What you need to know – Thursday 8/26/10

Its another business day and you know what that means. More news to keep you ready to begin the day fresh faced and well informed.

Six Apart, one of the original blogging platforms on the Web, has some serious rumors swirling around it regarding impending possible purchase. Six Apart has hired GCA Savvian, an investment banking firm that is well-known for creating Internet startup deals. Nothing has been said by either Six Apart or GCA Savvian, but the rumors are flying fast and furious, bringing new notice to an often overlooked company.

Mophie and Intuit launced a credit-card-processing device for your iPhone. For $179.95 at the Apple store, you can by a device that gives your iPhone the ability to swipe credit cards. The screen of your phone also acts as a digital signature pad. An account costs $12.95 a month with a $0.30 to $0.34 per transaction fee. Each account allows up to 50 users to process on the device, making it a cost friendly solution

Google Voice phone booths. Google voice, its VOIP service will soon be creating a series of phone booths in public locations, like airports and college campuses in the next year. This is part of a campaign to promote the integration of Google Voice and Gmail. While the phones will be rotary style, but still fully functional. Google has not, as yet, disclosed where exactly these calling stations will be located. So, no planning your free calls, and they will be free calls, even internationally.

Bring Palm the money and make some of your own. Palm webOS Developers with the most downloaded webOS PDK Applications will get from July 15, 2010 through September 30, 2010. In order to be eligible the application must have been developed using Palm’s Plug-in Development Kit and be available for download, at some point during the contest, through an official Palm web OS distribution program. The top award is $100,00 dollars with smaller prizes available.

Microsoft accidentally leaks IE9 images. Internet Explorer 9’s interface was a closely guarded secret, until Microsoft Russia accidentally released a screenshot on their press site. While the posting has since been taken down by Microsoft the post did mention that some sites will be protected, and end users will be able to open them without first opening the browser, so that these sites will act almost like applications.

Myspace to upgrade profiles. Myspace announced that it will upgrade their users profiles. The new themes highlights ease of use and simplicity. Themes are currently available to be viewed in the theme gallery. The biggest changes will be to the profiles of musicians. The new profiles will allow musicians to upload more songs for fans to hear and also to feature up to 25 songs on their profile at once. Celebrities like Ashton Kutcher, Nicole Kidman, Russell Brand, Cristiano Ronaldo and Eli Roth have already upgraded their profiles during the Beta tests of this feature.

Twitter and Facebook are making moves that aren’t very frienldy. It used to be – at least for a brief period – that Facebook users could see which of their friends were on Twitter, and follow them with one click. The briefly-existent feature, allowing Twitter users to locate their Facebook friends on Twitter has officially been removed. After a period of both sides attempting to resolve the issue the feature has been pulled. Twitter told a reporter at Tech Crunch that they removed the feature to “avoid user confusion.”

On September 1st, Apple will be holding a mystery event. While the icon for the event is music themed, there has been no announcement of what will happen at this event. The event will be held at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Theater in San Francisco at 10 AM pacific time. Rumors are circulating about what Apple will announce.