Hulu Scoops the Nets
Hulu, the joint venture between NBC and Fox that’s probably the best stab yet at bringing network-style TV to the Web, is hosting a network-like rollout of the fall season’s series premieres and new episodes of old shows. Not only that, but it’ll have the first episodes of four new and returning shows–Knight Rider, Lipstick Jungle, Chuck, and Life–a week before they’re on broadcast TV. That’s a far cry from the more typical tactic of delaying Web premieres of TV programming so they don’t compete with the networks. And another instance of Hulu being a shockingly with-it entertainment service for something owned and operated by Old Hollywood.

Read more at: TechCrunch

Broadband Price Wars
The Wall Street Journal has a story on price cuts for broadband service–the examples given involve DSL from Verizon and AT&T (and actually, the AT&T news involves a guarantee that prices won’t increase), but the Journal says that some analysts think that cable will get cheaper, too. Good news, but let’s hope that broadband prices drop on a real, permanent basis–the teaser pricing that both cable and phone companies use to hook you in on the basis of a cheap price for the first six months is nearly as much of a pox on consumers as rebates. I’d love to see the FTC (or whoever is in charge of such things) mandate that you can’t promote a teaser rate without listing the ongoing rate in type that’s at least as large.

iPhone Browsing Doubles
Browser research company NetApplications says that its data shows that Web browsing with iPhones has doubled since the release of the iPhone 3G last month. As a percentage of all browsing, that done on iPhones remains tiny: It’s .3 percent, according to NetApplications. Fun fact: Four percent of all visits to Technologizer to date have come from folks using iPhones. I’m not sure what that means, other than that this site is a bit ahead of the curve: I expect the day to come when the majority of Web browsing is done on phones.

Read more at: Cnet

IE8’s Weight Problem
The Exo Performance Network has published some facts and figures on Internet Explorer 8’s footprint, and they’re…well, they’re kind of appalling. IE8, Exo says, takes more RAM than Windows XP. No, not the XP version of IE–more RAM than the entire operating system. And it’s over twice as resource-intensive as Firefox. I’ve ranted about bloatware for years–usually bringing up the fact that I can remember the day when programmers were lucky if they had 16K to work with. As much of computing moves from the desktop to the cloud, bloat will be more of a problem than ever: If I ran Microsoft, I’d be working very hard to ensure that the company gets really good at writing applications that are really skinny. Or at least not morbidly obese.

Read more at: InfoWorld, exo.blog

Facebook’s Virtual-Gift Windfall
Lightspeed Venture Partners has done the math on Facebook’s digital gifts–those little images of everything from hugging teddy bears to sushi to boxer shorts that sell for a buck apiece–and says that it thinks Facebook is making around $35 million a year from them. Fascinating. And scary. Betcha the guy who invented the Pet Rock didn’t do nearly so well.