[Best of the Web – Thursday, 21 January 2010]

Amazon opens Kindle to third-party apps: Online retailer Amazon.com is opening its Kindle e-book reader to third-party application developers. The announcement comes less than a week before Apple is expected to announce a tablet device that will compete with Amazon in the e-book market. A beta, or test version, of a Kindle software development kit will be made available next month to a limited number of software developers. Consumers will be able to download apps “later this year”, Amazon says. The company will specifically bar developers from writing generic e-reader applications that could endanger its e-book business. [The Register] [The New York Times]

YouTube gets into video rentals: Google’s YouTube is getting into the movie rentals business. But it’s approaching the market cautiously, offering only five movies to start, none of them blockbusters. The New York Times says YouTube held discussions with the big movie studios last winter, including Lionsgate Entertainment, Sony and Warner Bros. [The New York Times] [Los Angeles Times]

Oracle’s acquisition of Sun gets the green light: The European Union has approved Oracle’s US$7,4bn takeover of Sun Microsystems. The deal, which already has the backing of US regulators, was delayed by the EU’s concerns about what Oracle might do with the open-source MySQL database, which is regarded as a competitor to Oracle’s commercial database offerings. The EU says it had found that the Oracle database and MySQL do not compete directly in all markets, especially the “high-end segment”. [CNet News] [BBC News]

Nokia to offer free turn-by-turn navigation: Nokia will offer free turn-by-turn GPS navigation to all its current mobile handset users worldwide, becoming the first cellphone company to do so. The Finnish company will offer the service with an upcoming version of its Ovi Maps software, according to the TimesOnline website. Nokia says the software includes data for 180 countries in 46 languages. Shares in TomTom, a dedicated GPS manufacturer, tanked 15% on the news. [TimesOnline] [BusinessWeek]