tunesBag is a fresh approach to listen to your music anytime and anywhere. Just fire up your browser and indulge in your eclectic music taste – or in those of your friends. Yes, we all love our iPod – but it doesn’t allow for sharing. Not only does music sound better if it’s shared with friends; tunesBag has all the funky bells and whistles that you would expect ‐ plus that extra bit more to make it different.

Founded by 27-year old Hansjörg Posch, tunesBag is currently in closed beta and is free-to-use at the moment. However, there is a chance that it may charge a premium fee once it is opened for public usage. You may want to read up on the development blog, sign up with its Google Group; or simply follow their progress on Twitter.

In January this year, a non-profit organization representing independent music labels, called Merlin, issued an open invitation for independent music labels to join them so as to create the fifth largest record label after bigwigs like EMI, Warner Music etc.

This is so that they can have better bargaining power at negotiation tables with online music stores like iTunes. In the past, it can be a hassle for online music stores to carry indie music labels’ records as they have to deal with the countless labels individually, creating a large overhead on costs.

Merlin, hopes that by teaming up, they’d be able to sign more deals, on behalf of the thousands of independently owned music labels, with big distributors so that their music can be distributed online and compete on equal ground with the major labels.

Ars.Technica writes that Merlin has already gotten 12,000 labels on board.

From Merlin Network:

Merlin exists because the independents need their own body to ensure their interests are properly represented by an organisation focused wholly on their sector. Independents work in a incredibly competitive environment, ruled by shrinking physical sales, a digital market that is not replacing the fall in revenues, and where independent’s ability to compete is being eroded by the major corporations that dominate the market, from both the supply and retail side.

Merlin is not an aggregator or distributor. Its remit is to represent its members in new media deals that can’t be easily negotiated locally or individually or are not covered adequately by existing arrangements.

Merlin also does not operate in the space occupied by Collecting Societies, rather Merlin aims to address the gap between what these societies are able to offer their members and what labels and aggregators can achieve individually.

Merlin is a stand-alone body and a sister organisation
to the Worldwide Independent Network (WIN).

Not only that, it looks like grassroot activities for independent music labels have been increasing, with the latest one (at least to me) being Slicethepie.com. In the past, musicians have to struggle to raise funds so that they can send their music for recording. With the power of the internet, Slicethepie helps bring the struggle online to a wider audience.

At Slicethepie, artists basically upload demos of their music onto the website and readers of the site basically rate each track. The top 20 rated artists will then move onto a section of the site called Showcase, where fans can help to finance these artists by buying “Backstage Passes”. These “Passes” can then be used to claim a free copy of the album when its recorded.

The cool thing about the site is that, it seems to introduce social lending into the concept of supporting independent artists. Fans can also buy “Contracts” from artists which will entitle them to returns based on the number of singles and albums sold by the artists in a 2 year period.

So if you’re a local artist, why not give it a shot, who knows your bedroom music could just be the next international sensation. I hope as technology grows, the Davids in the music industry will finally be able to take down the Goliaths.

VirtualBox is a virtualization management application that was developed by innotek until Sun Microsystems acquired the software development company in February 2008.

You can read up on the Changelog here. In a nutshell, VirtualBox 1.6’s new highlights include Web service API, a SATA hard disk controller, experimental support for Physical Address Extensions (PAE) and a new guest addition set for the Solaris operating system.

Presently, VirtualBox runs on Windows, Linux, Macintosh and OpenSolaris hosts and supports a large number of guest operating systems including but not limited to Windows (NT 4.0, 2000, XP, Server 2003, Vista), DOS/Windows 3.x, Linux (2.4 and 2.6), and OpenBSD. Feel free to grab a copy of the application, and do catch up on additional reading while you are waiting for your download to complete.

James Leszczenski had recently announced that Facebook will no longer be continuing its support for Java-based applications. He also added:

While we understand this may have an impact on some developers, we feel that it is most important to keep working on our list of initiatives I referred to before, instead of maintaining an additional client library of which the developer community has already built several unofficial versions.

