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Joost's video player is on the simple side, and fades in and out with mouse movement. You also get a description of the show when it's in full screen mode.

(Credit:
CBS Interactive)

(Credit:
CBS Interactive)

(Credit:
CBS Interactive)

(Credit:
CBS Interactive)

Whether you’re on a
Mac or a Windows machine, you’ll still need to install an executable file on your computer to view videos. The new plug-in sits on your desktop taskbar even when you’re not viewing the site, and apparently only begins to pipe data back and forth to other users when you’re watching Joost videos.

Joost on Friday finally took an important step forward by announcing that its desktop software would be getting phased out to make way for a Web watching experience. The only problem is that special software is in fact still required–and we’re not talking Adobe Flash.

The new version of the site will be available for beta testers in about two weeks time, although I’ve had the chance to nose around and watch a few videos on it today. Despite the need for software, it’s impressive. Videos start playing in just a few seconds and when toggled for full-screen, the quality scales up nicely.

The new Joost player runs right in your browser as long as you've got a small peice of software running on your machine. (click to enlarge)

Like before, there are pre-roll ads, although I found them less intrusive and disjointed than Hulu’s experience. The only anti-user ad interference I stumbled across was when a pre-roll ad kept me from being able to scroll through content on a playlist. I had to wait about five seconds for the ad to run before I could get back to finding something to watch. Not cool.

The biggest thing missing from the new Joost is the feeling of immersion. The Joost application, for all it’s faults, took you away from your desktop and everything else you were doing. Like up and comer Boxee, which runs off the core of
Xbox Media Center, it’s something that had personality and a really marvelous UI. The new version feels a tad sterile, although when it comes to browsing through episodes and series, there’s noticeably less lag, and hey, you can continue to get work done on your computer at the same time.

You can find friends from existing networks by plugging in your account credentials.

Noticeably gone from the new Joost (at least for now) is the user chat. You can still comment on a video and favorite it, but the feeling of a real-time experience has gone out the door. There’s also a feature called “shout it out” that lets you flag the video with various pop culture acronyms like LOL, HOT, PUKE, and the generally useful WTF. Clicking on any of these will play a canned sound clip and alert you of your flag, although it has no noticeable effect.

The Joost software sits in your taskbar, ready to serve up vintage Star Trek.

(Credit:
CBS Interactive)

More screens after the jump.

Joost's new channel guide is pretty straightforward, with a featured section and categories you can drill down into.

Software aside, I’m excited to see Joost hop onto the Web. There’s a lot of good content on there that you can’t find elsewhere, and experiencing it in your browser will seem like second nature for newcomers–that is as long as they’re willing to jump through a software hoop.

Ultimately the Joost experience comes down to the content and the various ways to dig through it to find something good. While the existing playlists are very good for this, when you’re searching by TV network or content provider it’s still difficult to simply browse by shows. For instance, clicking on MTV took me to a player that randomly began playing Laguna Beach. Ideally, it would jump me to a list of shows where I could drill down a little deeper–like what was available before.

And more than 6 million of the downloads came from Windows users.

Safari's Top Sites feature.

(Credit:
Apple)

Safari is free for download for both Mac and Windows users.

Safari includes several enhancements, such as Top Sites, the ability to search history, Google Suggest, and Full Page Zoom, to make browsing the Web a bit easier.

According to Apple, Safari 4 tops IE 8 and Firefox by three times or more when loading HTML Web pages. With its Nitro JavaScript engine, the company claims, Safari executes JavaScript almost eight times as fast as IE 8 and more than four times as fast as Firefox.

Since
Safari 4’s public beta release in February, Apple has touted the browser as the fastest in the world, when compared with other popular browsers like
Firefox and
Internet Explorer 8.

Apple’s Safari 4 Web browser was downloaded more than 11 million times in the first three days of release, the company said Friday.

Based on the open-source Webkit browser engine, Safari includes HTML 5 support for offline technologies and is the first browser to pass the Web Standards Project’s Acid3 test.

Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.

Think about it. My in-box already knows where I’m traveling, what I buy, etc. because my receipts go there. If someone were to merge this data with my phone records (easily had for the price of my AT&T login credentials), my e-mail log, and my Twitter, IM, and social network data, they’d know exactly who I know and where I’m likely to bump into them.

Maybe that “someone,” as Tim O’Reilly has suggested, could be the open-source community. We wouldn’t want a community to shepherd the data, but to build the data connectors to a centralized service? Sure.

