The conversations weren’t explicitly aimed at recruiting a new chief executive and were more of an informal exploration of the company’s options, said these people. The directors don’t appear to have been acting on behalf of the full board, some of these people said. Apple has seven directors, including Mr. Jobs.

It is also unclear whether Mr. Jobs was aware. In response to questions from The Wall Street Journal about the discussions, Mr. Jobs said Monday in an email, “I think it’s hogwash.” An Apple spokesman declined to comment.

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“I know this has been a frustrating time for all of you,” Mr. Stringer said in a blog post addressed to Sony customers late Thursday evening. “Let me assure you that the resources of this company have been focused on investigating the entire nature and impact of the cyber-attack we’ve all experienced and on fixing it.”

The intrusion, which occurred last month, resulted in the theft of names, email addresses and possibly credit-card information from its PlayStation Network and Sony Online Entertainment gaming services. Sony took down the PlayStation Network over two weeks ago to investigate the intrusion and secure the network from future attacks.

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This is the message Mr. Sheeran, a 44-year-old technology executive in the Seattle area, got instead: “Just wanted to know that your punches ordered the done in the Dipper pickup. Ok. Then you can pick up the French abortion.”

Mr. Sheeran was bewildered. “It sounded like a coded message for a drug deal,” he says.

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The marketing deal being discussed by San Francisco-based Zynga and the singer involve Lady Gaga’s third studio album “Born This Way,” due to be released May 23, though the exact details of their agreement are still being worked out, these people said. There are more than 250 million active monthly players of Zynga’s online games on Facebook, which include FarmVille and CityVille.

Spokeswomen for Zynga and Lady Gaga declined to comment.

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If such a deal were to come to fruition it would add a new competitor to the television industry by increasing the degree to which Netflix vies with premium-cable television channels like Time Warner Inc.’s HBO.

The discussions for the series–a political drama called “House of Cards” based on a British miniseries–is part of a growing behind-the-scenes push by Netflix to secure from Hollywood production companies more original shows that will run initially on Netflix’s streaming Internet service, according to a person familiar with Netflix’s plans. Original series like “The Sopranos,” “The Wire” and “True Blood” have been a big part of HBO’s growth over the years.

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Microsoft’s decision to include the tool in Internet Explorer 9 means Google Inc. and Apple Inc. are the only big providers of browsers that haven’t yet declared their support for a do-no-track system in their products. In January, Mozilla Corp. said it would include a do-not-track feature in an upcoming version of its Firefox browser. Internet Explorer is the most widely used browser.

The moves by Microsoft and Mozilla reflect an unusually fast adoption of an idea—the do-not-track system—that was first officially proposed by the Federal Trade Commission only three months ago. It highlights the pressure the industry faces to provide people with a way to control how they are tracked and targeted online, as lawmakers and regulators threaten to rein in the practice.

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Hipmunk, which just raised $4.2 million from a roster of online travel veterans and venture capitalists, gives users access to the familiar airline fares they’re used to on other sites. But the company has a slick visual interface that arrays all of the travel options for a given trip on a grid that shows the hours of day along one axis. Each airfare is represented by a rectangle (color-coded for each airline), the length of which is determined by the duration of the trip, layovers included.

The layout makes it easier to see lots of airfare options at a glance. But another key feature of Hipmunk is its method of ranking the most attractive travel options according to an “agony score.”

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Silver Lake, a private equity firm with investments in Skype and other technology companies, has invested an undisclosed amount in PrimeSense Inc., a company behind some of the key ingredients in Kinect, a device that lets Xbox 360 players operate games with body movements. One of the hit products of the holiday season, Microsoft says it shipped more than 8 million Kinects in the product’s first 60 days on the market.

The Kinect’s success has put a spotlight on the category of gesture recognition, an area PrimeSense is seeking to develop with a variety of new non-game applications. At the Consumer Electronics Show last week, the PC maker Asustek showed off a product called the Wave Xtion that uses PrimeSense to navigate Web content and other PC applications on a television set. PrimeSense also showed its technology in action with televisions from Haier and others.

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The milestone means “Call of Duty: Black Ops” crossed the $1 billion threshold nearly a month earlier than the last version of the game, “Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, “which came out in early November 2009. In a news release, Activision CEO Bobby Kotick said only “Call of Duty” and the movie “Avatar” have passed $1 billion in revenue so quickly.

In an interview, Kotick attributed the improved performance of “Black Ops” to the quality of the game, including the manner in which it allows even novice gamers to easily start playing the combat game.

