Zite outlined the changes in a blog post. CEO Mark Johnson has been pretty vocal about how he doesn’t think Zite should be like Google Reader, and told me the new features Zite has added to its iOS app are those that “enhance the user experience both for Google Reader users and the reading population in general.” Articles will now “gray out” after they’ve been read, users will be able to save sources as favorites and Zite’s algorithm will pay more attention to obscure content:

“One of the biggest problems with Google Reader is that RSS feeds which publish many stories per day tend to dominate your feed, so the obscure blog you found a few years ago that publishes every three months can be drowned out in the noise. Zite’s algorithm will more aggressively highlight rare content, so feel free to ‘like’ publishers that you enjoy, no matter how popular or rare.”

An Android update is coming soon.

Zite’s also added seven new publishers to its publisher program, bringing the total number of publishers it works with to 24. The new publishers are GigaOM, Atlantic Media (with The Atlantic and Quartz), Business Insider, Fast Company, Salon, Say Media (Remodelista and ReadWrite) and Serious Eats, and they join existing publishers like CNN (Zite’s parent company), the Huffington Post, and the Chicago Tribune. Zite publisher partners share their “best-of” content in their own sections of Zite’s app, and can run their own ads against their content.

“We are also starting to look at ways to monetize publisher content,” Johnson said. That’s something Zite’s competitors are already doing: The New York Times makes content available to paying subscribers through Flipboard, and the Wall Street Journal has a similar arrangement with Pulse.

Here’s a video of Johnson speaking about the future of content personalization at paidContent 2013:

Let’s be positive

Every story I read about Google is us versus some other company or some stupid thing. Being negative is not how we make progress. The most important things are not zero sum.

Except Microsoft is not playing ball

The Web is not advancing as fast as it should be. Certainly, we struggle with companies like Microsoft. We would like to see more open standards and more people involved in those ecosystems. I wouldn’t grade the industry well with where we have gotten to.

And that other Larry is just greedy

We’ve had a difficult relationship with Oracle, including having to appear in court. Money is obviously more important to them than any collaboration.”

Google has been fighting with Microsoft for a while and well, Oracle is a tough adversary, especially when it comes to Java.

While I am complete agreement with Page’s general sentiment about opportunities and the importance of being positive, I think Larry (and all other technology industry leaders) should actually practice what they preach if they want others to follow.

Not that Edelstein would exactly describe Haunting Melissa  — the story of a teenage girl who believes her dead mother is haunting her, and then suddenly disappears — as a movie. “I didn’t want to take a movie and stuff it in an app,” he told me. Rather, the goal was to use technology “to push a story out to people in bits and pieces.”

Edelstein’s production company, Hooked Digital Media — which includes investor Kevin Washington as cofounder and MySpace cofounder Aber Whitcomb as advisor — built an iOS platform that pushes content out to viewers over time. Haunting Melissa doesn’t have a predetermined length: Edelstein shot thousands of hours of video, and it will be pushed out to viewers in “chapters,” or segments, on a timeline that can be tweaked on the back end. For example, if a user hasn’t entered the app for a while, he or she might receive a push notification that a new chapter is available.

In addition, the actual video content can be adjusted through the app’s content management system, so new content can be inserted into a chapter after a user has already watched it. The idea is to keep users coming back to the app, checking for new content and seeing what has changed.

The Haunting Melissa iOS app, available in the iTunes Store today, is free, as is the first chapter. If a user shares that chapter on Facebook, he or she gets the second chapter for free. Users can buy a “season pass” for $6.99 (standard definition or $14.99 (HD); if purchased individually, chapters are $0.99 for standard definition and $1.99 for HD.

“We are gambling on the notion that this is going to fit in the diet of people who watch and consume a lot of stuff,” Edelstein said. “This isn’t sitting down to watch X hours of House of Cards. It’s one piece of what you’re going to consume over the course of time.” He imagines that users will dip in and out of the app as new content becomes available — but he isn’t sure, because Hooked Digital Media hasn’t tested how viewers use the app. “We just have to go for it and see how people watch and react,” Edelstein said. “My experience in testing movies is that it’s a total clusterf*ck. Unless you have a sample size that’s over thousands of people, you can’t get an accurate measure of content consumption.”

So the company is waiting to see what viewers do and how they share Haunting Melissa on social media. Edelstein describes the creation of Haunting Melissa as “low-budget independent film making.” He tapped industry connections who wanted to work on a different kind of project and got to test new skills — like iPad color correction — for Haunting Melissa. “Because of that excitement level,” Edelstein said, “I was able to work with people I’d worked with before.” He is now working on a sequel.

According to a court filing released on Tuesday, CEOs of the same publishing houses that once rejected the price-fixing theory will now offer evidence to suggest they colluded with Apple in order to increase ebook prices. The case involves allegations that Apple and its late CEO Steve Jobs organized a conspiracy with the Big Six publishers to introduce a commission-style pricing system in order to wrest pricing power from Amazon.

