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PayPal has confirmed this week that the service has reached 100 million active users.

Additionally, the company notes that it expects total payment volume for mobile payment transactions to double in 2011 to $3 billion.

The service adds around 1 million active users per month, apparently, as it finished 2010 with 94.4 million.

What PayPal did not elaborate on, is how many transactions need to be completed per month for the company to consider a user "active."

PayPal, purchased by eBay in 2002 for $1.5 billion, now accounts for 39 percent of the auction sites total revenue.

Mobile continues to be a big winner for the service, with the company reporting that 8 million users now actively use the transaction service from their mobile devices, up from 6 million just a few months ago.

Multiple sources are claiming that MySpace will fire 150 of its remaining 400 employees this week, as part of the deal to sell off the company.

One source even believes a few of the employees are eagerly awaiting their pink slips as "I think the management owes the employees severance because of the terrible management mistakes they presided over."

In January, the company laid off 550 employees in the U.S. and internationally, in an effort to cut costs and look more attractive to a buyer.

Since early 2009, the company has laid off 1500 employees.

The two companies looking to buy MySpace for $20-$30 million are Golden Gate Capital, a private equity firm, and Specific Media, an ad network.

Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. originally purchased the company for $580 million in 2005, back when Facebook was still in its infancy but traffic has begun to crater, with the service seeing a drop in traffic of 14 percent per month in 2011.

News Corp. is just about ready to part with the death spiraling social network MySpace, at a price at least 70 percent smaller than their asking price.

The two companies looking to buy MySpace for $20-$30 million are Golden Gate Capital, a private equity firm, and Specific Media, an ad network.

Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. purchased the company for $580 million in 2005 and quickly saw it disintegrate. From 2010 to 2011 alone, MySpace traffic fell 48 percent to 35 million unique U.S. visitors. The company had an operating loss of $165 million last year.

Initial reports had News Corp. wanting to keep a 20 percent stake but it appears now that Murdoch wants the struggling social network off his books by the end of the year.

The company put itself up for sale earlier this year asking for $100 million.

Excellent Infographic spells out major points of history in both companies.

Manolution has created an infographic (about 3MB) that chronicles some of the major points in the histories of Microsoft Corporation and Apple Inc., from their formation in 1975 (officially) and 1976 respectively, right up to the launches of Windows 7, Windows Phone 7 and OS X Lion.

Alone the timeline it gives information on stock value, while giving little nuggets of information alongside product launches of major changes in a company.

Manolution is encouraging everyone to embed the infographic wherever they want, and to remember to link back to its original source.

(If viewing this on news homepage, be warned that the image you are about to download is about 3MB in size, so remember that before you click Read More.)

Launch geared toward small- to medium-sized businesses.

At a media event in New York, Microsoft officially launched Office 365, which has been in beta phase since last year. Over 200,000 organizations signed up and began testing the service after it was announced. At the core of the demo was need for collaboration between users, and how Office 365 can deliver it across distance.

Office 365 is now available in 40 different markets, with more expected, bringing together Microsoft Office, Microsoft SharePoint Online, Microsoft Exchange Online and Microsoft Lync Online in an always-up-to-date cloud service. It is available at a predictable monthly subscription.

More than 20 service providers around the world announced today plans to bring Office 365 services to their customers. Among them are Bell Canada, Intuit Inc., NTT Communications Corp., Telefonica S.A., Telstra Corp. and Vodafone Group Plc.

Steve Ballmer talks Collaboration

Unpopular Sony Chief Executive asserts connection between anti-piracy measures, and hacks targeting the company.

Howard Stringer told a shareholders' meeting on Tuesday that the company was targeted by hackers because it tried to protect its content against piracy. "We believe that we first became the subject of attack because we tried to protect our IP (intellectual property), our content, in this case videogames," Stringer said.

In April, the PlayStation Network (PSN) service was breached and details of up to 77 million user accounts were leaked. Nobody has claimed responsibility for the attack, but Stringer finds motive in Sony's protection of its own corporate assets.

"These are our corporate assets, and there are those that don't want us to protect them, they want everything to be free," he said.

