Disney joins NBC and News Corp. with Hulu stake

The Walt Disney Co. is taking a stake inHulu.com. This means titles from The Walt Disney Studios library of films and full-length episodes of ABC television shows will join the online video site.

Disney joins NBC Universal, News Corp. and private equity firmProvidence Equity Partners, who own Hulu in a joint venture.

Disney said Chief Executive Robert Iger, Disney/ABC Television Group President Anne Sweeney and Kevin Mayer, a Disney senior vice president, will join Hulu's board.

Financial terms were not disclosed.

Obamas first 100

The President almost seemed apologetic. "This may be a slightly longer speech than I usually give," he told his audience at Georgetown University on April 14. "This is going to be prose and not poetry." What followed, as promised, was not poetry. Barack Obama doesn't do much poetry anymore. But in prose that was spare and clear and compelling, the President proceeded to describe how his Administration had responded to the financial crisis, the overriding challenge of his first 100 days in office. He had covered this ground before, nearly as well, in his budget message to Congress. But now Obama went further, using a parable from the Sermon on the Mount - the need for a house built on rock rather than on sand - to describe a future that was nothing less than an overhaul of the nature of American capitalism. "It is simply not sustainable," he said, "to have an economy where, in one year, 40% of our corporate profits came from a financial sector that was based on inflated home prices, maxed-out credit cards, overleveraged banks and overvalued assets."

Cablevisions fast internet

Cablevision Systems Corp. on Tuesday unveiled the fastest Internet speeds available from any cable or phone company.

Starting May 11, the Bethpage, N.Y.-based cable operator will offer speeds of up to 101 megabits per second downstream throughout its service area, and 15 megabits per second upstream.

That means a 4-gigabyte, high-definition movie can be downloaded in 5 1/2 minutes. It would take two minutes for a 1.6-gigabyte standard definition movie.

Cablevision, which has 3 million subscribers in the New York metro area, also plans to double the downstream speed of the Wi-Fi Internet service it offers at "hot spots" in New York's Long Island, Connecticut and Westchester County, and in parts of New Jersey.

Cablevision is in a race against Verizon Communications Inc., which is rolling out its fiber-optic FiOS service in New York City.

At present, Verizon's top Internet speed is 50 megabits per second with a starting cost of $140 a month plus a free wireless router. Cablevision is offering its service at $99.95 a month.

Hollywood vs DVD ripper

Hollywood calls it "rent, rip and return" and contends it's one of the biggest technological threats to the movie industry's annual $20 billion DVD market — software that allows you to copy a film without paying for it.

On Friday, industry lawyers urged a federal judge to barRealNetworks Inc. from selling software that allows consumers to copy their DVDs to computer hard drives, arguing that the Seattle-based company's product is an illegal pirating tool.

RealNetworks' lawyers countered later in the morning that its RealDVD product is equipped with piracy protections that limits a DVD owner to making a single copy and a legitimate way to back up copies of movies legally purchased.

The same federal judge who shut down the music-swapping site Napster in 2000 because of copyright violations is presiding over the three-day trial, which is expected to cut to the heart of the same technological upheaval roiling Hollywood that forever changed the face of the music business.

Facebook adopts new rules

Facebook will adopt new rules governing the social network even though a vote fell well short of a minimum threshold.

The new documents specify, among other things, that users own their information, not Facebook. An earlier attempt to push changes led to user confusion and protests over who controls the personal information people share on the site.

More than 600,000 of Facebook's 200 million regular users voted over the past week, with nearly three-quarters in favor of the changes. Palo Alto, Calif.-based Facebook said Friday an outside auditor is verifying the results.

Ted Ullyot, Facebook's general counsel, said turnout is "a small number" compared with the site's user base. Facebook had set a minimum threshold of a 30 percent voter turnout for the vote to be binding. That would have been about 60 million people, or about 100 times the actual turnout

Myspace cofounder steps down

MySpace co-founder Chris DeWolfe will step down soon as the social networking site's chief executive, amid the site's stalled user growth and the rapid rise of rival Facebook.

MySpace owner News Corp. said Wednesday the decision was made by mutual agreement with former AOL Chief Executive Jonathan Miller, who was appointed News Corp.'s chief digital officer April 1.

DeWolfe, 43, helped launch the site in January 2004. He will remain on the board of MySpace China and be a strategic adviser to the company.

AT&T earnings fall, but the iPhone helps

Cost-cutting and the lure of the iPhone softened the effect of the weak economy at AT&T Inc., helping the country's biggest telecommunications carrier beat analyst estimates for the first quarter.

AT&T said Wednesday it earned more than $3.1 billion, or 53 cents per share, in the first three months of 2009, down 10 percent from almost $3.5 billion, or 57 cents per share, a year earlier.

