Hi, I'm Molly Wood, and welcome to the Buzz Report, the show about the tech news
that everyone's talking about. This week, it's Apple's September music event, Google
organizing your mail for you, and the patent troll that could end the Internet.
But first, it's the Gadget of the Week.
The Gadget of the Week is this cool new thing that Apple announced the day after we taped this. And that
is... the New Apple TV. Steve Jobs calls it a hobby, but it's a heck of a lot more tempting hobby than it
used to be. It's 99 bucks, it' small enough to fit into your hand, and it streams Netflix! It also streams music
and photos from your computers OR your iOS devices, like your iPad, neat, and you can rent movies and
TV shows ... but only TV shows from Fox and ABC. Basically, if you have a lot of Macs, iPhones, and
iPods at your house, plus a Netflix subscription, and a really big Glee fan, you've never been happier than
you are today.
And speaking of new Apple announcements, the company held its big September music event this week,
and we had an ace reporter on the scene. Take it away, Molly.
Thanks Molly. ThatÕs right I am here at the Yerba Buena center where Steve Jobs just announced a total
revamp of the iPod line. The Shuffle gets itÕs buttons back, the iPod Nano says goodbye to the click wheel
forever, and the iPod Touch gets even thinner, if that was even possible.
Thanks, Molly. Great report. Plus it gets the front facing camera for Facetime, and the Retina Display. No
seven inch iPad, but we do get Hooray! A new version of iTunes. Another thing to download. The new
iTunes also includes something called Ping, which is AppleÕs music social network. You can only use it in
iTunes but you can share music recommendations with your friends, follow artist, that sort of thing, sort of
like Myspace Music, but it doesnÕt connet with MySpace music, or facebook, or anything like that. I donÕt
know why!
In other tech news this week, Google announced a new feature called Priority Inbox that will supposedly
screen your emails for what's important and put it up at the top of your inbox. Less important stuff, like
newsletters or email coupons and the like, will go down at the bottom, and you can star emails for
followup. It can tell what's important to you partly by how often you reply to emails from certain senders.
So, you'd better start sending little "thank you" notes to Groupon so you don't miss anything good. Just
saying.
Also this week, Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen sued most of the Internet, including Google, Facebook,
Apple, Netflix, and Yahoo, for infringing on four INSANELY broad patents that could cover everything
from a auto-refreshing status updates to related news links on the side of a Web page. And by the way, he's
sitting on an arsenal of more than 300 patents that cover the rest of the Web that he didn't sue this time
around, like Facebook and Twitter. Yep. Paul Allen owns the Internet. Still think broad idea-based software
patents are a good idea?
Touche, Paul.
Moving on, Digg got a redesign and in case you were wondering if people still use Digg, apparently all the
people who use it hate the redesign more than they've ever hated anything. They hate it so much they
carpet-bombed the Digg front page with links to Reddit. They hate it so much that interim CEO Kevin Rose
said some of the features they miss, like upcoming stories, will come back. They hate it so much that
interim CEO Kevin Rose actually just went ahead and announced a new CEO, Matt Williams from
Amazon, and said, hey! How about you email him! I'm headed to Bermuda, suckers! Good call, Kev.
And finally, a sad trombone moment for MySpace, which announced this week that it would connect to
Facebook, letting its users synchronize posts and other activity with the obvious social networking winner.
Reached for comment, MySpace said, "Look, at least we're not Friendster. We HAVE MUSIC."
Keep on rockin', MySpace.
And that's the Buzz Report for this week, everyone. I'm Molly Wood and thank you for watching.