You have to wonder if Stringer includes the removal of the OtherOS feature from the PS3 under the umbrella of "protecting corporate assets", because of everything Sony has done in past years, that is clearly the move that riled up more tech-savvy PS3 users than any other.

Eric Schmidt tells summit in Dublin that ongoing unrest in middle east might put employees in danger.

The Google chairman was speaking at the Summit Against Violent Extremism in Dublin on Monday, in which he warned about the desire for oppressive regimes to crackdown on the Internet as it helps to fuel and sustain uprisings and resistance movements in the middle east.

"The reason is that as the technology becomes more pervasive and as the citizenry becomes completely wired and the content gets localised to the language of the country, it becomes an issue like television," Schmidt said. "If you look at television in most of these countries, television is highly regulated because the leaders, partial dictators, half dictators or whatever you want to call them understand the power of television imagery to keep their citizenry in some bucket."

Wael Ghonim, a Google executive, was previously detained and blindfolded for two weeks during the protests in Egypt that eventually led to the fall of Mubarak from power. Schmidt pointed out that Google has staff in countries where it is illegal to do things that Google actually encourages.

Dennis Durkin, corporate Vice President and COO for Microsoft Corp.'s Interactive Entertainment Business (IEB), wouldn't switch places with Nintendo or Sony in the games business.

In an interview with IndustryGamers.com, he revealed that Microsoft feels in no way pressured to develop a portable games console. "I'm not sure I would want to be launching a dedicated portable device right now into that market. I think the DS - if you look at the 3DS, certainly versus people's expectation's it's not been as successful as people would have thought," he said.

"So that's a very crowded market and a very, very red ocean right now with a lot of change happening. So I’m not sure it's a good idea. You only have a certain number of bets you can make as a company and you have to decide what you want to put your wood behind and I’m just not sure that that’s a place that I would put mine."

Microsoft's Xbox 360 has been on something of a high since the launch of the Kinect peripheral for the console in late 2010. Durkin thinks that Microsoft's position in the industry now is pretty good compared to the competition, to the point that he, "certainly wouldn't want to trade hands with either of them."

Report says high profile attacks could have been avoided easily.

Mitre, a US federal contract research laboratory, released a security analysis on Monday that addressed some of the high profile Data Breach incidents over the past year. It says that the attacks were carried out using mostly well-known software flaws, and could have been prevented with adequate testing.

It pointed to the attack on Sony Pictures as an example of an SQL-injection attack. It called SQL-injections the most dangerous flaw for web services, as it can allow outsiders to gain access to possible sensitive information or resources on servers.

The sixth most dangerous flaw it identified as "missing authorization," and pointed to the theft of records of credit card users from Citigroup in May. Identifying and fixing the flaws has a "low to medium cost", according to the report.

Complaints about flawed programming and architecture have gotten noisier in recent times. Programmers are generally not blamed for bugs in their software, and the process of reviewing their work is "uneven", according to Alan Paller, Sans director of research.

Motion Picture Association trying to force BT to block NZB site.

The trade group is going to court, applying for an injunction forcing BT to cut off access to Newzbin, a popular Usenet-indexing website. Newzbin hosts NZB files, which can be combined with a newsreader software to locate content on Usenet binary groups.

The MPA is targeting BT because it is the largest service provider in the UK, and it also supplies the "Cleanfeed" website-blocking system to other Internet Service Providers (ISPs) in the country. The MPA is arguing that BT should block access to Newzbin the same way it blocks access to sites hosting child sex abuse images.

The MPA originally took action against Newzbin in the UK in 2010. Since then, Newzbin went into administration and sold its assets to new owners who launched a fresh version of the website.

"Newzbin has no regard for UK law and it is unacceptable that it continues to infringe copyright on a massive and commercial scale when it has been ordered to stop by the High Court," said Chris Marcich, European president of the MPA, in a statement. "We have explored every route to get Newzbin to take down the infringing material and are left with no option but to challenge this in the courts."

Chief Executive Steve Ballmer will show Office in the cloud.

Taking on Google Inc., VMware Inc. and others, Microsoft is putting Office services into the cloud under the name "Office 365." It will be launched at a New York event on Tuesday. Microsoft's popular Office products have generated enormous revenue for the company, with nine out of every ten office computers running the software.

