SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Yahoo Inc. introduced on Monday a new Internet search system for mobile phone users that delivers locally relevant answers, a move that vaults it ahead of what rival Google Inc. now offers.

Reuters - Yahoo Inc. introduced on Monday a new Internet search system for mobile phone users that delivers locally relevant answers, a move that vaults it ahead of what rival Google Inc. now offers.

TechWeb - Mixing Apple TV with iTunes could become a disruptive technology to legacy video purchase-and-consumption behavior, according to ThinkEquity Partners.

AP - Sprucing up its famously plain Web site, Google Inc. is offering a new option that plants its Internet search box in panoramic settings that change with the time of day and the outside weather.

TechWeb - Ian Murdock is expected to help align Sun's position on open source operating systems.

LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) - MTV2 plans to release the entire upcoming season of 'The Andy Milonakis Show' on Apple's iTunes a month before its first episode premieres on television, the cable network will announce Tuesday.

Reuters - MTV2 plans to release the entire upcoming season of "The Andy Milonakis Show" on Apple's iTunes a month before its first episode premieres on television, the cable network will announce Tuesday.

AP - Perhaps you know that sinking feeling when a single keystroke accidentally destroy hours of work. Now imagine wiping out a disc drive containing an account worth $38 billion.

Reuters - A married Singaporean woman who met a man in an online chatroom and conned him into giving her about $45,000 after she promised to marry him, was jailed for six months on Monday, court documents showed.

AFP - South Korea's Hynix Semiconductor has forged an alliance with Japanese electronics giant Toshiba, the two companies said Tuesday.

InfoWorld - The chairman of BenQ Corp. offered his resignation on Tuesday over losses caused by the company's inability to make its former German mobile phone subsidiary profitable. BenQ's board of directors refused to accept the offer, however, demanding that he remain in his role and turn the company around.

InfoWorld - Dell opened its first Chinese language blog on Monday in a bid to make sure its communications keep pace with its growth and enable it to better serve customers, the head of the new blog said in the first entry.

InfoWorld - Seattle's Medio Systems hopes to win a piece of the promising mobile advertising market -- an emerging market that giants such as Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft are also chasing -- by focusing on delivering advertisements in mobile search results.

InfoWorld - IBM and Cisco Systems on Tuesday announced a new one-stop service designed to help businesses and government agencies respond to and recover from disasters, the companies said.

AMSTERDAM (Reuters) - Sony Corp. on Tuesday moved to head off a public relations disaster by announcing which older PlayStation 2 games will work on the European version of the PlayStation 3 console due out on Friday.

KUALA LUMPUR (Reuters) - A whiff of plastic led sniffer dogs in Malaysia to a cache of about one million pirated game and movie discs with a street value of roughly $3 million, film industry officials said on Tuesday.

AP - Hynix Semiconductor Inc. of South Korea and Japan's Toshiba Corp. declared an end to their legal battles Tuesday, signing accords to share semiconductor patents and products.

Reuters - Sony Corp. (6758.T) on Tuesday moved to head off a public relations disaster by announcing which older PlayStation 2 games will work on the European version of the PlayStation 3 console due out on Friday.

USATODAY.com - Microsoft and Sony aren't just battling for video game supremacy: They want control of your living room too. Both the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 play music and high-def movies and connect to an online network. USATODAY's Mike Snider compares the two systems beyond just games:

USATODAY.com - Sony's new PlayStation 3 video game has gone from top dog to underdog in record time. Despite the buildup and hype around its arrival in November, the PS3 has been outsold so far - at a rate of almost 2-to-1 - by the Nintendo Wii.

USATODAY.com - SAN FRANCISCO - Go ahead - drop that laptop. If it has a new flash memory drive inside, there's a good chance it won't break. Flash memory, the type of computer memory in digital cameras and other small electronics, is finding its way into bigger, more powerful devices.

USATODAY.com - Eager to connect with teen and twentysomething shoppers, retailers are focusing on the mobile devices that are never far from their hands - or ears. "They are the early adopters and the influencers," Roman Tsunder says of teens targeted by cellphone marketing campaigns from his company, Access 360 Media. "The youth markets will show adults how it's done."

InfoWorld - Secure64 Software has released software to turn an Itanium 2 server into a secure DNS (domain name service) appliance it says can handle 100,000 queries per second.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Nokia and up to three other potential bidders are interested in buying Palm Inc. , which could be sold for some $2 billion as early as this week, a technology news Web site said.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - CBS Corp. said on Tuesday it has purchased high school sports online network MaxPreps to expand its local sports coverage.

InfoWorld - Hynix Semiconductor and Toshiba have agreed to share licenses for using one another's semiconductor patents, putting an end to several lawsuits, Hynix said Tuesday.

AP - Dell Inc.'s sales in India have soared in the past year, but the high taxes the country levies on computers are preventing the U.S. company from expanding investment and operations here, Chairman and Chief Executive Michael Dell said Tuesday.

AP - John Backus, whose development of the Fortran programming language in the 1950s changed how people interacted with computers and paved the way for modern software, has died. He was 82.

Reuters - CBS Corp. said on Tuesday it has purchased high school sports online network MaxPreps to expand its local sports coverage.

NewsFactor - Amid rumors of a Google phone that some believe could optimize the mobile search experience, Yahoo is making its mobile intentions crystal clear. The prince of search on Tuesday took its new oneSearch service to the mobile Web with a bold claim of reinventing search.

AFP - Global sales of personal computers are expected to increase 10.5 percent in 2007, getting little help from the new Windows Vista operating system, a market research firm said Tuesday.

