Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) has again raised its bid for 3Par (PAR), trumping a superior bid made by Dell (DELL) just hours before. HP offered $33 a share for the data-storage company, surpassing Dell’s counter-offer of $32 a share and pushing the total value of the deal to $2.4 billion. [Details to follow] PREVIOUSLY Will Dell Bail on [...] Read More »

The plot thickens! While two official Apple pages tout an ability to use Facebook to find friends on its new social music offering in ITunes called Ping, which would be very useful, the feature is now not available on the service. CEO Steve Jobs told me that “onerous terms” prevented the integration at Apple launch event yesterday. Which is why it is odd that Apple’s SVP of worldwide product marketing Phil Schiller said in the interview below that I also did at the confab minutes before that “you can use your Facebook contacts to find friends who are also on Ping and hook up to them.” Read More »

Why isn’t Ping playing with Facebook? It’s Facebook’s fault, says Apple CEO Steve Jobs: The social network demanded “onerous terms” to connect with Apple’s social music play. But clearly there’s more to the story. Because while Facebook isn’t connected to Ping right now, it had been up through the service’s launch last night, and even for some time after that. Read More »

Brandon or Dylan? Brenda or Kelly? I don’t care at all, but some of you seem very invested in the classic (?) 90s show. So for you people, today’s date has a weird importance. The wayback machine beckons… Read More »

In a surprisingly quick and even stealthy move, AOL has renewed and expanded its search agreement with Google, even though many had expected there to be more competitive bidding throughout the fall to win the deal. The five-year deal, which is actually the third between the companies since 2002, to provide search technology and search advertising by powering AOL Search is more wide-ranging than the one it replaces. It also includes improved search products, global search, mobile search and also a video distribution arrangement with YouTube, which could evolve over time to include content partnerships. Read More »

Apple events are typically heavy on metrics and yesterday’s affair was no exception. In fact, it was more abundant with the stats than most I’ve seen, with CEO Steve Jobs trotting out quite an array of big milestone numbers with which to mark the company’s achievements. After the jump, a list of most of them. Read More »

Yesterday, at the Apple music event in San Francisco, I had a short chat with Apple CEO Steve Jobs about its new social music service, called Ping. Essentially, it is a vertical version–in this case for music–of Facebook. But, except for Apple borrowing the blue color scheme from the powerful social networking site, Facebook is nowhere on Ping. So, Jobs explained why. Read More »

Here is a lovely movie from the Apple iPod, iPad, iTumes, TV and, now, Ping event yesterday in San Francisco. (Yes, this is a photo of me channeling Walt Mossberg in a chat with CEO Steve Jobs in the demo area.) It includes the you-are-there shots of Jobs onstage, as well as scenes from the media throng and more, as the tech giant unveiled updates, additions and renovations of old stuff and also launched new stuff. Read More »

Amazon.com Inc. cut the price on some downloaded TV shows to 99 cents from $2.99 in the wake of Apple Inc.’s announcement Wednesday it will begin streaming some shows for 99 cents. Read More »

BoomTown does not plan to get into the endless so-and-so launches an Apple iPad app news cycle, because it is not really news, except to the more breathless fanboy tech bloggers. But Twitter’s intro of one tonight in the App Store is probably more important than most. “Twitter for iPad,” said the company, “makes it even easier for people to explore Tweets and discover new content and accounts on Twitter.” We’ll reserve judgement on that. Read More »

Within the next several weeks, the New Yorker magazine will be publishing big pieces about a pair of digital icons located on the East and West coasts–an assessment of the turnaround at AOL by staff writer Ken Auletta and a profile of Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg by Huffington Post senior contributing editor Jose Antonio Vargas. So fire up the iPad! Read More »

The number of Internet users in the top emerging markets is set to nearly double by 2015 — a pace of growth that sounds enticing but that actually presents plenty of challenges for businesses, according to a Boston Consulting Group report released Wednesday. The report estimates that China, India, Brazil, Russia and Indonesia will have 1.2 billion Internet users within five years, up from about 610 million in 2009. Read More »

Here’s one lawsuit averted! In case you were wondering, Apple had gone ahead and cleared the name of its new music service before launching the thing. That’s unlike its 2007 iPhone imbroglio, which led to a trademark dispute with Cisco. In this case, Apple reached a deal in advance with the PING golf brand and its owners, Karsten Manufacturing Corporation. Read More »

Steve Jobs may call Apple TV a hobby, and it certainly hasn’t met with the runaway success of some of the company’s products. But Jobs is an avid collector of both users and cooperative media companies, and with that in mind, Apple, as widely rumored, announced a new version of the gadget today, equipped to stream videos rented from iTunes. Read More »