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A man bled to death on a street in Tehran on Monday. As one bystander tenderly held the man's head, five others held out their cameras. They captured photos and videos of the man, and of the blood that stained his white shirt. On Wednesday afternoon, an anonymous individual uploaded the disturbing video to YouTube, where it was viewed by thousands and shared by bloggers. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Since Facebook started giving out customized Web addresses like facebook.com/yourname last Friday, some 9.5 million people have rushed to grab their top choice. On Twitter, public fights have broken out over so-called impostor accounts, like those that should probably be in the hands of Kanye West or Bank of America. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

PLENTY of authors dream of writing the great American novel. Bradley Inman wants to create great fiction, dramatic online video and compelling Twitter stream -- and then roll them all into a multimedia hybrid that is tailored to the rapidly growing number of digital reading devices. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Facebook, the fast-growing online social network, said Tuesday its chief financial officer, Gideon Yu, was leaving the company. Mr. Yu is a well-regarded Silicon Valley veteran with experience at Google, YouTube and Yahoo. Facebook, which is privately held, did not offer an explanation for his departure but said it had hired an executive search firm to find a successor with experience in running a public company. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Skype, the Internet calling service that has more than 400 million users around the world, is aggressively moving onto mobile phones. The Luxembourg-based company, a division of eBay, plans to announce on Tuesday that it will make its free software available immediately for Apple'siPhone and iPod Touch and, beginning in May, for various BlackBerry phones, made by Research in Motion. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the last couple of years, the television industry has made a big push onto the Web, giving viewers hope that they might one day reach nirvana: every show ever made, available online for immediate free viewing. But many in the industry are now questioning whether free is a sustainable model. And some are trying to make sure people have a reason to keep paying hefty cable bills. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

WHEN Facebook signed up its 100 millionth member last August, its employees spread out in two parks in Palo Alto, Calif., for a huge barbecue. Sometime this week, this five-year-old start-up, born in a dorm room at Harvard, expects to register its 200 millionth user. That staggering growth rate -- doubling in size in just eight months -- suggests Facebook is rapidly becoming the Web's dominant social ecosystem and an essential personal and business networking tool in much of the wired world. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

America, meet your farmer. The maker of Stone-Buhr flour, a popular brand in the western United States, is encouraging its customers to reconnect with their lost agrarian past, from the comfort of their computer screens. Its Find the Farmer Web site and special labels on the packages let buyers learn about and even contact the farmers who produced the wheat that went into their bag of flour. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

With its lingering debt problems resolved for now, Blockbuster is pinning some of its hopes on a digital future. The struggling video rental chain will announce a partnership with TiVo on Wednesday to deliver Blockbuster's digital movie library over the Internet directly to the televisions of people with TiVo digital video recorders. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Aiming to outdo Amazon.com and recapture the crown for the most digital titles in an e-book library, Sony is announcing Thursday a deal with Google to make a half million copyright-free books available for its Reader device, a rival to the AmazonKindle. Since 2004, Google has scanned about seven million books from major university and research library collections. For now, however, Google can make full digital copies available only of books whose copyrights have expired. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

More than 40 years ago, computer researchers came up with the concept of cutting and pasting text in a computer document. Electronic organizers and sophisticated phones have had those basic functions for years. On stage at its headquarters here on Tuesday, an Apple executive announced that the iPhone would at long last be joining the cut, copy and paste party. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Google stepped up its attack on the telecommunications industry on Thursday with a free service called Google Voice that, if successful, could chip away at the revenue of companies big and small, like eBay, which owns Skype, telephone companies and a string of technology start-up firms. Google Voice is an expanded version of a service previously known as GrandCentral, a start-up that Google acquired 20 months ago. It is intended to simplify the way people handle phone calls, voice mail and text messages. The service will initially be made available only to existing GrandCentral subscribers; Google says the general public will be able to use it in the coming weeks. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Boxee and Hulu's On-Again, Off-Again Relationship on Videos In the powder keg of conflicting interests and strategies that is the television industry's attitude toward online video, Boxee keeps lighting a match. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

FIRST, MySpace. Now, Mugshotbook? Like unhip adults late to adopt a fad, police departments and other law enforcement agencies are jumping on the social networking bandwagon. They hope to break down bureaucratic boundaries between departments and jurisdictions and further the fight against crime. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Shaking up the nascent market for electronic books for the second time in two months, Amazon.com will begin selling e-books for reading on Apple's popular iPhone and iPod Touch. Starting Wednesday, owners of these Apple devices can download a free application, Kindle for iPhone and iPod Touch, from Apple's App Store. The software will give them full access to the 240,000 e-books for sale on Amazon.com, which include a majority of best sellers. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

