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First Glance

New York

MySpace parent to purchase two multimedia companies

NEW YORK The parent of MySpace is buying the media-sharing site Photobucket for about $300 million, bringing together two of the Internet's most popular hangouts.

The deal announced Wednesday will give MySpace and sister sites under News Corp.'s Fox Interactive Media access to Photobucket Inc.'s photo and video technologies, while Photobucket gets Fox's resources to accelerate development of its tools.

Peter Levinsohn, president of Fox Interactive, said Photobucket also would be able to incorporate advanced slide show generators and other editing tools from Flektor Inc., which Fox on Wednesday also announced it bought.

Financial terms of the two deals were not disclosed.

Washington, D.C.

Zoellick's aim is to restore confidence at World Bank

Robert Zoellick has dealt with the Cold War, the killing in Darfur, China's rise as an economic colossus. His next challenge: to restore confidence at the badly shaken World Bank.

"We need to put yesterday's discord behind us and to focus on the future together," Zoellick declared after President Bush chose him Wednesday to run the poverty-fighting institution and heal wounds left behind by outgoing president Paul Wolfowitz.

"I believe that the World Bank's best days are still to come," said Zoellick, now an executive at Wall Street giant Goldman Sachs.

California

Apple debuts songs online free of copy restrictions

SAN JOSE Apple Inc.'s iTunes Store started selling thousands of songs without copy protection Wednesday, marking the trendsetting company's latest coup and a model for what analysts say will likely become a pattern for online music sales.

Launching initially with songs from music company EMI Group PLC, iTunes Plus features tracks that are free of digital rights management, or DRM, technology copy-protection software that limits where songs or movies can be played and distributed.

The unrestricted content means some songs purchased from iTunes will work for the first time directly on portable players other than Apple's iPod, including Microsoft Corp.'s Zune.

The DRM-free tracks feature a higher sound quality and cost $1.29 apiece 30 cents more than the usual 99-cent price of other, copy-protected songs at the market-leading online music store.

If available, users could upgrade existing purchases to DRM-free versions for 30 cents a song or $3 for most albums, Apple said.