Users of the Internet phone application can buy more ring-tones

Users of Skype's popular VoIP (voice over Internet protocol) application can buy a greater selection of ring-tones under a deal the company has reached with four music publishers, it said this week.

Google's GMail service has been opened up to the public after being invitation-only since its inception. The only catch is that you must have a cell phone. Considering that everyone and a grandma has a cell phone these days, that shouldn't be too much of a problem:

The mobile phone requirement was designed to prevent Gmail accounts from being created by robots and stop spammers from signing up multiple times. Google will send an invitation code via SMS, which can then be used to register with Gmail. Only one account may be created per phone number.

Los Angeles -- Popular micro-blogging outfit Twitter is leaning on e-commerce as its next big potential revenue stream through a partnership with American Express. Twitter and American Express today forged an alliance that will allow Amex card holders to make certain purchases simply by tweeting.

New York -- In the spirit of the holiday season Skype is running a limited time offer that will surely become popular. So, if you have friends or family around the world and wish to communicate with them on their landline or mobile phone this Christmas, Skype announced that it is offering users of its service a free month of its 'Premium' product, which includes unlimited worldwide calling of telephones, and group video calling to a long list of countries.

Facebook and Internet Explorer have rarely gone hand in hand. In August 2010, Facebook phased out support for IE6, but the recent to the addition noted that Facebook's latest feature, that is Timeline has no support for IE7. IE7 users cannot access Facebook's Timeline feature, as reported by Sociable. The reason noted was that the browser is quite outdated for Facebook's Timeline to be pushed in.

San Francisco -- Internet telephony giant Skype suffered an outage lasting several hours with millions of users around the globe have been hit by an outage Wednesday when the prominent internet telephony system was disrupted by a massive glitch.

The company which prides itself on delivering relatively reliable service last suffered a major outage in 2007. Millions of Skype users globally could not make calls -- or were dropped in mid-conversation -- because of a network connection failure that began about 9 a.m. Wednesday PST. Users as far afield as Japan, Europe and the US have all reported problems.

This outage marks the second time this year that the popular, low-priced calling service has suffered with a major outage, and this one was more widespread than the two-day disruption in 2007.

Skype issued an apology for the outage, which incapacitated millions of people who were unable to log on to the service or connect to any of their contacts and that the program is crashing across all platforms, whether on their mobile device or PC.

New York -- After years of stalling efforts to offer music fans the power to “rent” music instead of buying downloads, finally Apple is joining the party. Apple, earlier this week confirmed the acquisition of popular online music service Lala into the streaming music business, adding to its arsenal the ways it could offer music to users.

The company declined to discuss plans on how it would integrate the service, neither offered any details on the price it paid to acquire Lala. “Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time, and we generally do not comment on our purpose or plans,” an Apple spokeswoman said in an e-mail. Earlier reports said Apple had bought Lala, but neither company had confirmed the deal.

Lala makes it possible for U.S. users to listen a song once for free, as well as lets them purchase over 8 million songs for 10 cents each, for a version that can be played online continually or pay $0.79 or more for a copy that can be downloaded, and then listen to the tunes as many times as they like through a browser on their Windows PC or Mac. The first 25 songs are offered at no charge.

Helsinki-- World’s leading mobile phone maker Nokia on Sunday cleared one of the key obstacles for adopting its new Internet offering, and is gearing toward completing its Ovi service suite -- making it easier for their customers to log into their online service network Ovi.com.

The company intends to provide a single login mechanism on this service which combines various features some of which require separate details.

Recently Nokia has acquired a dozen companies -- including an $8.1 billion (5.4 billion pound) purchase of mapping company Navteq -- to jump-start its Internet business as growth in the mobile phone market stalls.