Internet & Media

Apple's MobileMe technology executive has been appointed chief technology officer at Thumbplay, the cloud-based music company said on Monday.

Pablo Calamera was most recently director of Apple's MobileMe, and spent a total of 10 years at the company over the course of his career. In the newly created position of CTO, he will report directly to Evan Schwartz, Thumbplay CEO and co-founder.

Thumbplay said Calamera will oversee all technology initiatives, including its new cloud-based music service. Thumbplay, in private beta in the U.S., offers unlimited, on-demand access to songs. Thumbplay Music is currently available for select BlackBerry … Read more

Symantec on Monday announced the launch of a hosting service designed to let health care providers store, archive, and share their medical records.

The company's new Symantec Health service is designed to help hospitals and health care companies offload the costs and internal resources used to house medical records. As health care firms are forced to keep more image-based files, such as lab tests, for longer retention times, their storage costs have soared, said Symantec. The Symantec Health service will offer an alternative cloud-based storage environment where companies can budget and pay only for what they need.

The service … Read more

Although he lost his voice to cancer surgery, Roger Ebert is sounding like his old self thanks to some innovative software.

The famous film critic, known for his spirited debates with the late Gene Siskel on their "At the Movies" show, has survived a difficult few years.

Diagnosed with thyroid cancer in 2002, Ebert underwent a series of operations that eventually robbed him of his voice and lower jaw, taking away his ability to speak, eat, and drink. To communicate with the outside world, he has relied on traditional text-to-speech (TTS) software that speaks whatever he types.

But … Read more

Among the reasons people are cutting back on sharing music illegally on peer-to-peer sites is that some have sated their need for songs, according to a NPD Group survey.

Russ Crupnick, a senior analyst with the research firm, said last week at the Digital Music East Forum that the company saw a 25 percent decline in illegal downloading in the United States via P2P sites during 2009.

"You have a lot of people who have built up their collections," Crupnick said. "They are filled up with both paid music and unpaid and it is something like 'I … Read more

The Wired iPad app Conde Nast showed off this month looks great. But the chances that the publisher will give its other magazines the same treatment don't look promising.

Conde is still creating a digital version of its tech magazine for the device. But the influential publisher says it won't create similar iPad apps for other titles unless Apple and Adobe figure out how to work together.

Conde does plan to sell iPad-friendly versions of some of its other magazines. But they will be similar to the iPhone app that the publisher has already created for its GQ title, … Read more

PayPal has received the green light from the Reserve Bank of India to resume bank withdrawals for settlements involving exports of goods and services, but personal payments remains suspended.

In a blog post Friday, Farhad Irani, head of PayPal Asia-Pacific wrote that RBI has allowed PayPal to resume bank withdrawals for the exports of goods and services. The company is now making changes to comply with Indian regulations and "anticipates" it will be able to resume bank withdrawal service for settlements effective March 3.

However, personal payments remain suspended as PayPal still needs specific government approval to allow … Read more

If you are like the overwhelming majority of Americans, you are likely to read or hear about this story again on TV, the radio, newspapers, and other Internet sites. A recent survey found that 92 percent of Americans get their daily news from multiple sources.

The Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism report, released Monday, finds that the Internet is now the third most popular news medium, trailing behind local and national television but ahead of newspapers and radio broadcasts. Almost two-thirds (59 percent) people get news from both online and offline sources, according to the report.… Read more

A new profile of septuagenarian media mogul Rupert Murdoch says that the News Corp. chief is ready to press legal action against Google if talks fail with the search giant over indexing content.

In a lengthy article in New York magazine that hit the Web late on Sunday, writer Gabriel Sherman quotes a source high up in the media industry echelon who says Murdoch is "pretty tightly wound up over Google and has been ready to sue them...He doesn't trust them at all." The lawsuit, presumably, would come if Google refused to stop indexing News Corp. … Read more

Google is using a tool to help people locate friends and loved ones who might have been affected by Saturday's 8.8.-magnitude earthquake in Chile.

Google Person Finder allows users to search for information about people by name or leave information about people in both English and Spanish. As of Sunday morning, the page said it contained 22,900 records. However, the page cautions users that all data input would be viewable and usable by all and that the company plays no role in verifying the information. Google had set up a similar Person Finder tool after Haiti'… Read more