The new filing, posted below, says that the CEOs of Macmillan, Hachette, Harper Collins, Simon & Schuster and Random House will testify about various aspects of Apple’s role in the alleged conspiracy. All of these companies with the exception of Random House were also named in the antitrust lawsuit brought by the Department of Justice and agreed to settle the case last year.

The government’s new filing says Macmillan CEO John Sargent is expected to testify that:

“[T]he deal that 5 of us did with Apple meant someone was gonna have to do it. Just luck of the draw that it was me. . . . The optics make it look like I stood alone, but in the end I had no doubt that the others would eventually follow.”

Such evidence could prove damaging to Apple, which is also expected to confront testimony from Amazon executives. Apple will also be forced explain a growing list of possibly incriminating comments and emails. One of these, cited by the government to show Apple played an active role in the price changes, describes SVP of internet software and services Eddy Cue telling Jobs:

“In the end, they want us and see the opportunity we give them but they’re scared to commit! It [has] less to do with the terms and more about the dramatic business change for them. . . . They just have to get some balls.”

The new filing also includes the views of other prominent executives, including News Corp’s Rupert Murdoch. According to Harper Collins CEO Brian Murray, Murdoch was “pissed at Amazon” and wanted to “screw Amazon.”

In its own filings, Apple maintains its long-held position that it is not a “ringmaster” of a conspiracy, as the government alleges, but that it simply offered the same pricing system, which is based on a 30 percent commission, that it offers to any company that sells through its iTunes store. Apple also maintains that it helped to create competition at a time when Amazon dominated the ebook market.

The next important step of the proceedings will take place on May 23, when the parties meet before U.S. District Judge Denise Cote for a pre-trial conference.

Here’s the filing (all 156 pages of it!) with some of the key points underlined:

DOJ Motion of Facts and Law

“This effort represents the very best example of a public/private partnership,” Rick Richter, who was the president of Simon & Schuster’s children’s division before founding Ruckus, said in a statement. “[It] shows real initiative on the part of CPTV to satisfy the needs of their audience and, importantly, to engage them through their smartphones and tablets.”

As with Ruckus’s existing app, parents can track their children’s reading through the CPTV app and can buy new books through it. Users can also donate to Connecticut Public Television directly through the app. And CPTV is licensing the technology used to build the CPTV-branded app to other public television stations that want to do something similar.

Ruckus hopes to offer this developer service to other content companies that need a way to share their content through an app as well. That’s not limited to children’s content: Rather, Ruckus hopes that the general capabilities of its app — including the digital storefront, in-app purchases, content management system and email engagement — will be useful to lots of content companies. CPTV plans to roll out an app for  general audiences, using Ruckus technology, later this year.

The charts show how iTunes content revenue has been steadily growing upward and to the right. But they also show that Apple saw an increase in iTunes net sales by $300 million just from the holiday quarter (when Apple always sees its biggest concentrated pop in downloads) to the March quarter, making $2.4 billion in sales. This is also up from $1.9 billion during the same quarter a year ago.

Relatively, this is still very tiny compared to the $23 billion in net sales Apple derived from its most essential business, the iPhone. And to the $8.7 billion from the iPad last quarter. But iTunes alone is close to half of Mac net sales, which were $5.4 billion.

The reason for the increase is mostly due to Apple’s steady expansion of the iTunes Store to new countries around the world in recent quarters. iTunes Music sells in 119 countries, videos in 109 countries, while the App Store and iBookstore are both in 155 countries.

According to Asymco’s calculations, this wider availability in the store has driven up the amount the average user is paying Apple for content:

In March Apple reported that they have 500 million iTunes [users] so one way to think about the iTunes business is to say that  iTunes users purchase content and services at the rate of about $40 per year.

This is really interesting in the context of the long-rumored Apple video subscription deal and the still-being-hashed-out “iRadio” service for subscription music content. Imagine if just in just some of those countries Apple introduced a $10 per month streaming solution. So instead of $40 per year from a user, Apple started getting more like $120 per year. And that would be just music. If there was a separate video package some day that figure would get even larger. Plus, that doesn’t include money spent on and within both Apple’s own iOS and Mac apps and third-party apps.

iTunes has always been more of a bonus source of revenue than a meaningful contributor to Apple’s bottom line — the songs were originally there to sell iPods, in the way mobile apps are there to sell iOS devices. But software and services — from iCloud and Maps to Siri — have begun to play a more prominent role at Apple, and in its customers’ experiences. A subscription service of digital content, if deployed and priced correctly, could actually turn into a meaningful new source of revenue for Apple.

If current trends continue, with software and content sales going up and laptop and desktop sales dropping off, it’s not impossible that Apple’s content business could someday soon outpace the Mac segment as its third-largest business.

The partnership, which comes a year after a similar deal between Flipboard and the New York Times, will grant full access to FT subscribers while casual visitors will be able to read a smattering of FT blog posts and cultural stories.

