Sony has acquired Gracenote, the company whose software tells digital music listeners what song they're annoying fellow BART riders with. Sony paid $260 million for Emeryville-based digital media identification company Gracenote, and is likely to integrate its services with its digital audio players. [AP]

Gracenote runs the service that automatically fills in song names, musicians, and album names when you rip a CD to your PC's hard drive. Without it, we'd be stuck spending years entering CD track data manually. But the company is no longer without competition — and it just lost a big client to a rival. Gracenote has been discreetly dropped by RealNetworks. A tipster alerts us that RealPlayer and Rhaposdy are now using All Media Guide's identification service, Lasso. Real joins a growing list of AMG adopters, including Sony and Apple. It's no surprise that the music services, facing thin margins, are shopping around.

Scott Jones, CEO of search engine ChaCha, has built a high-tech wonderland of a mansion in central Indiana to rival any abode in Silicon Valley. The 27,000 sq. ft. English country manor, selected by HGTV as the No. 1 home in America, melds old-world charm with a hardcore nerd's wet dreams. Amenities include the obligatory, and thoroughly geeky, automated lighting, air conditioning, and media systems controlled by touchscreen and a workstation sporting eight large LCDs (one of twenty-six computers in the home). Jones's playthings, however, don't stop with the typical high technology.