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Hey folks,

Well, Apple has sure made a splash with its newest purchase, hasn't it? The big guys have bought streaming music service Lala, and while it's poised to make some major moves in the industry there are a couple other happenings ready to change your life, too. Seriously. We promise.

Ten Cents a Pop
For those of you unfamiliar with Lala's services, here's the deal: Lala is like Pandora in that you can stream songs across the internet, but instead of "suggesting" songs in the style of the artist you've selected, Lala lets you input the actual group you want to listen to and charges you ten cents per song. You do not own the music on Lala...you don't even rent the music on Lala. However, in exchange for this no-ownership agreement you can listen (all the way through) to a new song once for free. Revolutionary.

What we'll say is that it seems natural for this type of service to be integrated into iTunes. One free listen is an excellent incentive to spend more time online discovering new artists and the Genius feature really would benefit from this because it makes our searching even easier. Not only that, but the ability to cough up the extra $0.89 if we wanted to buy the song on the spot would probably make the companies even more money. After all, we already spent ten cents on the track we're listening to...and what's another eighty nine? It's still just a dollar.

The move is very interesting, and we'll be waiting with bated breath to see what happens next and which features are going to be integrated into each service.

Dragon's on your iPhone
Not only is the Dragon Dictation voice to text app for your iPhone new, cool and time saving, it's also free--for a limited time in the App Store. It claims to be five times faster than typing on your teeny iPhone keyboard, and even corrections are voice based. You can record your dictation and choose to send it as SMS, email, or make use of the long awaited much vaunted copy paste feature to transmit it into any other iPhone app. Dictation everywhere...hmmm. We could get used to this...and we could stop asking for a personal secretaty to type this column. Kidding...

Google Did It Again
Just when we thought we were cool with the internet, had fully appreciated everything it could do and swore not to be shocked and awed like a five year old when it whips out some new trick, Google had to go and burst our bubble. As the latest in a series of unwieldy names, Google Goggles does something truly spectacular: it lets you search for information based on a image enquiry. Google's Vice President of Engineering said it better than we ever could:

"It could be we are really at the cusp of an entirely new computing era, [with] devices that can understand our own speech, help us understand others, and augment our own sight by helping us see further."

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Till tomorrow, Newsies...