San Francisco - In his latest effort to control use of his music and likeness on the Internet, recording artist Prince has served a lawsuit on the creators of a 81-track cover song tribute compilation -- made in honor of Prince's 50th birthday on June 7 -- and demanded that all copies be destroyed, The Daily Swarm reported, citing the Norwegian daily Dagbladet.
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Mountain View, Calif. - Completing a nearly year-long search, Google has named Bell Canada executive Patrick Pichette to become its new senior vice president and CFO. [more..]

West Hollywood, Calif. - IAC's Ticketmaster announced on Thursday that it has won a default judgment and permanent injunction against RMG Technologies, a company it said was offering software that allowed ticket brokers to improperly access its site. [more..]

New York - XM Satellite Radio announced on Thursday that it has settled a lawsuit brought by EMI Music Publishing over the Pioneer Inno, a portable satellite radio with advanced recording features. [more..]

Marietta, Ga. - Amazon.com has acquired Marietta, Ga.-based Fabric.com, an online fabric store offering custom measured and cut fabrics, as well as patterns, sewing tools and accessories. [more..]

New York - Vitrue, an Atlanta-based provider of social media marketing technology, has acquired UGENmedia, a New York-based social media marketer. [more..]

Ithaca, N.Y. - Instinctiv, the developer of an application for Apple's iPhone that recommends songs from a user's own library for listening, has raised $750,000 in seed funding from backers including Cayuga Venture Fund, Rosetech Ventures and a group of strategic angel investors. [more..]

San Francisco - RateItAll, a distributed consumer rating Web application that lets users, find, share and solicit opinions on any topic, has raised an undisclosed sum of funding from investors including Accelerator Ventures, JAIC America, Pacific I&T Ventures and Eric Di Benedetto. [more..]

One important source of traffic is social networks, and in May 2008 these accounted for 6.37% of upstream traffic to websites in our Apparel and Accessories category, blogs Hitwise's Robin Goad. [more..]

Looking at it from the other perspective, MySpace accounted for 40% of upstream visits to RockYou last week and 45% of visits to Slide.com. Facebook accounted for 2.39% of visits to Rock You and and 0.65% to Slide.com, blogs Heather Hopkins. [more..]

San Francisco - Facebook has suspended third party developer Slide's "Top Friends" application, after an independent programmer found a way to exploit the application so that anyone could view the birthdays, gender and relationship status of any Facebook user, as well as who is in their list of Top Friends, CNET News.com reported. [more..]

Los Angeles - Coldplay's new album "Viva la Vida or Death And All His Friends" sold 288,000 digital copies in its first week in the U.S., some 275,000 of which are thought to have been sold at Apple's iTunes Store -- breaking the retailer's pre-sale and first-week sales records, Digital Music News reported. [more..]

Los Angeles - News Corp.'s MySpace announced on Thursday that it partnered with NBC News and MSNBC.com for a "Decision '08 Convention Contest," which will award two citizen journalists credentials to attend the Republican or Democratic National Conventions in the fall. [more..]

New York - Rolling Stone recently posted an interview with Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama, and reports that his iPod contains songs from artists including Stevie Wonder, Bob Dylan, Elton John, Earth, Wind and Fire, Jay-Z, Howlin' Wolf, Yo-Yo Ma and Sheryl Crow. [more..]