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Universal Music Group (UMG) has struck a deal with Conduit Labs, a startup that creates musical social games, to provide users with access to UMG’s library of licensed music from the record label’s artists such as Lady Gaga, Rihanna and others. The partnership will all 1 million users of Conduit Labs’ games, including Music Pets, Super Dance and Loudcrowd, to access the tracks. All of Conduit Labs’ games are free-to-play but allow users can purchase virtual items, such as songs, to further personalize their experience.
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We’ve already posted some sentiment analysis after the arrival of the iPad last weekend, based on messages posted on Twitter, which showed that people were split about the launch of the tablet (people either love it or hate others for not shutting up about it). Here’s some more: Attensity used its Cloud tool to collect some 50,000 Tweets on the iPad – a relatively small sample considering the heaps of chatter on the iPad that has taken Twitter by storm over the past couple of days – and analyzed the general sentiment.
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We ran through the seven mainstream iPad alternatives a few weeks ago. You should know the list anyway.  They include the usual suspects of the ModBook, Notion Ink Adam, HP Slate and Dell Streak along with a few others. But there are a bunch more portables either currently available or coming out real soon that could also have made that list. Consider the following seven computers alternatives to the standard iPad alternatives.
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I hate it when a product like the Viliv S10 Blade looks so good as a concept but fails to live up to its potential. The S10 has a late-model Atom CPU, 1GB of RAM, and a multitouch 10-inch screen. It should be solid, right? If only.
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There was recently a little skirmish on the web regarding the question of whether or not Microsoft has stopped innovating — whether the internal corporate culture there has thwarted new ideas, and so on. Well, I think we can all agree that Microsoft hasn’t exactly been an innovation machine in recent years; although, with as little currency as the word “innovation” has these days, that’s not saying much — but the fact is that its products haven’t shown as much ingenuity as its competitors in nearly every arena.
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At long last, webOS has been granted a Facebook application worth its weight in kilobytes. A completely revamped version of the Facebook application has just gone live in the Palm App Catalog – and boy, is it an improvement. Palm has offered some level of Facebook support on webOS since the launch of the Pixi – but as we noted in our Pixi review, calling what it had “Facebook support” was probably exaggerating. You could sync your Facebook contacts, read your news feed, and.. well, that’s it.
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Good luck sorting this one out, short-sighted lawmakers. An upcoming piece of major legislation in the UK, called the Digital Economy Bill, would essentially force all public wi-fi points offline by requiring impossibly high levels of copyright protection. The bill, which bears some similarity to the controversial DMCA here in the US, is ostensibly aimed at providing copyright holders the means of controlling their content online.
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Good news, Palm fans! If you’ve taken a break from jamming on the “Update” button, it’s time to go tap it one last time: the rollout of webOS 1.4 has just begun. The catch: it seems that it’s only for Sprint handsets right now, with the Verizon Pre Plus and Pixi Plus still reporting that 1.3 is the latest release. We knew it was coming in February thanks to Palm’s announcement at CES — and thanks to the rumor mill, we were all lead to believe it was coming a few weeks ago.
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Editor’s note: This guest post is written by Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO of salesforce.com. In it, he explains why enterprise software should take its cues from Facebook and become more social. I quit my job at Oracle in 1999 because I couldn’t stop thinking about a simple question: “Why isn’t all enterprise software like Amazon.
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There’s nothing like finding and getting rid of junk on eBay, especially if you’re a gadget hound looking to offload last month’s toys for the latest and greatest. While it’s entirely possible to manage your eBay account on your phone’s browser, a dedicated application would make life so much easier. The new eBay app for Android could make shopping, paying and selling through the online auction site a breeze.
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