Privacy wonks will bewail this apparent lack of concern for the sanctity of my data. But they’d be wrong.

(Credit:
Apple)

Over the weekend news broke that IBM Research has been working with personal mobile phone records to map social networks. Some may complain that Big Brother is watching, but the real question is why some company hasn’t formed already to blend mobile data with IM and e-mail traffic to map and profit from the social graph.

I’m guessing you would, too. So who’s going to build it?

All the necessary data is sitting in my in-box or through easily accessed online or desktop applications. Someone simply needs to combine and process it.

commentary

I can’t fathom why someone hasn’t done this yet. Tim O’Reilly has been talking about this Address Book 2.0 concept for years, and I’ve written on it several times, too. (See here and here.)

It needs to happen. I’d love to automatically be told that my good friend Mike is in London at the same time as I am, and have a service suggest a reservation at a favorite restaurant (which it would know through my past OpenTable reservations). I’d “pay” for that by giving up a lot of data.

It’s not that I deprecate the value of my security. It’s just that I value more the possibilities that arise when I share this data with a network of friends–sharing really only makes sense through a company or community that networks my address book with those of others I like and trust.

I’d gladly give up this data to facilitate those interactions.

(Credit:
Netgear)

I am not a big fan of parental controls, but that might be just because I’m not a parent.

If you are not like me and have been wondering if paying a yearly fee for the comprehensive parental control feature that accompanies the lackluster iBoss router is worth it, Netgear may have just made your life a lot easier.

Netgear announced Tuesday the release of Live Parental Controls, a comprehensive Web-filtering feature it has developed in collaboration with OpenDNS.

The best things about the new features are that they’re free and are included with Netgear’s new routers. The first one that comes with this is Netgear’s Wireless-N 300 WNR2000 router. Netgear plans on putting Live Parental Controls in its future routers and Internet gateways.

The WNR2000 is available immediately and costs less than $80, which is very good for a Wirelesss-N router and it’s a great deal considering the new Web filter, especially when compared with the iBoss.

The new feature enables parents and small businesses to restrict Internet access to all the devices that connect via the router, with filtering based on more than 50 categories of content. The Live Parental Controls incorporate a comprehensive set of filtering features including some not available in other parental control solutions, such as remote management from mobile devices and highly flexible settings.

Hands-on testing and a full review of Netgear’s Wireless-N 300 WNR2000 wireless router will be available soon.

“Adobe is the next Microsoft,” said Roel Schouwenberg, a senior antivirus researcher at Kaspersky. “They are slowly realizing that they have become a main vector of getting into a machine…We as an industry must push hard” to get Adobe to improve security.

“The PDF exploitation only recently blew up, and remember, it takes any software development house a while to really address problems,” he said, adding that Flash 9 was much more secure than Flash 8.

“There’s always a ‘most vulnerable’ attack surface.”

“We are quite happy with the performance on those,” Arkin said of the time frame for the patches.

Dan Kaminsky, director of penetration testing at IOActive, praised Adobe for “reconfiguring itself” with regards to security issues and suggested critics should cut the company some slack.

In particular, Adobe’s patching process isn’t as robust as Microsoft’s, he and others said.

“Microsoft is a model for patch management…they were forced into it. They really turned around,” Hypponen said in an interview last week at Black Hat. “Now, Flash and Reader are ubiquitous and it’s harder and harder to target Microsoft, so the attackers are looking for easier targets.”

F-Secure said it identified about 1,967 targeted attack files in 2008, the most popular type being .doc used in Microsoft Word.

Nearly half of targeted attacks exploit holes in Acrobat Reader, which is used to read PDF (portable document format) files, according to F-Secure. Meanwhile, the number of PDF files used in dangerous Web drive-by attacks jumped from 128 during the first three and a half months of last year to more than 2,300 during that time this year, the company said.

In 2002, that would have been Windows. Today, it’s likely to be Adobe Reader or Flash Player, whose share of vulnerabilities and exploits are on the rise while Microsoft’s is falling.

The company established a Security Development Lifecycle program, designed to build security into the software, that has become the standard others in the industry follow. It is roundly lauded for its efforts.

Now it’s Adobe’s turn to step up to the plate.

Microsoft: Been there, done that
In January 2002, Bill Gates launched the Trustworthy Computing initiative and said security would be a top priority for the company. Microsoft had to do something to combat the negative press and public opinion over its whack-a-mole strategy for countering the viruses and other security holes that plagued its software.

