A consortium of investors that are being led by Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) and Silver Lake are submitting a plan to buy a minority stake in Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO). TPG Capital is another company that will be making a proposal for Yahoo! Both of these proposals would lead to taking a stake of around 20% of the company.

The European Commission is starting an investigation about the way that Facebook gathers information from users such as political opinions and religious beliefs and sends it to advertisers. Supposedly a new European Commission Directive will be introduced in January and will ban targeted advertising unless users specifically allow it. This seems unreasonable to me because targeted advertising seems to be the way that every Internet company makes their money.

Music is an art form and its elements include pitch, rhythm, dynamics, and tempo. Almost everyone is subjected to learning how to play a musical instrument in elementary or middle school. Personally I learned how to start playing the recorder in 4th grade and then I played the clarinet between 5th and 8th grade. Many of the common instruments have gone virtual are in the form of software applications. The Apple App Store specifically has a plethora of musical instrument applications. This includes trombones, guitars, pianos, harmonicas, ocarinas, etc. Below is a list of 18 of the best instrument apps on the Apple App Store:

The images and technical specifications of the Motorola Droid 4 will be available on the Verizon 4G LTE network. The Droid 4 is expected to be released on December 8th. Droid 4 has a 1.2 GHz dual-core processor, 1GB RAM, 4-inch screen, and slide-out QWERTY keyboard. [Droid-Life]

Gameloft is a mobile gaming company that is best known for developing iOS games based on movies such as Fast Five the Movie: Official Game, Iron Man 2, James Cameron’s Avatar, Shrek Kart, and Spider-Man: Total Mayhem. Gameloft has made a deal with Australian airline company Jetstar to provide iPads that are preloaded with their games for in-flight use. About twelve games will be offered to passengers eventually.

Samsung Electronics is planning on ending the manufacturing of netbook computers (10.1-inches) to focus on ultrabooks and ultraportables (11.6-12 inches). This is a statement from a leaked Samsung memo obtained by French blog (Blogee): “Following the introduction of our new strategy in 2012, we will discontinue our 10.1-inch (netbook) product range in Q1 2012, in favor of ultraportables (11.6 and 12 inches) and ultrabooks to be launched in 2012.”

According to a survey conducted between August 16th through September 8, 2011 by Careerbuilder.com, about 50% of Americans will be spending time shopping online while at work on Cyber Monday of this year (November 28, 2011). Of these workers, about 34% will spend one hour or more and 16% will spend two or more hours. Last year 52% of shoppers shopped online while at work, 27% spent 1+ hour, and 13% spent over 2+ hours. This is based on a survey of 4,384 workers and 2,696 employers. Check out the infographic below:

Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) has partnered with medical informatics company Candelis Inc. Candelis stores the digital medical images of their patents on cloud storage. Patients would be able to transfer their digital images to Microsoft HealthVault as a result of the partnership.