That deal propelled News Corp. into one of the world’s largest mobile-entertainment companies, providing through Fox Mobile Entertainment Jamba’s ringtones,
mobile wallpaper, and other such offerings.

VeriSign on Tuesday announced that it has sold its minority stake in mobile-entertainment joint venture Jamba to partner News Corp. for approximately $200 million.

The sale bumps News Corp.’ unit Fox Mobile [...]

Business are stimulated by real customers buying real products in the midst of real competition. This is the very type of competition in which technology has thrived. Google doesn’t need the U.S. government to buy into its broadband and renewable energy proposals to grow. It needs to continue to strike at Microsoft’s jugular. IBM doesn’t [...]

Buried in an insightful Ars Technica article on digital music is this casual throwaway line, “At Princeton, Macs accounted for an astonishing 40 percent of all student computers in 2008.”
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Forty percent?!? That’s amazing. In the general operating-system market, according to Net Applications, Apple commands nearly 10 percent of the personal-computer [...]

As a side note, if anyone can explain why all these virtual-world companies have the word “fish” (Playfish, Gofish, TwoFish) in them, I would appreciate it. Hit me on Twitter @daveofdoom.

Virtual world and supporting companies raised more than $594 million in 2008, according to a new report from Virtual Worlds Management.

While this represents a [...]

Related: Facebook Connect officially open

This is a big deal for blog owners who may feel a little finicky about going through with a full Facebook Connect install on their blog. Considering the main point of registration often comes when users want to dip into a discussion this was the next logical step for any third-party [...]

“The NAB is trying to suffocate the first viable alternative to broadcast radio and is reaching out of their industry to kill another.” –Tim Westergren, Pandora founder

“This bill doesn’t effect the NAB at all,” Westergren said. “This bill is designed to give us the time to resolve what it looks we’re close to [...]

• Based upon qualitative research, Bowker believes that users are slow-rolling server virtualization because of systems management issues, security concerns, lack of virtualization skills in the IT organization, and I/O bottlenecks.

• On average, enterprises have about 225 physical servers running server virtualization.

• The main reason why enterprises are deploying server virtualization is to consolidate Windows server workloads.

Contributed by Jaspersoft CEO Brian Gentile. The views expressed are his own. (But if you like them, I’ll take credit. )

Because its criteria for inclusion on the business intelligence-focused Magic Quadrant chart focuses on the vendor achieving a minimum revenue threshold, not market penetration or customer adoption, the effect of open-source products is hugely understated.

Of course, open-source business intelligence (like many other software categories in which ope