For the last nine months, Apple has refused to get into specifics about the well-being of its chief executive, Steven P. Jobs, even as he said last month that he was taking a six-month leave of absence to deal with health problems. On Wednesday, the company's shareholders had their chance to press for more information -- but they did not get far. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The dream of a free and easy way to watch Internet video on a television set just ran into some harsh reality. Boxee, led by Avner Ronen, below, is a free software package that combines multiple sources of Internet video in a simple interface. One of its most important content sources, the video site Hulu, said on Wednesday that it would stop allowing its programs to be shown through Boxee. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Meg Whitman, a former chief executive of eBay, once said that running the Internet auction site was like being the mayor of a large city, with the mix of politics, competing constituencies and widespread resistance to change. Now Ms. Whitman, 52, says she is ready to be the governor of California, a state nearly paralyzed by its political and fiscal problems. But with her legacy at eBay not clear cut, she is trying to define her experience in the most favorable terms as she explores a run for the Republican nomination in 2010. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Facebook, the popular social networking site where people share photos and personal updates with friends and acquaintances, lost some face on Wednesday. After three days of pressure from angry users and the threat of a formal legal complaint by a coalition of consumer advocacy groups, the company reversed changes to its contract with users that had appeared to give it perpetual ownership of their contributions to the service. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The cellphone industry has a suggestion for improving the math skills of American students: spend more time on cellphones in the classroom. At a conference this week in Washington called Mobile Learning 09, CTIA, a wireless industry trade group, plans to start making its case for the educational value of cellphones. It will present research -- paid for by Qualcomm, a maker of chips for cellphones -- that shows so-called smartphones can make students smarter. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Setting up an obvious battle with Google and another possible one with Apple in the fast-growing electronic-book business, Amazon.com on Monday introduced the Kindle 2, a new version of its popular e-book reader. The announcement strengthens the bid by Amazon for control of the e-book market and the devices consumers use to read them. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Most media companies these days are desperately searching for ways to get people to pay for their content on the Web. Major League Baseball is not one of them. Half a million baseball fans paid $120 last year to watch live video of pro baseball games on the Web, according to MLB.com, a company owned by all 30 pro teams. An additional 350,000 paid $15 to listen to radio broadcasts online. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

FOR the backers of Proposition 8, the state ballot measure to stop single-sex couples from marrying in California, victory has been soured by the ugly specter of intimidation. Some donors to groups supporting the measure have received death threats and envelopes containing a powdery white substance, and their businesses have been boycotted. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Michael J. Homer, a Silicon Valley executive who played important roles in the development of three waves of technology -- the personal computer, the hand-held device and the Internet -- died on Sunday in Atherton, Calif. He was 50. The cause was Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, a rare neurodegenerative disorder, said Ron Conway, a close friend and prominent Silicon Valley investor. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Michael J. Homer, a Silicon Valley executive who played important roles in the development of three waves of technology -- the personal computer, the hand-held device and the Internet -- died on Sunday in Atherton, Calif. He was 50. The cause was Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, a rare neurodegenerative disorder, said Ron Conway, a close friend and prominent Silicon Valley investor. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

On the day last July when ''The Dark Knight'' arrived in theaters, Warner Brothers was ready with an ambitious antipiracy campaign that involved months of planning and steps to monitor each physical copy of the film. The campaign failed miserably. By the end of the year, illegal copies of the Batman movie had been downloaded more than seven million times around the world, according to the media measurement firm BigChampagne, turning it into a visible symbol of Hollywood's helplessness against the growing problem of online video piracy. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

TWENTY-FIVE years ago, Apple hurled a legendary marketing sledgehammer at I.B.M. personal computers that ran Microsoft software. During the 1984 Super Bowl, Apple ran a television ad that depicted those machines as instruments of Big Brotherish conformity. The ad was shown just once, but people still talk about it. Today, Apple is still producing ads that hammer away at computers that run Microsoft's software. But this time, Apple's pounding is constant, even as Microsoft has been weakened by product stumbles and a series of ads that fell flat with the public. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Technology entrepreneurs are having a devil of a time finding angels. Angel investors are the optimistic financiers who give entrepreneurs their crucial first infusion of cash to bring their ideas to life. Now, in the midst of a punishing economic downturn that is sparing few companies, these patrons are cutting back on their bets and threatening the very foundation of the technology economy. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In December, Amazon.com said it was having its ''best ever'' holiday season. On Thursday, it offered proof. The company posted strong earnings in a brutal climate that has punished nearly every other retailer, online and offline. Amazon's net profit rose 9 percent, to $225 million, or 52 cents a share, in the quarter that ended on Dec. 31, up from $207 million, or 48 cents, in the same quarter a year earlier. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The global credit crisis may have caused the decline in consumer and business spending that is assaulting the giants of high tech. But as the dominant technology companies try to emerge from this slump, they may find themselves blaming people like David Title just as much as they blame Wall Street. Mr. Title, a 35-year-old new-media manager at a film production company in New York, has dropped his cable subscription and moved to watching most of his television online -- free. While shopping for a new laptop for his girlfriend recently, he sidestepped more expensive full-featured computers and picked a bare-bones, $200 Asus EeePC laptop, also known as a netbook. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Amid a deepening recession and an intensifying controversy over the health of its chief executive, Apple reported strong first-quarter profits on Wednesday that surprised analysts and handily beat Wall Street's expectations. Apple said robust sales of iPods and laptops buoyed the company amid a terrible holiday shopping season that hurt nearly all other technology and consumer electronics firms. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Heartland Payment Systems, a major payment processing company, disclosed a data breach on Monday that potentially exposed tens of millions of credit and debit cardholders to the risk of fraud in what could quickly become one of the country's biggest data compromises. Robert H. B. Baldwin Jr., Heartland's president and chief financial officer, said that his company believed the card numbers, expiration dates, and in some cases cardholder names were exposed after attacks on its computer systems at the one point where data had been unencrypted. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Piping Internet video into a television seems as if it should be simple -- after all, a screen is a screen. But consumer electronics and media companies have been moving toward that combination with painstaking caution, both because of technical limitations and to protect their existing business models. Now, with an Internet start-up's hubris and whimsical name, an 11-employee New York company called Boxee is barging into the fray. It is treading over the carefully negotiated business arrangements of much larger companies and garnering accolades from tech-heads for doing what the big guys have failed to do. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

