Week in review: Debate grows around Apple’s subscription plan

Here’s our roundup of the week’s top tech business news. First, the most popular stories VentureBeat published in the last seven days:

Will Apple’s subscription plan spark a developer exodus? — For developers, it seems like it’s Apple’s way or the highway. And the highway is getting more appealing every day.

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Apple iPad 2 said to be unveiled at March 2 event — Apple will finally debut the iPad 2 at a San Francisco event on March 2.

HP’s new business laptops offer up to 32 hours of battery — Hewlett-Packard announced a new family of laptops for business users with new industrial designs and one very interesting feature: a battery life of up to 32 hours.

Amazon takes on Netflix with Prime instant videos — This is Amazon’s first move to counter Netflix’s streaming video dominance.

Apple rumored to launch new Macbook Pros — Rumors said Apple was going to introduce new MacBook Pro laptops last week — and it did.

And here are five more stories we think are important, thought-provoking, fun, or all of the above:

Room 77 helps you avoid bad hotel rooms — There’s no shortage of ways to book hotel rooms online, but most services have little information about one of the most important factors — the quality of the room itself.

Grameen IT CEO on how technology transformed Bangladesh — Kazi Islam describes his job as “implementing the future”.

Apple looks towards music files that surpass CD quality — Apple, the company responsible for the widespread popularity of heavily compressed music, is looking into offering high-fidelity music files that will surpass the quality of CDs.

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Google’s investment in Transphorm could be good news for electric cars — Google is backing a startup called Transphorm, whose power-conversion efficiency technology could some day help create more efficient electric cars.

Killzone 3 with Move controller: a novel but not brilliant gaming experience — Sony’s newly launched Killzone 3 video game for the PlayStation 3 promised to be a big step up in first-person shooting sci-fi combat, but it has serious shortcomings.