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Fanhattan, previously known as Vuze, on Thursday announced a service of the same name that will provide a single interface from which consumers can search for movies and television shows from a variety of distributors of online video. In theory, the distributors Fanhattan can search include Netflix, Apple’s iTunes Store, Hulu, Amazon and others, though Fanhattan doesn’t yet have deals with those providers.

The problem the company is seeking to address will be familiar to power users of Web video. No single source of online video provides anything remotely approaching a comprehensive selection of movies and television shows, in large part because of arcane Hollywood licensing schemes that dictate when certain material can be made available through which distribution vehicle and under which pricing models (rental, sales and subscription services).

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All that poses a potential threat to the traditional way consumers watch movies and TV: cable, phone and satellite systems.
Netflix had 16.9 million subscribers at the end of September, up 52 percent from a year earlier.

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A game called Angry Birds is dominating the best-selling-applications charts for Apple’s iPhone with a simple, whimsical premise: Players turn different species of scowling birds into projectiles with which to crush a collection of grunting pigs scattered around various ramshackle structures. More than 12 million copies of Angry Birds have been sold since it went on sale late last year, most of them 99-cent downloads for iPhones and iPod touches, according to Rovio Mobile Ltd., the Finnish company that created the game.

Why do smart people love seemingly mindless games? Angry Birds is one of the latest to join the pantheon of “casual games” that have appealed to a mass audience with a blend of addictive game play, memorable design and deft marketing. The games are designed to be played in short bursts, sometimes called “entertainment snacking” by industry executives, and there is no stigma attached to adults pulling out their mobile phones and playing in most places. Games like Angry Birds incorporate cute, warm graphics, amusing sound effects and a reward system to make players feel good.

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Accel Partners and Tiger Global Management are investing $30 million in Vostu, a startup that has grown quickly in Brazil with a collection of games that have spread through Orkut, a Google-owned social networking site that’s popular in Latin America’s biggest Internet market. Jim Breyer, a partner at Accel and Facebook board member, will join Vostu’s board of directors.

Vostu has become to Brazil what Zynga, the creator of the inescapable Farmville game on Facebook, is to the U.S. market. Vostu’s biggest game is Mini Fazenda, a Farmville-like game that lets players cultivate virtual crops. The company makes money by charging people to buy virtual goods, like tractors and other items, which help their farms thrive.

“Vostu is profitable and well-capitalized and continues to grow at an extraordinary pace,” says the company’s CEO Daniel Kafie, who cofounded Vostu with two classmates from Harvard University, Joshua Kushner and Mario Schlosser.

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Dohring’s new venture, Age of Learning Inc., plans to launch a Web site called ABCmouse.com Early Learning Academy designed to teach basic reading, math, science and other subjects to children between the ages of two and six. In some ways, the site is a big departure from Neopets, which Dohring sold to Viacom Inc. in 2005 for $160 million.

For starters, he says there won’t be any advertisements on ABCmouse.com, which will instead charge parents $7.95 a month or $79.95 for a year (the site will be free to public schools in the U.S. and Canada that apply, he says). Some parents and children’s advocacy groups have criticized Neopets in the past for immersing them in ads for McDonald’s Happy Meals, cereals and other things.

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That prompted the website of Consumer Reports to run its own tests to see if it could duplicate Kinect’s alleged discrimination. The publication just posted its results under the headline, “Consumers Reports debunks the ‘racist’ Kinect.” (That headline was a bit of a straw man since GameSpot didn’t say definitively that dark skin was the cause of the problems, much less claim Kinect was racist. Plus can objects be racist?)

Consumer Reports said they found the problem GameSpot wrote about was related to low room lighting, rather than skin color. Like GameSpot, Consumer Reports found the issue only occurred with Kinect’s facial recognition, a feature that allows players to automatically log in to their Xboxes when they stand in front of Kinect’s camera to load their personal gamer profiles. Lighting conditions didn’t affect playing actual games with Kinect, Consumer Reports said.

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But Kinect, when it goes on sale Thursday, will also be the most visible test in years of whether Microsoft can churn out breakout consumer products from its huge investment in research and development.

Microsoft faces increasing pressure from investors to show a payoff from those investments, which amounted to $8.7 billion for the fiscal year ended June 30–bigger than the R&D budget for any other tech company. Microsoft has poured a chunk of that money into improving existing products and services like its Bing search engine, as well as more traditional franchises like Windows and Office.

Kinect will be especially visible: an entirely new $150 device sold at retail outlets and aimed squarely at the consumer market, a field in which Microsoft has been more sluggish to respond to trends than Apple Inc. and other competitors.

