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iPhones are being used as musical instruments in a new class taught at the University of Michigan. The students who design, build and play instruments on their iPhones, will perform a free public concert on December 9. The course called "Building a Mobile Phone Ensemble" is believed to be the first of its kind. The class is taught by Georg Essl, a computer scientist and musician who has been working on developing mobile phones as musical instruments.

Mercatus released the results from an interesting survey about the mobile offerings of banks. According to the firm's findings, banks that offer mobile financial services can increase their new customers acquisitions by as much as sixty percent.

The PageZoom, NoSquint, and Image Zoom add-ons for Firefox have been downloaded over 5 million times, all together, so obviously, there are a significant number of people for whom default sizes don't cut it.  And now Google's trying to help them out by adjusting the way in which it displays image results.

Today, Microsoft may have given Firefox and Chrome a better shot at grabbing market share in Europe.  A report's indicated that Microsoft will appease antitrust regulators - along with its competitors - by showing Windows users a randomized ballot screen for Web browsers.

According to the Financial Times, Google is in talks with estate agents in Britain to launch an online property portal for the UK, similar to one that already exists in Australia. Through that one, agents list properties and show pictures from Google Maps Street View. FT cites Douglas & Godon (an estate firm) commercial director Ed Mead as its source, who claims to have spoken with Google about the plans. No comment has been received from Google on the matter.

MySpace is continuing to make big strides on the music front.  Or more accurately, the social network has made a huge, across-the-Atlantic leap, as late yesterday, MySpace Music launched in the UK.

Update: The Wall Street Journal is running a piece from Google CEO Eric Schmidt on how Google can help newspapers. It's an interesting read.

The Pulitzer Prize Board said Wednesday it is opening its doors wider to entries from text-based online-only newspapers and news sites. A year ago, the Board broadened the competition to include many news outlets in the United States that publish on the Internet at least weekly, but it required that all entered material had to come from outlets "primarily dedicated to original news reporting and coverage of ongoing events."