People close to Apple have reportedly spilled the beans on a media-related event that will happen in New York City before January ends.

The announcement likely will not involve the iPad 3, Apple TV or other interactive television efforts, suggests All Things D, adding that the event may focus on a small-scale advertising or publishing revelation.

Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice president of Internet Software and Services, reportedly will be in attendance, All Things D adds: “Cue is in charge of a large swath of Apple’s media units, including the iTunes Store, App Store, iBookstore, as well as iAd and its iCloud services.”

What do you think Apple will announce at this NYC event? Make your best predictions in the comments below.

Bonus: Apple in 2011 — A Bittersweet Year for Tech’s Most Valuable Company

January

Apple started the year on a high, surpassing $300 billion in market capitalization.

The launch of the Mac App Store brought the "App Store experience" to computer users, with more than 1,000 free and paid apps available for download. The Store saw one million downloads on the first day, while the App Store also hit a milestone in January — 10 billion apps downloaded worldwide.

After more than four years, AT&T’s exclusivity with the iPhone came to an end as Verizon became the second official U.S. carrier for the Apple mobile.

The news that Apple CEO Steve Jobs was to take another leave of absence for health reasons was quickly followed by Apple reporting record-breaking earnings for its fiscal first quarter.

Click here to view this gallery.

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After saying she wouldn’t step down from Yahoo’s board of directors, Carol Bartz has resigned from the board.

Bartz’s role as CEO ended abruptly Tuesday when she was ousted from the position she’d held for less than three years. In an interview with Fortune later in the week, she made it clear she intended to stay on the company’s board. In the interview, she called its members “doofuses” and said they “f***ed me over.”

It appears she is no longer among them, though. According to multiple reports, Bartz’s last day on the board was Friday.

[via Bloomberg]

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Yahoo has formed an “Executive Leadership Council” to govern the struggling Internet company in the wake of Carol Bartz’s firing. To fill the void left by Bartz’s departure, Yahoo CFO Tim Morse has been promoted to interim CEO.

“The Board has also named key senior Yahoo! executives to a newly formed Executive Leadership Council tasked with supporting Morse in managing the Company’s day-to-day operations until a permanent chief executive is appointed, as well as supporting a comprehensive strategic review that the Board has initiated to position the Company for future growth,” the company said in a statement released on Tuesday evening.

Yahoo’s new executive council contains most of Yahoo’s key players. Mike Callahan (EVP, general counsel and secretary), Blake Irving (EVP & CPO), Ross Levinsohn (EVP, Americas), Rich Riley (SVP of the EMEA region) and Rose Tsou (SVP of the APAC region) will sit on the council. Co-founders David Filo and Jerry Yang will not sit on the council, but will remain as Chief Yahoos. As we reported earlier, Yahoo is now conducting a thorough search for the company’s next CEO.

The move doesn’t change anybody’s title (except for Morse) and it doesn’t come as a surprise. Bartz’s departure leaves a power void that Yahoo will need time to fill. Bartz, known for her bombastic and strong-willed nature, definitely got the last laugh with her feisty email to all Yahoo employees, informing them that she had been fired over the phone by Yahoo Chairman Roy Bostock.

Image courtesy of Warner Bros.

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What might the 2011 version of Orson Welles’s War of the World‘s radio broadcast look like using today’s fastest method of information-sharing?

Gerardo Buganza, the interior secretary for Veracruz state in Mexico, said it could very well be the “Twitter terrorism” caused by two people who allegedly spread false reports of gunmen attacking schools and kidnapping children. Those reports caused such panic when parents scrambled around the city to get to their children that there were dozens of car accidents and emergency phone lines were jammed.

The two people, a private school teacher and a radio presenter, now face 30 years in prison for charges under terrorism laws.

According to the Guardian, these are the most serious charges ever for inciting chaos or violence through Twitter.

Prosecutors claim one of the defendants tweeted, “My sister-in-law just called me all upset, they just kidnapped five children from the school.”

Both defendants claim that they only repeated what they saw elsewhere on the Internet.

Do you think people should be imprisoned for inciting violence or chaos using Twitter? How serious should the punishment be? (Welles received no punishment for the mass hysteria that the Halloween 1938 broadcast caused.)

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This week’s convergence of politics and digital is all about debate and how it’s filtered through social media.

In the past week, former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum took on (and lost to) a college student, Google is ramping up for another GOP debate and we’ve got stats on how the Republican candidates stack up against each other on social.

This is the Week in Politics & Digital.

Santorum Video Goes Viral

When presidential candidate Rick Santorum visited Penn State, he probably wasn’t expecting an audience-made video to go viral. In it, he defends his stance on homosexuality. One student stands up to Santorum and the fireworks start flying.

