ReadWriteWeb

Updated at 1pm PST with quote from Pandora founder Tim Westergren below. Updated August 4th with comment from Clear Channel PR.

Streaming music service Pandora has entered into an ad sales partnership with a subsidiary of media conglomerate Clear Channel, a move that should help ensure the service's long-term financial viability but will likely lead to more ads in the stream and criticism of the independent company for getting in bed with the widely disliked mega-firm.

AdAge provided in-depth coverage of the partnership in a report this morning. A zoom out to look at the criticism that Clear Channel has faced and how this impacts music fans is worthwhile as well.

We first reviewed TinyChat when it was just a text chat with Twitter integration. Since then, though, TinyChat has morphed into a full-blown online video conferencing system with features like screen sharing, video recording, and Facebook integration. These days, as more and more video services offer integration with Twitter, TinyChat has been under some pressure to stay ahead of the competition like camtweet and Twitcam. In response to the increased competition, TinyChat just released a new and improved version of its service. This new version offers a number of interesting new features, including a push to talk mode and more options to manage a room for room starters. In addition, the video resolution and frame rate have also been doubled in the free version.

Within the next two weeks, Google will release a new development version of Google Chrome that will include the ability to sync bookmarks between different computers. As Tim Steele, a software engineer on the Chrome team explained in a message to the Chrome developer group, the synchronization will be managed through a Google account. Changes in one install will be reflected in another Chrome instance in real time thanks to the Chrome team's use of the Google Talk servers as the messaging backend for this service.

A little over a month ago, the next update to the iPhone firmware - OS 3.1 beta - was released to developers. With the updated firmware, there are a number of bug fixes and a few new features, including voice control over Bluetooth, copy and paste for phone numbers, vibration feedback when re-arranging screen icons, and more. However, the most notable change in the latest OS update is the re-inclusion of MMS. For unknown reasons, this feature was removed from the fifth beta and the public release of the OS, but now it's back and enabled by default. Although the functionality isn't working over the AT&T network yet, there are reports that the next iPhone update will indeed enable MMS. The only question is when?

One of the most popular activities on the microblogging service Twitter is sharing links. However, this activity is also one of the most dangerous, too. Ever since Twitter gained in popularity, hackers and spammers have been using the service to direct traffic to their unsavory websites. For the end user, clicking on those bad links could result in, at best, an annoyance as they're directed to some spammy website or, at worst, a full-on malware attack on their PC.

Today, it appears that Twitter is starting to do something about the problem. According to security firm f-secure, Twitter is now blocking malicious URLs from being posted to their service.

Google just launched "Going Google" - a marketing campaign similar to the Spread Firefox to encourage companies to switch to Google Apps in the workplace. While millions already use Gmail, the campaign is aimed at luring business and enterprise users away from Microsoft Exchange and Outlook. Google already claims to serve more than 1.75 million companies and judging by the flashy campaign, it hopes to increase that number in the near future.

This weekend, developers, UI designers and testers combined forces to share ideas and collaborate at the third annual iPhone Dev Camp. The event encourages individuals at all levels to continue to stretch the development boundaries of the iPhone and iPod touch. The event's Hackathon competition offers an exhibition of attendee projects and is a showcase of some of the industry's brightest innovators. Below are some of the latest trends amongst those innovators.

I had a big, long post written up here about how, with a very few exceptions, the speaker lineup at most tech conferences is disproportionately, staggeringly, overwhelmingly male. (And at least with the ones I've been at, pretty damn white, too.)

But so much has been said in such better ways by people better positioned to comment intelligently - the issue recently earned its own hashtag, which tells you something - that I deleted the whole thing.

Don't forget, we've put all of our events into a calendar so that you can keep track of them using your scheduling app of choice. So, go ahead and download the entire calendar in iCal format. You can also use this link to import it into your Google Calendar, or import individual events using the link beside each entry. This events guide is a weekly feature here on ReadWriteWeb. We publish it every weekend, as good a time as any to review your conference plans.

Know of an event taking place that should appear here? Let us know in the comments below or contact us.

In this edition of the Weekly Wrapup - our newsletter summarizing the top stories of the week - we analyze the deal to bring Microsoft's Bing search engine to Yahoo, check out the latest social media and Twitter statistics, investigate the state of RFID tags and Internet fridges, look at Apple's "interactive album" concept, and more. We also check in on our two new channels: ReadWriteEnterprise (devoted to 'enterprise 2.0' trends and products) and ReadWriteStart (dedicated to profiling startups and entrepreneurs).

Note: this week ReadWriteWeb released our second premium report: our Q2 2009 VC Funding Report. Full details below...