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Google and MySpace have finally reached a new deal on search and ad services on the social entertainment website following months of negotiations.

Search-giant Google entered into an agreement to provide search and advertisement services for MySpace back in 2006. The deal was worth $900 million to News Corp.'s MySpace service, then the dominant social networking site on the Internet.

The deal gave Google the right to sell advertisements related to user searches on MySpace and some other News Corp. properties for three years from commencement. It expired in June this year, but was temporarily extended as the pair continued talks on a renewed deal. The pair announced a new deal has been reached on Thursday, but did not disclose the terms.

The British Phonographic Industry (BPI) trade group has once against highlighted the level of Internet music piracy in the UK in its annual report.

The group, which represents major and independent record companies in the UK, estimated that Internet users will illegally download 1.2 billion songs this year, and describes the estimate as "conservative." The number is compared to the 370 million tracks (including individual tracks in album downloads) that will be bought legally in the UK during the same time.

"Illegal downloading continues to rise in the UK," said Geoff Taylor, BPI chief executive. "It is a parasite that threatens to deprive a generation of talented young people of their chance to make a career in music, and is holding back investment in the fledgling digital entertainment sector."

LG has unveiled the Optimus 2X today, the first smartphone to use a dual-core processor.

The smartphone will launch with Android 2.2 but will be upgradeable to 2.3 Gingerbread and beyond.

Using Nvidia's Tegra 2 chip at 1GHz will give Optimus 2X users "HDMI mirroring" and no lag on multitasking apps or Web browsing.

HDMI mirroring means full replication of the current display on the phone on an external screen at 1080p.

Finnish mobile phone firm Nokia has filed patent infringement complaints against Apple Inc. in the United Kingdom, Germany and the Netherlands.

"These actions add 13 further Nokia patents to the 24 already asserted against Apple in the US International Trade Commission and the Delaware and Wisconsin Federal courts," said Paul Melin, vice president, Intellectual Property at Nokia.

A complaint filed in the High Court in the UK covers four Nokia patents. They relate to the touch user interface, on-device app stores, signal noise suppression and modular structures.

In the Dusseldorf District Court in Germany, a complaint was filed by Nokia against Apple that cites several patents held by the Finnish giant. The patents relate to a touch user interface, antenna structures, messaging functionality and chipsets. Another complaint filed in Germany, in the Mannheim District Court, cites five Nokia patents related to on-device app stores, caller ID, display illumination and the integration of multiple radios.

Online auction giant eBay Inc. announced on Wednesday that it has acquired Critical Path Software for its ventures into the mobile marketplace.

eBay has bought Critical Path Software of Portland, Oregon, for an undisclosed amount. The company had already developed applications for eBay's ticket site StubHub, eBay Classified and for Shopping.com. The main work it has done for eBay however, is the development of the eBay iPhone application.

French regulators have sent a warning to Google Inc. to avoid exploiting its market position in relation to search advertising.

The French regulator said that Google's market power was not bad or illegal, but that its practices would have to be closely monitored to watch for an anti-competitive impact on the market. A 10-month investigation into Google's activities was carried out by Authorite de la Concurrence at the request of the French economy ministry.

The investigation examined Google's advertisement services that allow firms to buy targeted advertising based on search keywords, or when a user loads a webpage with Google ads that contains related content. These services generate the majority of Google's revenues.

The regulator wrote that while Google's position in the market results from a great deal of innovation supported by continuous investments, its search ads, "represent a specific market that cannot be replaced by other forms of communication, notably because it allows for very fine-tuned targeting, and because no other equivalent alternative offer exists in the eyes of advertisers."

Social networking giant Twitter has announced that it raised $200 million in new finance.

The micro-blogging outlet received the new investment funds from some of its existing investors, and from venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers. The new financing is valuing the social networking firm at $3.7 billion.

Twitter boasts 175 million registered users and currently employs about 300 people. The service is based around 140-character messages, dubbed Tweets, and has caught on very well in recent years, often being used to spread information in times of crisis. One such example is the disputed Iranian presidential election in 2009, where members of the green movement used Twitter to spread information.

