The demise of Digital Rights Management is nigh, but the music industry is already experimenting with a new DRM substitute. So-called "watermarking" could offer Big Music the copy protection it craves by letting companies track where digital music files end up--particularly, file-sharing networks. The technology would impart a unique serial number that lets music companies match digital files to the original purchaser. However, the big four record labels have thus far shunned the technology: Warner and EMI have yet to touch it at all, while Sony and Universal have attached "anonymous" watermarks to files that don't trace back to …

The first software developer has create applications using Google's Android. These include a Google browser, a phone dialer for making voice calls, an audio player, Google maps, a camera, several games, a calendar, a contacts manager, a calculator and a notes application. With Android, "there can be a lot more customization," than with other mobile operating systems, "reducing the cost of devices as well as development time," says A La Mobile CEO Pauline Lo Alker. The company installed the aforementioned programs on the Qtek 9090, a smartphone from HTC. It now plans to pitch this prototype, which …

Netflix on Monday lifted restrictions on how long subscribers can watch movies and TV shows streamed over broadband connections. The announcement comes on the same day that Apple's Macworld conference goes live in San Francisco. On Tuesday, the consumer electronics giant is expected to announce a new online rental service through its iTunes store, which would make Apple a direct competitor to Netflix. Netflix has been offering online rentals for about a year, allowing its customers to stream movies over the Internet instead of making them wait for DVDs ordered on the Web but delivered by mail. …

For all the talk of "engagement," advertisers still covet "eyeballs" as the No. 1 criteria for buying media, according to a recent survey. Throughout media history, advertisers have gone where the eyeballs are, but new media promised new ways to measure how long and how well people interact with ads-also known as "engagement." Even so, less than half of 2,047 marketers surveyed by Advertiser Perceptions ranked the promising marketing tactic among their top five criteria. Marketers said the most important statistic on the Web is return on investment. Other interesting data: despite a looming U.S. recession, 76 percent …

That Google Mobile Search has had outstanding success on Apple's iPhone underscores just how lucrative a market the mobile Web could be for Web firms. Why? Because the iPhone's mobile Web browser comes closest to resembling the experience of surfing on the Internet. And if internal Google-iPhone data is to be believed, then companies stand to benefit massively from the mobile browser transforming into something more like Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Apple's Safari. According to Google data, iPhone traffic to Google surged on Christmas Day, surpassing incoming traffic from all other mobile devices. It was only a few …