After this Tuesday’s push, the official Java client library will no longer be available for download from any of the developers pages. We encourage all developers who are interested in continuing to develop in Java to consider some of the open source alternative client libraries listed on the Wiki here. While the official Java library should have no immediate problems with continued use, we nevertheless recommend that you use a client library that is kept up to date, in order to best take advantage of any new functionality that is added in the future.

Here’s a list of alternative platforms that you could work on if you were affected by this announcement:

• ASP.NET
• ASP (VBScript)
• Cocoa
• ColdFusion
• C++
• C#
• D
• Emacs Lisp
• Java
• JavaScript
• Lisp
• Perl
• PHP
• Python
• Ruby on Rails
• VB.NET
• Windows Mobile

On a hindsight, we would like to take this opportunity to note that we do provide support for Ruby on Rails at FRRO. Inquire us today to find out more.

In all, Elliot Schrage’s impeding departure as Google’s Vice President of Global Communications and Public Affairs has sent ripples throughout coffee tables at the Silicon Valley. After all, it isn’t the first time that Facebook has managed to coerce Google’s elite to hop over.

So far, the slew of prolific Google employees that moved over to Facebook works out in a list of top flyers that included the likes of:

• Sheryl Sandberg, Google’s ex-Vice President of Global Online Sales and Operations
• Gideon Yu, Youtube’s ex-CFO
• Benjamin Ling, Google’s ex-1337 Engineer
• Justin Rosenstein, Google’s ex-Product Manager of Google Pages and ex-GDrive 1337 Developer
• Ethan Beard, Google’s ex-Director of Social Media

Well, the idea of having someone like Elliot Schrage coming aboard with a team of ex-Google seems like a cause for a celebration. That would have been too much excitement to hold back. The following is a leaked memo that Mark Zuckerberg had sent out to the peons at Facebook:

Hey Everyone –

I’m writing from India to share with you the good news that Elliot Schrage will be joining our management team as VP Communications and Public Policy. In this role, he will be responsible for developing the key messages we want people to understand about our products, our business and the growing global importance of social networking and what we do. The goal here is to help people understand how the internet can strengthen people’s relationships. Elliot will direct our efforts to work with users, media, governments and other entities around the world to ensure that Facebook’s policies are transparent, responsive, effective and are recognized as being those things.

Elliot is joining us from Google where he has been their VP Global Communications and Public Affairs since 2005. At Google, he broadened the company’s messaging from a focus on only product PR to include all aspects of corporate, financial, policy, philanthropic and internal communications. Before that, he served as a Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, a public policy think tank, as a professor at Columbia Business School and as SVP at Gap. Early on, he began his career as a Harvard-trained lawyer.

This is a really important role for us and one that we’ve been trying to find the right person for a while. Elliot’s role will be critical to helping us scale based on our culture that values transparency, openness, and honest internal communications.

Elliot will be starting on May 14, although you may see him around the office before then.

Nick Gonzalez noted that this ongoing phenomenon have been dubbed as the “Facebook problem”, a term coined by Google’s management at the undeniable exodus of top-ranking executives and engineers leaving for Facebook. It is not surprising to note, however, that Microsoft had once faced a similar situation as Google now did, for which Google had once poached the cream of the crop from Microsoft with the lure of a promising and satisfactory pay job that Microsoft can’t beat.

Could it be the same that Facebook is offering something a million times better than what Google has to offer? Or could it be that the taste of pre-IPO explosion is too much for anybody to miss out on? We all know how awesome the working environment at Google can be but do Facebook have something else that is by far the best ever?

When Erick Schonfeld inquired Ethan Beard about his departure from Google for Facebook, this was the message that he had received (via Facebook):

Yes, I can confirm that I have resigned from Google and will be going to work for Facebook.

I think Facebook is great for a variety of reasons: the company has an innovative product with amazing growth, the team they have assembled is first rate, and the business is at a very exciting time in its development. I am excited to join Facebook at a time and in a role where I can have a significant impact on its core business and bottom line.

Maybe the work environment at Google isn’t “sociable” after all. And that could be the reason why they are moving over.

Or maybe it is the pre-IPO carrot-on-a-stick offer that is too tasty to miss out on.