Apple Creating $10 Monthly Music Streaming Service: Reports

Today’s topics include a new music streaming service from Apple, a new product lineup from Intel, a connector for BI and visualization from MongoDB and developers gain new options for providing offline support for their mobile applications on iOS and Android.

Apple is aiming to grow its streaming music business against established competitors like Spotify by unveiling a new $10-a-month service.

The idea that Apple might offer such a service has been around for a while, especially since the company’s purchase of Beats Electronics in May 2014, which included the Beats Music streaming division as well as that company’s headphone business.

Now Apple is expected to announce the new service at its Worldwide Developers Conference, which begins June 8.

At the Computex 2015 show in Taiwan, Intel introduced the 14-nanometer Xeon E3-1200 v4 product lineup, which is integrated with the vendor’s Iris Pro P6300 graphics.

Company officials are aiming the new processors at cloud-based workloads with high visual demands, such as high-definition video transcoding, complex 3D applications and the delivery of remote workstations software.

MongoDB recently announced a new connector that links MongoDB to industry-standard Business Intelligence and data visualization tools.

MongoDB’s connector is designed to work with every SQL-compliant data analysis tool on the market, including Tableau, SAP Business Objects, Qlik and IBM Cognos Business Intelligence. The technology is now in preview release and is expected to become generally available in the fourth quarter of 2015.

Developers of mobile applications for iOS and Android platforms have a new option for enabling offline support for their applications.

Google has released a Mobile Offline software development kit for both platforms that it says will help developers build applications that work smoothly even when not connected to the Internet.

The Mobile Offline capability is based on a mobile cloud service from Google’s acquisition of Firebase last October. It is designed to give developers a way to overcome the limitations of traditional programming approaches in a mobile context.