If there’s a war for online music and radio services it’s probably going to be between Pandora and a service like Spotify. We can’t really count iTunes in this battle because the streaming in it isn’t up to the same level as those other two.

The battle is heating up now as Spotify has unveiled Spotify Radio, a new service similar to Pandora that will roll out as an extension to the company’s desktop client. The service allows users to create artist-based stations that will stream an unlimited amount of music similar to the artist selected.

Here’s the scoop on the new service directly from Spotify:

You can be the DJ and skip between stations and tracks, or choose a station and just go with the flow. If you like what you hear, you can save the song to a playlist or play it again on demand.

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Facebook's "Open Graph" Concept

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced a series of updates integral to their next-gen Facebook Platform today at their third annual f8 conference held in San Francisco. At the heart of these updates is the technology to allow Facebook data to flow more easily outside the carefully-controlled confines of Facebook itself.

Building on the success and widespread adoption of Facebook Connect, first announced at the inaugural f8 in 2008, a new concept dubbed “Open Graph” will expose your Facebook connections and public data to third-party web sites and mobile apps. In doing so, these outside services can better personalize your experience based on the data it finds. Expect the data to flow in two directions as services like Pandora, Yelp, Foursquare and other connected services feed even more behavioral data into your personal Open Graph.

You can easily imagine a scenario wherein after analyzing your Foursquare check-ins, Yelp decides that you really have a thing for Thai food and helpfully displays all of the Thai Restaurants in your immediate area upon start-up. Or perhaps you’ve favorited so many female singer-songwriter tracks at your favorite music-streaming service, that Yelp notifies you that Sara Barailles is playing at the Hotel Cafe nearby in Los Angeles this evening.

If you’re anything like me, you’re probably marveling at the glorious levels of personalization you might experience while simultaneously cringing at the potential privacy issues that Open Graph may unleash on unsuspecting users. But wait, there’s more!

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Back in 1999, a little company out of San Francisco invented and released a device that would allow TV watchers to freeze live television, as well as set their favorite shows to record–not on a VHS tape or DVD, but on a built in hard drive. Since that day, the idea of the Digital Video Recorder has become as globally common in the household as the coffee maker or dishwasher.

In the time following Tivo’s invention, many incarnations have been born to accommodate the growing popularity of YouTube, HD upgrades, and digital downloads of movies from Netflix or Amazon. Now, over a decade later, the company is ready to jump start the world into the upcoming digital era of media.

The new box, dubbed “Tivo Premiere”, will incorporate feature films, internet videos, music, and more web-based content to the Tivo subscribers, along with their regular TV-watching abilities. The big deal? This box will also be the first set-top device that can run Adobe Flash programming, allowing other third-party developers to create applications for the system. From THR:

Unveiled Tuesday at a party in New York, the $300 Premiere can store 400 hours of standard-definition programming and 45 hours of HD. A Premiere XL box at $500 can store 1,350 hours of standard definition and 150 hours of HD programming.

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This past Friday was a pretty new and exciting day for the cinema, as most dubbed it “Avatar Day” because 20th Century Fox ran free screenings of select clips from James Cameron’s highly anticipated film in 3D IMAX theaters across the country. There were roughly six clips totaling about 15 minutes. Cameron made an appearance at the beginning of the clips (in 3D, of course) and introduced the scenes.

Not much was known about the film, let alone the premise, leading up to “Avatar Day,” so it was nice to get an idea of the story. From what was gathered, the film takes place in the 21st century, when mankind is at war with the alien race known as the Na’vi. They enlist people to fight on the warring planet, but before they are dropped off, they go through a process which places them in an alien body, or their “avatar”.

From there, the main character Jake Sully (played by Terminator: Salvation‘s Sam Worthington) embarks on a journey of this new and beautiful world, and discovers that he may be fighting for the wrong side. The story is pretty old-hat, which most people could remember as the main plot from 2003′s The Last Samurai.

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