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Steve Jobs held a press conference Tuesday and announced new features for iTunes and some new products (or at least updated products). Here is a run down:

iTunes 7
This new release of iTunes adds movie downloads from these Disney affiliated studios: Miramax, Pixar, Touchstone, and Disney. Pricing will run 12.99 for pre-orders and the first week of release, 14.99 after that for new releases and 9.99 for older titles. Oh yeah…and you can’t burn them to DVD. Bummer.

iPods
The iPod video received a storage boost and some price adjustments on the lower end models. The nano got a colorful facelift now with 5 colors to choose from (silver, black, green, blue, pink) and a storage boost. The Shuffle was redesigned the most and is now half the size of its predecessor. I think this was a much needed design update.

iTV
This one was the climax of the show. iTV (I don’t know if that’s the final name) is a hardware device which uses WiFi to stream movies/photos from a PC or Mac running iTunes to your TV. It will be released Q1 or 2007 and will retail for $299. Last winter I started on a project similar to this, but I was side tracked by a more viable business idea. I hope to one day complete this project.

I found out about a neat little service called PodAPic (Pod A Pic) this week from Jeff Nunn. We have all seen the iPod commercials and billboards with the bright colored background and the blacked out figure with white iPod headphones contrasting against the figure.

With PodAPic, you can turn any photo into an iPod style photo. Just upload your photo to PodAPic and in about 3 business days you’ll have your PodAPic waiting for you in your inbox in all its iPod’ish glory.

This service reminds me of the funny picture booths at amusement parks, yet obviously this is web based. This is a great novelty gift idea and I can see people buying these for their friends. An option that I would like to see is the ability to have the PodAPic photo sent back in printed form on some nice glossy paper for an extra fee, but I would imagine most consumers would probably just do this themselves on their home printer. I think this is a Great niche service, so go check it out!

Examples