Pop musician Prince continued his online content bulldozing with a series of legal notices sent to sites devoted to the artist, demanding that all images of, lyrics by, and "anything linked to the likeness of " the artist be removed.

Fan sites housequake.com,

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Digital entertainment download service CinemaNow has announced a partnership with Sonic Solutions' QFlix, to develop a system which enables burning of protected DVDs that promise to be identical to those available off the shelf, with one very big catch.

CinemaNow holds protection of DVD copyrights high in its list of priorities. It had previously offered a download-and-burn service, though copied discs intentionally included a kind of defect that was supposed to protect against further copies. That defect defeated those copies to the extent that they did not even play on many DVD players.

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Nokia announced today that the LSTI (LTE/SAE Trial Initiative) had achieved a 100 megabits-per-second data transfer speed in recent tests.

LTE/SAE is an evolved version of today's mobile phone radio access technology designed for faster data transfer with a simplified architecture, using new transmission schemes and advanced antenna technology. Initial deployment configurations are specified to have downlink rates above 100 Mbps and uplink rates above 50 Mbps.

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What began as the nation's biggest planned deployment of IP-based services, having originally anticipated a customer base of 19 million homes, AT&T's U-verse high-speed TV/communications/Internet service appears to be scaling down its predicted uptake while scaling up its cost estimates.

In a recent regulatory filing, AT&T downgraded the availability of U-verse to 17 million homes by the end of next year, 2 million fewer than its spring forecast.

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Joost, a free, long-form video service designed to take TV to the desktop, is launching a new version of its platform which appears to be missing a notable feature. Apparently scrapped is Joost's own inline chat client, with the company opting instead to align with Meebo, a cross-platform chat service that supports MSN, Yahoo Messenger, AIM, Google Talk, as well as ICQ and Jabber.

Meebo is natively browser-based, but since Joost typically consumes the whole screen, it will be integrated as a layer atop the application, eliminating the need to switch to the browser. While Meebo seems an odd choice, since Skype was actually co-founded by Joost's founder Niklas Zennström, Joost is separate now, still growing, and has plenty of venture capital to play with.

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At a press event in Mumbai, India today, Microsoft announced a partnership with India's Reliance Communications Ltd. to bring IPTV service to the country by March 2008.

Microsoft's work with Reliance, one of Asia's biggest telecommunications companies, has gone on for several years. In fact, the two companies have intended to create an enriched TV network for over five years, but little has come of the partnership thus far.

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Yahoo! has launched Kickstart, a social networking site dedicated to the collegiate and professional world, and also announced FireEagle, a tentatively-named geospatial platform.

Kickstart's social network leans more heavily on the "network" than the "social." Upon initial perusal, one notices Kickstart's almost-identical-to-Facebook signup criteria. But the key difference is how user profiles are presented.

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MySpace and Facebook have both been devising new advertising platforms, and MySpace's platform, SelfServe, will be officially announced just one day ahead of the rumored announcement of Facebook's SocialAds.

Similar to Google AdWords but geared toward display ads, SelfServe allows advertisers to analyze ad performance throughout the MySpace network and then create ads accordingly. Advertisers may buy space for as little as $10 USD, and payment is made when someone clicks on the advertiser's profile. There will be a fixed cost per click based on the category, but will eventually, like Google Adwords, become auction based.

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Without an official CEO to succeed Gary Forsee, Sprint is weighing options regarding the rollout of its planned national WiMAX network.

The company has reportedly been in talks since July with a wireless start-up called Clearwire about working together to build a nationwide WiMAX network. No official agreements have yet been made, and given Sprint's current state of administrative flux, they will likely continue unresolved; at least until a new CEO is in place.

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First-come, first-served ticket sales for the 2008 Beijing Olympics began and ended in one hour on Tuesday when the overwhelming demand crashed the server's database.

Ticket sales for the Games were halted after demand proved to be far too much for the database to handle. The ticketing database could supposedly process 150,000 transactions an hour, but in just the first hour, the Games' site had 8 million hits, its hotline had 3.8 million calls, and 200,000 orders were taken from customers.

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A Canadian technology licensing company called Wi-Lan Inc. launched an assault today on no fewer than 22 companies, including both equipment vendors and consumer electronics retailers. The claim isn't new - patent infringement - but the strategy is certainly unique.

Each of the company's three infringement suits deal with individual patents, two of which were actually invented by the co-founders of the company, dealing with Wi-Fi/OFDM and multicode applications.

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AOL's video search service Truveo has launched sites in France, Germany, India, Japan, Korea, Spain, Taiwan and UK, with seven more countries to follow.

The international expansion appears to be a move to give Truveo a firm foundation in markets that aren't already entrenched, such as the US.

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Motorola has announced its MotoROKR T505 A2DP FM Transmitter - a car-mounted device that can turn any FM radio into an MP3-playing speakerphone - for the first quarter of 2008.

Though it resembles a garage door opener, the Motorola MotoROKR T505 is actually a Bluetooth FM transmitter that also handles speakerphone duties. It can pair with stereo Bluetooth-enabled phones and MP3 players, and then broadcast the signal to a free station on your car's FM dial.

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Stanford University's Folding@home program has assembled the most powerful distributed computing network yet, but there's no mainframe systems involved. Instead, the network is made up of PlayStation 3 consoles.

Can you say your PS3 is helping to cure cancer? PS3 owners participating in the Folding@home project can. The Cell CPU in the devices are being utilized en masse to do work to understand the nature of protein folding.

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Rockstar's controversially violent game Manhunt 2 finally hits shelves on Halloween, with toned-down violence and some scenes removed.

Controversy surrounding Manhunt 2 has gone on for several months, with Rockstar Games having suspended its July release in attempt to ensure a rating that would allow the game to be sold by North American retailers.

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