• iTunes Music Store downloads now cost $.69, $.99, or $1.29 per track. Apple has mitigated the pain a bit here by making every track available as a higher-quality sound file than before and stripping away the five-device limit that was once standard in the iTunes Store. But on the flip side, anecdotal evidence seems to indicate far more tracks priced at $1.29 than $.69.
• Amazon MP3 downloads now cost $.79, $.99 or $1.29 per song. Amazon’s approach seems to be to apply the lower prices a bit more freely than at iTunes, and Amazon’s songs have never had play restrictions attached.
• And Wal-Mart comes in on the low end here with downloads offered at $.64, $.94, and $1.24. The retail giant also offers specific pages highlighting songs available at the different price points.

Are you able to find what you listen to at the lower price points? Or has this change made buying music more expensive for you?

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In a statement issued directly to followers of TWC on micro-blogging/IM platform Twitter, chief operating officer Landel Hobbs detailed some of the changes:

• To accommodate lighter Internet users and those who need a lower priced option, we are introducing a 1 GB per month tier offering speeds of 768 KB/128 KB for $15 per month. Overage charges will be $2 per GB per month. Our usage data show that about 30% of our customers use less than 1 GB per month.

• We are increasing the bandwidth tier sizes included in all existing packages in the trial markets to 10, 20, 40 and 60 GB for Road Runner Lite, Basic, Standard and Turbo packages, respectively. Package prices will remain the same. Overage charges will be $1 per GB per month.

• We will introduce a 100 GB Road Runner Turbo package for $75 per month (offering speeds of 10 MB/1 MB). Overage charges will be $1 per GB per month.

• Overage charges will be capped at $75 per month. That means that for $150 per month customers could have virtually unlimited usage at Turbo speeds.

• Once we implement this trial, we will not immediately start billing customers for overage. Rather, we will first provide two months of usage data. Then we will provide a one-month grace period in which overages will be noted on customers’ bills, but they will not be charged. So, customers will have an opportunity to assess their usage and right-size their service packages before usage charges are applied.

These are all steps in the right direction. It’ll be interesting to see if these amounts are tweaked further, and by how much.

[Read - via CrunchGear]

Now the site has gotten that much more useful with the launch of a printable-coupon service for local businesses. You just punch in your ZIP code and, optionally, what you’re looking for coupons for, and the results are displayed in a handy map format.

The pickings around my area are fairly slim at the moment, but given that the service has just recently launched, it’s likely to improve anywhere. If you’re in a major metropolitan area, you may see better results more quickly.

The venerable Valpak and Money Mailer both offer similar services, but RetailMeNot’s thriving community leads me to believe it could eclipse both those coupon clearinghouses given enough time.

[Read - via Lifehacker]

Sources say the caps are priced as follows:

5 GB: $29.99/month
10 GB: $39.99/month
20 GB: $49.99/month
40 GB: $54.90/ month
100 GB: No information yet

What does this mean to you? Well, say you were subscribing to the fairly standard tier of service at $30 a month.Currently, your fee pays for a particular speed of service. Under the new plan, you’d be paying by usage, not by speed, so for $30 you’d be able to download up to 5 Gigabytes of information.

5 GB may sound like a lot of bandwidth, and for many internet users it’s no doubt plenty. But as Gamers With Jobs points out in their excellent report, watching just one movie a month online could put you well over that cap on its own, and that’s not counting the bandwith you’d use for anything else — like e-mail, instant messaging, or viewing your family’s photos online.

Here are a few things that 5GB gets you:

• Just over three episodes of Lost in HD from iTunes
• About 5 game demos on PlayStation 3 or Xbox 360
• About 14 games in the Xbox Live Arcade
• About 500 songs downloaded from iTunes
• About 550 three-and-a-half-minute videos on YouTube
• About 1000 holiday chain e-mails with multiple pictures
• About 1500 pictures from an average digital camera
• About 3000 visits to Facebook…or Roadrunner.com
• About 350,000 text-only e-mails

Of course, the real question is: What happens if you download more than what’s included in your plan? The same thing that happens if you go over your cell phone plan: You get charged for the usage. In this case, Time Warner says they’ll charge customers $1 per GB of overage.

Time Warner claims to be implementing this plan to ensure that the average user isn’t adversely impacted by a handful of high-volume users downloading and sharing huge files constantly. But interestingly, competitor Comcast took the same stance…with a cap of 250GB per month. And a warning — not a fee — for overage.

As online video becomes more common and sites like ABC.com, NBC.com, Hulu, and YouTube gain regular viewers, the average user is going to burn more and more bandwidth. At the same time, bandwidth is getting cheaper and cheaper to the provider thanks to advances in technology and economies of scale. So why is Time Warner picking now to begin squashing bandwidth hogs? Your guess is as good as mine.

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10 PRINT “HELLO!”
20 GOTO 10

…and, if you were lucky, perhaps an educational game like Lemonade Stand or The Oregon Trail. These state-of-the-art machines could display 16 different colors with their 64 kilobytes of memory, and ran at speeds just over 1 Megahertz. (By contrast, Apple recently released a device that includes two thousand times the memory, displays about a million times as many colors, and runs over six hundred times as fast. And it’s a phone.)

Now, Macworld reports that thanks to near-incomprehensible advances in technology, you can play an assortment of games for old Apple machines in your web browser with the Virtual Apple emulator. They even have Lemonade Stand and The Oregon Trail.

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Now, before we go any further, a disclaimer: I love gambling. Love it. I especially love poker, which I play every chance I get. Before the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006 went into effect, making it illegal for U.S. banks to do business with poker sites, I played poker online regularly (for very small stakes, but still). I believe that poker is a game of skill more than chance, and I find the fact that it is for all intents and purposes illegal to play online here — and pretty much only here — faintly ridiculous.So understand that I do indeed have a horse in this race, as it were.

But it’s also important to note that this study isn’t coming from fringe sources. Reuters is one of the preeminent news organizations in the world, and PwC has a sterling reputation as well. And if these numbers are correct, this could be a relatively painless way of shaving a bit off the government’s budget deficit.

It seems to me that we can scarcely afford not to re-evaluate the UIGEA. But then, I’m clearly biased. What do you think?

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