As part of an effort to get YouTube visitors using the site for things besides user-made videos, YouTube is expanding its professionally produced offerings as well as increasing investments in its own programs, confirming reports from last month suggesting that the company wanted to add to its exclusive programming.

The most audacious start-up pitches are those that propose changing people’s communications habits. No matter how clever a company’s technology or gorgeous an app’s interface, getting users to adopt new modalities of communication is perhaps the hardest job in tech.

It’s a social challenge as much as a technological one, which means that if you get it right, your technology spreads from person to person–virally, as the overused term calls it. Lately, social start-ups have been adopting strange, mutated viral models: Path is a social app that launched with a bizarrely limited way to join networks. Color opens you up to pop-up social networks based on physical proximity. Both clever but far outside most users’ comfort zones.

SAN FRANCISCO–Hoping to bring magazine-style layout tools to Web publishing, Adobe Systems tonight released a prototype browser specifically designed to let Web developers test the company’s proposed formatting technology.

The technology, called CSS Regions, lets programmers easily create multi-column layouts, place text in various polygonal shapes, and flow around objects in the middle of text.

A new network employing mobile devices and social networks wants to make it easier for small charitable organizations to raise the money they need to help their causes.

MobileCause, a Web service for nonprofit fundraising in the social-media age, has launched a new mobile mentor program, One by One, in an effort “to increase mobile philanthropy and provide essential mobile tools free-of-charge to smaller nonprofits.”

Microsoft has agreed to acquire Skype for $8.5 billion.

“Skype is a phenomenal service that is loved by millions of people around the world,” Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said today in a statement.

“Together we will create the future of real-time communications so people can easily stay connected to family, friends, clients and colleagues anywhere in the world.”

The World Wide Web Consortium announced 35 new members, a move it says signals growing interest in HTML and other Web technologies it standardizes.

Among the new members are: China Unicom, Comcast, Facebook, LG Electronics, NEC Corporation, Netflix, SanDisk, Sony, and Zynga.

SAN FRANCISCO–Google touted Android’s spread across the world today, saying growth of the mobile operating system and applications is accelerating.

It’s all bragging at the Google I/O conference, of course, but the numbers from Hugo Barra, director of Android product management, are real:

• There have been 100 million Android device activations.