EU Approves Vivendi-Activision $9.85 Billion Video Game Deal
Activision is riding high on the success of games such as Guitar Hero, Call of Duty, and Tony Hawk, but has lacked an offering such as World of Warcraft.

AT&T Launches Starbucks Wi-Fi Service In San Antonio
Blogger Alan Weinkrantz, the first to use the service, reported that it worked perfectly.

PluggedIn Music Video Site Lauded As The Next MTV
Overbrook Entertainment, whose partners include actor/musician Will Smith, launched the site with more than 10,000 free high-def music videos from EMI, Sony BMG, and others.

Mobile Banking To Grow Tenfold
The number of transactions is expected to rise from 2.7 billion in 2007 to 37 billion by 2011, as banks continue to deploy more services, Juniper Research says.

Comcast, Pando Call For P2P Bill Of Rights, Responsibilities
Despite the cable provider's plans to work with BitTorrent and other ISPs, critics say companies should not create consumer protection plans.

Google Earth Resurfaced
The 4.3 beta has improved photo-realistic renderings and includes a new sunlight button to observe how light changes over time and at different times of day.

Online Retail Group Urges Caution On Behavioral Advertising Guidelines
Shop.org says consumers aren't hurt by tracking technology and the Federal Trade Commission's report on the subject was too broad.

Yahoo Hit With $1 Million Click Fraud Lawsuit
Bigreds.com accuses the search engine of participating in one of the multi-billion dollar search marketing industry's dark secrets.

Mickos: Sun Has Expertise That MySQL Needs, Vice Versa
Downloads of the open source database have increased by 10,000 per day since its recent acquisition by Sun.

Six Apart Gives Facebook Users Free Blogging Tool
The feature lets Facebook users create blog posts and post them through any one of 10 blogging services, including Blogger, Movable Type, TypePad, Twitter, Vox, and WordPress.

Yahoo Launches Upgraded Search Crawler
As the rollout of Slurp 3.0 begins, sites using IP-based recognition of crawlers might see a drop in Yahoo activity, the company said.

AOL Nets Related Content Provider Sphere
The acquisition of the blog content company is aimed at speeding AOL's transformation from an ISP to a Web 2.0 company.

Curl's Nitro Takes Aim At Adobe AIR
The two companies also compete with Microsoft's Windows Presentation Foundation and Silverlight in the online-offline rich Internet app runtime marketplace.

Google Helps Group Find Child Predators On The Web
The software tools help the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children sift through millions of pornographic images and videos from the Web to find child sex predators.

USPTO Launches Pilot To Expedite Patents
The First Action Interview pilot program will allow certain patent applicants a chance to resolve issues one-on-one early in the process.

Nokia 3G Handset Optimized For Mobile Payments
The 6212 is enabled with near field communication technology that is designed to simplify wireless data transfers.

Microsoft, Sigma Designs Collaborate On Set-Top Box Technology
Sigma's SoC design for Microsoft's Mediaroom internet TV platform improves overall performance by about 50%, the companies said.

Google's KML Format Approved As Open Standard
The file format used in Google Earth and Google Maps is already being used by Microsoft.

Sun Microsystems Expands Streaming Media Systems
The accompanying software enables service providers to scale from 500 to more than 1.5 million subscribers and from 200 to more than 1 million hours of content.

Google Comes Knocking In Search Of Hidden Data
By crawling using HTML forms (and abiding by robots.txt), Google claims it leads search engine users to documents that otherwise would not be easily found -- but privacy concerns remain.

Google, Salesforce Partnership Owes Legacy To Microsoft, SAP, Oracle
While the integration of Salesforce and Google Apps builds on work of its predecessors, it also represents a fundamental departure from most of those previous integration efforts.

Layered Technologies Buys FastServers.net
Layered is targeting its growth toward consolidation and virtualization in the data center, as corporations look to reduce high real estate and leasing costs.

GrandCentral Recovers After Weekend Outage
The outage appeared to be the first for the service, which Google acquired in June of 2007.

Higher Antitrust Bar For Yahoo, Google Partnership
Any deal between the world's two largest Internet search services will draw heavy scrutiny from U.S. and European competition regulators, analysts suggest.

Mobile Browsing Set For Major Growth
ABI forecasts 700 million browsers shipped in 2013, compared with 76 million in 2007.

Microsoft Calls On Net Advertisers To Adopt Privacy Standards
The company told the FTC that Internet advertising companies should adopt a five-tiered system of standards to protect consumer privacy.

Minneapolis Proves That Big City Wireless Municipal Networks Can Work
In contrast to similar projects beset by cancellations or cutbacks, the city's massive 57-square-mile metro Wi-Fi network has surpassed expectations.