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•Unlimited U.S. and Canada: Unlimited calls to landline and cell phones in the U.S. and Canada. ($2.95 per month)

•Unlimited Mexico: Unlimited calls to landline and cell phones in the U.S. and Canada, and to landlines in Mexico City, Guadalajara, and Monterrey; up to 80 percent off normal SkypeOut rates to landlines in the rest of Mexico and up to 40 percent off normal SkypeOut rates to all Mexico cell phones. ($5.95 per month)

More details on the calling plans
The company’s Monday morning announcement laid out three new subscription plans for consumers in the U.S. and Canada, as follows:

•Unlimited World: Unlimited calls to landline and cell phones in 34 countries (see the cell-phone exception noted earlier in the story), including the U.S. and Canada, as well as to Mexico City, Guadalajara, and Monterrey; up to 80 percent off normal SkypeOut rates to the rest of Mexico landlines and up to 40 percent off normal SkypeOut rates to all Mexico cell phones. ($9.95 per month)

Calls to cell phones abroad are allowed under the $9.95 price only to Canada, China, Hong Kong and Singapore.

For $9.95 per month, callers will be able to ring folks abroad in 34 countries, including many in Europe, along with Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Chile, China, Singapore, Taiwan, Japan, Korea and Malaysia. (The details of the new flat-rate subscriptions were first published in an Associated Press story Sunday evening.) There is one limit–in most of those countries, the calls must be to a landline.

Skype, a unit of e-commerce giant eBay, expects to hit $500 million in revenue this year, and profits have been strong. Still, eBay is giving the service a hard look and may consider selling it, if the “synergies” don’t work out favorably.

Updated April 21, 5:36 AM PDT to reflect the actual announcement by Skype.

In December 2006, Skype began offering unlimited calls to cell phones and landlines in the U.S. and Canada at $29.95 per year.

The plan also allows unlimited domestic calls in the U.S., via Skype’s Internet-based phone service, to both landline phones and mobile phones.

Skype on Monday said it is now offering unlimited calls from the U.S. to phones in a wide range of international locations.

Skype notes that calls to premium, nongeographic, and other special numbers are excluded. The company continues to offer Skype-to-Skype calls free of charge.

It starts on September 23 at 8:00 in the morning, Eastern time. Show up early, and you’ll get a free copy of the 10th-anniversary edition of Sorcerer’s Stone. Oh, Harry–still a marketing wizard.

It’s a dark time to be a Harry Potter fan. The book series has drawn to a close, the next big-screen installment of the hit fantasy series has been unceremoniously delayed, and scientists have announced they’re getting close to a real-life invisibility cloak–hence sucking just a little bit of the Potter magic out of it.

Getting to read a paragraph of Harry Potter for a live Web broadcast doesn’t strike me as the sort of thing I’d be willing to wait in line for, but hey, those Potter fans are really dedicated. And here’s a bonus for them: they would get to sit in the same “throne” that author J.K. Rowling sat in during readings at New York’s Radio City Music Hall and Carnegie Hall.

OK, maybe that was a little melodramatic. But in case you don’t have enough Harry Potter in your life, U.S. publisher Scholastic wants to help that…with an all-day read-a-thon.

To celebrate the 10th anniversary of the release of the original Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, Scholastic has organized a cover-to-cover reading of the book to take place at its headquarters in New York. Fans can show up and participate, or can watch a live Webcast if they don’t happen to be in New York.

In any event, let us know if you have any problems installing the new update. It’s hard to believe, but it’s getting close to a year since Leopard was first released.

Apple has released the latest version of
Leopard, with bug fixes and security updates accompanying the fifth update to the operating system.

The company sent over a list of improvements about 30 minutes ago, and the full list of fixes and improvements should be up on Apple’s Web site any moment with the update itself popping up in Software Update. Two notable updates from the “General” section were a fix for the video playback problems that affected some MacBook Air owners, as well as a puzzling bug “in which some Macs could unexpectedly power on at the same time each day,” which would be the first time I’ve heard that one.

I’ll admit, I went into this analysis thinking that the data would show that Yahoo was worth more together–I thought that the sum of the whole would be greater than the parts. However after looking more closely at the data, I’m not sure that is necessarily true.

