Amid a severe shortage of top tech talent, Slate investigates Google and its obsession with keeping employees happy. “Google monitors its employees’ well-being to a degree that can seem absurd to those who work outside Mountain View,” Slate reports. “And if there’s any sign that joy among Googlers is on the wane, it’s the Google HR department’s mission to figure out why and how to fix it.” It’s no wonder then that the search giant regularly ranks as the best place to work in America. 

Putting its comeback in jeopardy, MySpace is facing pressure from a group representing thousands of small labels, which accuse the social network of using its members’ music without permission. “The group, Merlin, negotiates digital deals on behalf of labels around the world,” The New York Times reports. A deal between Merlin and Myspace apparently expired over a year ago, but the group’s content continues to circulate on the site.  

Demonstrating the newfound prominence of digital media, some magazine publishers now charge more for e-versions than for their print publications. “Buffeted by declining advertising … magazines are turning to tablet computers and digital editions to boost circulation revenue,” The Wall Street Journal reports. Readers of Cosmopolitan, for instance, can buy their first year's subscription to the print magazine for $10, while the digital edition will set them back $19.99. 

Threatening to inconvenience many a U.S. Web company, France is floating an Internet tax on the collection of personal data. The idea, mentioned in a new report commissioned by President François Hollande, is meant to “address what the French see as tax avoidance by Internet companies like Google, Amazon and Facebook,” The New York Times reports. 

While it may always be considered a “portal” by older users, Yahoo is working on ways to distance itself from the increasingly outdated moniker. “The desktop portal needs to transform itself,” Henrique De Castro, the company’s recently named COO, said at a conference on Monday. “The personalization is not there, the tech is not there, and generalists portals are losing traffic,” De Castro said, reports AllThingD. 

At least in the U.K., Netflix is superior to rival LOVEFilm when it comes to TV listings, but LOVEFilm wins out with a better movie library. So reports TechCrunch, citing new data from Oric, a U.K. company that offers its own online video service by cataloguing legal sources of content. The first thing to note is how tiddly [i.e., small] both U.K. streaming services are compared to their U.S. equivalents,” TechCrunch notes. “The U.S. Netflix has close to six times more streamable titles than U.K. Netflix,” for instance. 

Google has once again topped Fortune’s list of the 100 Best Companies to Work For – far ahead of rival Microsoft, which came in a disappointing 75th in the rankings. As The Next Web reports, 10 technology companies made Fortune’s latest list, including Salesforce.com at 19, Intuit at at 22, and Intel at 68. What makes Google such a great employer? “Not just for the 100,000 hours of free massages it doled out in 2012,” according to Fortune. 

SurveyMonkey, the popular purveyor of cheap, easy-to-use online surveys, plans to raise almost $800 million in equity and -- in an unusual move -- debt, Fortune reports. Tiger Global Management and Google invested in a $444 million equity round SurveyMonkey closed in December. New equity investors include Iconiq Capital and Social + Capital Partnership. “The new financing -- a recapitalization in Wall Street jargon -- values SurveyMonkey at $1.35 billion,” Fortune reports. 

More than 90 million people use Instagram on a monthly basis, the company reported on Thursday. “Moreover, the company is seeing growth rather than decline,” AllThingsD reports. “That number is up 10%, month on month, in the period from December to January.” This marks the first time Instagram has released usage numbers, and is being seen as a response to rumors of recent usage declines. 

Everyone’s buzzing about big data analysis startup Ayasdi, which made its public debut this week, and announced about $10 million in funding. What makes Ayasdi so special? “Topological data analysis,” writes The New York Times’ Bits blog. “The technique analyzes the shape of complex data, identifying clusters and their statistical significance. That, in turn, delivers a more accurate ‘big picture’ of the data.”