The video has received more than 100,000 views since it was posted August 31.

Google Launches Site to Crowdsource Debate Questions

Fox News and Google are co-presenting the next GOP presidential debate taking place on September 22. Google’s site, FOXNews/Google Debate, is collecting text and video questions from users to be asked during the debate. Users can also scroll though submitted questions and vote on ones they find most relevant.

Social Decision Releases Stats on the Republican Field

Just listening to the media, it’s hard to tell which Republican candidates are at the front of the field. Social Decision, a news and analytics site, has put together a study with numbers from Klout and Real Clear Politics. The study shows Rick Perry owns the majority of Twitter mentions, with 30.66%. Michele Bachmann was best able to convert her tweets into action at the Ames Straw Poll in Iowa, while Newt Gingrich had the lowest poll numbers compared to his number of social media followers.

Image courtesy of Flickr, familymwr

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AT&T has a plan to save the $39 billion T-Mobile acquisition blocked by the U.S. government, reports Reuters quoting sources familiar with the matter.

AT&T’s new plan has two parts: First, it will pledge to keep T-Mobile’s subscription plans and rates at current levels. Second, it will need to sell off up to 25% of T-Mobile’s business, potentially including airwaves and customers.

Some analysts doubt AT&T can pull off the merger. Former antitrust enforcer Bob Doyle told Reuters it would be difficult to find a buyer for parts of T-Mobile’s business in the U.S., as a sale to either Verizon or Sprint would also cause antitrust lawsuits.

Should AT&T fail to reach a settlement, it will need to pay T-Mobile’s owner Deutsche Telekom approximately $6 billion.

In a recent Mashable poll, 66.49% of readers said the U.S. government was right to block the AT&T/T-Mobile merger, 25.53% thought the government should butt out and 7.97% were unsure.

More About: acquisition, att, merger, monopoly, T-Mobile, takeover

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In tablets generally and the iPad particularly, consumers have found a device conducive to reading news.

It’s no surprise then that a growing number of newsreading apps have appeared, from individual, branded apps such as the Wall Street Journal for iPad to independent apps such as Flipboard, Editions and Zite, which are designed for consuming content from a variety of sources.

The last of these was acquired by CNN Tuesday. In an emailed statement, CNN’s general manager of digital, KC Estenson, suggested that Zite will continue to work with a wide array of media partners and that its technology will also be leveraged “to help CNN’s websites and apps serve more personalized content, making our current digital services even better.”

Zite would continue to operate as an independent company on a day-to-day basis under existing CEO Mark Johnson, the statement said.

Still, we were left with many questions. Why Zite? Will it truly remain independent? Will the new subsidiary be free to strike partnerships with other media outlets? Will the algorithms be tweaked to feature CNN content more prominently?

These are some of the questions we posed to both Estenson and Johnson in a phone interview Tuesday afternoon, parts of which are transcribed below.

Q&A With KC Estenson, CNN & Mark Johnson, Zite

Why Zite?

Estenson: We saw in Zite a best-in-class product. It’s deeply loved by the people who have it, and we thought it would be a nice addition to our digital portfolio. Secondly, there’s great technology behind it. We’re seeing a lot of inteest in this space now, but these guys have been working on this for six years.

Johnson: The iPad is really well suited to reading. I think what’s interesting about Zite is that it brings you really interesting information you might not have otherwise read. It’s not just repackaging information.

We’re seeing Flipboard move into TV and film, while Pulse is getting into bookmarklets and extensions. Where is Zite going next?

Johnson: We still see a huge market in giving you the information most relevant to you. We’re focusing on content right now, news-type content. We really want to focus on giving people a great personalized iPad magazine.

Your competitors are striking partnerships with content publishers left and right. Are you doing the same?

Johnson: We’re certainly having a lot of conversations right now. We’re looking at ways to work with publishers to help them monetize and distribute their content. But we have nothing to announce right now.

Flipboard has recently begun displaying ads in its app. Are you planning on doing the same?

Johnson: We’re not going to rush the business model here. Part of the [attraction of] the deal was not to have unnatural pressure on Zite to deliver financially. The goal is to get a great product and the business model will follow. We can imagine a variety of ways this company can monetize itself.

And how do you plan on integrating Zite with CNN’s existing digital properties?

Estenson: Zite is going to stand alone as an independent operation. Mark will be running it in San Francisco. The development office is in Vancouver. The technology that powers Zite over time we will begin to leverage with CNN’s digital services, but it won’t be an overnight thing. But over the course of the next 18 months or so I can imagine a world where CNN starts to serve up more personally relevant content. That can help with CNN’s traffic recirculation and those sorts of things on the site. The important thing is that Zite stays.

