Following the departure of CEO and chairman Gary Forsee, Sprint may soon be forced to give up its extensive (and expensive) WiMax plans, according CNET. Not that WiMax--a technology that could blanket whole cities with wireless Internet access--is a bad idea, it's just too risky an idea for a company performing so poorly. Two years after merging with Nextel, Sprint shareholders have yet to see any payoff, which has them worried that a risky new technology that faces plenty of competition could put the company deep in the hole. Unfortunately, Sprint has already dumped more than a billion dollars into …

IBM and Second Life creator Linden Lab are teaming up to create "universal avatars" that let patrons of virtual worlds move from one to another using the same identity. An interesting vision, to be sure, but a "borderless" virtual world society presents all kinds of data integration problems--of course, this is where IBM comes in. The integration of identities also calls for standards to be developed to allow for things like secure business transactions and porting business and personal data over from one world to another. More than 20 virtual world companies met in San Francisco earlier this week to …

BitTorrent, founder of modern (illegal) file-sharing, is reinventing itself once again. In its bid to turn straight, the company's new plan, introduced this year, is to help media companies stream videos over the Internet--which is a little weird, as Forbes' Andy Greenberg points out. "[The] company whose name has long meant digital piracy to content owners now wants to be the online media industry's humble servant," he says. BitTorrent on Tuesday introduced a new product called the Delivery Network Accelerator (DNA), which distributes the task of streaming or downloading video among many computers in a given network, leveraging collective bandwidth …

The Web press is still absolutely transfixed by Facebook (which is registering new users at a clip of 150,000 per day), so it's not surprising that executives at rival MySpace are granting interviews all over the place--'hey guys, what about us?' To be fair, MySpace is still the largest social network, and one of the most highly trafficked sites on the Web. It's also far more lucrative than its young competitor: parent Fox Interactive tells USA Today that MySpace is on pace to earn $1 billion in revenue for the fiscal year ending in June. By comparison, Facebook is …

One of Yahoo's most valuable areas is news. In the last few years, the Web giant has firmly entrenched itself as the No. 1 provider of news on the Internet in all the major categories: general, financial and sports. An astonishing two in five users reads Yahoo News--or 50 million people per month, according to comScore, which is more than Google News, even. As the Forbes report suggests, here's your business model for the future--Web portals. The strongest selling point for content aggregators like Yahoo, AOL and MSN is their transformation into "power hubs" for news. Forget original content, forget …

Google shares have shot past $600, giving the Web giant a valuation of $190 billion-plus. For many critics, the question now becomes: where do we grow from here? Industry watchers have often criticized Google for failing to get into social networking, but BusinessWeek points out that they would be wrong, as Google--outside of North America and Europe--is very much in the social networking game. Orkut, as Google's social network is called, generates 24.6 million monthly uniques across the globe (nearly a quarter of MySpace's traffic)--nearly all of which come from Asia and Latin America. The latter is 12.4 million strong, …

Virtual world developer Multiverse is announcing a partnership today with Google allowing Web users to create their own virtual worlds using 3D models from Google 3D Warehouse, Google SketchUp and Google Earth. Although it sounds complicated, CNET insists that it's not: the Multiverse platform allows users to literally grab images from 3D Warehouse, whole environments from Google Earth, and 3D models created using SketchUp, and plot them in a digital universe that's all your own--well, you and anyone else who wants to play in your newly created world. So, if you want San Francisco in your virtual world, all you …

The New York Times has more on Google's worst-kept mobile phone secret, the GPhone. Is it a phone, mobile OS or both? Various reports have said the GPhone is actually both (er, a mobile lifestyle?), but the Times report reveals that it's not, really. Rather, Google's aim is to build open-source operating and Web-browsing software that would compete with Microsoft's Windows Mobile. As ever, the Web giant expects advertising to be its engine. Ad revenue could not only help subsidize the cost of phones for consumers, but also allow it to offer software to handset makers free of charge. The …

The release of the album "In Rainbows" by British rock band Radiohead is being closely watched this week by the music industry for several reasons: for one thing, the band is one of the most highly acclaimed rock groups by critics worldwide. For another, the band decided to allow fans to pay whatever they want to download the new album, which is sure to make recording industry executives sit up and take notice. Aside from the novel "donation" approach, one unique aspect of the "In Rainbows" release is that it comes just 10 days after the band completed recording …

To boost its share price, Yahoo needs to either break up its online businesses or go through a major business model makeover, Sanford C. Bernstein analyst Jeffrey Lindsay said in an a research note last week. Viewed separately, Lindsay said Yahoo's operations--which include advertising services, content, and Web search--could be valued as high as $39 per share; its current share price is $27. Of course, no one seriously believes Yahoo would do this, or follow Lindsay's other suggestion (cited by several other Web analysts and pundits) to outsource search. Try as it might, Yahoo simply can't compete with Google in …