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Reuters – China’s Youku Inc has agreed with Warner Bros. Entertainment’s local joint venture to offer pay per view movies on its newly launched online paid content platform, Youku said on Tuesday.

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NewsFactor – Your Office in the cloud began Tuesday with Microsoft’s formal launch of the online version for businesses of its venerable Office productivity applications. Called Office 365, the service offers Microsoft Office’s word processing, e-mail, spreadsheets and collaboration programs on the web.

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AP – Businesses facing a growing threat of cyberattacks against their websites will now have more tools to protect themselves and harden their Internet sites against hackers.

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NewsFactor – The LulzSec hackers responsible for a spree of cybercrimes over the past 50 days abruptly bid farewell to its followers worldwide on Monday. The surprise announcement came just four days after the underground group unleashed a trove of confidential law-enforcement documents swiped from the web site of the Arizona Department of Public Safety.

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Reuters – The more Mexican authorities try to stamp out violent drug ballads celebrating the joys of narcotics trafficking, the more their fame spreads like wildfire, fanned by the Internet.

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Reuters – The owner of the Alvin and the Chipmunks franchise, is suing the producers of an “artistically inferior knockoff” Chipmunks tribute album on iTunes, Amazon.com and other digital stores.

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AFP – Google chairman Eric Schmidt on Monday warned that the ongoing Arab uprisings could lead to an upsurge in internet censorship and an increased risk of arrest for colleagues working in restive nations.

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NewsFactor – The Mozilla Foundation has released a new vision statement for its Firefox browser. The goal is to inspire developers to construct a browser environment for users to interact with web sites, apps and people in a personalized and secure way without relying on search engines and mobile-app stores.

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Appolicious – Last week, the Internet circulated some contradictory rumors about Apple’s next iPhone release. One said we’d receive an incremental, not-so-amazing new iPhone (call it the iPhone 4S) in September; the other said there’d be a full-blown new iPhone 5 with design updates and everything, coming in August.

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Reuters – A British teenager accused of attempting to hack the website of a national law enforcement agency and two music industry bodies was released on bail on Monday on the condition he does not try to access the internet.

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Reuters – Tencent Holdings Ltd, the world’s third largest Internet firm, aims to be China’s Facebook, Twitter and Google — all rolled into one.

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Reuters – Internet giant Google’s tussles with some governments over Internet censorship could get worse, Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt said on Monday, adding he feared his own colleagues faced mounting danger of occasional arrest and torture.

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AFP – The Pope will this week launch a new web portal making it easier to access all Vatican news online, officials said on Monday.

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AP – The Vatican, whose communications problems are no secret, is taking a leap into the world of new media with the launch next week of a news information portal that Pope Benedict XVI himself may put online with a papal click.

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PC Magazine – Olympians at the London Games of 2012 will be able to tweet, post, and blog about their experiences, but can’t play journalist – only diary entries are allowed, the International Olympic Committee said.

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PC Magazine – Google executives gave a few more hints at the company’s social strategy last week – and it looks like the company wants to forge contacts first, and then possibly relationships.

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Appolicious – Wall Street analysts are joining tech bloggers who are anticipating the production if not unveiling of the iPhone 5 within the next 60 days.

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Appolicious – A dedicated Skype app for Apple’s iPad is on its way, bringing along with it the company’s popular voice over Internet phone service and video chatting.

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Appolicious – Apple’s iPad rules the market and online traffic as tabs using Google’s Android have failed to catch fire.

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PC Magazine – On Monday, Best Buy’s online store listed Apple MacBook Airs as “not available,” fueling rumors that Apple will launch a next-generation MacBook Air any day now.

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PC Magazine – LucasArts and Sony Online Entertainment announced last week that they will shut down Star Wars Galaxies, effective December 15.

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PC Magazine – LulzSec dropped one last data dump with data from companies like AT&T and AOL, as well as government sites.

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AP – A member of a publicity-seeking hacker group that sabotaged websites over the past two months and has announced it is dissolving itself says his group wasn’t disbanding under pressure from the FBI or enemy hackers.

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Reuters – The Lulz Security group of rogue hackers announced it was disbanding on Saturday with one last data dump, which included internal AOL Inc and AT&T documents.

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AFP – Lulz Security hacker group said it has ended an Internet rampage that included cyberattacks on videogame companies, police and even the CIA’s website.

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Appolicious – Since Groupon introduced the concept of online daily deals to the masses two years ago, scores of like-minded sites in Chicago alone have entered what is now a multi-billion dollar industry.

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AFP – Chinese search engine Baidu has agreed to invest $306 million in domestic travel website Qunar as it seeks to cash in on the booming tourism market in China.

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AP – The Vatican is taking a leap into the world of new media next week with the launch of a news information portal that Pope Benedict XVI himself may put online with a papal click.

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AFP – US regulators have launched a probe into Google’s lucrative search and advertising business in a move that could pose the most serious legal challenge yet to the Internet giant.

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AP – Google may be entering a make-or-break phase in its colorful history now that U.S. regulators have opened an investigation into whether the company has been abusing its dominance of Internet search and advertising to stifle competition.

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Reuters – Larry Page should put in a call to Bill Gates.

