Indie musicians have a new shortcut to reach megastar status: Having their music picked up for an Apple commercial., “New Soul”, by Yael Naim, was featured in the ad for the MacBook Air. The song just debuted in the Billboard Hot 100 at number nine. Not bad for somebody nobody had heard of a few months ago.

In this regard, Apple is following in the footsteps of Levi’s. Through the 1980s and 1990s, the jeans company broke many new acts with its famous TV commercials. In the UK, having a song featured in a Levi’s spot pretty much guaranteed a number one hit. And Apple knows this. Famous for driving hard deals, the Cupertino company pays a lot less than usual for its music rights. According to Ad Age, Apple paid just $80,000 for Feist’s “1234″. The normal cost would be around $300,000.

It helps that Apple is a “cool” brand. Licensing music for a Mac ad is not seen as selling out to The Man. Can you imagine, say, the Beastie Boys allowing their music to be used in a Vista commercial? Neither can we.

Not even a week passed since iPhone SDK launch and it was already downloaded over 100,000 times. Surely not every person will create ground-breaking app, even if app at all, but we certainly can expect some nice applications coming for iPhone in the near future.

Game developers and publishers were quick to realise its potential and had plenty of announcements lately. Now app developers were a bit slower. But it

A new iPhone jailbreak / iPhone unlock solution was released by Zibri. ZiPhone v2.5c seems to be the easiest and most efficient tool out there to activate, jailbreak, and unlock your iPhone.

The best part is that this iPhone hack works with iPhones of all versions: it can activate / jailbreak / unlock iPhones that run with firmwares: 1.0.0, 1.0.1, 1.0.2, 1.1.1, 1.1.2, 1.1.3, and 1.1.4.

Since ZiPhone comes with a graphical user interface, no advanced knowledge of computers or electronics is needed. All you do is download the program (it

Many iPhone users want to transfer their music clips, movies, and just random videos onto their iPhone. However it

Posted by Josh Lowensohn

I remember a time when making ringtones used to be a very cumbersome experience. My technique of choice was to use the open-sourced Audacity then do various conversions in iTunes or Quicktime Pro by tweaking some of the advanced settings. However, the Web has spawned newer, less tedious methods. On of them, Audiko, is a particularly well-done effort, letting you grab audio tracks from your hard drive or the Web and customize them for use on your mobile phone.

While I think ringtones of popular songs are largely annoying and superfluous, the tools to create them are actually quite fun. Audiko simply layers the entire track on one timeline, while giving you a magnified area for each minute of the song to manipulate up to a 40-second ringtone from the segment of your choice. The entire editor is overlaid on a waveform of the song, and you can toggle whether or not you want a fade on the in and out, which can be helpful if your phone doesn’t automatically do it for you.

When you’re all finished creating your pocket masterpiece you’ve got three simple download options. One will save it as a normal mp3 ringtone compatible on most major handsets, as well as an option to download the .m4r iPhone-compatible ringtone–something you normally need an application like iToner or GarageBand (both Mac-only apps) to create. There’s also a WAP-friendly URL to simply grab the audio file on your handset without having to sync to your desktop. Whatever you’ve created gets put into a pool of other songs, and you can even see and download other ringtones from the same artist that have been created by other users when you’re all done.

Edit MP3 tracks into ringtones for your phone without software or visual distractions using Audiko.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Developers site:
http://george.zjlotto.com/

This actually has some nice tools, and will have even more tools down the line, aside from having different ways to unlock. Safely, and without downgrading the bootloader. For people that want Jailbreak/Activate only for 1.1.4, they can now do this in a Windows GUI without risk.

Here’s a list of current/future tools:

Jailbreak various versions
Activate various versions
Unlock various versions with correct startup scripts (e.g. for IPSF, with seczone check to avoid permanant lock on non-IPSF)
Setup AFC2 for iPHUC
Install BSDsubsystem
Install OpenSSH for remote shell access
Install Term-vt100 in case there

If you still don