Los Angeles - Indian billionaire Anil Dhirubhai Ambani has paid $325 million for a 50% stake in DreamWorks, director Steven Spielberg's film studio. DreamWorks has raised a total of $825 million, including $150 million from Disney, and debt from a number of banks. [more..]

Palo Alto, Calif. - Facebook, which recently passed MySpace as the most-visited social network in the U.S., now counts 250 million users, having added 50 million since early April, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced in a blog post on Wednesday. [more..]

McLean, Va. - In a hopeful sign for the newspaper industry, Gannett, the publisher of USA Today and 83 other daily papers, on Wednesday reported a second-quarter profit that easily topped the estimates of Wall Street analysts and sent company shares up more than 20% by midday. [more..]

San Francisco - A class action lawsuit has been filed against Amazon.com by the owner of a Kindle e-book reader, who says a cover for the device sold by Amazon can actually break the Kindle's screen, Reuters reported. [more..]

Reston, Va. - Microsoft saw its share of the U.S. search market rise 0.4% in June on buzz around its new Bing search engine, according to data from measurement firm comScore. [more..]

Los Angeles - Blogger Kevin Cogill, who was convicted of misdemeanor copyright infringement after admitting to posting tracks from the then-unreleased Guns N' Roses album "Chinese Democracy" online, has been sentenced to two months of home confinement and a year of probation, the Associated Press reported. [more..]

Stockholm, Sweden - The conviction of the operators of file-sharing hub The Pirate Bay, paired with a newly enacted law aimed at prosecuting suspected illegal file-swappers has pushed the level of file-sharing down by 40 to 50% in Sweden, the local Dagens Nyheter reported. [more..]

New York - U.S. companies raised $1.6 billion through 12 initial public offerings (IPOs) during the second quarter, marking the first quarterly increase in IPO activity since the fourth quarter of 2007, according to a new report by PricewaterhouseCoopers. [more..]

San Francisco - The online games more in South Korea, where broadband access is near-ubiquitous and PC ownership is 80%, grew by more than 20% in 2008, according to a report from market research firm Pearl Research. [more..]

New York - Time Warner's AOL has acquired mixed martial arts fighting site MMAFighting.com for an undisclosed sum. [more..]

Los Angeles - News Corp.'s FoxSports.com has partnered with OpenSports, a fantasy sports-focused online social network, in a deal that will see FoxSports.com take an equity stake in the company, Sports Business Journal reported. [more..]

London - Alterian, a provider of online marketing services, announced on Wednesday that it has acquired Techrigy, a provider of social media monitoring and analytics software. [more..]

Los Angeles - Apple has blocked the Palm Pre from being able to sync music from its iTunes application, a feature that Palm touted when the well-received smartphone was launched last month, Engadget reported. [more..]

New York - The most effective, and least annoying ad format for short-form online video is a five-second pre-roll, combined with a ten-second ad that overlays the bottom one-third of the screen, according to a study conducted by Viacom's MTV Networks and InsightExpress. [more..]

Mountain View, Calif. - Google has made its Google Voice service available to owners of BlackBerry and Android-powered smartphones, CNET News.com reported. [more..]

New York - Verizon has launched new social TV services for its FiOS subscribers, which will integrate Facebook, Twitter and Web video into the viewing experience. [more..]