Though it has its problems, they contend, the model adopted by Apple — which requires retailers to charge book prices set by the publisher, while allowing them to keep 30 percent of sales revenue — may actually protect the long-term interests of everyone in the e-book value chain: Author and publisher, retailer and consumer.

What Apple has been attempting to do with e-books is pretty much what it did with digital music: Standardize pricing*. And while that effort might still irk recording industry executives, it’s near impossible to imagine the industry today without iTunes. And Apple clearly has similar hopes for iBooks and the publishing industry.

“Apple [is] attempting to recreate an environment around books that exists around digital music: Establishing base-line pricing so that consumers understand the digital value of a ‘book’ in much the same way a single music track is worth 99 cents,” Auriga analyst Kevin Dede argues in a note to clients today. “And as we see Apple’s overarching philosophy, it appears to us that Apple is defending interests of all the members of its ‘book’ value chain, including authors, publisher, and customers, as it does with all its constituents that offer value to the end customer. There is no salvageable long-term business model in destroying any key participant’s position; all players need to see a reason to play the game.”

In other words, with its agency model, Apple has been working to set a basic market perception of book value. And one could argue this is a good thing. Setting an agreed-upon value, says Dede, brings stability to book pricing, which is typically pretty chaotic. “One day, a new best-seller may be on sale for $15.99 at a book store, but the next day, when some anxious customer is looking for it, the price may have returned to $29.99,” Dede explains. “This is the undesirable, unpredictable atmosphere we see Apple attempting to avoid.”

And, alleged collusion aside, setting baseline prices does do that. More, it preserves the value proposition of books themselves, regardless of the means by which they’re distributed — which is good for publishers and, more importantly, authors.

It’s also very good for Apple, and in the company’s best interests. This is not at all an altruistic effort by any means.

But it does raise e-book prices. And, of course, it prevents Amazon, which already controls about 60 percent of the e-book market, from taking a loss on every book it sells as it drives to dominate the market. Short-term, that’s great for consumers who can buy their e-books at a significant discount.

But long-term what does it mean for the value of a book, and the industry itself — authors in particular? If the value of a “book” continues to drop, what does that mean for them? What does it mean for the editors who work with them? The proof-readers that ensure their copy is clean? Right now, Amazon is the one taking the loss on books it sells at heavily discounted prices. Who takes the loss when a shift in public perception of book value makes those discounted prices the norm?

*Caveat: With iTunes Apple pays record labels a wholesale price for music and then sets retail prices itself. This is obviously not how the agency model works. The similarity that Dede is pointing out here is solely standardization of prices.

The gap between the individual and the household is perhaps most evident and annoying on personalized recommendation sites, like Netflix and Amazon. The person who loves “Yo Gabba Gabba” is not always the one who watches every Jennifer Aniston movie or the one who can’t be budged from the Criterion Collection. But then, we watch movies and TV together, or sometimes we’re just in the mood for something different from our usual taste.

Netflix is asked to address this personalization problem all the time by analysts and users. On Netflix’s most recent earnings call, CEO Reed Hastings said to expect “multi-account options” within the next year. The company has talked about making this a premium feature, where customers pay extra to maintain multiple user accounts on one bill.

Single-user accounts are certainly more straightforward to manage for both companies and users, but they ignore the reality that we live together and depend on each other. If a personalization system doesn’t even understand the difference between two people, then it’s not very good, is it?

A very interesting Netflix developer post from this weekend about the company’s recommendation system noted that the company already implicitly tries to acknowledge different users in a household. “It is important to keep in mind that Netflix’ personalization is intended to handle a household that is likely to have different people with different tastes. … To achieve this, in many parts of our system we are not only optimizing for accuracy, but also for diversity.”

Because of this focus on diversity, the “Top 10” recommendations on each user’s personalized Netflix homepage are really for each household, wrote Netflix personalization engineers Xavier Amatriain and Justin Basilico.

Really? Because when I log into Netflix on my joint account with my husband, I see “Top 10 for Michael.” It doesn’t exactly make me feel acknowledged.

But Netflix isn’t the only one. A household or “inner circle” setting makes sense for any online content seller, from the New York Times to iTunes. For instance, the household finance manager, Mint.com, has no household account option. Two people who use the service have to associate the account with one of their emails and a joint password. I don’t have high expectations of the wide range of banking and utility bill sites, but they suffer from the same problem.

