The world’s largest Internet search company, Google, today unveiled a new HTML5-powered news and media aggregator for mobile and tablet devices, Google Currents, that elegantly displays user customized content from a number of sources, including from Google News, Google Reader, RSS Feeds, and even the company’s latest social network Google+.

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Moments ago, Rockstar Games, the maker of the popular game series Grand Theft Auto, unveiled the first trailer to the forthcoming game, GTA V.

The setting in GTA V is based in Los Angeles (San Andreas), the same place GTA 3 was based on, but GTA V will include multiple areas. We can also see from the trailer that there are animals in the game now and there are different types of planes players could use. This title will be a lot more comprehensive compared to previous titles and we will get a closer look as new trailers are released.

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The world’s largest online search engine, Google, is now indexing Facebook comments that are posted using the Facebook Commenting plugin on websites that use the plugin to power their commenting system.

If you use your Facebook account to post a comment on a website that uses Facebook Comments, your comment (with your name) can now be indexed by Google’s web spiders and will be directly ranked and searchable in Google’s index.

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About a few weeks after the iPhone 4S was announced, hackers have been trying to fully jailbreak the new smartphone and to also port the new voice assistant system, Siri, to previous generation iOS devices.

Troughton-Smith was the first person to port Siri to the iPhone 4, but the system was not functional since it required authentication with Apple servers, only the user interface was working.

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Apple "Slide to Unlock" patent image

In 2007 at the MacWorld Expo, former Apple chief executive Steve Jobs took to the stage to unveil the iPhone for the first time, and during that unveiling the Slide to Unlock gesture on the iPhone was first shown to the world.

At the time, Jobs touted the feature as a seamless and elegant fix to an otherwise common annoyance: unknowingly pressing buttons on your phone while it is tucked away in your pocket.

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Apple's iCloud setup screen on the iPhone

During the live “Let’s Talk iPhone” event at Apple’s Cupertino headquarters moments ago, Scott Forstall has confirmed that Apple will be making available iOS 5 for the following Apple devices on October 12:

- iPhone 4S
- iPhone 4
- iPhone 3GS
- iPad 2
- iPod touch (4th and 3rd generation only)

Apple’s new iOS 5 operating system will be available on October 12 for users to update straight from iTunes for their respective devices.

Apple also revealed that its iCloud service would also be available on October 12 as well.

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Demonstration of how Apple’s FaceTime works on iOS devices, which is now also supported with Mac computers. Source: CNet

A look at the current BlackBerry Messenger service. Source: RIM

RIM’s overhauled BlackBerry Bold 9900, includes capacitive display and keyboard. Source: RIM, via Bloomberg

The Ontario-based maker of the BlackBerry smartphone, Research In Motion Ltd, is working on a new communications platform that will include video chat capabilities directly from BlackBerry Messenger to compete with Apple’s FaceTime video chat service, according to a person familiar with the plans that spoke to us on condition of anonymity because the plans were not yet made public.

The platform will only support QNX-powered BlackBerry smartphones that will include a front-facing camera for video chat.

The delayed release of the first QNX BlackBerry smartphone is likely the result of compatibility issues with RIM’s BlackBerry Enterprise Server platform.

The first QNX powered BlackBerry smartphone will be released near the end of the first quarter of 2012 and will include the new communications platform complete with a front-facing camera, according to the same source. It is unclear if current BlackBerry OS 7 powered devices would support the application with limited functionality.

The latest U.S. mobile subscriber market share data published by comScore puts RIM’s platform market share down at 23.4% in June 2011, compared to Google at 40.1% and Apple at 26.6%, respectively.

RIM’s dated portfolio of devices have pushed consumers to competing platforms that offer a super user experience with push email, which largely explains the decline in RIM’s stock price as well. Consumers and businesses alike have largely been loyal to the BlackBerry platform because of BlackBerry Messenger (BBM).

Apple has announced iMessage, which largely offers the same functionality as BBM, complete with Delivered and Read receipts, for iOS 5 powered devices, which includes the iPad, the current iPhone 4 and the upcoming iPhone 5 that is expected to launch in mid October of this year.

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The world’s largest software vendor, Microsoft Corporation, today announced the company has set up a massive $250,000 fund for its Blue Hat contest as part of the company’s latest efforts to challenge developers to enhance security for the world’s most popular operating system, Microsoft Windows.

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The world’s largest online search engine, Google Inc., is now subject of a U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) review, after the agency officially announced the formal investigation last Friday.

