The 5,000 Comcast (NSDQ: CMCSA) subscribers taking part in the company’s planned online VOD trial this summer will have access to 300 movies and some original programming from Starz Entertainment—if they already subscribe to the premium network. The Comcast On Demand Online trial is the first toe in the water…

We think there’s plenty of water yet to pass under the bridge before the SEK 60 million (£7.4 million, $7.6 million) acquisition of The Pirate Bay’s domain actually happens. Not just because little-known Global Gaming Factory X shareholders haven’t yet approved its bid, or because its revenue projections are so…

Adding heft to its entry into the operating system market, Google (NSDQ: GOOG) disclosed it was working with a number of major netbook makers on Chrome OS. Among the partners Google listed: Acer, ASUS, Hewlett-Packard, and Lenovo. Google’s plans call for Chrome OS to be on netbooks by the middle…

Mobile video streaming service Qik has raised just under $5.5 million in funding, according to an SEC filing, which the company has confirmed. This round’s backers include Quest Venture Partners, CampVentures, and private investors. The Redwood City, Calif.-based startup raised an undisclosed amount of funding from Marc Andreessen and Ben…

Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) still hasn’t commented on Google’s plans to introduce an operating system of its own. An official statement is coming later today and we’ll post it here when it comes out. (Update: Microsoft now says it will in fact not comment). But there are lots of reasons why…

Updated: The Michael Jackson memorial service has come and gone, and some of the preliminary stats on online viewing, streaming and social media activity have come in. First up is Facebook, which reports that roughly one million users tuned in through its Live Stream box across CNN, E! Online, *MTV*…

Hoping to get more businesses to adopt its suite of online *Google* Apps, Google (NSDQ: GOOG) said Tuesday that it had finally dropped the ‘beta’ tag that it had stubbornly affixed to the names of the products for years. In a blog post announcing the move, which applies worldwide, Google…

Former Feedburner CEO and Co-founder Dick Costolo joins the stream of senior level ad exec departures at *Google* within recent months. Google (NSDQ: GOOG) bought out Feedburner for $100 million in 2007, and quickly integrated its RSS feed monetization technology into AdSense. (It also aggravated many publishers with bugs and…

Performance based ad net Q Interactive has acquired e-mail marketer Postmaster Direct. Since Q Interactive is focused on behavioral targeting, which is receiving a great deal of scrutiny from federal legislators and regulators, Postmaster Direct’s emphasis on “double opt-in” marketing programs is designed to insulate it from the sort of…

For a change, Yahoo’s search business is grabbing some headlines this evening with Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) Search Pad, a tool it initially introduced in February, and is now slated to go live tomorrow. Search Pad lets Yahoo searchers take and save notes as they visit various websites (It automatically asks…

News of Michael Jackson’s death crippled sites like Twitter and even *Google* News when it broke—while others like *Yahoo* were able to handle the record traffic surges without much incident. But with millions of people ready to live stream, tweet and otherwise tune in to his memorial service online tomorrow,…

The Inside Word is a weekly feature that looks at compelling industry debates and discussions unfolding on the blogs of employees at digital-media companies. Poster: Raj Kapoor Blog name: the vc in me ... Company: Mayfield Fund Backstory: Kapoor, a managing director at Mayfield Fund and co-founder of online photo-sharing…

While the Jerry Seinfeld ads represented the nadir of Microsoft’s attempts to create a popular ad campaign, the software company seemed to hit its stride recently with the generally positive notices for its I’m A PC spots. But now the latest in a series of ads promoting Microsoft’s Internet Explorer…

Swedish stock exchange officials are investigating whether there may have been insider trading around Global Factory X’s deal to buy Pirate Bay for $7.8 million. “There are reasons to suspect that information was leaked,” a stock market official at the AktieTorget exchange tells Swedish business paper Dagens Industri (via Swedish…

If the stories of other file-sharing firms that sold out are any indication, Pirate Bay’s move to sell itself and go legit might not play out so well. Here’s what happened to some of its peer-to-peer predecessors that were put up for sale: Company: Scour Buyer: CenterSpan Sale Price: $9…

The Mozilla Foundation put out Firefox 3.5 this morning—the latest version of its blockbuster browser, which has steadily chipped away at Microsoft’s lead, although it still only commands about a quarter of the browser market in the U.S. For all Mozilla’s progress, a big challenge remains reminding users that they…

Much-hyped video portal Joost is remaking itself as a “cost-effective” white-label video provider—slashing staff, closing and shaking up its top ranks in the process, possibly as a step towards its sale as a technology company rather than an entertainment platform. Mike Volpi, rumored of late to be on the short…

Swedish publicly listed software company Global Gaming Factory X says it wants to buy The Pirate Bay SEK60 million ($7.8 million) and will begin compensating copyright ownersfor material its users find and download. GGF announced today said it will also buy P2P technology company Peerialism and plans “to launch new…

Rumors about this had been circulating for a while now, since Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) never knew what to do with it from the start: it is killing the third-party publisher services from Maven Networks, the online video tech service that it bought early last year for about $160 million ($143…