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GSM is the basis of U.S. networks operated by AT&T Inc. (T) and T-Mobile USA, and is widely used in Europe and other markets. AT&T will carry three devices running on the new Windows Phone 7 when it debuts in the U.S., according to a person familiar with the matter.

Windows Phone 7 won’t run on the cellular technology known as CDMA, which has a smaller position globally and is used in the U.S. by Verizon Wireless and Sprint.

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Halo: Reach is the last installment in the series that will be made by Bungie Studios, the game development shop that created the franchise, nurtured it through most of its half-dozen iterations and is now moving on to other projects since spinning off from Microsoft three years ago. Microsoft will continue to own the Halo brand and has formed a new studio called 343 Industries that’s responsible for the ever-expanding array of Halo products that it envisions in the decades (yes, decades) to come.

Frank O’Connor and Bonnie Ross are the two executives at 343 Industries in charge of keeping the blood pumping at Microsoft’s Halo business in the post-Bungie era. It’s a scary prospect: think “Star Wars” losing George Lucas.

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Like a lot of runners, I’ve gotten hooked on the ability to tally up how many miles I put in on the road and to use my watch to motivate myself to run a bit farther or faster.

The Adidas miCoach

These days ordinary smartphones have GPS built into them and developers are creating apps that use the technology for tracking runs. Plus some of the apps do a lot more than a GPS watch: They can help you devise a training schedule prior to races and more actively coach you during your runs.

I spent a couple of weeks using three running apps for the iPhone—Running Method’s Run Coach Pro, FitnessKeeper’s RunKeeper Pro and Adidas’ miCoach—with the goal of seeing whether any of them could be an adequate substitute for my GPS watch, a Garmin (GRMN) Forerunner 305, which cost me $190 two years ago with a companion heart-rate monitor (the same package now sells for $153 on Amazon). (There’s a BlackBerry version of miCoach app and an Android app is in the works.)

The answer, in one case, is an emphatic yes. There are, however, some tradeoffs to running with an iPhone that might make using any running app a deal-killer for some people. First, the iPhone is a handsome device that faces a risk of disfigurement from your sweaty hands as well as from falling onto concrete so runners will want to consider buying an accessory that keeps the phone safe.

My Garmin is a giant of a watch, but at least it doesn’t require its own carrying case on a run, unlike the iPhone. Armbands for the iPhone let you easily glance at the screen while you’re working out. I ran with the iPhone tucked into a carrying pouch that came with a water-bottle belt I used on long runs. The iPhone is also a music player, which meant I could leave the iPod Shuffle at home. The iPhone’s maps feature also would have been very helpful on runs in unfamiliar places where I’ve gotten completely lost.

Revolver’s Run Coach Pro ($2.99) was the most bare-bones apps I ran with. It starts by guiding you through a few selections to develop a training plan for everything from achieving basic fitness to finishing a 50K “ultra” run. You tell the app your experience level as a runner, when any race you plan to run will occur and which day of the week you like to do your long runs—the endurance workouts that are a cornerstone of half-marathon and marathon training.

The RunKeeper Pro app helps runners record information about their runs.

The app then crafts a weekly running schedule telling you which days to run and rest on; how long to run (in time terms); and how hard to run (for example, easy or race pace). During runs, it tracks your distance, your overall pace and time elapsed.

One of the biggest drawbacks of Run Coach Pro is that you have to look at the iPhone screen while you’re running to check on your progress. That’s a big distraction if, like me, you run with your iPhone in a case on a belt.

The app could have gotten around this by using voice commands to tell me through my headphones when to go faster or slower, which would have been helpful on days when the app recommended I do interval runs, where I was supposed to vary my pace.

RunKeeper’s RunKeeper Pro ($9.99), in contrast, uses a pleasant female voice to tell you when you’re falling short of or exceeding a target pace that you establish with the app before your run. You can control how often the voice chimes in through your headphones at various time and distance intervals.

It also helps them work out smarter, right.

If you’re listening to music, RunKeeper Pro temporarily dims your tunes so you can hear the voice commands. A free version of RunKeeper lacks these voice commands.

I was most disappointed by the lack of a feature that allows you to build a training calendar for a specific race. The publisher says such a feature is coming. The app syncs all the data it collects during a workout to the RunKeeper Web site, which makes it easy to look at some basic weekly and monthly statistics your runs, but charges extra for weekly reports with other data, like average pace and calories burned.

The free miCoach app from apparel maker Adidas does all the same run tracking of the other apps, but it was the only one to really use the intelligence of the iPhone to provide decent coaching during runs.