Security-versus-functionality trade-offs aside, changes in Adobe’s products and processes will come in response to market pressures and not merely because it’s the favorite target for attackers, said Bruce Schneier, chief technology officer of BT Counterpane.

The company was the first third-party vendor to release a fix for software affected by a vulnerability in Microsoft’s Active Template Library, which is used to build components for Web applications and which was being exploited, according to Arkin.

In addition, there are more and more zero-day holes, vulnerabilities that are public before a patch is available. Like sitting ducks, users of affected software are left wide open to attack until a fix is available.

“Does Adobe have products they need to lock down? Yes. Are they in the process of doing so? Yes. They did it for Flash and they’ll do it for Reader,” he said.

An Adobe manager said the problem stems from the fact that it’s software is so broadly used.

“It’s only natural, given the fact that some of our products like Reader and Flash Player are some of the most widely distributed on Earth, that they would be targeted by attacks,” Brad Arkin, director for product security and privacy at Adobe, said in an interview on Wednesday.

One security researcher at Black Hat last week, who asked to remain anonymous, said: “As a result of the number of zero-day attacks on PDFs this year, large banks hate Adobe.”

In all fairness, Adobe is on the right path. Prompted by a zero-day hole in Reader, Adobe decided in May to start releasing patches on a quarterly basis, and to schedule the updates to coincide with Microsoft’s Patch Tuesday releases.

Adobe “has a lot to learn from, of all places, Microsoft.” –Mikko Hypponen, F-Secure

Not really, the experts agreed.

The security researcher who asked not to be named complained that at an architectural level, some Adobe applications have too much access to the operating system. “Why should something that operates on untrusted data have full access to your trusted data?” he asked, mentioning specifically Adobe Reader and its ability to access the hard drive to read and write files.

Adobe “has a lot to learn from, of all places, Microsoft,” Hypponen said at the time. At the Black Hat and Defcon security shows last week, others concurred.

Microsoft has been in the same boat, and in many ways still is. The difference is in how the companies respond to the problem, experts said.

If you’re a criminal and you want to break into a network, a common attack method is to exploit a hole in software that exists on most computers, has its fair share of holes, and isn’t automatically updated.

The company also has been turning an eye toward “digging into legacy code” and looking for additional ways to improve products overall he said. “Adobe integrates the best practices you see at Microsoft and other companies.”

(Credit: F-Secure)

The program’s functions require it to be able to save and open files on the file system and thus have read and write access to the hard drive, Arkin said. “Web browsers all have the ability to save to the file system,” and the privileges between the two types of programs are similar, he added.

At the time of the Adobe announcement, Arkin said the company was reviewing “everything from our security team’s communications during an incident to our security update process to the code itself.” He also promised that users would “see more timely communications regarding incidents, quicker turnaround times on patch releases, and simultaneous patches for more affected versions as we move forward.”

There have been zero-day exploits for the Flash Player plug-in, used for viewing rich media like videos and interactive charts on Web sites. And in one case this spring, a zero-day hole in Adobe Reader spurred security experts to recommend that users disable JavaScript.

Those scary statistics prompted F-Secure researcher Mikko Hypponen, chief research officer at F-Secure, to urge Adobe Reader users to switch to an alternative PDF reader at the RSA show in April.

(Credit: F-Secure)

“I’d like to think that they would start realizing that they can use security as a selling point, but it took Linux to get Microsoft to do that. They felt they had competition,” he said. “Is there a Linux waiting to affect Adobe?”

A zero-day exploit targeting Reader and Acrobat that Adobe learned about on April 27 was fixed about two weeks later, he said. And Adobe issued a patch last week for a critical Flash Player problem that was being exploited, allowing attackers to take over a computer via content viewed in a browser.

During the first three months of 2009, F-Secure discovered 663 targeted attack files, the most popular type being PDF. The change from the previous year is primarily due to the fact that there have been more vulnerabilities in Adobe Acrobat/Reader than in Microsoft Office, F-Secure said.

“We scoured the entire Adobe portfolio and evaluated more than 200 products in the field today to determine which might be vulnerable,” he said, adding that fixes for Shockwave Player and Flash Player shipped within weeks.

“This is all very much a business decision, whether the company decides to take security seriously or not,” he said, adding that he spent his day dealing with Adobe updates.

One of those, called Jolicloud is launching in beta in the next few months. Created by Tariq Krim, who founded and later left widget-based start page Netvibes, the alternate OS has been designed for Web workers, or people who do most of their work (or play) on Web applications and services.

