The app can identify the TV show or movie that's playing down to the airing, episode and time of a program, for shows that are up to 5 years old. The app also produces recommendations for what to watch, based on what it identifies as a user's interests and what a user's friends have watched.

"Relying on social channels as a means for discovering content -- whether it's on a PC, mobile
device, or TV -- is rapidly on the rise," Bill Shaughnessy, Yahoo's senior vice president of product management, said in a statement. "IntoNow's technology combines the ability to check in to what a consumer is watching, engage in conversations and find related content.

"The IntoNow application the team has built clearly demonstrates the opportunities the technology presents across Yahoo's network, especially in regards to our video content, search, mobile and Connected TV experiences. We are excited to have the IntoNow team join Yahoo as we continue to build out these experiences."

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Image: Screen shots of the IntoNow app on an iPhone. Credit: Apple/IntoNow

Barnes & Noble's Nook Color gained a few new features on Monday that push the device more into the classification of a tablet computer and not simply another e-reader.

Among the additions is a store for buying applications, which Barnes & Noble is calling Nook Apps; apps for email, calendars and contacts; support for Adobe Air and Flash; and a new Nook social networking app.

One thing that isn't changing, however, is the price -- $249 for the 7-inch touch-screen device, which features 8GB of storage.

The updates come as the Nook Color is being switched over to a newer version of Google's Android operating system, called Froyo. Unlike the Honeycomb software, which was designed specifically to run on tablets, Froyo was designed for phones but is on many tablets, such as the Samsung Galaxy Tab.

But while the Nook Color can now run Android Froyo, it won't be running all Android apps. Instead, Barnes & Noble is asking developers to optimize their apps for the Nook Color and submit them through the Nook Apps store, rather than simply allowing users to download apps from the Android Market.

As of Monday, 125 apps were available in the Nook Apps store, including Angry Birds, one of the more popular games available on tablets and smartphones nowadays. Other apps include Pandora Internet radio, the game Uno, the cooking app Epicurious and the as-seen-on-iPad news app Pulse.

Barnes & Noble is also taking a stab at building its own social network among Nook users called Nook Friends.

Using a Nook Friends app, Nook users can see what their friends are reading, read reviews of books, loan books to each other, share quotes from a book, list their progress in a book and recommend a title to a buddy.

In another nod to social networking, Nook users can now "like" titles in the device's bookstore app, with the liking showing up on a person's Facebook page.

The Nook Color updates, which are free, are being pushed to users via Wi-Fi beginning this week or available for manual download at www.nookcolor.com/update.

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Image: Angry Birds running on a Nook Color tablet from Barnes & Noble. Credit: Barnes & Noble

Google, a titan of a tech company with the leading search engine and smartphone OS among its successes, is looking to become the leader in business applications based in the cloud.

The Mountain View, Calif., firm is banking that its Cloud Connect software, which allows users to sync Microsoft Office documents with its own Google Docs suite, will be a major part of its moves to own the enterprise space.

However, just a little over a year ago, Cloud Connect was called DocVerse and it wasn't in Google's stable of Web-based apps.

When Google bought DocVerse in March 2010 for a reported price of about $25 million, it was a start-up just 2 1/2 years old that had raised about $1.3 million in capital, looking to push Microsoft Office users into the cloud.

Started by two former Microsoft employees, Shan Sinha and Alex DeNeui, DocVerse's software was a plug-in for Microsoft Office that allowed users to collaborate with one another by saving a version of whatever document they were working on to cloud-based servers.

Sinha and DeNeui, and DocVerse's team of about a dozen employees, built the plug-in to enable themselves and others to escape having to constantly email attachments of Office files to one another when they were working on documents together.

"We thought of our product as a sort of set of training wheels for the cloud," Sinha said in a recent interview with the Technology blog. "What we did, the way I like to describe it was, we made Microsoft Office work more like Google Docs. We were building into Office the functionality that Google Docs offered -- using the cloud to let multiple people work with multiple documents at the same time."

DocVerse employees had a few friends at Google who, from time to time, would lend advice to the San Francisco start-up. And Google, Sinha said, liked what it saw.

"Google's goal was to enable collaboration between all these different users -- those who are using Microsoft Office and those who are using Google Docs -- and we shared that vision," he said. "It made a lot of sense for us to move to doing what we were doing as a part of Google, rather than outside of Google."

Nokia and Microsoft said on Thursday that the two companies have signed an agreement worth "billions of dollars" to put the Windows Phone OS on Nokia handsets, along with other collaborations.

"In recognition of the unique nature of Nokia's agreement with Microsoft and the contributions that Nokia is providing, Nokia will receive payments measured in the billions of dollars," the two companies said in a joint statement.

However, Nokia won't be the only company getting paid in the now-official deal.

The two tech giants said Microsoft was going to receive "a running royalty from Nokia for the Windows Phone platform, starting when the first Nokia products incorporating Windows Phone ship."

Just how much the royalties would add up to wasn't disclosed, but the companies said "the royalty payments are competitive and reflect the large volumes that Nokia expects to ship, as well as a variety of other considerations related to engineering work to which both companies are committed.

