AllThingsD gets up close and personal with Passbook -- a new feature of Apple’s latest mobile operating system, iOS 6, which hopes to make physical sports tickets, gift cards and boarding passes a thing of the past. After recognizing a users’ proximity to a physical event, Passbook will alert them to that fact, and then automatically scan them in. An earlier adopter of the technology, Major League Baseball is currently testing Passbook with four teams, including The San Francisco Giants, New York Mets, Boston Red Sox and Kansas City Royals.  

Elsewhere in Facebook Land, the company has teamed up with Google to test a feature for Android owners, which syncs photos they take from their phones directly to their Facebook accounts. “It's a hybrid of Google+'s instant photo-upload feature and Apple's Photostream, which uploads any picture you take to the cloud and syncs it with your other iOS devices and computers,” The Verge reports. With the Photo Sync, any time users take a picture from the their Android device, it will automatically upload, but remain private inside a "Synced from Phone" tab on a new Photos page. 

Ready to tackle a range of issues from online privacy to anti-hacking measures, a many Web giants have come together to form a lobbyist group. Google, Amazon.com, Facebook and 11 other Internet companies represent what will now be called the Internet Association. “Calls for more regulation of online business have prompted Web companies to boost their lobbying in recent years,” Bloomberg writes. “Google, Facebook and others led an online protest earlier this year against proposed anti-piracy bills in the U.S. Congress, which they said would promote online censorship, disrupt the Web’s architecture and hurt innovation.”

Twitch -- once known to the world as Justin.TV -- just raised $15 million to continue scaling its online video platform. The company specializes in live footage of videogames being played, which, as AllThingsD explains, “can be analogous to watching a professional basketball or football game on TV, especially as videogames increasingly become a rival to other major forms of entertainment.”  Twitch’s platform now attracts over 20 million monthly viewers. This latest round was led by Bessemer Venture Partners, along with participation from Alsop Louie Partners and Draper Associates. 

For a price, social data provider Gnip is now letting brands, PR agencies and other data gluttons access tweets going back to Twitter’s birth in 2006. “When you’re talking historical data for social intelligence, there’s probably no better source of information than Twitter,” The Next Web writes. “But as the service grows and changes, there’s been a veritable brick wall in the timeline -- 30 days.” Earlier Gnip users include PayPal, Esri and Waggener Edstrom. Putting Gnip’s reach into perspective, rival DataSift gives users access to historical Twitter data going back to January of 2010, according to The Next Web.

Hoping to drive digital sales, 20th Century Fox is selling its sci-fi thriller "Prometheus" through several major online retailers three weeks ahead of the movie’s release on DVD and Blu-ray disc. “The Ridley Scott film is one of 600 titles to be sold digitally in high-definition for less than $15 -- a discount from the typical retail price of $20,” The Los Angles Times reports. The movies are available online through Amazon, Apple's iTunes store, BestBuy's CinemaNow, Google Play, YouTube and Wal-Mart's Vudu, as well as through entertainment stores connected to the Sony PlayStation and Xbox game consoles. 

Looking for some old news? Well, the Internet Archive’s online cache now includes every bit of news produced in the last three years by 20 different channels, encompassing more than 1,000 news series, and more than 350,000 separate news programs. As Brewster Kahle, the archive’s founder, tells The New York Times, the content is intended for researchers as well as average citizens -- together which current account for the site’s 2 million daily visitors. But Kahle isn’t done yet. “We want to collect all the books, music and video that has ever been produced by humans,” he tells NYT. 

Users of music-tagging app Shazam can now tag every show on TV to find out, among other things, what music is playing and the names of specific actors. To date, Shazam has let users tag music as well as select sponsored TV shows and ads. And consumers have responded. Indeed, the company announced that it now has 250 million users. As The Verge writes: “Now when you open Shazam you can tag anything you're watching on TV and see music from that show, information from IMDB about cast and crew, trivia, ‘celebrity buzz’ … the latest tweets about the show, …

Their baaaaaack! Yes, The Winklevoss twins have reemerged as supporters of a new social network for professional investors. “Flush with at least $65 million from the settlement of a legal battle with Mr. Zuckerberg and Facebook Inc., Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss are backing fellow Harvard alumnus Divya Narendra, their ally in the Facebook fight, in the investment website,” The Wall Street Journal reports. So far, the Winklevosses have put $1 million into SumZero, so-called, which was founded by Narendra and another Harvard alum Aalap Mahadevia, in 2008.

Recalling its Disrupt event last week, TechCrunch is stuck on comments Mark Zuckerberg made about Facebook’s search ambitions. “Rather than incremental increases in revenue that better ad units could bring, the prospect of the social network taking on a whole new business offers an upside worth betting on,” it writes regarding a general feeling it’s sensing from the investment community. Better yet, Facebook has a huge opportunity to “take advantage of the data inside its walled garden that Google can’t get to.”