The UpStream

Hulu has implemented their Hulu Plus service (officially in beta) since June for $9.95/month, but now we are being told by a couple sources that the company is considering reducing their price by $5, to $4.95/month.

Hulu Plus is their attempt at gaining a second revenue income on top of the ads placed during the TV shows, clips and movies that are on the site. Hulu Plus has been giving subscribers more depth to the shows and movies that are available compared to the free service. You can also watch Hulu on the iPhone, iPad, Xbox 360 and Internet-connected TVs with the premium subscription.

For more on the possible price cut, follow the break.

Netflix has been having a good couple of years. They have successfully shut down Hollywood Video and turned Blockbuster into a kiosk company competing with the RedBox. Recently, however, CEO Reed Hastings realized and said that they are no longer a DVD company, they are a streaming company that just happens to offer DVDs almost as a bi-product. He said,

We are very proud to announce that by every measure we are now a streaming company, which also offers DVD-by-mail. In Q4, we’ll spend more on streaming content than DVD content, and we’ll deliver many more hours of entertainment via streaming than on DVD. More impressively, a majority of our subs will watch more content streamed from Netflix than delivered by us on DVD. DVD-by-mail shipments are still growing, but streaming for us is much larger and growing much faster.

For more on Netflix's transition to streaming, hit the break.

Have you ever owned a book that you liked so much that you wanted everyone you know to read it and you lent that book to everyone so they could? In the new digital world, that concept has become difficult or impossible. If you read books on the Kindle app on your Samsung Epic, you probably aren't lending your phone out so your friend can read your eBook.

Luckily, Amazon made an announcement this week to change all of that. Coming soon, you will be able to lend your eBooks to other Kindle owners. Here'sthe announcements:

Later this year, we will be introducing lending for Kindle, a new feature that lets you loan your Kindle books to other Kindle device or Kindle app users. Each book can be lent once for a loan period of 14-days and the lender cannot read the book during the loan period. Additionally, not all e-books will be lendable - this is solely up to the publisher or rights holder, who determines which titles are enabled for lending.

Hit the break for the details on Kindle lending.

I am officially tired of writing about Apple but I couldn't let this one go. This week Steve Jobs announced a few things that will be new to the Apple universe and the Interwebz have gone nuts. First, the new MacBook Air (the netbook that Steve Jobs said was too expensive and a useless piece of technology a little while back) will not come with a Mac OSX restore DVD. Instead it will come with a flash drive containing the restore software.

That was not the biggest deal, however. The one that the blogs have been all a-Twitter about was the Mac App Store. Now you will be able to download software titles to your Mac the same way you do to your iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad. Completing the package will be automatic updates. Somehow this has all been considered revolutionary by the Apple-loving tech media and I can't quite figure out why.

To hear why I am confused, hit the break.

Google is still in hot water with regards to their infamous Street View cars and their intrusive WiFi probing. There has been some speculation as to how severe the intrusion was and in a Google blog post by the senior vice president of engineering and research this past May, he went on to say that the data collected were only fragments, despite the fact that no one inside Google had analyzed the data at that time. Since then the data has been analyzed and Alan Eustace concluded, "That while most of the data is fragmentary, in some instances entire emails and URLs were captured, as well as passwords." I can also imagine they know where you keep your porn. Of course they want to delete this data as soon as possible but there is still no word that it has been destroyed. The newest controversy in this matter centers around a statement made by Google CEO Eric Schmidt.

Hit the break to find out what the Google CEO said that isn't helping their cause.

If you thought Intel's stack-dropping acquisition of McAfee for $7.68 billion was a lot, you'll drop your jaw at this one. The world's largest chip manufacturer said earlier this week that it will spend somewhere between $6 and $8 billion on factory upgrades in the US, which will create anywhere from 800 to 1,000 manufacturing jobs.

Intel plans to renovate and renew plants in Oregon and Arizona and looks to open a new plant in Oregon. The implementation of these plans will create up to 8,000 construction jobs and looks to be in place over several years, said an Intel official.

For more on the big spending, follow the break.