While that is certain to change with the release of Windows 7 in late October, which runs leaner and meaner than Vista ever did (and could even come on a thumb drive), Microsoft’s stumble opened things up for other operating systems to come in and fill the gap. Many consumers have more of a choice than ever with alternate operating systems that are becoming easier to install and use on these smaller machines.

(Credit:
CNET)

I’m less enthralled by the idea of having to basically install bookmarks, and do away with having multiple windows open in the same desktop area–something I’ve grown very accustomed to on Macs and PCs. It’s also still Linux, and comes with some of the same hang ups and the often-steep learning curve.

Easy and hard at the same time

When showing this to one of my friends, their first question was “does that mean everyone will know what video I watched while I was supposed to be working?” Luckily no. For now it’s limited to displaying what applications your friends are adding or removing–not what they’re doing inside of them. But I could easily see that changing with some apps that share your information with others, like social-gaming site Kongregate, and social networks Facebook and Twitter.

The good:
• Free (for now).
• Large directory of applications that are easy to install and uninstall.
• Simple way to create a USB key w/included software.
• Multiple types of installations, including ones that can sit alongside your normal OS.
• Windows emulator (WINE) so you can run many applications you’re used to.
• OS and applications automatically update.

Jolicloud users can befriend one another and keep an eye on what apps are being installed.

To install or uninstall "applications" you can head to Jolicloud's online directory.

Jolicloud is designed to let users hop back and forth between apps that all use the entire screen. Apps you have open stay in a top menu bar and can be switched back and forth just by clicking on them. Alt+tab works too.

(Credit:
Jolicloud)

Jolicloud centers on a directory of applications that can be sorted by genre, release date, and popularity. To download or remove them from your computer, you just click on their icon and it does the rest. Jolicloud groups both Web apps and software programs under the same name umbrella, and both are added and removed from your system in the same manner. There’s also a normal add and remove programs tool just like you get in Windows, but it’s easier to do it from Jolicloud’s rounded and simplistic interface.

As mentioned earlier, Jolicloud allows users to befriend one another as well as join groups. This means you’re alerted to new applications on a constant basis. For many though, this may be a little creepy.

For instance, on the machine I was using to test it (Acer’s Aspire One), I had to manually track down the Ubuntu Linux display drivers in order to get the screen resolution above 1024×768. As a result, everything I was looking at was stretched out. There was also no software for the multitouch trackpad I was using, which meant no handy gestures for things like page navigation or on-screen shortcuts. These things could certainly make their way into future builds, but in the meantime, the fact that I was a part of the technological minority became abundantly clear.

How it works

(Credit:
CNET)

Although it’s not done yet, there are some definite key features that make Jolicloud more than just a re-skinning of Linux. The idea that you can discover new applications and manage what you have installed on your machine in the same place is downright cool. So is the idea of having all your apps and settings synced up between multiple machines.

One change since earlier versions is a cross-platform (Windows, Mac, and Linux) software utility that lets you create a bootable USB key. You just tell it where the Jolicloud install file is and where the USB stick is and it does the rest. Previously you had to do this using third party applications, and/or a multistep copy and paste into the command line. Not exactly user-friendly.

The USB creator makes it easy to create a bootable USB drive with Jolicloud on it.

The bad:
• Can’t have multiple applications on screen at the same time.
• Downloaded applications are organized for you and cannot be reorganized.
• Does not work on all Netbooks, only certain models.
• Linux-related hang ups like limited driver support.

Will these kind of kinks be worked out eventually? I sure hope so, because it’s one of the few things that held me back from fully enjoying the experience. I greatly dislike having to hunt down drivers, or deal with bugs that keep me from using certain applications, and I have a greater tolerance than most folks. One of the easiest way to square away these problems is to partner with hardware vendors and get Jolicloud on there as the main or alternate OS. Offering it for free, which is what Krim is currently doing, is a good way to start.

One of the big draws to Jolicloud is that it takes this list of apps you have installed and backs it up. If you have multiple computers running Jolicloud that share the same account, it syncs up those apps, including any log-ins or shared data. This puts less of an importance on what hardware you’re using, meaning you can hop from machine to machine and get right back to what you were doing on the other.

I’ve been giving it a thorough run-though over the past few days and have come away impressed at what it’s trying to do. Some bits and pieces are definitely still beta, but the underlying approach of making Web sites and software applications feel the same, as well as introducing users to new ones to use is really innovative.

