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Since the announcement of iOS 4 earlier this year, millions of iPhone users have drooled over finally being given the ability to multitask their apps.

Today, two of the most popular music streaming apps, Spotify and Last.fm have been updated to use iOS 4 properly, allowing for background listening.

You can now minimize the apps and continue to hear music, while browsing the Internet or using other apps.

Spotify will require a premium account, and the update also adds the ability to "use the headset remote and lockscreen buttons to control playback."

Last.fm is free to download and update.

The latest mega-rumor, fueled by Digg CEO Kevin Rose, is that Google is quietly creating a social networking site dubbed Google Me that will openly compete with the Facebook behemoth.

Rose tweeted yesterday (it has since been taken down): "Ok, umm, huge rumor: Google to launch facebook competitor very soon ‘Google Me’, very credible source."

Furthermore, former Facebook CTO Adam D'Angelo blogged that he heard from reliable sources that Google has made the project its highest priority outside of Android.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt would not deny the rumor. When asked, he responded: "That would be a product announcement and I won’t say."

If accurate, the attempt will be Google's third foray into social networking. Orkut, its first attempt, is extremely popular in Brazil, but nowhere else. Google Buzz, launched in 2010, has received more criticism than praise.

Google could create a monster, however, rolling YouTube, Picasa, Blogger, Maps, Google Profiles and more into a single platform.

After a more than a week of dismissing iPhone 4 user complaints about reception problems and dropped calls as a non-issue, Apple has announced they're working on an update to the phone's OS.

The announcement follows an interesting report on AnandTech showing the actual difference in Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR) for each additional bar of signal displayed on the phone varies wildly. SNR is essentially an indicator of the phone's signal quality.

In the article, published earlier this week, Brian Klug & Anand Lal Shimpi showed that the signal quality increas from 4 bars to 5 is greater than the difference going from 1 bar all the way up to 4.

An update to solve the problem sounds like just what iPhone users were demanding. Except that the fix is only cosmetic.

While it should make the number of bars displayed more meaningful, that doesn't address the actual reception. Also in the AnandTech article is a comparison of signal loss (attenuation) between the iPhone 4 and other handsets when held in various ways.

Steve Jobs has noted in some tersely worded emails to dissatisfied customers that all phones suffer from attenuation when you hold them in your hand. But AnandTech's data shows the external antennas on the iPhone 4 drastically increase the effect.

According to DisplaySearch, global TV shipments are expected to jump 15 percent this year, to about 242 million.

In 2009, shipments stalled, seeing a small 2 percent growth.

LCD HDTVs continue to lead the way, with 29 percent growth expected, for a total of 188 million units. Despite being "aging" technology, both plasma and CRT televisions have seen their outlooks upgraded.

LED-backlit LCDs would have the strongest growth in the market, however acute supply chain shortages are keeping those numbers down. CCFL LCDs have no supply issues.

Overall, LCD TVs are the dominant technology, with shipment share over 50 percent in all regions except for "Asia Pacific" which is in the high 40's, with the 50 percent barrier expected to be crossed within months.

China remains one of the strongest growth area for LCD TVs, seeing 35 percent year-over-year growth in 2010, after a massive 120 percent growth in 2009. Shipments to Japan are expected to rise 36 percent in 2010, as well.

Because LED-backlit LCDs remain on the more expensive side, plasma TVs should see a boost, as consumers search for the "best bang for the buck," says the report.

The NPD Group has released their latest U.S. video game industry sales figures, and unsurprisingly the industry was down again for the month of May.

Overall sales fell 5 percent year-over-year (YoY), with hardware dragging the numbers down with a 20 percent plummet. Software, on the other hand, rose 4 percent for the period.

Sales of software, hardware and accessories fell to $823.5 million, hardware fell to $241.5 million, and software rose to $466.3 million.

Software was given a big boost by Red Dead Redemption, which sold 1.51 million units for the month. Super Mario Galaxy followed at 563,000 units sold.

