Sony, while mulling about in the shadow of Apple’s iPod and other reveals, announced its plan to launch a cloud-based music streaming service. The goal is to allow most Sony products to tap into the service and access Sony’s music library.

Sony is basically looking to compete with Apple’s iTunes platform through a different venue. iTunes has long focused on its devices and physical media — using CDs and owning actual, physical copies of songs — while Sony is attempting to bring its service to all its capable devices, including the workhorse jack-of-all-trades Playstation 3.

The service is called Qriocity — which may sound familiar, as it already exists as a video-on-demand service.

This isn’t Sony’s first foray into a music service — Apple and Sony already have some history competing for music sales over the Internet. Apple previously beat down on Sony’s Connect music service, which went dark in 2008.

 The service will reportedly pop up in Europe first, though no details on pricing or an exact release date have emerged yet.

[Photo: teresawer] via Venturebeat

Much awaited by many, Twitter released its official iPad app some hours ago. And it’s something of a gem — if you think you know what Twitter apps on touch screen devices feel like, you’re going to be in for of a treat. You can downloaded the app from Apple’s app store today for free.

The first thing striking about Twitter’s iPad app is its friendliness to first-time users — whether they’re just new to the app or to Twitter itself. Instead of being hit with a login box upon initial startup as with a lot of Twitter apps, it shows you categories like Art & Design, Science and Travel on the left, and trending topics on the right, along with Sign Up, Sign In, and search boxes. Tapping any of the categories, trending topics, or making a search reveal tweets in the right panel. If your use only extends to occasionally lurking through categories and trending topics to see what’s being talked about, you might not even see the need to sign up.

Unlike other apps which use panes only in landscape mode, Twitter’s makes no fuss about its pane-oriented design. Once logged in, the left pane lists the usual suspects: Timeline, Mentions, Lists, Messages, Profile, and Search, and the right shows the tweets. Tapping on a tweet brings up another pane on the right, with the tweet at the top, and any link included in the tweet opened usefully below it. If a tweet is a reply to another, the entire reply thread is shown below instead.

This is where the app begins to set itself apart from any iPad or Twitter app that we’ve seen before — at least, in terms of user-interface. Fairly intuitively, you can drag each pane into, out of, and “almost” out of view, using quick swipes. A couple of use-cases: you tap on a tweet, read it, and slide it out of view. Or, you slide it slightly to the right so that it is just out of view as it loads the embedded link — most useful for videos — while you continue scrolling through your timeline and slide back to it when it finishes.

Another neat innovation is the use of gestures. Pinching outward on a tweet brings up a popup box that gives you a quick overview of a Twitter user, including their bio, location, follow counts, and links to jump to their tweets and mentions.

And finally, as if all the panes weren’t already enough, pressing the Compose Tweet button in the bottom left brings up a yet another pane at the top, while the keyboard slides up from the bottom. Everything in between the keyboard and tweet compose box stays in the middle, making it somewhat useful for you to be able to read and browse tweets even while you think of what to type in those 140 characters.

There are a couple peeves worth mentioning. First, the app doesn’t seem to make full use of its landscape mode — every screen is just a horizontally expanded version of the portrait mode. The extra space on the side on some of the panels could be used better. Second, as intuitive as it is, there is a slight learning curve to all the sliding and swiping and pinching. Some users may initially get confused when things start to slide in and out of view.

With that said, it’s a solid effort by Twitter. The company could have easily played it safe and given users something tried and tested, but there seems to have been an attempt to raise the bar in terms of user experience and the product in general. It’s going to undoubtedly make a dent in some of the other Twitter apps, most of which are paid. Why pay $5 for unknown app X when Twitter has quite an impressive offering of its own for free?

Back in April, the company acquired Tweetie, the maker of the popular desktop and iPhone Twitter app. While this app isn’t based on previous work by the developers at Tweetie, the influence on the product is clearly visible.

Another interesting tidbit from the Apple event today. Jobs said that People have downloaded over 11.7 billion songs from iTunes, with the 12 billion mark approaching in the near future.

Jobs also said over 450 million TV episodes, 100 million movies, and 35 million books have been downloaded. People have created over 160 million accounts with credit cards and 1-click shopping in 23 countries.

The numbers are enormous but not particularly surprising. Clearly, iTunes is seeing major traction amongst users. Apple also revealed a new version of iTunes, and a music-focused social network Ping.

We are proud to announce that we have successfully closed a second financing round led by Centralway, a Swiss-based venture capital company.

This new investment will allow us to continue developing Sandbox further by growing the community and reaching a sustainable income level.

Over the next years, Sandbox and Centralway will develop synergies at different levels. This new proximity to an investor will also benefit members looking for funding, providing them with a facilitated access to capital. Check out the Centralway blog here for more information about them and this new investment.

Antoine is a Co-Founder and the CEO of Sandbox. He just relocated to Frankfurt for two weeks with the whole full-time team to work from the Project M camp and spends his days there getting inspired by amazing people and drinking Johannisbeerschorle.

Cisco has reportedly made an offer to acquire internet phone firm Skype before it completes its planned initial public offering, according to Techcrunch.

Techcrunch said the rumor came from one of its more reliable sources but it has not been able to confirm anything. If it’s true, the deal could be a big one as Skype is gunning for a valuation of $5 billion. Techcrunch said that Google was also rumored to be considering an offer for Skype, but antitrust concerns may have derailed that bid. We’ll offer more details as they come in. Josh Silverman, chief executive of Skype, is pictured.

One of my own sources confirmed that Cisco has made the offer and it is serious about combining Skype’s internet communications service with its own WebEx collaboration tools.

Cisco is the world’s biggest internet networking equipment firm with plenty of presence in internet applications. So there is some reason for Cisco and Skype to be married. But after the surprise acquisition of security firm McAfee by Intel, I suppose that just about any combination of tech companies is possible.

On August 9, Skype filed for an IPO. That filing came after eBay finalized the sale of 70 percent of the company in November 2009 to an investment consortium led by Silver Lake Partners. It included participation from Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, venture firm Andreessen Horowitz, and Joltid — the peer-to-peer technology company founded by Skype’s founders Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis. The sale left eBay with 30 percent of Skype, Joltid with 14 percent, and the rest of the investment group with the remaining 56 percent. The deal valued Skype at $2.75 billion, and eBay was paid $1.9 billion in cash, and received a note from buyer worth $125 million.

To make the deal happen, eBay first had to settle some longstanding lawsuits with Skype’s founders – drama that mostly centered around the Joltid-owned peer-to-peer technology underneath Skype. Joltid was transferred to Skype as part of the deal, and it was partially what led to the founders receiving 14 percent of the company.

In addition to the IPO announcement, Skype’s filing revealed some interesting details about the company and its user base. For one thing, it’s profitable. Skype snagged $13 million on $406 million in revenues for the first six months of 2010. Looking at it with non-GAAP metrics, Skype generated $115.8 million in profits in that time.

The company says it has 560 million registered users, with 124 million using it every month. 8.1 million of those users pay an average of $96 a year for the service.