Bob Caswell

Apple today is introducing a new offering at its iTunes store. Called “Complete My Album,” the new service allows you to purchase the remaining songs of an album at a discount if you’ve already purchased singles from that album. So, for example, if you have already bought two songs for 99 cents, you could buy the rest of the album for $8.01.

Will you go back to buying music the old way? Will this help boost sales of albums? Probably not much, but it’s still a great option, anything that provides us with more flexibility in our music purchases is a good thing.

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The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) announced that it has reached 116 settlements after going after 400 students / computer users at 13 universities just a few weeks ago. More settlements are expected, as the RIAA sent out another batch of letters last week.

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Last week, 40,000+ students at Purdue (including myself) received a warning email. In short, stop illegal downloads, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) is coming. Purdue is advising all computer users to remove or at least partially disable any peer-to-peer file sharing software on their computers.

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Google often gets flak for having all its eggs in one basket, at least in terms of how it makes money. Current figures put advertising revenue at 97% to 98% of total revenue. So that has some critics asking what the search giant plants to do to diversify. But to clarify, we should distinguish between two types of diversification: 1) different types of advertising revenue (search, video, billboards, in-game, etc.) and 2) all other revenue (charging for premium services as an example: Picasa, Google Apps, etc.).

Google seems to be aggressively diversifying in one way while only dabbling in the other.

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Back in December 2006, I did a review of Norton 360 (the beta version) and pointed out a bunch of minor annoyances with the product. Since then, it has been met with glowing reviews by the big boys at CNET and PC Magazine. Interestingly enough, my 360 review is often the most popular article at Computers.net any given week.

I found that it shows up on the first page of Google results for “Norton 360″ and is the only site on that first page that has anything really bad to say let alone a place to leave anonymous comments. And there seem to be plenty of people frustrated, looking for some way to be heard.

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Whether or not Google has a phone in the works doesn’t seem to stop the world from wanting the search giant to have one. The Wall Street Journal (subscription required) has a piece out today that discusses the latest wannabe details of the “Google phone.” As of now, that particular WSJ article is listed at the top of the site’s “Today’s Most Popular” section. Here’s a compilation of what we know (don’t know?) about the Google phone:

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Comcast is busy negotiating with Microsoft so as to find a potential replacement for Google search on the Comcast.net portal. Comcast is the largest cable operator in the United States with over 24 million cable subscribers and is the second-largest high-speed Internet provider (second only to AT&T). Comcast.net receives around 15 million visitors per month and is one of the biggest non-Google sources of search queries handled by Google. Comcast is currently under contract with Google through the end of this year but appears to be less than satisfied for the following reasons:

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This one’s a classic in the never-ending Google vs. Microsoft saga. Microsoft’s CEO Steve Ballmer met with business students at Stanford University only to bash Google during the Q&A. He said things like, “Google built one very good business. They only have one thing they do. Everything else is sort of cute.” And in response to Google’s growth plan: “They are trying to double in a year… That’s insane in my opinion.”

Perhaps the funniest part of the story is that Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt was close by during the thrashing; he was eating lunch at the business school’s cafeteria.

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