A man in the UK has admitted to being part of a group involved in a £500,000 fraud involving music tracks sold from Amazon and iTunes.

Nineteen year old Lamar Johnson from Wolverhampton was part of a group that stands accused of gaining royalties from music sales through the use of stolen credit card details. The group added their own songs to both services and then used the credit card details to purchase them all about 6,000 times during 2008 and 2009, the BBC reports.

Johnson admitted in the Southwark Crown Court that he was responsible for about 2,000 of the illegal purchases. The group were then paid royalties for their music sales, which they had purchased themselves using "compromised credit card details," according to the prosecution.

An update distributed by Apple Inc. for its popular iTunes software that was intended to address stability issues with the software, has had the opposite effect for some users.

iTunes 10.1.1 is the first update pushed out since iTunes 10.1 added support for iOS 4.2 and Airplay functionality with Apple TV. It was issued as a fix for problems that caused the software to terminate unexpectedly during use.

AppleInsider reported that some of its iTunes users complained that after installing the iTunes 10.1 update, the program would crash once it was run. Apple's Support forums also started to get reports of similar problems, which seem to be occuring when iTunes' built-in Software Update feature was used for the update.

BREIN, the Dutch anti-piracy group, has taken down 29 torrent and NZB sites this week although only one, HD-UNiT3D has been named.

Visitors to the HD-U site are now redirected to BREIN'S homepage.

HD-U and the other were hosted in the United States but a BREIN spokesperson said the sites were "directed at the Dutch public and unlawful under Dutch law."

T-Mobile USA and Nokia have announced Long Term HSPA Evolution, a new mobile data standard that promises speeds over 650 Mbps.

Commercial deployment of the standard is expected as soon as 2013.

The current HSPA+ "4G" network offered by T-Mobile in the United States offers speeds of up to 21 Mbps, and the carrier says those speeds will be doubled to 42 Mbps next year.

Says T-Mobile CTO Neville Ray: "Long Term HSPA Evolution will allow us to enhance our 4G mobile broadband network beyond its current and planned near term capabilities, and provide room for considerable growth and speed enhancements. As customer demand for wireless data increases, we are well positioned to compete based on the speed, breadth and evolution path of our mobile broadband service."!-- PAGE BREAK -->

The most notable features of the new standard:

-HSDPA Multicarrier evolution: Combines up to eight carriers and provides peak data rates of up to 672 Mbps along with improving spectrum utilization. To overcome operators’ spectrum fragmentation constraints, HSDPA carrier aggregation enables carriers from more than one frequency band to be combined.

Although it has yet to be confirmed by either Verizon or Apple, Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster has ramped up his iPhone sales estimates for 2011, fully "baking" in sales for a Verizon model of the popular iOS smartphone.

Rumors have been flying around for months that a Verizon iPhone is ready for launch in the Q1 2011 and Munster believes a CDMA iPhone is indeed on the way.

Time magazine has dubbed Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg their 2010 Person of the Year 2010.

Says Time:

For connecting more than half a billion people and mapping the social relations among them; for creating a new system of exchanging information; and for changing how we all live our lives, Mark Elliot Zuckerberg is TIME's 2010 Person of the Year.

Stephen Colbert, the popular political pundit, had the most retweeted tweet for all of 2010 for his commentary on the Gulf oil spill which started this summer.

Colbert, known as @stephenathome on Twitter, currently has 1.9 million followers.

The tweet in question, from June 16th, read:

"In honor of oil-soaked birds, 'tweets' are now 'gurgles.' http://bit.ly/cIhZNf

Samsung has noted this week that it fully expects to sell 5 million smartphones running the Bada mobile OS by the end of 2010.

The first Bada smartphone launched in June.

Since then, the #3 mobile phone maker in the world has promised five more Bada devices, all within the "Wave" line.

Besides the original Wave, the Wave II, Wave525, Wave533, Wave575 and Wave723 have launched or will launch in 2011.