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Michael Yang, the founder of comparison shopping engine MySimon.com (currently property of CNET) is launching Become.com, a shopping search engine with a content twist. While most of the comparison shopping sites require merchants to register and pay up for being listed in customer search results, it looks like Become.com is simply indexing the products available on the Web and tries to link to relevant articles and buyer’s guides. So a search for 8 megapixel digital camera brings up some review sites (About.com, PC World) as well as shopping sites where the product can be purchased.

Eagle Broadband and GlobeCast (affiliated with France Telecom) are selling a turnkey IPTV solution. It’s a system that would allow a telecom (the one that’s capable of providing DSL lines, I assume) to roll out an IPTV service with roughly 200 channels within 60 days. No word on the cost of the system and, more specifically, cost of the set-top box for the consumer. Time to start placing bets when the guys will get stomped on by The Borg.

Einstein@Home is a program that uses your computer’s idle time to search for spinning neutron stars (also called pulsars) using data from the LIGO and GEO gravitational wave detectors. Windows, Linux, Solaris and Mac OS clients are available. The project uses the same platform as SETI@Home, according to this MSNBC article.

If your choice of consumer operating systems, coffee shops and passenger airplanes has been significantly limited down to one vendor recently, you probably have heard of Seattle, WA. Seattle Weekly has a detailed story of how the music business is changing in the city, and how the changes will probably impact the industry. Starbucks gaining a major market share in music distribution business, 17% of radio station’s audience using Web audiostreams, new music discovery via online social networks and creating a better playing field for indie bands.

Here’s Reed Hastings in an interview with Business 2.0 talking about Blockbuster, Amazon and Wal-Mart entering the DVD-by-mail rental business:

“You’ve got the biggest rental company, the biggest e-commerce company, and the biggest company, period,” Hastings observes. “So if it’s true that you should be judged by the quality of your competitors, we must be doing pretty well.”

The same article has info on online DVD rental market: Netflix boasts 2.6 mln users, Blockbuster has estimated half a million, Wal-Mart has 50,000 users.

Script Soft has released WinSpeedUp v. 2.63, an application that lets you tune and optimize Windows to suit your computing environment and needs. With access to Windows’ hidden system options, programs can start faster, unnecessary files can be deleted from your hard drive, Internet and LAN connections will be faster, and your system will be more stable. It’s easy to take a snapshot of your starting Windows configuration, and restore it if you create a configuration which doesn’t meet your needs.

WinSpeedUp’s cleanup functions allow you to maintain your privacy by erasing your computing tracks and, in the process, free up some hard drive space. The program empties the recycle bin, deletes cookies, resets the history and documents lists, erases your Internet Explorer cache, deletes temporary files, and gets rid of unnecessary files such as TMP, BAK, and OLD files. In addition, you have one-click access to Windows cleanup utilities such as scandisk, defrag, and config. The RAM Cleanup function frees the physical memory from unnecessary entries with only one click.

New York Times says some of the minor players in the consumer electronics industry were missed during the latest CES show and profiles three companies. KidSmart produces a vocal smoke detector, since the regular ones “do not reliably awaken sleeping children”, according to the company. Sling Media sells a $249 box that takes your television programming and broadcasts it over the Internet. Voodoo PC produces fast and expensive PCs (both laptops, desktops and small form-factor desktops) respected by the gaming community.

There’s bound to be a thousand similar articles like this, some of them urging the reader to pay up for an MLM scheme or buy a subscription to select stock picks that will make a millionaire out of anyone who subscribes. However, this article from Business to Business magazine seems to be practical, lack hype and offer concrete examples as well as summarization of few ways one can make a profit on the Internet.

The New York Times profiles Netflix, a company that pioneered subscription-based DVD plans where a disc is sent via postal service and no late fee is charged. It describes the company from May 1998, when it originally launched the Web site as a DVD-by-mail rental service (with late fees). Interesting factoids: Netflix operates 30 centers around the country and 11% of San Francisco residents subscribe to the service. Turns out, the company is not really afraid of Blockbuster, Wal-mart and Amazon moving into their markets, but they do consider on-demand Internet-download services to be a threat to their business model.

US federal authorities conducted first arrest for spimming. Eighteen-year-old Anthony Greco was arrested for sending spam to instant messenger users of MySpace.com.