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The European Union said Tuesday it will invest $25 million into research that will underpin the next generation of 4G mobile networks. The EU says the funding will go towards research on Long Term Evolution (LTE) Advanced technology, that will offer mobile Internet speeds up to a hundred times faster than current 3G networks. The funding will be released on January 1, 2010.

Newspaper websites attracted more than 70.3 million unique visitors in June, reaching 35.9 percent of all Internet users, according to a custom report by Nielsen Online for the Newspaper Association of America. News paper website visitors viewed 3.5 billion page views during the month, spending 2.7 billion minutes browsing the sites in more than 597 million sessions.

Sony has announced that its eBook store now offers access to more than 1 million free public domain books from Google. The selections include biographies, historical texts, romance novels and hundreds of other genres. The titles have been digitized by Google as part of its Google Book project. The titles are available on Sony's eBook reader.

If you're a Facebook user, you've almost certainly encountered the "We're Related" app in one way or another. Whether or not you have actually participated in it, you have probably at least seen an invitation.

Twitter gets criticized on a regular basis for not having a business plan.  But the point of a business plan is to bring in money, and it turns out that, at least in terms of marketing expenses, Twitter doesn't have any financial needs.  A report claims that the company's received $48 million in free media coverage over the past 30 days.

Tonight, it's almost certain that bars around Facebook's new headquarters in Stanford Research Park will be busy.  Tomorrow, the offices of Facebook's employees may be full of new toys and gadgets.  It seems that Russian investment firm Digital Sky Technologies wants to buy $100 million of common stock from employees. 

CoTweet is a Twitter app, which is described as a real-time business collaboration platform for Twitter. It has also just raised $1.1 million in venture funding. The funding comes from Baseline Ventures, Founders Fund, First Round Capital, SV Angel, Maples Investments and Freestyle Capital. CoTweet is used by brands like Whole Foods, Starbucks, Microsoft, JetBlue, Ford, Pepsi, Sprint, and Coca-Cola.

Nearly 55 million Americans visited an entertainment news site in May 2009, representing a 7 percent increase over the previous year, according to a new report from comScore. Online video has also played an increasingly important role for content in the category, with the number of videos viewed growing 53 percent in the past year.