Nine Inch Nails Video Game for iPhone

This morning, Spyboy (@spyboy on Twitter) brightened my day with news that a Nine Inch Nails-specific version of Tap Tap Revenge is coming to the iPhone. The story broke yesterday on TechCrunch, but I’ve been in a work-induced haze these past few weeks, and I didn’t catch the news until just now.

Tap Tap Revenge, if you’re not familiar, is like a combination of Guitar Hero and Dance Dance Revolution for the iPhone and iPod Touch. The goal of the simple, intuitive game is to tap in time with the music as a series of dots/thumb-targets scroll across your screen. In this new NIN version, you’ll be able to tap along to over a dozen songs from the last two albums put out by Mr. Trent Reznor and company.

The significance for me is, of course, the geek convergence—Nine Inch Nails + iPhone = teh awesum—but TechCrunch elaborates on why this release may be significant in other ways:

The partnership is among the first to bring licensed content to an iPhone application ...Provided the app does well (and I think it will), expect to see more brands and artists step forward to release their own applications (or acquire the popular ones that are already out there). The most lucrative apps will be the ones that can fuse licensed media, as Tap Tap Revenge has. But we’ll also be seeing more branded apps - it won’t be long before we’ll see iBeer by Coors, or Fender’s PocketGuitar (there’s already a lighter app by Zippo). The App Store is still in its infancy, and we’re only beginning to see its potential for monetization.

What artists or bands would you like to see Tapulous team up with next?

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Free iPod Touch For College Students

Buy a Mac for college and get a free iPod. That’s the deal that Apple is offering students, faculty, and staff at American universities this summer. VentureBeat thinks this is a huge deal and marks the beginning of the end of desktop computing.

Apple can get students started using their free iPod Touches. Then perhaps they opt to upgrade to an iPhone. Then maybe they’ll buy a new Mac Tablet or Newton-type device if and when it comes out. You can kiss the desktop computer goodbye. It’s time to start training the young minds of today about the future of computing: mobile.

I think VentureBeat is getting a little overexcited here. The deal is a great one, and the college campus, with its potentially ubiquitous Wi-Fi, is one of the only places where having an iPod Touch makes sense to me (otherwise, why not just get an iPhone?), but you have to take into account that, on certain university campuses, like the one I work on, the iPod Touch doesn’t work, thanks to VPN or other security software that’s in place.

A device that relies on Wi-Fi alone is never going to make a big splash, in my opinion, because free Wi-Fi isn’t as easy to find as Apple’s PR department would have us believe. And mobile computing on handhelds (in concert with affordable laptops) might kill the desktop, but it’s never going to kill the laptop. People still need keyboards, and most of us still want screens bigger than 3.5 inches to do any seriously involved work on.

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