EMI, which is looking less like a music label and more like a lawsuit label, is at it again. This afternoon they filed a lawsuit alleging “massive and blatant” copyright infringement by Hi5, VideoEgg and ten John Doe defendants to be named later. The core of the suit is over copyrighted EMI content that appears on Hi5, particularly music videos. EMI is a particularly litigious company. In the recent past, they’vd sued or threatened to sue AllofMP3, YouTube, Apple, MP3Tunes, XM Radio... Read Full Story

A key feature of Twitter has been down most of this week: Replies. The core Twitter service itself is alive, but the team took the Reply feature down on Tuesday when the service started to slow. As of now, Friday afternoon, Replies are still down. Disabling certain features is Twitter’s recent attempt to keep their frail architecture from failing completely. They tried it out during Apple’s recent WWDC keynote and it worked, so they’re clearly using this approach more often now to deal with... Read Full Story

Whoisi is a central site that allows users to add people and their associated web feeds, and then track any number of these people and their feed items using a follower model. Whoisi is a side project by open source evangelist and Mozilla contributor Chris Blizzard. Currently it supports feeds from Flickr, Twitter, LinkedIn, Picasa and any Atom or RSS feed. Once you have added a number of people that you follow, it presents their feed activity in a time-based interface similar to FriendFeed... Read Full Story

Everyone likes to share their thoughts and activities with friends and family, but, narcissists aside, most people don’t have time to spend hours each week blogging about their life. Swurl, a new startup that just launched in public beta, is looking to fix this problem. Swurl is essentially a lifecasting aggregator that pulls your current activity from web services that include Last.fm, Flickr, Amazon, and nearly twenty other sources (you can see the full list here). The site is... Read Full Story

Earlier this month we launched Elevator Pitches, a site for startup CEOs and founders to upload a 60-second video explaining what their companies do and how they make money. As I explained in the launch post, the idea is to create a repository of startup pitches where viewers can offer their critiques and vote the best ones up and the worst ones down. The initial response was very encouraging. We got 50,000 pageviews in the first three days. But we soon realized that we had launched too... Read Full Story

Virgin Mobile purchased Helio today for $39 million in equity. Helio is a small MVNO that made its name by selling powerful and high-end telephones aimed at technophiles and, thanks to an investment by South Korea’s SK Telecom, Korean-Americans. As part of the deal, Virgin Mobile is also receiving $50 million to pay down Helio’s debt (half from SK Telecom, and half from its parent company Virgin Group), as well as an additional revolving credit facility of $60 million. Just last September... Read Full Story

Need to schedule a meeting or phone call, but can’t agree on a time that is good for everyone? Try using When Is Good, a dead-simple Web app that does just one thing: zero in on a meeting time that is good for everyone without sending 20 emails back and forth. There are plenty of other apps that help you find a mutually convenient time time for meetings or events (such as Presdo, Scheduly, or Jiffle). But When Is Good strips the process down to its bare essentials. No login is required... Read Full Story

Today, Bill Gates is retiring as an employee of Microsoft to focus on his philanthropic foundation. More than any other single person, Gates defined the PC era. His products touch nearly every computer user on the planet. And he created what is still the biggest technology wealth machine in Microsoft. But now that he is leaving, who will fill his shoes? I don’t mean who will fill his shoes at Microsoft. Gates stepped back from day-to-day management years ago, handing his business... Read Full Story

Google just announced its odd Google Media Server, a Windows app that finds photos, music, and video and makes it available to DLNA devices like the PlayStation 3, XBox 360, and most Media Center PCs. Google Media Server is a Windows application that aims to bridge the gap between Google and your TV. It uses Google Desktop technology such as Desktop gadgets for the administration tool and Google Desktop Search to locate media files. All you need is a PC running Google Desktop and a UPnP... Read Full Story

Some technologies take things down a notch. For instance TinyPaste, a service obviously built with Twitter in mind that lets you link to ramblings in excess of the regular 140 character limit. Just like TinyURL and other URL shortening services, TinyPaste produces a short address that you can enter into microblogging and IM services with caps on message lengths. But instead of directing users to a regular webpage, a TinyPaste’s URL sends its clickers to a simple page displaying the poster’s... Read Full Story