The Devium Dash is a 4-inch-by-7-inch unit that is installed the same way as an in-dash GPS unit, but it replaces your whole stereo.  It’s a pretty plain design, with a slot to pop in an iPhone or an iPod touch and scroll knob. Founder Jeff Lizer says other smartphones will fit eventually too, but he started off with the original design for the iPhone because he “had to focus on a single product to get this right.”

The product’s information page says that your iPhone will fit with or without the rubber bumper that many people use. And we shouldn’t fret if Apple changes the body style for its next iPhone, he writes: ”I know the iPhone ’5′ may be released this summer and if its dimensions are similar to the current iPhones then it will work without purchasing a new faceplate. If the new iPhone varies too much, a new faceplate will be developed and released as soon as possible.”

Other interesting specs, according to the official site for Devium Dash:

Right now, Devium Dash is a Kickstarter project and is a little under halfway to its $45,000 funding goal. The company seems confident they’ll meet the goal and start producing units by July — the price will be $300 at retail. Those who cough up $250 now will get a unit when they start shipping, according to an announcement made Monday.

Speaking from experience, it’s amazing how out-of-date even a pretty nice two-year-old car’s stereo can be. It has a CD player and a digital interface, but all I really want to do is listen to my iTunes playlists anyway. My car did come with a 30-pin connector inside the middle console that lets you plug in an iPhone or iPod and control the device through the car’s dashboard. But the car’s frustrating interface uses buttons you click and a wheel you scroll, which is a pain when you’re used to touchscreen tapping or scrolling when selecting your music.

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• CES 2012: a recap and analysis
• Connected world: the consumer technology revolution
• 2012: Data, spectrum and the race to LTE

The key new part of the update is the addition of a new effect called “Depth” that brings what’s known as tilt-shift capabilities to Path’s photo taking feature. Tilt-shift photography lets you adjust the depth of field to take photos in which certain items are in focus and others are out of focus. The proliferation of affordable, high quality digital cameras has made tilt-shift photography increasingly accessible and popular with mainstream shutterbugs, so it’s a nice addition to the Path app, which has had a big photo-sharing component since its inception.

An example of tilt shift photography effects.

It bears mention that there are a number of dedicated tilt-shift apps for iOS devices already on the market, and Instagram also added the capability to the 2.0 version of its app that launched back in September. More than anything, Path’s latest update shows that its team is working hard to keep its service fresh and relevant in an ever-growing world of apps that compete for users’ time and attention. Adding useful new features in an incremental way is a good way to do that.

Also in the iPhone app update, Path added the capability to tap, pinch, rotate, and zoom photos and videos while viewing them at full screen. Path’s Android app has not been updated in a similar way, which may be because there is so much discrepancy between the camera capabilities on devices that run the Android operating system.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user Elycia Taylor.

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• 12 tech leaders’ resolutions for 2012
• Connected world: the consumer technology revolution
• NewNet Q4: Platform mania and social commerce shakeout

A big reason for that is editing — or, really, a lack thereof. Video can be a great way to convey things, but even the most exciting event can be boring if the video has not been edited properly. Even though devices that shoot high-definition video are cheaper and more ubiquitous than ever, amateur videos themselves have not gotten any better to watch.

That’s where a new iPhone app called Magisto comes in. Magisto, which debuted its web app in September 2011 and just launched its first iPhone app this week, turns any plain video into a fully edited movie in a matter of minutes. Essentially, it does for movies what Instagram does for photos: It makes even the most mundane media appear more compelling.

Screenshot of Magisto for iPhone

The greatest thing about Magisto is how dead simple it is to use. You log in with either your Facebook credentials or email address, upload one or several short videos from your iPhone (Magisto prefers to start with videos that are at least 45 seconds long,) select some music (you can upload your own song or choose from Magisto’s library, which is sorted into categories such as “Hip Hop,” “Birthday,” “Travel” and “Christmas”) and then that’s it — you wait for the app to do its magic.

The final product is edited to contain your videos’ most “interesting” bits, with music and a few visual effects thrown in to keep viewers entertained. I’ve submitted several videos that are a minute or so long, and Magisto typically took about 10 minutes to turn each one around. You can also use Magisto on your regular computer through its website.

