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Mashable – The inbox in its current form is a terrible place to manage your online shopping history, says Scott Brady, the CEO and co-founder of Slice, a new startup looking to change how consumers organize and access their purchase data.
Slice, now available to webmail users via the “All My Purchases” application inside the new Yahoo Mail, aims to helps users organize everything they buy online from right inside their inboxes.

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AP – Facebook said Thursday that it hired two aides of former President George W. Bush as lobbyists. The world’s largest online social network is stepping up efforts to friend Washington as it grows.

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AFP – Skype on Thursday was scrambling to fix a problem that caused the globally popular Internet telephone service to be inaccessible for a “small number” of users.

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AFP – Industry group Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) reported on Thursday that US online ad revenue hit a record high $7.3 billion in the first three months of the year.

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Reuters – New “American Idol” champion Scotty McCreery hit No.1 on the iTunes single charts on Thursday, as Fox television reported a 21 percent surge in viewers for the all country music finale of the long-running singing contest.

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Mashable – Prisoners at a labor camp in northeast China were forced by guards to play online games in a moneymaking scheme, says one former prisoner.
The scheme, a practice referred to among gamers as “gold farming,” required some 300 prisoners at the Jixi labor camp to gather currency (usually by repeating monotonous tasks) in multiplayer games such as World of Warcraft, which the guards then hawked online for cash.

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AFP – NATO members must bolster their ability to fend off Internet-based attacks, Estonian Defence Minister Mart Laar, whose country fell victim to a “cyber-war” in 2007, said Thursday.

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AFP – Internet prime movers including the bosses of Facebook and Google put their proposals to the G8 summit of world leaders on Thursday, calling for governments to guarantee Internet access.

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Reuters – Arab leaders were wrong to block Internet access in an effort to quell popular revolts as such moves only hurt their own economies, Google Chairman Eric Schmidt said on Thursday.

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Mashable – Google, which long ago passed Yahoo in search advertising, now has overtaken the company in display ads as well, according to IDC.
Google claimed the number-one spot in U.S. display advertising in the first quarter, with 14.7% of the market ($396 million), up from 13.3% in Q4 2010. Yahoo’s hold on the market declined from 13.6% to 12.3%, or $330 million, in that same period.

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Mashable – The Atlantic has announced the first selection for 1book140, an online reading and discussion club that will span the publication’s presences on Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr, as well its website.
Readers, in conjunction with The Atlantic’s editorial staff and Jeff Howe — a professor of journalism at Northeastern University and the author of Crowdsourcing:Why the Power of the Crowd Is Driving the Future of Business — have selected Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin from a pool of 300 user-submitted nominations.

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Appolicious – Every Thursday sees the biggest game releases of the week in the iTunes App Store, because the end of the week corresponds with Apple’s updates to its New and Noteworthy listings. So we stand by diligently each week to see what games make their way to iOS each week. Leading the charge today is Touchgrind BMX, a 3D game that’s all about doing bike tricks; up next is Demolition Dash, a 2D sidescroller in which you play a Godzilla-type monster on a rampage; and Back to the Future Ep 3, the latest update to Telltale Games’ Back to the Future series. …

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AFP – Internet giant Google on Thursday launched its ambitious “Street View” project in India to provide detailed panoramic images of life in a country of 1.2 billion people.

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AFP – Chinese search engine Baidu said Thursday it was thinking about expanding into more overseas markets and expected its share of the booming domestic mobile search market to grow rapidly.

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AFP – Spain’s anti-crisis protesters reject serious comparison with the Arab Spring popular revolts but they do claim a common weapon: online social networks.

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AP – Yahoo Inc. CEO Carol Bartz found herself in a familiar position Wednesday: assuring stock market analysts that she will clean up a mess damaging the long-slumping Internet company’s market value.

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Reuters – Yahoo Inc said it has made significant progress in resolving a dispute over the online payments unit of Alibaba Group, a Chinese Internet search company whose founder took control of the prized business.

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AFP – Facebook and Spotify are collaborating on a streaming music service at the world’s largest online social network, according to a report Wednesday by business magazine Forbes.

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Reuters – A computer security researcher has found a flaw in Microsoft Corp’s widely used Internet Explorer browser that he said could let hackers steal credentials to access FaceBook, Twitter and other websites.

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NewsFactor – After finding smashing success with its Kindle with Special Offers, Amazon.com has introduced a 3G model for $164. Many believe the online retailer’s next move will be a tablet computer.

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AFP – Yahoo! chief executive Carol Bartz said Wednesday that progress is being made in resolving a dispute with partner Alibaba over ownership of online payments service Alipay.