Jolicloud fits on a CD or a (more Netbook-friendly) USB thumb drive. It can be installed on top of, or beside your standard OS. In my case, I installed it alongside a build of Windows XP and it automatically partitioned my hard disk to make extra room. The whole thing took less than half an hour from start to finish, and when it was done I could still boot back into Windows without a hitch.

Interestingly enough, you don’t actually launch any downloaded app from the directory screen. Instead, they’re housed in a simple three-pane menu that users can hop back to at any time. This keeps apps organized by whatever category they were in on Jolicloud’s directory, but it’s also a little jarring after using Windows or
Mac where you’re used to a start button, quick launch menu, or dock.

One of the things that has been most-surprising about the advent of Netbooks is that it has become less about the hardware as much as how mainstream operating systems and applications have had to adapt to fit within their confines. In the earlier generations of these machines, operating systems like
Windows Vista just didn’t cut the mustard, which is why most Netbooks you can buy right now are either running Windows XP or a variant of Linux.

Wagner admitted in 2007 to taking part in the spying campaign waged by HP in its attempt to unearth a boardroom leak. The targeted journalists worked for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and CNET News.

Former HP chairwoman Patty Dunn leaving court in October 2006. Charges of identity theft and conspiracy would later be dropped.

(Credit:
Greg Sandoval/CNET News)

Wagner pleaded guilty to identity theft and conspiracy in January 2007 and on Wednesday is due to get a new sentencing date in U.S. District Court in San Jose, Calif., the AP reported.

Wagner was arguably the person at the lowest-level of the espionage but is the only one involved that may see jail time.

The irony of Wagner’s situation is that he pleaded guilty and agreed to testify in exchange for leniency. The problem for Wagner is that the charges against the other four accused, who all denied wrongdoing, were tossed out.

This will likely close the book on the scandal that fractured HPs board, triggered a congressional investigation, and shocked the tech community. Wagner is one of five people, including Patricia Dunn, the former chairman of HP, charged in California with four felonies, including conspiracy and identity theft. Wagner was one of the people who duped telephone employees into handing over private records belonging to the journalists, HP employees, and the company’s board members.

Bryan Wagner, the would-be private detective who helped Hewlett-Packard spy on technology journalists in 2006, will soon be sentenced, according to a story by The Associated Press.

Yes, we’ve seen smaller acquisitions of open-source companies that rely on Apache-style licensing. IBM acquired Gluecode (Geronimo project), SpringSource bought Covalent (Tomcat), Oracle acquired Sleepycat (Sleepycat, BSD license), and there have likely been others that I’m simply not remembering.

Others and I have made much of VMware’s acquisition of SpringSource for $420 million, but one crucial point has been overlooked: this is the first big acquisition of a company that depends on the Apache license.

It’s telling, for example, that InfoWorld’s attempts to interview Richard Stallman, founder of the GPL, were stymied by his “demand(ing) control of what (InfoWorld) published.” You don’t grow a community with that emphasis on control of the outcome.

In other words, we’re getting beyond open source as a religious coda, the secret handshake that makes one part of The Club, and instead are focused on building businesses that provide greater transparency and value for customers. I suspect we’ll therefore see more Apache and less GPL going forward, with companies contributing significant parts of their product/business to open source, while delivering the rest via proprietary licensing.

Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.

But the big, head-turning deals? GNU General Public License (GPL). Every one of them.

Perhaps this is because our notion of “monetizing open source” has expanded, as Eric Barroca astutely argues. The GPL is great for dual-licensing and support-based businesses, but it’s not very adept at incorporating proprietary software in the way that IBM does, for example, or Day Software, as Kevin Cochrane notes.

The SpringSource acquisition turns this “wisdom” on its head.

IBM already does this. So, frankly, does Microsoft (though still to a small degree). I think we’ll see a lot more.

The GPL has been prominent for good reason. It’s accepted wisdom in the commercial open-source crowd that it’s difficult to directly monetize Apache-licensed software, and that the GPL, what with its capitalist urge for control, is a better tool for the financially inclined.

As the open source market continues marching away from its roots–the lone developer who creates a useful product as a labor of love–appreciation for the idealism that lies at the GPL’s heart is diminishing. Businesses that view open source development as a path to a profitable future rather than as an altruistic mission are increasingly balking at what they view as the license’s excessively restrictive aspects concerning code improvements.