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AFP – US regulators have launched a probe into Google’s lucrative search and advertising business in a move that could pose the most serious legal challenge yet to the Internet giant.

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Mashable – One day after becoming the target of an FTC antitrust investigation, Google is publicly making its case for why it’s simply looking out for its users and not breaking federal law.
“Yesterday, we received formal notification from the U.S. Federal Trade Commission that it has begun a review of our business,” Google Fellow and head of the search ranking team Amit Singhal said in a blog post. “We respect the FTC’s process and will be working with them (as we have with other agencies) over the coming months to answer questions about Google and our services.”

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NewsFactor – Nokia and Microsoft’s first collaboration generated a substantial amount of buzz this week after a video of the smartphone appeared on a Hungarian web site — the kind of buzz Windows Phone 7 will need to gain traction in the smartphone market. The device, code-named Sea Ray, was unveiled at a Nokia Connections event in Singapore by CEO Stephen Elop and Jukka Kiiskinen, a Nokia sales manager.

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NewsFactor – Hackers have released a torrent of confidential data seized during an intrusion at the web site of the Arizona Department of Public Safety, including hundreds of private intelligence bulletins, training manuals, and personal e-mail correspondence of law-enforcement officials. The underground group LulzSec said it selected its latest target because of Arizona’s recent passage of an anti-immigration bill as well as the racial attitudes of state police officials.

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Reuters – From the streets of Cairo and Madrid to online forums and social media sites, “leaderless” protests are on the rise. But the very qualities that led to their short-term success may condemn them to failure in the long run.

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Reuters – Valuable broadband and networking patents developed by bankrupt Nortel Networks go up for sale next week, with tech giants like Google, Apple and Intel heading the list of would-be buyers.

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AP – Steve Crocker, one of the pioneers of the Internet, was named chairman Friday of the organization responsible for the online address system.

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Mashable – Apple blog Razorianfly says that it found a demo video for a Skype iPad app on the company’s YouTube channel Friday. The video, it says, was quickly either removed or set to private — but not before the blog took a screen recording of it and uploaded it to its own YouTube channel.

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AFP – Internet hackers invaded Brazil’s Institute of Geography and Statistics on Friday, the third straight day Brazilian government websites had been attacked.

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Mashable – Google’s been on a roll lately with its popular Google doodles. Because June is Gay and Lesbian Pride Month, the company wanted to celebrate that, too, but ran into controversy when it decided not to create a Google doodle commemorating the occasion.
Instead, for June, Google decided to make a little rainbow, a symbol of gay pride, appear next to its search window whenever certain search terms were entered, including words such as “gay,” “lesbian,” “homosexuality,” “LGBT,” “marriage equality,” “bisexual” and “transgender.”

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Reuters – Private equity firms KKR and Silver Lake are in talks to buy Internet domain site GoDaddy.com and a deal could be more than $2 billion, two sources familiar with the matter said on Friday.

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Mashable – Bill Clark is the CEO of Microventures, a securities broker/dealer that uses crowdfunding to allow investors to invest between $1,000 and $10,000 in startups online. You can follow him on Twitter @austinbillc.
When you pitch to investors or venture capitalists, assume that you are not going to have a lot of time. Investors constantly get pitched, so it’s important to catch their attention quickly and engage them by keeping it simple.

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Reuters – Computer hackers who previously broke into a U.S. Senate server and brought down the CIA website struck an Arizona police website on Thursday, releasing dozens of internal documents over the Internet.

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Reuters – Baidu Inc, China’s top search engine, is buying the country’s leading travel website Qunar to strengthen its foothold in the competitive Internet sector.

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Reuters – Google Inc found itself at the center of multiple government investigations on Thursday into whether it is using its dominance in search advertising to scotch competition.

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Mashable – Thanks to a weakening business, painful talent exodus and stagnant stock price, Yahoo is a house divided. And as President Abraham Lincoln famously once said, “a house divided against itself cannot stand.”
It’s no secret that Yahoo is struggling. The company hasn’t staged the dramatic turnaround that its investors envisioned CEO Carol Bartz would lead. Almost half of its market value is derived from its 40% stake in Alibaba, the China Internet giant with a market cap of approximately $8 billion. Most importantly, Yahoo hasn’t been able to create growth or articulate a clear vision for substantive growth.

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AP – Yahoo Inc. Chairman Roy Bostock sought to defuse speculation about CEO Carol Bartz’s job security at the Internet company’s annual shareholders meeting Thursday, only to have it ignited again at the end of the session by an exasperated investor.

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Appolicious – There were a great number of interesting games released this week. So many, in fact, that we didn’t get to feature every single one that dropped in the iTunes App Store. We’ve picked a few of the biggest and put together this week’s list, with the hope of sampling even more of the  games that became available for the iPhone and potentially featuring them next week. Leading the way is the formerly Android-exclusive BackStab from Gameloft, which is big, pretty, 3-D and pirate-themed. It’s also a bit bloody and adult-themed, so be careful who you let play it.

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AFP – The US Federal Trade Commission is poised to open a formal antitrust probe into whether Internet search giant Google has abused its dominance on the Web, The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday.

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