Hopkins took Yahoo’s top 20 U.S. Internet properties for the month of June and ranked them, based on user traffic.

Wonder if Yahoo has read Hopkins’ blog?

Then Hopkins compared whether these top 20 sites were getting their users by way of a Google search or a Yahoo search. In all but six of the top 20 sites, more users were coming to Yahoo’s top 20 sites by way of a Google search–even to its popular Yahoo Mail and Yahoo.com.

As expected, Yahoo Mail represented a 37.5 percent slice of the traffic pie, followed by the main Yahoo site with 30.6 percent and Yahoo search with 12.l percent.

Whether Yahoo is better kept whole or split up I can’t say. What I can say is that the parts of Yahoo are quite valuable and wouldn’t necessarily be lost without the search engine.

Jeopardize the Yahoo user experience and make it difficult for Yahoo to maintain search and display volume.

A fresh look at Yahoo’s search results Thursday by Hitwise Intelligence raises the question of whether Yahoo could survive just fine without its search engine.

Such a question is rather important to Yahoo investors, given the Internet search pioneer has given a cold shoulder to Microsoft, which has previously expressed interest in buying Yahoo’s search assets. Yahoo, however, rebuffed the offer, noting in its investor presentation that selling its search assets, including its algorithmic search, would:

But Heather Hopkins, vice president of research for Hitwise, noted in her blog that Yahoo’s valuable sites would not necessarily fair poorly without Yahoo’s search engine.

Yahoo Answers showed the disparity the most, with 49 percent of its U.S. traffic coming from Google in June, while only 20 percent was from a Yahoo search.

Hopkins made this observation in her blog:

Our request for a catfight between Stewart and IAC czar Barry Diller went unanswered.

The chief executive of New York-based Pingg, Lorien Gabel, spoke to CNET News a few months ago to make the case for his company as a more refined alternative to the clip art-friendly Evite, saying he hoped Pingg would be appropriate for “a whole segment of event types that people just (do) not want to use electronic invitations for,” like graduation parties and bar mitzvahs.

Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia said in a release that its investment in Pingg was designed to improve its digital presence. Through the partnership, Pingg will be promoted and have its tools worked into the Martha Stewart Web site; Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia will sell ads on Pingg, and some of its content will appear on the invitation start-up’s site. Joseph Holland, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia’s vice president of strategy and development, will join Pingg’s board of directors.

InterActiveCorp’s Evite might still be the biggest name in online invitations, but Martha Stewart has made her endorsement elsewhere.

Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia has partnered with and made an undisclosed investment in Pingg, a much smaller competitor.

This certainly gives Pingg an advantage, as it has plenty of other competitors attempting to eat into Evite’s market share: MyPunchbowl, Socializr, and Renkoo are just a few of them.

Note: If you’ve used YouTube to find a song you’d been long searching for, please leave a comment with the name of the song and a link to it.

To Chris Taylor, a San Francisco journalist, the meeting of the Palm V and Napster, circa 2000, was a “perfect storm” for being able to easily write down the names of songs to hunt for later and then to actually try to find them.

Taylor said his eagerness and persistence about tracking down 5 Minutes was due to the song’s quick rise and fall.

“After searching for so long for that recording,” Lien said, “I was thrilled to finally see it again. This four-minute piece of footage was my Moby Dick. I knew it was out there, but it had always eluded me.”

But a couple of weeks ago I had the inspiration to search for the song on YouTube. A quick, 21-character search string. Suddenly, with no fanfare, nothing to herald the conclusion of what had been at least a 15-year hunt, it popped up (see video below): the elusive song itself, accompanied by an obviously unofficial 1980s-era space-themed digital video.

But one friend I contacted for this story pointed out that there is a solution for some feeling Taylor’s frustration.

For Molly Steenson, a Ph.D. student at Princeton, YouTube has provided her and her boyfriend a way to DJ at home. They can track down songs they previously had no other way to find.

But Taylor said one song he’d been seeking for at least eight years–5 Minutes (Uncle Eric), by Mainframe (see video below)–had eluded even his most assiduous attempts to find it.

“It’s been great fun,” Steenson said, “to dig up songs I’ve had in my head since 1990 and that I’ve not heard since.”

