"West Bank Story"

"West Bank Story" won the Academy Award for short film (live action) last night, and I love the fact that I was able to pick it up on iTunes for two bucks. It's a great short film.

It's good enough that I'd like to share it with other people, and it would be cool if I could pre-buy, say, five "copies" of it through iTunes and post a code on my blog that would give a free download to the first five people that used the code. Better yet, iTunes could offer volume discounts to people who purchased multiple copies of a given song or movie to encourage bloggers to promote them.

The upside for bloggers would be that, once the practice took off, people would begin searching blogs for free copies of music or movies they're looking for, and drive traffic to blogs that otherwise would not receive attention.

The Japanese iTunes Music Store

Good article here.

I've tried to buy songs from the Japanese store and have experienced this frustration myself.

More on the iPhone

David Pogue has a nice FAQ here.

Is the iPhone really as expensive as it seems?

An interesting counterpoint here.

Duuuuuuuude.....

In the days following Apple's iPhone announcement, my enthusiasm for the device has faced challenges from considerations about the real-world limitations it's likely to face, such as limited battery life, lack of Microsoft Office document support, no support for adding third party applications, slow data speeds on Cingular's EDGE network, etc.

But I just watched this straigtforward video demo, and my enthusiasm has ratcheted right back up. This is the best video demo I've seen so far- the camera angle does a good job of showing the iPhone's size, which actually looks to be smaller than I had initially thought.

Enjoy.

Segway of Phones

Apple did it.

Steve Jobs' introduction today of Apple's new iPhone actually lived up to the hype and expectations.

It won't be out until June and who knows how the reality of using the iPhone will stack up against Steve's audience-captivating demo, but man, the iPhone looks every bit as cool as even the most ambitious Apple fans were hoping it would be.

There's something very Segway-ish about the iPhone's new Multi-touch interface. Watching the demos on Apple's site (check out all of the demos sprinkled throughout the iPhone section), I get the impression that the combination of advanced hardware and software on this device will actually allow for a completely new type of user experience- much like the Segway's combo of hardware and software created an experience on wheels that was previously impossible due to physics.

Time will tell if Apple can do for phones what they've done for computers and music. But today's announcement was every bit as exciting as anyone looking for The Next Big Thing could have hoped for.

Wow.