Such thinking, among other considerations, led Appcelerator to drop the GPL for Apache, and I believe we’ll see more. We just had a significant demonstration that you can make money with Apache-licensed software. SpringSource was doubling sales every year with Apache, and had a $420 million outcome as a result of both its sales and its community, which may be easier to come by with an Apache license than GPL, at least for commercial open-source projects.

The reason is that customers have never been as religious about open source as the vendors/communities that develop it, a lesson I was taught by a crowd of CTOs in New York and which is highlighted in a recent Enterprise Systems Journal article.

Nearly every other big open-source acquisition, from JBoss ($350 million) to MySQL ($1 billion) to XenSource ($500 million), has involved the GPL. Even Zimbra ($350 million), while not GPL, fits the mold because it used an attribution clause with an MPL license that was designed to accomplish GPL-esque ambitions.

IBM proved long ago that it’s possible to build billion-dollar businesses with Apache. But SpringSource is the first start-up to suggest that Apache isn’t simply a way for big companies to create complements to proprietary cores. Sometimes an Apache core is worth something, too. At least $420 million, by SpringSource’s reckoning.

But it’s also a function of open source’s growing importance in the software ecosystem. As more money pours into open source–IDC projects $8.1 billion in open-source revenues by 2013–there will be increasing pressure to make it pay, as InfoWorld recently wrote:

Perpetually is a new Web archiving tool demoed at the TechCrunch50 conference. It saves entire instances of Web pages, then lets users dial back to older versions. You just point it to a site or entire domain name then tell it what you want it to archive and for how long. It then does the hard work of saving pages to its servers.

(Credit:
Perpetually)

Included is a visual browser that shows you visual history of pages in thumbnail form. You can simply flip through these before viewing the full-sized version. There’s also a way to pick specific parts of a Web page and dial back such as a breaking stories box. And for those who want to find a specific archived page, or piece of archived content, there’s a search engine that lets you go back without having to browse.

The service is not free; in fact, it’s not even aimed at consumers. The lowest plan costs $99 a month, all the way up to $499 month, each with a higher level of monthly archiving storage. Considering each page takes up some storage space, it can fill up quickly, which is why the pro plans offer more.

The company said it’s aiming Perpetually at media networks, historians, and PR companies. It also butts heads with Iterasi and its Positive Press product whose core technology was first demoed in January 2008.

10:19 a.m.: He also shows us how Home Sharing works. You can drag a song or series of songs from other authorized computers to your own library. Can sort by songs that others have that you do not, and can set it so that when others buy new content from iTunes it can be automatically transferred to your library.

10:37 a.m.: A few developers of those games are going to come up on stage now. Ubisoft is up first. Ben Mattes from Ubisoft is talking about Assassin’s Creed II and how it’s coming to the App Store. It’ll be out November 11.

10:04 a.m.: Today we’re talking about music. Phil Schiller and Jeff Robbin will join him. First,
iPhone stuff. “Thrilling to report that in two years we’ve sold 30 million iPhones.”

10:05 a.m.: In the last year, the reason is the App Store, he says. There are 75,000 apps. 1.8 billion apps downloaded by users, he reports. That doesn’t include updates, though.

11:16 a.m.: He thanks everyone for coming. That’s the end, folks. We’ll have continuing coverage including reviews of the new devices coming later today from CNET’s Donald Bell and plenty of video and further analysis from CNET News. Thanks for joining us!

10:24 a.m.: Now Jeff is showing us iTunes LP. He picks a Doors album. You can see all the songs, all the lyrics, and lots of photos.

11:11 a.m.: Jones says: “Thanks to Steve Jobs for having us. Really happy to see he’s doing well.” Now we get a preview of a song from her upcoming album called “Young Blood.”

(Credit:
Stephen Shankland/CNET)

Steve Jobs takes the stage.

10:44 a.m.: Mark Hickey from Gameloft, one of the more prolific App Store game makers, is up. He’s showing a new first-person shooter called Nova, where you have to defend humanity against an alien attack in space.

10:06 a.m.: Today: iPhone OS 3.1. Some bug fixes and new features are coming. The Genius playlist technology is now going to work for apps in the App Store. It will recommend apps to you based on the apps you already own. The recommendations will get better as people say what they like and buy, he says.

Schiller mocks Dell's non-pocketable small PC.

10:09 a.m.: Today, iTunes 9 is out. A new look. Cleaner-looking, better navigation.

10:03 a.m.: “I’m very happy to be here today with you all,” he says. “As you may know I had a liver transplant. I have the liver of a mid-20s person who died in a
car crash. Without that, I wouldn’t be here without that person’s generosity.”