Now, Magisto is not for everyone or everything. Since users have very little control over the final product — how long the edited video will be, and what parts it will definitely contain, are completely up to the app — Magisto is only realistic for casual videos of things like vacations and birthday parties. And people who already know their way around iMovie or Final Cut Pro may find Magisto to be frustratingly short on features. But for most consumers who just want to make fun, short videos their friends might want to actually watch, it’s perfect. And the fact that it’s available now on the iPhone is pretty major, since people are increasingly doing everything from their mobile devices.

Magisto is run by an Israel-based startup called SightEra, which raised $5.5 million in Series B funding round this past fall led by Li Ka-shing’s Horizons Ventures.

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• Connected world: the consumer technology revolution
• Defining work in the digital age: an analysis by GigaOM Pro

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• CES 2012: a recap and analysis
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• The future of mobile: a segment analysis by GigaOM Pro

I first started seeing increased Instagram activity on my own account about two weeks ago. I saw a sharp jump in the number of folks following my photo feed and more importantly, more interactions (likes, comments) on those photos. I also started seeing a lot of links being shared by folks on Twitter. Intrigued, I emailed Kevin Systrom, CEO and co-founder of Instagram. This is what he wrote back:

Coupled with being iPhone App of the Year – new activations of iPhones on Christmas definitely gave Instagram a bump, though we’re not releasing publicly how much of a bump. Sorry I can’t be more specific, but things are going well!

The last officially reported user base of Instagram is about 15 million, a number that Systrom revealed in early December at the Le Web  conference in Paris. At our Mobilize 2011 (held in late September) conference, Systrom said that the company was adding a new user every second and had about 10 million people using the iOS-only photo-sharing service.

As we reported earlier, this has been a really good Christmas for Apple. For the first three weeks of December, between 1.3 and 1.8 million devices powered by iOS or Android were activated each day, according to Flurry Analytics. Fiksu, a Boston-based mobile app user acquisition company announced Wednesday that the “swell of new iPhone 4S users, combined with iOS 5 app updates, generated escalated app discovery activity and peak download volumes for the top 200 apps.”

Here are some of my previous posts about Instagram:

• Why Instagram can become the mobile social hub.
• Why Instagram works

Apple and Google’s iTunes App Store and Android Market are responsible for the lion’s share of all app downloads to smartphones and tablets. While both provide controls in their storefronts that allow parents to restrict downloads based on age cutoffs, maturity appropriate levels, or by type of media, they both depend primarily on their developers to provide the context for those ratings. The benefit of the ESRB ratings would be an independent review from an organization parents already trust.

“Parents are overwhelming aware of our ratings, and use them when buying games,” ESRB President Patricia Vance said, speaking Tuesday at a CTIA press conference announcing the new ratings system.

Vance said the ERSB’s review system also takes into account new presence, content sharing and personalization capabilities in mobile software that don’t readily apply to console games. Most parents aren’t just worried about their kids downloading porn or violent games; they’re also terrified Internet predators will take advantage of social media to locate their kids or proposition them through social media.

Once an ESRB rating is granted, developers can carry it across any mobile platform. If a developer doesn’t like the rating granted, it can challenge it. Verizon Wireless, AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile and U.S. Cellular, as well as Microsoft, have all agreed to use the ratings in their mobile storefronts. But the carrier portals account for relatively few downloads in the grand scheme of mobile data. The action is in the platform app stores, so without Apple, and Google (RIM isn’t participating either), ESRB would have relatively little impact. A developer might even look at the ESRB ratings as one more reason to ignore the operators’ stores completely.

Apple and Google have both been invited to participate, but so far they’re content to use the controls they have in place, ESRB officials said. One of the reasons Apple and Google may be on the sidelines for now is the apparent limitations of ESRB’s system. There are hundreds of thousands of mobile apps, and ESRB admits it can’t review all of them. Instead it relies on developers to fill out a detailed questionnaire when submitting an app to any store using the ratings system. An automated engine than instantly spits out a rating, which is applied to that app henceforth. ESRB will directly review the most popular mobile apps and will closely monitor consumer complaints about particular apps. But essentially much of the system is self-policing, just like iTunes and Android Market.

