Internet television service Joost moved into public beta on Tuesday, as the company announced that it is allowing its existing beta testers to invite an unlimited number of friends and family to sign up for the service.

Current users can invite anyone by clicking on the "My Joost" area, then selecting the "Invite Friends" widget.

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Seemingly taking a page from Apple's naming playbook, Google on Tuesday will unwrap "iGoogle," a new brand for the search company's Personalized Homepage service. News features will arrive alongside the iGoogle site, including a "Gadget Maker" and location based search results.

Google's Personalized Homepage lets users create exactly that: a customized start page for their Web browsing. On the page, users can place "gadgets" containing information they are interested in, be it weather, stock feeds, news feeds from Web sites, and even the current date and time.

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FROM MIX 07 Microsoft on Monday officially began shipping Expression Studio, the company's new product suite for building what it calls "next-generation user experiences" for Windows as well as the Web. Expression targets the new breed of designer that is also part developer.

Expression was largely created to help companies build applications that take advantage of the new Windows Presentation Foundation found in Windows Vista. Microsoft hoped the rich application capabilities would draw users to Vista, but developers have been slow to build such experiences.

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In a memo to his employees leaked to the press like a sieve from multiple sources over the weekend, Dell Computer CEO Michael Dell advised his employees that in the company's coming reorganization, quite a few possibilities are on the table, including a move beyond the direct sales model he himself devised and championed.

"The Direct Model has been a revolution, but it is not a religion," Mr. Dell writes. "We will continue to improve our business model, and go beyond it, to give our customers what they need. We will simplify our organization to make it easier to hear customers and respond to them."

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FROM MIX 07 The next round of relatively stable betas for Microsoft's Silverlight Web graphics platform were released today, along with the first of its alphas of a less stable version that tests the graphics-building capabilities of the Visual Studio "Orcas" and Expression Studio betas. This as Microsoft's MIX '07 conference in Las Vegas got under way full steam.

What hasn't been clear in recent explanations of Silverlight technology is the extent to which it's dependent upon the .NET Framework. Depending upon whom we've asked, Silverlight 1) doesn't require the .NET Framework, 2) does require it, or 3) is .NET in another form. As Microsoft product management director Forest Key stated this morning, "Silverlight is a factored version of .NET that is optimized for the Web and simple deployment." Just exactly what a "factored version" is, we're not entirely sure.

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FROM MIX 07 Microsoft on Monday launched a new version of its Windows Live developer Web site, complete with controls to build the company's services into third-party products.

Among the new options are a Spaces Photo Control and updated Windows Live Contacts Control. The dev.live.com site already includes other code snippets covering rich media, maps, search, and authentication.

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FROM MIX 07 In order to spur adoption of its new Silverlight platform for developing rich Internet applications, Microsoft is offering up free video hosting that falls under the company's Windows Live services brand.

While the downloadable runtime and development tools such as Expression Studio and Visual Stidio provide the crux of Microsoft's Silverlight effort, services are important as well, says product manager Brian Goldfarb. This full ecosystem is what Microsoft hopes will set Silverlight apart from rivals like Adobe Flex and Sun's Java.

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After a nearly two-year wait, the BBC has been given the go-ahead to launch its online on-demand television, however no exact launch date has been set.

This service is directed at British consumers and allows programs to be watched for up to seven days after they are broadcast. Once downloaded, the consumer has up to 30 days to view the content.

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FROM MIX 07 Microsoft Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie took the stage at the company's MIX 07 conference in Las Vegas Monday morning to discuss Microsoft's vision for the future of the Web, integrating software and services.

Ozzie opened his keynote by highlighting the difficult associated with creating applications for the Web due to the fragmentation across technologies, ranging from the Web browser to set-top box and mobile phone.

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Characterizing the estimated $50 million-plus that Internet streaming music providers would not pay in royalties as "a windfall to mega-corporate webcasters," the SoundExchange performance royalties collection firm, in a statement issued late last week, argued that the Inslee-Mazullo bill currently before the US House of Representatives would force performance artists into a position where they would actually owe the services that play their music.

"If passed, the bill would also result in a windfall of more than $50 million to mega-corporate webcasters like Clear Channel and Microsoft at the expense of recording artists across the country," the SoundExchange statement reads. "Because the bill is retroactive, artists would have to write checks to cover refunds to corporations whose CEOs and top executives are paid millions of dollars per year."

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Twelve nations have been put on a list by the Bush administration to be more closely monitored for piracy violations as part of a broader crackdown by the US Government on the problem. Among the countries on the list are the more commonly recognized problem areas like Russia and China, as well as Argentina, Chile, Egypt, India, Israel, Lebanon, Thailand, Turkey, Ukraine and Venezuela.

US Trade Representative Susan Schwab said that Thailand was added to the list due to worsening conditions surrounding copyright protection, while noting Brazil had been moved from the "priority" to the "watch" list amid improving conditions. Others, including Bahamas, Bulgaria, Croatia, the EU, and Latvia were removed from the list altogether.

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In a stunning 7-1 decision with extremely broad implications in the field of patents and patentability, the US Supreme Court has overturned a Federal Circuit ruling that was in favor of AT&T, and has apparently affirmed Microsoft's arguments that software coupled with the device on which the software is installed cannot be considered patentable.

Depending on the language of the ruling - which has not yet been released - some of the bedrock principles upon which countless US software patents have already been issued, may now come under question. And in one of the great ironies of our time and industry, Microsoft may have just won the single most important victory to date on behalf of open source advocates.

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Sony's party last month in Athens promoting its new game God of War II is now getting lots of attention for its featured centerpiece -- a decapitated goat.

The resulting fallout from the company's decision to print photos of the event, complete with unedited pictures of the headless animal, in its magazine will likely mean the recall of the entire run of the official PlayStation magazine.

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Sling Media said Monday that it had released the first version of its SlingPlayer application for the Mac OS platform. The release ends the company's year long trek from concept to release, as it first confirmed its existence in an interview with BetaNews in April of last year. In addition to the standard Sling features, the SlingPlayer for Mac also supports Apple entertainment products including Apple TV, Front Row, and iPods in either a iPod Hi-Fi or universal dock, the company said.

SlingPlayer takes advantage of the native user interface of the Mac OS platform and is available free of charge for all Slingbox owners. It supports Mac OS X 10.3.9 and higher, and runs on either PowerPC or Intel-based computers.

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Google said Monday it had partnered with Arizona, California, Utah, and Virginia to add its search capabilities to the websites of those governments.

In addition to offering its search technologies to these states, it would also take steps to ensure that public information was also more accessible from the search engine's own site. This would include indexing portions of the site normally missed by most search spiders.

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