Tim Conneally

Today, Universal announced that its upcoming Blu-ray title Fast & Furious will include bonus features that can only be accessed through an iPhone/iPod Touch app.

Of the hundreds of titles now available on Blu-ray, only a fraction are furnished with BD-Live bonus material -- that is, bonus material that exploits a player's Internet connectivity and onboard storage. Because the Blu-ray spec wasn't fully complete when Sony launched the format in 2004, it has had to incrementally roll out certain features. When Blu-ray profile 1.1 (or "bonus view") was rolled out, it was given picture-in-picture, and it wasn't until last year that Blu-ray profile 2.0 (or BD-Live) titles began coming out.

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While it hasn't been able to get a street view car up there yet, Google has launched Google Earth with 3D moon surface maps to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the first manned lunar expedition. The Google Earth team announced in its blog today that current Google Earth 5.0 users can re-start the program and browse the surface of the moon with layers providing more information about the Earth's largest satellite, and even an Apollo 11 guided tour narrated by Space Journalist Andrew Chaikin and former astronaut Buzz Aldrin.

Google actually announced that it was mapping the surface of the Earth exactly four years ago, on the less ceremonious 36th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon mission.

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All P2P networks must go "establishment" someday, and today another formerly popular P2P service rended by courtroom battles announced it has turned around. Like P2P pioneer Napster did six years ago, this morning, Kazaa (now with just one capital letter) has come back as www.kazaa.com, a subscription-based music service with all of the "big four" major labels in its corner.

For $19.98 a month, Kazaa.com users get unlimited music downloads on up to three PCs, and unlimited ringtone downloads on one mobile phone, but that's it. The service does not support portability and tracks cannot be moved onto MP3 players.

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In May, Verizon announced that it was selling its landline business in 14 U.S. states to Frontier for an approximated $8.6 billion. When the transaction closes next year, Fronter will be the largest rural triple play provider in the United States, with more than 7 million access lines in 27 states.

But all is not well in the Mountain State, West Virgina, where both the state legislature and communications union laborers are skeptical about the deal.

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Now that the wireless telecommunications industry is under scrutiny by Congress and the US Department of Justice over handset exclusivity agreements and their effect on the industry, Verizon Wireless has yielded slightly to political pressure and eased up on its exclusivity. We emphasize slightly.

In a letter to congress, Verizon Wireless CEO Lowell McAdam said, "Any new exclusively arrangement we enter with handset makers will last no longer than six months -- for all manufacturers and all devices."

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"We want a Mexico without fear; we want a free Mexico," President Felipe Calderon said yesterday, regarding the dispatch of more than 5,000 armed servicemen to Michoacan.

The Mexican government is attempting to establish order over a population fraught with organized crime; and while police respond to violence, the government and its law-abiding populace has already begun its response to criminal communications by establishing a nationwide database of prepaid cell phone users.

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Since Apple terminated iTunes' compatibility with the Palm Pre this week, there have been a number of services that have rushed to the forefront to make sure users aren't left with an unsyncable Pre for too long. This morning, Web-based syncing service Dazzboard announced its support for the Pre.

"We feel it is very unfair of Apple to penalize Palm and its growing Pre community, and we hope our free application will provide a solution for users are now left in cold due to Apple's decision," said Dazzboard CEO Tera Salonen.

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Today, Palm finally made its Mojo SDK available to the public more than a month after the release of the Pre, and more than five months of the Early Access Program, a sort of beta program for devs.

Now, Palm's app store is open to submissions from all developers, and apps submitted after today's SDK launch will start to appear in the app catalog this fall. In the meantime, submissions from the Early Access Program are "already in the pipeline" for release, according to Palm.

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Imagine a peer to peer model where you got paid to seed a torrent, and had to pay every time you leeched. That's what the Pirate Bay could become, and it appears it could be a case of history repeating.

In an article published first in The Music Void, Wayne Rosso, former president of notorious P2P service Grokster and founder of Mashboxx says he has begun working with Global Gaming Factory X, the Swedish firm that recently bought the Pirate Bay, to turn the service legit and legal without changing the user experience at all.

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Apple has dropped to fifth place in the US market according to preliminary second quarter estimates from market analysis firm IDC. The manufacturer had reached the fourth place position in 2008, but has failed to keep up that momentum in 2009, retaining a steady market share while its two nearest competitors, Acer and Toshiba, race ahead.

In the first quarter, for example, the company's shipments shrank by 1.2% year over year; and in the second quarter, shipments were down by 12.4%, according to IDC's Quarterly PC Tracker report. This negative growth would not have affected Apple all that much, as it has retained a steady 7.6% market share throughout the year, but Acer jumped up 2.1% in market share during the quarter, and Toshiba went up by 1.1%.

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Speaking with Industrygamers about the state of the Video Game business, Wedbush Morgan analyst Michael Pachter said it's "natural" that Apple could convince a large number of iPod and iPhone gamers to buy a game-enabled AppleTV, similar to the way it has drawn users to the Mac platform through the iPod.

Pachter, however, doesn't think it will be a full-blown gaming machine like Microsoft's Xbox 360 or Sony's PlayStation 3, but that it will instead be more Wii-like." We'd get cool stuff like World of Goo or Geometry Wars," Pachter said, "but probably not super cool stuff like Gears of War until they bought a few developers."

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With the latest version of iTunes (8.2.1), Apple has addressed what it calls "an issue with verification of Apple devices," that is, it now verifies that the Palm Pre is not one.

It was bound to happen. Both Palm and Sprint warned Pre owners of a possible rejection, and Apple last month issued an a report saying, "Newer versions of Apple's iTunes software may no longer provide syncing functionality with non-Apple digital media players."

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Last Month, Betanews' Scott Fulton asked "What will become of MySpace after a 30% headcount reduction?" None other than the highest man in the MySpace architecture, parent company News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch, answered that question this week.

In an interview with The Wall Street Journal yesterday, Murdoch said the fading social network will need to refocus itself as an entertainment portal.

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Google today released apps for BlackBerry and Android that allow the still-in-invite-only-beta Google Voice service to be accessed directly through users' smartphones.

The app lets users make outgoing calls or send texts from their Google Voice number through their BlackBerry or Android device. To place a call before the app existed, users had to dial their own Google Voice number from their cell or use the "Quick Call" button from the Web-based component. The app also handles voice mail duties by recording the messages from missed callers and transcribing them into text.

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Last night, Apple released the second iPhone OS 3.1 beta to developers, roughly two weeks after the first beta was released, adding several new features to the growing list of iPhone 3.1 features, but also terminating the popular IPCC tethering hack.

While the first SDK beta introduced a handful of new, but only moderately noteworthy features, such as Voice Control over Bluetooth, the second beta gives developers running Xcode the ability to wirelessly connect to their iPhones for development and testing purposes.

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