Hasta La Gadget!

We’ve all heard the horror stories behind children who rack up hundreds, if not thousands of dollars on in-app purchases on Apple’s iTunes App Store, leaving parents furious, and even more so when Apple refuses to refund them. While Apple is currently working on helping certain customers get their refund on accidental/unintentional in-app purchases, they have refused to refund the purchases of a 13-year old boy who managed to rack up a bill of around $5,600. Taking place in the UK, Apple refused to give the family a refund, causing the kid’s dad, Doug Crossan, to take rather drastic measures.

According to Crossan, Apple argued that it was the responsibility of the parent to lock their iOS device to prevent such things from happening, and with parental controls available as part of iOS, to a certain extent we can see Apple’s point. So what Crossan did was he reported the action to the Action Fraud Hotline, and what this means is that his son could possibly be arrested and face charges. The goal here is to lodge the complaint as criminal so that his credit card company would have to foot the bill, instead of himself.

A spokesperson at the Home Office who runs the Action Fraud stated that it does not sound like fraud has taken place, and according to the Daily Mail’s legal source, they doubt that prosecutors would bother charging the kid anyway.

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For those living in the US and who think that Apple’s products are already expensive, you might want to rethink that stance because in countries such as Australia, Apple’s products are even more expensive despite the Australian dollar being valued higher compared to the USD (AUD1 = USD1.0445). To that extent many are wondering why in spite of that, Apple Australia and other companies such as Microsoft and Adobe are charging higher prices than their US counterpart. That question is currently being asked in an Australian Parliament inquiry where executives from Microsoft, Adobe and Apple were called to explain their “price gouging” practices. (more…)

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Twitter is apparently looking to bring some music into its service. The company is getting ready to use We Are Hunted, a music discovery service it had acquired 6 months ago, to help build itself a standalone music app. The app will give personalized music recommendations to users based on the musical artists the user follows, and the musical artists the user’s followers follow. The service, while less personalized, will still be usable for those without a Twitter account.

The app will stream music via SoundCloud. It will feature 4 tabs. The “Suggested” tab recommends you songs based on the musical artists you follow. The “#NowPlaying” tab lists links to songs tweeted by your followers who tweet using the #NowPlaying hashtag. The “Popular” tab lists the songs that are currently trending on the music app, and the “Emerging” tab lists a bunch of up-and-coming artists featured on We Are Hunted.

The app will display artists and songs in a grid design. Clicking on an artist’s panel will cause it to expand displaying a short bio on the artist, as well as links to songs the artist has on SoundCloud, or on iTunes. Users can tap the play button to begin streaming music from the artist. Users will also be able to follow artists directly from Twitter’s “Twitter Music” page.

iOS users are said to have first dibs on the Twitter Music service, just like Twitter’s video sharing app, Vine. The Twitter Music service is speculated to be released to iOS devices by the end of this month. Twitter hopes that by integrating music into its network, it can attract more new users to its service. It will, however, have a hard time prying users away from popular music services like Pandora and Spotify.

[via CNET]

Twitter to launch standalone music app is written by Brian Sin & originally posted on SlashGear.
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Unlike buying physical goods, returning digital purchases can get a bit tricky. Purchasing songs and movies on iTunes, for example, pretty much tie you to the product and you can’t sell it once you’re done with it. This is compared to physical purchases of CDs or DVDs where you can always resell them when you think you no longer plan to listen or watch it. However a recently discovered Apple patent reveals that perhaps one day in the future, Apple will allow us to resell our digital purchases made on iTunes. It’s actually a pretty interesting system and it’s quite complex. (more…)

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We’ve heard rumors that Apple could be interested in launching a streaming radio service of their own, much like Pandora. According to a recent report by Reuters, it looks like such a service could be inching forward to become a reality. The report has suggested that Apple executives have recently met up with the CEO of Beats, Jimmy Iovine, during a visit to Los Angeles. Basically what the Apple executives were trying to find out was about a certain “Project Daisy” by Beats, which is a music subscription service Beats announced a couple of months ago although there is not much details to be had at the moment.

We guess based on this report, it’s not so much that Apple wanted to partner up with Beats to launch said service, but rather to learn more about it so that they’d have a better idea of what to do when the rumored service launches. Apple’s alleged music streaming service is supposedly set for a launch later this year, or so they intended but reports are saying that negotiations with the major labels are preventing Apple from moving forward with their plans.

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