By "taking the internet seriously," we mean, in one sense, getting more serious "the cloud," which is a digital yuppy euphemism for "stuff stored on honking servers out there somewhere that you access over the internet." A few things—a few acquisitions, really—make us think Apple is eyeballing the internet in a new way as means of service. And we don't mean in the sorta kinda way they run MobileMe, which has been, at first, a flop and now, decent if it were free like all the Google stuff is and not $100 a year.

• The biggest piece is Lala. It remains to be seen how radically Apple uses it to transform iTunes, but the potential for a complete upheaval of the current iTunes model is enormous. Right now, you buy stuff on iTunes, download it to your hard drive, and sync it to your iThing through a rubbery white cable. A LalaTunes would be re-oriented around the web: You buy and manage songs over the web, and could stream your library anywhere, like to other computers, to your phone, directly. You can buy the streaming rights to a song forever, for 10 cents (well, that's what Lala sells 'em for now, anyway), rather than download it. And if this new, de-centralized iTunes is indeed embedded all over the web, it would become the de facto way to listen to music on internet, the same way Google is just how your search.

• Apple tried to buy AdMob, before Google did. AdMob is a mobile advertising company, formerly, one of the biggest. The sell ads, on the internet, for mobile phones. Apple might've wanted it as a defensive move to keep it away from Google, but just as likely, Apple wanted a slice of the mobile advertising revenue that's simply going to explode over the next couple of years, much of which is being sold for the iPhone.

• A somewhat shakier rumor is that Apple's is thinking about buying iCall, not for the name, but because they're a VoIP company. If Apple's really diving into the internet stuff, an internet calling service makes some sense. Also, though unrelated, it's interesting that after Apple blocked the app Podcaster for being iTunesy, it later released the functionality it provided, and Apple's complaint about Google Voice and other GV apps, were that they "duplicated" functionality.

• Update: Oops, forgot all about the massive, 500,000 square-foot data center Apple's supposedly building that would be one of the largest in the world

Again, Apple's dabbled in internet services for a long time—you know, .Mac and MobileMe, with its storage and syncing and photo services—but in the future, you'll probably mark the iPhone as when the internet really started to matter. It's a relatively modest piece of hardware compared to a real computer—when Ballmer said "the internet is not designed for iPhone," truthfully, he wasn't horribly off-base since a ton of non-game apps really are particular means displaying stuff from the internet. Remember how limited the iPhone felt before apps? Before it became a real internet thing?

The defining conflict of personal computing for the last two decades has been Apple vs. Microsoft, Mac vs. PC. Today, it's a three-way battle: Apple vs. Microsoft vs. Google. Steve Ballmer's been mocked for years over his obsession with Google, manifested through their Microsoft's blind pursuit of search marketshare, but his single-mindedness looks far less loony today. It's funny, actually, that Microsoft has been entirely absent from Apple's recent collisions, which have all been with Google: Maps, voice, mobile advertising, music, executives, phones, etc. Microsoft doesn't even enter the picture here, at least from Apple's perspective. And these fights are all about the internet or mobile services.

Which is illuminating. Microsoft has had their lunch chewed, swallowed and spit back into their faces on mobile, on digital music and on, um, the internet. They let all of those things, which they were in a serious position to dominate, pass them by. Windows Mobile is hosed. Zune HD is amazing, but far too late. Google owns over 70 percent of the search market, and people are still abandoning Internet Explorer in droves after Microsoft let it rot for years. Microsoft, with its OS on 90 percent of the world's computers, obviously has much more to lose than Apple if the OS becomes truly irrelevant.

Apple probably doesn't want to be Microsoft. Complacency breeds extinction. And it's clear that things are continually shifting away from the traditional desktop (or laptop), to the internet. I'm not saying Apple's abandoning OS X and MacBooks and we're going to all wake up in the puffy cloud tomorrow, but anybody who thinks things aren't going in this new terminal-client direction, where OSes and hardware doesn't matter is blind or stupid or in denial. I mean, it's already here in some ways. (Uh, just look at Google.) A model that stays tethered to the traditional desktop is like tying a weight around your ankle and trying to fly by flapping your arms.

