In March, Yahoo opened the beta of Fire Eagle, its location-based middleware that allows developers to build services tailored to the user's geographic area. Fire Eagle is now open to the public with 22 launch partners providing their services.

Fire Eagle begins by asking users for location data, which can be entered as vaguely as the country or as specifically as the global coordinates. From that point, Fire Eagle's job is done as far as the user is concerned, most of a user's interaction will take place through applications built upon the service.

Monday, AMD unveiled its latest and most powerful graphics card to date, the Radeon HD 4870 X2. It achieves its specs by running two RV770 GPUs in tandem that communicate efficiently instead of relying on a single, faster chip.

The GPU architecture differs from other dual-processor models in that will utilize a 5 GB/sec sideport to offload some bandwidth from the PCI Express bridge when hard at work. This new pathway, however, will not be opened until AMD releases a software update for the card in the coming months.

Four Allman Brothers band members sued Universal Music Group for more than $10 million in royalties from both hard-copy sales and downloadables.

Greg Allman, Jai Johanny Johanson, Butch Trucks, and Dickey Betts filed suit in the Southern District of New York saying that UMG has refused to pay the correct royalties for sales of songs contained on the "Capricorn Masters."

Yesterday's Liberty Media Q2 earnings call was liberally dosed with rather frank disclosures from chairman John Malone about potentially big business moves, including swapping its majority stake in Time Warner for AOL's dial-up business.

During Liberty Media's second quarter earnings call Q&A yesterday, chairman John Malone was asked if he'd consider a transaction that may not have "strategic merits for the rest of the Liberty Enterprise, but makes financial sense in the context of LCAP (Liberty Capital Group, the company's non-interactive or entertainment properties)."

Yesterday, many Gmail users found themselves unable to access their mailboxes, as Gmail returned a "Temporary Error (502)." Google later posted an apology in the official Gmail Blog that gave a clue as to how big the outage was.

"We don't usually post about problems like this in our blog, but we wanted to make an exception in this case since so many people were impacted," Gmail Product Manager Todd Jackson posted. About 20 million users visit Gmail daily, and there are more than 100 million accounts in total.

At the Race To Zero contest at DEFCON 16 in Las Vegas last weekend, seven sample viruses and three sample exploits were reverse engineered to the point where they could bypass anti-virus software. The task took one team just over two hours.

Race to Zero is a contest where a series of malicious code samples are given that must be modified to be able to circumvent five anti-virus engines, each sample more difficult than the last.

An informal poll conducted by What They Play, a sort of Rotten Tomatoes site for video games, recently pointed to parents' areas of concern in video game content.

The fist poll, conducted on April 4-10 of this year, asked participants to select from a list of choices which item would they find most offensive in a video game. The responses were: a man and woman having sex (37%); two men kissing (27%); a graphically severed head (25%); and multiple use of the F-word (9%). This survey had 1,266 participants.

Common stock in five companies formerly under the IAC (InterActive Corp.) banner, owners of Ask.com and Match.com, will begin "when-issued" trading on the open market tomorrow under five new stock symbols.

This is the realization of an announcement by the holding company made in November 2007, when it made public its intent to spin off its properties Home Shopping Network (HSN). Ticketmaster, Interval Leisure Group (a real estate and timeshare company), and Lending Tree.

US-based wireless carrier Sprint Nextel is contemplating future measures for its iDEN network, which could include its ultimate sale.

Though there were talks several months ago of a "unified service architecture" that would bridge the gap between CDMA, iDEN, and the burgeoning Xohm WiMAX platform, a recent US Securities and Exchange Commission filing from Sprint Nextel shows the company is examining the potential sale of its iDEN network.

The Federal Communications Commission has concluded its vote on Comcast, finding the cable operator in violation of net neutrality rules by a margin of 3-2, but it will not issue fines.

Democrats Michael Copps and Jonathan Adelstein, as well as Republican chairman Kevin Martin were reported earlier this week to have voted in favor of taking action against Comcast for secretly degrading or blocking peer-to-peer traffic -- specifically that used by BitTorrent.

Videos or photographs implicating members of the police force in acts of misconduct will soon be directly uploadable to the New York Police Department, representatives reported yesterday.

The announcement from Police Commissioner Ray Kelly came after a recent string of videos of NYPD officers engaged in questionable practices were posted on YouTube.

A bill that calls for a ban on all in-flight cellular voice calls will be put up for vote before the full House of Representatives after being approved by the House Transportation and Infrastructure committee.

Chairman of the Subcommittee on Highways and Transit Peter DeFazio (D-OR.) introduced HR 5788, or the HANG UP (Halting Airplane Noise to Give Us Peace) Act in April of this year, and it was approved in the Transportation and Infrastructure committee on Thursday.

Yahoo's social bookmarking site Delicious (formerly del.icio.us) has received its long-awaited user interface overhaul, which the company hopes will attract more mainstream users and make the site less niche.

Since acquiring del.icio.us in late 2005, Yahoo has gradually moved the service into a more accessible realm. It has also been moved from its clever, but easy to mis-type .us domain to the much simpler Delicious.com.

Despite strong apprehension from EU legislators toward Google's Street View mapping technique, the UK Information Commissioner's Office has reportedly found Google's privacy safeguards acceptable and will allow the company's roving 360 degree cameras to record British streets for its mapping service.

The level of detail captured on Google Maps Street View has caused a great deal of concern among UK privacy advocates, some of whom feel the service breaks data protection laws.

In mid-2005, Google began experimenting with venture capital investments in startup companies. Now, over three years later, the Wall Street Journal reports the search company has plans to start an arm dedicated only to this kind of investment.

Google's earliest investments were in startups providing unique solutions for connectivity. In July 2005, the company joined Hearst and Goldman Sachs in a $100 million investment in Current Communications, a group working on providing broadband connections over power lines. In 2006, Google invested in Wi-Fi startups FON and Meraki, which both aimed to provide wireless access to communities based upon affordable shared routers -- sort of organically creating a Muni Wi-Fi network.