Microsoft is now going to try to convince users to make a switch to the cloud and do their work online from anywhere. Of course, launching products for the Cloud makes sense, as the market for Cloud-based services is projected to grow 27 percent annually over the next five years, reaching $73 billion in 2015 (IDC figures).

Like other services, Office 365 services can be bought based on demand. For example, a small company can subscribe to Office 365 and pay as little as $2 per month for each worker for the very basic levels of service. That charge can scale up to $27 per month for the equivalent of an enterprise user acessing the entire Office 365 suite, which won't be necessary in most cases.

Trial kicked off on Monday.

A new trial was launched in Cambridge, England today, to tackle a growing global issue. The phenomenal growth in Internet connected devices is fueled a demand for bandwidth that the currently allocated spectrum cannot continue to sustain while the technology evolves.

Congestion has become a big problem in some areas, leading to annoying dropped mobile phone calls and other service outages. The problem cannot be fixed by simply adding new call towers or building new fiber optic networks to take the load off.

Talk of changing how wireless spectrum is allocated has been getting louder for years, and now some in the industry think its time for that change. The Cambridge TV White Spaces Trial has a lot of industry names associated with it, including BBC, BSkyB, BT, Cambridge Consultants, Microsoft, Neul, Nokia, Samsung, Spectrum Bridge Inc. and TTP. Adaptrum.

A new generation of radio technologies might provide the key for the congestion problem by utilizing the (often unused) white spaces, and to avoid interference with licensed broadcasts and other primary uses. Wireless networks using the TV white spaces can provide connectivity similar to Wi-Fi, but with coverage areas measured in kilometers instead of meters.

Entertainment Merchants Association reacts to Monday's Supreme Court decision.

On Monday, the United States supreme court shot down a California law signed in 2005 by then-Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger than banned the rental or sale of "violent video games" to minors. The law also mandated an age rating system, even though industry self-regulation already provides a rating system.

The Supreme Court decision (7-2) designates the content in video games to be protected free speech under the First Amendment to the United States constitution. The decision brings an end to the case that has dragged on for almost six years.

Bo Andersen, President & CEO, Entertainment Merchants Association, applauded the Supreme Court's decision in a statement issued by the trade group.

Story continues after the break.

GSV Capital Corp adds Facebook shares to its portfolio.

GSV announced on Monday that it had bought 225,000 shares of Facebook, the world's largest social networking website, at a cost of $29.28 per share. Facebook, which by one estimate hit 750 million global users recently, is threatening the Google / Yahoo / Microsoft establishment online as its worldwide traffic continues to climb.

This year, it will overtake Yahoo Inc. in revenue from online display advertising, with more than $2 billion. The company has roughly 2.4 billion outstanding shares, and executives have admitted that it is inevitable that the company will be taken public.

GSV's $6.6 million investment in Facebook shares represents about 15 percent of the California-based investment firm's portfolio.

A group of Facebook shareholders were reported to be trying to unload $1 billion of stock on the secondary market, in a transaction that would also set a $70 billion value on the company. With that valuation, Facebook would sit just below Amazon Inc., HP or Cisco.

When Finns buy a new phone, they love it long time!

Finland is a country of about five million people, so you really couldn't blame the population for much of Nokia's problems directly. However, according to research conducted by Recon Analytics, Finnish mobile users replace their handsets at a much slower rate than most others.

In the UK, mobile phone users replace their handset every 22 months, while in France they wait about two and half years. In the United States, handsets are replaced on average every 28 months. In South Korea, it is 26 months, and so on.

In Finland, the home of Nokia, which dominated the global mobile phone market for the majority of its life (well, since it got in the business), mobile phone users wait six years on average to replace a handset. "Maybe it's no accident that Nokia is having a tough time developing smartphones given that in their home market so few people are replacing their handsets," Roger Entner, founder of Recon Analytics, said.

Entner accepts that the research conducted by the firm cannot categorically prove a correlation between Nokia's recent decline particularly in the smartphone market, and the rate at which Finns replace their mobile phones. He does think however that the weak demand for new handsets may have dulled any sense of urgency for Nokia to keep up in the market.