(Credit:
Stephen Shankland/CNET )

11:02 a.m.: The voice-over feature from the iPod Shuffle will also be in the Nano, as well as Genius Mixes which were discussed earlier. The Nano will also have an FM radio, a voice recorder app, and pedometer. The pedometer will sync online with Nike Plus.

10:14 a.m.: The iTunes Store also gets a new look, along with improved artists, movies, and TV pages–a “cleaner” layout, Jobs says.

10:08 a.m.: iPhone OS 3.1 is free for iPhone and
iPod Touch users who have 3.0. It will be made available today. Update 2:58 p.m.: Earlier, it was reported that it would cost iPod Touch users $4.95. The update only costs money to those who had not yet upgraded their iPod Touch to 3.0 or higher.

(Credit:
Stephen Shankland/CNET)

Travis Boatman from Electronic Arts shows the new interface to control the Madden game.

11:06 a.m.: Now Jobs is talking music. “It’s the primary reason we do this.” Live performance coming up. It’s Norah Jones.

10:49 a.m.: You can draw plays right on the screen, which draws lots of applause from the audience. Madden 10 is available today in the App Store, Boatman says.

10:15 a.m.: Another new feature: iTunes LP. “Some of us here are old enough to have bought LPs,” Steve says. You can get album art, videos, liner notes, credits, etc. This is clearly the “Cocktail” we’ve been hearing about. The artists and labels can now have access to adding extras to their albums now.

(Credit:
Stephen Shankland/CNET)

10:07 a.m.: Also: as Greg Sandoval previously reported, there will be ringtones for sale for $1.29 each. You can buy them the way you’d buy music.

10:54 a.m.: Now Schiller is discussing the iPod Classic. Now it will be 160GB for $249, which is up from 120GB.

Phil Schiller brags about the iPhone as a gaming platform.

10:35 a.m.: He says the iPod Touch is a better gaming platform than the PSP or Nintendo DS. He points to $30 game titles on those devices and the buying experience as “too expensive” and “not a lot of fun.” He says there are 21,178 “game and entertainment” titles on iPhone OS, compared to 3,600 on Nintendo, and 600 on Sony.

11:04 a.m.: We’re getting a preview of the new ad, which highlights the video feature and colors of the Nano–with a cutesy pop song as backing, of course.

(Credit:
Stephen Shankland/CNET)

(Credit:
Stephen Shankland)

(Credit:
Stephen Shankland)

(Credit:
Stephen Shankland)

(Credit:
Stephen Shankland/CNET)

10:12 a.m.: He says syncing will be better now, too. When syncing playlists you can also sync particular genres or particular artists. Also specific photo albums or specific faces from iPhoto, and specific movies from iTunes. You can also manage your apps syncing in iTunes.

10:27 a.m.: There’s also something called iTunes Extras. Using the movie “Wall-E,” he shows there are extra features like short videos, and a way to navigate chapters in the movie.

10:47 a.m.: Only one more game developer, Schiller promises. It’s Travis Boatman from Electronic Arts. He’s talking Madden NFL 10, which is coming to the App Store for the first time.

9:55 a.m. PDT: Good morning. We’re inside and seated, just waiting for the event to begin. There’s quite a crowd in here with some notable names already appearing. Greg Grunberg from TV’s “Heroes” is sitting right behind us, and Herbie Hancock and Google’s Eric Schmidt have also been spotted.

10:21 a.m.: There’s a new navigation bar in the iTunes Store: music, movies, TV shows, podcasts, audio books, etc.

9:59 a.m.: Now playing “It’s Only Rock ‘n Roll” by the Rolling Stones, also the title of the event per the invitation. It looks like we’ll be starting momentarily.

10:53 a.m.: OpenGL ES 2.0 is also on the iPod Touch now, so games are faster–except for the $199 version, which will not have that.

Phil Schiller talks new iPod colors.

11:15 a.m.: Norah Jones concludes her performance. The lights are back up and Steve’s on stage.

10:59 a.m.: “Video has exploded in the last few years,” he says. All those streams are coming from solid-state video cameras. He shows a picture of the Flip Video and its 4GB $149 price point. “We want to get in on this,” he says. There will be a video camera in the back of every iPod Nano. There’s also a mic and a speaker inside.

11:04 a.m.: It will come in a variety of colors: pink, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, silver, black. 8GB for $159 and 16GB for $179, both will be available today.

