One thing Google doesn’t have, that Apple and Amazon, their current competition, do have, is a music store. Google will help you find music to buy, but you can’t buy music from them. Sure, Google bought a music service, but it seems up in the air as to what that service will actually be doing.

Well, courtesy of their dev blog, we just got a hint.

OK, so the posting itself is boringly technical and seemingly innocuous. It’s just detailing that now, instead of billing directly to your credit card, Android app developers can set up apps to bill your cell phone carrier. Not a big deal. They’ve had it on T-Mobile and a few other networks for a while, and are just rolling it out on Sprint. So what?

Well, aside from giving app developers another way to collect their cash, which is always welcome, it means Google is slowly expanding and developing ways to make small payments through various means, including the carriers.

That’s kind of a clue that they have something else they’d like you to make small payments on. Nothing’s definite, but don’t be surprised if there’s an Android music store this time next year.

One thing I think most reasonable human beings can’t stand is when some jackass gets on the bus with his cell phone and starts playing his music over the tinny little speaker. It’s annoying, it’s invasive, and inevitably his taste in music sucks (at least listen to some Mos Def, suburban white kid who thinks he’s “street”).

Fortunately, Grace Digital, not wanting people in the country to feel left out of the douche parade, have a fifty dollar solution: a waterproof case with a speaker on it.

You shouldn’t have. No, really, what the hell, guys?

Seriously, why does this thing even exist in the first place? I would get a waterproof case, because for hikers, kayakers, and very clumsy people who keep dropping it into puddles and sewers, it makes sense. But why does it have a speaker?

And a tiny speaker, no less? Who goes out into the woods or on the river blasting their music over a tiny little speaker that mostly serves to announce the presence of somebody who just can’t bear to be listening to music and for you not to know that they are listening to music?

This is why, where I grew up, they handed out buttons that said “Why is it called tourist season if we can’t shoot them?” Just something to think about.

Online video streaming has gone from that goofy YouTube video you uploaded for your mom to a major industry in the space of about five years. But the number of competitors has stayed pretty limited: Netflix has dominated pretty much the entire market, with Hulu controlling most of TV only thanks to being owned by a few networks. But the ‘Flix has controlled movies online, especially in browsers…until now.

Yes, Vudu, your would-be online video store, has finally managed to get browser streaming up and running. It wasn’t a technical challenge, obviously; it was a rights problem.

Unfortunately, those rights problems rear its ugly head again when it comes to the quality: the highest video quality you’ll get is 480p. The higher quality streams are apparently being sorted out for separate applications.

On the other hand, at least for your dollar you get instant access to your rentals, right there in your browser.

Does this change the online video landscape? Not at the moment: Netflix still has a death grip on the vast majority of the customers, and Vudu is still picking up the scraps. On the other hand, it’s stayed alive through the settop box wars and just scored a major victory…so they’re worth keeping an eye on.

Remember when “Doom” was the killer app for computers and for keeping you from killing your coworkers in the real world? And then “Doom II” came out and pretty much ruined American productivity for a year? Hard as it is to imagine now, “Doom” was a huge phenomenon; there were even people pretending to suffer from DAS, “Doom Addiction Syndrome”.

Of course, since them Doom’s been ported to everything with a processor remotely capable of supporting it (even calculators and digital cameras), but now we have the most glorious port imaginable….Doom on an eReader

Since the page is in Russian, we have absolutely no idea what it’s actually saying. Probably some jibber-jabber about processors and compression and how hard it was to fit an early ’90s FPS onto something designed to read books.

Just go straight for the video embed, which shows all the Doom you can handle on the eReader. It’s the most hilariously ridiculous thing you’ll see today.

From what we can tell, this eReader won’t ship with Doom II bundled, which is a real shame. But at least we know it’s possible, and that the nameless space marine spending all that time gunning down demons still has some life left in him yet.

Some videos linked here may not be work-safe.

Ahhhh, YouTube. Is there a greater site on the Internet? All the videos of dogs humping Pokemon plushies, grown men getting punched in the testicles, and godawful pop songs you could ever want. How could it be improved?

