It was no secret that social network MySpace was looking to acquire music discovery service iLike, thanks to reports earlier this week. Today, however, it was made official.

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, but rumors this week valued iLike at around $20 million after subtracting the cost MySpace will incur from maintaining the entire iLike staff, which includes CEO Ali Partovi, President Hadi Partovi, CTO Nat Brown, and all 26 employees.

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Sign up for Sybase PowerBuilder 12 Beta 1 through Fileforum now.

Win32 is, to this day, the continually evolving basic API of Windows, keeping the "32" even in 64-bit systems. It remains in place to support what Microsoft and Sybase both call "legacy" apps, even though in Sybase's case, PowerBuilder is a substantial part of this legacy. With PB 12's embrace of .NET, for the first time, it moves toward full adoption of Windows Presentation Foundation, the graphical system that was created for Windows Vista, and rolled out during the Windows XP SP2 development cycle. Now, PB 12's new DataWindow component -- still at the heart of Sybase's value proposition -- will be geared to utilize WPF; and migration wizards in place for PB 12 will guide developers in moving legacy Win32 DataWindow apps to PB 12-era WPF apps.

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Smartphones may be growing in popularity, but the market is still completely owned by feature phones, market research company NPD Group said today. According to the company's Mobile Phone Track service 72% of all new handsets sold in the second quarter were so-called "dumbphones."

This does represent a 5% decline for the quarter, when smartphones managed to increase their share by more than 47% (they now represent 28% of overall consumer phone sales). But there's still a long way to go before smartphones can lay claim to even half of the mobile phone market.

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As we saw earlier in the summer, Hybrid Satellite/Cell phones are almost here, and the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act is playing a major role in their advancement.

SkyTerra Safety Access, a subdivision of SkyTerra Communications (formerly Mobile Satellite Ventures), has applied for $37 million in funds from the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) under the Act. The plan is for these funds to be used to develop and deploy two dual-mode Cell/Sat phones for the public safety sector.

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Usually when a new online product unveils an upgrade, its audience numbers see a bump for the first month, before subsiding and evening out. Last month, Bing's first usage share numbers from analysis firm comScore showed a little bump, but not much of one -- yet Microsoft made as much out of it as it could.

The news this month -- the first to show month-by-month progress since the changeover from Windows Live -- may actually be more encouraging for Microsoft: It gained half a point of usage share among US users for the month of July over June, at the same time when Google and Yahoo combined lost about as much.

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The Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority announced yesterday that the project to improve cellular service in Washington DC's Metro stations and tunnels began construction over the weekend, and will be completed on October 16.

The bill to expand wireless coverage in Washington DC's underground Metrorail stations was passed in October 2008, and broke the exclusive contract Verizon Wireless had with the DC Metro Transit Authority through its acquisition of Bell Atlantic Mobile Systems. Bell Atlantic Mobile signed the exclusivity contract with Metro in 1993.

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Almost everyone who has been observing the patent infringement case in US District Court in Eastern Texas surrounding Microsoft Word (Betanews correspondents included) have predicted that this is the opening round in a very long dance whose steps are pretty much pre-determined: The merits of Canadian software firm i4i's case seem questionable at the very least, and cases like this are typically either overturned on appeal or settled out of court. But one can't help feeling that there's an ever-so-slight chance of this being not really a dance but a train wreck in progress, the slim possibility that the ironically named i4i has found the one loophole in US patent law just waiting to be exploited: the notion that a heretofore unclaimed function that should seem obvious on its face, may not qualify as prior art for the sake of a patent challenge.

Yesterday, as first reported by the Seattle P-I, Microsoft filed its emergency motion for a stay of injunction, with the US Federal Circuit Court of Appeals. It could have filed a boilerplate appeal, simply saying the company has a viable case but needs time to present it. It didn't. Instead, it gave everyone including i4i a peek at the big cards it's willing to play, an advance look at the Supreme Court argument it's willing to make if the case should go that far.

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After CEO Mark Hurd led Hewlett-Packard through the aftermath of Carly Fiorina and then the boardroom scandals, you'd think it would have been prepared for the downturn in the global economy. But more than one factor surprised analysts today, in reading the early numbers from HP, the first one being this: Shipments of personal systems in the company's fiscal third quarter, ending last July, increased by 2% over Q3 2008, but revenue fell 18% in the same interval to $8.4 billion.

