News Corp chairman Rupert Murdoch says his Chinese-born wife, Wendi Deng, is in China with the company’s executives to help launch a Chinese version of its popular MySpace social networking Web site, a newspaper reported Wednesday. Murdoch, speaking in New York, said the company is trying to find a way to enter the Chinese market [...]

It’s only been a week since Disney plonked a load of movies on Apple’s iTunes store, but already the studio is squeaking about how well it’s all going. “We are very, very bullish on consumption of electronically delivered media,” CEO Robert Iger told Wall Street analysts Tuesday. Disney said it has already flogged around 125,000 [...]

Message this morning on their site reads:: Where is Snarf-It? Your guess is as good as ours, at some point last night our database servers disappeared, and we really mean disappeared. The data centre where they are stored is not telling us anything and they are not replying to our calls or emails. We are [...]

When Microsoft officially previewed the Zune digital music player last week, it left out details about the price and release date. Although we still don’t know when it’s going to be out, Wal-Mart may have given us an idea of how much it will cost. In a product page posted yesterday in the Electronics section [...]

A couple of days ago uTorrent at last released a WebUI (Web User Interface) plugin that allows you to control this BitTorrent client server remotely. Long has it seemingly played second fiddle to Azureus with all of it’s bells & whistles but, perhaps now with this plugin it will make it a stronger alternative. A [...]

Well Microsoft, as usual, continues on in its game of catch up with just about everybody around. From its new Zune player, aka “iPod killer,” to the new Windows Live, aka “Google killer,” those deep pockets up in Redmond have taken reverse-engineering to a different level. Now they have devised a new site called Soapbox, [...]

Mobile phone maker Sony Ericsson said on Tuesday that it would launch a new service on its phones that would allow full music downloading, initially focusing on new and up-and-coming artists. Mobile phone makers have been integrating music players into their handsets, part of a threat to Apple’s iPod. Sony Ericsson has christened its new [...]

Rupert Murdoch told an investor conference Tuesday that he didn’t see a need to distribute programming or other media content from his News Corp. conglomerate through Internet portals. Murdoch, asked why he hadn’t made deal with large aggregators of online content like Yahoo Inc. (Nasdaq:YHOO – news) or Microsoft Corp.’s MSN portal, said he didn’t [...]

There’s a meeting of the film and music industry’s anti-piracy captains in London today. The Fraud Advisory Panel’s (FAP) conference has an interesting roster of speakers. There’s Met anti-piracy DCI, the deputy director of technology for the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, the British Phonographic Industry’s director of anti-piracy, a strategy advisor from the [...]

Online music company Napster Inc is for sale. The company said Monday it is considering options of either selling itself or forging alliances in order to set up possible joint ventures. The company has hired UBS Investment Bank to help it assess possibilities and identify a suitable option. Napster’s chief executive Chris Gorog said he [...]

Fascinating evidence – in a paid-for supplement to this week’s New Statesman – that the record business has reached the acceptance stage of the grieving process. The Smith Institute, which is the Think Tank set up in John Smith’s memory, set up a round table for the industry to discuss ‘Copyright reform: bridging a gap [...]

‘Just a lot of f’d – up shit’ says rapper on consumer experience of DRM. Digital rights management (DRM) has its uses but should not be used to overly restrict users, according to musician and mobile entrepreneur Chuck D. The rapper, who was a founding member of hip hop group Public Enemy and now runs [...]

Sweden’s Pirate Party was optimistic about its chances leading up to yesterday’s general election, but the results are in and it doesn’t look good for the upstart political movement. Under current election procedures, you need at least 4 percent of the national votes or 12 percent in any one electoral district to qualify for a [...]

Universal Music Group vs Warner Music Group Corp, a battle between two companies with very different ideas when it comes to online music with the college-beloved sites MySpace.com and YouTube.com caught right in the middle. Universal speaks of MySpace and YouTube in words that could have been lifted from a Recording Industry Association of America [...]

uTorrent just got a little better with this new remote control plugin. Installation in a nutshell: 1) Get and extract files http://download.utorrent.com/webui_v0.300_beta_1.zip 2) Copy webui.zip to %AppData%/utorrent (click on start->run then type that and click ok) 3) Startup the new utorrent.exe (make sure its build 475, the one you downloaded with the webui) 4) Hit [...]

Fox Broadcasting Co has extended its online streaming experiment to three more series. The drama “Justice” and the comedies “‘Til Death” and “Happy Hour” are joining “Prison Break” and “Vanished” on the list of Fox series that are available free and sans commercials on 40 Web sites, including Fox.com, AOL.com, Google, MSN, TV Guide.com, IGN.com [...]

RealNetworks Inc is teaming up with SanDisk Corp to release a portable music player that more closely links with RealNetworks’ Rhapsody online music service, in the latest attempt to take on Apple’s iPod and iTunes stronghold. Analysts see the deal, to be announced Monday, as a way for SanDisk and RealNetworks to join forces against [...]

When Wal-Mart looks out at the digital landscape, it sees opportunity, if not success. The retailer behemoth tried its hand at the online music gig, but came up mostly empty. Now the company wants to try again, this time with video. Online video sales are nothing new, and no, I’m not referencing porn. Both Movielink [...]

Unveiling its Zune portable media player last week, Microsoft Corp sought to focus attention on all the whiz-bang capabilities of the new device. But just as notable is something the Zune doesn’t do. Microsoft says the device won’t play tracks or albums bought through existing music services affiliated with its own Windows Media “PlaysForSure” initiative. [...]

Mozilla Corporation has hired a former security strategist from Microsoft as part of its efforts to improve the security of its software, in particular its flagship Firefox web browser software. Window Snyder (sic), Mozilla’s new Chief Security Something, an unusual job description but one not out of keeping for an organisation that used to to [...]