Last January Warner Music Group forced YouTube to remove all of its music from the site, citing disputes over royalty payments. This led to an outcry from users, who created protest videos once YouTube started muting or pulling down any user-generated content that contained WMG songs as background music. Today, those songs are starting to make their way back to the world's largest video portal: music videos for Madonna, Green Day, and Bee Gees, among others, are now live on YouTube for the first time in nearly a year. That's great news. But the new videos will look a bit odd to anyone who has used YouTube before — they're all decked out with extensive branding, including colorful backgrounds and large links to the artist's products. Warner alone has the ability to do this, because of a deal it negotiated that gives it far more control over its pages than other content partners have.

Zuck announced last month that Facebook would be bringing the company's 360 dynamic streaming to Gear VR to improve experiences. Now, the company is

When you hear “Oculus Rift” you think games, but it looks like virtual tours are becoming a new category to the uses for the virtual reality device. Founders of YouVisit, a virtual tour company, Taher Baderkhan, Abi Mandelbaum and Endri Tolka met in their first year of college and they had one thing in common: they were all international students.

We've seen some notable developments around mobile payments that turn handsets effectively into credit cards, credit card processors, reward point aggregators, and more. A new product out today could see the ranks of these services swell even larger: mobile marketing company Placecast is launching ShopAlerts Wallet, an HTML5-based, white-label service combining local offers and payments, which it wants to sell on to credit card companies, carriers and retailers to develop their own mobile payment wallets and loyalty services. PlaceCast says that this is service is the first of its kind, in that it ties location-based offers (the service Placecast is best known for) to mobile payments in a "turnkey", plug-and-play solution. Based on HTML5, the service works across all smartphone platforms, and is potentially easier to implement and use than a native app: "There’s no app to build for marketers, and no app for consumers to download," the company says.

I'm excited for Astro Bot but also disappointed its release affirms that Sony has completely abandoned first-party PlayStation VR2 support.