MySpace (NYSE: NWS) pulled up the curtain a little this week, letting in some light on a makeover still very much in progress and marking a debut of sorts for Co-Presidents Mike Jones and Jason Hirschhorn as a team. By walking reporters through their road map, the two hope to…

Barring a last-minute fix or change of strategy, at midnight Tuesday Hulu.com will switch from a co-host for online video of the Daily Show with Jon Stewart and The Colbert Report to a referral engine for the popular shows. Viacom (NYSE: VIA) execs like to call it a test but…

Nine months since relaunching its search engine, Bing’s market share continues to inch up. It’s now at 11.5 percent, up from 8 percent prior to its remake, according to the latest comScore (NSDQ: SCOR) figures (via Business Insider). We’ve made a point of checking in each quarter, rather than monthly,…

Newspapers have blamed Google (NSDQ: GOOG) for their woes, and Google, in turn, has helped remind newspapers that they did a pretty good job of digging their own grave. The latest Googler to weigh in on the business is Chief Economist Hal Varian, in a speech to the FTC today.…

Celebrity gossip site TMZ has quietly unveiled a gentler fashion-oriented offshoot called Too Fab. Although TMZ maintains high traffic—February uniques were up 6 percent to 14 million, per comScore (NSDQ: SCOR)—and gained new credibility by breaking the news of Michael Jackson’s death last year, many advertisers remain uncomfortable with the…

The Financial Times has a sizeable and nicely growing subscription business—so why mess with micropayments? FT.com Managing Director Rob Grimshaw says that half the FT’s print customers are newsstand buyers, and the company needs to offer an similar a la carte option online as well. Grimshaw, in an interview with…

T-Mobile USA executives explained that it abruptly ended its year-old exclusive search deal with Yahoo, and replaced it with Google (NSDQ: GOOG), because it is what their subscribers wanted. “It was customer led; the Google brand is associated with Internet and search,” Ian McKerlich, T-Mobile’s director of mobile web and…

With services that make it easy for users to share their location—like FourSquare and Gowalla—gaining buzz and usage, Facebook is finally set to fire back with its own move into the hot location-aware space. The NYT reports that the social network will release a new feature in late April that…

Canada continues to stick it to the U.S. when it comes to hockey. Not only do they get the gold medal, now Canadians can watch Hockey Night in Canada streamed live on Yahoo Canada for the rest of the season. (For those who made it through the Vancouver closing ceremonies,…

On Monday morning, I helped Beet.tv executive producer Andy Plesser host his latest roundtable discussion on the future of online video, at The Guardian’s London HQ. In this video, I ask the Financial Times’ lead online product manager Stephen Pinches about the the paper’s video strategy, which gets over a…

The NFL has signed a new four-year deal with Verizon Wireless, putting an end to a roughly five-year partnership with Sprint (NYSE: S). The deal is valued at $720 million, including a rights fee and advertising spending, according to the WSJ, which quotes people familiar with the negotiations. NFL fans…

Litigious EMI may have avoided a court showdown with yet another digital music startup (it’s settled a case over lyrics data with TuneWiki), but it’s also fighting a case brought against it by one of its own artists… Pink Floyd has two beefs, according to some rather bare-bones reporting of…

After a month-long delay, Microsoft’s overhaul of the MSN homepage is going live to the site’s 100 million users over the next two weeks. Perhaps the three most significant of the 30 updates Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) has made since announcing that a redesign was coming to MSN last November: Headlines…

At the opening speech of the first Abu Dhabi Media Summit, Rupert Murdoch is exhorting Arab nations to open up and let creative talents flow. Of course, he has his own agenda: open it up to our content as well. This is the show-me-the-money quote: “When we look to the…

Here’s why Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) is advertising Bing on UK TV: it’s barely making the tiniest dent in Google’s search leadership. Though Google (NSDQ: GOOG) piled on eight tenths of the 617 million additional searches Brits made since Bing launched in June, Bing took just four percent of them, according…

David Dorn doesn’t flinch when the C word—“cheesy”—comes up during an interview about Rhino Entertainment. He embraces it, talking about the two extremes of the Warner Music Group (NYSE: WMG) catalog division—a “really great sense of humor” that can result in something like Golden Throats, the series of compilations featuring…

The search for revenue by deconstructing the New York Times (NYSE: NYT) into its most valuable pieces for various platforms continues. Up next: the New York Times Book Review for e-reader. NYT marketing exec James Dunn mentioned the new subscription effort during a session of the Digital Publishing Alliance (DPA)…

Gadget sites have been abuzz with all things Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) as the company’s stock hits yet another record high today, and gears up for iPad pre-orders at the end of the week. We’ve rounded up and the scuttlebutt so you don’t have to: »  HP launches a sneak attack…

Variety followed up Sunday’s Academy Awards with a different batch of envelopes, handing out pink slips to eight editorial staffers—including chief film critic Todd McCarthy and theater critic David Rooney—in its latest reorg. Reed Business Information has sold or plans to sell most of its U.S. titles that rely heavily…