On the hardware side, the normally strong DS and Wii sales were sluggish, and the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 continued their sluggish 2010 pace. The PSP practically fell off the map, having one its slowest months in history.

In late April, HP announced it was purchasing the struggling smartphone maker Palm for $1.2 billion, after at least four other companies gave serious bids.

Palm had put itself up for sale in March after it became clear that the company's phones were not selling and it only had enough cash to last the next 12 months.

Today, HP has completed that acquisition, while at the same time confirming WebOS-based tablets, smartphones and netbooks coming in the future.

"Palm will be responsible for WebOS software development and WebOS-based hardware products, from a robust smartphone roadmap to future slate PCs and netbooks," says the company.

Yesterday, the MeeGo Project officially started its "Day 1" launch, making the baseline source code available to developers.

October should see the release of MeeGo 1.1, on Nokia smartphones.

Furthermore, the MeeGo UI team has said they are actively creating the "handset reference user experience."

Day 1 marks the final merger of Moblin and Maemo, a joint effort by Intel and Nokia.

The MeeGo Project Handset Day 1 includes:

MeeGo APIs, incorporating Qt and MeeGo Touch UI Framework (MTF)
Subset of the handset reference UI and applications
Status Bar: clock, network, Bluetooth, 3G connection, notifications, and battery charge
Home Screen
Lock Screen
Application Launcher
Virtual Keyboard
Applications: Dialer, SMS, Browser, Contacts, and Photo Viewer
MeeGo Core OS (including the middleware components)
Hardware adaptation support for Intel Atom-based handset (Moorestown) and ARM-based Nokia N900

Video, via MeeGo Project:

RIAA President Cary Sherman recently posted a statement responding to last week's summary judgement in the Viacom lawsuit against YouTube decrying the decision as a "dangerously expansive reading of the liability immunity provisions of the DMCA." He also called it "bad public policy."

He went on to claim the decision will "will actually discourage service providers from taking steps to minimize the illegal exchange of copyrighted works on their sites."

This is nothing surprising coming from the RIAA. Like the MPAA and Business Software Alliance (BSA), they have consistently argued service providers should be responsibile for identifying copyright infringement rather than the content owners themselves.

But as Judge Louis Stanton pointed out in his decision on YouTube's DMCA defense, this responsibility falls solely on the shoulders of the content owners except in rare cases where the infringement is obvious without any investigation.

He wrote, "The DMCA is explicit: it shall not be construed to condition "safe harbor" protection on "a service provider monitoring its service or affirmatively seeding facts indicating infringing activity.""

Google has said today that it will purchase travel comparison firm ITA Software for $700 million, but did admit that there is a chance that regulators will not let the deal pass.

The search giant outbid Kayak, an ITA rival, for the company.

ITA is widely used by airlines, travel agents and sites such as Expedia in an effort to bring the easiest comparison of flight times, prices, and availability.

Google says the deal will benefit consumers as it gives them a "new, easier way to find better flight information online, which should encourage more users to make their flight purchases online."

Reveals CEO Eric Schmidt: "Airline tickets online is a very large business, and of course a global business but I don’t know about you all, but when I do it, I find it sort of frustrating. The prices are changing constantly. The availability is changing all the time. There’s so many thousands of options, even for a simple itinerary. Users are going between multiple websites and ultimately not a very good user experience, although people trying make this better. So when we looked at it, we said we still had more room for competition here and innovation."

As of today, Finland has become the first nation in the world to make broadband Internet a legal right, with every citizen guaranteed the right to at least a 1Mbps connection.

Furthermore, the Finnish government has promised guaranteed speeds of 100Mbps for all of its citizens by 2015, a feat that will likely not be matched by most other nations.

97 percent of the Finnish population currently has access to a broadband connection.

Finland passed the legislation last year, and Spain followed in November with a similar bill.

Says Fninish communication minister Suvi Linden: "We considered the role of the internet in Finns everyday life. Internet services are no longer just for entertainment. Finland has worked hard to develop an information society and a couple of years ago we realised not everyone had access."

The British government has also committed to giving all citizens a minimum 2Mbps broadband connection by 2012 but that is not a legally binding ruling.

