Jackass 2.5 from Paramount is believed to be the first studio-backed feature film to premiere online, and will be streamable for two weeks completely free of charge.

The Jackass movies essentially add a slightly larger budget to the MTV gross-out comedy clip show, stringing together a series of sketches into something of an anthology film. The 2.5 edition, which mixes new material with outtakes from the 2006 movie, reportedly cost a meager $2 million to produce.

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A Beijing company has taken Google's Chinese division to court over the search company's Mandarin name.

Google's name translates to "Guge" (goo-guh) in Chinese, which loosely means "Valley's Song." It was decided upon by Google's CEO Eric Schmidt from a list of 1,800 alternate choices, and announced on April 12, 2006.

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From Russia, the land well-publicized for bringing the Internet questionable music service AllofMP3.com and mafia-related bank scams, comes a new kind of chat bot.

Called Cyberlover, the program is an application that claims to intelligently fabricate chat room dialogue that seduces its victims into sharing personal photos and phone numbers. In half an hour, the program can supposedly secure 4 to 6 "contacts."

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Two major global information system (GIS) and satellite imagery acquisitions were announced on Wednesday, illustrating the continuing desirability of such services to both hardware and software manufacturers.

First, Nokia's acquisition of Navteq for a reported $8.1 billion dollars is nearing completion. The Finnish mobile phone company already uses Navteq as its mapping supplier, and considering Nokia's expectations of GPS phone ubiquity, the purchase was unanimously welcomed by Navteq shareholders.

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Google brings its Picasa photo sharing application to Mobile OS X Safari, with an interface designed especially for the iPhone and iPod Touch.

Google's photo sharing application Picasa has been redesigned to support Safari on OS X Mobile, allowing iPhone and iPod Touch users to see the albums they've uploaded to Picasa Web, watch slideshows, search for photos, and browse other users' albums through the tactile interface.

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MercExchange, a tiny Virginia-based company that has taken eBay to all levels of the US court system for patent infringement, has won at the District Court level in Virginia.

MercExchange holds patents for e-commerce solutions that involve internet auctions, what it calls "name a price" systems, dynamic pricing models, desktop messaging, as well as streaming and multicasting.

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The San Antonio telco announced today the availability of "black box" type solutions for K-12 school busses, working toward a day when school vehicles can be tracked like aircraft.

The devices provide GPS-based mobile resource management (MRM) solutions, tracking school bus locations, monitoring their speed and providing on-board driving information to bus drivers.

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That's not an interjection from the reporter. The exclamation "w00t" was chosen by Merriam-Webster's online users as 2007's Word of the Year.

An interesting choice if not simply because half of the word is spelled with numbers instead of letters, w00t is a neologism showing the effect that technology has on common language.

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Radiohead's album in Rainbows was revolutionary for its "pay what you like" availability. Now the band's plan for licensing that album continues the trend, further eroding the bond between bands and the record industry.

The band Radiohead baffled many with the choice to release their in Rainbows album as a DRM-free download with no fixed price, but rather with a non-compulsory fee similar to purchasing admission to a museum.

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Blinkx, a video search engine featuring over 18 million hours of searchable video with more than 200 media partnerships already, announced a new one yesterday with the Raindance Film Festival.

Under the terms of an agreement announced yesterday, Blinkx will host, transcribe, and index top independent shorts, features and documentaries from the independent Raindance Film Festival.

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This morning, the head of AT&T said his company expects to have attained one million U-Verse subscribers by the end of 2008, and coverage for 30 million by 2010.

At a meeting of financial analysts in New York City this morning, where he touted continued double-digit revenue growth for his company going into next year, AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson made some bold predictions for his U-verse triple/quadruple-play media service. He reported AT&T was on target to attain one million U-verse subscribers by the end of this year.

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Oakland-based search engine Ask.com debuted "AskEraser" today, a feature which can mark all of a user's queries in the company's servers for deletion.

Ask.com, the fifth largest US search engine according to Nielsen Online in October, announced earlier this year that it would be making this feature available. Developed in conjunction with the Center for Democracy and Technology, an advocacy group working toward enhancing privacy and free expression, Ask.com claims it's the only search engine that affords users such control over their personal data.

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Rogers Yahoo, which has repeatedly come under fire for traffic shaping, has now ventured even further away from neutral ground, by inserting usage messages into its users' unencrypted data streams.

Made public over the weekend through Internet activist and co-founder of nonprofit People for Internet Responsibility Lauren Weinstein, someone going by the tag of "A Concerned Reader" captured an image of a Rogers Yahoo message being displayed over a Google Canada page.

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IPTV service Vudu has announced that The Bourne Ultimatum will be available as a 1080i high-def download today -- the same day as it is released on DVD.

Many studios currently providing content to Vudu also offer support for sites like Movielink, CinemaNow and even Xbox Live HD downloads. But today's announcement marks the first instance of a studio simultaneously releasing a DVD and an HD download.

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LinkedIn, a social networking site designed for establishing and maintaining business contacts, has announced that it will provide a set of REST APIs and widgets that let developers build applications using LinkedIn data.

The site is a member of Google's OpenSocial developer network, so in the near future, developers will be able to use their own UI and back end, augmented with the LinkedIn Application Program Interface (API).

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