Internet News

DENVER (Billboard) - When Napster reported its fiscal first-quarter results in August, it tried to paint a positive picture to investors who were growing increasingly nervous about the company's future.

A Web site for matching buyers and sellers of wireless spectrum went live on Friday.

Nearly 20 percent of American households are tuning into TV over the Internet. That's twice the number from 2006, according to new research from The Conference Board Consumer Research Center and market-research firm TNS. The most popular destinations for online broadcasts? The official TV channel home page and YouTube.com.

SEOUL, South Korea - Samsung Electronics Co. is pursuing an acquisition of U.S. computer memory card maker SanDisk Corp., a South Korean online business newspaper reported Friday.

When Apple opened its iTunes App Store in July, the idea of a mass-market Web site that sells downloadable games, tools, and other applications for cell phones was a rarity. Handset owners could buy apps from their carriers or the occasional niche site. But these days, the app store concept is becoming commonplace. The question is, does the world need a warren of wireless app stores?

Comcast fired back at the Federal Communications Commission on Thursday in its long-running duel with the agency. The cable-TV and Internet service provider filed suit in the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C.

HUMBLE START: Larry Page and Sergey Brin incorporated Google on Sept. 7, 1998, after unsuccessfully trying to sell their search engine for a couple of million dollars. They set up shop in their Stanford dorm rooms with just four computers before moving their headquarters to a garage owned by Brin's future sister-in-law.

BEIJING (Reuters) - Does Chinese President Hu Jintao give you goosebumps? Got the hots for Premier Wen Jiabao? Then Communist Party mouthpiece the People's Daily has the answer -- join their online fan club.

John McCain's announcement last week that he has chosen Sarah Palin as his running mate left the public thirsting for information about the Alaska governor-- and inspired hundreds of commentators, entrepreneurs, and Palin imitators to try to fill in the gaps.

Filmmaker Michael Moore plans to premiere his latest documentary exclusively on the Internet for free, forgoing the traditional theatrical release.

NEW ORLEANS, Louisiana (AFP) - In what is heralded as the seeds of an Internet-age emergency broadcast system, MySpace has teamed with the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to spread news on hurricanes through users of the online social network.

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Firebrand filmmaker Michael Moore will release his latest documentary exclusively on the Internet for free on September 23, eschewing a traditional theatrical rollout, he said on Thursday.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Comcast Corp has filed an appeal to reverse a U.S. Federal Communication Commission (FCC) decision ordering the cable operator to change how it manages its broadband Internet network.

SAN FRANCISCO - Yahoo Inc.'s stock sank to its lowest level in nearly five years Thursday, magnifying the challenge facing the Internet company as its management tries to justify their rebuff of Microsoft Corp.'s $47.5 billion takeover bid.

NEW YORK (Billboard) - Target and Target.com (http://www.target.com/) will be the sole retailers to carry Christina Aguilera's first greatest hits collection, "Keeps Gettin' Better - A Decade of Hits," due November 11.

WASHINGTON - Comcast Corp. is appealing an FCC ruling that the company is improperly blocking customers' Web traffic, triggering a legal battle that could determine the extent of the government's authority to regulate the Internet.

Google has added a new level of detail to the tools advertisers can use to track the performance of their search-ad campaigns, showing them the geographic region of the users who clicked on the ads.

NEW YORK - Google Inc.'s new Web browser, called Chrome, does much of what a browser needs to do these days: It presents a sleek appearance, groups pages into easy-to-manage "tabs" and offers several ways for people to control their Internet privacy settings.

Democratic presidential hopeful Sen. Barack Obama has run a more advanced online campaign during the first half of 2008 than his Republican opponent Sen. John McCain, according to a Thursday report from comScore.

BERLIN (AFP) - German ministers agreed on Thursday to update data protection laws for the digital age in the wake of scandals showing how easily personal details can be bought on the Internet.

Google Chrome. It's a browser that was admittedly still in the development oven when Google released it, so are Internet Explorer 8-killer comments premature? Some analysts think so.

Online TV viewership has doubled since 2006, according to a Thursday study from market research firms the Conference Board and TNS.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The blogs are alive with the sound of Sarah.

TRENTON, N.J. - The popular social networking Web site Facebook has agreed to test replacing its own link for reporting abuse with a bigger one developed by the New Jersey Attorney General's Office.

BANGKOK (Reuters) - Asia will continue to deliver strong growth in the mobile phone market due to sustained demand from China and India, the world's two biggest markets of such services, industry officials said.

CANBERRA, Australia (Reuters) - Stephenie Meyer, author of the best-selling young adult "Twilight" books, has put the fifth and final installment in the series on hold in protest after a partial draft was posted on the Internet.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - A monthly online gauge of labor demand in the United States rose slightly in August from the prior month but was 14.5 percent down from a year ago, a private research group said on Thursday.

LONDON (AFP) - Google's chief executive admitted Thursday there was a "defensive component" to the Web search giant's launch of its own Internet browser, thereby pitting it against Microsoft's dominant software.

Add another possibility to the list of possible announcements at Apple's iPod event next week: a new version of iTunes.