According to new reports, Google is in talks with Hollywood studios to offer movie rentals on YouTube for $5 a pop as streams, which is a few bucks more than they cost on comparable services like iTunes. Google has been testing movie rentals a few months ago with a select few indie titles, and now the company is set to expand significantly. We’ll have to wait and see what kind of deal is struck with the studios.

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Google has acquired Ångströ, which, despite its odd name, is a popular service for delivering search results on a person’s network — stuff that includes Facebook and LinkedIn.

Google is expected to integrate the new technology into its search engine. The acquisition price wasn’t disclosed.

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Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen has filed lawsuits against Google, Apple and Facebook via his company Interval Licensing LLC, which holds a number of patents related to the web. The patents in question (via Mashable):

• United States Patent No. 6,263,507 issued for an invention entitled “Browser for Use in Navigating a Body of Information, With Particular Application to Browsing Information Represented By Audiovisual Data.”
• United States Patent No. 6,034,652 issued for an invention entitled “Attention Manager for Occupying the Peripheral Attention of a Person in the Vicinity of a Display Device.”
• United States Patent No. 6,788,314 issued for an invention entitled “Attention Manager for Occupying the Peripheral Attention of a Person in the Vicinity of a Display Device.”
• United States Patent No. 6,757,682 issued for an invention entitled “Alerting Users to Items of Current Interest.”

As you can see, they’re pretty vague and Allen can pretty much sue every tech company and website out there.

UPDATE: It turns out that Paul Allen has sued quite a few companies besides Apple, Google and Facebook. The list now includes: AOL, , ebay, Netflix, Office Depot, OfficeMax, Staples, Yahoo, and YouTube.

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DigitalBattle brings news on Microsoft’s new chip which powers the Xbox 360. While the previous Xbox 360 had two chips — CPU and GPU — the new, slimmer console has them fused into one chip, which means it takes up less space and draws less power — 50% less power, to be exact. More details here.

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Storage software and solutions company 3PAR has been getting a lot of interest from Dell and HP, and now the two tech giants are competing over 3PAr. Yesterday, Dell offered $1.6 billion for 3PAR, and today, HP countered that with a $1.8 billion offer. The whole thing started on August 15, when Dell offered $1.15 billion for the company, but HP made a counter offer before the papers were signed.

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After months of beta testing, Digg has finally rolled out its version 4 of Digg.com. The new site features an all new look, something that wasn’t seen when the site went from v2 to v3. Digg has also added more social features, and is now almost like Twitter, in a sense where users can follow and be followed by others.

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Apple has announced that it will hold a special event, the way it does every September, on September 1, where it will reportedly reveal new iPods and a newly revamped Apple TV, rumored to be named iTV. Apple is also said to be introducing a 99-cent TV show rental program, but none of these things are confirmed — as usual we’ll have to wait and see.

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According to a new rumor, Facebook is looking to use CPUs based on the ARM architecture, rather than the usual Intel and AMD x86 based processors.

The advantage of using ARM CPUs is that they’re a lot more power efficient, however, they’re a lot less powerful in terms of computational power, so it’ll be interesting to see what Facebook does — if it does anything — with the ARM CPUs. Facebook is currently constructing a nw

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