Internet & Media

Yahoo continued to build out the content side of its business Wednesday, announcing plans to acquire Citizen Sports.

Citizen Sports develops Facebook and iPhone applications for sports fans, focusing on creating communities around individual teams and fantasy sports. The plan appears to involve Yahoo merging the social-media applications from Citizen Sports with content produced by Yahoo Sports, according to a press release outlining the deal.

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Earlier this month during a press event for Yahoo's 15th birthday, CEO Carol Bartz suggested that the company was about to make a few small acquisitions … Read more

On Tuesdays and Wednesdays, anyone with humanity, a pulse, and functional eyes, ears, and cerebellum watches Champions League soccer.

I know that not everyone has yet been converted to this phenomenon. Equally, this being a World Cup year, I feel sure that the beauty of the world's most popular game will continue to seep into resistant pores.

In Italy, despite the fact that they play a brand of soccer that makes the dead grateful, there is no one left to persuade. Which is why this stunning, brilliant, original, inspired guerrilla marketing should make you look at most tech advertising … Read more

A group of Google's advertising partners in China has sent a letter to the Web giant, saying it has waited in "profound pain" for word on the company's plans ever since the announcement that it may withdraw from the country.

The letter, which was signed by 27 partners, was sent Monday via e-mail to John Liu, vice president of sales for greater China and was posted to the Web site of Chinese state broadcaster CCTV. The letter states that the partners' businesses are at risk of failure and demands to know how they will be compensated … Read more

Flying is increasingly becoming pleasant only for proctologists.

However, one CEO, David Martin, perhaps now considers himself fortunate to have been on Saturday's flying Alcatraz that was the Virgin America flight from LA to New York.

This flight seems to have consisted of a diversion away from JFK due to high winds. It then involved a landing at Stewart International Airport, which does not seem to be an international airport owned by Rod Stewart but some little outpost 90 miles northwest of New York.

Passengers were then kept on the plane for somewhere between four and a half and … Read more

AUSTIN, Texas--It turned out to be just a rumor that Spotify CEO Daniel Ek would use his Tuesday keynote at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival (SXSWi) to announce that the streaming music service would be expanding from Europe to the U.S. Ek said onstage that the stars just aren't aligned yet, and that he would rather wait than launch a lackluster Spotify.

"The most important thing for us when it comes to the U.S. launch is the fact that we want to build the best product that we can," Ek said. "Here you … Read more

Google has proclaimed that the conventional PC will become "irrelevant" within the next three years, and it insists that it puts mobile first in development.

That's a bold statement indicating just how much Google is betting on the mobile Web. But it's also an indication of just how critical synchronization technology is going to become--especially syncing to an open Web.

Traditionally, sync has been that thing you do between your desktop and your one mobile device to ensure that calendars, address books, and even browser bookmarks are current between the two islands of computing. But in … Read more

Up to now, rocking out with guitar-playing simulators has typically been about pushing buttons or bars.

Universal Music Group, the largest of the four top record companies, is trying to inject more realism into the experience with a new music app designed for the iPhone and iPod. The game is called Six String and is expected to debut Wednesday at the iTunes App store.

The game, which will sell for $4.99, is similar to the biggie guitar-simulation games: Guitar Hero and Rock Band. Players are directed to the proper strings with a scrolling series of dots and arrows, according … Read more

The next friend request you receive might come from the FBI.

The Obama administration has considered sending federal police undercover on social-networking sites, including Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter.

A confidential U.S. Department of Justice presentation (PDF) on social-networking sites made public Tuesday said online undercover work can help agents "communicate with suspects," "gain access to nonpublic info," and "map social relationships."

Federal police agencies organized under the Justice Department include the FBI, the U.S. Marshals, the Drug Enforcement Administration, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives.

The 33-page presentation noted … Read more

AUSTIN, Texas--Disco lights. Bubble machines. Big-name DJs. Ashton Kutcher.

Those are just a smattering of the things you would have seen on Monday night in downtown Austin, Texas, where two of the most talked-about parties of the South by Southwest Interactive Festival (SXSWi) were happening simultaneously. These would be, of course, the respective parties thrown by Foursquare and Gowalla, two start-ups offering very similar "geolocation" services. And at SXSWi, where everyone wants to know where everyone else is in instant real-time, this kind of social-networking app is going to be big.

Most people expected that SXSWi would see … Read more