T-Mobile USA is planning to charge an additional fee to businesses that send texts over its network, reports GigaOm. The move will almost certainly impact increasingly popular text message offerings like tweets, bank alerts and sports scores. "Beginning Oct. 1, the carrier reportedly will charge a toll of one-quarter of one cent to businesses for every SMS delivered to its customers," writes GigaOm. "That's right, the Twitters of the world could soon have to pay to send your texts." In 2008, Verizon told its business partners it would begin charging three cents per text alert, but abandoned …

Google and MySpace are moving close to signing a new agreement, "in which the search giant would remain the provider of search and online advertising technology for the social networking site," BoomTown reports, citing unnamed sources. Yet, "This deal is a lot different from the one signed four years back when the News Corp. unit was flying high and Google forked over $900 million in guaranteed payments to stave off a competitive effort from Microsoft." Specifically, the new deal has no big guaranteed payments, nor any of the "bells and whistles" that came with Google's recently renewed …

Motorola on Thursday announced the acquisition of location-based software maker Aloqa. The privately-held startup develops technologies designed to enable the discovery of relevant web content by mobile smartphone users, according to TechCrunch. Just over a year ago, Aloqa raised $1.5 million Series A funding from multiple angel investors and VC firm Wellington Partners. "Motorola says it will use Aloqa's expertise to enhance Motoblur, which delivers customized content to mobile device homescreens, with a context-aware platform and related services," TechCrunch notes. Additionally, Aloqa will be folded into Motorola Mobility, which is comprised of Motorola's Mobile Devices and Home …

The New York Times investigates the evolution of an Internet meme, i.e., "an idea, image, catchphrase or video that goes viral, mutating via amateur remixes into unexpected forms." As The Times notes, "Often, memes revolve around an inside joke -- say, a screen capture from an obscure video game -- but just as often they make jokes of the source material." What's more, "Memes may be image-based, involving a kind of visual pun ... Memes may bear little resemblance to the original material, such as when a local news segment in Alabama about an attempted rape." But, …

Google has been offering "huge" bonuses to keep its top engineers from defecting to Facebook, Fortune reports. And the search giant is going to need that talent to successfully execute its ambitious social strategy. "We're trying to take Google's core products and add a social component," CEO Eric Schmidt said this week at the Google Zeitgeist conference in Scottsdale, Arizona. "If you think about it, it's obvious. With your permission, knowing more about who your friends are, we can provide more tailored recommendations. Search quality can get better." While Schmidt downplayed copying Facebook's functionality directly, Fortune notes, …

Despite serious brand swagger and a (relatively) successful new phone launch, Apple's continues to lose market share to Google's Android. According to new comScore data, "Apple's iPhone 4 did not give the company the bump in sales it needed to put Android's momentum in check," writes mocoNews.net. "Instead, Apple's smartphone marketshare in the U.S. dropped by 1.3 percent in the three months ended in July while Android's share grew by an impressive five percentage points." "RIM and Apple are still the top smartphone manufacturers in the United States, according to the report, …

Facebook and Microsoft are presently considering expanding their search partnership, reports BoomTown, citing "several" unnamed sources. Those sources say the new partnership could involve Bing mining "anonimized data from consumer usage of the social networking site's recently introduced Like buttons," notes BoomTown. "Such information might yield a treasure trove of insight for both search users and advertisers ... That's because it represents search based on what people are actually interested in rather than just crunching massive amounts of information." Obviously, such a deal would represent a serious challenge to Google, which is seen to losing ground to Facebook's more …

Amid mounting government scrutiny over consumer privacy, Google has fired a software engineer following a related policy breach. Engineer David Barksdale has been "dismissed" for "breaking Google's strict internal privacy policies," Bill Coughran, Google's SVP of engineering, wrote in a blog post Tuesday. An engineer in Google's Seattle office, Barksdale "allegedly accessed information of several users who were minors," a company spokeswoman tells The Wall Street Journal. Gawker first reported the news on Tuesday. As The Journal notes, "The privacy-breech comes amid probes in the U.S. and overseas for what it has said was the inadvertent collection of …

Google's Android mobile OS is shaping up to be a bigger threat to Apple that anyone expected, reports Tech Trader Daily, citing new findings from Bernstein Research analysts Toni Sacconagh and Pierre Ferragu. The pair note that the daily run-rate for Android phone sales has more than tripled in the last seven months, to 200,000 phones a day from 60,000, while they estimate that 53 million Android phones will ship this year. What's more, the Bernstein analysts forecast that the Android installed base could exceed that of the iPhone in just over 5 quarters. As a result, the research …

The New York Post goes one-on-one with Tyler Winklevoss, who, along with his identical twin brother, are pursuing a multimillion-dollar lawsuit against Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg. "It took me 15 years to make the Olympics of rowing," Winklevoss tells The Post regarding his Olympic experience in Beijing in 2008. "We're not just guys who walk away from a fight because someone beats their chest hard. We're never going to go away, and we're never going to stop until this situation has been rectified and the wrong has been righted." The "wrong," as The Post notes, happened in …