An Apple that's seriously focused on the internet could be a curious thing. Apple's all about ecosystems that flow and work together. Would it be a walled garden in the clouds? Or would it be open, you know like people seem to think the internet should be? (I think of how Nintendo transitioned Mario from 2D to 3D with Super Mario 64. It was totally Mario, but something completely new.)

Whatever the case, it's hard to imagine Apple not taking the internet and internet-based services more seriously than ever—butting heads again and again with Google, the new Microsoft (of the internet) shows at least that much. We'll have to wait and see what that really means, though.

The WSJ uses Apple's purchase of streaming music service Lala, swooping in to pry it out of Google hands, as a way to tell the tale of two humpbacked giants clashing in a conflict that's been going on since earlier this summer, first marked—publicly anyway—by Apple's high-profile non-rejection rejection of Google Voice from the App Store.

More recently, Apple tried to buy AdMob—one of the dominant players in mobile advertising—not only to make more money off of iPhone apps, but to keep Google from buying them. Interestingly, the WSJ says Apple "has been exploring buying iPhone-related technologies that it doesn't yet have," meaning we could be seeing more Apple acquisitions soon, or perhaps more bloody bouts of Apple and Google wrestling over companies, especially since Google wants into music, and Apple wants into mobile ads, according to the WSJ.

The other interesting bit the WSJ drops is that "Google is also talking to handset manufacturers about building phones with more prominent Google branding and more preinstalled Google applications," which sounds sorta kinda like a Google phone.

The WSJ article seems to take a tone of surprise, or shock, that Apple and Google compete on so many fronts, and I'm not quite sure where it's coming from. They're so huge, that guess what? They're gonna bump into each other. It's just inevitable. And it isn't even ugly yet. But it will be. [WSJ via MacRumors]

You won't need software anymore to buy songs from iTunes. iTunes will just be on the web—you'll be able to buy and listen directly, through search engines or other sites, much like you can with Lala now. Or if you're not familiar with it, think about the way Amazon is embedded on the internet, and imagine that for music, through iTunes. It's a kind of ubiquity would make the biggest music store in the world even more influential and intractable, a fact that's not lost on record labels.

It's an uprooting of the entire iTunes model: Not only would you buy songs and manage your iTunes library through the web, iTunes could shift to having a serious streaming component, away from "download to own," as Apple's been evaluating the impact of Pandora and Lala on iTunes, though the WSJ is more tentative on this point.

Also, you may very well be able to put your music in the cloud. Essentially, you would own right to listen to the song anytime and anywhere, not just the digital file you downloaded. There's also a chance that Apple will use Lala's ability to scan your current music library, match it up with the files on their servers, and give you access to the songs you already own anywhere via its servers.

Two mildly tangential points: Lala Chairman Bill Nguyen appears to be heavily involved in the new effort, making joint calls to the labels with Apple's Eddie Cue, indicating it's a classic Apple tech-and-brains acquisition, and the WSJ backs up the previously rumored $80 million pricepoint, saying Apple paid $85 million for Lala.

This whole iTunes revamp could happen as early as next year, although there's expected to be some pushback from a music industry already cowed by Apple's strength. But Cupertino's been keeping the major labels on life support for so long, there's just not much they can do about it. [WSJ]

First, let's look at what Lala is. (Or was.) It's three things, really: A CD trading site (its original emphasis), a streaming site, where you can "upload" your own music and stream it anywhere (your collection is matched with what Lala's got, and anything they don't have is actually uploaded); and a streaming site that'll let you stream a song once for free, or pay 10 cents to stream it an unlimited number of times. In other words, It's a music service that's all about streaming and the cloud, both for the music you already own, and for finding and playing new music.

That obviously looks a lot different from iTunes—you pay for things, you download them, you have a library of stuff. It's kind of a dated, restrictive model, really. Only being able to listen to the small slice of music that's banked on my hard drive, it feels cramped and very 2004. Zune feels like a generation ahead with Zune Pass, which essentially expands my library ad infinitum, with full access to most of the service's 6 million songs (plus I get to keep 10 a month, so the pass just about pays for itself). iTunes needs to refresh itself.

