2007 is turning out to be a terrible year for the music industry. Or rather, a terrible year for the the music labels. The DRM walls are crumbling. Music CD sales continue to plummet rather alarmingly. Artists like Prince and Nine Inch Nails are flouting their labels and either giving music away or telling their [...]

  Spanish WiFi startup Fon is invading England. In its quest to turn everyone’s home and business WiFi router into a worldwide network of shareable hotspots, Fon just inked a long-rumored deal with British Telecom.  BT’s three million broadband customers in the UK can now opt to join the Fon network, which gives them access [...]

  Media search platform provider Pixsy have announced a strategic partnership with video sharing service Veoh Networks that wil see Veoh adopting Pixsy’s media search platform to offer enhanced video and image search functionality on Veoh.com.Pixsy’s appeal to Veoh is the ability to deliver near-real time search results, allowing Veoh users to search videos and images [...]

  The University of California Berkeley has started uploading video recordings of course lectures on to YouTube.The initial round of lectures covers 300 hours of video on subjects including Chemistry, Physics and Non-Violence, with more content to come. The move by Berkeley is claimed to be a first by some, however some of the videos have [...]

  You’ve probably tried the “Street View” feature in Google Maps, the one in which you can actually view 3D panoramas from the street level of several cities including San Francisco, Las Vegas, Denver, Houston, and New York. Earthmine is working to bring that concept of visually mapping the real world to a deeper level by [...]

  Google Transit, Google’s public transport mapping feature, has graduated from Google Labs.The service is now fully integrated into Google Maps, with users now being able to select “Take Public Transit” as an alternative to driving instructions.Google Transit doesn’t cover public transport everywhere, but the list is growing. According to Google recent additions include transit maps [...]

  Call it social finance. A bunch of investing sites, from MarketWatch and Motley Fool CAPS to Cake Financial and Social Picks, let investors create fantasy portfolios and track their performance. The idea is to compete against each other, celebrity investors, and the overall market. The best investors, whether pros or schmoes, rise [...]

  This guest post is written by Dave McClure: startup advisor, angel investor, PayPal alumnus, and Master of 500 Hats. Dave is organizing next week’s Graphing Social Patterns conference on Facebook, covering many of the topics and companies mentioned below. He’s also a rookie instructor for a new Stanford class on Facebook apps, and [...]

  Amazon chief technology officer Werner Vogels just released a very technical paper about a Web storage system being tested internally at Amazon called Dynamo. As applications move to massive grids of computers on the Web (like the ones that power Amazon’s e-commerce site or Google’s search engine and online apps), a new type of [...]

  Flexiscale, a new UK-based on-demand computing service aimed at Web 2.0 startups plans to compete with Amazon’s EC2/S3 service. The move - announced at today’s Future of Web Apps conference in London - is significant because there are so few ‘pay as you go’ hosting solutions in Europe, so the launch of a new service [...]

  Zoho is adding another weapon to its arsenal today - Zoho DB - raising its total number of online office applications to 13 (not including four additional “utilities”, or lightweight apps). Zoho DB is meant to provide developers and database administrators with better ways to manage and digest their data. In a way, it’s like [...]

  Blabberize is a new service that allows you to create your own talking picture, basically a moving mouth on a still image.Using Blabberize is simple. Users upload a photo of someone to Blabberize, select a mouth and then record a message. Once done, users can email a link to the Blabberize hosted page or embed [...]

  Christian Renaud, Chief Architect of Networked Virtual Environments for the Cisco Technology Center will be launching a new virtual worlds tracking organization called the Metaverse Market Index (MMI) at Virtual Worlds Fall next week.MMI will be established as a not-for-profit organization that will define and track metrics across multiple virtual worlds.The problem is simple; there [...]

  Video discovery and broadcast service Magnify.net has launched a new platform for the aggregation of web video.The new platform offers “a complete customization toolkit” that aims to make it easier for users to create branded online broadcast channels, discover and integrate Web video, and analyze visitor statistics and activities.New features include:The “Magnify This” video [...]