Facebook has approached the major record labels about creating a music service for the popular social-networking site. The approach, described as "preliminary," follows a similar move by News Corp.'s MySpace earlier in the year. MySpace is in talks to create an ad-supported music service with music's big four-Universal, Sony BMG, Warner Music and EMI. The record companies see social networking as a way to offset shrinking physical album sales. They also see ad-supported music as a way to combat Apple's dominant share of the digital music market. Facebook already offers third-party music applications from …

In a research note, UBS analyst Ben Reitzes said that Apple had lined up German chipmaker Infineon Technologies to produce chips for a new 3G iPhone that could hit shelves as early as June. Other reports claim that Apple has shifted its focus from creating software for the iPhone's current platform, running on the 2.5G EDGE network, to developing applications that would run on the newer device. Apple CEO Steve Jobs has also hinted that a new iPhone would become available later this year. A 3G iPhone could spark a flurry of new sales for Apple, …

Copyrights are often compared to property rights, especially by those who are opposed to the practice of file sharing, which often includes the illegal exchange of copyrighted material over a peer-to-peer file-sharing network. Those who want to increase the power of copyright owners stress the laws' similarities, while those who want to decrease the importance of intellectual property, resist the analogy. The scarcity argument claims that when a resource is overused, its value is diminished. This is true with respect to land, where communal land inevitably becomes over-grazed and over-farmed, but not true when it comes to …

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently hired Sheryl Sandberg as company COO. Zuckerberg says that Sandberg isn't meant to be a direct replacement for outgoing chief revenue officer Owen Van Natta, but rather someone who will manage the companies' various departments as it grows. Her role will be more extensive than Van Natta's, which means her attention will be less focused on the day-to-day operations of each unit than it will be on keeping the young executive heads of these different departments in check. Sandberg's charge is to help Facebook grow into a more multinational organization. By year's end, …

Experts claim that to take off, mobile video will either have to be free and ad-supported or cost very little and be ad-supported. A survey of 1,004 users last year from In-Stat found that while most people are interested in viewing video content on their mobile phones, 80 percent said they wouldn't pay $15 per month for it. In fact, IDC Research adds that even among those who do watch mobile content on their phones (roughly 2 percent of U.S. wireless users according to M:Metrics), the vast majority opt for $2 downloads rather than pay a monthly subscription. …

Forrester Research analyst Charlene Li has some interesting advice for Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, saying that she would open up the Web site's prized social graph--and not just the applications. Li says such a move would preempt the Web portals, which are undoubtedly on the same path to providing more interoperable applications based on the user's social graph. The problem for portals like AOL and Yahoo is that most of their social information comes from email, and contains far less data than a big social network like Facebook. "Instead of using [the portals'] social map," Li says …

Employers are starting to block workers from watching online video during the workday. Indeed, Web 2.0 in the workplace is starting to go the way of streaming music and adult content sites: banned because they sap up bandwidth and employee productivity. According to the latest figures from Nielsen Online, the heaviest consumption of Web video is during lunchtime: between 12 p.m. and 2, when most people are at work. ComScore reports that in December, Internet users watched more than 10 billion videos. For smaller companies, video consumption poses a particularly big problem, because they often …