Or how about counting multiple devices as members of a family? Family mobile data plans are finally supposed to arrive in the U.S. this year.

I’d propose that these sites and services create a level between billing account and user account. They should understand and design around the idea of a household and allow users to switch between profiles — like players on gaming consoles — without logging in and out each time.

PandoDaily writer Hamish McKenzie seems to be thinking along some of the same lines in a post today suggesting that Pair, the new app that helps romantic couples share their days with each other, could become a platform for joint management of calendars, travel and bank accounts. I think he’s getting at a similar concept — but this is probably a setting that would be better done by each service individually, rather than an outside authenticator.

These joint household accounts would present challenges — and opportunities. It’s not as simple as designing for just one person or the general public.

For one thing: privacy. Are you as a household member allowed to see everything your family watches, reads, listens to, pays for, etc? I’d say generally it makes sense to be open within a household, but there are reasons to build in secret or incognito activity. For instance, I don’t necessarily want my husband to be able to anticipate what I’m giving him for his birthday by seeing the purchase pop up on our joint Mint account.

There could also be interesting design around the Venn diagrams of multiple users. I was chatting about this topic with investor Manu Kumar of K9 Ventures, who suggested a Netflix interface where people sit down to watch a movie and tell the service who is in the room — kind of like a check-in. Then, Netflix would be able to recommend something for the group, and also capture better data about how to make recommendations for each person in the future.

I’d be interested to know what you think, and whether you’ve seen examples of people doing this well.

The free-music party was supposed to end three months ago, which would have meant that nonpaying users would face a 10-hour-a-month cap.

But the company extended the promotion, which it introduced during Spotify’s U.S. launch last summer, and it’s announcing today that it’s extending it again.

Meanwhile, in some European countries, Spotify has also removed another limit on free music — a restriction that meant free users could only hear a single song five times, period — though the 10-hours-a-month restriction still stands.

The various restrictions are a result of negotiations with the big music labels, and are designed to give users an incentive to upgrade their free accounts to premium ones, and/or actually buy music from Spotify or other sources. Paying users get to listen to Spotify without ads, and can access the service from iPhones and Android handsets.

Why lift the limits? Feel free to speculate. Here are two guesses, which aren’t mutually exclusive:

• Both Spotify and the music labels are pleased with the service’s results, which have been producing free-to-paid conversions of around 15 percent, at least during the U.S. launch. If that’s still working, it may be worth it, from both sides’ perspectives, to lay off the limits.
• Spotify is in the midst of a giant funding round that could value the company at some $4 billion. That pitch is premised on the company’s “extraordinary” growth.  If it did clamp down on free listening, that growth would presumably slow, which makes that pitch harder to make.

Yesterday, it acquired OMGPOP, the developer that suddenly unseated the social game giant after its overnight success with Draw Something.

Draw Something, which challenges players to guess what another person is drawing, much like Pictionary, has been downloaded more than 35 million times in the past six weeks.

In the words of OMGPOP’s CEO Dan Porter, that’s pretty “Drawsome!”

But in making the acquisition, Zynga may have inadvertently set the expectation that if it doesn’t create the No. 1 game on Facebook — it will acquire it.

In this case, that wasn’t a cheap thing to do.

Zynga declined to say how much it spent on OMGPOP, but our sources say it paid $210 million, including $30 million in employee-retention payments. 

The message Zynga is sending with this acquisition is that it is committed to having the most popular games — a difficult and expensive proposition, especially if acquisitions are always the answer.

Just ask Porter how difficult it is. It took him 34 attempts and six years to build a hit.

“You are always trying to figure out what everyone wants,” he said in an interview. “But a hit is a hit for reasons that are hard to understand. I’ve told investors before — if I could, I would only make those games, and not the other games.”

Porter likened it to the music business, where he started his career. While busy signing every hot band he could find, the unexpected runaway hit was the “Dirty Dancing” soundtrack.

Still, the stock market rewarded Zynga’s decision yesterday, sending the company’s stock up about 5.3 percent, to $14.45 a share, after getting confirmation of the acquisition at noon. However, by the end of the day, enthusiasm waned, and shares closed at $13.72 a share.

Since going public in December, it’s been a rocky ride for Zynga.

After raising $1 billion to make it the largest Internet IPO since Google, it has traded as low as $7.97 and as high as $15.91. Based on yesterday’s closing price, the stock is now up 37 percent.

Acquisitions are hardly a new strategy for the company.