Conceivably, shipment rates overall should be permitted to slip between 8% and 10% this year. But that's for the overall market, which includes servers. In Enterprise and Servers, a key revenue category, revenue was down 23% to $3.7 billion. But you can see from the disparity between the two revenue figures that HP these days does more than two-thirds of its systems business with consumers, not businesses individual unit sales as opposed to volume business sales [an HP spokesperson asked Betanews for that clarification]. While HP omitted server shipment figures from its early numbers (those will probably have been squeezed out of the company by tomorrow morning), server shipments would have to have fallen by as much as 10%, we estimate, for HP's performance to be in keeping with the average overall shipment decline that analysts expect, assuming costs stay flat (and they're not -- they declined a bit in this last quarter).

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Even though T-Mobile continues to deny it, the Android community has resigned to the fact that the T-Mobile G1 (also known as the HTC Dream) will not receive any significant upgrades beyond "Cupcake," the Android software update from last April.

The simple fact is that there is not enough memory on the G1 to support a much bigger OS, and even equipping the device with Cupcake was reportedly problematic. "We knew that internal flash space was going to be very tight on the G1 and we kept the system partition tight on purpose," Jean-Baptiste Queru, a software engineer at Google said on Twitter last week.

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Download Google Chrome Dev channel build 4.0.201.1 from Fileforum now.

With Google, one tends to learn the meanings and intentions behind the many events in its development programs pretty much as they happen. For example, the distinctions between what goes on in the Chrome browser's development channel ("Dev") and what happens in the beta channel, have frequently been explained to us after the fact.

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As Blockbuster gets slowly buried by rivals Netflix and Redbox, it has pulled out a number of noteworthy streaming partnerships: TiVo in March, Samsung in July, and according to the most recent reports, Motorola. But Blockbuster OnDemand is reportedly not coming to Motorola set-top boxes, just phones.

Kevin Lewis, Senior Vice President of Digital Entertainment for Blockbuster today said, "People are increasingly relying on their mobile phones to stay connected to the things they love the most -- including their favorite movies and TV shows. The integration of our Blockbuster OnDemand service into Motorola's mobile phones will provide access to thousands of movies from the moment someone initiates their service."

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Today, the European Commission announced it will invest a total of €18 million into researching the deployment of LTE and LTE Advanced.

The EC says it will begin laying down the details of its LTE projects next month, and intends to begin in January 2010. The projects are expected to cost more than €700 million by the time they're completed in 2012.

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Yesterday, Leichtman Research Group (LRG) released its quarterly study of the nation's cable and telephone providers and found that net broadband additions last quarter were the lowest they have been in eight years, dropping by almost 30% from last year.

"The second quarter has proven to be traditionally weak for broadband growth, but with the market becoming more mature, broadband adds further waned in 2Q 2009," said Leichtman Research Group's President and principal analyst Bruce Leichtman.

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Since September of last year, Betanews could barely do a story about one or two specific, related Microsoft technologies, code named "Oslo" and "Dublin," without getting a call or comment from the department responsible for the other technology saying our perspective was all wrong. This despite, at one point, providing the transcript of most of a complete interview with the product manager responsible for Oslo, which includes Microsoft's very innovative M modeling language, and which will become a core component of Visual Studio 2010.

Yesterday morning, company engineer Douglas Purdy, a product unit manager on the Oslo project, acknowledged all the confusion that had been generated over associating the modeling language with Dublin, arguably a very different technology for Windows Server, giving it the ability to deploy cloud services. In a blog post, Purdy explained that the company now intends to treat these separate technologies as separate, and to stop extending the boundaries of Oslo into Ireland and Dublin into Norway.

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At Sony's big press conference scheduled today in Germany for Gamescom, the long-rumored PS3 Slim, a much cheaper, much smaller PlayStation 3 with a 120 GB HDD and requisite Blu-ray player, was finally unveiled. However, it wasn't too much of a surprise for eager potential buyers, as several online retailers prematurely posted product pages for the device.

It is similar to the situation with the PSP Go! at E3 this year. Just days before the new, smaller PlayStation Portable was slated to make its big debut, Sony's own Qore magazine leaked a picture of it.
Sony Computer Entertainment's President and CEO Kaz Hirai called it the "Worst-kept secret of E3."

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