As widely rumored and confirmed ahead of time by the Wall Street Journal, the Beatles debuted on iTunes today in an exclusive distribution deal. I contacted Apple, Apple Corps. and EMI about exclusivity and heard back from Apple early this afternoon. "The Beatles will be exclusively available on iTunes, with exclusivity expiring in 2011," said Apple spokesperson Tom Neumayr. Uh-oh. Exclusivity could bring Apple under fire for violating antitrust laws. The Beatles deal is representative of exclusives available only from iTunes.

Depending on the analyst firm doing the counting, Apple's market share for U.S. digital downloads ranges from more than 70 percent to about 90 percent. Meanwhile, Apple's command of the portable music player market is 75 percent or more, again depending on who's doing the counting. Apple's market-leading position -- not just in the United States -- means that antitrust enforcers apply different rules, so to speak, to Apple compared to its competitors. One thing they'll watch for: Actions that forestall competition or compel consumers to pay higher prices for music.

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Mobile network operators AT&T, Verizon Wireless, and T-Mobile USA today announced they have joined forces in a new venture called Isis, a commerce network based upon so-called "wallet phones."

The idea is that a user's smartphone is equipped with a near-field communication (NFC) chip encoded with their banking information, and exchanging money is as quick as swiping your phone over an NFC reader. These types of devices have been in use in Japan for more than six years, and have been extensively tested in the United States by the likes of MasterCard, Citigroup, Nokia, AT&T, and Visa, but this is the first time such a unified move by network operators has been made in the space.

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Today's Apple homepage iTunes teaser -- "Tomorrow is just another day. That you'll never forget." -- sent the rumormongers howling and Mac fanatics salivating. And I looked on, groaning: "Oh, please, get a life." I really couldn't care less about Apple's so-called "exciting announcement," which distracted from other big tech news, like Facebook's messaging service or Microsoft's 1 million Kinect sales, and from global stories like the coming vote that could divide Sudan into two countries. Apple's little teaser has geek bloggers and reporters once again doing the hamster dance in the proverbial wheel. Steve Jobs has you trained well, and he's promising some sweet kibbel as reward.

I've been chuckling, wondering what would make me never forget. Some days I won't forget: My daughter's birth; my best friend's death; my 14th birthday (I had appendicitis); Sept. 11, 2001; the D.C. Snipers' first day of killing; and Black Friday weekend 2009 car accident. What could Apple do tomorrow that would make it unforgettable? In marketing, smart companies always deliver more than promised. I can't imagine what Apple could deliver tomorrow that would even meet the implications promised.

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Popular social networking site Facebook today announced it is rolling out a whole new messaging system over the next few months that "isn't just e-mail," but integrates four common ways users communicate: email, Facebook messages and chat, and SMS, and archives it all in a single thread.

The new system puts a user's identity above the communication protocol. Facebook Engineer Joel Seligstein today said, "You decide how you want to talk to your friends...They will receive your message through whatever medium or device is convenient for them, and you can both have a conversation in real time. You shouldn't have to remember who prefers IM over email or worry about which technology to use. Simply choose their name and type a message."

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SkyTerra 1, the communications satellite that will be a part of LightSquared's hybrid satellite/terrestrial mobile network, successfully launched into orbit yesterday afternoon, LightSquared announced this morning.

The satellite launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at 12:30 yesterday afternoon, and established its first connection with ground-based communications approximately nine hours later.

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On Monday, the front page of Apple.com changed into a full-page message that teases an "exciting announcement from iTunes" at 10am EST tomorrow, November 16.

ITunes has received a significant number of updates since version 10 of
the popular cross-platform music software debuted in September. A major addition to the newest iTunes was Ping, a social music sharing service. Last week, popular microblogging service Twitter announced it had partnered with Apple to bring iTunes to Twitter via Ping, and last Friday Apple released the 10.1 iTunes update to coincide with the launch of iOS 4.2.

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It's the unexpected question I'm asking you following Friday's PC user poll, which is embedded below to take additional responses. The poll is about identification, rather than usage. Instead of asking what operating system you run, I ask how you identify yourself as a PC user. Not surprisingly, 76 percent of respondents identify themselves as Windows PC users. But surprisngly -- well, to me -- nearly 12 percent identify themselves as Linux users, which is slightly more than Macintosh. Could this possibly be true?

While the poll is embedded at Betanews, it is accessible by anyone. I expect that most respondents are Betanews readers, but they don't have to be. This post may marshall the fanboys and skew further results, which as I post are 682 votes, with 507 for Windows PC, 77 for Linux PC, 70 for Macintosh and 19 for other. Please vote if you haven't. The poll requires JavaScript. If you have disabled JavaScript or you can't see the embedded poll, please use this link.

