MobileME, Pandora, and EA Games in Your Tech News

Get more at getthedaily.com

In the world of video games, industry giant Electronic Arts decided to not extend their bid for a sixth time to acquire “Grand Theft Auto” makers Take Two Interactive. When Take Two learned about the bigger company's decision, they offered to open up their books to EA. Most analysts believe that the companies need each other and any animosity caused by the negotiations will eventually be forgotten in hopes of closing-out a deal.

The Princeton Review is getting low marks from the public after a recent fiasco. Due to a problem with its website code, The Princeton Review unintentionally shared personal data about thousands of students publicly for seven weeks. Because of the code flaw, any web-searcher could easily access thousands of files on the site. Hardest hit were 34-thousand students from Sarasota, Florida and 74-thousand students from Fairfax County, Virginia, as data about gender, learning disabilities, birthdates, ethnicities, and test scores were on public display.

And there is more rotten news for Apple. The company's troubled MobileMe service is still causing so many problems that the company has announced they will offer users two more months of free service. MobileMe has only been available for a month and Apple had already given out a free month of the service because some MobileMe users had lost emails. The service has been so unreliable that Steve Jobs admitted in an email that MobileMe has not lived up to the company's high standards. Analysts believe that Apple overextended itself when releasing MobileMe the same day as putting out the new 3G iPhone, the iPhone 2.0 operating system, and the new App Store.

And in web radio, popular streaming radio sites like Pandora could be in big trouble if royalty laws are not changed. Last year, a federal panel ordered web radio broadcasters to pay twice the fees they were already paying, per song, per listener. While traditional radio doesn't pay such a fee and satellite radio pays a much lower one, web radio sites will see most of their revenue eaten up by the fees, with 70-percent of revenues going towards the fees. This week, California Representative Howard L. Berman is trying to make a last minute deal between webcasters and SoundExchange, the company that reps recording companies and artists. However, both sides have not yet budged. If an agreement is not reached, Pandora and other similar sites might simply have to shut down.