Users do have many alternatives to finding information online, from other search engines, including Microsoft Bing, to specialized search engines that retrieve information from particular databases, like financial information from the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

Although far from perfect, the reality today is that Google’s superior algorithmic technologies make the search engine the go-to place for online search – giving the company 65-percent market share of the U.S. Internet search market alone, and a whopping 84-percent of the global search market share.

Google maintains the company is exceedingly transparent in how it ranks search results (but there’s evidence it seems to favor top sites – that’s a different topic), and that it clearly labels and differentiates paid advertisements from organic search results (fine). However, as nice as that may be, the primary reason behind the investigation stems from more significant and potentially illegally activities in the way the company generates revenue.

Most of Google’s revenue is generated from its online advertising business. In the latest quarterly earnings (Q1 2011), Google reported $8.58-billion in gross revenue, up 27% from the same period last year. $8.306-billion of which was generated from advertising, that represents over 96.7-percent of total revenue for the period.

The issue is that a significant portion of Google’s advertising revenue could be generated from non-legitimate companies that advertise illegal products and services to U.S. consumers. For example, it is difficult to miss advertisements on Google-owned webpages that offer cheap drugs without prescriptions – an illegal activity – that Google in the process could be greatly profiting while essentially promoting the operations of the illegal enterprises.

Google maintains the company takes aggressive action through developed systems to identify, mitigate, and remove illegal advertisements, but the company has not been very transparent as to how successful it really is at identifying those ads. More recently, Google tweaked its systems (dubbed Panda update) to demote spam sites, and low quality websites from its index, a move that changed over 10-percent of U.S. search results. Google has also filed lawsuits against counterfeit pharmacies in the past that used its advertising platform Google AdWords.

The U.S. Justice Department has already launched an investigation specifically toward complaints of advertisements relating to illegal drugs. In that case, Google has earmarked $500-million toward a possible settlement with the U.S. Justice Department, where if the fine is paid, would make it one of the largest fines ever paid by a U.S. firm to the U.S. government.

Although Google claims to be transparent, it is not as transparent as perhaps it should be in many different functional areas: ranking organic search results, ranking sources in Google News, censoring search results abroad, promoting its own offerings, and possibly most importantly: mitigating profit from illegal advertisements. Now, the last time I checked, if I promoted the sale of illegal/counterfeit drugs (even if I didn’t have proper knowledge of the law), it is an illegal act, and as far as I’m concerned, there is (or, at least there shouldn’t be) no difference between me, you, Google, or any other organization.

It could be argued that Google is simply an advertising medium criminals are using, and that if Google begun censoring which types of advertisements can/cannot be shown (especially given Google’s near monopoly of the online advertising market), then we’re just heading down the Big Brother road. Rather, it is the government’s responsibility to identify, shut down, and prosecute those responsible for selling illegal drugs.

Google says the company would fully cooperate with the current FTC investigation, and that it strongly believes its principles will “stand up to scrutiny”.

The world’s largest consumer electronics retailer in the world, Best Buy Co. Inc., will launch a new cloud-based music service, Music Cloud, in the United States, which will directly compete against a number of new cloud products from top competitors including Amazon’s, Google’s, and Apple’s cloud products.

Best Buy already operates a cloud-based music service in the United Kingdom, My Music Anywhere UK, which allows consumers to stream their media files through the cloud to a variety of supported devices, including the Apple iPhone, RIM BlackBerry devices, and Google Android devices, among others.

Best Buy plans to expand My Music Anywhere to the United States as a rebranded product under the “Music Cloud” name. Sources that spoke on condition of anonymity because the plans were private, said the service would launch by the end of this year.

Best Buy has secured agreements with a number of record labels, including Sony Universal, EMI, and Warner Music, among others.

More than 6-million titles are already part of the Music Cloud library, and the service will even allow users to upload songs that are not already available in the cloud.

Consumers also have the option to purchase music directly from Best Buy Music Cloud, with the tracks automatically syncing with the cloud service.

The news comes as the popular European music service, Spotify, just closed a massive $100-million round of venture capital financing, a round that was led by Accel Ventures, DST, among other investors, valuing the company at $1-billion.

Spotify is widely believed to launch in the United States by the end of this year as the company has already secured agreements with three of the top four record labels in the U.S.

Although Spotify launched in Europe well over a year ago, the service could have been a viable competitor against iTunes as it offered a number of added features, including the ability to upload music to the cloud – however, that opportunity now seems to have all but passed with the Apple iCloud announcement.

The streaming media cloud market place has very quickly become saturated with products from top tech companies, including Amazon, Google (see our previous coverage of Google Music), Apple, Microsoft, among other smaller players, including Spotify, and now most recently, Best Buy.

The Best Buy stock (NYSE:BBY) closed up 330 basis points to close out this week’s trading at $31.01 per share.