Texas,United States

Facebook Connect and OS 3.0 are coming to Apple's iPhone, and there are rumors of more additions.

Late last week, Apple issued invitations for a special event Tuesday in Cupertino, Calif., to discuss its new operating system and a new software development kit (SDK) for the iPhone. A variety of rumors have been populating the Web in anticipation of the OS 3.0 release.

Background Processing, Search, Copy and Paste

In the wake of news that Google is introducing behavioral targeting of advertisements, a Democratic congressman from Virginia is renewing his suggestion that new consumer-protection legislation may be needed to rein in data collection.

Rep. Rick Boucher (D-Va.) said he is working with Rep. Cliff Stearns (R-Fla.) and Rep. Joe Barton (R-Texas), to craft a bill to require online companies to notify consumers of tracking activity. All three congressmen are members of the Internet subcommittee in the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which Boucher chairs.

A Recycled Proposal

Trendy California isn't a trendsetter when it comes to relying on cell phones. And while the 1987 movie "Wall Street" helped introduce the then-brick-sized mobile phone to popular culture, New York and other Northeast states lag in dropping landlines. Surprisingly, Oklahoma and Utah lead in going wireless, according to federal estimates released Wednesday.

 From Orion:

Melissa Healy in the Los Angeles Times:

The software company Spiceworks has a small audience at small and midsize businesses that technology advertisers are eager to reach: the information technology managers at those firms.

Spiceworks started in 2006 in Austin, Texas, in response to complaints among information technology professionals about the lack of a single application to manage their company networks and the hours they spent scanning Google for solutions to technology problems.

The auditions are over. The first YouTube Symphony Orchestra -- selected by viewers of the Web site -- will consist of more than 90 musicians from some 30 countries.

More than 3,000 videos were submitted by amateur and professional musicians from 70-plus countries. Musicians from professional orchestras including the London and San Francisco symphonies and the Berlin, Hong Kong and New York philharmonic orchestras picked 200 finalists. The winners were then selected by voters on YouTube.

Maybe Tony Soprano was onto something. As the lead mobster in "The Sopranos," a longtime U.S. television series, he and his crew often turned to prepaid mobile phones, presumably to avoid wiretaps.

But now these pay-as-you-go phones are winning over fans for different reasons -- recession-battered consumers are buying them as a way to cut costs and avoid the lengthy contracts and occasional billing surprises that come with traditional mobile phone plans.

Two leading Republican lawmakers from Texas, Sen. John Cornyn and Rep. Lamar Smith, have filed identical legislation in their houses of Congress that would require a broad range of Internet service providers to maintain logs of user data for up to two years.

From Wikipedia: