Apple and PayPal today announced that the iTunes Music Store in the US will now accept PayPal for purchases of music downloads, audiobooks and gift certificates.

Starting today, iTunes Music Store purchases can be funded through PayPal’s virtual wallet, allowing customers to pay in the way they prefer — using a credit card, bank account or stored account balance.

The first 500,000 customers to open a new iTunes account in the US using PayPal as their form of payment before March 31, 2005, will receive five free songs.*

Travelers Advantage delivered a lower online price for travel to 50 top destinations nine out of 10 times when compared to Priceline, Expedia, and Travelocity, the membership-based travel service said today.

Travelers Advantage based the claim on a 48-week comparison, through November 2004, of total air transportation costs for round trip flights between more than 50 frequently booked pairs of cities.

TravelersAdvantage.com delivered the lowest purchasable price to consumers more than 90 percent of the time thus far in 2004, and consumers can take advantage of these great fares just in time for the holidays,” said Travelers Advantage Vice President Julia Ryan. “Each week we compared ourselves to Priceline, Expedia, and Travelocity for travel between cities that include New York and London; Denver and Los Angeles; Los Angeles and Denver; Newark, N.J. and Las Vegas; and Newark and Orlando, Fla.

“Our price comparison is based on the actual price consumers pay,” she added. “We included airport fees, taxes and other fees as well as the service fees imposed by the competing travel agencies to present an accurate comparison of the full cost of flying between two cities.”

Shocking statistics revealed by the South African Film and Publication Board (FPB) indicate that more than a million websites containing child pornography are in existence on the net. Ivor Chetty, acting FPB CEO, says this is only the tip of the iceberg.

Source: SABC news

Google announced late last night that they have launched seven non-english editions of their extremely popular Google News service.

The news sites all have a similar appearance, but they are in seven different languages. They also are focused on the geographic region they serve.

The new versions launched: Argentina, Chile, Canada Français, México, Österreich, Schweiz, Suisse

Source: webpronews.com

Google has launched a new feature that tries to guess what users are looking for as they type queries into a search box.

Google Suggest quietly debuted this week on the company’s Labs site, which showcases Google features that “aren’t quite ready for prime time,” according to a message on the site. When a user starts typing a request into the search box, a drop-down menu appears with possible suggestions as to what the user could be looking for.

For instance, typing in “Mi” generates a list starting with “Microsoft” and continuing with “miniclip,” “Michael Moore” and “miserable failure,” among other suggestions.

Google uses “a wide range of information” to predict queries, according to an FAQ, including data about the overall popularity of various searches. The company does not use individual search histories to help generate the prompts, it says.

Source: News.com

Yahoo Inc. said on Thursday it will begin testing a free desktop search service in early January, following rivals hoping to extend the reach of wildly profitable search-related advertising.

Desktop search, which helps excavate information buried on computer hard drives, is seen as the next frontier in the booming search sector that has generated billions in revenues from ads generated by Web search queries.

Yahoo’s product will use licensed technology from Pasadena, California-based X1 Technologies Inc. to help users search e-mail and a variety of files — from photos and music to PDF-format documents — on their hard drives.

Those search capabilities also will be integrated with Yahoo’s own Web search technology, said Jeff Weiner, senior vice president of Yahoo’s search and marketplace business.

Sunnyvale, California-based Yahoo expects to roll out rapid updates to its desktop service, which will eventually allow users to search even more of the Web — including content from Yahoo chat groups, address book and instant messaging archives.

Web search leader Google Inc., Yahoo’s biggest rival, launched its test desktop search service in October.

Software giant Microsoft Corp., whose Windows operating system runs on more than 90 percent of the world’s personal computers, bought a desktop search business in July and has said it will launch its own desktop search engine by year-end.

Ask Jeeves Inc. bought desktop search company Tukaroo Inc. in June and also has said it will launch sometime this month.

Desktop search products are expected from AOL and Apple Computer Inc., too.

Yahoo, Google, Ask Jeeves and Microsoft’s MSN Internet division each rely on Web-search advertising to drive profits

Source: Reuters