Can we expect CNN’s content to feature more prominently on Zite in the future?

Johnson: Absolutely not. Our personalization algorithms look for most interesting content on the web, whether that comes from CNN or elsewhere. Our algorithms are completely agnostic.

Will Zite still be free to pursue partnerships with media companies beyond CNN?

Estenson: Yes. You’ll see them do a wide variety of deals. We have a lot of experience at CNN with content partnerships. The web is a really interconnected space, a lot of linking and crosslinking of articles. That same philosophy will be remixed and repurposed. You’ll see us help Zite with that in a variety of ways.

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“It’s fairly common knowledge that a startup can’t execute on two products simultaneously,” reasons Michael Seibel. Seibel, who will be transitioning out of his role as CEO of Justin.tv, is now the CEO of the newly independent startup Socialcam.

Socialcam was created inside Justin.tv in just 60 days to address challenges associated with sharing video via mobile. The iPhone and Android application traffics in quick clip-sharing in the same way that Instagram makes mobile photos instantly sharable.

In four months time, Socialcam “destroyed targets” and surpassed one million downloads, Seibel says.

Now, the product is being spun out as its own entity, and will go it alone with Seibel and a team of three engineers all moving over from Justin.tv. The foursome hopes to dethrone Facebook, YouTube and Apple and become top dog in the mobile video-sharing department.

“The big entrenched players don’t do what we do well,” Seibel boasts. “People are carrying around smartphones. They have a video capture device in their pockets twentyfour-seven,” he says. “But, they don’t have an easy way to take videos and share them with their friends.”

Facebook, YouTube and Apple — the three largest players in the mobile video market, as identified by Seibel — make for an encumbered or clunky social video experience on mobile. It’s too challenging to upload and discover videos on Facebook, too difficult to find YouTube videos from Facebook friends and impossible to see the quality content stored in a friend’s Camera application, he explains.

These factors, he says, have enabled Socialcam to grow at an ever-accelerating rate.

As for Justin.tv, Seibel will be replaced as CEO by former Justin.tv CTO Emmet Shear, who will continue to push forward on TwitchTV, Justin.tv’s new online destination for video gamers.

Considering Seibel’s departure and his statement about a startup not being able to execute on multiple products, one has to wonder: Where does this leave Justin.tv? “We still believe in that product,” he says. “We just believe Twitch and Socialcam are operating in markets that are significantly larger and are more underserved.”

Seibel declined to comment on how Socialcam will be financed, saying only that new investors will have the opportunity to invest in the spun off company.

[via TechCrunch]

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The 5.9 magnitude earthquake that hit Virginia and rolled through much of the east coast Tuesday caused more inconvenience than damage. Case in point: though no cellphone towers were knocked out, high call volume meant massive service interruptions for users of AT&T, Verizon, Sprint and T-Mobile.

But one cellphone-based service managed to work as normal, according to Bloomberg: RIM’s BlackBerry Messenger.

BBM, which can run on either a phone’s data connection or local Wi-fi, and uses unique wireless protocols, has gained a reputation for reliability and security. In the Chilean earthquake of 2010, and in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 in New York, it was the only service left standing.

In London earlier this month, BBM was deemed a little too reliable and secure: it was the primary method for rioters to communicate and coordinate. RIM’s unwitting role in the riots has come under scrutiny from the UK government.

But on a day when the carriers have all experienced what one Sprint spokesman called “an intermittent mass calling event”, RIM has added a much-needed sheen to its reputation. Its stock closed a dollar higher in late New York trading — not a huge bump, but considering RIM’s share price is off 53% this year overall, not to mention the fact that BlackBerry has slipped to third place in the smartphone market, the company will take what it can get.

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The group messaging battle just heated up with the announcement Sunday that Skype has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire GroupMe, a group messaging service that will enhance Skype’s ability to facilitate text and photo messaging.

With this acquisition, Skype said in a press release that GroupMe will provide “best-in-class text-based communications and innovative features that enable users to connect, share locations and photos and make plans with their closest ties.”

Given the hyper-competitive backdrop of this booming group messaging field, it’s no surprise that Skype’s CEO Tony Bates told The Wall Street Journal about how important he thinks the mobile group messaging space is to his company. That’s evidenced by the multiple deals in that space taking in the past year, including Google’s purchase of group messaging company Slide in August of last year, Facebook’s rollout of its Group Chat capabilities after it acquired group messaging app Beluga in March of this year, and Apple’s June announcement of iMessage in iOS 5 that’s also capable of group messaging.

Even though Skype agreed in May to sell itself to Microsoft for $8.5 billion, that transaction has not been completed yet. Skype’s CEO didn’t specify the terms of the agreement between Skype and GroupMe, which is expected to close on Monday.

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