Lien said he’d actually tried finding it on the service several times before, to no avail. But then one day, someone posted it.

And YouTube is also helping Steenson rediscover songs that she remembers from spending her high school years in Germany.

“Presto,” he said. “The YouTube version.”

But exist it did. And because it was one of the very few songs on the list on his Palm he couldn’t find, “its mystique increased.”

Some time after the Google era kicked in, I began looking for it, finding it listed here or there on some random music site, the artist identified as Dave Storrs. But there were few clues as to how I could get a copy.

For years, it was jammed in the back of my memory, always there as this incredible song that I just had to find.

Suffice it to say, it’s hard to live up to the profundity of college-era memories, and Dancing on the Planet turned out to be a fun, if not great, dance track. But this sudden, unexpected end to a very long-standing personal mystery left me startled.

Lien, of The Sound of Indie blog, said he’d set up Google RSS feeds that automatically alert him if, for example, a song he’d been looking for turned up on YouTube.

Another friend who heard that I was looking for people who had used YouTube to find rare music, asked if there wasn’t some risk that by writing this article, many of the songs I identified in it would be removed, since many of them were posted by people other than the legitimate rights-holders.

In the small hours of a summer night when I was in college, I heard a song play on San Francisco’s famous Live 105 that seemed, at the time, one of the most profound, melodic, and catchy tunes I’d ever come across.

In the comments section, I discovered I was hardly the only one who had used YouTube to reunite themselves with Dancing on the Planet.

It was called Dancing on the Planet, and even back then–in the late 80s or early 90s–a rare track I never again heard on the radio.

“I had been looking on every file-sharing service in existence, from Napster on,” Taylor said. “I found a 12-inch remix on BitTorrent, but like most 12-inch remixes of the day, it’s a bit crap. I remember the song as being a bit spooky and surreal and time-travel-like.”

“Damn,” wrote someone calling themselves gforcekaras. “(I) never thought I live (long) enough to hear this song again. Thank you so much for uploading this!”

“It sank without a trace shortly after making an impression in the charts,” Taylor said. “It’s so funny how that happens. You hear a song on the radio every day for two weeks, then nothing at all ever. Like it went into the memory hole. It never existed.”

In retrospect, I shouldn’t have been so surprised that YouTube would prove to be the terminus for the search. In fact, after finding Dancing on the Planet, I immediately checked off another decade-plus hunt on the site as well: Doug E. Fresh and Slick Rick’s original studio version of The Show, one of the first great rap songs.

“It started when I was in Bangalore, India (in) 2006,” Steenson said. “My friend Udai…wanted to show me a Raj Kumar song (and YouTube) was the best way to find it. It’s only increased since then. And now it’s a few times a week that (her boyfriend) and I end up DJing back and forth on YouTube….It helps to find specific live performances we remember from TV shows, things that once upon a time I had on bootleg VHS.”

“Not only is the track rarely as good as you remember,” he said, “but also, you hear it on YouTube, but you can’t download it to iTunes…Like, why did you post it (there) and not on LimeWire?”

In response, a YouTube spokesperson told me that, “We offer copyright holders choice as to what they want done with their videos: Whether to block, promote, or create revenue from them, in a way that is simple and straightforward. We cooperate with all copyright holders to identify and promptly remove infringing content as soon as we are notified.”

He noted that one YouTube user, known as herecomesmongo79, rips old vinyl and posts the songs on YouTube along with purchasing information online. The idea is that this user is trying to promote the purchase of rare, out-of-print vinyl that would otherwise go completely unheard.

Then there are the songs that still, inexplicably, haven’t turned up on YouTube.

Serial song searching
For some people, tracking down missing songs is a serious pastime, since music is so important to so many and we all have those tunes we heard one time when on vacation or danced to with a certain special someone.

“Is there anything I’m looking for that I can’t find?” Steenson said. “Some, yes: Indie bands from Minneapolis and elsewhere in Minnesota that are long forgotten. But someone will put them on YouTube, I’m sure.”

Once, I found a European site offering a compilation that included Dancing on the Planet. I tried buying it, but it didn’t pan out. I also scanned various file-sharing sites and caught the occasional whiff of it. But still, the song was no more than an unimpeachable memory.

