CBS-owned social Internet radio service Last.fm once had content from all four major labels, but now Warner Music Group, which had been licensing to Last.fm on a month-to-month basis, has pulled its catalog from the service.
As first noticed by Silicon Alley Insider on Friday, it appears the main impetus for WMG's withdrawal from Last.fm's streams is, of course, money. The major label simply wanted more money from CBS, and was reportedly "disappointed" that a Last.fm premium subscription service was not opened as was anticipated.
While numerically-named sites such as 123.net and 1337.com already exist, on June 10 the landrush will begin for the .NU domain which is being marketed in the US as the "number domain."
Belonging to the small island nation Niue which is located between New Zealand, Tonga, Samoa, and the Cook Islands, the internationalized domain name has been popular for several years in Scandinavian countries where "nu" translates to "now." Roughly 80% of the registered .nu domains are Swedish.
According to French financial daily La Tribune, Apple has received approval to build one of its eponymous stores in Paris. The location? Where else but under the glass pyramid in the Carrousel du Louvre.
It would mark the second piece of geometric glass architecture used by the Cupertino company, the first being the cube at the Apple's Fifth Avenue store in Manhattan, New York that first opened in May 2006.
Qik, a service that allows its users to stream video from their phones live on the site, has begun its invitation-only alpha period and extended the list of supported devices to include select Windows Mobile handsets.
The idea behind Qik is familiar: to give the user a platform upon which to broadcast and archive footage captured on his mobile device. The concept is being attempted by several competitors.
Restrictions have reportedly been loosened in the nation of Turkmenistan, the Southernmost nation of the former Soviet Union, and private citizens are gradually -- about 20 per day -- being connected to the Internet.
As a result of a development plan put forth by President Gurbanguli Berdymukhammedov, Turkmenistan has been moving toward becoming connected. Previously, only government employees, diplomats, and employees of major international corporations were allowed access to the Internet. But after Berdymukhammedov rose to power in 2006, he put repeated emphasis upon improving the nation's information infrastructure and social standing. In 2007, the first Internet cafe opened, and several dozen followed.
An academic study charting the daily mobility of people based upon their mobile phone data has raised ethical concerns regarding privacy and nondisclosure.
The study was conducted by Northeastern University and recently published in the journal Nature. Cell phone usage data from a private European mobile phone carrier was used as the primary dataset for the study. Both the carrier and the nation in which the data was gathered were not named.
Based upon the SearchMonkey platform, Yahoo users can now enhance their searches with developer-created apps.
The enhancements (there were 39 available as of 1:00 pm EDT today) available in Search Gallery highlight specific sites in results such as public domain book text from Feedbooks, Last.fm song and artist information, and Yahoo Local data.
Verizon has announced it will be rolling out 60 new channels to the
FiOS TV lineup region-by-region beginning in July, at least 25 of these will be HD.
Verizon today claims FiOS will have between 52 and 65 HD channels, depending upon the subscriber's region. Some of the FiOS channels to receive the HD upgrade are Lifetime, Animal Planet, TLC, Science Channel, and Smithsonian Channel, as well as five new channels from Starz and Showtime.
Sony has selected IGA Worldwide as its first partner to provide dynamic in-game advertisements for PlayStation 3 games, with an initial focus on the frequently delayed MMO undertaking called Home.
Within Home, the company says the simulated environment will "depict brands in various forms...where users would expect to see them in real life: on billboards and posters, on shopping bags and soda cans and on images of TV screens."
YouTube has been given a feature upgrade which allows for annotations to be added to a user's already uploaded videos.
Listed under the "My Videos" heading, a new button has been added called "Edit Annotations" which allows speech bubbles, subtitles, internal links, and spotlights to be embedded in videos.
The Music Genome Project has released a beta of its music-recommending internet radio service Pandora as a gadget that works independently of browsers, based upon Adobe AIR.
Everything that the user gets in the in-browser version of Pandora can now be delivered from the system tray or dock of his system, with the latest Pandora Desktop beta for Windows and Mac, released this week. This is beneficial because the gadget itself is no small item. In the Pandora blog, this issue is somewhat shamefacedly addressed:
Microsoft subsidiary Massive Inc. teamed up with media research firm Interpret LLC to study the efficacy of in-game advertising, and today released its findings.
The study was commissioned by Massive's customers, including Adidas footwear and three unnamed other companies, which represented a "quick service" restaurant, a candy company, and a movie studio. All four companies had a new product that they wished to test by serving ads to connected gamers.
At the Intel keynote today at Computex, EVP Sean Maloney officially unveiled the new 4 Series chipsets and prognosticated a bright, high definition future delivered via WiMAX.
Intel Executive Vice President Sean Maloney was "more optimistic than ever," about the future, thanks to all the innovations on the Computex show floor in Taipei, Taiwan. Perhaps he's not so much giving credit to the industry as giving himself a high-five for the sheer mass of Intel-powered hardware being shown off this week.
AT&T has agreed to settle a class action suit issued against it in Georgia, for allowing third parties to charge customers on unclear or wholly undisclosed terms for downloads.
The settlement received preliminary approval in the Superior Court of Fulton County, Georgia on Friday. The final hearing for the settlement will not occur until December 8th, giving customers approximately six months to file their claims.
Call them sub-notebooks, netbooks, UMPCs, or what one clever Engadget poster deemed them: "Liliputers," the biggest hardware launches at Computex in Taipei this week fall into the umbrella category of "smallest."
The specifications for Acer's Aspire One are now official as of today: With a profile of 9.8" x 6.7" x 1.14", a weight of under 2 pounds, and an LED display with 1024 x 600 resolution, the Aspire One is about on par with its fellow netbooks in size.