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AP – Twitter has bought TweetDeck, a London-based startup that helps people read, write and organize the short messages posted on the online network — and will keep the service going.

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AP – THE DEAL: Twitter has bought TweetDeck, a London-based startup that helps people read, write and organize the short messages posted on the online network. It will keep the service going.

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AFP – Internet bosses from Google and other top firms set out from their “e-G8″ summit Wednesday to take G8 world leaders to task over sensitive issues such as online copyright and freedoms.

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AP – A judge on Tuesday refused to throw out a lawsuit by two Democratic political consultants who allege that The Huffington Post’s founders stole the idea for the online news website from them.

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AP – The knowledge that I’d be cut off from Internet and cellphone service in just a few hours started to relax me long before I reached the secluded, serene site of a two-day yoga retreat in upstate New York.

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AP – Internet activists and digital entrepreneurs warned Wednesday that if global leaders attempt to limit access to the Web, their restrictions will be bypassed and they will become irrelevant.

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Reuters – Google Inc Chairman Eric Schmidt and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg warned governments to tread lightly on Internet regulation because moves to tame its rough edges risked hurting its virtues.

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PC Magazine – Sony has begun emailing its PlayStation Network customers on how to sign up for the identity theft protection services it said it would offer. The PlayStation online store will also remain down until the end of the month.

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AFP – Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg denied Wednesday that his global social networking site was to thank for enabling the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt through protestors coordinating online.

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Reuters – Wall Street banks clamor to underwrite stock for social media companies like LinkedIn and Twitter, but the online networking sites are largely off limits to the banks’ financial advisers.

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Reuters – Online retailer Amazon said on Wednesday it would open a customer support center in Edinburgh to provide technical support for its market-leading Kindle device, creating 500 permanent and 400 temporary jobs.

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AFP – Hackers have attacked Sony Ericsson’s Canadian eShop website, affecting 2,000 users, the latest online strike against the Japanese electronics and entertainment giant, a Sony spokesman said Wednesday.

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AFP – Online retail titan Amazon.com and bookselling giant Barnes & Noble are battling for the devotion of digital book lovers with bargain-priced versions of their popular electronic readers.

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AP – Sony has suffered another online security breach, this time for 2,000 customers of its Sony Ericsson joint venture in Canada, the latest in a series of hacker attacks against the electronics and entertainment company.

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AP – Online retailer Amazon.com Inc. is selling an ad-laden version of its Kindle 3G e-reader, which has wireless service for downloading books.

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Reuters – Shares of Yandex NV, known as “Russia’s Google,” rose 55 percent in their trading debut, evidence for some investors that Internet companies have strong prospects and a confirmation for others that the market has gotten ahead of itself.

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AP – Internet gambling is the future of the casino industry, whether it’s approved at the federal or state level, a panel of online and brick-and-mortar casino executives said Tuesday.

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AFP – Yandex shares soared on Tuesday as Russia’s top Internet portal and leading search engine made its Wall Street debut amid feverish investor enthusiasm for technology stocks.

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NewsFactor – Up, down … up, down. Sony’s networks, which have been slowly coming back online, had account management shut down Tuesday as a result of system maintenance. And there are reports of new break-ins at Sony online properties in Greece and Japan.

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NewsFactor – How quickly we forget. Despite the drama at Amazon Web Services that took down many popular web sites just weeks ago, Oracle is giving a vote of confidence to the platform by taking its database business to Amazon’s cloud.

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Reuters – French President Nicolas Sarkozy softened his usually tough stance on Internet regulation at a forum that brought together tech titans in Paris, but stark divisions remained on everything from privacy to copyright.

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AFP – Media baron Rupert Murdoch on Tuesday urged Internet companies to pull out the stops in developing digital education programmes to revolutionise the world’s classrooms.

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AFP – The boss of Google warned Tuesday against moves to step up regulation of the Internet after French President Nicolas Sarkozy said governments must have a hand in setting the rules to avoid anarchy.

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AP – France wants better regulation of the Internet. Google’s executive chairman says policymakers should tread lightly and avoid “stupid” rules.

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AP – iTunes’ top 10 selling singles and albums of the week ending May 23, 2011:

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PC Magazine – The online video platform company is launching a new division focused on designing apps that can be ported to multiple mobile devices with different specs.

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AFP – Yandex shares rose sharply on Tuesday as Russia’s top Internet portal and leading search engine made its debut on Wall Street.

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AFP – The European Union mounted on Tuesday an offensive against online music and film piracy, with plans to rewrite intellectual property law across the EU market of half a billion consumers.

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Reuters – Internet search firm Yandex declared itself “better than Google” as it debuted on the Nasdaq on Tuesday, and signaled it has ambitions to expand beyond its Russian heartland.

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