The issue of patrolling app stores is only going to become more important as more kids get online wirelessly. PBS Kids recently conducted a survey of parents with children between two and 10 and found 38 percent of them were passing down older mobile devices to their kids. Another 30 percent felt at least a quarter of the apps of their smartphones and tablets were educational or entertainment apps for their kids.

Image courtesy of Flickr user jenny downing

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• CES 2012: a recap and analysis
• Connected Consumer 2012: A year of consolidation and integration
• 2012: Data, spectrum and the race to LTE

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• Connected world: the consumer technology revolution
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• Connected Consumer Q2: Digital music meets the cloud; e-book growth explodes

U.K-based STHoldings was adamant that Spotify and the rest were stripping away value, referring to reports of a study commissioned by the National Association of Recording Merchandisers. “Despite these services offering promotion to many millions of music listeners, we have concerns that these services cannibalise the revenues of more traditional digital services,” said the company.

That stoked a fire… but it wasn’t the whole story.

First, NARM clarified the study and backpedalled a little. Then Stuart Dredge at MusicAlly pointed out some strange goings on. Was the story planted to boost iTunes?

Then the complaints went viral with a blunt tweet from Jon Hopkins, a musician and collaborator with Coldplay, Brian Eno and respected Scottish indie performer King Creosote. His message was simple: he was angry because he only earned £8 — that’s $12.50 — for getting 90,000 plays on Spotify.

All in all, it was a mess.

The thing is, it doesn’t look like it’s getting any better.

Right now, there’s a host of reports and statements is flooding in, from people whose figures back up Hopkins and STH — and from those who contradict it. Take this from Danny Ryan at Kudos, another British distributor which classifies itself as a competitor to STH. He describes essentially the opposite experience:

Our current Spotify quarterly turnover is, BY A VERY LARGE FACTOR more than the £2,500 quoted as ST’s quarterly Spotify revenue  in the linked Digital Music News article.  Now, I am pretty sure that our overall company turnover is no greater than ST’s, so why this enormous disparity? […] Currently, Spotify is our number two digital account in most of the territories where it exists in terms of actual turnover. In Scandinavian countries it is our number one source of income (physical or digital).

Danny says he thinks distributors like him aren’t getting a raw deal from streaming services, and that in some cases the problem is between artists and their labels, not producers and platforms. Working out who’s right and who’s wrong is tough.

Here’s the thing, though: perhaps neither of them are.

Everyone has different experiences because, it seems, everyone’s deal is different. Each part of the relationship — artist to label, label to distributor, distributor to platform — allows for some variance. How long you’ve been on a service can make a difference; how well you operate inside the service; how much work you have online; how easily surfaced it is; and, of course, the quality and desirability of your work… these things all count.

Labels and distributors have different negotiations with streaming services, and operate under different rights regimes in different countries. And all the while, big labels are shareholders in Spotify and presumably hope to recoup some of their money in the future (rather than today).

I think one of the problems of streaming music is essentially the same one that sees many of the world’s banks struggling right now: they are simple products built around incredibly difficult, increasingly complex business models. No service is going to succeed in the long term without coming up with answers for these issues — and yet in the short term they burn some bridges by trying to work out the answer.

Perhaps these arguments will only fade once things are standardized and straightforward. But until then, the fight is based on wildly varying data and vastly different experiences. And that means more trouble is going to be coming, whether musicians, labels and platforms like it or not.

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• Connected world: the consumer technology revolution
• Forecast: the future of the digital music industry
• Connected Consumer Q2: Digital music meets the cloud; e-book growth explodes

To see how big of a change this is, it’s worth taking a look at the status quo of the digital music biz. Artists under contract with a major label typically get between $0.08 and $0.14 per $0.99 sold on iTunes, depending on their contract. Indie musicians may make a little more, but still have to share the revenue with their labels, and more often than not, a digital distributor that handles the relations between the label and various download stores.

Self-released indie musicians have had the option to sign up with specialized distributors like Tunecore and CD Baby to receive a higher share. But even these companies have to stay in business somehow, so they’re each taking a cut. CD Baby charges musicians a one-time setup fee of $39 per album and 9 percent of each track sold on top of the 30 percent charged by iTunes. Tunecore charges $50 per album per year.

