Google announced Thursday the first expansion of its Google Print library service, but the books included will mostly be in the public domain due to several outstanding lawsuits from publishers and authors over copyright infringement.

10,000 works will initially be available for viewing. Some examples include Henry James' "Daisy Miller," government Rhode Island volunteers in the Civil War.

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Yahoo has rolled out a new beta of its mapping and directions service, which follows the interactive approach taken by rivals Google and MSN with one major difference: Yahoo! Maps is built with Flash. Despite the change, Yahoo has made sure that printing and sharing maps online remains easy.

Local content takes center stage in the new approach. Information such as hotels, restaurants and events can be instantly layered atop the map, with a single click to bring up driving directions. Yahoo has also tapped its user-generated reviews and ratings to provide what it calls "the inside scoop" on local establishments.

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Microsoft on Thursday announced that it had acquired Switzerland-based media-streams.com AG, a VoIP applications provider. The company plans to integrate the media-streams technology into its business services, such as Microsoft Office Live Communications Server.

While Live Communications Server already has PC-to-PC VoIP capability, the media-streams acquisition would add phone-to-phone service, as well as PC-to-phone and vice versa, Microsoft says.

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AOL entered the online music business on Thursday, announcing it had acquired digital music company MusicNow. The service will replace AOL's pre-existing MusicNet@AOL offering, and allow the company to offer subscription as well as a-la-carte downloads. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

AOL has launched a preview version of the service at aolmusicnow.com. MusicNet customers will be gradually upgraded to the service, which had previously been owned by electronics retail chain Circuit City.

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Samsung's digital media chief Choi Gee-sung said that media reports of Samsung opening an online music store similar to iTunes earlier in the week were incorrect, and there had been a misunderstanding.

"We are not at all interested in a music service," Choi said to reporters outside of an analyst meeting. Instead, he said the company plans to offer technical assistance to pre-existing music stores in order to enhance the experience for users, and at the same time increase its own hardware sales.

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Microsoft on Tuesday announced its highly-anticipated lineup of online services, called Windows Live and Office Live. The news has received much attention from tech pundits and throughout the blogosphere. Read on for a selection of what people are saying about Redmond's latest move and tell us what you think.

"There's been a lot of chatter about how this is a response to Google or how it's Microsoft being dragged into offering these type of services at the expense of losing it's traditional market for Office apps. Well, that analysis is all wrong. Microsoft has been planning this for quite some time, long before it would appear as a response to Google or anyone else. Let's also make one thing clear, these services aren't about replacing Windows or Office nor is this a retreat from the traditional Office applications. If you're looking to replace your Word, Excel, PowerPoint or Outlook with this set of offerings, you're looking in the wrong place."
-- Michael Gartenberg, Jupiter Research

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When Mark Russinovich was testing his company's security software last week, he came across a disturbing find: a Sony BMG CD he purchased from Amazon had secretly installed DRM software on his PC and used "rootkit" cloaking methods to hide it. With the story sweeping across the Net, Sony is attempting to clean up its mess.

DRM, or digital rights management, is nothing new to CDs. Record companies began employing software to prevent users from easily transferring tracks to a PC after the explosion of file sharing activity that followed Napster's debut in 1999. But for the most part, the DRM was quite rudimentary and only required the pressing of the "shift" key to bypass.

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Since its launch in late 2002, the Nokia N-Gage phone turned handheld gaming console has struggled to meet expectations. Nokia has sold about 2 million of the devices in 3 years, far below its goal of 6 million. But despite the disappointments, Nokia plans to make some changes that it hopes will invigorate the concept.

The original N-Gage model was plagued with design flaws, such as placing the game memory card under the battery slot, which brought bad reviews and slowed consumer adoption. Even after changes were made, pricing has remained a huge sticking point, with games running upwards of $40 USD.

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The Motion Picture Association of America sued a Wisconsin grandfather on Tuesday for allegedly downloading several movies to his home computer. However, there's one small problem with the case: the man doesn't like to watch movies, nor does he have any intention of downloading them.

Fred Lawrence, 67, of Racine says that his 12-year-old grandson apparently downloaded four movies from the P2P file service iMesh in December 2004. The family actually owns three of the four movies, and Lawrence says his grandson had no intention of breaking, nor knowledge of copyright laws.

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Silicon Graphics, the former king of 3D and advanced computing that was founded by Netscape backer Jim Clark, announced it will be delisted from the New York Stock Exchange as of November 7. SGI stock has been trading at below $1.00, which is the minimum requirement for the NYSE.

"As previously reported, SGI received notice from the NYSE on May 9, 2005 that SGI's common stock had fallen below the NYSE's minimum share price standard," the company said in the announcement. SGI shares will now trade as a penny stock on the OTC Bulletin Board.

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Although one prior N series phone has still not reached store shelves, Nokia pushed ahead on Wednesday, announcing three new phones it will market as convergence devices. The N series phones focus on multimedia features, and the new upgraded handsets are no exception.

The predecessor of one of the new devices, the Nokia N91, remains unreleased. The 4GB N91 music phone was pushed to a 2006 release following issues regarding content and problems with Microsoft's DRM. The Nokia N70 and N90, however, are now available in Europe.

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Netflix has settled class action lawsuit brought against the company last year for allegedly duping potential customers by advertising "unlimited" DVD rentals and "one day delivery." Current and former Netflix customers will receive a one-month perk, but the real winners of the settlement are the lawyers.

While not admitting any wrongdoing, Netflix will provide customers with a one-month service level upgrade free of charge. This means that Netflix users subscribed to the 3 DVDs at-a-time program will be upgraded to 4 DVDs at-a-time for one month. After the free month, customers must remember to downgrade their service manually or face higher fees.

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In an effort to put its service in front of more customers in an increasingly competitive and consolidated market, Sprint is turning to the nation's cable operators. The company announced Wednesday that it had reached agreements with four of the largest cable providers to form a joint venture to converge television and wireless technologies.

Comcast, Cox Communications, Time Warner Cable, and Advance/Newhouse Communications are the four cable companies involved in the deal.

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Browser market share statistics from Web analytics firm OneStat.com indicate that usage of Mozilla Firefox has surpassed the 10 percent milestone, reaching 11.51 percent globally in its most recent survey released Wednesday.

However, the data somewhat conflicts with previous information that indicated usage numbers of the alternative browser might have been inflated due to Netscape reporting itself as Firefox. That survey, from NetApplications.com, placed Firefox's market share at around 8 percent.

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Sun on Tuesday added two new offerings to its Grid Utility service in an aim to attract more customers to company's fledgling computing-on-demand initiative. The service will now allow customers to convert proprietary productivity suite files -- like those from Microsoft Office -- to the OpenDocument format, and convert text files to audio.

The applications are part of Sun Grid, a $1 per CPU-hour utility from the company that it says puts affordable supercomputing power in front of more users.

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