Last year, it set a pace of buying more than one company every month, seeking both employees and new games to maintain its rapid growth rate.

In this case, OMGPOP’s 40 New York employees will join forces with Zynga’s existing New York office, and Porter will become the new VP and GM.

What really stands out about this acquisition is the price — at $210 million, it’s the most expensive company Zynga has purchased. Prior to this acquisition, Zynga’s largest buy was the $53 million purchase of Newtoy, the developer behind Words With Friends.

That’s not to say that Zynga hasn’t attempted other big purchases. In 2011, it courted Rovio, the maker of Angry Birds, and unsuccessfully bid for PopCap, which instead sold to Electronic Arts for $750 million.

Although Draw Something has been proven to be astonishingly popular in the short term, it doesn’t have the same kind of track record as Rovio or PopCap.

The mobile game sits atop the iTunes “top paid,” “top free” and “top-grossing app” lists, an unusual accomplishment. On iTunes, it beats every single Zynga title — including Zynga Poker, which is frequently one of the highest-grossing apps.

As mentioned at the top of this post, Draw Something is also the most popular game on Facebook. However, what’s interesting is that the game isn’t available on the social network. Instead, it uses Facebook credentials as a way for players to register on their mobile phones.

From what we’ve heard, it has also been generating a lot of cash, based in large part on in-app purchases made by players. People familiar with the company told my colleague Peter Kafka that it has recently been netting around $250,000 a day from the game — after Apple takes its 30 percent cut.

In an interview, Zynga’s Chief Mobile Officer David Ko said OMGPOP’s acquisition represents more than a hit game for the company.

“It was about the team and how well we connected,” he said. “We found a great leader in Dan, and an amazing team around him. I couldn’t be happier in partnering with the team.”

Indeed, that’s Drawsome.

Let’s assume that some of you are interested in taking your old DVDs to Walmart, and paying up to $5 a disc so you can access the movies on them from Vudu, Walmart’s cloud-based service. Fair enough — different strokes and all of that.

But we’re going to have to shrink the size of this theoretical group a bit. Because Walmart’s new “disc to digital service” won’t work for:

• People who want to watch Disney or Pixar movies. Disney is working on its own cloud service, and isn’t joining the five other major studios on this one.
• People who want to download the movies to iPhones and iPads. Users of iOS can stream Vudu movies to their devices, but can’t keep them on their machines.
• People who want to stream or download their movies on Android phones or tablets. I’m sure there’s a good biz-dev reason that Vudu doesn’t support Google’s OS, because I can’t think of a technical one.

You can download and stream movies to Windows or Mac PCs. Walmart says Vudu will work on “more than 300” devices, but I only count 211 on the service’s Web site, and most of those are Internet-connected TVs and Blu-ray players.

I guess there are some people who would rather go to Walmart and upload their movies instead of ripping them directly from their DVDs to their PCs, even though it’s very easy. Maybe they are very, very interested in obeying the law, because — weirdly — it’s technically illegal to copy a movie you own, even for personal use.

But I can’t figure out who’s going to use disc-to-digital to watch movies on their TVs, since it’s very likely they already have a machine that plays discs sitting right next to their TVs. (Based on the promotional video Walmart has rolled out, it can’t either. As you can see at the bottom of this post, it’s playing up disc-to-digital’s mobile advantages.)

I’m also pretty skeptical that anyone who doesn’t have kids will have much interest in making digital copies of movies they already own. The reason that Hollywood is working on schemes like this to promote movie ownership is that most people have figured out they’d rather rent. Not because they’re constrained by device compatibility, but because they only want to watch a movie once or twice.

Kids’ movies are the big exception here. I think lots of people would jump through lots of hoops to get copies of kids’ movies on as many devices as possible. But the absence of all those Disney movies, and all those Pixar movies, sure looks like a problem for that pitch.

But I don’t want to end the evening on a negative note! So take a look at Walmart’s video. It’s pleasant enough. And perhaps at some point, Walmart figures out how to rope Disney in, add more devices to its lineup, and actually deliver on the promise sketched out below:

The company was slated to announce the pacts — with Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group, EMI Music Group and Sony — at the South by Southwest conference today. CNET reported on Turntable’s Warner deal last week, and I think that report helped accelerate today’s announcement.

The fact that Turntable was able to get deals done in less than a year — the company is the result of a well-documented pivot from something called Stickybits — says a lot about the newfound flexibility on the part of the music business. Especially since Turntable has carved out a new business model — basically a hybrid between “on-demand” services like Spotify and “radio” services like Pandora.

