Amazon reportedly plans to launch a streaming movie service specifically for its own Amazon-branded tablets. That's what researchers at Detwiler Fenton tell Boy Genius Reports, anyway. "The revelation seems obvious, but the Boston-based research firm's claim could be the first well-sourced confirmation of the service, reports of which were purely speculative until now," writes BGR.com. According to the research team, Amazon's streaming movie service will be available to early adopters of Amazon's tablet for free. "It is also believed that Amazon's tablets will feature deep integration with Amazon's Cloud Locker streaming music service, and the Amazon Appstore will …

Apple recently announced plans to fully integrate Twitter into its forthcoming iOS 5 mobile operating system. Facebook, meanwhile, seemed to be left out in the cold. Why? Perhaps, it's "nothing more complex than Apple and Facebook failing to reach terms either could agree to," BetaNews admits. But the trade publication suspects more sinister motives on the part of Apple. "I see some very good reasons why deep Facebook integration into iOS would be a bad move for Apple," BetaNews' Joe Wilcox writes. For one, "Apple wants to push users' content to the device, whereas Facebook wants to pull …

If we are experiencing another economic slowdown, it hasn't hit online. So assures paidContent based on new data from Kantar Media, which finds that display advertising continued to rise 14.6% in the first quarter of the year. "After cable TV, which is even more firmly established and grew 31.9 percent in Q1, and Spanish-language magazines, which is still an emerging area and was up 22.3%, display ad dollars came in a number three in Kantar's ranking of spending growth," paidContent points out. For its part, Kantar credited the rise in display to higher spending from automakers, travel-related marketers …

Aspiring to be the Facebook for the 13-and-under crowd, Everloop just secured $3.1 million in funding. "Everloop combines music, social games, videos, photos, animation, user-generated content and other experiences," TechCrunch explains. More to the point, the site offers a "private" environment, where parents can actually monitor the day-to-day activities of their kids. Indeed, "The start-up prides itself on a high-level of security within the network, so parents can constantly monitor their child's interactions on the site for foul language, bullying, inappropriate pictures and more," notes TechCrunch. As TechCrunch also points out, Everloop faces competition from Togetherville, …

Late last year, YouTube debuted TrueView pre-roll ads, which users could skip if they were so inclined. "The news didn't seem too great for advertisers," The Next Web writes. "Although it meant you only paid if someone watched the full ad or the first 30 seconds (whichever was shorter), the implication of course was that most people would skip past the ads." What might surprise many: Only about 30% of viewers are skipping the pre-rolls, Bruce Daisley, sales director at YouTube & Google, tells The Next Web. "This is a surprising figure and shows people's willingness to consume …

For the good or ill of mankind, new comScore data shows that The Huffington Post has officially surpassed The New York Times' Web site in terms of monthly unique online visitors. "It's an impressive feat," notes Business Insider. Or, as Brad Garlinghouse, AOL's president of applications and commerce, just put it on Twitter, "Six years to disrupt 100 years." A New York Times spokeswoman was quick to point out that HuffPo is benefiting from redirects to its site from AOLNews.com -- which is part of the Web giant that recently acquired HuffPo. "And she's right!" Business Insider writes. "AOL …

Led by Apple and Google, mobile messaging services are curbing the once-rapid growth of texting messaging, The Wall Street Journal reports. Granted, U.S. cell phone users sent and received over 1 trillion texts in the second half of 2010, according to CTIA, a wireless industry trade group. But while that represented an 8.7% increase from the prior six months, "It was the slimmest gain since texting exploded last decade." Not making phone carriers' lives any easier, Apple just showed off an application that will let iPhone and iPad owners send text messages online to other Apple device owners. Google …

From Foursquare to Google's related efforts, location-based services are expected to deliver $10 billion in revenue by 2016, according to research firm Strategy Analytics. "The biggest chunk, just over 50%, will come from location-based search advertising," reports GigaOm, citing the research. According to Strategy Analytics, the biggest obstacle to growth remains consumer privacy concerns about location data -- an issue that has only been made worse by recent questions about tracking from iPhones and Android devices, GigaOm notes. "But if location services provide enough transparency about how they use and store this information, it should not derail the approaching …

Emboldened by strong adoption rates and a bullish IPO market, Pandora has raised the price range of its stock to $10 to $12 per share. Giving the music streaming service a valuation of $1.9 billion, that's up from Pandora's recent stock pricing at $7 to $9 per share, at a market cap of $1.3 billion, according to TechCrunch. According to a new version of its S-1, Pandora aims to raise as much as $202.6 million in the offering (up from $141.6 million), and will offer 6,000,682 shares of its common stock with the selling stockholders are offering 8,683,318 shares …

What are the cool kids -- at least in tech-world terms -- buzzing about right now? Writing in TechCrunch, former TechCrunch writer Steve Poland says it's a social music service named Turntable.fm. "The early adopting tech elites are eating this site up, just as they did Twitter, Foursquare, Instagram, and others," Poland insists. "Barring some awful interference, this app is going to break big and change things." Essentially, Turntable.fm lets users listen to tracks in online groups, and share their thoughts in real-time via an accompanying chat board. "The only issue I thought Turntable had was needing to deal …