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About five months after Microsoft decided to kill off its Kin phone project, leaked documents obtained by mobile blog PPC Geeks indicates that the company plans to bring back the devices as feature phones, but without the functions that set it apart.

Tech blog Engadget says sources have told it that the Kin's most data-intensive features have been disabled. This would mean its "Loop" feature -- possibly one of the most unique qualities of the device -- would no longer work. However, Zune Pass would still operate over Wi-Fi as long as the customer carries the appropriate data plan.

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Yesterday, Microsoft posted video "PC & Mac take flight -- Avatar & Windows 7." It's not the most clever title, but the story is subtle and driving, like good marketing should be. Microsoft mad men once again cleverly market Windows 7 PC benefits, but, more importantly, they quite effectively highlight the differences between a Windows PC and Mac.

The video features a Windows laptop and Mac notebook in adjacent seats on a plane flight. The animated short is long on subtle marketing cues -- like the airplane made out of Campbell soup-like "Windows Seven" cans; plane taking off over a Hollywood-like "Microsoft" sign; Windows logo on fasten-seat-belt-sign; and rating: "This film is rated PC. No Macs were used in the making of this video."

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WiMAX network operator Clearwire is in arbitration talks with its majority shareholder Sprint, an SEC filing from Clearwire revealed today. The two companies are in dispute over dual-mode WiMAX phones such as the HTC EVO 4G and the Samsung Epic and the wholesale charges they incur.

"We have been engaged in ongoing negotiations with Sprint to resolve issues related to wholesale pricing for Sprint 4G smartphone usage under our commercial agreements with Sprint." The filing says. "On October 29, 2010, we received a notice from Sprint initiating an arbitration process to resolve these issues. The process is in the early stages, and its outcome is unknown."

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When Google officially integrates its own Web services into Android and Chrome, the products usually work well and are always worth at least a look by users of those platforms. Yesterday, Google announced new official Chrome extensions for Calendar, Google Docs, and YouTube which offer new, but somewhat limited, first-party features to Chrome.

The Google Calendar extension lets users click add events to their Google Calendars from their Chrome toolbar. This extension works in a couple of ways: users can add events from scratch, or they can import event information presented in the hCalendar microformat or some of its derivitaves like hResume. So if an event on Facebook or Evite is compatible with the extension, a green plus sign will appear that users can click and automatically import the event data in their calendar.

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Amazon became the target of Internet criticism after initially ignoring pleas to remove a book it listed in its Kindle store on the subject of pedophilia, only to quietly change position and remove the book on Thursday without much notice.

The book, "The Pedophile's Guide to Love and Pleasure: a Child-lover's Code of Conduct" by Phillip Graves, was sold by Amazon for $4.79. It was intended to give those interested in such activity advice on the subject. However, child protection advocates saw the book as potentially dangerous, and threatened to boycott the online retailer.

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Yesterday, after several weeks of delay due to continued heavy crash counts, Mozilla released public beta 7 of its Firefox 4 browser, with at least three more public beta cycles planned before the end of the year. Beta 7 is the first public release to contain the device Mozilla calls JaegerMonkey, which hybridizes the optimized TraceMonkey engine introduced in Firefox 3.5 with a new just-in-time native code compiler.

The organization touted Beta 7 as being three to five times faster than the stable Firefox 3.6.12 in executing well-known benchmark suites, including the organization's new Kraken suite, and Google's V8 test battery. In a newly revised series of tests conducted this morning by Ingenus LLC, there were limited instances of 300% acceleration, but not across the board. Firefox 4 Beta 7 posted speed scores that were 2.38 times those of Firefox 3.6.12 overall.

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[Editor's Note: The survey below requires JavaScript. If you have disabled JavaScript or can't see the embedded survey, please use this link. You can choose up to two answers.]

In January, I posted "Microsoft Office is obsolete, or soon will be," which generated heated comment debate and accusations of linkbaiting. Never. I'm always serious about this stuff, and I tend to be right. Today, Gartner added a little oomph to my assertion, claiming that within four years, 20 percent of business users will replace e-mail with social networking services. Really? I think Gartner is being a wee bit conservative.

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Ping, the social music service introduced as a part of iTunes 10 in September, can now be linked with Twitter, the popular microblogging service announced Thursday.

Starting today, Ping users can connect their iTunes Ping account to their Twitter account and share their listening activity in their Twitter feed. Tweets sent from Ping include the album and artist information, album cover, song preview, and a link to the iTunes store to buy the music mentioned.

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