Shawn Fanning

Social networking mobile app maker Path said Monday that it raised about $30 million from venture capital firms such as Greylock Partners and Redpoint Ventures and individual investors such as Virgin Group's Richard Branson and DST Global's Yuri Milner. The investment values the San Francisco company at $250 million. Path, which had previously raised $11.2 million, is the brainchild of former senior Facebook executive Dave Morin and Napster co-founder Shawn Fanning. It's riding the new wave of tech companies that are building for mobile, not the Web. Path has been compared to Instagram, which Facebook said last week it would buy for $1 billion.

Music giant Sony BMG finalized its deal with the legal file-sharing network Mashboxx, two days after a U.S. court dealt a blow to Mashboxx's unauthorized rivals such as Grokster. Mashboxx, headed by former Grokster President Wayne Rosso, is a peer-to-peer file-sharing network that requires users to pay for copyrighted songs. The companies said Wednesday that Sony BMG songs would cost 99 cents each, in line with the price charged by Apple Computer Inc.'s iTunes online music store.

The gig: Rob Wells is president of global digital business at Universal Music Group. With a global staff of 75 and an office that sits next to the company's chief executive in Santa Monica, Wells must chart the digital course for the world's largest record company. The opening act: Wells landed his first record company job in 1994 at BMG Entertainment in his native Britain, where his job included sorting through the company's fan mail and building a database of customer names and addresses for promotional mailings.

Napster Inc., the Internet music exchange service, said Monday that it has filed for bankruptcy protection as part of the planned sale of its assets to German media giant Bertelsmann. The closely held Redwood City, Calif.-based company listed $7.9million in assets and about $101million in debt as of April 30, according to papers filed with its voluntary Chapter 11 petition at the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Delaware.

Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Shawn Fanning and even the Lone Gunmen from "The X-Files" are poster boys for the tech world. But in such a testosterone-dominated field, those with the second X chromosome are often left out of the mix.

Rapper Eminem performed "The Real Slim Shady" while walking into Radio City Music Hall with an army of look-alikes Thursday, then walked out with the top honors at the MTV Video Music Awards. Along the way, pop music's annual wild party lived up to its reputation with a high-altitude stage-crasher and profane jokes that tested the censor's trigger finger. Eminem's signature song was named video of the year and best male video.

One of the world's most famous computer hackers gets off probation this week and plans to dive back into the Internet, his former playground where breaking-and-entering landed him in jail for five years. On Tuesday, 39-year-old Kevin Mitnick will log on to the Internet for the first time in eight years, during the live TechTV show "Screen Savers." Also scheduled to be on the program are Shawn Fanning, creator of Napster Inc., and Steve Wozniak, a co-founder of Apple Computer Inc.

Two of Napster's founders have rejoined forces to launch a new startup, this time a live social video network. The new service by Sean Parker and Shawn Fanning is intended to bring users together through their social networks as well as their shared interests in a way that seems to combine the experiences of Skype, Chatroulette and alsoGoogle's now-extinct Wave. To use Airtime, which was launched at an event Tuesday in New York City, users need only a Facebook account and a webcam.

Global media conglomerate Bertelsmann struck a deal with Napster Inc. on Friday to buy the company after Napster emerges from bankruptcy, paying creditors $8million but leaving investors in the pioneering song-sharing service empty-handed. Among the creditors are the major record labels and music publishers that sued Napster for copyright infringement, saying Napster users made millions of unauthorized copies of their songs for free.

Napster Inc., once the copyright-flouting bad boy of the music world, is relaunching its online song-sharing system today as a subscription service that pays for music and deters piracy. The launch is limited to an invitation-only trial with about 20,000 participants, who will receive the service for free. The service will have a familiar look and feel but far fewer songs to download.