The flip side is that the buzz and momentum Turntable was generating last summer has gone away. That may be due mostly to Spotify’s U.S. launch, which by all accounts has been a huge success. But it may also be because not that many people want to listen to other people play music.

I do, though, so I hope the deals give Turntable the ability to turn things around. Right now, when I visit the service I don’t see any of my pals there. And while I’m sure I could find some cool people playing cool songs there if I dug around for a while, I don’t want to do a lot of digging.

One thing the deals won’t do is give Turntable the ability to open its doors to users outside the U.S. But it does give the company a better chance of getting international deals done.

That would give Turntable a leg up on rival Pandora. But there are a gazillion legal ways to get your hands on digital music, for very little money these days — from Spotify to Rhapsody to iTunes Match to Deezer. Getting heard above that din will be a challenge.

That’s the first time Netflix has handed off its customer billing to a third party. And it’s a significant step for Reed Hastings and company.

For starters, it will make it that much easier for Netflix to sign up more users. But it also sets up a model for a possible Netflix-cable provider deal.

Reuters reported yesterday that Hastings was looking to bundle his service with pay-TV operators, and to deliver movies and TV shows through cable providers’ set-top boxes. But people familiar with his thinking tell me the Apple TV model is a more plausible tie-up: Netflix would be happy to let cable operators take care of billing, but wants to send its video over the Web, just like it always has.

That assumes that the cable guys buy the argument Hastings has been making for some time — that his service isn’t for cord-cutters, but for people who like watching lots of video, and don’t mind paying another $8 for what is essentially another cable channel.

How much would Netflix be willing to pay to let a third party market its service and take on billing duties as well? I don’t know.

But I have a hunch that that it’s less than the 30 percent per month that Apple has previously required from subscription services that want to let users sign up via its iOS devices.

One hint: Though you’ll now be able to sign up for Netflix using Apple TV, you still won’t be able to do that with Apple’s iPhones, iPads and iPods. Those devices will still require you to sign up somewhere else before you can stream video on their screens.

Worth noting that Netflix isn’t the only outside service handing over billing to Apple. Major League Baseball is doing the same thing with its app, and presumably we’ll see more down the line. Curious to see if Hulu Plus joins in.

RELATED POSTS:

• Verizon, AT&T Get to Duke It Out Over 4G iPad; Sprint, T-Mobile Stuck on Sidelines
• A Brief Hands-On With Apple’s New iPad (Video)
• Here’s What a Netflix-Cable Deal Could Look Like: The One That Netflix Just Announced With Apple
• Here’s the New iPad
• Post-PC Apple, By the Numbers
• HBO Deals Keep Fox, Universal Out of New iCloud Movie Service
• Apple Introduces LTE-Equipped iPad, Updates Apple TV
• What to Watch For at Apple’s Event, Besides That New iPad
• Complete Apple coverage

The new device will support video in 1080p, and Apple will now allow users to re-download movies they’ve already purchased from iTunes, like they’ve already been able to do with TV shows, via Apple’s iCloud service. No details yet on whether this means all movies from all studios. If I had to bet, I’d guess that some studios may not participate, but I’ll ask around.

Update: A studio executive tells me that Apple does not have all six of the major studios on board. And here’s confirmation from a source with first-hand knowledge: News Corp.’s Fox and Comcast’s Universal aren’t in, because they have preexisting deals with Time Warner’s HBO that give the pay-TV service exclusive “windows.” (News Corp. also owns this Web site.)

That means that if you bought, say, “Rise of the Planet of the Apes” from iTunes earlier this year, you won’t be able to re-watch it on Apple TV.

But that should get sorted out eventually, says HBO spokesman Jeff Cusson. “With every technological enhancement, we have always been able to find common ground with our studio partners, and we’re sure that will be the result here.”

The price for the device remains the same: $99. The upgraded boxes will be available next week, says Apple CEO Tim Cook.