The earnings were reduced by 5 cents per share for increases in pension and retiree expenses. Excluding that item, the earnings were 58 cents per share. The average estimate of analysts polled by Thomson Reuters, which generally excludes one-time items, was for earnings of 48 cents per share.

Despite strong wireless sales, AT&T says revenue slipped to $30.6 billion from $30.7 billion a year ago. That was short of analyst expectations for $31.1 billion

Washington is the first to try Mobile TV

Washington will be the first U.S. city to get free digital TV broadcasts for mobile devices like cell phones, laptop computersand in-car entertainment systems, broadcasters were set to announce Monday.

Broadcasts using new "mobile DTV" technology are expected to begin in late summer from five stations: local affiliates of CBS,NBC, PBS and Ion and one independent station owned by Fox.

The initial broadcasts will be identical to those beamed to TV sets, including the advertising.

It's unclear what devices might be available with the special receivers needed for the new signals. Cell phones are main candidates for the technology, but the wireless carriers have shown no enthusiasm, and the largest two have their own TV services, which require subscriptions.

Behind the scenes with Windows 7

To design Windows 7, Microsoft analyzed billions of pieces of data. It studied exactly what PC users do in front of their screens. It tallied hundreds of thousands of Windows surveys. It got feedback from people all over the world who tried different versions of the software.

As a result, every change or new feature in Windows 7 comes with a back story. Here is a sampling of things you'll see in the next operating system and explanations of how each came about.

• New feature: You decide the left-to-right order of icons in the task bar at the bottom of your screen.

• Back story: Microsoft's research showed Vista users commonly launching a series of programs, then closing and immediately reopening some. Microsoft realized that these people wanted their programs to appear in the same order on the task bar every time.

• New feature: Right-click on a task bar icon and get a "jump list," a menu of important or frequently used options for the program.

• Back story: Microsoft had resisted the idea of hiding a key feature behind a right click, worried people wouldn't find it. But the data showed most people right-click on icons to see what that might do.

• New feature: Drag one open window to the left side of the screen, then another to the right side to line them up so they are the same size and side by side.

• Back story: Microsoft couldn't initially figure out why people were spending so much time resizing windows and dragging them around. It turned out that users were trying to give themselves a side-by-side view of documents for easy comparison.

• New feature: Libraries, or virtual folders that have shortcuts to files that are actually stored in many different places on a hard drive or home network.

• Back story: From its Vista data, Microsoft could see people's photos, music and other files were swelling in number and stashed all over the place, not organized into the dedicated folders Microsoft had set up.

• New feature: "Shake" an open window with your mouse to make all the other ones "minimize" into the task bar.

• Back story: Microsoft's research showed that people often had six or even 10 windows open at once, which gets distracting. Shake is one of several features designed to help people tame all the open windows.

• New feature: Move your mouse to the bottom-right corner to make all your windows temporarily transparent. Then click the mouse, and all the windows minimize.

Back story: What's notable here is what Microsoft didn't do. There's no tutorial or bubble advertising the feature, a small step toward making Windows 7 quieter than Vista. "We want people to confidently explore the system," said Sam Moreau, a user experience manager.

Yahoo plans to lay off under a new CEO

Yahoo Inc. is gearing up for its third round of mass layoffs in 14 months, signaling the long-slumping Internet company is still struggling to snap out of its financial malaise under a new leadership team.

The cuts will likely affect several hundred employees, a person familiar with the plan said late Tuesday, confirming a report first published on The New York Times' Web site.

Somali Pirates

The shipping captain held hostage by Somali pirates will return to the U.S. with his crew on Wednesday.

Maersk Line Limited said Tuesday that Captain Richard Phillips and the crew of the Maersk Alabama are expected to arrive at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland late Wednesday. They are taking a chartered flight from Mombasa, Kenya.

Pirates took over the boat briefly last week before Phillips surrendered himself in exchange for the safety of his 19-member crew. Phillips was taken hostage on a lifeboat for days before Navy SEALs killed the pirates and rescued the captain on Sunday.

Phillips and crew will be reunited with loved ones at Andrews Air Force Base in a private reception area.

Conflicker

The Conficker worm, a nasty computer infection that has poisoned millions of PCs, will start ramping up its efforts Wednesday to use those machines for cybercrimes. It's unclear whether everyday PC users will even notice, but this is as good an excuse as any to make sure your computer is clean.

There are some easy ways to figure out whether a computer has the Conficker worm, and free tools available for getting rid of it.

One scary thing about Conficker is that it spreads without human involvement, moving from PC to PC by exploiting a security hole in Microsoft Corp.'s Windows operating system. The hole was fixed in October, but if your computer doesn't get automatic updates from Microsoft, you could be vulnerable.