Okay, so Lala obviously fits into that need. But what's Apple going to do with it specifically? Bring Lala under iTunes? Kill Lala and assimilate its features into iTunes? Keep Lala running? Well, there's actually some pretty good case studies when it comes to Apple buying up smaller companies, historically, especially when it comes to iPod and iTunes.

iTunes actually began life as an acquisition. In 2000, Apple was looking to buy MP3 software and wound up purchasing a little program called SoundJam MP, along with its lead developer, Jeff Robbin—it was re-engineered into what you now know as iTunes, and Robbin is now the VP for consumer applications at Apple. Cover Flow, which is now slathered on top of basically every app Apple makes, was originally an independent program developed by Steel Skies. Apple bought Cover Flow, though not the company. The iPod itself was mostly developed by a company called PortalPlayer—again, Apple bought the rights to the hardware and software, but not the company (which was later picked up by Nvidia).

Finally, and most recently, Apple bought PA Semi, an entire chip company, likely so Apple can design its own chips for iPhones and iPods (we haven't seen the fruits of this venture yet, though we likely will soon). So, there's a couple different models here: Buy the tech, buy the brains behind it; buy the tech; buy the company, the tech and the brains. In each instance, though, the thing purchased became wholly an Apple thing, fully assimilated, as if its past life had never existed.

Looking at Lala, it's likely true, as the NYT says, that Apple is "buying Lala's engineers, including its energetic co-founder Bill Nguyen, and their experience with cloud-based music services," as Apple did with iTunes so many years ago. But that's not all Apple was after, not if they paid $80 million (or whatever) to outbid at least two other competitors, as some reports say. It seems clear, looking at the history of Apple's iTunes acquisitions, Lala and its features are going to be integrated into iTunes in a very fundamental way.

After all, one of the central conceits of Lala—streaming your own music library anywhere—is something Apple's been looking at for a while, and it doesn't alter the fundamental iTunes model, the one that's so deeply tied to your own music collection. It just expands it. Lala, actually, was even in the midst of getting its streaming iPhone app approved.

And that's most likely what Lala is going to look like inside of the iTunes beast: You'll be able to stream your own library anywhere. The other half of Lala, the true streaming service, with its 10-cent songs, as a part of a new iTunes too, would radically alter the entire iTunes model by introducing one organized around streaming—while still preserving that core tenet of paying for and owning songs. The kind of value hierarchy that Apple is devoted to still works—songs you have more ownership of, that stay on your hard drive, cost more (like when DRM-free songs used to cost more) while ones that stay in the cloud are cheaper—even as it completely changes the way we'd buy music from iTunes, and if history's any guide, maybe digital music as a whole. (Oh, and iTunes' new web interface practically begs to be a streaming site.) It'd be a big step, even for a company that killed their most popular iPod, the mini, to introduce a brand new one, the nano.

True, we won't know precisely what Apple's going to do with LaLa until they do it. But we've got some rough ideas.

OK Go's New Music Video Reminds Me of My First Computer

OK Go, masters of both slightly quirky power pop and internet promotion, have unleashed their newest video, for "WTF." You know how on older, crappy Windows machines, images or windows would sometimes get stuck and leave trails whenever you moved them? This is pretty much like that. Fun! [Vimeo]

Apple May Have Bought Lala Bought for a Song (Oh God I Am Too Much)

As if you didn't get enough Lala-Apple news today, a new report surfaced that says Apple may have bought the streaming audio company for about 50 cents on the dollar. "But if that's so cheap, how come this story's in Remainders?" you might ask. Well, imaginary commenter, it's in Remainders because of this quick update:

A second source close to the company insists my estimate is "way off" but won't offer up other details.

