It was only a month ago that I posted my story on BeamItDown Software closing up shop because of Apple's in-app subscription requirements. Turns out Apple has decided to update the policy to be more developer friendly. But why?

Lady Gaga’s new album Born This Way is available today on Amazon.com for only 99¢. Although I am not a fan of her music, I am pleased to see that by purchasing the album, I qualify to receive a free upgrade to 20GB of space on Amazon Cloud!

If you are interested in Amazon’s cloud offering and have yet to move on it, this is a good time to start with 20GB for only 99¢! If 99¢ is too much of an investment, Amazon is offering 5GB for free.

As a business man, creative writing has never been my forte. Sure, I have written my fair share of poetry in the past, but the majority of my writing falls under formal communications such as business e-mails and technical papers. Seeing as I wanted to venture into the world of blogging, I felt that the only way to capture the reader's attention was to write articles that are fun to read. To help open my mind to the world of creative writing, I decided to read Joy Writing by Kenn Amdahl.

BeamItDown Software, the creators of the iFlowReader eBook reader app for iOS, is closing up shop. Citing Apple's in-app purchase requirement for developers, they state that after Apple takes a 30% cut, they would end up running in the red...

It’s official, Microsoft will acquire Skype for $8.5 billion in cash.

From the Wall Street Journal:

The deal allows Microsoft to integrate Skype’s free and low-cost Internet-based video and telephony services into everything from its Bing search engine to Windows smartphones and its Xbox videogame system. The need to add a communications component is seen as crucial with the growing popularity of Apple Inc.’s Facetime video-chat service and Google Inc.’s Voice.

Is FaceTime really that popular? Although I have it on my iPad and Mac, I always default to Skype for it’s cross-platform support. My only real concern is continued support for non-Microsoft platforms like Linux, Mac, Android and iOS. We use Skype every week for our Unsigned podcast because of its cross-platform support. If this goes away, I will be forced to look for alternatives.

From Microsoft’s press release:

Microsoft will continue to invest in and support Skype clients on non-Microsoft platforms

How well they continue to support non-Microsoft platforms is the question I need answered. I feel that Macs are treated as second-class citizens from Skype today, so can it get any worse? We’ll have to wait and see how this deal turns out.