Sony says it will start a movie download service for its PlayStation 3 home console this summer in the U.S.

Kazuo Hirai, who heads Sony Corp.’s video game unit, said Thursday the service will be offered in Japan and Europe at later dates, although details won’t be available until next month.

Hirai said the company will strengthen its network services and further cut costs to achieve profitability in the Sony gaming business in the current fiscal year ending March 2009.

Ever wonder whether you’d be better off working some place else?

A new Web site called Glassdoor.com is trying to make it easier to find out by compiling free snapshots of the current salaries paid by hundreds of major employers, along with reviews anonymously written by current and past workers.

“We think it’s super important that people are able to find a job where they can go home happy at the end of the day,” said Robert Hohman, Glassdoor’s co-founder and chief executive.

The Sausalito-based startup’s other founders include Rich Barton, CEO of online home appraisal site Zillow.com.

By providing free access to sensitive salary information and sometimes blunt reviews of companies, Glassdoor is bound to upset some employers, predicted Jupiter Research analyst Barry Parr.

The Washington Post Co said on Wednesday that it is launching a new unit that will develop and manage a family of Web-based magazines.

The Slate Group plans to get into other new media ventures that it develops on its own or through acquisitions, the company said in a statement.

“The rationale is that you can build an audience beyond Slate’s existing audience in certain vertical or demographic categories,” the group’s editor-in-chief, Jacob Weisberg, said in an interview on Wednesday.

“I think it’s sort of the logic by which Time magazine gave birth to Sports Illustrated and People, and it’s the idea that you can incubate a magazine within another magazine,” said Weisberg, who was editor of Slate magazine before being named editor-in-chief of the Slate Group.

Amazon.com Inc, the largest Internet retailer, will launch a streaming video service in the next few weeks to augment its digital offerings, the company’s chief executive said on Wednesday.

Jeff Bezos, speaking at The Wall Street Journal’s three-day D: All Things Digital conference taking place north of San Diego, did not elaborate, and a company spokeswoman would not provide more information.

The Seattle-based company has been beefing up its digital media offerings in order to better compete with rivals such as Apple Inc, which dominates the category with the popular iTunes music download service.

Borders Group Inc. is returning to online retailing after seven years paired with Amazon.com, but analysts say it will be a challenge for the nation’s second-largest bookseller to compete with established Web retailers.

The move comes as Borders, which has said it may put itself up for sale, has lost market share both to online retailers and to discounters such as Wal-Mart Stores Inc. amid a difficult economic climate in the United States.

It’s a long shot, analysts say, in an environment where people are spending less and Amazon.com rules.

“Amazon just dominates,” said Fred Crawford, managing director at turnaround consultant AlixPartners who has studied consumer attitudes toward major booksellers. “Amazon is nearly unassailable.”

In 2001, Borders abandoned its money-losing online business, turning it over to Amazon. Under that arrangement, Borders.com took shoppers to a site partnered with Amazon, while a Web site for its stores allowed shoppers to check inventories and reserve items.

Time Warner Inc’s AOL Internet division will launch versions of its video service in Canada, India and Taiwan on Thursday as part of an aggressive global expansion.

By autumn, it will also introduce versions of its video portal, AOL Video ( video.aol.com ), in the United Kingdom, France and Germany, AOL Video senior vice president Fred McIntyre said in an interview.

The expansion is part of Time Warner’s plans to refashion AOL as a free, advertising-dependent Web site, as well as to transform itself into a one-stop shop for advertising services for other companies.

“If you look at usage patterns on online video, it is the first global broadband user behavior,” McIntyre said. “It happened everywhere in the world at the same time.”

International availability of online videos from the United States has been held up by copyright licenses, which are negotiated on a regional basis, Internet executives said this week at the Reuters Global Media and Telecoms Summit.

But AOL said it has sealed deals with local programming partners for its regional sites. The availability of shows from U.S. programming partners, such as Hulu, a joint venture of News Corp and General Electric’s NBC Universal, or CBS Corp, is unclear and varies depending on partners

The foundation of the services is built around AOL’s video search technology, Truveo, which has indexed, or searched and sorted related information on than 170 million videos in 16 countries including: Russia, Hong Kong, Germany and France.

