposal … virtually instantly. I’m not alone in this opinion either, and spotify has been widely welcomed, both by an internet community sick & tired of fighting the outdated business models and practices of Industry labels, and by proponents of the “Cloud” computing model that has gained so much media focus recently.
Perhaps the music labels too realise that spotify is a way of angling across the current of the increasingly powerful anti-copyright lobby ? The significant shares owned by labels such as Sony would seem to support this theory.
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We said Shun, not shoot…
I fear we may have to backtrack a little here. While I am gratified that the gunman above (patently an avid tbv reader ! see last post) took my advice to shun the iphone very seriously indeed – I have to say that his blunt nosed, macho and frankly stupid response has done nothing more than take a serious debate and discredit it, Allowing apple to shrug it off with the time honoured phrase : ‘There’s always one’.
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Be BOLD, shun the iPhone to save your wallets.
What with all the hype over the new iPhone 3GS which was announced at Apple’s latest WWDC, and the $99 iPhone 3G, you are probably all waiting with
baited breath to get your hands on the latest sensation to hit the smartphone market.
And at $199/$99, who can blame you right ? That’s certainly better pricing than you’ll find for a lot of smartphones out there.
Well no …not exactly…
See the thing is, as fantastic as the iPhone may be, in the long run I Guarantee you it will make your wallet squirm. Here’s how:
- Apple may carry on touting its price cuts, but $99 is actually still $99 more than anyone else is asking. I don’t know how it is for you guys in the US, but over here the carriers predominantly cover the entire cost of their smartphones as a part of the contract. My ‘Blackberry Bold’ for instance, didn’t cost me a single cent.The reason you still pay money for your iphone then, is that the true cost of the device is much more than is let on. This would perhaps be easier to excuse if the iPhone was on a different playing field to all its competitors, but it isn’t. Devices such as the Bold, Storm or HTC Magic all offer comparable experiences, so there really isn’t any excuse for the charge.
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Site News and General Announcements
First off, I feel I ought to apologise for the lack of updates over the last couple of days. Ant and I have been swamped with exams, so, unfortunately, The Bytevine had to take a back seat to the issues of real life for a while (namely, seemingly insurmountable piles of chemistry revision … I shudder at the thought!). However, those are, for the most part, behind us and we can begin to bring you content In earnest.
Looking forward to the next couple of days now, I would just like to make you aware of the fact that the web host for thebytevine.com’s VPS (servercomplete.com) have decided that in order to continue providing premium bandwidth (and not just Cogent! I wonder why …. ? 
), all San Jose based servers must be migrated to alternative DC locations.
What will this mean for you ? Well … hopefully nothing – if all goes to plan the site will only be down for as long as is required for the dns to re-propagate – but I like to think (in my infinite wisdom) that this is your site as much as it is ours, so fair warning seemed to be in order.
On a more general note, you may have noticed from the 1200 word giant of an article on new iphone rumours, that we have a new associate editor here at the Bytevine. Dylan (or Tracker, as he prefers to be known) has been writing about technology for a long while now over at themodshop.net, and we are delighted to have him on board here, helping us bring you stuff really worth a space on your feed reader!
Lastly, I’d like to thank those few who have already commented and/or subscribed … you early contributors are really why we blog and we won’t forget it (when we’re all rich and famous and stuff …). Please continue to come back, it won’t be a waste of your time!
Cheers, Hugo
iPhone: Past, Present and Future – plus some rumours shot …
Apple … that wondeful company that brought us such fun stuff such as iPods, OSX and the iPhone. In this article I am going to talk about the iPhone – all of its previous generations, and the one that may be on its way into a apple store near you following the upcoming Apple WWDC!
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