Google has gone and integrated its Moderator service -- which lets users vote on user-submitted ideas -- into YouTube. In the past, YouTube used the service for special events, and granted only select users access. With the permanent integration, Google is "bringing order to the relative chaos of a few hundred million users chatting about videos," writes CNet's Web Crawler blog. Unlike comments, which rest on a video page, Moderator is located on channel pages where channel owners can more easily police items they feel to be off-topic or offensive. Like the original Google Moderator, the list …

Confirming earlier reports, The New York Times says Apple has indeed surpassed Microsoft to become "the world's most valuable technology company." Notes The Times: "This changing of the guard caps one of the most stunning turnarounds in business history for Apple, which had been given up for dead only a decade earlier." Apple ended the day yesterday with a market cap in excess of $220 billion.Among other factors, the paper of record attributes Apple's rise to the advent of mobile devices, and a broad cultural shift that has placed a greater emphasis on consumer tastes than those …

Supporting preliminary findings, the iPad's popularity is indeed curtailing netbook sales, according to a new survey commissioned by consumer electronics review site Retrevo. Indeed, nearly one in three buyers who had been considering a netbook waited for, and then bought, an Apple iPad tablet instead, finds the survey of more than a thousand US consumers spread across gender, age, income and location demographics. "Buyers, the analysts said, mostly bought netbooks because of price sensitivity during an economic downturn," notes VentureBeat. Now, "the iPad, they say, has provoked Americans' gadget lust enough that they'll pay extra for one." …

Bruce Nussbaum -- a Parsons professor and former assistant managing editor for Business Week -- suggests that Facebook may have a "fatal" business model, and its ongoing privacy issues are proof. But don't take Nussbaum's word for it. "I know because my students at Parsons The New School For Design tell me so," Nussbaum writes in Harvard Business Review. "They live on Facebook and they are furious at it." More threatening still, "At the moment, [Facebook] has an audience that is at war with its advertisers ... Not good." Nussbaum believes that Facebook's success is the result …

There were 8.7 million Android OS devices and 18.3 million iPhone OS devices -- iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch -- in the US last month, according to new findings from mobile ad AdMob. As ZDNet notes, "the April release of the iPad in the US surely gave Apple a boost there, and that factors down to a 2 to 1 ratio of iPhone OS to Android devices." Worldwide, AdMob found that there were 11.6 million Android OS devices versus 40.8 million iPhone OS devices, producing a 3.5 to 1 ratio. Meanwhile, the greatest concentration of Android OS …

Attracting more government scrutiny than Microsoft is bad. Attracting more money than Microsoft is good. Perhaps achieving both, Business Insider suggests that Apple has closed in within $1 billion of Microsoft's market capitalization. "Apple's stock market capitalization has not yet quite surpassed Microsoft's, but the value of its actual business is now higher," writes BI. "Specifically, Apple's business is now worth $200 billion, while Microsoft's is only worth $197 billion -- at least by one simple calculation of enterprise value." What's the difference between a company's stock market capitalization and the value of its actual business, i.e., …

Despite signing a five-year extension to its partnership with Facebook, Zynga just partnered up with Yahoo to feature its games throughout the portal's network. According to TechCrunch, the deal extends Zynga's potential reach by about 600 million users -- not accounting for overlap between Facebook and Yahoo users. The terms of the deal are still unclear, and Yahoo isn't expected to begin rolling out Zynga's game for at two months. Still, TechCrunch is betting that Zynga's most popular games like Farmville will be featured prominently throughout Yahoo's network, even including its highly-trafficked homepage. Yahoo is saying that …

Has Apple's Microsoft moment finally come? Like Bill Gates in '98, is Steve Jobs destined to defend his company's business practices against government accusations of anticompetitiveness? Opening up the possibility for such a scenario -- and opening the door for many would-be rivals -- the Justice Department is examining Apple's tactics in the market for digital music, The New York Times reports. "The questions are not part of a formal investigation ... but rather a routine initial attempt to learn whether complaints the agency has received deserve further examination," sources tell …

Mayor Michael Bloomberg on Tuesday announced that the city-sponsored NYC Entrepreneurial Fund has made its first investment -- $300,000 of a $500,000 seed round in local search startup MyCityWay, reports the Business Insider. The fund is a collaboration between FirstMark Capital and the New York City Economic Development Corporation. The city contributed $3 million to the $22 million fund, which will make seed-stage investments in NYC-based startups. "The goal is to create jobs and help make New York more of a hub for entrepreneurship and technology," writes Business Insider. "The city retains the right to veto investments, …

Digital-photography vendor Phase One just bought Microsoft's digital-asset-management application Expression Media. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Effective immediately, Phase One is expected to take on customer support and future development for the application, while Microsoft will continue to offer support for Expression Media retail customers for the next 90 days. Expression Media is actually one of several products in the Microsoft Expression family, the rest of which it has no plans to sell off anytime soon, a company rep tells ZDNet. Microsoft has no plans to sell any of the other Expression tools, a company …