Microsoft Corp has launched a new online service in 20 countries which will allow users to watch video clips at the same time as a network of friends and chat via Windows Live Messenger.

The new service called Messenger TV will offer a range of clips on MSN Video including MTV shows and music clips from providers such as Sony BMG.

The firm hopes the ability to watch clips with friends on different computers will create a new social experience and attract users who already spend hours on social networks.

Microsoft Corp. launched its WorldWide Telescope late Monday, bringing the free Web-based program for zooming around the universe to a broad audience.

WorldWide Telescope, developed by Microsoft’s research arm, knits together images from the Hubble Space Telescope, the Chandra X-Ray Observatory Center, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and others.

Computer users can browse through the galaxy on their own or take guided tours of different outer-space destinations developed by astronomers and academics.

The site lets users choose from a number of different telescopes and switch between different light wavelengths.

A startup is betting that people are tired enough of their cable and satellite bills to take a look at an alternative pay TV system that combines a number of different technologies to deliver programming.

Silicon Valley-based Sezmi Corp. is revealing a system Thursday that amounts to a way for phone companies and local TV broadcasters to team up for an end run around satellite and cable. Technical trials are starting shortly, with full-blown commercial trials in some markets, yet unnamed, later this year.

The carrot for consumers: monthly fees that are about half those of cable or satellite, according to Sezmi founder Buno Pati.

Sezmi’s system takes some explaining. At its heart is a TV set-top box that receives video content in three different ways. Two are available through other means: digital over-the-air local broadcasts, the kind that are available to anyone with a digital TV and a rabbit-ear antenna; and Internet downloads through the home’s broadband connection.

The third delivery method would be unique to Sezmi. It plans to have local TV stations use vacant portions of their airwaves to transmit basic cable channels like Nickelodeon and Discovery. Given the limited spectrum available, the stations won’t be able to transmit a full lineup, and only some of it will be in high definition. Sezmi plans to mitigate that by having stations send out the most-watched shows and have the set-top boxes save them on their hard drives, making them available for viewing on demand.

Danny Kennedy may have come up with a way to make solar panels an impulse buy.

Sungevity, Kennedy’s company, has come up with a Web-based system for evaluating the solar potential for a given home through satellite data. Customers log onto Sungevity’s site and provide an address and some information about their monthly electrical bill.

Within 24 hours, the company sends customers a quote for installing a solar system, an estimate of how much the system will save them over 25 years, the prospective increase in the value of their home, and simulated imagery of what their home might look like after solar panels are installed. Traditionally, the process that provides all that information takes days and a physical examination of the roof.

“We do all that (the calculations for preparing the estimate) in about 10 to 15 minutes,” he said.

In their ever continuing battle to free the Internet, The Pirate Bay has now launched an uncensored blogging service, called Baywords. The service is intended to be a safe haven for bloggers who want to be able to write whatever they want, without being afraid to get shut down by their blog host.

The Pirate Bay is known for defending people’s right to freedom of speech on the Internet, and this is exactly what motivated them to start this new blogging service.

Brokep, one of the co-founders of the site, told TorrentFreak that the idea to start a blogging service came up when the weblog of one of his friends was taken down from Wordpress recently, for linking to copyrighted material.

This, of course, goes against the “uncensored web” philosophy of The Pirate Bay team, and they didn’t hesitate to start their own blogging service, Baywords, using Wordpress as their blogging engine.

Armed with market research that showed Americans spend as much time researching a vacation as they do a mortgage loan (answer: five hours), Zillow.com is launching a mortgage marketplace that allows consumers to anonymously receive custom loan quotes and rate their lenders.

Zillow.com, which created a buzz in the real estate industry two years ago with its online home value “zestimates”, hopes to add transparency and information to the mortgage application process, while making it easier and faster to get mortgage quotes.

On its Web site, potential borrowers can fill out a detailed loan request form, which doesn’t ask for any identifiable information. Registered lenders can respond with quotes and rates, which are displayed on Zillow’s standardized quote form aimed at making comparisons easier. The borrower then has the option to contact lenders about their quotes.