GigOm is suggesting -- albeit in the Fox Newsian form of a question -- that The New York Times just "declared war" on news aggregators. In its tireless pursuit of a viable business model, "The newspaper company appears to be sending its lawyers after news aggregators that use its RSS feeds in commercial applications," writes GigaOm. Citing a report from All Things Digital, GigOm reports that the Pulse newsreader app was pulled from the Apple store after a legal threat from the NYT over unauthorized use of the company's RSS feeds. In an email that Apple just …

Now that Apple has surpassed Microsoft to become "the world's most valuable technology company" -- in the words of The New York Times -- Michael Wolff asks: "Has Steve Jobs won?" Well, working in his favor is the fact that so many powerful people have so much invested in the success of Apple's products. Case in point, Rupert Murdoch "certainly has spectacular ambitions for the Wall Street Journal on the iPad, hoping for a million more subscribers," writes the author and Newser founder. Still, "It is true that, behind the scenes, there is a huge gnashing of …

How will the iPhone's new FaceTime videophone functionality fare among users? Not well, according to a close reading of David Foster Wallace's '96 novel "Infinite Jest." "Within the reality of the book, videophones enjoyed enormous initial popularity but then after a few months, most people gave it up," notes blogger Jason Kottke. The reasons? Emotional stress, physical vanity, and "a certain queer kind of self-obliterating logic in the microeconomics of consumer high-tech." Regarding the stress part, Wallace wrote: "Good old traditional audio-only phone conversations allowed you to presume that the person on the other end was paying …

At the D8 conference last week, Steve Jobs said he wasn't interested in banning third-party ad networks from Apple's iAd mobile ad platform. Yet, according to a new version of Apple's developer agreement, Jobs wasn't referring to any company that poses a creditable threat to Apple's core business model. Concerning the use of data collection, the newly revised developer agreement reads: "The collection, use or disclosure is for the purpose of serving advertising to Your Application ... is provided to an independent advertising service provider whose primary business is serving mobile ads (for example, an advertising service …

Yahoo's new social strategy has arrived, and it is Facebook -- literally. The Web portal on Monday is expected to relaunch its Yahoo Profiles platform -- now named Yahoo Pulse -- and its "all in" integration with Facebook Connect, including on the Yahoo home page. "We've all known deep integration with Facebook was coming, but until now it wasn't clear exactly how deeply Yahoo would go," writes TechCrunch. "The answer -- pretty deep." Indeed, users can now log into Facebook directly from Yahoo's home page, along with 15 other Yahoo properties, including …

In an effort to keep up with the digital age, Hewlett-Packard this week is expected to introduce a new line of printers with Web access, their own email addresses and touch screens, reports The New York Times. HP announced the product at the opening enevt of Internet Week in New York. "These products should open up new ways for people to print from Web services like Google Docs, and from smartphones and devices like the iPad," writes The Times. According to analysts, HP's print business is just as uncertain as it is critical to the health of …

In the increasingly dominant mobile sphere, apps are taking the place of search, suggests Search Engine Land's Greg Sterling. He's in good company; Apple's Steve Jobs seems to feel the same way. "This is an entirely new thing -- [consumers] aren't using search, they're using apps like Yelp," Jobs said during an interview at the recent D8 conference. On average -- according to data just released by Yelp -- 27% of all Yelp searches come from its iPhone App. "That number dips during the week when Yelp.com traffic surges," according to Yelp. "Then on the weekend, it …

The Bing team on Monday announced the availability of the Bing Maps Apps software development kit, along with three new apps. "Hopefully, the release of the Bing Map App SDK and these apps will inspire you to get coding and add your application to Bing Maps!" the Bing team wrote in a blog post. "Bing Maps have some interesting applications that allow you to see twitter activities, parking places, fuel pricing or Foursquare check-ins near a particular location," noted The Next Web. "The SDK will allow developers to make their own apps over Bing maps and once …

Tony Hsieh, founder of ecommerce site Zappos, explains how and why the company was sold to Amazon. In short, outside investors were clamoring for substantial returns, the economy was in the dumps, and credit was increasingly hard to come by. "In early 2009, there weren't a lot of banks eager to give out $100 million to a business in our situation," Hsieh writes in Inc. Magazine. That was all compounded by the fact that the value of Zappos' inventory -- which was "based on the amount of money we could reasonably collect if the company were liquidated …

The New York Times investigates the always-on, perpetually-wired consumer. "Scientists say juggling email, phone calls and other incoming information can change how people think and behave," writes The Times. Indeed, "Scientists are discovering that even after the multitasking ends, fractured thinking and lack of focus persist." Leading brain scientist Nora Volkow tells the paper: "The technology is rewiring our brains." Meanwhile, neuroscientist Adam Gazzaley believes that the nonstop interactivity is one of the most significant shifts ever in what The Times calls, "the human environment." "We are exposing our brains to an environment and asking them to …