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Color Labs founder Bill Nguyen has a relationship with Apple. In 2009, the tech giant bought one of his startups called Lala for $80 million.

Now, rumor has it that Apple may be after his Color Labs too.

According to The Next Web, sources say that Apple has picked up the startup for a price in the "high double digits," and the deal is final even though papers aren't yet signed.

Color made a big splash when it launched last year as a location-based photo-sharing app for iOS and Android. Its charismatic founder, Nguyen, won big backers, … Read more

With the announcement of Facebook's acquisition of Instagram, some Instagram users are worried about information being passed on to the larger social network.

When you delete your account with Instagram, your photos, friendships, comments, and everything you've done with the service will be deleted. Before you pull the trigger, you can save your Instagram shots by using Instaport, an online app that lets you download your images or move them to other social networks. Simply log in to your account, give permission to Instaport to access your files, then start the download.

Now that you have your photos … Read more

STOIK Imagic is a large, feature-packed photo album, organizer, manager, and editor. It's also a retouching tool, a calendar maker, a media cataloger, a video editor, and a drawing tool. In short, it's a full-featured graphics suite with an emphasis on digital photographs. At 80MB, it's a big download, but since it's compressed, it's a fast one, too, and setup is virtually automatic, including scanning your system for images. Anything else? You bet: it's free.

Like all proper graphics apps worth the name, STOIK Imagic's interface is finished in mod dark-gray tones with … Read more

HP Photosmart Essential provides a simple set of tools for editing and sharing photos. While not offering a ton of options and functions, the program does a fine job of sticking to the basics.

We were surprised by how simple and professional-looking the program's interface was and it was clear the designers put a lot of effort into it. That was even before we watched the brief tutorial videos that showed us everything we needed to know. The program reminded us of many other photo editors, though with only a handful of tools, like color, lighting, resizing, and cropping. … Read more

How's the Sirius XM satellite radio monopoly working out for subscribers? Not so well. Now that Sirius XM is the only game in town, it's nudging up fees for subscribers. Nice!

The one and only satellite radio company's boasts of its ever-increasing subscriber base are gone now, and the decline is significant. The number floating around the Internet is a loss of 400,000 subscribers. That still leaves 18.6 million, but there's no way of knowing how many of that number are full-price-paying subscribers.

Could the subscriber losses be attributed to recent price hikes? The … Read more

Sirius Satellite Radio has a lot on its plate. Shock jock Howard Stern is already making noises about leaving after his contract expires in a couple of years, the stock price is in the tank, and the company has huge debt.

All of that shouldn't matter to subscribers, of which I am one. But the frequent signal dropouts are really getting out of hand.

I had similar problems in the early days, but after a while, the dropouts became rare. Months would go by without signal interruptions, but about six months ago, the off-and-on signal problems returned.

Sometimes, the dropout lasts just a few seconds but occurs many times an hour. My Sirius home radio hasn't budged since I first got it many years ago, and my antenna is pretty much in the same place it has always been, but lately, the signal regularly disappears for minutes at a time before sputtering back to life. … Read more

Over on the Audiophiliac blog, Steve Guttenberg is polling readers about how they get their music. Here are my answers to his questions.

Do you buy CDs, LPs, MP3s, iTunes, or 8 track cartridges? I purchase about 80% of my music on LP. For a few years in the early 1990s it was almost impossible to find new vinyl, but now it's reasonably common, especially for indie rock, electronic music, and hip hop. (Classical? Not so much. Jazz? Only re-releases.) In fact, vinyl availability sometimes convinces me to buy a record I otherwise might have skipped--Of Montreal'sGladiator Nightstick Collection … Read more