This week, mobile operator 3 has seemingly changed the mobile web forever by being the first to offer flat rate mobile broadband on its new X-Series service. No pricing details have been announced yet, but for a flat monthly fee, 3 users will be able to Skype, IM, stream TV from their homes and access desktop files from their X-Series compatible phones.

Also, Yahoo has announced that it's to acquire online karaoke and contest site Bix. The company was founded in January and only went live in August. It claimed one million unique visitors since launch.

Finally, Yahoo and Microsoft have partnered with Google to support the Sitemaps 0.90 protocol. Published under the Creative Commons licence, Sitemaps enable webmasters to craft XML files containing information about recently updated pages. When a search engine's indexing program spiders the site, the Sitemap file informs it which pages require indexing, useful stuff!

Have a great weekend.