Struggling online video startup Joost, begun with much fanfare in 2007 by the same people behind Skype and Kazaa, is restructuring its business after discovering that it can’t survive on advertising to fund its operations.

The chief executive, Mike Volpi, has stepped down but will remain as chairman.

The London-based company said it will shift its focus from being an online video site for consumers supported by advertising - similar to Google Inc.’s YouTube. Instead, it will help businesses manage their videos on the Internet as they build brands.

Its target market will be media companies such as cable and satellite TV providers, broadcasters and video aggregators.

“In these tough economic times, it’s been increasingly challenging to operate as an independent, ad-supported online video platform,” Volpi said in a statement.

Joost was co-founded by Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom, the same people behind Internet phone service Skype and the file-sharing site Kazaa. It has minority investments from Viacom Inc. and CBS Corp.

It started as a peer-to-peer sharing site but wasn’t successful, then switched to online video. But Joost has suffered from poor traffic and had trouble making money.

Joost, which also has offices in New York, is closing its Leiden office in the Netherlands. The company declined to say how many people it’s laying off.

Comcast Corp. will become the first major cable TV operator to roll out wireless broadband outside of Wi-Fi hotspots as it launches the service in Portland, Ore., on Tuesday, with at least three other cities to follow this year.

Comcast will offer speeds of up to 4 Megabits per second, faster than any other comparable, non-Wi-Fi service currently being marketed. The service is for use with laptops, but not other mobile devices.

Comcast’s wireless broadband, which lets users surf the Web on the go with their computers, pits it squarely against the mobile data offerings of phone companies.

But the cable operator is coming out first with the market’s fastest wireless broadband, using WiMax technology. Phone companies have lined up behind a competing technology called LTE, with Verizon Communications Inc. planning to deploy it next year.

The Filipino inmates who shot to global fame with a YouTube video of their “Thriller” dance swayed and stomped again Saturday in a behind-bars tribute to their idol, Michael Jackson.

After being told of Jackson’s death Thursday in Los Angeles, the 1,500 inmates at the Cebu Provincial Detention and Rehabilitation Center hit the exercise yard, practicing for nine hours Friday night — and into the wee hours of Saturday morning — for the show. They took breaks only to eat or when it rained, said professional choreographer Gwendolyn Lador, hired by the prison to teach the inmates the dance.

In early 2007, Urban Aeronautics announced it’d have an “air jeep” flying car dubbed the X-Hawk ready for flight by 2009. The future’s now, and while the X-Hawk isn’t quite ready, the test mule almost is, and this is it.

The Urban Aeronautics concept for a flying car, or “fancraft” as they like to call it, centers on a ducted fan concept which was tested by the US military long ago with unacceptable results. Fast forward several decades and add much larger control surfaces, high-power and more reliable hardware, much better controls logic combined with the magic of modern computer processing speeds and the concept is no longer so far-fetched.

The Israeli company currently has a proof of concept scale prototype which runs on electricity, but they’re in the final stages of completing a full scale test mule powered by a pair of gas turbine engines which will supposedly be ready for its maiden voyage in about two months. When fully developed, the craft should be able to achieve vertical takeoff, hover, rotate 360 degrees at a standstill, reach speeds up to 115 MPH and drop vertically into a tight urban landing zone.

An alleged spammer could face jail time in connection with a Facebook lawsuit after a judge referred him to the U.S. Attorney General’s Office for criminal proceedings.

Judge Jeremy Fogel of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California referred Sanford Wallace to the U.S. Attorney General’s Office for criminal proceedings for allegedly violating an injunction that prohibited him from accessing Facebook.

Facebook filed a lawsuit against Wallace and two other men in February for spamming and phishing schemes through the social-networking site. The following week, Judge Fogel issued a temporary restraining order barring Wallace and two other alleged spammers, Adam Arzoomanian and Scott Shaw, from accessing Facebook’s network.

“We see Fogel’s ruling as a strong deterrent against spammers. Spammers feel that they are immune from criminal prosecution. Fogel’s ruling demonstrates that judges will enforce restraining orders and spammers who violate them will face criminal prosecution,” said Barry Schnitt, a Facebook spokesman.

