Daily News Channel
YouTube is in talks to acquire licensing rights to full-length content from Sony Pictures, home of such films as "The International" and "Spider-Man," sources familiar with the negotiations told CNET News. Details about what a final agreement could look like are sparse, but any partnership between the two powerhouses would likely benefit both. Representatives from both companies declined to comment
Months after teasing us at CES with an announcement of Skype’s native VoIP client for the iPhone, the free Skype for iPhone will finally be available to download from the iTunes App Store sometime on Tuesday.
In an industry dominated by men, leave it to women to come up with the winning idea in a contest to create a concept for a video game about losing one’s virginity. On Wednesday, at the Game Developers Conference here, the two-woman team of Heather Kelley and Erin Robinson won the Game Design Challenge with just 36 hours of preparation, while their competitors had weeks to come up with concepts for a game about “your first time.” This was the sixth straight year of the design challenge, hosted annually by New York-based game developer Eric Zimmerman.
IMDb founder Col Needham said the massively popular movie database has set as its major goal for the future to add one-button streaming for all of the 1.3 million titles it indexes. Obviously, the vision is a long-term one, Needham acknowledged, and it faces hurdles from the slew of content owners who control the vast library of titles the Internet Movie Database provides information about, but as a leading movie-oriented site, it’s a very important goal to articulate in public. Needham was speaking Monday afternoon at the South by Southwest (SXSW) Film Festival here.
Taking a different approach to Google’s Latitude software, Yahoo has released a Facebook application called Friends on Fire that lets people share their location with each other.
Google plans to unveil a service called Google Voice on Thursday that indicates Google wants to do with your telephone communications what companies such as Yahoo have done with e-mail. Google Voice, the new version of the GrandCentral technology Google acquired in July 2007, has the potential to make the search giant a middleman in an important part of people’s lives, telephone communications. With the service, people can pick a new phone number from Google Voice; when others call it, Google can ring all the actual phones a person uses and handle voice mail.
Well, here’s what we’ve all been waiting for. Apple put out a couple of announcements on Tuesday related to its desktop computers. The company unveiled a new Mac Pro high-end desktop powered by Intel’s “Nehalem” processor, a new and more graphics-intensive Mac Mini machine, and updated iMacs that include the lowest price point yet for the consumer desktops
On an otherwise placid holiday weekend, one blog’s commentary on a change to Facebook’s terms of service created a firestorm of banter on the Web: does the social network claim ownership to any user content on the site, even if the user deletes it? Facebook reorganized its terms of service last Wednesday. In a blog post, company legal representative Suzie White provided an explanation
Last year my 26-year-old assistant asked me to write her a recommendation for business school. I was happy to help. For two years, Megan had worked around the clock, or so it surely felt to her, bringing insight to my work and order to my life.
Microsoft is gearing up to take on rival Apple in the smartphone market. The Wall Street Journal reported Monday that Microsoft is getting ready to launch an online marketplace akin to Apple’s App Store. Microsoft is also readying a more sophisticated version of its mobile operating system called Windows Mobile 6.5, the Journal reported.