It can’t. Improving it is impossible. But Google would like it to be a little more respectable, so YouTube is getting a facelift…and some original content.

Basically, it’s hard to sell advertising when you don’t know whether your ad will be next to something respectable or two men getting into a fistfight on a public transit bus. So Google is going to group YouTube into channels and produce up to $100 million worth of original content. That way, the content is sorted (and screened), and while users can still upload content, and continue to give YouTube the viral videos it needs to survive, advertisers can be reassured that nobody will associate their product with beatings.

Do we think this is unfortunate? Yes. Completely. The glory of YouTube is that it’s a cross between deep human moments and a total freaking train wreck. Sure, there’s plenty of great, professionally produced video on the site. But notice what goes viral are generally either moments of honesty we rarely see and moments of blithering self-delusion. YouTube is where a thirteen-year-old girl can turn a vanity song into a charting hit, donate most of the money to Japan, and shame the entire Internet. YouTube is great because it’s us. Don’t change that, Google. Don’t change that at all.

So, you’ve got a lot of photos, music, movies, and other digital media you’ve acquired via absolutely legitimate means with no torrents whatsoever. Now you’re faced with a problem: you would like to share this material with your friends, but remote PC login is a pain in the butt.

Buffalo feels your pain: that’s why they made the CloudStor.

The Cloudstor uses PogoPlug software, a popular media-sharing and streaming setup, and is configured and used via a browser. All you have to do is plug it in, connect it to the Internet, and upload your media to it. Then, you just log in from any computer, and it streams media to you.

If this sounds like a fairly simple solution using network attached storage…well…that’s pretty much exactly what it is. Where the CloudStor stands out is really in how that solution is implemented. It has a terabyte drive already installed on shipping, and there’s a second drive bay if you have that much media. The PogoPlug software is simple. It even installs and configures in a browser, no driver disk required. In short, it’s pretty much perfect for most people’s needs.

It’s an ideal gift for somebody who has dozens of DVDs they haven’t backed up yet, and need to be able to watch anywhere. Or, you know, for the person who has way too many dirty movies. There’s that market too.

360 degree lenses are one of those things that are just pure concentrated awesome. They’re exactly what they sound like: a lens designed to give you a complete wraparound view of whatever the camera happens to be shooting. It’s incredibly neat to see, and lots of fun to shoot, but 360 degree shooting has been largely limited to expensive extreme sports rigs and other specialized applications.

Until it hits the iPhone later this year.

The lens comes to us courtesy of GoPano, one of the leaders in 360 video technology. GoPano has developed a lens and software combination for the iPhone that records 360 degree video and, naturally, lets you flick around the video with the touch of a finger. In addition, GoPano is developing web software to make 360 degree video available online, so you can upload your videos and actually scroll through them.

So far, only the iPhone 4 is supported, mostly because GoPano wasn’t sure if this was going to catch on and funded the project through Kickstarter. However, considering they’ve gotten $31,000 so far and their goal was $20,000, it’s fairly safe to say that GoPano will be looking into developing this for other platforms in fairly short order. Check out video at the above link, and reserve a lens there as well.

The boom box was an ’80s cultural icon. Either you shut out the world with a Walkman, or blasted your music everywhere with a boom box. OK, so a lot of guys with boom boxes were basically being jerks, but it helped to spread hip-hop and propagate mixtape culture in the ’70s and ’80s, so they were a good thing in that respect. And, now, after years of iPods and dweebs playing their music over tinny cell phone speakers, TDK is bringing them back.

The first, striking thing about these are the design, courtesy of design house Ziba. These aren’t your typical boom boxes by any means. They’re eye-catching, minimalist, and engaging.

The second surprising feature is the lack of formats: these are designed to have an iPod or other device plugged into them. No tape decks, no CD players, nothing: just the music in your pocket.

Beyond that, you have two classics, one stereo two-speaker and a three-speaker job with better bass response. Then there’s the Sound Cube, which is designed to fill rooms with music and thus has a speaker on three sides.

