Steve Sprang, a 32-year-old programmer, created Brushes, a painting simulator for the iPhone, that has been downloaded more than 50,000 times and was used to create last week's New Yorker cover. The $3.99 app, of which Sprang keeps 70% of the revenue (per Apple's agreement with developers), has netted approximately $140,000, proving that there is money to be made selling software applications for the iPhone and other wireless devices, says BusinessWeek. Apple's App Store has paved the way for competitors like Google, Research in Motion, Nokia and Sony Ericsson to follow up with their own application stores. …

Speaking at an investor conference, Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz stressed that the Web giant isn't under any pressure to do a deal with Microsoft. "Yahoo doesn't have to do anything with Microsoft about anything," Bartz said, adding: "We are a damned big, important site." However, despite these assertions, Bartz said that combining Yahoo's search technology with Microsoft could provide important benefits of scale, and in turn, improve the company's monetization of its search service. She said a partnership could save Yahoo up to $700 million in costs. Analysts had pegged the annual cost savings of a search …

Hulu's incredible growth seems to be dropping off-quickly, TechCrunch's Jason Kincaid reports. Between January and February of this year, the online video giant, which is jointly owned by News Corp., NBC Universal and Disney, saw a 42% increase in unique visitors and a 33% increase in streams, according to comScore data. Between February and March, Hulu became the third most popular video site in the U.S., with a 14% growth in uniques and a 20% growth in overall streams. However, between March and April, the site recorded modest growth of 4.4% in streams, from 380 million to 397 million. Meanwhile, …

The Pre, Palm's much-hyped iPhone competitor, is now just a few days away from its official release, and for the most part, it's receiving strong reviews, although most critics are complaining that the device lacks a sufficient app store, which has decidedly light third-party support thus far. That said, the consensus is that the Pre looks cool, has a great user interface-including touch screen technology and a slide-out keyboard-, and in Sprint, a superior network to the iPhone's AT&T. Henry Blodget, for one, thinks the Pre won't be enough to steal the iPhone's thunder. "The Pre may …

Newspaper publishers are looking to band together to demand payment from Web sites that use their content, The Wall Street Journal reports, in the same way that music publishers collect a fraction of a cent when their songs are played in public. According to experts, the publishers might be able to achieve this, as long as they're careful about violating antitrust law, which forbids teaming up in ways that drive up prices and limit consumers' options. The music industry has been able to sidestep antitrust claims by limiting any single entity's control over access to songs. Under …

Facebook is rolling out a new internal payments system, testing it on three different applications on the site, a move that could help the social networking giant become less reliant on advertising, the Financial Times reports. The system, which is in the very early stages of development, will allow users to purchase Facebook "credits" to buy virtual goods across the social network's services and third party applications. Facebook will take a cut of every transaction. "Over time, this will be very significant," Gartner analyst Ray Valdes says. "Social networking sites have suffered with monetizing [their services], but …

Wired's Julian Dibbell argues that no one really understands the point of Twitter, as knowing how people use the microblogging service isn't the same thing as knowing why they use it. Indeed, says Dibbell, "most of the uses Twitter has been adapted to were already well-served by existing online tools -- blogs, email, instant-messaging -- and it's not entirely obvious how the subcompact message lengths and other constraints of microblogging represent an improvement." This makes nailing down Twitter's comparative advantage somewhat difficult. "I think there's a question whether Twitter is going to be the thing everybody does, …