I first set up a training calendar for a half-marathon in November through the miCoach Web site on my computer, which then synced the plan with my iPhone. It then told me to do a 12-minute “assessment workout” during which a coach instructed me to proceed from a walk to a fast pace, providing detailed instructions on how much I should be exerting myself at each interval (“conversation should be difficult”). It assessed my fitness level by judging how fast I moved into different intervals.

This step was key for helping miCoach calibrate how fast I should be going during different stages of a run. All of the instructions it gave me during runs were personalized to my fitness level based on that initial assessment run.

Adidas has also done a good job keeping all of its coaching from getting too complicated. The app and its companion Web site use a color-coded system of speed zones, from the slowest, blue, to the fastest, red, to visually illustrate how difficult an upcoming series of runs will be.

It’s worth noting that all iPhones now ship with a running app made by Nike, which I omitted from this review because it currently requires an additional $19 sensor that attaches to your running shoes to track runs. A new version of the app that uses the iPhone’s GPS is due out soon. For now, miCoach is the only iPhone app for which I would forsake my Garmin watch.

Walter S. Mossberg is on vacation. Mossberg’s Mailbox will return Sept. 16. Email Nick Wingfield at nick.wingfield@wsj.com.

Hillcrest, a maker of a Nintendo Wii-like remote control for navigating Internet content on televisions, has revealed that it designed the technology behind a motion-sensing remote control for new high-end televisions made by LG Electronics, the Korean consumer electronics maker.

Hillcrest also says it has licensed its patents on motion control technology to Sony’s videogame division. Sony (SNE) and Hillcrest spokesmen wouldn’t talk about the terms of the deal, but it’s likely to be relevant to PlayStation Move, an upcoming motion-sensing game controller for Sony’s PlayStation 3.

While it’s unclear how much Hillcrest is profiting from the deals, they’re a sign that some of the big electronics makers are taking the startup’s expertise and intellectual property in motion control technology seriously. They also show how a technology that has been used to swing virtual tennis rackets and other in-game objects is now emerging as a way to navigate other forms of content on television sets. The array of Internet video, photos and applications on Web-enabled televisions are becoming tougher to navigate with traditional button-centric remote controls.

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A couple of weekends ago, the Bing name seemed to be everywhere on the top iPhone app charts. At one point, Microsoft (MSFT) says, there were seven programs bearing the Bing name in the top 26 most frequently downloaded free iPhone apps. Most of them were apps that give consumers access to popular music for free, with names like Pop 100 by Bing, Ryan Seacrest’s MixTapes by Bing and Bing Hip Hop 100.

Most of the apps were created by outside developers. Bing paid the developers a sponsorship fee to keep the music free for consumers, at least for a limited time. The one catch: in most cases, consumers had to also download Microsoft’s main Bing app –which the company released last last year and which is used for searching Bing –before using the free sponsored apps.

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In early 2008, Microsoft Corp.’s (MSFT) product planners for the Internet Explorer 8.0 browser intended to give users a simple, effective way to avoid being tracked online. They wanted to design the software to automatically thwart common tracking tools, unless a user deliberately switched to settings affording less privacy.

That triggered heated debate inside Microsoft. As the leading maker of Web browsers, the gateway software to the Internet, Microsoft must balance conflicting interests: helping people surf the Web with its browser to keep their mouse clicks private, and helping advertisers who want to see those clicks.

In the end, the product planners lost a key part of the debate. The winners: executives who argued that giving automatic privacy to consumers would make it tougher for Microsoft to profit from selling online ads. Microsoft built its browser so that users must deliberately turn on privacy settings every time they start up the software.

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Videogame makers in Asia, who years ago figured out how to make money from free services by began charging players for virtual goods on free services, like weapons and outfits. Now that approach is catching on in the U.S., even among makers of big-budget online games.

This week, Sony Corp.’s (SNE) videogame unit said it plans to soon offer a free version of “EverQuest II,” the company’s flagship online fantasy game, while allowing players to upgrade their characters by purchasing better virtual armor and other items.

It’s a big change from the $15-a-month subscription fee Sony normally charges for the game—a plan that will continue to exist for players who don’t want to pay a la carte fees for virtual goods.

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After leaving MySpace last April, DeWolfe has resurfaced as the CEO of MindJolt Inc., a San Francisco-based company that he acquired several months ago with the backing of Austin Ventures for an undisclosed sum. MindJolt helps small game makers – such as one- or two-person programming shops – with tools to promote themselves to consumers on social networking sites.

That leaves the game makers more time to focus on the creative challenges of making games, while MindJolt operates key features like the “leaderboards” that allow players to show off high game scores and the virtual currency system used by players to buy in-game items like fancy uniforms and powerful weapons.

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