Apple now third largest music retailer
iTunes Music Store is now the third largest retailer of music in the United States, overtaking Amazon.com in the first quarter with nearly 10% market share, according to a survey by NPD Group. Apple's iTunes is third behind market leader Wal-Mart Stores, with 15.8% and Best Buy with 13.8%. Online store bestbuy.com has a 1.1% market share. Amazon.com Inc. dropped to fourth with a 6.7% share. NPD said iTunes digital music store had benefited from high iPod sales during the holiday season. The vast majority of digital songs and albums bought on iTunes will only play on iPods as well as the iTunes application.

Business.com Could Hit Jackpot on Auction Block
Entrepreneurs Jake Winebaum and Sky Dayton were widely mocked for lavishing $7.5 million on a single Internet domain name -- business.com -- back in 1999. It was the single highest price paid for a domain name at the time. Now look who is having the last laugh. The company that grew out of business.com -- a search engine used by businesses to find products and services -- is now on the auction block, and could fetch anywhere between $300 million and $400 million. Closely held business.com is expected to attract a host of interest from the likes of media companies such as Dow Jones and New York Times, these people said. Business.com does the kind of things publishers are trying to do more of: Drive readers to spend money with merchants who will pay a bounty for the traffic. Their interest shows how, well into the Internet age, media companies are still eager for properties that can deliver online revenue and growth. Business.com, Santa Monica, Calif., has 2007 earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization of about $15 million, the people familiar with the matter said, with its online traffic growing by 50% in the first quarter of 2007, compared with the year earlier. The people familiar with the matter say that the final price for Business.com is hard to predict. But at $350 million, a deal would value the company at some 24 times cash flow. Credit Suisse is running the auction. Mr. Dayton remains a director. Mr. Winebaum is business.com's chief executive.

How US tech firms place job ads no-one will apply for
Americans are expensive. They eat more food, use more petrol and create more greenhouse gas then the rest of us. So when they go to work they need a hefty salary. Not so Indians or Chinese, or Filipinos. Or Cubans or Iraqis come to that. You can get three or four of most of these for what you might have to pay an American. This is why tech firms are keen to ship workers into the States to get them to work for them, rather than some equally-qualified but expensive hamburger-muncher from down the road. But immigration laws pertaining to the hiring of foreign workers in the States are tight. And firms have to prove that they can't find anyone in their back yard to do the jobs they need to fill, before casting their gaze abroad. This is why U.S. firms hire consultants to publish classified job ads in local U.S. papers, with goal of not finding any applicants. At least that's what a report on the Information Clearing House" alleges. Microsoft, Oracle, Hewlett-Packard, and thousands of other companies are running fake ads in Sunday newspapers across the country each week.

Social networkers have little loyalty
Surfers have little loyalty when it comes to social networking websites, according to a new study from US research house Parks Associates. MySpace users are chronically unfaithful, according to Parks Associates' Web 2.0 & the New Net report on the social networking market. The study found that nearly 40% of MySpace users also keep profiles on other social networking sites such as Friendster and Facebook. Loyalty among the smaller social networking sites is even lower, where more than 50% of all users actively maintain multiple profiles. Parks Associates said that these trends highlight a peculiar aspect of the market for social networking services. Nearly half of all social networkers regularly use more than one site and one in six use three or more. The result is an increasingly interlinked environment tied together by links, widgets and the users themselves. This environment creates fertile ground for new social networking sites and application providers.

Online banks losing customers' trust
Nearly three-quarters of UK customers do not trust their retail bank, and the more virtual a bank is, the lower the level of trust, according to a survey by Unisys. The research was carried out in April this year and shows a significant loss of trust over the past 12 months. When Unisys asked the same questions in 2005 and 2006, 47% of customers indicated that they did not trust their retail bank. This year the figure had risen to 71%. Unisys urged banks to work on developing personal relationships with clients and to be aware of how their business decisions affect customers and how customers interpret their decisions. The research also highlighted the importance of face-to-face interaction, as the lowest six ranked banks were those with no high street presence. This turns on its head the previously held notion that the traditional branch office is a 'thing of the past' and that banks should aim to become increasingly virtual.

Copyright Complaints Shut Down Gossip Site PerezHilton.com
Popular Internet gossip columnist Perez Hilton had his Web site shut down for several hours after the company hosting it received a flurry of complaints about copyrighted photos being posted on PerezHilton.com. After being silenced on Tuesday, the site was back online Wednesday but hosted by a different Internet service provider. The gossip columnist, whose real name is Mario Lavandeira, is the target of several lawsuits by paparazzi and others who claim he posts their photos and video content on his site without permission. Celebrity photographers make hundreds of thousands of dollars selling exclusive images to magazines and Web sites each year. The agencies that have sued Mr. Lavandeira say he has refused to pay fees to license the photos, claiming he has a right as a journalist to use the images for free. The Web site routinely posts tabloid photos of celebrities and adds scribbled commentary and rudimentary doodles. Mr. Lavandeira defends his actions, saying his commentary constitutes "fair use" and is protected by copyright law. Los Angeles photo agency X17 Inc. sued Mr. Lavandeira in federal court last year, asking for $7.6 million in damages. The suit claimed Mr. Lavandeira used 51 photographs without permission, payment or credit, including images of a pregnant Katie Holmes, Kevin Federline pumping gas and Britney Spears. A federal judge denied the company's motion for an injunction against the site, although the lawsuit continues, as does another filed on behalf of several other photo agencies. A lawsuit filed by Universal Studios claiming the site posted a stolen photo of Jennifer Aniston from the film "The Break-Up" is also pending. X17 co-owner Brandy Navarre said the company has sent more than a dozen notices to the Australian Web hosting company Crucial Paradigm in the past two weeks, demanding that copies of copyrighted photos on the Perezhilton.com site be removed.

Nuance to Buy AOL Unit Tegic For About $265 Million
Nuance Communications agreed to buy AOL's Tegic Communications unit for about $265 million. Tegic makes software for mobile data services. Nuance, speech and imaging-software company, said Tegic will bring next-generation integrated text and touch-input solutions to Nuance's portfolio of voice-enabled applications for mobile search, email and text messaging. Tegic makes T9 predictive text input software for mobile devices. The company's wide distribution -- its flagship T9 software has shipped on more than 2.5 billion devices world-wide -- will also help expand Nuance's presence. AOL acquired Tegic in 1999 to bolster its "AOL Anywhere" strategy. Nuance said it expects Tegic in fiscal 2008 to add $45 million to $48 million to revenue, $65 million to $68 million to adjusted revenue.

France Asks Top Officials To Banish BlackBerrys
French government defense experts have advised officials in France's corridors of power to stop using BlackBerry, reportedly to avoid snooping by U.S. intelligence agencies. BlackBerry withdrawal among those who have given them up. "We feel that we are wasting huge amounts of time, having to relearn how to work in the old way," the daily quoted a ministry office director as saying. Emails sent from "Le BlackBerry" pass through servers in the U.S. and Britain, and France fears that makes the system vulnerable to snooping by the U.S. National Security Agency. The company that makes BlackBerrys, however, denies such spying is possible. French lawmaker Pierre Lasbordes, who was commissioned in 2005 by then-Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin to look into such issues, said he alerted the government to this "weakness" months ago. He said he met with BlackBerry maker Research In Motion Ltd. to discuss the problem in the course of preparing his report on the security of French information systems. Research In Motion insisted that BlackBerry emails cannot be read by the NSA or other organizations. The emails are more heavily encrypted than online banking Web sites. The BlackBerry system has been accredited by security agencies in the U.S., Australia, New Zealand, Austria and Canada, Research in Motion said, adding that a certification process is under way in the Netherlands and Germany.

Wi-Fi gets onboard Asia's trains
Wireless internet services, currently available on Japan's Tsukuba Express, are slowly making their way onto other public train networks in Asia. MTR, which serves more than 2.4 million passengers daily, will be looking at, firstly, providing its commuters with an onboard internet connection and, subsequently, the implementation of wireless video surveillance. Colubris wireless LAN access points will be deployed in all 51 MTR subway stations by the end of the year. Singapore's public trains could also be equipped with Wi-Fi capabilities. Early this year, the Land Transport Authority of Singapore issued a request for information for a train-borne surveillance system. Koeneman said it is still too early to say what Singapore's plans are, since the government has only called for an RFI. Train operators typically build a business case for Wi-Fi based on five applications: video surveillance, "infotainment", passenger internet connectivity, voice communications for employees, and train maintenance. While different train operators would have different motivations to implement Wi-Fi, Koeneman said, video surveillance would probably be the key reason, especially for countries like Singapore which are "very security conscious".

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