Microsoft says anecdotal evidence indicates its version of Grand Theft Auto IV is doing much better than Sony's, although Sony seems to dispute that claim.

So far, there are no hard numbers available, so Microsoft's claims cannot be verified. To its defense Sony is disputing the claims as inconsistent with its own reports, although it will not provide more data until further reports are received.

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At the Interop show in Las Vegas this week, Netgear continued its focus on SMB customers with its rollout of a new 802.11n wireless access point, a ReadyNAS storage solution, and three gigabit Smart Switches.

"We see strong growth in market demand for our SMB products, especially our ReadyNAS [storage] and Smart Switches," contended Netgear CEO and Chairman Patrick Lo, during a recent financial call with analysts.

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Several pieces of evidence were found this week pointing to T-Mobile's launch of a 3G network in select markets today. However, it appears today's launch is only an early step toward a complete UMTS network.

TMO news posted a leaked internal T-Mobile document from April 29, announcing the launch as a part of the company's "Big 5 goal to Deepen Coverage and Begin High-Speed Service Rollout." It clarifies that this phase of 3G only affects the voice channel; all data transmission will still rely on T-Mobile's EDGE network.

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Microsoft has hired Mark Hamburg, a 17-year-veteran of Adobe's Photoshop product and most recently its new Lightroom product.

Although Microsoft did not confirm independently to BetaNews at press time, news reports indicate that Hamburg's likely new job is the "Future of OS User Experience" group at the company.

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According to analysts Screen Digest, advertising will account for more than 20 percent of all mobile TV revenues on a worldwide basis by 2012. So get ready for the ad-funded games, especially after mobile TV becomes universally available.

Four years from now, more than 60 million ad-funded mobile games will be downloaded each year worldwide, according to results of of a new survey by analyst group Screen Digest.

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Microsoft's principal challenge to Adobe's creative suite now officially enters the second stage of its life cycle, with the release this afternoon of Expression Studio 2.

On the one hand, Microsoft is moving its Expression suite for Web developers towards more generally adopted Web standards with a more genuine embrace of PHP in addition to ASP.NET, with the final release today of version 2. On the other hand, it adds complete support for its Silverlight platform, showing it still has intentions to build a platform for the Web -- just not the same one it was building before.

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Creative becomes the second company behind Seagate to settle with consumers over exaggerated drive capacity.

Creative was accused of misrepresenting the number of files and hours of songs that players could hold, as well as inflating capacities by as much as seven percent.

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Last week, eBay -- an investor in classified ad site Craiglist -- filed suit against it in Delaware for "unfairly diluting eBay's economic interest in Craigslist by more than 10 percent," according to details released just yesterday.

After the suit was issued, Craigslist's official blog said eBay's action came without any forewarning, and immediately struck the classified ad publisher as unethical. With most of the suit's details posted today (a considerable chunk of important data was redacted at the behest of Craigslist) in a public version of eBay's claim (PDF available here), it appears eBay is accusing Craigslist founder Craig Newmark and CEO Jim Buckmaster of implementing "self-dealing transactions" that were designed to benefit Craigslist at eBay's expense.

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Today's news that Apple will offer movies for download on the same day as their DVD release was widely interpreted as a major breakthrough that will put iTunes in direct competition with Blockbuster. But there's a catch: Apple will only sell the movies, not rent them.

Movie download services ranging from CinemaNow to Vudu to iTunes have long been hamstrung by availability problems. Some movies can be purchased while others can be rented, and there is usually a delay before the films are available for download after their release on DVD.

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Less than two weeks after it had agreed to be acquired by the Redmond giant, the small e-mail startup has walked away from the deal.

Negotiations had been ongoing between the two companies over the past few weeks, with an agreement reached in mid-April. Xobni distributes a plug-in for Outlook that shows how contacts are linked to one another.

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With the number of Ruby developers projected by Gartner to more than quadruple to 4 million by 2013, start-up New Relic is getting into the act with an application management service for Ruby on Rails (RoR) that runs cross-platform.

Already in use among high profile Web sites that include Twitter, Hulu, and Helium.com, Ruby on Rails is an open source, database-driven Web application framework -- geared to ease of use and high productivity -- based on Ruby, an object-oriented programming language derived from Perl. Now, New Relic is launching a software-as-a-service (SaaS) package for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux, for managing applications created in the emerging cross-platform Web development environment.

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The artists' rights organization ASCAP will be receiving tens of millions in back royalties from 2006, from the leading Web radio broadcasters. But it's much less than what it had proposed, and way less than what royalties groups wanted last year.

A long-standing dispute over how much Internet streaming radio services owe in composers' royalties dating back to 2006 was settled yesterday in US District Court in New York. There, Judge William C. Conner issued a decision whose intricate formulas had their data, sadly, redacted from the public copy of the decision (PDF available here, black marks and all), although the end result is that AOL Radio, RealNetworks, and Yahoo will probably find themselves collectively owing more several million in back royalties.

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There may, in the end, be a gap of at least four dollars per share between what Microsoft thinks it might possibly, perhaps, be willing to pay, and what Yahoo's shareholders definitely would like to see. Suddenly Redmond is looking soft.

During the founding days of America, one way for its first citizens to communicate indirectly with prospective business partners, while at the same time influencing the public markets, was by taking out notices in newspapers. These earliest editions were often tacked to public posts.

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Adobe said Thursday it is looking to provide developers with a consistent runtime environment across multiple platforms, which allows for simpler and quicker development.

Adobe has lined up an impressive list of supporters to back the project, including ARM, Cisco, Intel, LG, Motorola, Qualcomm, Toshiba, and Verizon Wireless, among others. It has also gotten the blessing of several content providers including the BBC, MTV, and NBC.

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AT&T has finally given the exact date for its Mobile TV with FLO launch and how much subscribers should expect to pay, putting it a full year behind Verizon's establishment of its almost identical service, V CAST.

The Mobile TV announcement from AT&T came at the CTIA wireless trade show in March, where it disclosed the handsets that would be featured at launch time -- LG Vu and Samsung Access -- and anticipated a debut in April.

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