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A transparent photovoltaic film that lives on top of traditional displays could provide substantial amounts of power to mobile devices. By substantial, we mean that as long as you spend enough time outside, you might never have to charge your phone ever again.

Lala’s Bill Ngyuen had a short video interview with Fortune , and in it Nguyen says that Apple picked up his company specifically “for the people,” not for the streaming cloud music service or any of Lala’s other assets. Fortune confronts him on the idea of Apple running its own cloud music service (as has been rumored for a while ), and Nguyen suggests that instead of building its own service, Apple’s actually provided the hardware and software platforms to let any number of companies, from Pandora to Netflix, do what Lala did, and provide content over the air to whatever devices people happen to use. That’s an interesting take for sure — from Nguyen’s perspective, it sounds like Apple is already doing what it wants to do with Lala, which is just use its employees’ knowledge of how services like this work to provide help for other companies on the App Store. We’ve all expected Apple to run a streaming service of its own, but maybe it just wants to make things easier for other companies to jump in and provide content. Who knows what we’ll see with that data center in North Carolina .

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Sony’s enlisting some heavy hitters to help promote its PSN-integrated music platform, Qriocity — the company recently announced a list of events across Europe and North America, including two stops that will feature live performances by DeVotchKa and Big Boi. You’ll recognize that first name as the artist behind the accompaniment to Gears of War 2’s memorable ” Last Day ” ad. You’ll recognize that second name because it’s Big Boi . C’mon, everyone on Earth knows who Big Boi is. Check out the list of events scheduled for the global Qriocity tour after the jump. March 21-27 — Sampling at Sch

It looks like Amazon has beat Apple and Google to the punch, by launching its cloud-based music player today. Aptly called Cloud Player, the service follows similar offers by smaller companies such as mSpot and AudioBox – by giving folks some storage space in the clouds to upload their music that they can then stream on their mobile devices. This eliminates the need for users to store music on their precious memory cards, which frees up a lot of space for a whole lot of other media and apps. While the idea is not new, Amazon will be the first “big name” to venture into such territory. Right now the Cloud Player app works with desktop computers, and Android phones. Surprisingly iOS has been left out of the picture. The Cloud Player service is now available to existing Amazon customers in the US. Head over to Amazon for more details. Amazon launches Cloud Player , By Ubergizmo . Top Stories

It’s skinny , it’s fast , and it can do some seriously fun stuff with its gyroscope. Yes, we’re talking about the Galaxy S II , Samsung’s upcoming followup to one of Android’s biggest successes to date, the Galaxy S. The new handset will bring with it a revised version of Sammy’s Android skin, TouchWiz 4.0 , which will harness the mostly dormant gyroscope inside the phone to allow you to zoom in and out of webpages as well as navigate the UI with the movement of your hands. Basically, instead of the traditional pinch-to-zoom, resting two fingers atop the screen will allow you to zoom in by bringing the S II closer to your face or zoom out by holding it further away — a naturalistic gesture that makes all the sense in the world to us. Moreover, when adding new widgets to your home panels, you’ll be able to move between them by propelling the phone laterally

It is rare to find a device that is both baffling and compelling. We’ve been talking about the Acer Iconia for a while now and this dual-screened tablet or “Touchbook” is now available and shipping in the US next month. It runs a Core i5 chip, Windows 7, and has two Gorilla-glass 14-inch screens that allow for typing, multi-touch, and gestures. Acer has created an entirely new interface to the dual-screen system including an odd “ring” interface that lets you select items on screen by making a claw with your hand and spinning onscreen images. Add in various other elements including an onscreen keyboard that essentially turns this thing into a regular laptop and you’ve got something that may be worth a second look. It is shipping in April for $1,199.99. Product Page Acer Iconia Touchbook Dual-Screen Tablet Provides Engaging, Natural Way to Interact with Digital Data World’s First and Only Tablet Featuring Two 14-inch Touch Screen Displays Now Available for Pre-Sale in the U.S. and Canada SAN JOSE, CA – March 29, 2011 – Acer today announced that its much anticipated dual …

Last November President Obama saw Thai Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva using an iPad while at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) leaders’ retreat in Yokohama, Japan. After a brief exchange about the iPad versus lugging around books, it appears the president was swayed. Maybe it’s the fact that the iPad 2 has just come out, or maybe it’s because Obama and Steve Jobs had dinner together and Steve pitched Obama hard, but now the president has told reporters that he does own an actual iPad. Speaking at a town hall in Washington, DC today, President Obama was asked by news anchor Jorge Ramos if he owns and iPad to which Obama replied, “I do have an iPad.” The president then went on to joke, “I mean, Jorge, I’m the president of the United States. You think I’ve got to go borrow somebody’s computer? Hey, man, can I borrow your computer? How about you? You’ve got one?” There’s no word on which iPad Obama owns, but it’s probably a safe bet that he didn’t have to stand in line with the thousands of others on launch day.

Uh oh, Paypal; looks like you’ve got a new challenger in the person-to-person payments space. American Express has just announced the launch of their new money spendin’ service, Serve . At its foundation, it’s just a fancied up PayPal, allowing users to send one another money via e-mail address (as long as both users have Serve accounts.) Past that point, however, it’s got a few cool twists; you can pull funds from your account into a refillable pre-paid card, or you can create “subaccounts” that let other users (say, your kids) spend monies from your account while you limit and monitor everything that goes down. With today’s launch, they’re already offering up payment applications for both iPhone and Android. Given PayPal’s almost exclusive dominance of this market, there is by all means room for competition — but it’s certainly not as if others haven’t tried. Remember Obopay? Yeah — bet you didn’t know