New articles from the Associated Press have quietly started rolling out on Google’s news site in the past hour, ending a nearly seven-week absence stemming from contentious negotiations between the two parties. Read More »

The fine folks at comScore have graciously allowed BoomTown to embed a very good report it released this week about the digital landscape. Titled “”The 2009 U.S. Digital Year in Review: A Recap of the Year in Digital Marketing,” it’s chock-a-block full of all kinds of interesting information, from declining growth rates for e-commerce to core search market share to social networking trends to display advertising to what’s the big trends in video and mobile. Also, lots of pretty charts! Here’s the whole enchilada for those who like to gorge on digital data. Read More »

More talking, less texting. That’s the spin Sequoia Capital-backed Bubble Motion is putting on mobile social networking. Read More »

It’s a truism that mobile data traffic these days is growing at an extraordinary rate. But that doesn’t make the findings of mobile data growth by Cisco any less dramatic. According to the company’s Visual Networking Index Global Mobile Data Forecast, worldwide mobile data traffic could hit 40 exabytes by 2014, or 3.6 exabytes per month. Read More »

Real Networks and Viacom are reorganizing Rhapsody, their joint-venture music service, and will be spinning it off into an independent company, they told the Securities and Exchange Commission today. Rhapsody, along with Best Buy’s Napster, sell music via monthly subscription, as opposed to Apple’s a la carte download offering. But neither service has been able to gain much traction, despite years of effort. More shortly. Read More »

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski gets a little peeved when people suggests that he wants to regulate the Internet. Read More »

Can a microblogging twist on Gmail raise Google’s profile in social networking? We’ll soon find out. At an event at company headquarters today, Google announced Google Buzz, a new Twitter-style status update system for the email service that will allow users to share their everyday mundanities and inanities and follow those of selected contacts. Read More »

Electronic Arts Inc.’s loss narrowed in the holiday quarter from a year-ago period that was weighed down by charges. But the videogame publisher issued a weak outlook for the current quarter, sending its shares tumbling 10% after hours. Read More »

IAC/Interactive, the Barry Diller-piloted Internet conglomerate, this morning posted Q4 results that beat Street expectations. The company reported revenue of $367.2 million, ahead of the Street at $339.6 million; adjusted EPS of 20 cents a share was two cents better than the consensus at 18 cents. Read More »

Apple’s recent reiteration of support for AT&T and its decision to debut the iPad on the carrier’s network are fueling speculation that AT&T may hold on to its iPhone exclusive far longer than anyone is expecting. Indeed, in a note to clients today, Barclays Capital analyst Vijay Jayant suggests that the arrangement will last through the summer, perhaps to year’s end. Read More »

Book publishers itching to raise the prices on their e-books should pay attention to the music labels, which raised the prices on their downloads last spring. Consumers, it turns out, like paying less for stuff. Read More »

Yesterday, the day after after Google aired its first national commercial on the Super Bowl, an exec at a rival Internet company marveled at what high favorable scores the “Parisian Love” advertisement got, adding that the possibilities for spoofs were endless. “I have a feeling that making fun of it will probably be a good thing for Google,” sighed the exec, who would dearly like such attention. And, indeed, it did not take two seconds before the takeoffs on the ad–an unusually sentimental, but effective, ongoing story about love in Paris, using only Google’s iconic search box–appeared. Read More »

Here’s a metric to consider in advance of The Mobile World Congress next week and the likely debut of Microsoft’s Windows Mobile 7 operating system: As widely maligned as it is, Windows Mobile was still running on 18 percent of U.S. smartphones at the end of 2009, according to comScore. Read More »

Intel loves to talk about Moore’s Law, its co-founder’s famed maxim about how rapidly miniaturization improves semiconductors. The company also prides itself on setting the pace, underscoring the strategy recently by deploying its most tiny circuitry in microprocessors for mainstream PCs. Read More »

A former Universal Music executive, now headed to Yahoo, explains concisely why his former employer and the other big guys are just playing out the string: CD sales are wasting away, and the digital boost they were counting on simply isn’t big enough. Read More »