RELATED POSTS:

• Verizon, AT&T Get to Duke It Out Over 4G iPad; Sprint, T-Mobile Stuck on Sidelines
• A Brief Hands-On With Apple’s New iPad (Video)
• Here’s What a Netflix-Cable Deal Could Look Like: The One That Netflix Just Announced With Apple
• Here’s the New iPad
• Post-PC Apple, By the Numbers
• HBO Deals Keep Fox, Universal Out of New iCloud Movie Service
• Apple Introduces LTE-Equipped iPad, Updates Apple TV
• What to Watch For at Apple’s Event, Besides That New iPad
• Complete Apple coverage

Google plans to rename the Android Market as well as its books, movies and music apps, rebranding all of them under the “Google Play” brand. Over the next week or so, the Android Market icon will change to “Google Play Store,” while each of the other apps will get new monikers the next time they are updated.

It’s all part of an effort by Google to unify its fledgling efforts to become a serious player in music and video sales.

Google is also making similar changes on the Web, unifying Google Music, the Web-based Android Market and its e-book store. With music, Google has actually had two separate experiences: one for buying music and another for playing it back.

In an interview, Google’s Chris Yerga said the primary reason for the changes is to give people one-stop shopping for different types of media and to make sure consumers know that the content they buy can be played both on the Web and on Android devices. However, he said Google would also like to see the effort result in more sales of its newer content types.

“We’re actually pretty happy with how the non-apps verticals have been performing,” Yerga said, but added that “it’s always better if those things are climbing at even higher velocities.”

Media companies continue to say that Google remains a challenging company to do business with. For example, Warner Music’s Edgar Bronfman said at D: Dive Into Media that Google Music is “an oxymoron.”

Google didn’t comment specifically on Bronfman’s statement, though a representative did say: “We want to work with everybody and we’ve been able to sign deals with many media companies.”

Other than the name changes, though, Google said it is making no changes to the content of its stores or its business terms or practices.

With each of the content types, Google allows people to play their content either on Android or the Web. With some — but not all — media types, Google has apps for other devices, such as the iPhone.

“You are always going to get the premier experience on your Android device,” Yerga said. “We support other devices where it makes sense but that’s not the core thing.”

That data point comes from NPD, which says 78 million Americans bought music in 2011, up 2 percent from 2010. And that’s the second consecutive year the number has bumped up.

Since CD sales continue to decline, the uptick here comes from the digital side, just like people have been predicting since … forever. NPD says 45 million people bought digital downloads at Apple’s iTunes and Amazon, up 14 percent from 2010.

Given that it’s easier than ever to listen to free music, legally, via streaming options like Pandora and Spotify, the fact that paid downloads are up is a little counterintuitive.

But that’s always been part of the streaming music service pitch to the big labels: Let us give away your stuff, and we’ll help increase demand — just like radio used to do.

We’re starting to hear murmurs from the labels that this is actually how it’s working in the real world, too. Again, too early to tell if it’s a long-term trend, or perhaps just an Adele-inspired bump. But near-term good news is still much better than years of decline.

App-o-Day, a new mobile app launching today, is branding itself as the “Groupon of apps” and serving up an app deal of the day. For example, an app that might normally be 99 cents might be free for a limited time; another app might be featured because there’s a good deal offered within the app.

The free iOS App-o-Day app was created by Iddiction, a new start-up from mobile games veteran Andrej Nabergoj. He employs a team of 15 people who go out and speak with developers, then handpick and test the apps that are promoted in App-o-Day.

But App-o-Day isn’t just about helping users find a good app deal. It’s also about helping them find mobile apps in general, as apps for searching apps become increasingly valuable.

The most recent evidence of this trend is Apple’s acquisition of app search engine Chomp — which helped users find apps in both iTunes and the Google Android marketplace — as its App Store numbers balloon to over 500,000 apps and nearly 25 billion downloads.

AppTap, an app recommendation and advertising network that works across mobile platforms and Web sites, just raised $4 million in Series A funding to continue to build its business. AppTap has said it thinks app discovery isn’t — and shouldn’t be — limited to app stores, and that more context can aid in search discovery.

And Argentina-based Kinetik recently took its iOS-based app discovery service to the Web, TheNextWeb reports; the service will now allow app users to “share apps, post comments and discover your friends’ recommendations,” all part of an effort to enhance the app-search process.

Despite the fact that many apps are free or very inexpensive, the app economy continues to grow, with research firm iSuppli projecting that total download revenue from mobile apps and games will hit $5.6 billion in 2012, $6.9 billion in 2013, and $8.3 billion in 2014. Increasing smartphone adoption, in addition to the growing number of apps available in app stores, is likely contributing to this.

With everyone getting app-happy, it’s easy to see why good app-discovery apps are becoming a trend (and why mobile developers like the idea, as well, since their apps can easily get lost amid hundreds of thousands of apps).

