It's official, the Skype saga is finally over, with all parties involved most likely satisfied with the results, though not exactly thrilled. eBay got rid of Skype, allowing it to focus on its other assets, most notably PayPal, the investors got a nice piece of the VoIP service and Skype's founders also got themselves a small but juicy stake in the company. The settlement puts an end to months of legal disputes that could have potentially threatened Skype's future entirely. The deal has been rumored for a while now and most of the details have now been confirmed. As expected, Index Ventures is out of the picture, along with... [read more >>] A bit of a Nordic rivalry is heating up between Sweden and Finland, but a type of rivalry anyone can get behind of. Just a couple of weeks after Finland announced its plans to make broadband connections a legal right, Sweden is following suit with plans of its own. Regardless of whether it's national pride or a real necessity that needs addressing, Sweden is announcing its commitment to providing 90 percent of its population with a 100-megabits-per-second broadband connection by 2020. The plans have been announced by none other than Åsa Torstensson, Sweden's infrastructure minister, who recognized the importance of the Inte... [read more >>] We take it for granted today and it's easy to forget just how new it really is, but the Internet is a very different beast than it was just five years ago. It's now evolving at an amazing pace and soon one third of the world's population will be online. Its beginnings 40 years ago though were a lot more humble.The actual birth date of the Internet isn't exactly set in stone but one date that is largely regarded as the day it all started is October 29, 1969. Back then computers were the size of rooms and mostly relegated to universities, big companies and military use. And 40 years ago researchers at two universities were... [read more >>] An ICANN representative has led reporters to believe that, till the end of the week, the committee might approve the usage of non-Latin characters in standard web addresses. The change, if approved, will not only be the biggest face-lift given to the Internet, but will also be the biggest technical modification done since its birth 40 years ago.On the 29th of October, 2009, three days from now, the Internet will officially be 40 years old, and there are great chances that a revolution of the way we look at it is about to be approved on the same day.This week in Seoul, South Korea, the ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbe... [read more >>] The real-time web just got a lot more competitive with two of the largest search engines in the market announcing deals with Twitter. Both Google and Bing will now show tweets from the microblogging platform in their results pages. Both deals have been speculated for a while and now they've been made official. Google and Twitter have just announced the deal and it will be a while before this has any sort of benefit for the users. “[W]e are very excited to announce that we have reached an agreement with Twitter to include their updates in our search results. We believe that our search results and user experience will greatly bene... [read more >>] The online music market is crowded enough as it is and a bunch more services have launched recently. Very few are actually making money from it but there is definitely a lot of potential judging solely by the interest in the market. But, while there are plenty of startups trying to get their hands on a piece of the action, the larger web companies have mostly stayed out of this latest wave of music service. At least that was the case up till now as it looks like Google may be launching its dedicated music service possibly called Google Audio. There are very few details at the moment, but TechCrunch cites multiple sources who claim that th... [read more >>] From a distance Facebook looks like a very conservative site and the look of the social network seems very much unchanged for years. But take a closer look and you'll notice that the company is constantly tweaking and updating the design and features and now it's getting ready for another homepage redesign. The first details popped up a couple of weeks ago but now we have a much better overview of the upcoming changes including the Top News filter and the Recent Activity view. We got a first glimpse of the changes that were spotted in the wild as the social network was testing them in a limited trial. Facebook confirmed the chan... [read more >>] Online video isn't exactly the most lucrative business yet and it isn't one that's particularly easy to become successful in. YouTube dominates the landscape but even the Google-owned site isn't profitable yet. Still, professional content sites like Hulu proved that online video can generate decent revenue and, considering that music videos make up a huge percentage of YouTube's views, a dedicated music video site sounded like a good idea. Universal Music thought so and joined Sony Music to create Vevo, an upcoming music video site, which has now secured an undisclosed sum in funding from Abu Dhabi Media Company. T... [read more >>] There's little doubt that YouTube is a huge success when it comes to user numbers as the video site handily dominates the market in all aspects. But, on the day that YouTube celebrates its third year under Google, a little boasting perhaps is appropriate. And when you've got more than one billion views every day you've earned at least some bragging rights. “Three years ago today, Steve and I stood out in front of our offices and jokingly crowned ourselves the burger kings of media. We'd just made headlines by joining with Google in our shared goal of organizing the world's information (in our case, video) an... [read more >>] At the press conference held in New York earlier, Google's top dogs, CEO Eric Schmidt and cofounder Sergey Brin, went through several aspects concerning the company. One of the most important ones, from a technology point of view, was Google Chrome, the company's speedy web browser, and the overall cloud computing environment of which Google is a strong backer. Having been launched for a little over a year, Google Chrome has failed to achieve a considerable market share, hovering at around 3 percent. Some were concerned that this was a sign that the browser wasn't doing as great as Google would want it to be. Both Schmidt a... [read more >>] | 
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