SAN FRANCISCO--Google defended its music storage service at a press conference today shortly after it unveiled the service at its developer conference here.

The new Google Music service, which CNET first reported last night, allows people to store up to 20,000 songs in the Internet "cloud." The benefit of doing this is that they will then be able to access the music from any Web browser that supports Flash or Android devices. The service is still being beta-tested and will only be offered to a select group of invitation-only users in the U.S. Initially, the service … Read more

Microsoft has stopped identifying specific Windows Phone handsets when it collects location data from them, and will soon stop any unique device identifiers at all being sent to its location services, the company said yesterday.

In a blog post, Windows Phone chief Andy Lees said the data Microsoft collected from the smartphones was for identifying local "landmarks"--nearby Wi-Fi access points and cellular base stations--that in turn make it easier to ascertain Windows Phones' locations. "We've recently taken specific steps to eliminate the use and storage of unique device identifiers by our location service when collecting … Read more

Apple's iPhone shipments jumped nearly 15 percent in the first quarter over the previous one, despite a slight downturn industrywide, according to new data.

Market researcher IHS iSuppli reported that Apple shipped 18.6 million of its smartphones in the first quarter, up from 16.2 million in the fourth quarter of 2010. That 14.9 percent increase marked the highest growth rate among the top five global smartphone vendors. It also stood out against an 1.5 percent sequential drop in smartphone shipments industrywide in the first quarter, which is usually a slow retail season but one that … Read more

The Federal Communications Commission is expanding its familiar emergency alert system notifications sent over TV and radio to now include mobile phones.

Dubbing the new service PLAN (Personal Localized Alerting Network), the government would target the alerts in the form of text messages sent to cell phones of people who need or want to be notified in the event of an emergency. Developed by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), PLAN would allow customers of any participating wireless carrier to turn their phones into personal alert systems.

The service will initially launch in New York City by the end of … Read more

Editor's note: We used Cover It Live for this event, so if you missed the live blog, you can still replay it in the embedded component below. Replaying the event will give you all the live updates along with commentary from our readers and CNET reporters. For those of you who just want the updates, we've included them in regular text here. To get the key points from today's announcement, you can check out our summary of what got announced, in our story here.

SAN FRANCISCO--Google's annual developer conference kicks off here Tuesday morning at Moscone … Read more

Intuit wants to give its customers a glimpse of the future of mobile payments through an adaptation of its GoPayment service that eliminates the need for credit cards.

Tapping into the growing field of NFC (near-field communication) technology, Intuit's reimagined GoPayment service would let consumers wirelessly pay for items on the go through just a touch of an NFC-enabled cell phone.

With the necessary NFC hardware and credit card information stored on a mobile phone, consumers could leave their money and credit cards at home and use their phones to buy items and services at stores, restaurants, and other … Read more

A new network employing mobile devices and social networks wants to make it easier for small charitable organizations to raise the money they need to help their causes.

MobileCause, a Web service for nonprofit fundraising in the social-media age, has launched a new mobile mentor program, One by One, in an effort "to increase mobile philanthropy and provide essential mobile tools free-of-charge to smaller nonprofits."

According to MobileCause's stats, of the more than 1.5 million established nonprofits in the United States, more than 50 percent raise less than $500,000 a year from donations because they don't have the budget to cash in on a diversity of fundraising tools in the Information Age.

So, MobileCause will provide an online, mobile giving setup allowing large and medium nonprofits to support a charity of their choosing. The hope is that mentoring and support will provide hundreds of early-stage and smaller charities access to various mobile solutions they couldn't use previously. … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO - Search and advertising still pay the bills at Google, but as the company moves into new markets such as mobile and Web apps, increasingly its fortunes will be tied to developers outside the Googleplex.

At this week's Google I/O developer conference here the company will be reaching out to thousands of these third-party developers in an effort to enlist their help in creating robust ecosystems for up and coming Google products. How successfully Google is able to tap into this developer culture to fuel growth in Google products will determine Google's standing in the … Read more

Microsoft is putting the finishing touches on a deal to buy Internet phone company Skype for between $7 billion and $8 billion, and a deal could be announced as early as tomorrow, according to a Wall Street Journal report.

The report cited people familiar with the matter who said negotiations were ongoing and could still fall apart. Microsoft representatives did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The Luxembourg-based company provides a software-based communications service that allows people to make free voice and video calls over the Internet to other Skype users using almost any Internet-connected device. The voice … Read more