NEW YORK (Reuters) - News Corp.'s MySpace social network plans to test a service on Thursday that scours the Web for news stories and lets users rate them, aiming to lure more advertisers to the Rupert Murdoch-controlled company.

TechWeb - One Wall Street analyst said she kept hitting her BlackBerry's version of a "refresh" button, not believing that the system could fail.

TechWeb - The long-term ramifications of the outage could prove troubling for the maker of the popular smartphone.

TechWeb - The champ will receive a bunch of prizes, including a one-of-a-kind Pac-Man embossed version of the Xbox 360.

AP - The popular online hangout MySpace is entering the news business with a feature that lets its users determine what items other members see.

AP - A human rights group launched a campaign Thursday against Yahoo Inc. on grounds the U.S. search company assisted China's communist government with torture by revealing information that led to the arrest of dissidents.

AP - EBay Inc. is trying to wring more money out of every customer and purge the online auction site of shoddy sellers, a business strategy that executives say has already pumped profits.

AP - Microsoft Corp. said Thursday it will build on existing efforts to bridge the digital divide worldwide and announced several new ventures, including a $3 software package for governments that subsidize student computers.

AP - Sony's European video-game unit is cutting jobs to grow more competitive, a company spokesman said Thursday, as the just-launched PlayStation 3 machine struggles against rival offerings from Microsoft and Nintendo that beat it to the market.

SEATTLE (Reuters) - Microsoft Corp., trying to meet its goal of doubling the number of computer users to 2 billion by 2015, promised to cut its software prices to governments in developing countries that provide free computers to school children.

PC World - Use your cell phone to view home videos, send voice mail to groups, and instantly share phone-camera photos.

Reuters - Microsoft Corp., trying to meet its goal of doubling the number of computer users to 2 billion by 2015, promised to cut its software prices to governments in developing countries that provide free computers to school children.

BEIJING (Reuters) - Technology will keep getting better and better rather than plateauing out, with the humble keyboard making way for speech recognition software as standard, Microsoft Corp. Chairman Bill Gates said on Thursday.

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Jenova Chen and Kellee Santiago, two of video gaming's hottest independent developers, are tapping new emotions with their games in a bid to give their industry the range to rival Hollywood films.

BERLIN (Reuters) - The advance of digital media does not mean the end of traditional printed newspapers, the chief executive of Berlin publisher Axel Springer said on Thursday.

TOKYO (Reuters) - U.S. recording disk and tape maker Imation Corp. said on Thursday it will buy Tokyo-based TDK Corp.'s brand and sales operations in recording media for $300 million in stock and cash.

AFP - MySpace launched a news service on Thursday that lets members of the popular social-networking website decide which stories bouncing about the Internet are most deserving of attention.

Reuters - Technology will keep getting better and better rather than plateauing out, with the humble keyboard making way for speech recognition software as standard, Microsoft Corp. Chairman Bill Gates said on Thursday.

Reuters - Jenova Chen and Kellee Santiago, two of video gaming's hottest independent developers, are tapping new emotions with their games in a bid to give their industry the range to rival Hollywood films.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Microsoft Corp. and Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. said on Thursday they have agreed to a broad technology patent pact to develop future products.

USATODAY.com - A massive BlackBerry outage Tuesday and Wednesday revealed a huge drawback in the popular mobile e-mail system's design. Maker Research In Motion gave few details about the outage, saying it was investigating. But tech analysts say the way the BlackBerry works is at least partly to blame.

AP - Greater investment in technology to improve health care and education would help ease global economic inequality, Microsoft Corp. Chairman Bill Gates said Thursday, adding he saw no limits to the technological revolution.

PC World - The wife of an imprisoned Chinese dissident has sued Yahoo Inc. for divulging information about her husband's Internet activity, which allegedly led to his arrest and torture.

InfoWorld - Open-source business intelligence software vendor Pentaho is hoping a new tie-up unveiled Thursday with the OpenOffice.org community and Sun Microsystems will bring its BI offerings to the attention of many more new users.

InfoWorld - Salesforce.com has won a contract to provide CRM (customer relationship management) applications to Japan Post, the world's largest financial institution by assets, Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff announced Thursday in Tokyo.