It’s one thing if consumers can search for a specific app based on a friend’s recommendation — as more than half of them do, according to a report put out last year by Latitude and MTV Networks. It’s easy enough to search for, say, Instagram, and come up with the desired app.

But mobile app searches often don’t perform as well when a smartphone owner is looking for a specific function, such as an app that makes photos look vintage-y and hip, which can result in frustrated mobile consumers and developers — and advertisers. We’ll likely see more developers try to solve the search problem, as there are even more apps to search for.

Until this month, when it released Draw Something.

The game is essentially a mobile version of Pictionary and, for whatever reason, it’s a huge hit. Maybe it touches on some of the same things that Words With Friends mines, except it doesn’t require spelling.

In any case, it’s currently atop both the free and paid charts at the iTunes App store. And because it’s the kind of game that gets better as more people play it, it’s probably going to stay there for a while.

CEO Dan Porter says Draw Something, which didn’t exist a month ago, is now averaging two million active users a day. So how does a start-up ride that kind of rocket growth? Bigger question: Now what?

I asked Porter to jot down some thoughts about what he’s learned over the last few weeks, and what he thinks happens next. This is an edited version of his email replies:

All Hands On Deck
Two weeks ago there were five people working on the game. Now there are 40 people. We redeployed resources from a ton of other projects, and with the growth even those people are maxed out. If we were a 10-person company now instead of a 40-person company we would be dead. It causes disruptions when people are quickly moved from one thing to another, but everyone likes being associated with a winner.

Self-Reliance
We started out heavily reliant on Facebook and Amazon S3. We started making too many calls to S3, and almost took down one of their data centers. They throttled us and it took us a while to figure out what was going on; for a while our numbers cratered as users could not connect.

We had to move completely off of Amazon and host everything ourselves. As soon as we did that, our growth exploded again. Going from the 25th to the 1st most popular app was as much about performance as anything.

We also use Facebook to log people in. When Facebook is slow our app is slow, except that users don’t blame Facebook. They blame us.

A Tale of Two App Stores
The hardest thing about navigating the iTunes App Store is that there is a process for submission and approval. I understand why — it’s how Apple keeps things nice. But when you find a problem in the game, you fix it in a day or two but then have to wait a week to get approved. It is stressful. And very different than operating on the Web, where you can push live multiple times a day.

Android accounts for about 15 percent of our installs. The pro is we can push changes to the game live immediately. The challenge is that with their algorithm and so many different app stores, we are low in the charts. It’s hard to believe the game could be blowing up as big as it is and be somewhat invisible on Android, but that’s how it is.

Meanwhile, no single Android device makes up more than 3 percent of the downloads. In other words, we are on more than 50 devices, and not one of them is larger than 3 percent. That is really difficult to support.

Hot Ticket
With the success of the app, investors, celebrities and brands have all come out of the woodwork looking to get involved. The first inclination is to say yes to everyone, especially when you haven’t had that type of attention. But you have to protect the brand and make very strategic choices.

Attack of the Clones
You always feel like as soon as you are successful other folks are going to come after you. Cloning is inherent in the games business. So you need to think long and hard about how to maintain your advantage against well-funded, well-run companies.

Draw Something is about building the network for the game. When all your friends are in the game, as Zynga has proved with Words With Friends, then the network is the value of the game. Now we have more than two million players using the game daily. That’s a powerful network. Great offense, and great defense too.

Thanks, Norway! You Too, Instagram.
We’re huge in Sweden and Norway. We’ve been #1 there from day one and I have no idea why. And the activity on Instagram, as people share their drawings, has been tremendous. Spreading the game on Instagram would never have been on my radar in a million years.

Can you download movies directly to the AirStash wireless USB flash drive you reviewed recently? Can you play Netflix movies or iTunes movies downloaded to your computer and then moved to the AirStash?

A:

The AirStash is a storage device that is loaded from a PC or Mac with files (of which videos are only one type) and which then uses a special Wi-Fi network to beam those files to devices like iPads that lack USB ports. Because it doesn’t connect to the Internet itself, it can’t download movies or anything else directly via an Internet connection.

As for the Netflix and iTunes questions, Netflix wouldn’t work because Netflix doesn’t sell or download movie files at all. It only streams movies to computers running the Netflix website or mobile devices running the Netflix app. And you wouldn’t need AirStash to view a Netflix movie on, say, an iPad, because the latter can receive them directly via the app.