We'll update on the Apple-Lala situation when we have some more solid info on what this means for us. [All Things D]

Super Mario Cross-Stitch Is Cool Enough to Get Me to Google "Cross-Stitch"

According to Wikipedia, it is "a popular form of counted-thread embroidery in which X-shaped stitches are used to form a picture." This one, to my totally untrained eye, looks really great, an elegant addition to any living room. [A Little Stranger]

Ellen Degeneres Gives Away Pixi, Nokia Booklet and Upside-Down Nook for Christmas

On her talk show, Ellen Degeneres began her annual gift giveaway with an all-tech first day. Included in the roundup: A PowerMat charger, MiFi, Palm Pixi, Nokia Booklet (the audience starts shrieking at "weighs less than three pounds" for that one—how did they guess what it was based on that?), and a B&N Nook, which she proudly holds upside-down. Pretty good roundup, really, but you should check out our Gift Guides to see what we'd have suggested. [Engadget]

Interestingly, the Times says that LaLa went to Apple to be acquired, and what Apple's after is LaLa's engineers, with their cloud service-y brains.

Apple's official response is that they "buy smaller technology companies all the time, and we generally do not comment on our purpose or plans." Hmmm. [NYT]

Previously: NY Times reporter Brad Stone says that Apple has agreed to acquire the streaming music service LaLa as rumored, and the NYT is currently updating their story.

Talks are very advanced, said the sources Friday. One of the sources said that the sides have already agreed on terms and have only to sign a final agreement.

Steve Dowling, Apple's spokesman, said the company doesn't comment on rumors and speculation. A representative from Lala was not immediately available.

An acquisition of Lala, a streaming-music site that has gone through multiple iterations including one as a CD-swapping service, would be the third acquisition deal of a digital-music site in recent months.

MySpace acquired iLike in August and Imeem last month.

Exactly what Apple intends to do with Lala remains unclear, but it would appear that Apple intends to offer some kind of streaming service to iTunes users. Right now, Apple is the largest music store online or offline and Apple has made more money than any other music service by selling music downloads.

But the public has shown an appetite for free music and many people have clamored for a better way to store music. Right now, most music libraries can be found on an owner's computer hard drive, which can malfunction. Lala enables users to store songs on the company's servers and access them from Web-enabled devices.

This story originally appeared on CNET

Say what you will about the merits of a pay-per-song streaming music service, but the ability to play just about any song instantly is pretty amazing. And in an actual improvement over the desktop service, songs are apparently cached:

Fortunately the Lala app uses caching to store hundreds of songs from your library, which it has waiting in case your connection dies. Lala wouldn't say exactly how many songs are saved, but they say that the app uses some intelligence to determine what gets cached

That'd be a killer feature for the app, as well as exactly the kind of thing Apple might throw a shitfit over: it's two music libraries, see! In any case, prepare for two outcomes here: either this app is coming out in a week or so, or you're going to be reading a fresh wave of necessary, if totally predictable, App Store approval outrage posts. See you then! [Techcrunch]

Basically, as you can see in the picture, you will see play buttons alongside different songs when you get search results. If you press play, a popup from MySpace (iLike) or Lala appears, letting you play the full song and giving you buttons to buy it or get more info. You will also have the chance to check out the band on other services/sites, including Pandora, iMeem and Rhapsody. (As you might imagine, there's no mention of iTunes in all of this.)

In essence, Google isn't playing the music at all. It's up to MySpace and Lala to manage the rights of the full-song playback business, and to serve up the content. For more info, check out the YouTube video or Google blog. They say they'll be rolling it out to US Google users over the next day, so be on the lookout. [Google]

Songs are a mere ten pennies through Lala because they would be streamed to your phone, but there's more to the app than streaming. It would allow for your own music collection to be uploaded to and accessed through the cloud for free. No more fretting over music storage.

There's good news for the non-iPhone users too. Lala intends on coming out with an app for Android, Palm Pre, and Blackberry phones as well. [Wired]

Techcrunch has a few shots of the service, which give a pretty good idea of how it'll work: You, Anonymous Google User, will search for music. Google will return a special search page template with artist info, album listings and cover art—this is something they've been doing for a while now. The crucial difference is, you'll be able to listen to songs, either as samples or in full, by way of a iLike and LaLa player widgets, directly from the results. (It could be more—Kafka says Imeem's joining in as well)
iLike is a music discovery service-cum-music store, which streams samples for free, and sells tracks for $.89 to $1.29, not unlike iTunes. LaLa has a much webbier model, in which users can listen to any song once, after which they can either a) purchase online, browser-based listening privileges for $.10, or download the track in full for $.79. They're two minor players (though iLike got snatched up by MySpace a while back) that just got one of the biggest endorsements imaginable: Prime placement on Google's search pages.

