Reuters - Finding Nemo is about to get a lot easier with the launch of a scientific survey that will allow anyone with access to the internet to take a virtual tour of Australia's Great Barrier Reef.

Reuters - PayPal, the online payments company owned by eBay Inc, just got a new rival in the race to develop a mobile payment service that can be used in physical stores.

Reuters - The White House on Thursday proposed a "bill of rights" that would give consumers greater online privacy protection and could eventually give the government greater powers to police Internet firms such as Google Inc and Facebook.

AP - The Obama administration is calling for stronger privacy protections for consumers as mobile gadgets, Internet services and other tools are able to do a better job of tracking what you do and where you go.

Reuters - South Korea's top Internet provider, KT Corp plans to charge data-heavy content providers such as Google's Youtube and Internet-enabled TV service operators to subsidize costly network upgrades, a KT executive said on Thursday.

Mashable - Like many artists before her, global pop star Adele experienced a post-Grammys album sales boost, selling 730,000 copies of 21 in the past week. Unlike every other artist in history, however, Adele is the first person to sell 2 million copies of one album on iTunes in the U.S.

Mashable - The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here. Name: Splash

Reuters - Internet service providers need to work harder to prevent hacks, data theft and other fraud, including contacting customers whose infected computers have been hijacked by organized crime and helping them clean out viruses, the head of the Federal Communications Commission said on Wednesday.

Appolicious - Today’s most innovative comedians are not necessarily telling jokes in front of a live audience, on TV, or in the movies. A new golden age of comedy is playing out online and via mobile applications for smartphones and tablet computers. There are apps that showcase the funniest satirists on Twitter, broadcast interviews with newcomers and comedy legends, and make classic publications like The Onion and Cracked come alive.

Reuters - International Business Machines is gearing up to take a chunk of the growing Internet security market by applying its data analytics to help companies and organizations fight cyberattacks.

Mashable - Google is looking to get into the paid TV business. The company filed an application last week to provide video service to residents of Kansas City, Mo., according to The Wall Street Journal. If approved, the service could launch as soon as a month from now, according to the article, which cites a "media executive currently involved in negotiations to license channels to the service." Offerings in the video package would include live TV as well as on-demand and online access to TV channels, according to the report, which was based on an earlier article by The New York Post.

Reuters - Microsoft Corp has asked EU antitrust regulators to intervene in a patent dispute with Google Inc and Motorola Mobility Holdings Inc as it stepped up its battle against Google.

Reuters - Microsoft Corp has asked EU antitrust regulators to intervene in a patent dispute with Google Inc and Motorola Mobility Holdings Inc as it stepped up its battle against Google.

Mashable - [More from Mashable: Adele Is First To Go Double Platinum on iTunes]

Appolicious - There’s still no official Pokemon title in the iTunes App Store, despite the clamoring of fans for a mobile version of Nintendo’s incredibly popular monster-catching role-playing game series.

Reuters - The European Union's executive said on Wednesday it would refer a disputed global agreement to tackle online piracy to the bloc's highest court to check whether it complies with EU fundamental rights.

AP - A global coalition against censorship is needed to protect online journalists and bloggers who are being targeted by repressive governments, a leading advocacy group said Tuesday.

Mashable - Are you addicted to the Internet? If so, you're not alone. Some 61% of people feel addicted to the Internet and are unable to quit browsing, according to an informal survey.

Mashable - Google announced a Google Docs update for Android Wednesday, allowing for easy native editing from your smartphone and tablet. The new feature was introduced in a blog post, in which Google says the update focuses on remote collaboration and is aimed at increasing users' productivity. Google software engineer Vadim Gerasimov describes how he now can accomplish everything he does in the office -- such as check his email and edit documents -- with his Android during his morning commute to the company's Sydney office.

Mashable - Rapportive, a startup that makes a Gmail add-on that displays social media info about contacts as you email them, confirmed on Wednesday that it had been purchased by LinkedIn. Rahul Vohra, CEO of Rapportive, confirmed the acquisition on the company's blog. "In business, partnership is dating — and we went on a lot of dates with LinkedIn. Slowly, but surely, we fell in love," Vohra wrote. Vohra wrote that despite the new ownership, Rapportive will continue building its product. "At LinkedIn, we will support Rapportive, and we will continue to build beautiful products that make you brilliant with people."

AP - Google is to carry real-time pricing from leading European stock exchanges, the company said Tuesday, marking an expansion of the online search giant's financial offerings.

Reuters - Google is to bolster its Google Finance service by giving retail investors free access to real-time London Stock Exchange share prices.

AP - Russia's top search engine Yandex said Tuesday it has teamed up with Twitter to allow the Russian firm to show the full feed of all public Twitter posts.

Reuters - Twitter and Russian search engine Yandex have agreed a partnership that will allow Yandex to show new tweets in its search results almost instantly, as Twitter becomes an increasingly important source of real-time information.

AP - YouTube has committed $100 million to 96 new video channels and has recruited top Hollywood talent to produce content. But the Google-owned site's talent search is far from complete. Fancy yourself a filmmaker?

AP - Demand Media Inc.'s stock soared by 31 percent Friday after the online content publisher's fourth-quarter earnings and outlook for this year gave investors hope that it is starting to recover from diminished traffic that had stemmed from changes to Google's Internet search formula.

Reuters - China's top search engine, Baidu Inc, plans to begin monetizing its mobile search traffic and social media platforms this year in an effort to boost growth outside its traditional PC domain, Baidu's chief executive said on Friday.

Reuters - U.S. and European regulators approved Google Inc's $12.5 billion purchase of Motorola Mobility Holdings Inc and said they would keep a sharp eye on the web search giant to ensure patents critical to the telecommunications industry would be licensed at fair prices.

Reuters - Cyberplex Inc said its debt-laden unit Tsavo Media is required to pay Yahoo Inc $4.8 million for what the U.S. search company called "low quality traffic" from ads on Tsavo-run websites last year.

AP - Microsoft Corp. slammed search rival Google Inc. with full-page newspaper ads Wednesday, saying that recent changes at Google that allow it to internally merge the data it collects on user activity across services such as YouTube and Gmail are meant to allow advertisers to better target customers.

Reuters - Lawmakers on the House Energy and Commerce Committee asked Google Inc on Thursday to provide answers about recent changes to the search engine's privacy policy.

Reuters - Suppliers basked in the reflection of Apple's glowing results on Wednesday after the company's gold standard iPhones and iPads flew off the shelves over the holiday sales season.

Reuters - Yahoo Chief Executive Scott Thompson tried to manage expectations on his first earnings call as the new CEO, broadly addressing numerous issues the Internet company is grappling with -- from a potential sale to reviving its core display advertising business -- but declined to lay out a detailed strategy.

Ben Patterson - Google has been dabbling in streaming movie rentals for months now, but word has it that the search giant wants to plunge into the pay-per-view market head-first. Hollywood, meet YouTube.

Christopher Null - Are you tired of searching Google for, say, a market share report and being handed data from 2009? Those days may be coming to an end, says Google, thanks to an update to its Web indexing system called Caffeine.

Christopher Null - Some called it a move of the truly desperate: Paying users outright for using the Microsoft Bing search engine.

Ben Patterson - The whole Web TV thing has been tried before ... just not very well, frankly. Now Google thinks it's hit on the right formula for letting couch potatoes easily switch back and forth between live TV and the Web, baking Google search results, Web and Android applications into HDTVs, Blu-ray players, and set-top boxes for a "single, seamless experience."