For Taylor, the resolution came one day when he decided to Google the song.

And Steenson suggested that it’s just a matter of biding one’s time.

Like my experience with Dancing on the Planet, though, Taylor said finally uncovering 5 Minutes was somewhat bittersweet.

And it turns out that YouTube, a service that was never really supposed to be about music, is many people’s choice for tracking down the songs they’ve longed to hear for years, but couldn’t find.

“Probably 15 years ago, I remember seeing The Wedding Present perform (Yeah, Yeah, Yeah, Yeah, Yeah) on the Conan O’Brien show,” said Kevin Lien, who runs the music blog, The Sound of Indie. “I put a video tape in to try and record it, but…I missed it and have been on the lookout for it for nearly 15 years. Then all (of a) sudden, it pops up on YouTube one day.”

Reading between the lines of that comment, my sense is that since the songs I’m writing about are all way, way below most people’s radar, it’s unlikely anyone is going to complain. Plus, some of the songs were posted by the record labels themselves.

Instead of focusing on specific applications that may be hogging traffic, Comcast plans to determine “in nearly real time” whether a heavy user is causing congestion, Bowling said.

Comcast, the largest cable provider in the U.S., has been under fire for months after it was discovered the company had been slowing down peer-to-peer traffic on its network. Comcast had said that its measures to slow BitTorrent transfers, which it voluntarily ended in March, were necessary to prevent its network from being overrun. At a public hearing in February, Comcast Executive Vice President David Cohen said, “Comcast may on a limited basis temporarily delay certain P2P traffic when that traffic has or is projected to have an adverse effect on other customers’ use of the service.”

To keep service flowing to other customers, Comcast plans to impede Internet speeds to its heaviest users for up to 20 minutes, Mitch Bowling, Comcast’s senior vice president and general manager of online services, told Bloomberg in an interview Tuesday.

Consumer groups were incensed by the tactic, and the FCC investigation ensued over whether Comcast had violated any of its Net neutrality principles.

The move follows the Federal Communications Commission’s ruling on August 1 that Comcast’s throttling of BitTorrent traffic last year was unlawful–the first time any U.S. broadband provider has ever been found to violate Net neutrality rules. (The FCC released the text of that ruling Wednesday.) The FCC issued a cease-and-desist order and required the company to disclose to subscribers in the future how it plans to manage traffic.

“If in fact a person is generating enough packets that they’re the ones creating that situation, we will manage that consumer for the overall good of all of our consumers,” Bowling said.

Comcast reportedly plans to reduce Internet service to customers it deems to be using too much bandwidth, a move that comes on the heels of federal regulators ruling that the Internet service provider violated the law by throttling BitTorrent transfers.

Chrome shows the locations of search terms in the scroll bar.

The most serious issue I ran into was incompatibility with Windows Live Hotmail (seen above), which is a showstopper if you are a Hotmail user. It seems like this is an easily correctable issue and probably not the fault of Google. Chrome also suffers from the same insanely annoying bug as Firefox, where Flash videos sometimes stop after two seconds.

As everyone else has mentioned, Chrome is really snappy when using Google apps. Gmail and Google Reader work like a dream. Loading each tab in its own process also makes a difference. If you are in the middle of something important, a balky page or Flash element in a different tab doesn’t crash everything. During my entire test of Chrome, there was only one instance when the whole browser started choking, but it was able to pull itself out of it. Chrome certainly showed nothing like the crashing issues that pop up with Firefox (although they have been made better with Firefox 3).

When Google Chrome was released a week ago, I bravely volunteered to use the browser exclusively for the next seven days. That means no
Firefox, no IE, no Opera, only Chrome, with no exceptions. I was fully expecting a week of frustrations, incompatibilities, and annoyances. I was ready to criticize all of the fatal flaws that were sure to turn up. I am happy to say that I was wrong. Google Chrome passes the full-time use test with flying colors.

Chrome is more than a bright and shiny Google lab experiment. It’s a useful browser that is going to steal share from the existing products.

All in all, my experience with Chrome was very positive and it really did not give me any major difficulties. I see Google Chrome potentially winning over some of Firefox’s users, especially if they add extensions and get support from the developer community.

