Helen Gurley Brown, editor-in-chief of Cosmopolitan magazines' 64 international editions and one of the world's most influential editors, died today at NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia University Medical Center. She was 90.

Google acquired Frommer's travel guidebooks in the latest move to support travel and local commerce in search engine results and Google Local. The content from the deal announced Monday will eventually integrate into Zagat.

Barnes & Noble on Sunday cut the prices of its Nook Tablet devices and Nook Color as it tries to gain a firmer foothold in the tablet space. The company dropped the price of the 16 GB Nook Tablet from $249 to $199 , while the 8 GB was lowered from $199 to $179. The Nook Color now goes for $149, down from $169. The price reductions underscore the challenge Barnes & Noble is faces with direct competitors like Amazon pulling ahead. Data released this month by IDC showed Apple …

Fareed Zakaria has been suspended by Time and CNN for plagiarism, following revelations that he lifted text for a column on gun control which appeared in the August 20 issue of Time magazine from an article on the same subject by Jill Lepore which appeared in the April 23 issue of The New Yorker earlier this year. The transgression was discovered and publicized by NewsBusters, a conservative Web site which keeps watch for liberal media bias, hypocrisy, and general malfeasance. As a result of the NewsBusters expose, Time has suspended Zakaria's column for a month, and CNN has suspended him as a contributor …

Underscoring the growth of mobile devices in the last two years, NBC's coverage of the London Summer Olympics had generated three times the number of live streams as the Beijing Games four years ago. In a video the network posted Friday, Alan Wurtzel, president of research and media development for NBC Universal, said live streams had tripled to 45 million from 14 million in 2008, when tablets weren't even part of the media landscape and smartphones weren't widespread. The network didn't provide figures for on-demand streaming.

Yahoo has struck gold again at the Olympics. The Web giant said today its coverage of the London Summer Games had so far (through Aug. 6) generated doubled the page views of both the Vancouver and Beijing Olympics combined. Yahoo's Olympics-related content, anchored by a dedicated Olympics site, has drawn 2 billion page views across the desktop, mobile phones and tablets. Through the end of July, which spanned the opening days of the Games, …

Say Media announced Thursday that tech industry veteran Anna Baird has been named as the new CFO. The hiring comes just weeks after former Time publishers Kim Kelleher joined the company as president, and Say's closing of $27 million in new venture funding. The company also promoted Alex Schleifer to creative director, overseeing design and implementation. Prior to joining Say Media, Baird was a partner at Connor Group. Before that, she was a senior …

The Federal Trade Commission announced this morning that Google has agreed to pay $22.5M to settle charges that it circumvented Apple users' privacy settings.

After introducing subscriptions for apps on a limited basis last month, Facebook on Wednesday announced it was making subscriptions available to all developers with apps on the social network. The feature allows developers to set prices based on local currency (e.g. U.S. dollars, Japanese yen) and offer different levels of subscriptions. Users pay with a credit card or PayPal account, and can cancel from their Facebook payment settings. Among the initial group of developers offering game subscriptions on …

Social networking on mobile devices is going mainstream. Some 82 million U.S. mobile users, or 25.9% of all Americans, will access a social networking site on their phone at least monthly this year, according to a new estimate by eMarketer. Not surprisingly, most of that activity will happen on Facebook. Nearly 70 million people, or 85.4% of those social networking on phones, will visit Facebook each month in 2012. That share will climb to 87.4% by 2014. Virtually all (95.5%) users will be checking social sites on a smartphone, and smartphone users are about twice …