MySpace Sold for $35 Million

The day that the web has been buzzing about has finally come: It seems that MySpace has been sold to an advertising network called Specific Media for a mere $35 million.

News Corp. declared it was ready to sell MySpace in an earnings call in February. The media company was reportedly hoping to get $100 million out of the sale.

News Corp bought the site for $580 million from its original owners, but MySpace's traffic has plummeted in recent years.

All Things Digital reports that the deal will close Wednesday but has not yet been signed. News Corp. will reportedly hold a 5% to 10% stake in the company.

It looks like MySpace is just about dead. what do you think?

New MacBook Air to launch later this month!

News out of the company's Taiwanese supply chain suggests that the new model will be available for sale later this month. According to typically reliable sources out of Taiwan, 380,000 of the new notebooks are on their way stateside.

The "refresh" — a term typically used by Apple to signal incremental hardware upgrades and additions — is expected to bring the Thunderbolt high speed transfer technology to the Air for the first time. The new laptops are also expected to get the top-of-the-line "Sandy Bridge" microprocessors from Intel, which should provide a generous speed boost to the already speedy hardware.

The MacBook Air is the lightweight brother of Apple's MacBook and MacBook Pro notebooks. It uses a solid state hard drive which doesn't spin like a typical disk drive, allowing the notebooks to be made much slimmer than a typical laptop, and also an order of magnitude faster. Apple hasn't officially announced the launch date of the refreshed Air line, but expect to hear more about it later this month.

Windows 8 is Coming! And Will Run on Multiple Devices

Barry Levine, newsfactor.com-On Wednesday, Microsoft demonstrated the next generation of its venerable operating system, which is expected to be launched next year.

But it may not be called Windows 8. In a posting on the company blog, corporate Vice President Julie Larson-Green noted that Windows 8 is the internal code name, and Microsoft is reimagining Windows "from the chip to the interface."

Small To Large Screens

She also noted that the next Windows will be applicable across a wide range of devices, from "touch-only small screens through to large screens, with or without a keyboard and mouse."

The demonstration was at the Computex trade show in Taipei, Taiwan. New approaches include a tile-based Start screen to launch apps, rather than the Windows Start menu. Live tiles show notifications, with up-to-date information from the apps. In a demonstration video released online by Microsoft, Windows User Experience Program Manager Jensen Harris said tiles are better than icons at showing the "personality" of apps.

A "snap" function allows a user to move one app partially onto the screen, leaving another one running in a dynamic window on the rest of the screen, as an aid to multitasking. The operating system can handle online-connected apps created in HTML5 and JavaScript. And in addition to running the kind of apps found on smartphones, the OS is optimized for touch-based interaction.

The company has also learned key lessons from previous major upgrades, in which customers often had to buy new machines and new applications. Although the company has said the OS has been reimagined at every level -- the kernel, networking, storage, devices, user interface -- Larson-Green said there is full compatibility with existing Windows 7 PCs, software and peripherals.

Microsoft said Windows 8 will run on a wide range of machines with the same system requirements or lower as Windows 7, and the user interface will automatically adapt to the available hardware.