I don't really see where a desktop client or even a Google-branded storefront fits into this picture, but it's early, and these are just leaks—and besides, as interesting as this is, it doesn't feel quite complete. Maybe new pricing from iLike or LaLa? Subscriptions? Whatever it is, a formal announcement is expected on October 28th. [TechCrunch]

Rhapsody claims its catalogue includes 8 million tracks, but unfortunately they only stream at 64kbps quality. [Real Networks | iTunes]

Update: Rhapsody has been approved. More information.

The screenshot is courtesy of a Gdgt hands-on, which explains that "unlike Spotify's yet-to-be-released iPhone app, Rhapsody's app lacks offline capability." No local storage until version 2.0, apparently. Bummer.

Also worth noting: the free app won't support Rhapsody Unlimited subscribers ($12 a month).

Even if the app is approved (that is, Apple doesn't balk at competition to iTunes on its own device), you kinda get the feeling it'll be a tough sell beyond existing subscribers until they get the local storage sorted. In the meantime, the company plans a limited time free-trial, and an Android version. From its blog:

"We are working diligently on an Android app and once we're done there, we plan to turn our sights on more mobile platform and carrier app stores"

[Real Networks Blog and Gdgt]

So how do they get away with it? Well, Lala assumes that you're doing most of your listening over the web—as a result, the songs that cost a dime are only playable through a browser, like Rhapsody in the olden days. If you want the DRM-free MP3 for your portable player (or whatever), you're looking at a more typical 89 to 99-cent sticker price. All songs in the 6 million+ track catalog can be sampled once for free before you commit to purchasing them, and the 10 cents for a web purchase can be credited toward your MP3 purchase, so it's not money lost.

If you listen to most of your music sitting at the computer, and have qualms about stealing it, Lala may very well be a good way to go. It's like a soup made up of the best components of other online music services such as iTunes, Rhapsody, Pandora, and Last.fm. The site is appealing, the music recommendation engine is good, and there's some value in there. If you're the type of person who would add just one or two new songs per day to your personal playlist, this kind of a la carte pay system is a lot cheaper and more practical than Rhapsody. You can build up a nice collection for a few dollars a month, and you don't keep paying after you've amassed all the music you need.

Finally, web browsers and internet connectivity is becoming, if not already, the norm in smartphones, I mean "coms", and Lala plans to expand to meet this market. They already have an iPhone app in the approval process, which will play recommended songs and hopefully soon, your web library too. An app that acts like Simplify and Pandora together? It could be a real winner, but we'll reserve judgment till we see it in action. [Lala]

PALO ALTO, Calif., October 21, 2008 – Lala is unveiling the first and only free service to instantly provide anywhere Web access to an existing MP3 music library such as iTunes. Replacing the outdated approach of uploading MP3 files from a PC, Lala introduces a licensed technology to instantly match songs from consumers’ personal music library with the Web-based catalog on lala.com.

Adding new music to a collection is easier and less expensive than ever. Sample any full song or complete album for free. Add songs to a Web collection for only 10 cents, and buy DRM-free MP3 downloads for as low as an additional 79 cents.

“We live our lives in a browser, whether it’s emailing, watching television shows or using Facebook” said Geoff Ralston, CEO of Lala. “When I launched Yahoo! Mail few thought hundreds of millions would depend on Web email. My music belongs online in the same way. Will there be anything without a browser in 5 years?”

Microsoft Explorer, FireFox, and Safari browsers on both Windows and Mac OS are supported.

Major and Independent Labels Support
All four major labels including EMI Music, Sony BMG Music Entertainment, Universal Music Group and Warner Music Group and publishers have licensed Lala with partnership agreements to stream and sell music online.

And unlike ad-supported music sites, Lala has garnered support from over 170,000 independent labels and distributors.