TEL AVIV (Reuters) - A 'cybertooth' that dispenses medicine to chronic patients may replace pills and injections for those who have a hard time remembering to take their pills, researchers say.

InfoWorld - Advanced Semiconductor Engineering (ASE), the world's largest chip packaging and testing company, denied a report that said four investment firms were interested in acquiring the company after its talks with The Carlyle Group failed.

PC World - A price cut for the PlayStation 3 games console may be in the cards as Sony Corp. looks to strengthen the platform and expand its penetration.

AP - Microsoft Corp. said Thursday it will build on existing efforts to bridge the digital divide worldwide and announced several new ventures, including a $3 software package for governments that subsidize student computers.

Reuters - Publisher New York Times Co. said on Thursday its quarterly profit fell 26 percent partly due to a drop in print advertising and warned investors that its 2007 online ad revenue would be lower than originally forecast.

AFP - Nokia strengthened its position as the world's leading maker of mobile phones in the first quarter by upping its market share to 36 percent, though net profit slid seven percent, the group said on Thursday.

InfoWorld - Red Hat has set up a global services center in India that will assist its customers with deploying open-source technologies. The center will hire about 100 staff over the next 12 months.

TORONTO (Reuters) - Research In Motion Ltd. remained silent on Thursday regarding the cause of a massive service outage of its BlackBerry e-mail service that frustrated thousands of users across North America and initially spooked investors.

AP - Samsung Electronics Co. and Microsoft Corp. said Thursday they have entered into a patent licensing agreement focused on the technology companies' consumer electronics lines.

Reuters - Research In Motion Ltd. remained silent on Thursday regarding the cause of a massive service outage of its BlackBerry e-mail service that frustrated thousands of users across North America and initially spooked investors.

PC World - At the Web 2.0 Expo at Moscone Center in San Francisco on Wednesday, three thought leaders in the Web 2.0 space, Ross Mayfield, CEO of Socialtext, Satish Dharmaraj, CEO of Zimbra and Matthew Glotzbach, business product manager at Google, participated in a panel discussion titled, Web 2.0 for the Enterprise.

InfoWorld - Nonprofit consortium the Open Solutions Alliance (OSA) has begun making moves to increase businesses' use of open-source software.

InfoWorld - Spammers and hackers are using the slayings at Virginia Tech as a gory lure to infect computers with malicious software, security experts noted Thursday.

NewsFactor - Every culture has its rituals for grieving: Jews sit shiva, the Irish throw a wake, and in New Orleans, the funeral procession is often led by an uplifting jazz band. For the members of the iGen, the infinitely connected teens and twenty-somethings who cannot remember a time when the World Wide Web didn't exist, the ritual of mourning is now a social-networking phenomenon. Welcome to Grief 2.0.

NewsFactor - The space between a notebook computer and a smartphone is an opportunity that Intel, among others, is trying to fill. At the Intel Developers Forum on Wednesday in Beijing, the chipmaker announced it is creating an alliance to work on challenges related to a new computer form factor, the mobile Internet device (MID). Intel also detailed a new platform for both MIDs and the existing ultra-mobile PC (UMPC).

Reuters - Research In Motion Ltd. remained silent on Thursday regarding the cause of a massive service outage of its BlackBerry e-mail service that frustrated thousands of users across North America and initially spooked investors.

AP - To find volunteer Redaktisto Noble, you have to go to John Edwards presidential campaign headquarters. Not in Iowa or New Hampshire, but in cyberspace.

AP - With a few delays, friends and family tracked my progress through this year's Boston Marathon via e-mail, text messaging and the Web.

AP - A look at some of the online tracking and participant statistics from this year's Boston marathon:

AP - The Chicago Tribune has launched a community journalism Web site encouraging readers in nine suburbs to post their own articles, photos and blogs.

InfoWorld - Sun and Canonical, the commercial sponsor of the Ubuntu Linux distribution, announced Thursday a further deepening of their existing partnership.

NewsFactor - In Beijing on Thursday, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates let his philanthropic heart bleed over into his corporate strategy with a plan to offer a scaled-down version of Windows, Office, and other Microsoft software for $3 to people in developing nations.