Those digital distribution models can work out in a band’s favor when compared to the traditional share paid by a label, but it’s still quite a bit of money, especially for musicians who want to leverage a huge back catalog. Google Music, on the other hand, only charges musicians a one-time fee of $25, with no additional charges, after which they receive the full 70 percent share.

I know what you’re going to say: Labels may take a big cut from an artist’s digital download revenue, but they’re also doing a lot to promote a band and help them build an audience. That’s true, and Google Music won’t be able to match this benefit, despite Google putting a big emphasis on curation and discovery during the service’s launch event on Wednesday.

However, the secret weapon for indie artists is Google’s other big music service: YouTube. The video site currently serves more than three billion videos every day, and stats from TubeMogul showed last year that around a third of the views of YouTube’s top 2500 partners were music videos. Indie artists will soon be able to utilize this huge audience to sell their music directly on YouTube, Google revealed yesterday.

In other words: Media-savvy indie musicians now have the option to sell their music directly to fans, without any middle men, and promote it on one of the world’s biggest sites for free music entertainment. That means some musicians may spend a lot more resources on producing interesting and catchy viral videos, and in turn gain some independence from traditional distribution methods.

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• Forecast: the future of the digital music industry
• A clouded view of Google Music
• Connected world: the consumer technology revolution

According to a report from the Wall Street Journal, the music service Google is close to launching will include sharing features via integration with its Google+ platform, which isn’t that surprising, since Google has said the new social network will be part of everything it does. For Apple, however, the new social features in Google’s offering will reinforce what Spotify and other music services have already made obvious: Apple and iTunes are falling behind in the social-music race, which could have significant consequences for the company as the music industry continues to evolve.

By any measure, iTunes is still the 800-pound gorilla of the digital-music industry: More than 10 billion songs have been downloaded since Apple launched the service in 2001, and some record labels and music publishers now get a huge proportion of the revenue they make on their artists from iTunes. By launching the service — along with the iPod, which turned 10 years old on the weekend — Apple effectively re-engineered the entire music industry, convincing the major labels to use it as a conduit to reach music lovers who were busy downloading whatever they could get their hands on.

Obviously, that kind of power means iTunes isn’t going away anytime soon, and it will continue to be the main choice for record companies who want to monetize an artist. But the music business is changing — along with virtually every other form of media and content — as a result of the increasingly social nature of the web. And in that particular race, services such as Spotify are winning, in part because of their integration with networks like Facebook and their focus on streaming over buying.

Streaming and sharing is the new downloading

Facebook and Spotify have gotten a lot of criticism since the social network launched its “frictionless sharing” features, which allow services like Spotify to publish sharing info to a user’s Facebook page without having to ask permission every time. Many users have complained about this behavior — and that Spotify requires that anyone signing up have a Facebook account to connect to — and some have no doubt cancelled their accounts, but they are likely in the minority. In the end, this new kind of sharing, which shows links to what friends are listening to in the “ticker” stream on a user’s page, could be a hugely powerful driver for the industry.

And what kinds of weapons does Apple have? It has its massive market dominance — and it has Ping. Remember Ping? Apple’s music-based social network launched last fall, and was designed to do something similar to what Spotify and others are now doing: make it easy for users to share their activity and convince others to buy music. Except that Ping almost instantly looked like a social network from the late 1990s rather than a contender for the music-sharing future: as GigaOM’s Cyndy Aleo argued at the time, it looked lame in part because it wasn’t connected to anything else, and it made sharing surprisingly cumbersome (for his part, Om said that he thought Ping was part of “the future of social commerce”).

Ping shone a spotlight on one of Apple’s major weaknesses, which is a lack of knowledge or experience with social networks or social behavior. The company’s products are famous for their brilliant design and usability, but virtually none of that applies to things like Ping or Apple’s Game Center network (or to iTunes itself, arguably) since both seem more like ghost towns and afterthoughts than powerful competitors.

Twitter integration may not be enough

In an attempt to bolt on some form of social behavior, Apple added support for Twitter to Ping, and more recently it has integrated Twitter into many of its apps and services through iOS 5 — a ground-breaking move, since it rarely gives that kind of preferential treatment and real estate to a third party. (It tried to negotiate a Facebook deal but was rebuffed, presumably because of Spotify). This was a smart decision, since Twitter accomplishes much of what iTunes and Ping do not: Users can easily send out links to what they have bought or are listening to, and those links appear in the “media pane” at Twitter’s website and can be easily clicked on.

