Hasta La Gadget!

Well that’s that, apparently. Although this story has evolved quite a bit over the day, according to Peter Kafka over at All Things Digital, Apple has indeed coughed up the dough for music streaming service Lala. If you believe what you read in the report (and you probably can, Kafka tends to be a straight shooter), Apple’s snapping up the company for what will amount to a bargain-basement price… possibly less than $.50 on the dollar. However, Kafka says at least one source claims his valuation of the deal is off, but we’ll have to wait for some official word before we know for sure. If this turns out to all be true, the lingering question is still about Apple’s reasoning behind the purchase — is the company after a particular technology, or is there a service in the offing? Hopefully we’ll know soon.

Note: If you want a little background on Lala, Ross Rubin has covered the service extensively in his Switched On column.

WSJ confirms Apple purchase of Lala originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 04 Dec 2009 22:54:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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In this week’s Steve-approved app roundup: Your music library, converted into baddies! Twitter, visualized in 3D! Byplanes, flown! Xbox Live accounts, accessed! Cars, salvaged! Overprotective parents, abetted! Live video calls, called! And more…

The Apps

To view the gallery as a single page, click here

This Week’s iPhone News On Giz

• An Exploded iPhone Is a Major Frat Party Buzzkill…Or Is It?

• Apple Sued For iPhone Patent Infringement, Again

• The New Mobile Twitter Site Is Actually, Um, Nice

• Droid Commercial Paints iPhone as “Digitally Clueless Beauty Pageant Queen”

• Wolfram Alpha Is Tired Of People Not Paying $50 Dollars For Their iPhone App

• New Mercedes iPhone App: Hands On

• iPhone Orchestra Hacks Touchscreen, GPS and Accelerometer to Create “Music”

• Just a Cheap iPhone/iPod Adapter USB Hub

• Mirror’s Edge Coming to the iPhone In January

• iPhone Fitted With SLR Lens (It Was Bound to Happen)

• Top 5 Assclowns Laughing at the iPhone Back in 2007

• RedEye Makes Your iPhone a Universal Remote Control

• Stolen Belgian iPhones Traced to Russian Black Market

• Where Is My iPhone Videochat, Apple?

This list is in no way definitive. If you’ve spotted a great app that hit the store this week, give us a heads up or, better yet, your firsthand impressions in the comments. And for even more apps: see our previous weekly roundups here, and check out our Favorite iPhone Apps Directory. Have a great weekend, everybody!

The New York Times is reporting that Apple’s agreed to buy the music streaming service LaLa, according to “a person with knowledge of the deal.” Apple’s now in the streaming music business.

Interestingly, the Times says that LaLa went to Apple to be acquired, and what Apple’s after is LaLa’s engineers, with their cloud service-y brains.

Apple’s official response is that they “buy smaller technology companies all the time, and we generally do not comment on our purpose or plans.” Hmmm. [NYT]

Previously: NY Times reporter Brad Stone says that Apple has agreed to acquire the streaming music service LaLa as rumored, and the NYT is currently updating their story.

Apple could be knocking on the door of Lala, an online music service, with plans to buy out the Palo Alto-based startup.

Two anonymous sources told Bloomberg they could not be identified because talks are still in progress. The terms of the deal are unknown. However, if the rumor is true, it suggests Apple is thinking about its next competitive move in digital music, with the emergence of cloud-based audio services such as Pandora and Last.fm.

Lala allows customers to listen to songs on their site once for free. Then, customers have two options: to pay 10 cents to listen to songs from Lala’s online servers, or to pay 79 cents to download a song onto their computer hard drive.

On a similar subject, Cult of Mac in August reported that Apple was building a 500,000-square-foot data center in North Carolina. Rich Miller, editor of Data Center Knowledge, speculates that given its enormity, Apple’s data center would most likely focus on cloud computing — hosting services or data over the web. If the acquisition pans out, perhaps Lala’s service would be integrated into this new data center to support Apple’s gigantic iTunes customer base.

Wired.com’s Eliot Van Buskirk speculates a Lala acquisition could lead to deep discounts for iTunes customers. See his report at Wired.com’s Epicenter.

See Also:

• Apple Buyout of Mapping Firm Hints at Future Breakup With Google …
• Apple Quietly Recruits Chip Designers for In-House Tech
• Apple Is Ready to Take a Bite of Silicon Valley

Photo: Manny Hernandez/Flickr

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