In Gemstar-TV Guide International’s first such deal with a telco TV provider, signing a patent-licensing agreement with Verizon Communications for interactive program guides and related technology for its FiOS TV product.

Under the agreement, the two companies will also jointly develop a solution to let Verizon’s FiOS TV customers remotely schedule recordings on their digital-video recorders using TV Guide’s listings. See TV Guide Channel to Become TV Guide Network.

According to Bloomberg, Cablevision just agreed to be taken private by the Dolan family for $10.6 billion in cash, capping their two-year effort to buy the company. The Dolans will pay $36.26 a share, compared with a $30 bid rejected in January, the Bethpage, New York-based company said today in a statement. The price is 11 percent more than yesterday’s close.

The agreement hands the Dolans a cable network that gets 21 percent more revenue per customer than larger rival Comcast Corp., as well as ownership of the New York Knicks basketball and New York Rangers hockey teams. Going private also frees Chairman Charles Dolan and his son, Chief Executive Officer James Dolan, from public scrutiny of their stewardship and the demands of shareholders for faster profit growth. Read more.

Digg.com users revolted yesterday over posts being taken down regarding a hexadecimal string that was just leaked a few days ago that allowed cracking a HD-DVD. This so-called secret decryption key for HD-DVDs that was posted received takedown notices from those who own what they said was their “intellectual property.” Digg.com started removing posts that contain it, infuriating the web community and causing Digg users to revolt. The entire front page of digg.com was full of submissions and comments all containing the hexadecimal string in question. More posts were submitted as fast as digg could take them down, almost taking the entire site down at one point.

Continue reading Internet Community Did Not “Digg” Censorship…

On May 13th, Intel and Skype are sponsoring a day of free “global calling” (only to phones in the US or Canada). Call your mom for free!

Apple and Full Sail media college will announce “Project LaunchBox” on Friday. This new project is designed to put Apple hardware and professional software directly into the hands of more than 4,000 students across six different disciplines of study.
Students will receive a MacBook Pro loaded with software specifically geared toward their degree, and will receive instruction that combines 50 percent lecture and 50 percent hands-on.

Apple has now separated their ProCare service package into two distinct services. ProCare is now a tech support service only, and the training arm from the support plan was spun off as a new education package called One to One. Both are priced at $99 (US) each per year. ProCare members that joined before May 2 can take advantage of the new ProCare and One to One services for the remainder of their membership.

Continue reading Apple Separates ProCare Tech and Training Support…

Apple released a new security update (2007-004 v1.1) revising an earlier update (2007-004) that addresses two bugs introduced with last week’s update. An update to Quicktime (7.1.6) for Windows and Mac users was also released that addresses two important zero-day QuickTime flaws that can affect security for both platforms. This flaw was recently used with Safari to hack a MacBook in a recent “hackers” conference. Both of these updates are for ALL users.

Continue reading Apple Releases Quicktime and Revised Security Updates…

Maybe Eric Schmidt, Google CEO and Apple Board member is spending just too much time with Apple CEO Steve Jobs. Google’s personalized home page, Google IG, is now rebranded and relauched as iGoogle.

iGoogle is Google’s Ajax home page space, where My Yahoo is the leader. But Google has never promoted iGoogle, and it has a number of superior features to MyYahoo. The most important is that Google’s personalized home page supports widgets (they call them gadgets).

Continue reading Google IG Relaunches as iGoogle…

Dell will begin selling some consumer-focused laptop and desktop models with Ubuntu’s new “Feisty Fawn” version of Linux pre-installed in the coming weeks. Customers buying the Ubuntu powered Dell systems will have the option to purchase support from Canonical the start-up behind the very popular version of Linux called “Ubuntu.”

This is great news for Linux and open source users as they will soon be able to buy a mainstream computer from Dell without paying for a Windows OS they will never use, which is what is know as the “Windows tax.”
Continue reading Dell To Reduce the Windows Tax…

Joost is announcing that it will allow beta testers to invite anyone to use the system.”Later this month we will be completely open” and allow anyone to download the Joost software from the company’s Web site, said Yvette Alberdingk Thijm, the company’s top executive. “This is the way you normally ramp up peer-to-peer software … and it’s a way to give our (beta tester) friends a little bit of a scoop.”

Continue reading Joost Opens Up Signs More Content…