InfoWorld - Social bookmarking and IRC (Internet relay chat) top the list of must-have tools for organizations looking to leverage Web 2.0 technologies within the enterprise, according to a Web 2.0 Expo panel moderated by Rob Rueckert of Intel Capital.

TORONTO (Reuters) - Research In Motion Ltd. said on Thursday the full analysis of the cause of the North American outage of its BlackBerry e-mail service 'will take more time,' but the company expected to have an update by Friday morning.

AP - Advanced Micro Devices Inc. reported a greater-than-expected loss in the first quarter as the chip maker continued to struggle amid a fierce price competition with larger rival Intel Corp.

Reuters - Research In Motion Ltd. said on Thursday the full analysis of the cause of the North American outage of its BlackBerry e-mail service "will take more time," but the company expected to have an update by Friday morning.

InfoWorld - A security researcher at Juniper Networks has developed a new form of attack that can be used to run unauthorized software on a wide range of computing devices, including routers and mobile phones.

AP - Advanced Micro Devices Inc. reported a greater-than-expected loss in the first quarter as the chip maker continued to struggle amid a fierce price competition with larger rival Intel Corp.

AFP - The wife of a Yahoo user jailed in China for promoting democracy online is suing the Internet search engine company for helping Chinese officials track him down and convict him.

InfoWorld - The The U.S. Department of Justice has joined three whistleblower lawsuits alleging that Hewlett-Packard Co., Sun Microsystems Inc., and Accenture LLP paid and received kickbacks from IT partners in exchange for preferential treatment on government contacts, the DOJ said Thursday.

TORONTO (Reuters) - Research In Motion Ltd. remained silent on Thursday regarding the cause of a massive service outage of its BlackBerry e-mail service that frustrated thousands of users across North America and initially spooked investors.

InfoWorld - For the second straight quarter, AMD posted a loss, saying Thursday that it lost $611 million in its chip-manufacturing business during the first quarter of 2007.

Macworld.com - You don’t have to spend a lot of time in Hollywood to find instances where Apple’s Final Cut Studio is being put to use in film- and TV-production. And, given the latest changes to the updated editing suite announced earlier this week, analysts aren’t expecting Final Cut’s popularity to fade any time soon.

Reuters - Research In Motion Ltd. remained silent on Thursday regarding the cause of a massive service outage of its BlackBerry e-mail service that frustrated thousands of users across North America and initially spooked investors.

AP - Back by popular demand: Windows XP. PC maker Dell Inc. said on its Web site Thursday it will once again let home PC buyers choose between Microsoft Corp.'s older operating system and Windows Vista when they purchase certain new machines.

AFP - Google said Thursday that it is building a tool for television and film studios to get copyrighted video clips quickly removed from its superstar website YouTube.

AP - Intuit Inc., the maker of TurboTax and other software that caused delays and headaches for an untold number of tax filers earlier this week, issued an apology Thursday and promised improvements to prevent a reoccurrence.

NewsFactor - News Corp. is shouting "Extra! Extra!" on Thursday as its popular social-networking site gets into the news business. MySpace has launched the beta version of a service that searches the Web for news stories and lets users rate them.

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - U.S. sales of video games, devices and accessories rose 33 percent to $1.1 billion in March, propelled by sales of new video game consoles like the popular Wii from Nintendo Co. Ltd., market research firm NPD said on Thursday.

Reuters - U.S. sales of video games, devices and accessories rose 33 percent to $1.1 billion in March, propelled by sales of new video game consoles like the popular Wii from Nintendo Co. Ltd.(7974.OS), market research firm NPD said on Thursday.

PC Magazine - Microsoft executives said the patent deal struck with Samsung Thursday morning could have implications for the Zune MP3 player and the Xbox, as well as for Windows PCs.

AP - U.S. album sales are down 17 percent so far this year, a downward spiral caused in part by a surge in online music purchases and fewer big-name albums being released in the first quarter.

PC Magazine - Review: The updated free, open-source desktop mail client offers tagging and improved navigation, but faces competition from browser-based options.

InfoWorld - Microsoft has partnered with Unisys to offer a free trial of Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 that enables enterprise customers to evaluate the software's e-mail, calendaring, and unified-messaging features.

AFP - Microsoft is offering a low-cost, scaled-down version of its student software in developing countries to help billions of poor people access computer technology, the company said Thursday.