In an indication that Microsoft’s strategy for digital rights management in the "Zune era" will be even more stratified than at first thought, the company introduced another DRM technology to the mix this morning at 3GSM in Barcelona: PlayReady, which appears to add streaming media and pay-per-view capabilities to the PlaysForSure platform it already had in place.

This morning, Microsoft is calling PlayReady “the result of extended dialogue with the mobile industry,” whose members were evidently looking for a more flexible way to transfer content between devices.

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Motorola introduced several new phones on Monday at the 3GSM Conference in Barcelona, including a new line aimed at emerging markets, and a slider that opens in a curve to match the contour of the user's face.

The Motomobile line, to debut over the first half of this year, will include functionality such as a megapixel camera with video capabilities, music player functionality, and CrystalTalk, a technology aimed at assisting the user in placing calls in noisy environments.

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In an interview with BetaNews, Microsoft product manager for Windows Mobile and embedded devices John Starkweather said that a key feature of the system developers' kit for Windows Mobile 6 will be a set of tools that expose the functionality of a new graphical desktop synchronization tool for Windows Vista called Windows Mobile Device Center. Windows Mobile 6 is expected to play a role in several manufacturers' product introductions on Monday.

Once a Windows Mobile 6-endowed handset is connected to a Vista-based PC either directly or wirelessly, Starkweather told us, Vista will recognize the device's brand and model, and then will launch Microsoft Update, which will automatically download and install the Mobile Device Center for the identified model (it does not ship with Vista). The handset then becomes represented on the Vista desktop by a high-res picture of the device itself.

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Viacom is wasting no time in moving on from dealing with YouTube, as the company is planning to aggressively promote new functionality on ComedyCentral.com in the coming months, and others in the future.

Functionality will be provided directly from the site itself that allows users to embed and share videos much like the popular social video site. Users will be permitted to show the video for a period of one month after it is posted.

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Cisco said Friday that it had acquired Five Across, a small San-Francisco company that specializes in creating applications that allow companies to easily add social-networking functionality to their Web sites.

The software enables IT administrators to easily add sections to sites that allow for the sharing of content, as well as enable users to post profiles and blogs. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, and Cisco says it expects the acquisition to close by the end of April.

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EMI, the world's third largest music label, is actively considering removing the digital rights management restrictions from its song catalog and selling tracks online in MP3 format, according to a report published in The Wall Street Journal Friday.

The news comes on the heels of an open letter published by Apple CEO Steve Jobs, in which he advocated abolishing DRM as the best way to encourage digital music sales and benefit consumers. Jobs said that DRM systems only create walls that prevent interoperability and licensing technology has proven unworkable due to concerns the copyright protection will be more easily broken.

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In preparation for the capacity of the entire Internet to double to 1.8 billion users in just three years' time, VeriSign -- which manages the registry for the .com and .net top-level domain names, as well as the root servers for the entire domain name system -- announced this morning it will commit three years' worth of humanpower and $100 million in resources to the overhaul and expansion of DNS.

VeriSign CEO Stratton Sclavos is expected to reveal details of Project Titan, perhaps his company's most ambitious effort to date, later tonight at a keynote address to the RSA Conference in San Francisco.

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A bill introduced in the US Senate on Tuesday by Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D - Vermont), along with one independent and one Republican backer, aims to strengthen security requirements for all private databases accessible online that may hold personal information. Reintroducing language that had been stalled since 2005, if passed, the bill could hold IT managers accountable and responsible for security breaches where personal information is pilfered.

"Our bill...requires that companies that have databases with sensitive personal information on Americans establish and implement data privacy and security programs," Sen. Leahy stated in a speech on the Senate floor Tuesday. "In the Information Age, any company that wants to be trusted by the public must earn that trust by vigilantly protecting the databases they use and maintain."

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Just one day before Valentine's Day, Microsoft plans to release twelve patches fixing a variety of issues in Windows, Office, Visual Studio, and several other applications. At least five of these patches will be rated "critical."

There could be an easy explanation for the unusually large size of Patch Tuesday this month. Four patches slated for release last month were dropped at the last hour, including a Windows-Visual Studio update that appeared in the advanced notification but never appeared.

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Nokia is making a foray into the mobile applications market, saying Thursday it plans to make its smart2go navigation platform available at no charge to select Nokia S60 and Windows Mobile devices.

Eventually, application support would be expanded to other S60 and Windows Mobile phones, as well as additional phone platforms including Nokia's Series 40, Microsoft's Pocket PC and Linux operating systems.

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In an attempt to allay confusion over its new AJAX-enabled webmail system, Microsoft said Thursday that Windows Live Mail was being renamed to Windows Live Hotmail. The decision follows a recent switch to keep the classic Hotmail interface for existing users.

Microsoft says that during beta testing, which began last March, it learned that users were "extremely loyal to the Hotmail brand" and "a bit confused by name change." Therefore, it hopes the Windows Live Hotmail name will reiterate that the new service retains what users liked about the old system.

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The two co-founders behind YouTube received Google stock valued at about $650 million, according to a regulatory filing made with the US Securities and Exchange Commission Wednesday, while Sequoia Capital, the VC firm that backed YouTube walked away with around $450 million based on Google's current share price.

Google for the first time detailed the $1.65 billion acquisition in the filing, saying YouTube CEO Chad Hurley received 694,087 shares of Google common stock, while co-founder Steve Chen received 625,366 shares and another 68,721 shares held in a trust.

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Kodak said Thursday that it had created a new extension in conjunction with Mozilla that would make it easier for users of the popular alternative browser Firefox to upload and share their digital photos. The application supports drag and drop functionality, photo albums, and the ability to add captions directly in the browser window for use when the album is uploaded to Kodak's online gallery.

"We want to provide consumers with easy and convenient ways to do more with their pictures and thanks to the Firefox Companion for KODAK, they can now upload and share faster than ever before," said Madhav Mehra, general manager, KODAK Gallery. The extension is available for download from the Firefox Web site.

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It may be a single malicious user with an axe to grind, and that user may be targeting a very small group of people who just happen to use Microsoft Excel. But whoever it is continues to make security firms like Symantec nervous, as yet another Excel-based document with a malformed image string, dubbed Trojan.Mdropper.Y, has turned up.

As a message on Symantec's security blog stated this morning, the Excel document with the malformed string is capable of dropping two Trojan horse programs onto the victim's computer, both of which are identified as Backdoor.Bias.

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Lycos said Thursday that it had launched Mix, a new tool that would allow its users to pull videos from several different sources across the Web and play them in a single playlist. The offering integrates the "watch and chat" experience first debuted with Lycos Cinema in November. Users would be able to chat about videos being viewed, as well as pause, play, rewind and fast-forward communally.

Mixes could either be public, where anyone would be able to add videos to the playlist, or private, where just the list owner may add videos. Videos could be added to playlists via a bookmark feature available for any browser, the company said. The Lycos Mix service is be compatible with both Windows and Mac OS X, and work on Internet Explorer, Safari and Firefox browsers.

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