The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has announced the shut down of nine movie piracy sites, the first sites in a major crackdown from federal officials.

The anti-piracy initiative is dubbed "Operation in Our Sites," and is aimed at taking down sites that stream or offer downloads of films that are currently in theaters.

Movies-links.TV, nowmovies.com, thepiratecity.org, filespump.com, planetmoviez.com, zml.org, tvshack.net, ninjavideo.net and thisninja.net were all taken down.

Each site generated revenue from ads and some accept donations. All assets from the sites were seized, including PayPal and advertising accounts.

ICE president John Morton says the amount of illegal movie sites is rising rapidly, with organized crime behind a number of the bigger sites.

Morton added that the sites taken down combined for "millions and millions of hits on a monthly basis."

Microsoft has confirmed today that Xbox Arcade games will be easily ported to Windows Phone 7, using the XNA framework.

Says Oded Ran, head of Consumer Marketing for Windows Phone: "There are four million Xboxes in the UK compared to 2.5 million iPhones; we're now working with developers who know how to make games, and they're able to port Xbox Arcade games to mobile phones easily."

Furthermore, Ran says: "Of course we're not talking about bringing Halo 3 to your mobile phone - users want a 42-inch LCD TV and surround sound to play games like that - but our XNA framework is a big part [of the forthcoming Windows Phone 7 launch devices]."

Ran says Microsoft wants to become a leader in mobile gaming.

Moreover, TR says the "same framework is used to create games on Windows 7 PC games, so it's entirely feasible that multi-platform gaming will play an even bigger part of the launch than previously thought."

TechCrunch has reported today that Disney has purchased iOS game developer Tapulous, the maker behind the very popular Tap Tap Revenge game for the iPhone and iPod Touch.

In addition, Tapulous founder Bart Decrem will join Disney as a VP.

Tap Tap Revenge, which started as a game available only to those that had jailbroken their devices, has quietly become one of the most popular games in the Apple App Store, with millions upon millions of downloads. The game is billed as a Guitar Hero-esque music game, for your fingers.

There are multiple versions of the game, with some being general while others are aimed specifically at certain artists, and cost money to purchase, such as Lady Gaga Revenge.

Recently, the company introduced Tap Tap Radiaton for the iPad.

Buying the developer gives Disney a quick "in" the music game business, especially for handheld gaming.

IBM has announced today that the company is "moving to Firefox as its default browser," mainly because the browser is "stunningly standards compliant" and not "beholden to one commercial entity."

The giant corporation has about 400,000 employees so Mozilla is likely to see a small jump in market share over the coming months, as employees move to the browser at work, and then most likely back at home, as well.

Statcounter recently reported that Internet Explorer has 55 percent worldwide market share, with Firefox in second at 29 percent. Google's Chrome continues to see strong growth, but remains far behind at 8 percent.

When asked why the company-wide move, VP of open source and Linux Bob Sutor said: "Firefox is stunningly standards compliant, and interoperability via open standards is key to IBM's strategy. Firefox is open source and its development schedule is managed by a development community not beholden to one commercial entity. Firefox is secure and an international community of experts continues to develop and maintain it. Firefox is extensible and can be customized for particular applications and organizations, like IBM. Firefox is innovative and has forced the hand of browsers that came before and after it to add and improve speed and function."

According to mobile phone journalist Eldar Murtazin, Android 3.0, aka Gingerbread, will be aimed only at the high-end market, leaving out a bunch of current models, and upcoming low-end models, as well.

To be able to use Android 3.0, your phone must have a 1GHz processor, 512MB of RAM and a 3.5-inch display, or larger.

For any device with 4-inch displays or larger, 1280×760 resolution will be available.

Most importantly, Google is creating a whole new 3D interface for 3.0, one that will be like the Gallery App on the Nexus One, just as an entire UI.

Third-party UI shells, like the popular HTC Sense, and the less popular MotoBLUR, will be killed off by 3.0, but will continue on in Android 2.1 and 2.2 Froyo.