Despite this, however, it still feels like Apple is fundamentally playing catch-up in an industry that is moving rapidly towards sharing and streaming of music rather than simply purchasing, a la iTunes. With social services like Spotify and Rdio and MOG — not to mention Turntable.fm and Soundtracking — it is all about sharing music with friends rather than just acquiring it to keep forever. So how is Apple going to compete in this new kind of landscape? It will soon launch a streaming feature called iTunes Match, but the social element continues to elude it.

For the time being, at least, iTunes will remain the store of choice for many when it comes to buying music. And those who see their friends listening to music via Spotify and want to buy the same track may go to iTunes to do so — but then again, they might not. And if Google and Facebook integrate support for instant payments via Google Checkout or Facebook Credits, what kind of draw will Apple or iTunes have for new users then? The market dominance that Steve Jobs so brilliantly executed continues for now, but that dominance looks more and more precarious every day.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users Josh Lindsay and Yodel Anecdotal

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• Connected world: the consumer technology revolution
• Forecast: the future of the digital music industry
• NewNet Q4: Platform mania and social commerce shakeout

More accurately, both services — which previously required all users to subscribe — are adding a lower tier of free access to entice more users in. Mog pulled the trigger first, announcing a new “Freeplay” scheme (launching Thursday) that will let users listen to a limited number of tracks for nothing and earn more plays if they are active sharers. Rdio, meanwhile, says it will launch a similar service in the next month. And unlike Spotify, it looks like both will not support their free activities by running advertising. Mog has confirmed with GigaOM that it will, like Spotify, support the free service with advertising, while it looks like Rdio has no plans to run ads on its free version.

No ads? Isn’t that just a kamikaze business model? We know that the cost of streaming can often be prohibitive, but both companies Rdio must be hoping it can get enough users to upgrade to subscriptions to offset the losses the companies it will rack up in ad-free listening.

I suppose, faced with such strong competition, there aren’t that many other ways to compete. I mean obviously, both companies have teams of engineers working on a system that can stream free music directly to your mind — but until then, it looks like free is the way in.

Or is it?

The free streaming frenzy coincides with news from download retailer eMusic, which is pushing the results of a survey it commissioned into online behavior. Given the source, you will probably need to take the result with more than a pinch of salt, but essentially it backed up a novel idea: Instead of giving music away for nothing, you could try selling it.

The rise of streaming has led some to argue that it will eventually kill retail (such as the author of this piece in the Harvard Business Review which says that “over time this model [streaming] will displace iTunes”) and no doubt, such claims will receive a boost from the increase in free services.

But eMusic says it isn’t so simple. The survey, which was conducted by Insight Research and came from interviews with 1,000 adult music consumers across the U.S., found that only a small number of customers saw streaming and ownership as diametrically opposed.

According to the study, 91 percent of people still “prefer to own music,” listing a number of reasons such as unlimited listening, security that their music won’t disappear, and support for artists. And while only 13 percent of people surveyed pay to stream music online, the majority of those (84 percent) still buy music as well.

These tendencies become even stronger among those who count themselves as “independent” music fans, many of whom use streaming services like Spotify, Mog and Rdio as ways to try new music before they purchase.

It’s always worth being skeptical of surveys, but noises like this have to sound good to the likes of iTunes and Amazon — and while it may not be enough to those who think streaming will emerge as the only true victor, it indicates there’s life in retail yet.

Busker photo used under Creative Commons license, courtesy of Flickr user Johnny_boy_a

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• A 2011 Connected Consumer Forecast

Recommendation systems should instead ask users to compare products in pairs, not as stand-alone items, says Devavrat Shah, a professor at MIT’s Laboratory of Information and Decisions Systems.

According to Shah, the kind of star rating systems that are the status quo on the web today are flawed because, well, humans are flawed. “If my mood is bad today, I might give four stars, but tomorrow I’d give five stars. But if you ask me to compare two movies, most likely I will remain true to that for a while,” Shah says in an article published this week on MIT’s news site. “Your three stars might be my five stars, or vice versa. For that reason, I strongly believe that comparison is the right way to capture this.”

