AOL announced on Friday (12-01-2007) that it has named Napster as the exclusive music subscription service provider for its AOL Music site, replacing AOL Music Now, which claimed 350,000 paid subscribers. The companies will work to migrate existing subscribers to the Napster service, which will promoted throughout AOL’s free music site. Napster charges $9.95 per [...]

Microsoft is planning to cease development of the PlaysForSure DRM technology that it provides to online music stores and portable player manufacturers, according to reports. According to reports coming out of the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Microsoft will concentrate exclusively on its Zune platform, which is not compatible with PlaysForSure. Microsoft has neither [...]

Taking a page from Google Trends, Google software engineer Mihai Parparita said on Wednesday in a blog post that Google’s browser-based RSS reader now includes a Reader Trends page. Google Reader’s new Trend page shows the user his or her subscriptions, starred items, read items, and shared items. It tracks the number of items posted [...]

A group of Stanford students have launched a Web 2.0 project called Spokeo, which allows members to track over 20 social networking and other sites, including MySpace, Xanga, YouTube and Flickr. The multimedia aggregation tool can track friends’ blogs, photos and videos in a constantly updated news stream feed. The service also supports RSS/Atom feeds, [...]

Microsoft has signed an agreement with Chinese search giant Baidu, CNET News.com reported on Friday. Under the deal, Baidu will provide paid search listings on the Chinese versions of Microsoft sites including MSN and Live Search. According to Web traffic measurement service Alexa, Baidu is the fourth most-visited site in the world. Links: http://tinyurl.com/yh4bjg http://ir.baidu.com

One of the lead developers behind the Firefox browser has accused Google of abusing its powerful position in the search market to promote its growing range of products. In a blog posting last week, Blake Ross argued Google is wrong to include plugs for its Calendar, Blogger and Picasa at the top of search results [...]

The number of online searches made on Microsoft Windows Live Search fell 12% in November to 8.2% of the total number of Web searches, according to Nielsen/NetRatings. Microsoft continued to lose market share in online search in November, while rivals Google and Yahoo made significant gains, a monthly U.S. study shows. The number of online [...]

Google is set to get some new competition in the Internet search business, and this time it isn’t from a well-known company such as Microsoft or Yahoo!. Instead, Jimmy Wales, founder of the popular online encyclopaedia Wikipedia, is turning his attention to online search and applying the same principles that made Wikipedia so successful. The [...]

Nayio Media on Wednesday launched its melody-based music search tool, which can identify tunes consumers hum into a computer’s microphone. The Web-based service cross-references the hummed tune with Napster’s library of more than 3 million songs and delivers a list of potential matches, each accompanied by a direct link to where consumers can listen to [...]

Attributor, a company looking at new ways to provide DRM (digital rights management), is promising to release a technology that will scan the Internet for unauthorized uses of copyright digital media. Attributor, founded in 2005, plans to release a product in early 2007. The second round of funding was led by Sigma Partners, a venture [...]

The U.S. Senate on Friday approved a bill that would outlaw the practice of “pretexting,” or obtaining the phone records of someone without their permission, CNET News.com reported. The action follows revelations that executives at HP used the practice to obtain the cell phone records of several journalists and board members in order to identify [...]

Sales at Apple’s iTunes Store fell 65% in the first six months of 2006, according to a survey of U.S. iTunes debit and credit card purchases conducted by Forrester Research. The number of monthly iTunes transactions dropped 58% in the first half of 2006, while the average size of purchase also declined by 17%, the [...]

The International Mozart Foundation in Austria has published the entirety of the composer’s more than 600 works on its website. In addition to 24,000 pages of music, the free site includes more than 8,000 pages of critical reports and commentary on Mozart. The site is essentially a digitized version of the “New Mozart Edition,” a [...]

People are beginning to worry more an more about the possible hazards of exposure to wireless network signals. In a recent article by The Times, Dr Michael Clark, of the Health Protection Agency says, “a year sitting in a classroom near a wireless network is roughly equivalent to 20 minutes on a mobile. If wi-fi [...]

Still drooling over Firefox 2? The alpha version of Firefox 3.0, Gran Paradiso, has just been uploaded to Mozilla_s public FTP server for download. According to the Mozilla Wiki, one new feature planned for Firefox 3 new is “places”,a fresh approach to bookmarks and browser history. Another improvement is in the “tabbed browsing” department, adding [...]