Stalled in the station for nearly three years, New York City Transit says plans for citywide subway Wi-Fi are back on. The $200 million project was revived after the group that won the contract secured new financing from an Australian mobile-infrastructure operator, according to Bloomberg. "As part of the deal, Broadcast Australia took a majority stake in Transit Wireless LLC, the group of wireless and construction companies that was awarded the subway contract in 2007 and promised New York City Transit about $46 million over 10 years," Bloomberg reports. "The system will give New York's commuters a …

A Microsoft rep is telling Business Insider that the software king will attempt to block a proposed Yahoo Japan/Google partnership. "We plan to present evidence to the Japanese FTC explaining why we believe that this deal is substantially more harmful to competition than Google's deal with Yahoo in 2008 that the DOJ found to be illegal," said the Microsoft rep. By Microsoft's estimates, the Google/Yahoo partnership would amount to a 98% stake of the Japanese search market. "That's more than Yahoo and Google would have owned in the U.S. when the companies were going to join forces to parry …

With the soaring IPOs and market-share gains disappearing in the rearview mirror, Fortune takes a serious look at Google, and how the search giant plans to achieve "Google-like" growth going forward. "Its core business is slowing, its stock is down, its Android mobile platform generates scant revenue, and competition (hello, Facebook) is fierce," Fortune writes of Google. What's more, "There is (at long last) fresh competition from Microsoft's Bing, and also a new wave of sites and services that offer alternatives for consumers' time and attention -- and the advertisers that follow them." Long-term growth projections for …

With location-based digital services booming, Apple is moving to take complete control of its own location database, TechCrunch reports. "For devices running iPhone OS versions 1.1.3 to 3.1, Apple relied on (and still relies on) databases maintained by Google and Skyhook Wireless ("Skyhook") to provide location-based services," Apple's general counsel, Bruce Sewell, recently wrote in a letter to Congress. "Beginning with the iPhone OS version 3.2 released in April 2010, Apple relies on its own databases to provide location-based services and for diagnostic purposes." As TechCrunch explains: "In other words, since iPhone OS 3.2 (since renamed "iOS") …

Speaking at Microsoft's financial analyst meeting on Thursday, CEO Steve Ballmer touched on various ideas, from growing consumer-product and search market shares to Apple's gadget edge and the need for Windows-based tablet computers. "Microsoft's chief executive has come very close to telling investors he screwed up after years of writing off, belittling and underestimat[ing] Apple's potential success in touch-based computing," writes The Register. "Ballmer told Wall Street he's under no illusion about Apple's success with the iPad and iPhone, and Microsoft's number-one priority is now to deliver touch-based computing pads running Windows 7... that people want." …

Facebook's aversion to going public is well known, and, if sources are correct, the social net will indeed put off an IPO until at least 2012, Bloomberg reports. Three people familiar with the matter tell Bloomberg that chief exec Mark Zuckerberg more wants to grow Facebook's user base and sale revenue. "Facebook would benefit from another year of growth absent the added scrutiny that comes with a public listing, instead of holding an IPO in 2011 as investors speculated," Bloomberg reports. "Waiting lets Zuckerberg, 26, hone the skills needed to steer a company that issues quarterly results …

Facebook is becoming Google-like in its ability to challenge a wide swath of companies with competing services. Indeed, just days after Ask.com debuted a new question-and-answer service, the social net has unveiled Facebook Questions to facilitate Q&A between its roughly 500 million members. Ask.com, however, is far from the only company that Facebook will likely disrupt with its Questions service. For starters, "Facebook is taking on question-and-answer search services such as Quora, Google's Aardvark and Hunch," eWeek writes. "The most interesting competition Facebook Questions poses could be to Quora, which was formed by former Facebook engineers …

Google Casino? Facebook Blackjack? Yahoo Slots? For better or worse, these would-be Web destinations could become realities as Congress considers legalizing Internet gambling. On Wednesday, the House Financial Services Committee approved a bill that would, as The New York Times reports, "effectively legalize online poker and other nonsports betting, overturning a 2006 federal ban that critics say merely drove Web-based casinos offshore." The Times attributes the development to pressure on the federal government to find new revenue. The bill would direct the Treasury Department to license and regulate Internet gambling operations, while a "companion measure," pending before …

Sure, Google's got a handle on the whole computer-based search business, but how well is it positioned to serve an increasingly mobile Web? Um, pretty well, according to recent data from StatCounter, which found that the search giant controls 98.29% of the mobile search market. Coming in an astoundingly distant second is Yahoo with just over 0.8% of the mobile market. "How's [that] for absolutely dominating an increasingly lucrative and fast-growing segment?" remarks TechCrunch. According to a graph put together by Web monitoring firm Pingdom -- using global visitor stats for more than three million websites -- …

Creating much fodder for conspiracy theorists, libertarians, and Drudge-devotees, the CIA and Google are backing a company that monitors the Web in real time in order to predict the future, Wired.com reports. "The company is called Recorded Future, and it scours tens of thousands of Web sites, blogs and Twitter accounts to find the relationships between people, organizations, actions and incidents -- both present and still-to-come," writes Wired.com's Danger Room blog. In a white paper, the company says its "temporal analytics" engine "goes beyond search" by "looking at the 'invisible links' between documents that talk about the …