Despite the likeness of their names and new subscription models, paidContent warns industry watchers not to confuse the strategies of The New York Times and Britain's The Times of London. "Though each is historically the 'paper of record' in their respective countries, each online strategy is quite different," paidContent writes. "Whilst NYTimes.com introduced a meter by which more than 20 on-site articles per month and full mobile access costs between $15 and $35 per month, News Corp.'s UK title last summer opted for a blunter instrument -- no free content." As a result, Britain's Times has deliberately shed …

Making platform-agnostic new-media journalists out of anyone, Storify just opened to public beta. The start-up lets users pull together information from social media -- including, tweets, videos, photos, and various links -- and build stories that include both content and commentary. "It's as simple as dragging and dropping the items from your Twitter timeline, from Flickr, from YouTube, from RSS feeds into the story-builder," promises ReadWriteWeb. "When you're done, you have an easily embeddable story." Uses can also opt to notify the people whose tweets they've included. With the advent of Storify, ReadWriteWeb is predicting a fresh wave …

Getting into the hotel-booking business, Travel Channel is buying a minority stake in Oyster.com. With the investment, "The Scripps Networks Interactive channel is branching out into the online travel transaction business in search of new revenue streams," writes Broadcasting & Cable. "This is so much more than just growing a linear channel," Travel Channel President Laureen Ong tells B&C. "At Scripps, it's all about owning your category." Oyster.com is a 3-year-old content and commerce site funded by Bain Capital Ventures. In the short term, Travel Channel plans to make money on trips booked through Oyster.com via Travelchannel.com. As …

Last year, Google's then-CEO Eric Schmidt announced the company's "mobile first" strategy, which involved building products for phones at the same time as versions for PCs, and generally prioritizing all things mobile. Now that Schmidt has moved on, The New York Times wanted to know where Google stands on mobile. "This is the place that Google is essentially betting its future on," Karim Temsamani, Google's head of mobile advertising, says. Yet according to NYT, "Google has not consistently followed the mobile-first mantra, and some analysts, including Colin W. Gillis of BGC Partners, say it has not moved quickly …

Setting off a wave of consumer privacy concerns, researchers last week revealed that Apple iPhones and 3G iPads record and save their owners' geographic history. Now, The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the world's most popular smartphone collects and stores location information even when location services are turned off. "The fact that the iPhone is collecting and storing location data -- even when location services are turned off -- is likely to renew questions about how well users are informed about the data being gathered by their cellphones," the WSJ writes. According to a test conducted by …

Paving the way for more innovation (and competition), investment in U.S. venture-backed companies rose 35% in the first quarter, reports VentureBeat, citing a new report from Dow Jones VentureSource. During the quarter, venture firms invested $6.4 billion into 661 domestic deals. "The increased activity is consistent with the buzz in the tech industry about an overall recovery, an increase in optimism, and a faster pace for innovation among startups," according to VentureBeat. Yet, there is "considerable discussion about whether we're seeing a bubble in tech investing, with a major story on the topic every week or so." This past …

Japanese mobile gaming company GREE has acquired mobile gaming startup OpenFeint for $104 million in cash plus additional capital for growth of the OpenFeint platform. "OpenFeint provides a comprehensive mobile social gaming platform for the iPhone and Android platforms," according to TechCrunch. "OpenFeint's plug and play mobile social platform and application for smartphones includes a set of online game services such as leaderboards, virtual currencies and achievements running in a cloud-based Web environment." OpenFeint and its team, including CEO and founder Jason Citron, are expected to stay on with long-term incentives. The OpenFeint platform first launched on the …

Likely fueling the growth of location-based services, geo-location data storage and platform service SimpleGeo has put data for more than 20 million places into the public domain. "With this week's announcement, SimpleGeo is saying that the data for nearly 20 million places that it owns are now available, to use freely, under the Creative Commons Zero, or 'No Copyright,' license," reports ReadWriteWeb. "It is our belief that facts should be free, as in freedom," SimpleGeo co-founder Matt Galligan wrote yesterday on the company's blog."We wanted to see the proliferation of places data that developers could easily use, reuse, or basically …

Earlier this week, two security researchers revealed that Apple stores released iPhone and iPad users' long-term geographic histories. Now, The Wall Street Journal is reporting that both Apple devices and those running on Google's Android mobile operating system regularly transmit their locations back to Apple and Google, respectively. "Google and Apple are gathering location information as part of their race to build massive databases capable of pinpointing people's locations via their cellphones," WSJ writes. At stake is the $2.9 billion market for location-based services, which Gartner expects to rise to $8.3 billion by 2014. In the …

Likely beating Google to the punch, Apple is reportedly almost ready to debut its online music storage service. "Apple's plans will allow iTunes customers to store their songs on a remote server, and then access them from wherever they have an Internet connection," reports Reuters, citing unnamed sources. "The service is expected to arrive some point this summer, and Apple is yet to sign any licenses with music labels," according to PCWorld. Amazon launched a similar service earlier this month, but without one key ingredient, notes MediaMemo. "Amazon started its service without getting …