Consumer content

Microsoft said 50 million Halo units have been sold since the franchise's launch in 2001, and that gamers have spent over 5 billion hours playing the title on Xbox Live. Microsoft reported these figures in a press email release announcing a Halo challenge tournament, although the relevant section isn't available online. We've included it below.

Although Microsoft didn't say how many Halo 4 units have sold since that game's launch last month, the company did report in October that at that time, total Halo franchise unit sales reached 46 million. Given that, it appears Halo … Read more

Rolling Stones fans may find they can get what they want after all, namely a live stream of the group's upcoming 50th anniversary concert.

Streamed by Yahoo and entertainment company WWE, the pay-per-view special will be shown on Saturday, December 15, at 6 p.m. PT via Yahoo Music. Dubbed "One More Shot: The Rolling Stones Live," the concert will be the latest in a series of events marking this year's 50th anniversary of the group's debut.

Fans who tune in to the stream at 5:30 p.m. can catch a special called "… Read more

PARIS -- Licensing constraints mean that Europeans who want to try the Pandora music service had best be patient, Chief Technology Officer Tom Conrad said today.

"The reason we're not here today is because of music licensing," Conrad said here at the LeWeb 2012 show. In the United States, Pandora can use a statutory licensing provision that "allows us to do what do without having directly negotiate licenses with record labels. It's very likely in other international settings we'll have to pursue direct licensing."

Direct licensing, a difficult series of negotiations between online … Read more

The turf battle between Instagram and Twitter shows the sites have the wrong priorities, said Matt Mullenweg, founder of Automattic and its WordPress.com blogging service.

There's a danger when a company focuses too much on its own properties and pleasing its own advertisers at the expense of giving its users what they need, Mullenweg said here at the LeWeb 2012 show. Those problems are what's afflicted microblogging site Twitter and photo-sharing service Instagram, which Facebook recently acquired.

Twitter has been restricting access to third-party tweeting software and limiting access that third-party companies such as Instagram get to … Read more

Holiday cybershoppers in the United States have opened up their wallets to the tune of $21.4 billion so far, a 14 percent gain over last year, according to ComScore.

Measuring from November 1 through December 2 -- the first 32 days of the 2012 holiday-shopping season -- ComScore found that more people are buying online. Stats showed a 9 percent rise in the number of buyers to 128.7 million.

People are also freer with their hard-earned dollars. The average online consumer has so far spent $159.90, a gain of 5 percent from last year. Specifically, the amount … Read more

It looks like a four-year-old industry is hijacking one that has been around for six decades.

According to mobile analytics firm Flurry, the time people spend on mobile apps is now nearly neck-in-neck with time spent watching television.

"With new content released via thousands of new apps each day, we expect this trend to continue," Flurry CEO Simon Khalaf wrote in a blog post today. "In fact, we ultimately expect apps on tablets and smartphones to challenge broadcast television as the dominant channel for media consumption."

You've heard it said countless times: A picture's worth a thousand words.

If you think that's not at least as true online as it is offline, you haven't been paying attention to the explosive machinations in the war for digital real estate going on in Silicon Valley over the last year or so.

Today, the tech world is all worked up over the latest in the slow-moving war of attrition between Instagram and Twitter. By cutting off Twitter Card integration, Instagram is hoping to wean its users off Twitter.

This is a seismic event, especially with … Read more

PARIS -- Dropbox plans to launch a version of its software that will let Windows 8 customers use the file-sharing service on the Microsoft's new operating system.

"We are going to be launching our client app for Windows 8," said Aditya Agarwal, Dropbox's vice president of engineering, speaking at the LeWeb conference here. The software will of course work in the traditional desktop mode shared with earlier Windows versions, but also with the new touch-centric user interface of Windows 8 spotlighted with Microsoft's new Surface tablet, he said.

The move isn't a major surprise; … Read more

From the minute I was able to put the personalized magazine app Zite on my iPhone, it became one of my indispensable tools.

Even if I glanced at it for just a few minutes at a bus stop, it was the best portal I had to the news I cared most about because it led me to stories from a wide variety of publications and on almost any topic I could want. And the more I used it, the more it knew what I wanted to read.

That was a year ago, and today, the iOS world can get its … Read more