"Microsoft delivering the Windows Phone platform to Nokia will enable Nokia to significantly reduce operating expenses."

The exact length of the long-term deal between Microsoft and Nokia wasn't disclosed Thursday, but the first Nokia phones running the Windows Phone OS are scheduled to land in stores by 2012.

The two companies also said they've made "significant progress on the development of the first Nokia products incorporating Windows Phone" and have assigned hundreds of employees on getting the new smartphones out into the market.

The agreement also calls for the upcoming launch of a new Nokia-branded "global application store" built on the Windows Marketplace infrastructure to sell apps for Nokia devices.

The new Nokia storefront for mobile apps will allow developers to publish and distribute applications "through a single developer portal to hundreds of millions of consumers" that use the Windows Phone OS, Nokia's internally built Symbian OS and other Nokia phones, the statement said.

Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker, who worked together in 1990s during the early days of the music-sharing application Napster, have teamed up again and are building a new video chat project called Yo.

A source close to Fanning and Parker told The Times that Parker has been devoting a lot of time to Yo. Parker was previously Facebook's president and was recently played by Justin Timberlake in "The Social Network," a movie about the start of the world's most popular social media site.

Fanning is also involved with Path, former Facebook executive Dave Morin's photo-centric social networking start-up. 

Parker, who is a managing partner at the Founders Fund venture capital firm, also works with Joe Green's Causes, a Facebook app that connects users with various causes and organizations so they can donate time or money.

The website TechCrunch reported Friday that its co-editor and founder, Michael Arrington, is one of Yo's investors.

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Photo: Napster founder Shawn Fanning, 20, attends a press conference in San Francisco on Feb. 12, 2001, a short time after a ruling by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals which said that Napster, the on-line music down-loading service, must prevent subscribers from sharing copywritten material. Credit: Lou Dematteis/Reuters

Science fiction fans who have dreamed of having "the force" are in luck.

Two apps -- controlled and operated by mental power -- are now on sale in the Apple App Store from app developer MindGames in Iceland.

The Times previously reported on the mind-reading trend. The technology works using headsets that read brain waves and are essentially simplified and portable versions of electroencephalograph — or EEG — machines used in hospitals for decades to record brain activity.

One game app, dubbed W.I.L.D., rolled out last month for the iPhone and iPad for $4.99. By concentrating and relaxing, players navigate dream landscapes and complete tasks like putting out fires, bending spoons and creating galaxies "with the power of your mind,"  MindGames said in a statement.

The company's first app launched in December. Tug of Mind purports to train users how to relax under pressure. After uploading a headshot -- of an ex-boyfriend, say, or a mother-in-law -- the photo is transformed into an angry avatar that screams insults (you prerecord the message). The avatar starts smiling if the player remains calm; keep it up and the game is won. Price tag: $4.99.

Both games require a headset that reads brain waves, such as the Neurosky MindWave ($99.95) or the PLX XWave (price starts at $99.99).

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Photo: Demonstration of Tug of Mind app. Credit: MindGames via Apple App Store

Apple announced Final Cut Pro X, a major update of video-editing software used widely by filmmakers, journalists and video professionals alike, at an event in Las Vegas on Tuesday night, but on Wednesday, the tech giant offered little information.

The announcement came in a presentation at the National Assn. of Broadcasters trade show in Las Vegas. Peter Steinauer, Final Cut Pro's video architect, and Randy Ubillos, Apple's chief architect for video applications, showed off the new software in front of a crowd of video professionals, according to multiple reports online.

But on Wednesday, Apple hadn't updated its website with any information on Final Cut Pro X, and company officials weren't available for comment either.

People in attendance at the event, however, have reported on the new software themselves, posting cellphone photos to Facebook and videos to Twitter of Steinauer and Ubillos offering a preview of Final Cut Pro X.

At the event, Steinauer and Ubillos said Final Cut Pro X was rebuilt from the current version, which is based off the first iteration of Final Cut, which was released in 1999, according to a report from Gary Adcock, a Chicago-based film and television consultant, published by PC World magazine.

The two also said Final Cut Pro X would be released in June for download from the Mac App Store at a price of $299, PC World reported.

A drop to $299 for Final Cut Pro is dramatic. Currently, Final Cut Pro is available only in Apple's Final Cut Studio package, which sells for $999.99 and includes Motion 4 for graphics and animation, Soundtrack Pro 3 for audio editing, Color 1.5 for color correction and Compressor 3.5 and DVD Studio Pro 4, which allow users to create versions of finished videos for digital delivery or DVDs.

Reports on the Final Cut Pro X preview haven't made mention as to whether or not the other Final Cut Studio software would receive updates too.

Final Cut Pro's major competitors could end up far and away more expensive when compared with a $299 price.

A new copy of Avid's Media Composer 5.5 video-editing software, also a very popular platform, sells for between $2,295 and $2,495. Adobe's Premiere Pro 5.5 software can be bought for $799, or subscribed to at a cost of $39 per month.

Final Cut Pro X will be the first 64-bit version of the software that can use as many as eight separate processor cores (on computers that have that many) and take advantage of more than 4GB of RAM. The current release of Final Cut Pro is built on Apple's 32-bit architecture and was restricted to using a maximum of 4 GB of RAM, PC World said.