It has been in the air for some time, but Apple can dodge the question no longer: How important is Steven P. Jobs to its future? By all accounts, Mr. Jobs's perfectionism, autocratic managerial style and disregard for conventional wisdom are at the heart of Apple's remarkable streak of success. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Casting a pall over one of the world's most closely watched companies, Steven P. Jobs, chief executive of Apple, said on Wednesday that he was taking a leave of absence because of health concerns. Mr. Jobs wrote in a letter to Apple employees, released after the markets closed, that he had learned over the last week that his health problems were ''more complex'' than he originally thought. He said he planned to return to Apple at the end of June and in the meantime would hand day-to-day control of Apple over to Timothy D. Cook, its longtime chief operating officer. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Internet may not be such a dangerous place for children after all. A task force created by 49 state attorneys general to look into the problem of sexual solicitation of children online has concluded that there really is not a significant problem. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Internet may not be such a dangerous place for children after all. A task force created by 49 state attorneys general to look into the problem of sexual solicitation of children online has concluded that there really is not a significant problem. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Why can't the most powerful person in the world keep his BlackBerry? President-elect Barack Obama, who will take the oath of office next week, has repeatedly acknowledged a strong attachment to his Verizon BlackBerry 8830 World Edition smartphone, a k a the BarackBerry. But in an interview last week, Mr. Obama lamented that the Secret Service and his lawyers appeared to be winning the battle to deny him this electronic link to friends, family and news of the larger world. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Netflix's Founder on the Future of TV In the last year, Reed Hastings, above, the founder and chief executive of Netflix, has moved the company far beyond those familiar red envelopes. The company's Watch Instantly video library, which allows subscribers to select from around 12,000 movies and TV shows to stream on demand over the Internet, is now available on TiVo, Xbox and a variety of Blu-ray players. Mr. Hastings was at the Consumer Electronics Show last week in Las Vegas talking about Netflix's availability on LG's new line of broadband HDTVs. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In moves that will help shape the online future of the music business, Apple said Tuesday that it would remove anticopying restrictions on all of the songs in its popular iTunes Store and allow record companies to set a range of prices for them. Beginning this week, three of the four major music labels -- Sony Music Entertainment, Universal Music Group and Warner Music Group -- will begin selling music through iTunes without digital rights management software, or D.R.M., which controls the copying and use of digital files. The fourth, EMI, was already doing so. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Steven P. Jobs, the chief executive of Apple, sought to put to rest persistent speculation about his health on Monday, disclosing in a public letter that a hormone problem -- and not a recurrence of cancer -- had contributed to his very visible weight loss over the last year. Mr. Jobs lamented that his decision not to give his usual keynote address at the annual Macworld Expo this week in San Francisco ''set off another flurry of rumors about my health, with some even publishing stories of me on my deathbed.'' [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Publisher Ends Its Experiment [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The biggest news at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last January was not the birth of a new product but the death of one. A decision by Warner Brothers to withdraw support for the HD DVD video disc format sent shock waves through the electronics industry and appeared to hand the future of home entertainment to Blu-ray, a rival format. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Those who want to bring the wide world of Web video to their television screens usually need a separate device -- a video-game console, DVD player or set-top box with Internet access. Now they will be able to take a more direct route. LG Electronics, the third-largest television manufacturer in terms of United States sales, will announce on Monday a line of televisions that can directly receive Internet video in addition to satellite and cable signals. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]