• Shopify revises its pricing model. Some people are unhappy. Existing customers with public working stores get to stay at the old rates if they want. For a managed store, the new rates remain a bargain. If you cannot afford these rates, then perhaps you shouldn’t be selling online. Or instead, stick with a static site and links to PayPal checkout.
• BSkyB buys Amstrad for £125m. This wont please Pace Micro Technology.

• Does Apple care about enterprise customers with the launch of the iPhone? Some analysts think not, but maybe Apple doesn’t need to consider the enterprise. After all, if enough people use the iPhone, “the enterprise” will follow. Either that, or disappear altogether.
• There’s a lot of discussion about whether Last.fm is (or should) take part in the National Day of Silence. This event is to protest against the proposed price increases royalties payable by US internet radio stations. Most opinions revolve around a) Last.fm don’t care, and, b) they want to kill off the competition. It could just be this: juvenile piffle and not worth considering. Besides, what about Last.fm’s subscribers – would they get a day’s subscription refunded?
• Liquibase is an open source, DBMS-independent library for tracking, managing and applying database changes.
• I’m still at a loss as to why many people cannot multitask. It’s something that becomes very important in small businesses and is a trait that’s vital as businesses try to get more productive to remain competitive. Multitasking is not bad. It’s amazing.

• Noisy Decent Graphics asks “what’s the first question you get asked when you tell people you’re a graphic designer?” We find it difficult to tell people what we do. We tend to wheel out ‘web-application-software-designer’, which tends not to get us any questions because people have no idea what that means. Mind you, the ‘software’ thing does get us into lots of Mac vs. PC questions, which we’d rather not get involved in.
• Technorati relaunched and is up, and err.. down. I still think it’s as approachable as a group of weird school kids hanging around outside the computer lab.
• 37signals is in Time.
• Robert Scoble reports on the Distrust/Disdain of Google. I think what Google needs to do is cut down on its excursions into every application one can think of. Reading that 37signals article would be a great start.
• Major record labels get another kicking. Hoorah! This time from Trent Reznor, who owes one more album under his current deal. Big tip: release a compilation album or an album of covers. Go talk to Tori.
• Sonos has just announced their Sonos Bundle 130 which now makes their systems relatively affordable. It’s a pity that you still need one player wired to a PC.

• Andy Rutledge has branched out as a semi-independent designer. His announcement mentions the first little steps down this life, including the creation of business forms. Ah, I remember forms.. One of the many things I left behind when starting Junctionbox Media was forms. Because I quickly discovered that customers don’t like forms. They are barriers to relationships. Invoices, however, I do like. Especially when they get paid. On time.
• TechCrunch upsets Shannon Terry due to this post about Rivals.com. It’s weird that in the era of blogs, the first stage for many corporate counterarguments still comes in the form of a lawyer’s letter.
• Mail merges still get done wrong, as per No First Name Matt. It’s not a funny mistake – it’s a big mistake.

Opinions on yesterday’s EMI and Apple announcement:

• The BBC emphasises the relationship with piracy, referring to statements by EMI such as “Consumers tell us they would be prepared to pay a higher price for a piece of music they can play on any player” and “We have to trust our consumers.” I don’t believe that EMI believes those statements. Truth is that the price hike is to compensate EMI for anticipated consequential piracy, and to allow them to sell their music with a 30% price increase.
• Read/Write agrees that prices are going to go up, and that despite the win-win situation for Apple and EMI, it may well be Apple that gains the most long term.
• MacWorld’s Playlist however, suggests that everyone, including consumers, benefit from this agreement – the death of DRM. Their opinion identifies some ‘losers’ – notably the smaller online stores that use DRM.
• MacWorld looks forward to the future of digital music sales, pointing out the current annoyances with the iTunes Store, in particular those lovely Partial Albums and Album Only tracks.

• Microsoft joins the OpenAjax Alliance. Wow, an alliance built around one concept. John Essig has more information on this.

• Kathy Sierra asks some important questions about the personality of applications.

• MacWorld ponders on the release date of Mac OS X 10.5. My money’s on June 2007, but I’ve read that November is quite popular too.

• Applications for Y Combinator’s Summer 2007 funding cycle comes to a close on 2 April. They usually fund $5k per founder, plus $5K, in return for a 1-10% stake in the company.
• Google has launched Google Apps Premier Edition, a $50 per user per year subscription package of their hosted business applications. Once again, the dreaded user charging model is applied. Does a web host charge according to the number of unique visitors a site gets, or how many people build a web application. No. It’s the data that counts, so charge on that basis. 37signals understand this fundamental concept, so why can’t everyone else? What’s worse is that despite the subscription, there are still limits to how much e-mail can be stored.
• The new default for session storage in Ruby on Rails is… cookies. Which will surely be great for those Ajax applications. Fortunately, you can still use other mechanisms.
• ActiveMerchant 1.0.0 is now released. Hear those footsteps? That’s the sound of million Shopify clones coming your way.
• Netvibes has announced that their upcoming ‘Coriander’ release will allow their widgets to run cross-platform, using the Universal Widget API. No doubt the creaking institution that is the W3C will get their Widgets 1.0 specification out sometime.
• Monocle launches. But isn’t it just an in-flight magazine? Or do I just really hate in-flight magazines?

• Firefox 3 is going to deliver support for offline applications, although, of course web applications will need to be re-engineered to provide sufficient usefulness whilst offline.
• This leads from the announcement of the Dojo Offline Toolkit, which sitepen is going to use to provide offline Gmail and Blogger functionality.
• TechCrunch reckons that FilmLoop has been betrayed, because their investors forced a fire sale of the company. Much discussion is ensuing. This continues to prove that VCs are scary people to work with. If you need a VC, then you need to think of another business idea.
• 37Signals Sunrise application gets renamed to Highrise and starts hanging out at the mall.
• Windows Live is still a bozo concept with bozo branding.
• I continue to wonder why Extreme Programming (XP) leads to a practice of standup meetings. If you need standup meetings then your execution of XP is deficient.
• Intel launches a Web 2.0 Technology Development Kit designed to find out information about the (Intel) platform that your web application is running on. (via)