The U.S. Justice Department on Wednesday opened a review of decades-old rules for paying licensing fees to songwriters and composers, a move that could affect royalties paid by Pandora Media (P), Apple (AAPL) and other music streamers. Competition among Internet music streamers has been intensifying, with Apple last year launching iTunes Radio and Google (GOOGL) launching its own radio service. Stockholm-based startup Spotify hit 40 million users
Cantor Fitzgerald analyst Brian White says the majority of accessory makers he interacted with at the Computex trade show in Taiwan on Wednesday have already begun production in support of a 4.7-inch iPhone. The current iPhone 5 series phones have a 4-inch display. But Apple (AAPL) is widely believed to be working on two larger iPhone 6 models — one with a 4.7-inch screen and the other with a 5.5-inch screen. “Also at Computex, we noticed that a few vendors had already started work on accessories for the 5.5-inch iPhone 6 and the pieces were available at the show,” White said in a research report. “Given the lack of data points in recent months around progress with the 5.5-inch iPhone 6 and growing skepticism in…
Microsoft’s Bing search engine celebrated its fifth anniversary on Tuesday, a day after it made big gains against rival Google on Apple’s software platforms. Microsoft (MSFT) launched Bing on June 3, 2009, with the mission of offering better Internet search results than search engine leader Google (GOOGL). To celebrate the 5-year milestone, Microsoft offered up a gallery of some of its most popular and notable Bing home pages. The Bing home page is known for presenting large, beautiful photos of landscapes and nature with interesting facts about them. “People consistently tell us how much they enjoy the rich imagery on our homepage,” the Bing team said in a blog post. On Monday, Apple (AAPL) executives showed how they have integrated Bing into the new Mac OS X release called Yosemite. Apple revealed that it has dropped Google in favor of Bing for its desktop search app called Spotlight, Search Engine…