Wal-Mart to Sell Music Online Without DRM
Wal-Mart has begun selling some of its online music catalog without anticopying software, stepping up its competition with Apple Inc.'s iTunes store. Wal-Mart will sell songs without the software -- known as digital rights management, or DRM -- through its walmart.com site for 94 cents a track, or $9.22 an album. The No. 1 seller of recorded music said it will launch the service with songs from two major record labels, Vivendi SA's Universal Music Group and EMI Group. DRM has been a contentious issue in the world of online music sales. Record companies have so far insisted that digital retailers employ the software to prevent rampant copying. Universal Music said two weeks ago it will allow digital tracks from thousands of albums by artists such as Sting, 50 Cent and Stevie Wonder to be sold online without copy-protection technology for a limited time. However, they won't be available for sale at Apple's iTunes store. Wal-Mart will continue to offer its existing WMA-format music downloads.

Blu-ray dumped as HD-DVD strikes back
Viacom's Paramount Pictures and DreamWorks Animation said they will release their next-generation DVD titles exclusively on HD DVD ahead of what they say could be the biggest holiday season ever for DVDs. Paramount had sold titles in both the new high-definition formats -- HD DVD and Blu-Ray -- but settled exclusively on HD DVD after deciding it offered better quality, lower-priced players and lower manufacturing costs, Kelley Avery, president of Paramount Home Entertainment, told Reuters. "This has been the biggest summer on record for movies, it will be the biggest fourth quarter for popular movies for consumers," Avery said. "At the same time, we have HD DVD players that are truly affordable." HD DVD and Blu-Ray are waging a battle to dominate the next generation of DVD players that promise better pictures, sound and in some cases more content in the multibillion-dollar home-entertainment arena. But some HD DVD supporters hope to broaden their appeal to consumers based on cost. The lowest-priced, stand-alone HD DVD player sells for $299, compared with $499 for the lowest-cost Blu-Ray option. Parsons said the price difference between the new formats was falling.

Apple puts refurbished iPhones on sale
Want a cheaper iPhone? Apple has begun offering refurbished handsets for $100 less than it charges for freshly made models. So a refurbished 4GB iPhone costs $399, while the pre-owned 8GB model costs $499. Apple said both come with a one-year warranty, extendible to two years with a $69 payment. They are tested and certified as fully operational, the vendor said, and "as good as new". Each refurbished iPhone comes in the standard box, with full documentation, accessories and so on. The handsets presumably come from the stock of devices returned by original buyers because they didn't like the handset, the AT&T network it connects to, or because the thing didn't work and were replaced. Apple make non-warranty returnees pay a ten per cent "restocking fee", if they've opened the box. This presumably covers the cost of returning the device to its original, pre-purchase state so it can be sold again, as a refurbished unit. That ten per cent doesn't cover the $100 Apple's losing on the purchase price of a brand-new unit, of course, but it helps.

Google takes stake in Chinese social Web site
Google revealed on Monday that it had acquired a stake in Chinese community Web site Tianya.cn, indicating a foray by Google into social networking in the world's second-largest Internet market. A Google spokeswoman confirmed the stake holding by e-mail, but declined to give further details. Various local media reports on Monday put the estimated size of Google's stake at anywhere from less than 10% to up to 60%. Other media reports have said Google may be eyeing acquisitions in China. Google is rushing to close the gap with rival Baidu.com Inc., which dominated the search market in China in the second quarter with a 58.1% share, according to research firm Analysys International. Google followed with a 22.8% share and Yahoo China with 11.6%, Analysys said. China is the world's second-largest Internet market after the United States, with around 162 million Web users.

MySpace Partners with XM
XM and MySpace have partnered to launch a coast-to-coast online search for "the hottest unsigned hip-hop and R&B music talent." Aspiring hip-hop and/or R&B artists are encouraged to submit their original song for the opportunity to perform at The Mix Show Power Summit, the industry's premier event in October, where one grand prize winner will receive a mix tape created in coordination with a high profile DJ, plus an on-air XM appearance other perks. Unreleased artists are invited to visit the XM MySpace site at http://www.myspace.com/xm to review contest details, and enter their original song with the opportunity to become the next hip-hop star.

Issues at Ziff
Ziff Davis, a one-time publishing Goliath that employed over 1200 people, has skipped an interest payment due yesterday and is entering into negotiations with debt holders to restructure about $390 million in debt, writes the New York Post. The company has retained Alvarez & Marsal to handle the restructuring. Ziff Davis, which has shuttered more than 10 magazines, has a staff of around 290 now, and is down to publishing just three print publications. It also publishes 15 websites and a conference business. The Ziff family sold the company in pieces in the mid-1990s. In 2000, Willis Stein & Partners purchased the company for $700 million. It has been struggling since then, and began attempting to sell pieces of itself last year. It did manage to sell one of its three divisions, Enterprise Group - which publishes Baseline, CIO Insight, eWeek and related websites - to Insight Venture Partners, for $150 million. In the fiscal year ending Dec. 31, 2006, Ziff Davis Media had $181 million in revenue and cash flow of $27.1 million.

Research Shows Digital Billboards Safe for Drivers
New research from the Foundation for Outdoor Advertising Research and Education has indicated that digital billboards are no less safe than their traditional counterparts. In order to help media companies make the case for digital billboards to local municipalities, the Outdoor Advertising Association of America unveiled the two studies - one that analyzed the correlation between digital boards and traffic accidents and another that examined driver behavior. The studies come at a time when outdoor companies are building out digital billboards (boards that rotate static images displayed for 6 to 8 seconds). Costing more than $250,000 to erect, companies can sell the same space on digital billboards to multiple advertisers, increasing revenue by several multiples. Over the last few years, 500 digital billboards have been erected. While that's still a small percentage (0.1 percent) of the 450,000 billboards in the U.S., the OAAA estimates that media companies will erect several hundred digital displays each year.

Why Women Love a Red, Red Rose
Anyone who ever wondered why dying vegetation — say like a freshly-clipped red rose — may appeal to a lady friend, might take some comfort in science, which once again offers us a rational answer to one of the world's great irrationalities. Beyond a universal preference in people for blue, "the long history of color preference studies has been described as 'bewildering, confused and contradictory'," write neuroscientists Anya Hurlbert and Yazhu Ling of England's Newcastle University, authors of a new study in the journal Current Biology. "This fact is perhaps surprising," they add, "given the prevalence and longevity of the notion that little girls differ from boys in preferring pink." But the neuroscientists believe they have an answer to this scientific riddle, uncovering a distaff preference for red, hidden atop the universal liking for blue. In their study, the pair quickly flashed color cards, displaying numerous variations in shade, hue and saturation, at 208 volunteers, mostly Britishers but with a substantial number of Han Chinese, who were recent emigrants to the United Kingdom. Tested in three different experiments, the researchers teased out a small but significant preference for reddish hues in the female volunteers. Puzzled, the authors realized that most of the difference between men and women came in the form of a preference for red versus green in the color cards, regardless of the other shadings such as the bluish ones that everyone liked. Why might this be? Evolution might offer an answer, they reason. Human color perception, the "trichromacy" assessment of three separate color types — red-green-blue — in our vision is a relatively recent addition to our line of mammals.

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