10:58 a.m.: Steve’s back up. One more thing…a video camera.

He encourages everyone to be an organ donor, and extends a heartfelt thanks to the Apple community. Also, on Tim Cook: “He ran the company very ably during that time.” “I’m back at Apple, and loving every day of it,” he says.

10:08 a.m.: Now on to iTunes: Steve says iTunes is the No. 1 seller of music in the world. 8.5 billion songs have been purchased and there are 100 million accounts.

Album view in iTunes 9.

Norah "Not a Beatle" Jones closed the event by performing two songs.

Jobs touted brilliant new iPod colors.

You can see lyrics with the album view in iTunes 9. Shown here are Dave Matthews lyrics.

Twenty million of those sold are iPod Touch, he says.

10:42 a.m.: Now, Bart Decrem, founder of Tapulous (maker of Tap Tap Revolution) is up. Riddim Ribbon is their new game built “especially for iPhone and iPod Touch.” It’s a DJ game where you race down a rhythm of a song, Guitar Hero-style. You can remix the song by going different directions down the “ribbon.”

(Credit:
Stephen Shankland/CNET)

Jobs says the iPhone is popular internationally.

(Credit:
Stephen Shankland/CNET)

10:22 a.m.: Can also preview songs directly in the Top Charts section. When browsing the store, you can click an “i” button for a preview of the songs on the album which will allow a quick listen without going to the actual artist or album page. You can also Twitter info and post to Facebook about songs you find in the iTunes Store.

Earlier Wednesday, we brought you live coverage of Apple’s rock ‘n’ roll-themed event, which kicked off in San Francisco just after 10 a.m. Pacific time. The event has concluded, but for more iPod-related coverage, click here.

10:29 a.m.: First Schiller’s going to talk sales numbers. 220 million iPods sold to date, he says. He says they have 73.8 percent of the market, “with Microsoft pulling up the rear with 1.1 percent.” There are a few giggles.

10:52 a.m.: “$199 is a magic price point in the iPod market,” Schiller says. As of today, the iPod Touch is $199 for 8GB and $299 for 32GB. It now also comes in a 64GB model for $399.

10:02 a.m.: People are still clapping.

10:13 a.m.: Also something called Home Sharing. With it, you can copy songs, movies, TV shows to up to five authorized computers in your house. Can see what’s in all the other authorized computers right from your iTunes account.

11:00 a.m.: He says it’s just as thin as before, and shows a quick demo video from the device’s camera. The videos will sync back to your iPhoto or to YouTube, with one click (another feature of the Flip Video camera).

10:17 a.m.: Jeff Robbin, vice president of consumer applications and lead software designer for iTunes, is now demonstrating the new iTunes. He shows how to drag and drop apps in iTunes to rearrange how they appear on an iPod Touch or iPhone. You can check and uncheck which games or apps you want on the device.

Jobs shows new iPods.

Steve Jobs announces iPhone OS 3.1.

The crowd awaits Apple news inside the Yerba Buena center in San Francisco.

People clap, but there seems to be some palpable disappointment for those expecting a Beatle or Coldplay, which were some of the rumors. She starts with “Come Away with Me.”

10:28 a.m.: Jobs is back on stage. He says iTunes 9 is free and ready to download today. Phil Schiller will come up to talk iPods now.

10:25 a.m.: There are also videos that he says are exclusive to iTunes LP. For example, Ray Manzarek is talking about how they decided to name the band The Doors.

10:01 a.m.: Steve Jobs walks out. Standing ovation.

10:33 a.m.: Now Schiller’s talking up the computing aspect of the iPod Touch, with Wi-Fi, browsing the Internet on Safari, e-mail, etc. “It fits in your pocket. Not everybody can say that,” he says. And he shows a picture on screen of a Dell Netbook. More giggles from the audience.

(Credit:
Stephen Shankland/CNET)

(Credit:
Stephen Shankland/CNET)

(Credit:
Stephen Shankland/CNET)

Phil Schiller shows new prices and memory configurations for the iPod Touch.

10:11 a.m.: In iTunes 9: Genius Mixes. Like Genius Playlists, Genius Mixes is like a DJ that plays mixes of songs that go together from your own library. Will make up to 12 mixes at a time.

10:57 a.m.: The iPod Shuffle gets its turn. Now it will come in more colors. Pink, green, and blue in addition to the silver and black. It’s also now $59 for 2GB and $79 for 4GB. There’s also a special edition in stainless steel for $99.