One lawsuit from a user is already underway. The company is defending itself by saying the situation was caused by a “bug” in its software.

Let’s hope publicity on this situation will make sure it never happens again.  We’re still waiting to hear Apple’s public statement ensuring us that new safeguards are in place and that everything’s going to be ok…

Apple?  Please?

Even better, The UDK is free for noncommercial and educational use.  For for-profit projects, licensing terms are 25% of all revenue over $5,000.

Start your engines, kids.  Go forth and create cool stuff.   The future is bright.

UDK includes:

• The Unreal Editor toolset, complete with fully integrated game editing environment.
• Unreal Gemini multithreaded rendering system with support for all modern rendering and shading techniques, advanced lighting and shadowing, ambient occlusion and a powerful material system for creating complex shaders on the fly.
• Unreal Lightmass global illumination solver for high-quality static lighting.
• Unreal PhAT visual physics modeling tool with state-of-the-art physics system powered by NVIDIA® PhysX®.
• Unreal Kismet, an advanced visual scripting solution that facilitates rapid prototyping of ideas and gameplay mechanics.
• AnimSet Viewer and AnimTree Editor, which give animators precise control over every muscle and bone movement.
• Unreal Matinee, which includes movie director-class tools for creating in-game cut scenes and gorgeous cinematics.
• UnrealScript, a fully integrated, high-level object-oriented programming language.
• Unreal Cascade particle effects system for implementing explosions, fog, fire and smoke. Module-based system gives real-time previews of visual effects.
• Terrain building tool for placing and customizing vegetation, structures and countless in-game points of interest.

Businessweek analyzed documents submitted by Google to the FCC regarding its Google Voice service and found tantalizing hints that the company is planning to roll out the mobile-connected Internet calling service globally.

In the document, Google says it has already signed contracts with a number of “international service providers for inputs to Google Voice.”

To date, none of these services have been launched yet.  Contracts already signed is a pretty good sign, though!

[via Download Squad via BusinessWeek]

Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis, the founders of Skype who sold the company to Ebay in 2005 for $2.6 billion had recently been holding up the resale of the company with lawsuits charging that IP central to the internet telephony service was owned by another of their companies, Joltid – and that Skype owed Joltid licensing fees.

These lawsuits were settled today by Ebay, who agreed with Zennström and Friis to give them a 14 percent stake in their old company, which will now completely own the Joltid IP.

Acquisition of Skype from Ebay has been underway for several months by a group of investors, including Marc Andreessen, through his new fund Andreessen Horowitz.

Skype has 521 million users worldwide and has become the largest international voice carrier. In 2008, about 8% of international call traffic was carried by Skype.

If you’ve been anywhere near a TV or tech blog in the last month, you know that Motorola’s Droid is the company’s newest smart phone, and the latest contender in the struggle to compete with the iPhone.  Built with the active involvement and oversight of Google, the phone runs the latest version of Google’s Android operating system.  Its got a touch screen, a slide-out keyboard, a cool mouse-type thumb controller and can run any app on Android’s 3,000 strong (and growing) app store.

The phone is priced at $200, after a $100 rebate, for Verizon wireless customers or with activation of a new Verizon account (OR for $150 at Sears… with no need to wait for a rebate).

If you’re around a Verizon store in the next few days, go take a look and play with one for a bit.  You might even think it’s smarter than your iPhone…

Motorola’s new Android 2.0 phone, the Droid, is priced at $200, with activation of a Verizon account and after a $100 rebate

Enter this new Firefox add-on, Tab Progress Bar, which replicates this feature in the current stable version of Firefox, so you can enjoy this groovy goodness without having to plunge into the Beta pool (where it might still be a little chilly…) and at a puny 6k, it takes up less space than this blog post.

So, besides looking cool what does it do?  Well, it let’s you see at a glance what the loading progress is of open tabs that are not active, so if you are reading this blog while waiting for a video to load on another tab, you can tell at a glance how far you have to go.

[via Download Squad via Lifehacker]

According to Google, you’ll soon find a link to Google Dashboard in the “personal settings” of the “my account” page.

The dashboard will contain:

“some of the information associated with the Google services you use: your name, your email address, the number of contacts, the number of conversations in your Gmail inbox, your Google profile, the most recent entries from the web history etc. It’s a long answer to the question: “What does Google know about me?”.”

Dashboard also links to privacy policy pages for various sites and simplifies managing your online privacy profile.

This seems like a step in the right direction to us, and we’d definitely like to see more of it.  One major omission in looking at dashboard’s functionality so far, though, appears to be the lack of data on searches on google itself.  Let’s hope that enough users will request this that it gets added into future iterations.

Enter Verizon’s new pre-paid wireless “deal”.

$15 a day to access 75 megabytes of data.

OR… $30 a week for 250 MB of data.

OR $50 a month for 500 MB  of data.

(All the new services will be bundled with the Verizon Wireless USB760… no data here on what the upsell cost is there, but I’m guessing it’s no bargain.)

For comparison, the standard service costs $40 a month for 250MB or $60 a month for 5G of data.

What do these guys think when they go to Europe?  I guess they must think that mobile providers there are idiots.  Or they think that people here are idiots…

Boo hiss.

Google’s latest offering is directed at e-commerce site owners.

According to Google, the average visitor to a web store spends 8 seconds on the site before making the decision to stay or leave.  In order to improve the odds, Google is offering a software-as-a-service cloud-hosted search functionality for your retail site.

With Commerce Search, your site’s users will enjoy sub-second response times, will have built-in spell check and synonyms features to keep customers on the right track to find what they’re looking for.  Customers  can also sort results by “category, price, brand, or any other attribute,” according to Google.

On the retailer side, site owners will enjoy advanced functionality that will allow them to push certain products.

Almost 16 months after it opened its doors, the App Store now has over 100,000 applications for the iPhone and iPod touch, according to Apple, and App Store users have downloaded well over two billion apps.

148apps.biz celebrated the occasion with a nifty pie chart, showing what categories developers are creating apps in.  As you can see, games are in the lead with almost 17% of titles.  Entertainment, books, travel and education titles follow close behind (in that order).

Besides The iPhone, Google’s Android is in a distant second place with almost 12,000 apps in its store.  Blackberry has just over 3,000.  How many does Windows Mobile have?

246.  Ouch.

[via Fortune, via 148Apps.biz]