Wired Tech news

Google is in talks with music labels on plans for a download store and a digital song locker that would allow its mobile users to play songs wherever they are as it steps up its rivalry with Apple, according to people familiar with the matter.

Recent greentech IPOs have had mixed and less than stellar results. Here are some wild prognostications of ten potential greentech IPOs coming in late 2010 through 2012. These companies have real products, serious revenue and the prospect of profits in high-growth markets.

Take heed, tech giants of today. Some of your companies or services aren’t much older than the Edison Trust Studios was when it collapsed. How much of your current business strategy is based on offering new and original products, and how much of it is based on laws, courts, and the fact that you got there first?

While there’s plenty of reasons to keep a critical eye focused on Google, Consumer Watchdog’s ad is a dishonest, factually inaccurate joke that shamefully got plenty of uncritical media attention. In the simplest terms possible, Consumer Watchdog is just wrong.

The “Adult Services” listing on Craiglist was removed late Friday on its U.S.-based sites and replaced with the word 'censored.' The change comes as the service faces growing pressure in the U.S. over sex services advertised on its classifieds network, as well as allegations that it abets in human sex trafficking.

The increasingly popular online shopping site Thefind has finally found a way to connect with Facebook, without being creepy. It’s not a technical breakthrough — plenty of sites now work with Facebook to let users log-in — but Thefind has been grappling with how to integrate with Facebook in a way that’s relevant and privacy-respectful.

This week’s big Apple announcement featured one big disappointment: Apple TV’s relative lack of, well, TV. Out of all of the hundreds of channels available on cable and satellite, only ABC and Fox agreed to offer their programs for rent on Apple TV. The fact that Steve Jobs is the largest single shareholder in, and on the board of, Disney — owner of ABC — perfectly illustrates this digital divide.

People in Silicon Valley have focused on the set-top box as the lever to attack the cable industry. Cable boxes blow, but that's a losing battle. So why is Apple TV different? Because Steve Jobs has not just created a new set top box. He's actually created a whole new media ecosystem built around the mobile phone.

Video calls aren't for people to see you — they're for people to see what you see.

We know — the new Apple TV is really small, and cheap and easy-to-use. That's all good, but still not knocking our socks off despite being the ripest area for expansion by a company that has already firmly established itself on the computer, phone, portable media player and tablet. Here are five reasons Apple TV is still boring.

Apple audaciously seems to think the world actually needs another social network — one that you even need special software to be part of, to boot. With the introduction Wednesday of Ping, a music-centered community that exists only within iTunes, they are probably right — and then some.

Federal regulators are putting off efforts to regain authority over the nation’s internet providers while they seek renewed public input on net neutrality.

Breaking with a longstanding but unstated policy, Apple has decided to publish a live video stream of Wednesday's press conference. The stream will be optimized for Mac, iPhone and iPad users only.

Online video creators, advertisers and producers have an unhealthy fascination with viral videos, and that obsession is dragging down the entire industry. Why? Because viral videos are, at their core, no better than a fluffernutter white-bread sandwich, delivering little or no value to anyone.

Gmail users can now choose to let Google sort their inbox by the most pressing messages, thanks to a new feature called Priority Inbox — think of it as a sort of reverse spam filter which bubbles messages to the top of the queue based on what you read and respond to.

The venerable Oxford English Dictionary isn't even one-third finished with what will be only its third revision in 80 years. But already there is talk that the multivolume work, which has informed scholars and fussy linguists, may eschew print entirely when the new edition is completed in about decade.

We don’t know exactly what to call the online collaboration between Arcade Fire and Google that launched Monday morning, but it sure is neat. If music videos were invented for the web they might have looked something like this: The project uses the web browser itself as an artistic medium, showing off the HTML5’s potential for interaction and multi-paned viewing rather than just using the browser as a frame for a plain, television-style video.

Google is reportedly in talks with the major movie studios to launch mainstream, pay-per-view video rentals on YouTube by year's end. YouTube's movie rental program currently focuses on independent filmmakers and music artists and the addition would represent a significant development.

The social news site Reddit staged a mini-rebellion Friday, deciding to run ads for a pro-marijuana legalization campaign for free, after Condé Nast executives ruled against taking payment for the ads.

A long-simmering bill in North Carolina that sought to make community-owned broadband networks much more difficult to establish was sponsored by a prominent state lawmaker and backed by incumbent ISPs, including the cable lobby. But it’s not like those ISPs actually wrote the now-discarded bill, right? Um ...