It’s the announcement Steve Jobs has been waiting to make for years: that one of his favorite bands, and perhaps the greatest of all time, will finally be available on the music store that he created. Now he may have just had his thunder stolen. Two hours ago, Sky News reported that the Fab Four are finally coming to iTunes, attributing the news to John Lennon’s widow Yoko Ono, who is in charge of managing the music legend’s estate. The story kicked off with the headline:

“The whole of the Beatles back catalogue will be made available to buy on iTunes, Yoko Ono has told Sky News.”

But almost immediately after publishing the story Sky News killed it, leaving nothing but a blank page in its wake. Google News had a cache of it for a brief time, but that too has apparently disappeared in record time. 9to5mac spotted the article and reached Sky News for more information, only to be told that the news organization was unable to comment.

At this point there are two possibilities: Sky either made a major blunder and posted something that was untrue, or Apple has unleashed its hounds on the news network. My guess is the latter. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that The Beatles on iTunes will be announced tomorrow (the Sky report, or what’s left of it, doesn’t make a release date clear). In fact, a report in the Financial Times today quotes EMI global catalog president Ernesto Schmitt as explicitly ruling out a 9/9/09 release, stating, “Conversations between Apple and EMI are ongoing and we look forward to the day when we can make the music available digitally. But it’s not tomorrow.”

Another interesting point from the FT article: Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, Yoko Ono and Olivia Harrison want to sell the Beatles catalog on iTunes, but EMI has objected because of concerns over piracy, of all things (according to McCartney, EMI is worried about being held liable if any tracks leak to the web). Of course, the only way to obtain digital versions of The Beatles catalog online at this point is through piracy.

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In July, AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) embraced the stream in a new beta (for both Windows and Mac) and started moving beyond simple IMs. You can now see your Facebook and Twitter feeds, along with AIM buddy updates and feeds from other services.

The problem was that the Twitter and Facebook feeds were only one way. You could read them, but you couldn’t send updates from AIM to the other services. A few weeks ago that changed, and AIM status updates can now appear as updates in Facebook and Twitter as well. There also appears to be a way to comment, or respond, inline to other people’s messages, although I am having trouble getting that feature to work for some reason.

Going both ways turns AIM into a full-fledged Twitter/Facebook client. It is a big deal for AIM because now it can be used as both a private and public IM client. While stream readers such as TweetDeck and Seesmic already have two-way messaging capabilities with Twitter and Facebook, Yahoo Messenger and Windows Live Messenger are still stuck in Read-Only Land.

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Imagine a small device that you wear on a necklace that takes photos every few seconds of whatever is around you, and records sound all day long. It has GPS and the ability to wirelessly upload the data to the cloud, where everything is date/time and geo stamped and the sound files are automatically transcribed and indexed. Photos of people, of course, would be automatically identified and tagged as well.

Imagine an entire lifetime recorded and searchable. Imagine if you could scroll and search through the lives of your ancestors.

Would you wear that device? I think I would. I can imagine that advances in hardware and batteries will soon make these as small as you like. And I can see them becoming as ubiquitous as wrist watches were in the last century. I see them becoming customized fashion statements.

Privacy disaster? You betcha.

But ten years ago we’d be horrified by what we nonchalantly share on Facebook and Twitter every day. I always imagine what a family in the 70s would think about all of their photo albums being posted on computers and available for the entire world to see. They’d be horrified, they couldn’t even imagine it. Heck, a life recorder is less of a privacy abandonment step forward than we’ve already taken with the Internet and electronic surveillance in general.

A Business Week article talks about a ten year old Microsoft project called SenseCam (more here) that is just such a device.

It’s clunky today and doesn’t do most of the things I mentioned in the first paragraph above. But a true life recorder that isn’t a fashion tragedy isn’t that far away.

In fact I’ve already spoken with one startup that has been working on a device like this for over a year now, and may go to market with it in 2010.

The hardware is actually not the biggest challenge. How it will be stored, transcribed, indexed and protected online is. It’s a massive amount of data that only a few companies (Microsoft, Google, Amazon) are equipped to really handle anytime soon.

But these devices are coming. And you have to decide if you’ll be one of the first or one of the last to use one.

Will you wear one? I will. Let us know in the poll below.

Would You Wear A Life Recorder?(survey software)

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Hey, remember last year when Lenovo's UltraNav keyboard made a (re)appearance on Flickr because the company was soliciting feedback on how to make it better? Well check it -- there's a new version in town, and it incorporates all those user suggestions. Lenovo says people mostly wanted the exact same feel as their ThinkPad laptop keyboards in the desktop unit (no surprise there), but almost no one wanted wireless, a number pad or a trackpad -- so the new model pictured above is more or less a faithful wired replica of the T400s board, right down to those liquid drainage holes. What's more, cutting the numeric keypad and trackpad allowed the company to reduce the price by $40, so this little slice of hotness is not just $60. Not bad, but we'll be honest -- we'd still throw down for a wireless version of the old UltraNav in a heartbeart.

[Thanks, Tian]

Read - Lenovo DesignMatters blog post on the keyboard design process
Read - ThinkPad Keyboard at the Lenovo online store

Filed under: Peripherals

New ThinkPad keyboard features crowdsourced design, lower price originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 06 Sep 2009 08:06:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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