>> Mark Licea: US and Cuba link up. YouTube disables video uploads in South Korea and soccer mom's love their second life. It's Tuesday April 14th Natali DelConte is out today. I'm Mark Licea and it's time to get loaded.
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>> Yesterday the Obama administration changed official US policy toward the island of Cuba. Under the new policy companies will be able to provide fiber optic and satellite facilities linking both countries. In addition satellite radio and television service providers will be able to obtain licenses to provide service in Cuba. People will also be able to export cell phones, computers, software and satellite receivers. This marks a massive change in US policy towards Cuba. [ Background music]What better way to help Cuban American relations than a phone call and the latest episodes of 2 and a 1/2 men. Rumors of a release date for the Palm Prie have hit the web. They're saying that the phone could be on shelves as early as May 17th. The blog Pre-thinking stated that Sprint is in the process of training their staff on the new Smartphone and other sources say Sprint is preventing employees from vacationing during the month of May. I just planned my vacation around the next iPhone launch, so it is a possibility although last month phone news said the launch could happen as late as June 29th, so don't hold your breath. [Background music] Sprint announced their pricing plan for the Prie in March but cost of the actual phone, still a mystery. Some users in Korea will no longer be able to comment and upload videos to YouTube. We mentioned in an earlier episode that the Korean government has made it mandatory for users that contribute videos or comments to the site to indicate their real name. This is all part of a new cyber deformation law that came into effect last month and it applies to sites that get over 100,000 unique visitors per day. In response to this Google removed these features on the Korean version of YouTube. We have a bias in favor of freedom of expression and are committed to openness. It's very important that if users want to be anonymous that they have that chance. Users in South Korea will still be able to comment and upload video but they'll have to change their preference settings to a country other than Korea, [Background music] but still what a bummer. Itunes made a big move earlier this month with the removal of DRM from its music store and the addition of tiered pricing. Well as far as the new pricing system goes, the response from users is not so good. Bilboard.biz reports the changes from last week show that several songs priced at $1.29 had dropped in comparison to the lower priced songs. The study doesn't take into account sales trends or media attention that could have had an effect on the sales but iTunes users could just be fickle. [Background music]Remember when we had to drive all the way to the store to get music and then pay for the whole album. In a big win from Microsoft, the company has sold a major portion of their advertising inventory to the Discovery channel. The one day campaign is designed to promote its television series Deadliest Catch. The companies have declined to say how much it will cost but starting today you'll see the ads for the show across MSN, MSN Mobile, Hotmail, live search and Xbox live. Their testing out some new advertising schemes such as allowing users to be reminded via text or emails to set their DVR's and they will also run [background music] a sweepstakes on Xbox live where users can earn points to buy games. First cell phones then net books and now sit top boxes. Rumors are afloat that Google's new operating system Android will be headed to a TV near you. The website Android guys is reporting that Motorola is building a television set top box for Japanese telephone and broadband provider KDDI. It will be dubbed the Ah [assumed spelling] Box and let users take their music and video content on the go. [Background music] The box will also let users rip CD's, play DVD's and upload videos for transfer to their mobile device. For those of you still using MySpace the company is launching a new light version of their typically bloated and messy profile pages. Users will be able to toggle between the full nausea inducing view and the light view which takes out the user's customizations. The feature is aimed towards users who have limited broadband access. For some international users this can be an issue but I think the vast majority of MySpace users have broadband access. Perhaps this is MySpace's cloaked attempt to finally clean up their profile pages. We were expecting eBay to sell off Skype, but they sold off StumbleUpon instead. This is a recommendation and discovery service that eBay bought in 2007. Like Skype they were never really able to integrate the service into their core business model so they're cleaning house. We don't know really how much they sold it for but we think they sold it back to the original founders and investors. Now this doesn't mean [Background music] they won't sell off Skype 2 it just means that StumbleUpon was the first man overboard. Internet addiction is not just a condition for teenagers. One of the largest growing demographics to become internet addicted are the soccer moms. Research from the Illinois Institute for Addiction Recovery shows that young new mothers are addicted to blogs, message boards and even second life. [Background music] Second life, cool. Those are all your headlines for today and thank you for watching, I'm Mark Licea with CNET TV and you've just been loaded.
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