(You can get Chrome from CNET Download.com.)

One of the first things that people notice when they load up Google Chrome is the gigantic viewing window. Chrome’s presentation is very elegant, with the larger than usual viewing window, beautiful animations, browser bar that searches, suggests, and shows history, and a good-looking and highly functional start page. Page searches also show the locations in which your search terms appear in the scroll bar. Surfing has been way easier on my eyes in the past week.

Windows Live Mail is incompatible with Google Chrome, suggesting that you "Upgrade your web browser."

The thing I missed the most by switching from Firefox to Chrome for the week is the absence of my Remember The Milk todo list in Gmail. Google is promising extensions for Chrome, but doesn’t support them yet, so you lose a lot of the functionality that Firefox’s extensions provide.

When the government and 20 states filed their antitrust lawsuit, they charged Microsoft with exerting a ”choke hold” on rivals while denying consumer choice.

The proximity of those two dates raises a delicious “what if.” Knowing how the subsequent decade turned out, do you think the Justice Department would still have gone after Microsoft in 1998?

Bill Gates and his closest managers truly feared what would happen to Windows if Netscape’s browser became the preferred conduit to the Internet. The court ultimately found Microsoft guilty of predatory behavior, but the company avoided potentially crippling, worst-case sanctions.

I’m obviously asking a rhetorical question. Short of a H.G. Wells’ time machine, Joel Klein and his trustbusters had no way to accurately predict tech’s Google-centric future. But given the course of the technology industry in the subsequent decade, it’s clear in retrospect how little the court battle mattered.

(Credit:
CNET News.com)

That reads like a blast from the past. I spent the better part of two years watching lawyers for Microsoft and the trustbusters argue before the bench. Beyond the day-to-day, though, this was fundamentally a debate about the future of the desktop at a time when the Windows operating system was under challenge from the Internet.

If they ever sat down for a frank off-the-record conversation, maybe Klein and Gates might agree that their fin de siecle confrontation was less significant than it was cracked up to be. All the while, the bigger challenge to Microsoft was being put together in relative obscurity by a couple of Stanford geeks named Sergey Brin and Larry Page.

Ten years ago today, the United States Department of Justice filed a landmark antirust lawsuit against Microsoft. Six months later, Google incorporated in Menlo Park, Calif.

Former DOJ antitrust chief Joel Klein

The lawsuit we filed today seeks to put an end to Microsoft’s unlawful campaign to eliminate competition, deter innovation, and restrict consumer choice. In essence, what Microsoft has been doing, through a wide variety of illegal business practices, is leveraging its Windows operating system monopoly to force its other software products on consumers.”

So, what do you think?

The plan calls for a public-relations campaign, including video ads on YouTube, and a method to connect players online. But there’s little real meat. In reality, it’s a response to those skeptical about the industry’s chances to survive in the Internet era who have lately given radio plenty of static.

Radio Heard Here, a new initiative from the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) and the HD Digital Radio Alliance is focused largely on trying to convince the public that radio remains relevant.

“The explosion in both expression and availability, first on independent labels and now everywhere, thanks to the Internet,” Fine wrote, “began overtaking commercial radio stations well over 20 years ago.”

Without even getting into the problems the
iPod has posed, Fine notes that revenues are plunging and listeners are leaving. The Internet has turned countless people into disc jockeys and enabled them to compete with traditional radio stations. And radio’s carefully controlled and limited playlists compare unfavorably with the vast array of music available on the Web.

NAB CEO David Rehr told an audience at the NAB 2008 conference here Monday that what radio has always offered is “connection” to listeners. “Technology hasn’t changed that,” Rehr said. “It has just changed the devices of delivery.”

Naturally, radio broadcasters don’t see it that way. They note that radio still plays a huge part in people’s lives, during their work commutes, for example. They point to the development of high-definition radio and how automakers are starting to adopt the technology. They maintain that commercial radio can and will fit nicely on the Web.

LAS VEGAS–Over-the-air radio broadcasters have a plan to stay relevant even as their listeners continue to migrate to the Web.

(Credit:
Radioheardhere.com)

BusinessWeek’s Jon Fine wrote a column in February titled “Requiem for Old-Time Radio.”