"We thank Lala for their support of A2IM and the independent music community and congratulate them on the launch of their new service which includes tens of thousands of independent artists, labels, aggregators and distributors," said Rich Bengloff, President of The American Association For Independent Music (A2IM). "As the primary advocacy group for the independent music community, we also applaud Lala for recognizing the value of independent labels and artists to their business and providing inclusion to the independent community in their launch."

The Most Affordable Music on the Web
Lala offers consumers the easiest, most affordable way to buy music on the Web. Lala’s catalog includes over 6 million songs which users can play once for free before buying. For as little as 10 cents, users can buy a Websong, a new product that gives users the ability to play as often as they choose from their web collection. The Websong fee can be applied towards the purchase of the DRM-free MP3 version of the same track. MP3s are priced from 89 cents or 79 cents with a prior web song purchase.

Unique Features of lala.com
· Completely advertising free service
· First and only fully licensed service for free Web hosting of a personal music library
· Instant matching of MP3s and iTunes Fairplay songs to the Web without uploading
· Fully featured web-application in a browser with speedy look-ahead search, drag and drop playlist creation, and instant, continuous music streaming
· 6 million and growing song catalog
· Free sampling of the entire catalog as songs or albums
· Websongs available for purchase at 10 cents or less
· DRM-free MP3s for additional price of 79 cents
· Support of popular Web browsers including Windows Explorer, Firefox, and Safari
· Support for both Microsoft Windows and Apple Mac OS
· Catalog of all four major labels and publishers
· Catalog of 170,000 independent labels

OK, first: how does that work? Lala doesn't upload everything. Most of the songs you own are probably in its servers already; it will only upload the stuff it didn't have. If you are wondering if that includes The Beatles, Led Zeppelin and Dave Matthews Band, stuff famously not available online, it does. Lala assumes that if you own it, you have the right to it. It's a fair-use defense that makes sense, since you can't really distribute music through the service, you can only access it for your own use.

Next: what's this about my iPod? At this point in time, Lala is storing tracks as MP3 files. (I think 128Kbps, but could be greater—in the future, they say they will offer their stream at the original resolution of the track you own, but for now there's a bandwidth issue.) You can't download the tracks to a computer hard drive, but you can sideload the tracks straight to your iPod. If, and it's a big "if", you set up your iPod to sync with the service. You can't use the iPod with your iTunes again without reconfiguring it. Lala says you wouldn't need to, since it will give you access to anything you buy at iTunes, but I still think it's a bit of a leap of faith.

But what's in it for Lala? Well, for starters, the company wants to grow the music-sales business, selling cut-rate CDs and facilitating music swaps with other members. Logging your preferences is an easy way to build an oh-so-sweet customer profile, just like Amazon.com and iTunes do.

Will there be any digital tracks for sale? They have already inked a deal with Warner Music, letting you sample Warner tracks as many times as you like on the service, like a free baby Rhapsody. The company is talking with other record labels, too, so it soon could be a free alternative to Rhapsody, Napster and the like, with similar digital-download catalogs.

Is that all? With the DRM-free business taking off, the obvious next move is to sell non-DRM tracks for download to the iPod—like much of the American populace, these guys do not have any real interest in other music players. Before all of the deals are signed, there are lots of music samples available under net radio licenses, so you can easily get artist-themed user-generated radio stations a la Pandora.

How well does this whole thing work? So, it's in beta. There's a lot of stuff that doesn't make total sense yet. I'll spare you the specifics only because beta is as beta does, and frankly, free services are fun to try even if they end up screwing the pooch. Last I checked, the system was down, because the old Lala.com was giving way to the new Lala.com.

When it's back up, have a try and let me know what you think. I'm excited because a) anywhere access is just cool and b) I think what these guys are doing is a little bit crazy, and I want to see where it goes. Their last idea, the CD swapping thing, was also crazy, and I'm not sure it totally worked, but it was original enough for muchos kudos, and this idea is even more ballsy. Let's see what happens. – Wilson Rothman

Service Homepage [Lala.com]

Note: The site appears to be back up and running.