James Raymond

According to Dave Glassanos, founder of Disrupt.fm, the price of a song is about the equivalent of a Facebook update. That's up for debate, but I will say that Glassanos's Facebook-oriented startup is pretty cool.Disrupt.fm is based on the premise that pirating music is a common occurrence -- one that yields no benefit for musicians when it comes to publicity. To solve that quandary, Glassanos has come up with an alternative method of free music sharing.Basically, artists can upload their music to Disrupt.fm, which users can then download for free. However, that song doesn't just end up in the black void of a user's iTunes library -- since one is prompted to connect to Disrupt.fm via Facebook, the song is also automatically shared to the user's Facebook wall, where it can be listened to as a stream by friends.Currently, the selection on Disrupt.fm is not — shall we say — the best, and the UI is a little clunky (you can't search for artists, etc), but the idea is solid. Ideally, an artist would upload a few tracks to the service -- to prevent a fan from snagging the entire album for free -- and gain buzz for a new album thusly.While this service is reminiscent of pre-existing clients like Track For a Tweet, it kicks it up a notch by catering to Facebook users, who are much more plentiful than those using Twitter.[via hypebot]

The next generation of the iPhone and iPad will sport a new version of Apple's A4 chip with a dual-core graphics processing unit that should enable even higher resolutions on these devices, as well as support for HD (1080p) video playback, AppleInsider reports, citing sources familiar with the matter.More precisely, the chip in question should be a dual-core SGX543 GPU from Imagination Technologies. The rumor goes hand in hand with another rumor that claims the iPad 2 will have a much higher resolution screen than its predecessor, although the jury is still out on the exact number of pixels it'll have.The SGX543 graphics chip will most probably be paired up with a dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 CPU, which should make the iPad 2 a very powerful machine, more than capable of playing HD video.As far as the iPhone 5 goes, the most recent rumor has it that it will also sport a multi-core CPU, and that it will be completely redesigned compared to iPhone 4.[via AppleInsider]