An undue amount of attention is being paid to BlackBerry App World's "overpriced" $2.99 minimum charge in the soon-to-be-released app store, when there's the specter of PayPal and eBay lurking just behind it.

And where they go, dissatisfied users follow.

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In YouTube's
blog yesterday, Patrick Walker, Director of Video Partnerships (Europe, Middle East, and Africa), announced that premium music video content would be blocked from view in the UK.

Citing a failure in negotiations with the publishing, composing, and songwriting organization PRS for Music (Performing Rights Society), Walker said, "The costs are simply prohibitive for us -- under PRS's proposed terms we would lose significant amounts of money with every playback. In addition, PRS is unwilling to tell us what songs are included in the license they can provide so that we can identify those works on YouTube -- that's like asking a consumer to buy an unmarked CD without knowing what musicians are on it."

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Elevation Partners' Managing Director and Co-Founder Roger McNamee -- whose firm has a big stake in the restoration of Palm -- was interviewed by Bloomberg last week, both for television and print, discussing the upcoming launch of the Palm Pre. This morning, Palm issued everything short of a full retraction of McNamee's statements, in a statement filed with no less than the US Securities and Exchange Commission.

McNamee's casual and plain-spoken rapport with Bloomberg interviewers raised eyebrows in the tech community and has led Palm to print a disquisition of McNamee's statements.

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Owners of the Android Developer Phone (ADP1) found themselves unable to obtain protected apps from the Android Market because of the device's innate ability to sidestep protection measures. Today, the Android development team announced an update to the Android development system image that addresses this problem, along with other compatibility issues the unlocked device had with its locked counterpart, the G1.

Android Developer Advocate Dan Morrill said, "Many developers are concerned about the unauthorized redistribution of their applications, so they make use of the copy-protection feature (known as 'forward locking') which prevents applications from being copied off devices.

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Windows Mobile Marketplace was announced at 3GSM in Barcelona in February, noting that it would be available when Windows Mobile 6.5 is released before Christmas this year.

A site related to the app store, http://client.marketplace.windowsmobile.com/ has gone up, causing speculation that the shop could actually be Web-based instead of a standalone application. The page and its code give very little away other than its obvious mobile phone screen formatting.

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It takes a lot of discs to stock the more than 7,800 Blockbuster Video stores in North America, and the company is a prolific purchaser of disc-based media, both movies and games. So when the company's substantive value derives directly from the discs it buys, any big changes to its structure could impact the disc production industry, and all the other businesses that rely upon it.

Blockbuster's future has been uncertain since well before it attempted to purchase the now-defunct Circuit City, a move which CEO Jim Keyes said at the time was not in the best interest of Blockbuster's shareholders.

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Taiwanese electronics company Wintek reported to the Chinese Language financial newspaper Commercial Times that it is working with Apple to develop new products that utilize the company's touch panels.

The paper speculated that one such product will be a netbook made by Quanta Computer, which has already manufactured notebooks for Apple, although Wintek said the panels will begin shipping in the second half of the year. Wintek is the company which supplies touchscreens for the iPod Touch, and news of the product was revealed in a similar fashion, several months before the product's debut.

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Android has been commercially available for a little more than four months, and the completed application store for just over two weeks, and now we're beginning to see desktop theme changes that address a fundamental Android feature: the look of its widgets.

If there's one complaint about Android that you might have heard more often than any other, it's about the clock widget. The most frequently used screenshots of the mobile operating system show the big analog clock face hovering over the still blue waters in the wallpaper. It's a mundane representation of what is actually one of the most tweakable mobile home screens.

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After Hulu and Boxee were forced to stop working together, I began to feel that it was necessary to look closer and explain how this was one of the rare instances where the loss of Hulu wouldn't be so much of a deal breaker. However, upon closer inspection and with frequent use these last few weeks, the loss of Hulu really did create a big chasm in content.

Boxee is a media center application based on XBMC that awaits a dedicated hardware home. In alpha, this software is already more elegant and fully featured than many set top boxes are after RTM, and that's with such critical features as network drive awareness still disabled. It offers support for most audio, video, and image formats and has streaming audio and video solutions built into its interface. However, due to squabbles with content providers, some of these streaming services, most notably Hulu, had to be temporarily disabled.

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Yesterday, Cook County Sheriff Thomas J. Dart filed suit against classified ad site Craigslist in the US District Court of Northern Illinois to shut down the "erotic services" section of the site, and seek redress for all the resources consumed by Craigslist-related prostitution investigation.

"To say Craigslist's 'erotic services' forum makes prostitution accessible is an understatement," opens the complaint, "Advocacy groups consider the website to be one of the largest sources for prostitution in the country."

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Book retailer Barnes & Noble today announced it has purchased Fictionwise, the company which runs the e-Bookstores Fictionwise.com and ereader.com, in its move to launch its own e-book store this year.

Fictionwise is one of the country's largest independent sellers of e-books, and supports a number of formats, including Palm, PocketPC, Hiebook, Mobipocket, eBookMan, Adobe, MS Reader, and WinCE, several of which are supported by Amazon's Kindle. The site also offers free eReader software for Windows and Mac OS, as well as software for Palm OS, Symbian S60 and UIQ, and Windows Mobile devices.

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It is now well-established that social network Facebook was built up from the idea (if not the actual code) of HarvardConnect, which later became ConnectU. CEO Mark Zuckerberg was sued for stealing the idea of Facebook from HarvardConnect, which he briefly worked on as a student.

So when Facebook announced yesterday that interface changes would soon be rolled out, which will turn the user's page into a real-time update feed of his friends' activities, many assumed this move was to replicate some of the more popular functionality of microblogging service Twitter, and remove some of the luster from that popularity. This idea is largely due to repeated rumors of an attempted Twitter buyout by Facebook.

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While Palm announced yesterday that its Treo Pro will be coming to Sprint on March 15, Alltel Wireless announced a day later, though it gets the device first. The number five US mobile operator, now owned by Verizon, began offering the 3G Windows Mobile 6.1 Treo today as a web site-only purchase. As with Sprint, Alltel's Treo Pro will cost $199.99 with a two-year contract and related rebates.

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In a mobile device market being driven by capacitive touch-optimized operating systems, Windows Mobile has been forfeiting stature, and the enterprise sector has taken note. At the annual US Public Sector Chief Information Officer summit yesterday, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer talked up the forthcoming Windows Mobile 6.5 release, and almost immediately pushed it to the side.

"We have a significant release coming this year -- not the full release we wanted to have this year -- but we have a significant release coming this year with Windows Mobile 6.5...we still don't get some of the things that people want on the highest end phones. Those will come with Windows Mobile 7 next year."

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In recent days, consumers are being deluged with economy-related terminology and newspeak. There's almost nowhere for them to turn to avoid the onslaught. Every current event is being presented in the context of the economy, which now seems to be providing the backdrop for our everyday life. The other day I saw an ad for "Recession Proof Recipes."

So yes, when market research group NPD released its findings that the US smartphone market is growing, that bad-news backdrop couldn't be avoided even then. NPD said this growth is taking place "despite recession conditions."

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