News Corp’s MySpace refused to comment on Thursday on a report the previous day that said the online social network will fire a “massive” number of employees.

The online social network is preparing to lay off as many as 500 of its 1,600 workers, the TechCrunch blog reported on Wednesday, as it cuts costs while trying to stay ahead of growing competition from rival Facebook.

Australian scientists have restored the sight of three human test subjects using stem cells cultured in contact lenses. All the patients were blind in only one eye.

Two were legally blind, but can now read the big letters on an eye chart. The third could read the first few lines, but is now able to pass a driver’s test. The University of New South Wales reports that these patients all had damaged corneas, and the stem cells came from each person’s good eye. The best part: the procedure is inexpensive, raising hopes for being able to push this to the third world sooner than other, more expensive medications.

A real estate agent in Houston who blogged about Anna Nicole Smith was jailed for contempt last week in a defamation case brought by the late Playboy model’s mother.

Legal experts said bloggers are increasingly the targets of such litigation, which are testing the bounds of free speech.

Lyndal Harrington, who is accused of helping to spread falsehoods that Virgie Arthur married her stepbrother and abused Smith as a child, spent four nights in jail after she failed to comply with a court order to turn over her computer.

The 53-year-old grandmother claimed her computer was stolen during a burglary less than a week after it was subpoenaed.

A police officer testified that he believed the theft was staged and judge Tony Lindsay ordered Harrington to produce the computer by July 2 or she will again face incarceration.

Susan Boyle, the frumpy Scottish spinster whose amazing voice has become a global YouTube sensation, stunned audiences again on Sunday as she was voted through to the final of “Britain’s Got Talent.”

Singing “Memory” from the musical “Cats,” the 48-year-old overcame initial nerves to produce another command performance, her soaring rendition winning the telephone vote on the talent show.

“You are one special lady, I have to say, you really are,” Simon Cowell, one of the panel of three judges, said after Boyle’s performance brought the audience to their feet.

Biofuels continue to steal the spotlight when it comes to the search for a renewable, environmentally friendly replacement for crude oil. While that’s understandable when considering the transport industry, but crude oil is also used in the production of conventional plastics and chemical products such as fertilizers and solvents. Now chemists have learned how to convert plant biomass directly into a chemical building block that can not only be used to produce fuel, but also plastics, polyester and industrial chemicals cheaply and efficiently.

Earlier work by researchers at the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) saw the development of a process to convert glucose and fructose derived from cellulose, into a primary building block for fuel and polyesters known as hydroxymethylfurfural, or HMF. Although it is a fairly simple process to convert HMF into plastics or biofuel, it is seldom used because HMF is costly to make. Other researchers had previously converted fructose into HMF, but the PNNL research group made a series of improvements that raised the HMF output, and also made the HMF easier to extract.

Using a chemical and solvent known as an ionic liquid, the PNNL team was able to convert the simple sugars into HMF. The chemical, a metal chloride known as chromium chloride, converted sugar into highly pure HMF, but the team still needed to break down cellulose into simple sugars – a step they wanted to skip.

As a Rutgers philosopher discusses robot war scenarios, one science magazine counts the ways robots are already being used in warfare, including YouTube videos of six military robots in action.

There are up to 12,000 ‘robotic units’ on the ground in Iraq, some dismantling landmines and roadside bombs, but ‘a new generation of bots are designed to be fighting machines.’ One bot can operate an M-16 rifle, a machine gun, and a rocket launcher — and 250 people have already been killed by unmanned drones in Pakistan.

He also tells the story of a berserk robot explosives gun that killed nine people in South Africa due to a ’software glitch.

Digital music supplier Napster said on Monday it is slashing its monthly subscription price to $5 and adding downloads of songs to its streaming service in a bid to expand its customer base and compete with Apple Inc’s iTunes.

It is the latest attempt by Napster to take on iTunes, the dominant digital music leader, and its first major strategic move since being taken over by retailer Best Buy Co Inc last October.

Los Angeles-based Napster said users can now get unlimited access to stream music from its library of 7 million songs and five free songs for download every month for a subscription fee of $5. Previously, Napster had charged subscribers $12.99 for a streaming-only service.