In Brief: Apple gets social, YouTube goes mobile, Yahoo! upholds censorship and IT disappoints

Apple is expected to announce a deal today to sell iTunes music through the Bebo social networking site, according to the FT - its first deal with this type of online community.

Bebo users in the UK and Ireland will be able to purchase songs directly from musicians' profiles on the site, with plans to expand the deal to all Bebo users if it proves successful. It's been a steady stream of news out of Apple this week as its WorldWide Developers Forum takes place in San Francisco.

Yahoo! shareholders have backed the policy of its Chinese business to block certain sites, saying it must abide by local laws. At the company's AGM yesterday proposals to oppose internet censorship or set up a human rights committee to review such practices were both defeated.

This follows news that images on its Flickr photo-sharing site are inaccessible to Chinese users, the head of Yahoo!'s Hong Kong unit told Reuters.

Yahoo! shareholders also expressed their displeasure with the company's falling share price and CEO Terry Semel's $100m-plus compensation last year.

Sticking with web businesses, YouTube is testing software which could help it fight copyright infringement by identifying unique parts of a video clip, a major issue for the Google-owned site which has already resulted in multimillion-pound lawsuits.

Company co-founder Steven Chen also said YouTube will be making a major mobile push - and that its videos may be available on mobile phones as soon as 2008.

New research backs up the argument that IT needs to be more reliable before the business will see it as an asset.

According to consultancy Partners in IT, 74 per cent of non-IT business managers spend on average 12 per cent of their time every week fire-fighting IT problems. And around half of IT managers in large companies said downtime is a serious problem for their organisation.

In contract wins, online community and classifieds site Gumtree - which boasts 200 million page views per month - has chosen MySQL's open source database to store all its transaction data and power its searches.

And elevator and escalator company Kone is rolling out Salesforce.com's on-demand CRM to 2,500 additional staff in 43 countries. Already a Salesforce customer, Kone is looking to use the product to increase sales per person and cut down on admin overhead.

Finally from across the pond: the US is no longer the unchallenged world leader of tech. A new study from Info-Tech Research and KnowledgeStorm said businesses in Africa, Asia, India and Latin America are catching up when it comes to adopting advanced IT systems.

Indian IT managers are particularly willing to roll out sophisticated tech while Africa stands out in industrial automation.