It may not bring back the days of a boom box on every shoulder, but it’s sure nice to have them back.

Netflix is a great service, and an extremely profitable one, raking in billions and building a stock price higher than the companies making the movies they sell. But it’s also been a limited service: it was only available in the US and Canada. Netflix always planned to expand someday…and someday could be coming a lot sooner than everybody thought.

Recent job postings like this one hint that Netflix is getting ready to take over the world, something that probably has studios nervous. Netflix has mentioned before plans to tackle Europe, then Asia, then the rest of the world, pretty much the order Hollywood views profitability. But these are the first signs that it’s going to move on those plans, and move quickly.

What does this mean? In the short term, not very much, just that our friends overseas will enjoy the same streaming that we do without having to use a proxy server. In the long term, it could knock down distribution barriers. Netflix is already acquiring content to distribute, and even making its own TV shows. This could mean worldwide distribution on a much cheaper and simpler scale than currently available…and that’s going to make a lot of sales agents and film executives very nervous indeed.

It’s a common problem: you’re trying to listen to music on a busy street, and somebody keeps honking his honk at you, probably because you’re scrolling through your iTunes in the middle of a crosswalk. Hey, it happens to the best of us. Fortunately, you can tune that guy out completely with Sony’s luxurious new earbuds.

So “luxurious” is almost always an exaggeration when it comes to headphones in general, let alone earbuds, which are basically just ramming a tiny driver on a cord in your ear. But Sony really works to earn your $300 with these babies.

Noise-canceling processors have been fairly bulky, even when tied to earbuds, but this one is roughly the size and weight of two packs of gum, perfect for hanging off your ears as you walk around town listening to your favorite music. Or whatever you can get for free.

They will not, however, call the police if you get run over by a motorist distracted by his cell phone as he makes a perfectly legal drive through a green light as you stand there looking for Animal Collective tracks. It will, however, post a video of it to Failblog immediately, so that’s nice, we guess.

I’ve been using Apple products for two decades and buying them for myself for the last decade, and one thing I have learned, whether it’s the iMac dumping the floppy disk or Jobs deciding “No Flash for you!”, is that Apple just has to do something to make its products a pain in the butt to use in some respect. Any respect.

With the iPad, that apparently is USB connectors, because God forbid the $500 tablet computer has the same functionality as a netbook you can get from Best Buy. And HDMI can eat it too. Fortunately, the Japanese have our backs.

OK, so the solution, a two-in-one HDMI and USB hub that plugs into the dock connector, is unwieldy, expensive, and needs a mini-USB for you to plug it in so it doesn’t wipe out the battery. It’s also only available in Japan.

But still, it’s something. Apple doesn’t seem very excited to actually do something its customers would like, since every iPad owners has been screaming about the total lack of USB for, let’s see here, the iPad’s entire existence.

Come on, Jobs. If we’re reduced to buying bootleg adapters from Asia, it’s past time to solder a USB port in there. Just saying.

One of the biggest problems with getting magazines and other content on your iPad is the fact that everybody wants a subscription. Really, guys? On a machine that can access billions of blogs, video news sites, and podcasts, you expect users to clutter up their desktop with your back issues, which come out monthly in some cases? Apparently that answer was “yes”, because publishing executives still aren’t sure about this whole “Internet” thing catching on.

At least until now.

In light of the New York Times trying, yet again, to keep the Internet from reading its articles with a paywall, the Wall Street Journal has actually paid attention to the writing on the wall and is offering iPad versions of its papers at $2.

It’s interesting to see the different approaches. The Times’ paywall is doomed to fail, just like it failed the first and second times they tried it. People will just give away their usernames and passwords like they always do, and the Times will see no significant increase in income. The Journal, however, seems to be starting to admit that subscriptions, while profitable, aren’t the way of the future. I’m a lot more likely to drop two bucks in an airport for a newspaper than I am to subscribe to them, and I think the Journal is hoping my attitude is common.

More on this as it develops, especially when the Times gives up again.