mog

Apple, evidently, has a lot of employees with drinking problems, and it keeps letting those employees take iPhone prototypes out of the building. Really? Wow, dudes. Also, T-Mobile tries to pump up its employees over the merger situation, you can finally legally play Doom in Germany, tablet makers try everything but the easy solution, and China is going to kill us all. Or give us $99 tablets, hard to say. And Buzz Out Loud is getting out of the daily deals business.

Ford and Toyota team on car tech, Audi announces plug ins & hybrids, In-car internet radio explodes, and we take you - but just one of you - for a ride in the Scion iQ.

• Ford and Toyota team on hybrids for trucks, SUVs

• GM teams with LG to develop electric vehicles

• Audi plug-in hybrid rumored to be coming in 2014

• BMW to integrate MOG app

• Cadillac drops the cloth and top on new Ciel concept

BMW announced that it plans to integrate the MOG on-demand streaming music app in its vehicles. When integrated, occupants will be able to control the MOG app on their iPhone using the vehicle's iDrive controls. Stations, playlists, artist and song information, and search tools will be visible and accessible on the vehicle's in-dash display.

The latest app integration will be beta-tested during the upcoming launch of the 6 Series BMW Coupe. BMW already integrates Pandora, TuneIn Web radio, Twitter, and Facebook in the vehicle using its Connected app. Mog is already integrated with Mini vehicles.

The benefit of … Read more

Mog is planning to make a play for the car and home, the company announced today.

Next week at South By Southwest (SXSW), the company's CEO, David Hyman, will demonstrate Mog running in a Mini USA vehicle. The service, according to a brief statement from the company, will let users have "fast and easy access to unlimited music on demand from virtually anywhere."

Mog, which boasts more than 10 million tracks, offers customers two streaming services: a $5-per-month option, which provides access on a computer; and a $10-a-month service that lets users connect to Mog from mobile devices in addition to their PCs and other electronics.

Since Mog expects to reveal plans for the car service next week, details are slim. However, The New York Times is reporting that Mog's service will be preinstalled in Mini cars and will require subscribers to connect their smartphones to the in-car stereo. The built-in Mog service will use the smartphone's Web connection to access music, but the user interface will be on the in-car stereo and not on the user's smartphone, according to The Times. Mog hasn't revealed how it will handle pricing for in-car service.… Read more

commentary If you want to get a sense of both the wishful thinking and the likeliness of dashed dreams for people investing in the digital-music business, click over to your Netflix queue and rent a copy of the 1962 musical "The Music Man."

Humor me here: "The Music Man," first a Broadway play, tells the story of a traveling huckster who convinces people in small towns that he can teach their tin-eared kids to play a musical instrument--all he needs is money to buy their trumpets and whatnot. And what happens once they give him his … Read more

All albums eventually come to an end--even super-gonzo triple live CD sets--and the time has come for this blog to end as well.

I've had a great time exploring the intersection of music and technology for the last three-plus years. And even though the music industry is going through some wrenching changes, the public's interest in music has, if anything, gotten stronger.

I was at Coachella this April along with a record sold-out crowd of more than 90,000. Some of them were there for the party, but the musical lineup made the party happen. I've seen … Read more

Subscription music pioneer Rhapsody was spun out from joint owners RealNetworks and Viacom in April, and it immediately declared its independence by dropping the price of its mobile service from $15 to $10 per month. Since then, the service has introduced offline playback to its iPhone application--critical, if you want to be able to get the most out of your subscription while on AT&T's notoriously flaky 3G network--and successfully launched an Android version, which will be getting offline playback shortly.

Tomorrow, the company is set to announce that it's moving its streaming service from several data … Read more

It's been more than a year (!) since I first tested an early alpha version of the Grooveshark app for iPhone, and now the company has finally jumped through the necessary hoops to get it into the App Store.

Grooveshark's Web site has for several years offered on-demand streaming of just about any song in existence, and it remains one of my favorite destinations. The iPhone app is also free, and it gives you a 30-day free trial, after which you'll have to sign up for a VIP subscription. Still, that subscription costs only $3 a month or $… Read more

Another decade, another attempt at an almost certainly ill-fated universal DRM scheme. Hooray! This time, it's UltraViolet, and no, Disney (meaning Apple) isn't on board. Also, new details on how Google and China reached their license renewal deal. Upshot: diplomacy in action. And Apple is closing in on surpassing Microsoft in actual revenue. Yowsa.