Rob Grimshaw, managing director of the FT.com, said by phone that the deal will involve the FT and Flipboard sharing advertising revenue, but would not disclose what the exact revenue split is. In the past, the ad splits have been a source of contention for some publishers, including Condé Nast, which pulled back its advertisements from titles like New Yorker and Wired. (A Flipboard spokesperson said the company has an “excellent relationship” with Conde and is partnering on ads for six other titles).

Grimshaw also said that the FT is exploring selling subscriptions through Flipboard, and would be willing to share some of the proceeds with the platform. This is significant because the FT made waves by leaving iTunes in part due to the 30 percent commission (or “vig,” as the Brits call it) that Apple takes from every publisher.

So why is the FT willing to partner up with Flipboard so soon after leaving Apple? Grimshaw says the difference lies in how the two platforms treat customer relationships.

“The issue is not so much a percentage, it’s the relationship between publisher and audience. Paying a 30 percent finder’s fee is okay. Paying 30 percent in perpetuity and not knowing who the customer is not okay.”

The Flipboard partnership also reflects the fact that the FT and other publishers are keen to get their stories in as many places as possible at a time when readers are consuming more and more content on mobile. As for the future role of Flipboard, which some describe as a “giant iceberg” in the way of publishers, Grimshaw had this to say:

“I think the really interesting aspect to the platform is the way they’re giving readers the ability to create a bespoke user experience. I personally think this is going to be a strong strand in publishing and consumption of news in the digital space.”

Correction: This article was updated at 2:40pm to state that Conde Nast titles had pulled ads from certain titles; Conde did not, as previously stated, break off the relationship.

The case began in 2011 after Black Tower Press, a publisher of sci-fi and fantasy titles, filed a trademark suit in response to Apple’s announcement that it would use the word “iBooks” to describe software that allows users to purchase online books. Here’s a look at the two marks:

Black Tower came into possession of the “ibooks” mark in 2006 by purchasing the assets of another publishing company that had used the word for an imprint that sold millions of sci-fi and horror books in the early 2000′s. Neither Black Tower nor its predecessor, however, obtained a registered trademark for the word.

Apple, on the other hand, did obtain registered trademark rights. It first obtained a license to use “iBook” from another software company in 1999 to describe a line of colorful computers; in 2010, Apple bought the other company’s trademark entirely.

In a detailed decision, U.S. District Judge Denise Cote explained that the word “ibooks” was simply descriptive of books sold on the internet, and that Black Tower had not acquired any distinctive meaning in the word — only in the word and lightbulb logo used together.

Cote also wrote that she was granting summary judgment to Apple for a second reason: that no consumers would be confused by the two companies’ products:

Gumroad was founded by former Pinterest designer Sahil Lavingia in 2012 and aims to let anybody sell anything — whether it’s a song, a PDF, a video or a T-shirt — without having to set up their own store. The company has raised $8.1 million from Kleiner Perkins and Crunchfund, among others.

Readmill offers a clean, easy-to-use e-reading interface through its iPhone and iPad apps. Gumroad will let users selling ebooks on its platform add a “Send to Readmill” button that lets buyers send the ebook directly to their iOS device. (32 independent digital bookstores have also enabled “Send to Readmill.”)

“Reading should be an open and shared experience, for both authors and readers,” Gumroad’s Lavingia said in a statement. “Readmill and Gumroad will help authors make money doing what they love — writing — selling directly to their readership — so they can continue doing what they love: writing more.”

Separately, Readmill has partnered with Faber Factory, a U.K. based platform for independent publishers that is a joint venture between U.K. publisher Faber and Faber, U.S. publisher Perseus Books Group and Firsty Group, a U.K. company that helps publishers and authors sell ebooks directly. Readmill said these partnerships are part of its effort to “help independent publishers and retailers gain further traction and sell more books,” and says it is hoping to offer authors and publishers statistics on users’ reading data later this year.

The release of Snoop’s new app also marks Citia’s expansion of its offerings from iPad apps only to iPhone and web. The “Reincarnated” app works on Chrome and Safari, as well as on iOS. A free version of the app is available in the iOS App Store today, and Citia plans to release a premium version of the app that includes interviews with Snoop and other exclusive content this summer.

Citia sees the “Reincarnated” app as a demonstration of the capabilities of its platform. Each app — whether it’s for a book or an album — includes a set of virtual “cards” that users can navigate through quickly. A user can also flip a card with a flick of her finger to see a number of buy links. In the case of the “Reincarnated” app, a user can buy Snoop’s DVD, download the Reincarnated album, or buy Snoop’s “house shoes” or “grindtainers.” (See a video preview below.)

In March, Citia CEO Linda Holliday told me that the company now thinks of its clients as the “new content creators,” whether they’re publishers, artists or something else. “We define them either by their audience or by their point of view, and those two things are flip sides of the same coin,” she said. A book is just “a container,” and “I don’t confuse the container and the contents. We can’t hold the book up as some kind of requirement.”