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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If anyone remembers the old "Max Headroom" television series produced about twenty minutes back in the past, one of its frequent send-ups was a parody of the securities market, in which equity shares were replaced with TV advertising slots. In this semi-sci-fi world, the world's economy rested on the ratings of their countries' leading networks. When a show did well, trading in ad shares for its network rose, and everyone prospered...including those guys living in the streets warming their hands over burning oil barrels and watching sitcoms.

Fast-forward twenty minutes and reality suddenly doesn't appear all that different. This morning, Yahoo - the modern equivalent of the come-from-behind "Network 23" - purchased the outstanding 80% share of an advertising placement service called Right Media, for $680 million. Right Media's business is to present ad buyers with a real-time pool of available inventory, looking for Web sites that are hot right this minute and enabling them to purchase space and time on those sites before their needles start swinging the other way.

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In a recent interview with BetaNews, the chief researcher for IDC's Quarterly PC Tracker report -- which rates the relative market share of PC manufacturers in both the US and worldwide markets -- raised a serious question pertaining to the market growth figure around which much of IDC's reporting is based.

As last week's report noted, worldwide PC shipment growth stands at an annual rate of 10.9% by IDC's account, 2.4% higher than the firm expected it to be at the end of last year. That bump is on account of a number of factors, IDC's David Daoud believes, the onset of Windows Vista being among them, but perhaps more prominently, vendors like HP adopting a more direct approach to how to address their customers.

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Apparently, plain dolls just aren't enough for kids these days. Mattel is introducing a new line of Barbie MP3 players that come with their own accessories and link up to the new Barbie Girls Web site - a virtual world of all-things Barbie that is currently in beta.

Mattel says the traditional Barbie doll is sticking around, but notes that among its target demographic, physical toys are becoming much less prevalent as kids spend ever more of their free time on the Web. Barbie is also facing competition from Bratz dolls, which have more appeal to older kids. The Barbie MP3 player will go on sale in July for $59.99, although the beta Web site is open now.

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Apple on Friday acknowledged yet another battery problem in its MacBook and MacBook Pro laptops, but this one does not pose a safety hazard. Instead of potentially overheating, Apple says in an advisory its MacBook batteries may be underperforming or not charging correctly.

The company has released a battery firmware update, which it hopes should do the trick, but says customers can also receive a replacement if they continue to see problems. Apple notes the issue could affect any MacBook notebook built since the product line was introduced last year.

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For five decades, he was the man at the center of the movie industry's most polarizing, subjective, and explosive arguments, yet was the absolute gentleman - gracious, amiable, polished. For Jack Valenti, who died this morning from complications from a stroke, presentation was everything.

Latecomers to the business of digital media know Jack Valenti as the man who championed the principles of vigorous copyright protection and combating piracy. So a great many in this business have never had an opportunity to witness one of the most persuasive speakers in Washington never to become a politician, as the president and chief lobbyist for the Motion Picture Association of America.

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High-definition aficionados looking to upgrade their television setup to a Series3 TiVo but were hesitating over the high $799 price tag are in luck: TiVo has dropped the price to $499 and is including a free wireless network adapter for good measure.

The lower pricing is part of a special promotion that runs through the end of the month and includes 80-hour and 180-hour Series2 TiVo units as well. Customers must also sign up for a TiVo plan that ranges from a 1 to 3 year commitment and has an early termination fee.

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A bill introduced yesterday before the US House of Representatives by Rep. Jay Inslee (D - Wash.) and Rep. Don Manzullo (R - Ill.) would explicitly nullify the findings of the Copyright Royalty Board, which set forth last month a royalty fee for Internet streaming performances that online providers say could put them out of business entirely.

In its place, the Inslee/Manzullo bill, currently called the Internet Radio Equality Act, would establish a flat per-listener hour rate of 33 cents, or a third of a dollar for every individual who listens to music over the Internet for one hour. The rate would be retroactive to 2006, so the nation's #1 streaming music provider, AOL Radio, could find itself owing past-due royalties for last year in the amount of $916,000, by BetaNews estimates.

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AOL on Thursday began a limited beta test of a new AOL.com portal, which streamlines the look and utilizes AJAX to make the page more snappy. However, initial reviews of the site point out it's almost a direct copy of Yahoo's latest homepage that went live last July.

Approximately 5 percent of users will see the beta. The new AOL.com is expected to be finalized this summer, so changes could appear in the interim. AOL says it's attempting to build a unified look and feel that will extend across all of its Web services in numerous countries, and brings the most important features front and center.

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Hitachi this week announced it has ramped up production on its 1 terabyte hard drive, shipping the unit to retailers across the United States. Pricing for the drive, which spins at 7,200 RPM and features a Serial ATA interface is set at $399 USD.

In order to achieve the record-breaking storage space, Hitachi utilized perpendicular recording, in which bits stand vertical enabling more to be placed on a single platter. The Deskstar 7K1000, a line that Hitachi acquired from IBM, contains five platters. Other features include an 8.5ms seek time, 32MB buffer, and improved shock protection.

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If it were an independent company that produced the Xbox 360 game console and little or nothing else, the news for the quarter that just ended could be devastating: Fewer than one-third the number of consoles sold, by the company's estimates, than three quarters ago. You might be hearing the usual platitudes from a consumer electronics company: the market is saturating, the product's already a year-and-a-half old, the first calendar quarter is always a downer after the holidays, and maybe the economy's not all that good.

But this is Microsoft, a corporation which has so many other projects going on that it has back burners behind its back burners. The company that three quarters ago was praising Xbox 360 for stellar sales numbers that more than compensated for R&D expenses, easily dispensed with the bad news - truthfully, though quickly.

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In its quarterly report to analysts for its third fiscal quarter of 2007, Microsoft executives repeatedly stated much lower than expected Xbox 360 sales for the quarter. After selling as much as 1.8 million consoles per quarter last summer, the company sold only 500,000 consoles in the previous quarter to retailers.

Revenue for the Entertainment Division in the fiscal third quarter was down a staggering 21.5% annually, to $929 million; and the division posted a $315 million loss, though that's less of a loss than the $402 million posted during the same quarter last year. Microsoft CFO Chris Liddell told analysts to expect revenue for the Entertainment and Devices division for the fiscal fourth quarter to fall as much as 11%.

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Exploit code is available that could take advantage of a security flaw within both Adobe Photoshop Creative Suites 2 and 3, resulting in a hacker taking complete control of a user's machine. The software handles bitmap files incorrectly, which results in a buffer overflow. Security firm Secunia first reported the issue, and suggests users of any version of Photoshop do not open untrusted bitmap files until a patch is released.

Although the exploit code is publicly available, Secunia says it has so far received no reports of attackers using it in the wild. However, the company does not expect many incidents since Photoshop is not widely installed among general computer users. Adobe says it is aware of the problem, and is looking into a possible fix.

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PlayStation creator Ken Kutaragi will leave Sony at the end of June, the company revealed Thursday. This is only the latest in a string of developments which show the company is serious about turning around its business.

After years of being the top video game maker, it now finds itself in third place behind a resurgent Nintendo and surprisingly strong Microsoft. While Sony expected the video game unit to help it recover, it instead is doing exactly the opposite.

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Just prior to its quarterly earnings report to analysts on Wednesday, Apple Inc. released some typically astounding figures, and one atypical surprise: Net quarterly profit growth at the end of fiscal second quarter 2007 is now nearly 88% annually, at $770 million on revenue of $5.26 billion.

In other words, Apple is now earning close to double what it earned at this time last year, on revenue that's only just under 21% better. That's a sign of a much stronger company.

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