In October 2009, billionaires Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom, the creators of the Kazaa P2P client as well as Skype, announced that they had developed and financed the unlimited music subscription service Rdio, and the company has now made the service available to all.

Separating the service from others like Rhapsody is the fact that Rdio allows users to listen from anywhere in "the cloud," including through their phones, instead of needing to download DRM-laced music locally.

Furthermore, Rdio has many social networking features connected to Facebook and Twitter. Rdio uses subscriber's online social networks to recommend songs, as well. If a bunch of your friends like a certain artist, Rdio will likely recommend it to you.

Rdio has over seven million tracks available from the major labels and thousands of indies.

The service charges $10 per month for unlimited access to music on a computer or your smartphone. For $5, you can get browser-only access.

Rdio is available on BlackBerrys, Android devices and the Apple iPhone.

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T-Mobile MyTouch 3G Slide owners will begin receiving an OTA update for their Android operating system tomorrow, but it is not the highly anticipated Android 2.2 Froyo upgrade.

Along with optimizations comes some nice bug fixes as well, including a fix for an issue that has been quite annoying to me as an owner; the inability to receive MMS when connected to Wi-Fi.

Says T-Mobile: "Beginning August 4, T-Mobile will send an over-the-air (OTA) update to myTouch 3G Slide customers, which will provide a number of benefits, including increased battery performance and enhancements to software features such as Faves Gallery and Genius Button. The update will be sent to customers in staggered waves beginning August 4 and we anticipate all customers will receive it by August 19."

The improvements to Battery Life consist of "Updates to the T-Mobile online contact backup connection, which will improve battery life."

Users will now be able to send and receive MMS messages when connected to Wi-Fi.

The "Genius Button" is now improved with the "Ability to turn GPS on and off using your voice, such as "Turn GPS on." The button will also announce Caller ID for incoming voice calls and allow you to "Answer" or "Ignore" using your voice. Finally, the button will announce incoming text messages and allow you to "reply" with dictation."

Furthermore, the "Faves Gallery" is improved "the Faves icon being displayed beside notifications that appear while the device is locked to indicate that the communication is coming from one of your Faves. Fave photo display speed will be enhanced. Finally, general stability will be improved, including more seamless scrolling and consistent display of photos."

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Motorola and Verizon will soon unveil a new tablet with a FiOS digital pay-TV service included, trying a new method to differentiate itself from the growing number of tablets expected to hit shelves this year.

The 10-inch device will run Android 2.x and can launch as early as "this autumn."

Motorola is a long-time partner of Verizon, creating TV set-top boxes for the FiOS service.

Market leader Apple has sold over 3 million iPad tablets since launch in early April, but HP, RIM, Microsoft, Samsung, Lenovo and LG have all promised tablets by the end of the year, running either BlackBerry, WebOS, Windows 7 or Android operating systems.

None of those devices, however, has promised TV integration.

Verizon has 25 percent share of the U.S. TV market, and 29 percent of the broadband market.

Taking another shot directly at the iPad, the upcoming Motorola tablet will also support Adobe Flash, the standard used by over 85 percent of videos on the Web but blocked by Apple.

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According to AppleInsider, the second generation iPad tablet will likely have a camera, a feature shockingly missing from the first version.

Citing a document of Apple's iPad management policies, the site says there will be an ability to disable the use of the camera. As we know, there is no camera on the current generation model.

Additionally, the site cites a recent job listing from Apple for a "Performance QA Engineer, iPad Media" wherein the description says "we are looking for a software quality engineer with a strong technical background to test still, video and audio capture and playback frameworks."

Applicants can then "build on your QA experience and knowledge of digital camera technology (still and video) to develop and maintain testing frameworks for both capture and playback pipelines."

The second generation model iPad will likely offer a front-facing camera with FaceTime video conferencing support.

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In less than one year, Windows 7 has surpassed Vista in global usage, however both still pale in comparison to the aged Windows XP.

Vista was released in 2007 to extremely harsh critical reviews. The operating system left many concerns of application compatibility, stringent hardware requirements, and who could forget about the UAC?.

Windows 7 was released in September 2009 to high critical review.

New NetApplications analytics show that Windows has 90.67 percent of the OS market, with XP the dominant leader at 61.87 percent. Windows 7 has now moved to 14.46 percent, just ahead of Vista at 14.34 percent.

In the United States, XP has 44.26 percent, ahead of Vista at 23.31 percent and Windows 7 catching up at 16.09 percent.

Overall Windows share fell from just over 92 percent last July, thanks to a small increase in Apple Mac sales and a large jump in mobile operating systems. Linux share fell to under 1 percent.