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - Belgians will be able to use their cell phones as debit cards within a few months, Belgian cell phone operators and Banksys, a Belgian firm specialized in electronic payments, said on Tuesday.

AP - EU regulators said Tuesday they would investigate in detail plans by French mobile phone operator SFR to buy Tele2 AB's French fixed-line telephone and broadband unit, saying they believed the deal could shrink competition in the French pay-TV sector.

Reuters - Belgians will be able to use their cell phones as debit cards within a few months, Belgian cell phone operators and Banksys, a Belgian firm specialized in electronic payments, said on Tuesday.

AP - EU regulators said Tuesday they charged several companies — among them Sony Corp. — with running a cartel to fix the price of professional video tape used for television.

PC World - Companies from across IT face criminal sanctions, including prison time for employees, if their networks, software programs or online services are ever used to carry illegally copied material such as music or film, according to a draft law from the European Commission supported Tuesday by a committee of the European Parliament.

SAN JOSE, California (Reuters) - Web telephone calling service Skype will shortly begin allowing users to send money to other Skype users via the PayPal online payments system, Skype co-founder Niklas Zennstrom said on Tuesday.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Cablevision Systems Corp. and Verizon Communications Inc. are turning their competition for subscribers into a war of words, with each boasting it has the best network in advertising campaigns.

PARIS (Reuters) - The European Commission is studying whether existing rules on electronic commerce have been applied evenly in the 27-nation European Union and may seek to clarify the law, a senior official said on Tuesday.

AP - Hynix Semiconductor Inc. and Toshiba Corp. declared an end to their legal feud Tuesday, signing agreements to share semiconductor patents and products.

AFP - Belgium's nearly 10 million mobile phone users could soon use text messages to pay for everything from a taxi ride to a pizza in what organisers of the new system describe as a "world first."

AP - Human bones on the catwalk. Models in dagger-emblazoned silk dresses strutting while talking on cell phones. Bauhaus blaring overhead.

InfoWorld - Yahoo opened up its mobile oneSearch offering to anyone with a phone who can access the Internet. The service, which aims to offer more than a simple list of search results, was previously available as part of Yahoo Go for Mobile, a mobile phone-optimized content offering that is compatible with only certain handsets.

NewsFactor - For Euro gamers jonesing to know which PlayStation 1 and PlayStation 2 games will work on the European version of the soon-to-launch PlayStation 3, the wait is over. Sony Computer Entertainment released the titles of over a thousand games that will operate on the Euro PS3 when it hits store shelves on March 23.

AP - Many owners of Internet addresses face this quandary: Provide your real contact information when you register a domain name and subject yourself to junk or harassment. Or enter fake data and risk losing it outright.

AP - When a California woman recently gave birth to a healthy baby just two days after learning she was pregnant, the sudden change to her life was challenging enough. What April Branum definitely didn't need was a deluge of nasty Internet comments.

AP - Satellite broadband company WildBlue Communications Inc. said Tuesday it's turned on its first own satellite, greatly expanding its capacity.

Reuters - Web telephone calling service Skype will shortly begin allowing users to send money to other Skype users via the PayPal online payments system, Skype co-founder Niklas Zennstrom said on Tuesday.

NewsFactor - With Linux having become a big player in the server and data-center markets, the Linux frontier still remains the desktop. Linux mainstay Red Hat has said that it is planning a new, packaged Linux solution to better tackle that frontier.

AP - Speculation of a buyout of Palm Inc. heightened Tuesday after an industry online publication reported a deal could occur this week.

AP - The new Dutch transportation minister ordered a safety review of Segways and said he hoped to eventually lift a ban on the self-balancing scooters in public places.

InfoWorld - Telecommunications companies ranging from Internet service providers to wireless carriers are betting that a new wave of managed security services can help generate additional opportunities with enterprise customers.

InfoWorld - Oracle reported third-quarter results Tuesday that exceeded both the software vendor's and analysts' predictions.

NewsFactor - If you are looking for a Web analytics application, you'll find more than 100 vendors who are ready to jump in with statistical bells and whistles that measure your site's effectiveness. But before you get too impressed with the capabilities of any particular vendor, it can be particularly helpful to determine which type of analytics solution best suits your business.

InfoWorld - Shipments of servers powered by x86 processors will not grow as fast as previously forecasted, but x86 will remain the dominant chip design, IDC said in a report Tuesday.

AFP - Skype said on Tuesday that users of its Internet telephone service will soon be able to transfer money to each other using PayPal.

Investor's Business Daily - If the mobile Web ad market ever takes off, Google and Yahoo are poised to cash in.

AP - Adobe Systems Inc. reported flat first-quarter sales but easily exceeded Wall Street expectations with a 37 percent surge in profit, prompting bullish executives to raise guidance Tuesday as the software company prepares its biggest-ever product launch.

SHANGHAI (Reuters) - Dell Inc. said on Wednesday it was launching a low-cost personal computer in China, targeting its fastest-growing market.

AP - How much would you pay to cook up a few steaks on a fancy grill? If you buy it from Manny Ramirez, prepare to shell out about $5,000 or more — but it comes with an autographed baseball. The Red Sox quirky slugger with the $160 million contract is selling on eBay a JENN-AIR grill he said he bought for about $4,000.

InfoWorld - Oracle has gotten off to a "very strong start" with its support program for users of Red Hat's Enterprise Linux, according to Oracle CEO Larry Ellison.

SHANGHAI (Reuters) - Dell Inc., the world's second-largest personal computer maker, unveiled a low-cost PC on Wednesday for China, its fastest-growing market.