YouTube has announced via a blog posting that it will start supporting the 1080p high definition format.

The company says if you have already uploaded videos in 1080p, they will be converted automatically in the coming days.

The highly requested feature will fully launch by the end of next week.

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Rupert Murdoch, the Chairman and CEO of News Corporation, sat down with Sky News today to discuss how people should access internet news content.

Murdoch, who owns the WSJ.com, argues that people should have to pay some sort of marginal premium to access the content. He argues that people should have never had access to this content free of charge to begin with.

What he’s considering now is to end the partnership between Google and the WSJ, where Google would no longer be able to index WSJ.com content. That means the WSJ feed would not only disappear from Google News, but from the entire Google search.

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eBay is inching closer to selling it’s popular internet telephony service Skype after reaching an agreement with Joltid and Joost M.V. over patent infringement litigation.

The settlement did not come cheap. Skype founders Niklas Zennstorm and Janus Friis have given up a lot of equity, bringing their total stake in the company to 14-percent, in order for Joltid to drop litigation and to pass all rights to the questioned underlying VoIP technologies to Skype.

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Google has been around for just over a decade, and truly has revolutionized the way people work and play over a relatively short time span. The company has compiled a quick video documenting its accomplishments chronologically from the early days when the founders, Larry & Sergey first met, to the present day Google. For more complete information, you can also check its history time-line.

A technical error in the Google algorithm is indexing private voicemail recordings from Google Voice and making them available to the public.

If you currently search “site:https://www.google.com/voice/fm/*” in Google, it will return various voicemails, some dated as far back as many months ago, to even only hours ago.

As of right now, if you perform the search string noted above, the voicemails are still available publically with transcription.

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This is a guest post by Heather Dorso, Sales Executive at TRUSTe Inc.

Web sites are increasingly asking consumers to allow access to their address books to send invitations to their friends on the consumer’s behalf. A common technique to increase the site subscriptions, and benefits for the user by bringing their friends into the service.

A recent article in the New York Times highlights the complexities of implementing an address book import feature. Done well, such a mechanism provides clear notice to consumers to ensure that they understand what will happen to the addresses in their address book, so the consumer has a meaningful opportunity to consent. Implemented poorly, it can leave consumers distressed and even mortified to find their personal and professional contacts getting messages demanding to know why they aren’t on the latest social networking site.

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Twitter has raised a new round of financing at a $100 million dollar valuation.

Benchmark Capital, Spark Capital, Institutional Venture Partners are returning investors and were involved in the new offering. There were also two new shareholders added to the mix, T. Rowe Price and Insight Venture Partners.

The terms of the deal will not be disclosed, including neither the total amount Twitter has raised (except to say it was a significant sum) nor any indication as to the investment weights from each investor.

We just know that Twitter was valued at $1 billion after internal people familiar with the matter confirmed the valuation to the AP.

The new funds will be used to fund company operations, and could include purchasing new equipment to grow the service and even expand the current 60-strong workforce.

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TechCrunch conducted a quick interview with social news site Digg.com founder Kevin Rose backstage during the TechCrunch50 conference. Rose hinted during the interview that a “bigger launch with a completely revamped website [would be coming] a bit later”.

When asked if it was a mistake to startup Pownce, Kevin said it was a mistake not to appoint a CEO to manage the direction of the company where it could have been something big.

Check out the complete interview below where Rose talks about the latest ad voting system on Digg, and questions surrounding intensifying competition from Twitter, his picks at TechCrunch50, among other topics.

Microsoft today just unveiled its new visual search engine feature for Bing at the TechCrunch50 technology conference.

The new visual search lets you search for items that you might not necessarily know what its name is. The search results present a grid of images to you, where you can subsequently narrow your results with criteria based on your search.

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Google today added a new feature to its Google Voice service that allows you to forward SMS messages to an email account, and even reply (with threaded SMS) directly by simply replying to the email.

Google Voice now lets you combine your SMS messages with your voicemail notifications with your other emails in your inbox.

To get the feature, you simply have to turn it on in the settings panel of Google Voice.

Google Voice is still pending approval by Apple to get the app working on the iPhone after a federal inquiry by the FCC.

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