Burger King has extended its Coq Roq branded Web experience to include a quirky song recognition feature that uses visitors' mobile phones. Crispin Porter + Bogusky developed the mobile music recognition service and added it to CoqRoq.com a week ago.

America Online, the world's largest online company, said on Thursday it had purchased online storage and backup company Xdrive for an undisclosed sum. The six-year-old, Santa Monica, California-based Xdrive lets users store and back up computer files, music, pictures and videos on their computer servers, accessible to any Internet-connected computer. Online storage capabilities are expected to be integrated into AOL's services.

The Netscape threat that led Microsoft to wage the browser war and cross swords with antitrust regulators around the world is -- at long last -- poised to become reality. Software experts say recent innovations in web design are ushering in a new era for internet-based software applications, some of the best of which already rival desktop applications in power and efficiency. That's giving software developers a wide open platform for creating new programs that have no relation to the underlying operating system that runs a PC.

The digital-music field may soon be getting a bit more crowded. Internet retailer Amazon.com reportedly is moving toward offering a digital-music service, putting it into competition with the likes of Apple Computer, Napster and RealNetworks.

Indie shows are struggling to stand out amid the influx of media giants.

If you think about it, Google, with its $82 billion market cap, offers just a hint of the potential for online advertising. The average web surfer spends less than 5 percent of his time using a search engine, according to the Online Publishers Association's Internet Activity Index. That means Google earns almost $3 billion a year from people who devote 95 percent of their time on the internet to doing something else.

Yahoo has quietly begun testing blog-search technology in Korea, a sign of coming tools for the U.S. market that will take on existing players such as Technorati.

Newly released court documents reveal that Google Inc. anticipated a fight when it hired away a top Microsoft Corp. executive to launch a new research and development center in China. The Internet search company agreed to pay Kai-Fu Lee's full salary and let his stock options vest even if an agreement he signed at Microsoft prevented him from being able to work for up to a year.

We often hear print Yellow Pages will soon be dead. Rather than discuss whether a postmortem is appropriate, let's extend our condolences to the print Yellow Pages' younger sibling, the Internet Yellow Pages (IYPs). IYPs are a throwback to a directional media that meant simply finding a business and phone number when in need. Most IYPs are flat, static, and stale. They're remnants of the old in the new, innovative game of local search.

Interested in finding a tune on the Internet? Try Yahoo's new audio search service, which the company began testing Thursday. The service, available at audio.search.com, allows users to comb through more than 50 million music, voice, and other files for free.