Betanews Podcast: Apple's Lala cloud visions vs. AT&T's cloudy prospects for 3G

Listen to What Are We Learning Today? on Yahoo Media Player -- Today's topic: Apple, Lala, the cloud, and the AT&T roadblock.

In an apparent effort to appear as though the company is reversing its stance on a minority of customers consuming a disproportionate chunk of bandwidth, AT&T Mobility Chairman and CEO Ralph de la Vega is quoted by The Wall Street Journal yesterday as saying the company has "not made any decision" about implementing a tiered pricing structure.

Such a structure would have served as a sort of penalty for users who consume what AT&T may consider too much bandwidth, however much that is. As of Wednesday, de la Vega's position has changed, saying now that his company is considering "incentives" for customers to use less data, though declining to go into further detail...other than to enable the WSJ to spread the term "incentives" around.

The change from stick to carrot may not be a significant shift in position for the exclusive carrier of Apple iPhone service in the US. Last week, the company made an apparent -- and still officially unannounced, though unofficially acknowledged -- purchase of music streaming/cloud service Lala. A shift in Apple's business model for iTunes to one that incorporates Lala would most certainly raise traffic levels for AT&T, at a time when the network is indicating it can't handle them.

Our latest podcast introduces Apple to the cloud, Apple to Lala, and AT&T to its destiny. Why did Apple make the investment in Lala in the first place, and could AT&T be the proverbial wrinkle in the ointment?

Source material for today's podcast

• iTunes gets cloudy: Will a web-ified future save iTunes or kill it? by Carmi Levy.
• "Lala joins Apple." Blog post from Lala.com.
• "Switched On: Apple's song remains the same" by Ross Rubin, Engadget, December 8, 2009.
• "AT&T to New York and San Francisco: We're Working on It" by Andrew LaVallee, The Wall Street Journal, December 9, 2009.
• "AT&T to Urge Customers to Take Data Traffic Off Wireless Network" by Niraj Sheth, The Wall Street Journal, December 16, 2009.
• Satirical blog post may incite real AT&T protest on Friday by Tim Conneally.