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NTT DoCoMo has announced their complete purchase of the mobile video firm PacketVideo.

DoCoMo was already a 35 percent owner of the company, purchasing the rest for $111.6 million.

Last July, the company purchased its first stake for $45.5 million.

PacketVideo will continue run independently, keeping the same CEO, president and board of directors.

The acquired company was founded in 1998, becoming one of the earliest mobile video innovators. The company was one of the first to place video on mobile phones, as far back as 1999.

Currently, PacketVideo powers the video services for Verizon, AT&T, Vodafone India, TeliaSonera, Telstra, Rogers Canada, and Telus.

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Wikipedia lawyer Mike Godwin recently sent a letter to FBI Deputy Director David Larson rejecting a demand that the community authored online encyclopedia remove an image of the FBI seal from their article on the agency.

You may already know of Mike Godwin from the many internet references to Godwin's Law, which states, "As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one."

Responding to an earlier letter from Deputy Director Larson, Godwin took him to task for using "creative editing" of US law as proof of authority over use of the seal.

The portion of the US Code in question, 18 USC Section 701, makes it a crime to manufacture, sell or possess a badge, identification card or other insignia used to denote an official representative of a US government agency.

Godwin noted that the statutory language, "badge, identification card, or other insignia" was altered to simply read, "insignia" in Larson's letter.

He went on to explain, "You will note that the phrase "or other" precedes the word "insignia", both of which follow the enumerated items "badges" and "identification cards." This constrains the definition of insignia to those objects which are similar in nature to badges and identification cards. This definition comports with case law interpreting 701."

He also pointed out that the FBI seal is displayed on many other websites, including that of Encyclopedia Brittanica.

He concluded the letter saying, "[Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons] are in contact with outside counsel in this matter, and we are prepared to argue our view in court."

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According to the latest Net Applications data, Microsoft's Internet Explorer actually gained browser market share for the second straight month, gaining at the expense of rivals Firefox and Chrome.

For the month ended July 31st, IE grew its share globally by .42 percent, while Firefox dropped 1 percent and Chrome fell marginally by .08 percent.

Internet Explorer 8 saw the strongest growth of any individual browser version, moving up 1.38 percent to 42.16 percent.

Net Applications creates the figures based on browser usage, not installation or download numbers.

Overall, Internet Explorer has 60.74 percent of the market, Firefox has 22.91 percent, Chrome has 7.16 percent and Apple's Safari has 5.09 percent. Opera and others account for the remaining 4.10 percent.

View NetApps data here: http://www.netmarketshare.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qprid=1&sample=32

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RIM and AT&T have unveiled the latest BlackBerry smartphone today, the Torch 9800, RIM's first slider device.

The device has a 3.2" HVGA+ touch screen with 480x360 resolution and a 5MP camera with IS, auto-focus and VGA video recording.

On the inside is 512 MB flash memory and 512 MB SDRAM. Included are a 4 GB eMMC + 4 GB media card. The phone has a MicroSD slot with support up to 32GB.

As is standard now, the device supports Wi-Fi b/g/n, Bluetooth 2.1+EDR and 3G.

Perhaps the most notable addition alongside the otherwise mediocre specs, is the upgrade to BlackBerry OS 6. BB OS 6 brings a WebKit-based browser which should significantly improve the Internet experience, long a complaint among BlackBerry fans.

The Touch will hit AT&T on August 12th for $200 with contract.

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DivX has announced that Skyworth Group, a Chinese electronics company, will introduce DivX Certified digital TVs this year.

DivX certified DTVs are capable of playing MPEG-4 video, either from USB devices or streamed across a network if the TV has the necessary interface. They can also decode video encoded with a variety of other MPEG-4 tools.

According to a joint press release from the two companies, eventually Skyworth will be selling HDTVs with DivX Plus HD Certification, which among other things means support for Matroska (MKV) files.

The first DivX Certified TVs from Skyworth should be available throughout Oceania in August, and introduced soon after in Europe, Africa & the Middle East.

No date for the introduction of DivX HD Ultra Certified models has been announced.

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Starting today, kiosks from Redbox will be offering Blu-ray discs for rental in addition to DVDs.

The discs, which will rent for $1.50 (plus tax) per night compared to $1.00 for DVDs, will initially only be available at a little more than half of their locations. As with DVDs, they can be returned to any Redbox kiosk.

The company expects to be stocking Blu-ray discs in all of their kiosks before the end of the year.

The initial selection of Blu-ray discs includes The Book of Eli, Bounty Hunter, Brooklyn's Finest & Green Zone.

With approximately 23,000 locations, Redbox is the leading operator of DVD rental kiosks in the US.

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