On iTunes movies, the company says you can definitely use AirStash to beam an iTunes movie you buy (not rent) on a computer, to an Apple mobile device, as long as that device is authorized on the same iTunes account as the computer to which you downloaded the movie.

Q:

I am closing my office and moving to a home office. I need a phone that does email, text messaging and has international service. I do not need all the bells and whistles. Would a BlackBerry be good or do you have other suggestions?

A:

BlackBerry phones are especially good for email and not only handle texts well, but have their own free BlackBerry-to-BlackBerry messaging service. They also come with excellent physical keyboards, which some users strongly prefer. The main downside compared with other smartphones is that the devices have a tired user interface and a paucity of third-party apps. If a slicker interface and a wide variety of apps matter to you, consider an Android phone or an iPhone.

“Accepting this award means so much to me, because music meant so much to him,” Cue said during the awards ceremony. “He told us that music shaped his life. It made him who he was. Everyone who knows Steve knows the profound impact that artists like Bob Dylan and the Beatles had on him.”

Video and a transcript of Cue’s speech below:

On behalf of Steve’s wife, Laurene, his children, and everyone at Apple, I’d like to thank you for honoring Steve with the Trustees Grammy Award. Steve was a visionary, a mentor, and a very close friend. I had the incredible honor of working with him for the last fifteen years.

Accepting this award means so much to me because music meant so much to him. He told us that music shaped his life … it made him who he was. Everyone that knows Steve knows the profound impact that artists like Bob Dylan and The Beatles had on him.

Steve was focused on bringing music to everyone in innovative ways. We talked about it every single day. When he introduced the iPod in 2001, people asked “Why is Apple making a music player?” His answer was simple: “We love music, and it’s always good to do something you love.”

His family and I know that this Grammy would have been very special to him, so I thank you for honoring him today.

But maybe not. Michael Crichton, for instance, had insisted in 1993 that “what we now understand as the mass media will be gone within ten years. Vanished, without a trace.” Crichton, of course, wrote “Jurassic Park,” so we must defer to him on dinosaur expertise. But he was far wide of the mark on the extinction of mass media, so perhaps his vision about newspapers in particular was also flawed.

A hint of where Crichton’s vision went wrong can likely be found in the same speech, where he said this:

“More and more, people understand that they pay for information. Online databases charge by the minute. As the link between payment and information becomes more explicit, consumers will naturally want better information. They’ll demand it, and they’ll be willing to pay for it. There is going to be — I would argue there already is — a market for extremely high-quality information. …”

But that’s not what happened, at least outside of trade publishing (industry newspapers, magazines, and newsletters). The closed online services of the 1980s (CompuServe had started its service in 1979) and early 1990s, with their usage fees, gave way in the mid and late 1990s to the open Web. Prodigy, which already in 1991 boasted a million members, was sold at a billion-dollar loss in May 1996, just 18 months after the release of the test version of the Netscape Navigator browser.

And notions of what consumers would pay for — and what they should even be asked to pay for — were turned on their heads. By early 1996 the media theorist (and former Grateful Dead lyricist) John Perry Barlow was writing in Wired that the optimal price for information in many cases was … free. “Most soft goods,” Barlow declared, “increase in value as they become more common. Familiarity is an important asset in the world of information. It may often be true that the best way to raise demand for your product is to give it away.”

And that is precisely what newspaper publishers and others fairly quickly sought to do.

The rest of this e-essay is available on iTunes.

Richard Tofel is general manager of ProPublica, the Pulitzer Prize-winning nonprofit investigative journalism newsroom. At ProPublica, he has responsibility for all of its non-journalism operations, including communications, legal, development, finance and budgeting, and human resources. He was formerly the assistant publisher of The Wall Street Journal and, earlier, an assistant managing editor of the paper; vice president, corporate communications for Dow Jones & Company; and an assistant general counsel of Dow Jones.

To be clear: Young isn’t complaining about today’s songs. He’s complaining about the way those songs are recorded and distributed.

There’s a colorful donkey input-output metaphor here, which Young uses to make his point. And he also has a plan to fix the problem.

But first he has to convince people there is a problem. And, as Walt Mossberg and I point out, lots of people have been buying (and stealing) music in the MP3 format that Young hates, and they don’t seem to be complaining about it.

Young says former Apple CEO Steve Jobs agreed with him, though. And now he’s looking for new allies. You can see the entire pitch here: