Speaking at Apple’s music event, CEO Steve Jobs, in his first public appearance since his medical leave of absence, introduces iTunes 9. After noting that iTunes is the largest music store in the world, boasting some 100 million accounts, Jobs rattles off some of the software’s new features. Among them: Genius Mixes and improved synching. The latter enables more specific synching and supports a new way of managing applications for the iPhone and iPod touch with a nice drag-and-drop feature. Very easy to organize and reorganize applications. The crowd really likes this one.

Also included in this update: Home Sharing, which allows songs, movies and TV shows to be shared and copied to up to five home computers. Another very slick feature that allows users to simply drag and drop songs between computers to copy them.

iTunes 9 also features a new store with redesigned music, movie, TV pages and a handy new navigation bar. Beyond this, there’s also support for Twitter and Facebook.

“You know, some of us here are old enough that we actually bought LPs,” says Jobs. “You used to get liner notes, essays and photos, but that stuff left us when we moved to digital music.”

With that, Jobs announces iTunes LP–the official name of the company’s rumored “Cocktail” album bundle. As expected, these iTunes LP bundles will feature additional art, photos and whatnot. Apple is working directly with artists and labels to develop them.

A Doors “LP” is offered up as an example and it includes some videos exclusively recorded for iTunes–Ray Manzarek talking about how Jim Morrison named the Doors (“Not a door-door, man. Like the door in your MIND.”). Surprisingly nice little video, actually. Certainly, it’s likely to appeal to die-hard fans.

Apple (AAPL) is doing something similar with movies–iTunes extras. Movies bundled with additional photos, etc.

Live from Apple’s “Let’s Rock” Event

• iPod Updates, Games, Nano Video Cameras
• iTunes 9, iTunes LP, Home Sharing, Genius Mixes
• Steve Jobs: “I’m Vertical, Back at Apple and Loving Every Day of It”
• Event Photos by Adam Tow

Making New Yahoo! Homepages Your Own
 
We recognize that for many of you around the world, the Yahoo! homepage — whether you’re seeing it on a computer or a mobile device – is Yahoo!. And we know you all have vastly different interests and “must-see” places you navigate to online. We can make our homepage better reflect this reality and, as many of you know, we’ve been hard at work on improving both our mobile and Web homepages.
 
What’s new, you ask?
We recently made the new Yahoo! Mobile (http://m.yahoo.com) available on the mobile Web across more than 300 devices and as an Apple iPhone app — both are available in eight countries, with more launching soon. We’ve moved out of beta and are in the process of rolling it out as our default mobile homepage.
 
Like the PC homepage we’re testing, Yahoo! Mobile has a more feature-rich design, letting you bring together your favorite content and services from across the Web, making it more personally relevant. For example, my experience is customized with my Yahoo! Mail, Facebook, Twitter and Yahoo! Messenger accounts, as well as my various stocks, favorite blog feeds, and weather from my favorite cities. The beauty of it is that you can customize the experience to exactly what you want and add anything to the page.
 
As for the Web, we recently started testing some new designs based on your feedback. We recognize that many of you like your homepage just the way it is, thank-you-very-much, so the overall look and feel of the page will be familiar. But take a closer look, and you’ll see that we’ve made some fundamental improvements and packed in features that are easy to use and easy to make your own — things you have told us you want.
 
The “My Favorites” area on the left side of the page includes an applications “dashboard” with the ability to preview, interact with or navigate to your favorite sites — whether they’re on Yahoo! or elsewhere on the Web. It’s all fully customizable.
 
Here’s some of what’s new and cool:

• Lots more apps: We’re testing a growing library of apps that let you get more done without leaving the page. Some of these apps include eBay and MySpace, and content sites like USA Today and NPR. We also have newly developed apps for popular Yahoo! services like Messenger, Movies and Flickr.
• Social pulse: A new Yahoo! Updates app lets you keep up with your friends’ online activities directly on the homepage — such as a recently Buzzed article or a video uploaded to YouTube.
• Easier email: We’ve separated your individual email accounts as distinct apps, rather than a combined inbox, so that it’s faster and easier to get to the exact mail you want. This was a request we heard repeatedly during testing.

If inking a video-on-demand deal with a declining DVR pioneer is one of them… well, that’s not much of a plan, is it? But when your financial statements look like Blockbuster’s, I suppose you cling to life however you can (Blockbuster shares have fallen about 80 percent over the last 12 months). And so, beginning in the second half of 2009, the company will make its Blockbuster On Demand service available to TiVo subscribers. The agreement also calls for Blockbuster’s brick-and-mortar stores to sell TiVo DVRs. “We are excited to be teaming with TiVo, the company that created the DVR, to make Blockbuster’s entertainment content readily available to their millions of subscribers,” said Blockbuster CEO Jim Keyes. “Ultimately, our vision is to work with TiVo so that their subscribers can access movies not only through our On Demand service but also from our stores and through our by-mail service as well.”

For Blockbuster (BBI), the deal is a means of capitalizing on the rising popularity of on-demand video. But to really do that effectively, the company needs alliances with more electronics manufacturers than just TiVo (TIVO). After all, the DVR pioneer isn’t in the greatest of health these days. And Netflix (NLFX) already delivers online video to TiVo and PCs, Macs, Xbox 360s, and selected LG and Samsung Blu-ray players as well. Clearly, Blockbuster is as late to on-demand as it was to DVD-by-mail.

“There’s something I keep hearing, and I don’t think I’d rank it as high as a rumor, but it’s an interesting story that I keep hearing, that for awhile, trucks loaded with books would arrive at a loading dock on the Apple campus, and offload big, big, big, big, huge loads of books, and then the trucks would leave empty. And Apple does not have a 100,000-book employee library there on the Apple campus. So one is prone to believe that they’re doing something with these books, such as turning them into text for some purpose we can only guess at. There’s been a long-standing rumor that Apple has been silently preparing to open a bookstore on the iTunes store, and they want to make sure that they have a very large stock of electronic titles when they do open.”

Interesting, no? Especially in light of these new reports about 10-inch touchscreen devices. Could Apple be developing a new souped up e-book reader–a TouchBook, if you will? Something on which you could read books (in color), watch movies, surf the Web and create and edit documents? Something that would upend and redefine the e-book sector as we know it? And are the mysterious “books” to which Ihnatko refers really books and not the device themselves…

PREVIOUSLY:

• Coming Soon From Apple: Big Touch?
• iTablet: Apple’s Killer App for Higher Ed

A remarkable metric, given the economic downturn. How is it that gaming is thriving at a time when the global financial crisis is squeezing wallets? “There are a couple of reasons,” Ron Meiners, director of community for the Hollywood Interactive Group, recently told News.com. “One is the traditional value of entertainment during tough economic times. Like the great fantastic musicals in the 30s. Movies did great, because they took people’s mind off of the troubles they were facing. [And] videogames have great value as entertainment. The number of hours of solid entertainment that comes from a videogame purchase is much greater than a movie, for example, for very comparable cost.”

Now, Disney (DIS) and CBS (CBS) already offer those same shows for viewing on the same day-after-original air date schedule on their own Web sites (though they aren’t presented commercial-free as they will be on Netflix). But that doesn’t seem to matter to Netflix (NFLX), which is clearly positioning itself as a one-stop shop for online delivery of movies and television shows.

And doing quite well at it, I might add. Wedbush Morgan Securities analyst Michael Pachter estimates that between 10 and 20 percent of Netflix’s 8.4 million subscribers use the company’s streaming service regularly.

What’s more, it’s now the largest music retailer in the states. Which means it’s bested Wal-Mart (WMT) for the top music-retailer spot.

Apple offered up this news with a bit of a reality-distorted caveat, though. The latest NPD Group data on which its claims are based was culled from the research outfit’s MusicWatch survey, which counts one CD as representing 12 tracks.

As of this writing Wal-Mart’s list of 10 top-selling CDs includes many that feature more than 12 tracks–some with more than 20, and one that boasts more than 35.