In a series of recently published academic papers, Shah, along with students Ammar Ammar and Srikanth Jagabathula, as well as MIT Sloan School of Management professor Vivek Farias, demonstrated that stitching “pairwise rankings” together into a master list is a more accurate representation of customer sentiment than relying on customers to rate things by themselves on a typical five-star scale. According to the MIT researchers, they have formulated algorithms that have proven to accurately predict shoppers’ preferences with 20 percent greater accuracy than the kinds of formulas most often in use today. They have built a website, Celect.com, to show off their theories in practice.

The success of using a more complicated algorithmic approach for recommendation engines has been proven by Apple’s iTunes software, and in particular, its Genius song selection feature. An Apple engineer disclosed last year that Genius uses much more than just the star ratings system to power its personalized song recommendation engine. In fact, iTunes use a complex combination of big data analytics and aggregated personal information to customize content for users.

Of course, finding programmers is tough as it is, and not all web companies can afford to hire Apple-caliber software engineers or MIT Ph.D.s to formulate their recommendation engines. Also, users on sites such as Yelp have become very confident in their roles as armchair critics, adding and subtracting stars from reviews for highly specific reasons. But then again, classic websites such as HotorNot.com — and even Facebook predecessor FaceMash.com — have shown that one-to-one comparisons can be fun, too. According to the folks at MIT, if comparison engines can make the leap from fun pastime into the big leagues of e-commerce, recommendation systems could get even more spookily accurate.

Image from the cover art of The Complete Works of The Critic DVD set, found on Amazon.com

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• Defining Hadoop: the Players, Technologies and Challenges of 2011
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• Mobile Q2: Smartphone growth surges; iPad’s rule continues

The San Francisco-based company has announced the launch of its custom iPad app, which will be available as a free download in the iTunes store starting Tuesday. The iPad app launch is accompanied by an update to the iPhone app Hipmunk debuted in February. An Android application is in the pipeline, according to the company.

Hipmunk’s head of mobile Danilo Campos recently took me through a preview of the iPad app, and by all appearances, it’s a spot-on translation of Hipmunk’s unique web experience. Just like on the web, flight results are sorted according to those with the lowest amount of “agony,” which is determined by the flight’s duration, number of layovers, and price. The UI incorporates the same visual timeline format for displaying search results that is well known by users of Hipmunk’s website. It also includes a handy option to either book in the Safari browser, or save the selection with a finish code to finalize the booking later from a computer.

“Launching an iPad app aligns with our mission of providing a superior, and fun, travel search experience,” Hipmunk CEO Adam Goldstein said in a press release announcing the app’s availability. You can read more about Hipmunk in my more in-depth interview with Goldstein published by GigaOM earlier this month.

Here are some screenshots of Hipmunk’s iPad app:

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• A Media Tablet Forecast, 2011 – 2015
• Platform Makers Placing Big Bets on In-App Payments
• The rise of tablets in the enterprise

However, users that bought their music on iTunes before Apple abandoned DRM some two years ago better get ready for an unexpected surprise: Files originally bought with Apple’s Fairplay copy protection are also once again downloaded with DRM.

Apple still charges users $0.30 per track to get rid of DRM.

A number of users complained about this strange behavior on Twitter and on the web, with one stating that this would bring back “bad memories.” We were able to confirm it by re-downloading a DRMed track as well. Apple introduced the ability to “upgrade” copy protected tracks to DRM-free AACs by paying $0.30 per song in early 2009. The so-called upgrade to iTunes Plus is still available, so it might make economic sense for the company to not offer free upgrades as part of the new ability to download additional copies of previously purchased songs.

However, the fact that iTunes still serves up DRM to users who were honest enough to pay for their music may add fuel to recent criticism that Apple’s iCloud offering rewards piracy. Beginning this fall, customers will be able to synchronize their entire music library with iCloud without uploading a single song to Apple’s servers as part of the iTunes Music Match subscription. iCloud will instead match songs by title and audio fingerprint, allowing users to download higher-quality copies of songs even for those 128 kbps files they originally downloaded from LimeWire back in the day. Music Match will cost users $25 per year.

ZDNet blogger David Gewirtz called Music Match “complete music pirate amnesty” this week, and Evolver.fm’s Elliot van Buskirk said that the offering “reinforces the practice of downloading music without paying for it” (hat tip to AllAccess.com).