The update should allow editors to shorten the time they spend editing video projects using Final Cut, as would a widely reported feature -- background rendering, which allows files to adapt to changes made while an edit is still taking place. Currently, Final Cut users have to stop their editing and wait for rendering to complete before continuing.

Final Cut Pro X will also feature automatic audio cleanup, advanced color correction tools, new people detection, the ability to decipher and sort shorts based on type (wide shot, close-up, etc.), automatic audio cleanup and "range-based keywording," which gives editors the ability to tag selected clips of video with keywords so they can easily find and sort files, according to PC World.

And the new software also will include a feature that will prevent audio and video tracks from falling out of sync with one another, according to a video of the event posted by Twitter user, director and editor Rob Imbs, which can be seen below.

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-- Nathan Olivarez-Giles

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Photo: Randy Ubillos, Apple's chief architect for video applications, shows off Final Cut Pro X before a crowd at the National Assn. of Broadcasters trade show in Las Vegas on April 12, 2011. Credit: Rob Imbs via TwitVid.

"This American Life," the popular radio show and usual home for the whimsy of host Ira Glass, is  coming to the iPad.

The iPad app, launched Tuesday, will cost more than the iPhone or Android apps already available ($4.99 versus $2.99 for the smartphones), but comes equipped with more features, including the ability to bookmark favorite shows, download three episodes at a time for off-line listening and select individual stories within an episode with a button.

Other features included:

• Each new episode is automatically added to the app
• Access to the entire archive of episodes from the show
• Audio and video extras
• Link to weekly live stream

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Photo: "This American Life" iPad app. Credit: "This American Life" website.

Now even listening to tunes may unwittingly leak personal info.

Pandora, a free Internet radio service that streams and recommends songs, has an app for Android phones that finds, gathers and transmits "mass quantities" of personal data to advertising agencies, according to Veracode, an application security company that analyzed the app.

The personal information includes: your birthday, gender, postal code, a phone's unique device ID and even your GPS coordinates, according to Veracode.

"In isolation some of this data is uninteresting, but when compiled into a single unifying picture, it can provide some significant insight into a person's life," concluded Veracode researcher Tyler Shields in a Tuesday blog post.

Shields suggested that a person's current location, coupled with their gender, age and IP address, can be compiled "to determine who someone is, what they do for a living, who they associate with and any number of other traits about them."

While Pandora does request some personal information to customize music streams for users, Veracode said the music service was also sending data, possibly without even knowing it, to advertisers.

"The application developers may not even be aware of the privacy violations they are introducing by using third-party advertising libraries," he said. "They may merely think they are getting [the agreed amount] per ad impression, not that the ad library is leaking significant information about the user."

Veracode discovered that the Pandora app for Android was "integrated" into five advertising libraries, including AdMarvel, AdMob, comScore, Google.Ads and Medialets. In some cases, an ad library attempted to "capture GPS location information on a continuous looping mechanism," Shields said.

"I don't know about you, but that feels a little Orwellian to me," he wrote.

While apps that collect personal data to target ads and sell products is nothing new, they may come under increasing scrutiny as lawmakers look into how such information is collected, used and tracked.

Pandora revealed Monday in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing that it had been subpoenaed to turn over documents by a federal grand jury investigating how personal data is shared among smartphone applications.

The music service was not "a specific target of the investigation" and subpoenas were handed out "on an industry wide basis," the filing said.

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Photo: An Android phone running the Pandora app. Credit: Pandora

Time Warner Cable and Viacom are heading to the courts for a tussle over live video streaming on the Apple iPad.

The brouhaha began last month when TWC released an app allowing its cable subscribers to watch live television on their iPads (such as "Futurama" on Comedy Central), sparking a debate over content and licensing rights amid the skyrocketing popularity of mobile devices.

On Thursday, the two companies countersued in the U.S. District Court in New York's southern district, according to statements from both companies.

TWC "filed a request for declaratory judgment" and asked the court to rule that the cable company had the right to transmit TV programming to any device for customers, the company said. Viacom, in its suit, argued that it has always been device-specific when negotiating distribution rights to its content and seeks damages for TWC's alleged breach of licensing and distribution agreements.

Since the TWCableTV app launched, the cable company has removed several channels to appease content providers.

"We have steadfastly maintained that we have the rights to allow our customers to view this programming in their homes, over our cable systems, without artificial limits on the screens they can use to do so, and we are asking the court to confirm our view," said Marc Lawrence-Apfelbaum, general counsel of Time Warner, in a statement Thursday.

Viacom shot back Thursday and deemed TWC's actions "brazen" and concluded that TWC could afford to negotiate additional agreements to provide programming on other devices besides television "without passing along any additional costs to its customers."

"Viacom has made clear that it is willing to discuss extension of similar rights to others -- including TWC. What Viacom cannot do, however, is permit one of its contracting partners, TWC, to unilaterally change the terms of its contractual relationship," Viacom's lawsuit said.

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Photo: Cast of the TV show "Futurama" on Comedy Central, one of the TV shows being streamed live to iPads. Credit: Comedy Central.