The good news is that iCloud’s Music Match will likely also work for DRMed iTunes purchases (Apple PR didn’t respond in time to requests for comment), meaning that paying subscribers will be able to free their existing iTunes libraries from DRM by paying $25 per year instead of $0.30 per track.

Until then, Apple’s practice of serving up DRMed downloads to paying customers more than two years after the company announced with big fanfares that it would abandon DRM serves as an important reminder: Once businesses and consumers buy into a copy protection scheme, they’re gonna have a hard time getting rid of it.

Image courtesy (CC-BY-SA) of Flickr user Ben Cumming.

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• The Return of DRM
• Report: Monetizing Digital Content
• How to Manage Access to Digital Content

SoundHound’s Founder and CEO Keyvan Mohajer launched three profitable companies before he graduated from college. After completing his undergraduate work at the University of Toronto in 2000, Mohajer did some soul-searching to think about what to do next. “I realized that though I’m an entrepreneur and I like to start things, I’m also really passionate about technology. Some of my earlier companies were very successful, but they weren’t exactly high-tech,” he told me in a recent interview. “So I decided to get my Ph.D. in a deeper technology field and apply what I learned to start a really high-tech company.”

When Mohajer decided to go high-tech, he went big. He enrolled in Stanford’s graduate electrical engineering department, where he very quickly found his next big opportunity. “I realized that we are going to one day talk to our computers,” he said. “That day is going to come, and it’s going to come within my lifetime.” Mohajer dedicated his doctoral studies to voice recognition technology, and founded SoundHound two years before he received his Ph.D. in 2007.

Currently, SoundHound’s specialty is delivering information about music. Users can sing or hum a tune into its SoundHound app and the app returns the song name, as well as other information. Last week, the company released its Hound app, which can identify when a user says the name of an artist or album.

The slightly frivolous-seeming “name that tune” aspects of SoundHound’s applications belie the seriousness of the technology and business underneath it all. SoundHound has raised $16 million in venture capital and currently has 55 full-time employees. Investors have been attracted to the company by the future potential of SoundHound’s core technology, Mohajer told me. “We own all of our technology, while a lot of other apps in this space license their core technology,” he said. “We built everything in-house and we own all of our intellectual property.

I asked Mohajer if SoundHound’s proprietary technology and team of razor-sharp Ph.D.s has attracted interest from larger companies like Apple, who could incorporate voice search into its iTunes operations, or Internet radio website Pandora. The CEO demurred from talking about his company’s specific exit options, but pointed out that SoundHound’s board of directors includes Larry Marcus, who was the first investor in Pandora and currently sits on Pandora’s board. He also implied that in the right hands, the company’s technology could be employed for a much wider variety of uses. “We’re only in the music vertical now… but we argue that there’s a big demand for the future of computation devices that rely on voice recognition,” he said. “I’ve learned that it’s very important not to think about an exit and an outcome, and to just find something that you really enjoy doing.”

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Users can upload any music file they own — from iTunes libraries, Windows Media Player, or file folders — to Music. Music stores all the songs, albums and playlists completely in the cloud, so with the Music Android application, a user’s Google music library is automatically synced across all of his or her devices. The app automatically caches the most recently listened-to songs so they can be accessed without an Internet connection.

The app is currently available by invitation only to users in the U.S., Joyce said, and will be free for as long as it’s in beta. The company did not give any further information on any future pricing plans.

Although the Music application stores music and doesn’t sell it, Tuesday’s launch still puts Google more directly into a space currently dominated by Apple. Joyce acknowledged the competition during his keynote presentation with a hint of snark, referring to Google Music’s “Instant Mix” playlist-creating feature as a “truly ingenious” feature– an obvious wink to iTunes’ “Genius” automatic playlist creator.

Update: Android Director of Digital Content Jamie Rosenberg said during a press conference following the keynote that Google wants to eventually sell music through the platform as well. However, negotiations with some of the major labels broke down because of “terms that we felt were unreasonable and unsustainable.” He denied that Google is going to become a target of music industry lawsuits with its locker service. “What we launched today is a completely legal service,” said Rosenberg.

Additional reporting by Janko Roettgers.

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