Tim Conneally

Android will be the next mobile platform to receive Opera Mobile 9.7, Opera Software CEO Jon von Tetzchner confirmed yesterday in an interview with PCMag Network.

Opera Mobile 9.7 was released in its first beta in June on Windows Mobile and Symbian devices, adding new server-side optimization called "Opera Turbo" which promised to substantially speed up page rendering when users browse the Web on a 2G connection.

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Today, the Federal Communications Commission is holding the first of more than 20 public workshops focusing on the state of broadband access in the US, which will lead up to the creation of the National Broadband Plan in February 2010.

"From this point forward, there really is no letting up," newly minted FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski said yesterday. "This will be a deeply fact-based and data-driven process. We're bringing experts in-house and reaching out to external academic partners. This will be a seriously open and participatory process. Workshops will be streamed online and allow for external participation."

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In its quarterly earnings call, News Corp. reported an annual decline in revenue of $1.7 billion, citing the overall weakness of the economy as a major factor, but highlighting the advertising-related declines in its television, newspaper and information services divisions.

Rupert Murdoch, Chairman and CEO of News Corporation announced in its earnings call that the company is about to make a major change to its online news properties.

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This afternoon, Nielsen researchers David Martin and Sue MacDonald posted the Nielsen NetView Audience metric for Twitter in 2009, which shows that the majority of Twitter users are in the 25-54 age group.

The graph would otherwise be uninteresting were it not for the fact that 15-year old Morgan Stanley intern Matthew Robson declared that teenagers do not use Twitter, in a non-statistical representation of Teenager media consumption released last month.

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The Amazon Kindle may have achieved dominant mind share in e-book readers, but Sony is hoping to grab the attention of potential adopters by offering the cheapest e-reading device.

The Sony Reader Pocket Edition (PRS-300), a 5-inch e-book reader announced yesterday, will only cost $199, beating Amazon's Kindle 2 by $100. In July, Amazon dropped the price of the Kindle 2 to $299, knocking more than 15% off of its retail price.

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The Mozilla store has been shut down since yesterday after a security breach was discovered at GatewayCDI, the St. Louis-based third party vendor that runs the back end of the Mozilla Store.

"Mozilla immediately reached out to GatewayCDI and encouraged them to quickly inform individuals whose data had been compromised," The company said in its blog. "GatewayCDI is currently investigating their systems and determining the cause and extent of the breach.  Mozilla Store customers who are affected will be contacted directly by GatewayCDI."

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Google announced today that it will be acquiring video compression company On2 Technologies for an estimated $106.5 million, pending stockholder approval and regulatory consent.

"Today video is an essential part of the Web experience, and we believe high-quality video compression technology should be a part of the Web platform," Sundar Pichai, Google's vice president for product management, said this morning. "We are committed to innovation in video quality on the Web, and we believe that On2's team and technology will help us further that goal."

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Digeo today unveiled a new addition to its Moxi product line as well as a feature-enhancing software update to its flagship Moxi HD DVR.

Digeo's Moxi HD DVR is a cableCARD-ready digital media recorder that does not require a monthly subscription fee. Today's new add-on is called the Moxi Mate and adds multi-room functionality to the HD DVR at less than half the price of a new standalone unit. The Moxi Mate carries a retail price of $399, while the HD DVR costs $799.

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The almost four-year long battle between TiVo and former sister companies Dish Network and EchoStar over DVR timeshifting technology rages on. The US Patent and Trademark Office has given a preliminary rejection to TiVo's software claims that could be used to find EchoStar in contempt of court and thus responsible for a billion dollar payout.

In the short term, EchoStar may be on course to avoid the contempt of court suit that would earn it huge legal penalties for allegedly disregarding the court's order to change its DVRs so they no longer infringed upon TiVo's patents.

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Claiming that sites such as MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter pose a "haven for malicious actors and content," the United States Marine Corps has instituted an immediate ban on social networking sites for soldiers and officers using the Marines' internal network.

According to a notification issued yesterday, the Marine Corps says social networking sites put the military at risk of "information exposure, user generated content and targeting by adversaries" and that they "expose unnecessary information to adversaries and provides an easy conduit for information leakage that puts [Operational Security], [communications security], personnel, and [The Marine Corps Enterprise Network] at an elevated risk of compromise."

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Even though domain theft has occurred for years, it has never been treated as a criminal offense until now.

The $160,000 domain name P2P.com was allegedly stolen in 2006 by Daniel Gonclaves, a 25-year old computer tech from New Jersey. Gonclaves then sold the domain on eBay for $110,000 to professional basketball player Mark Madsen. Gonclaves claimed he had purchased the domain for $1,500 from its owners Albert and Lesli Angel.

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Yahoo's social bookmarking service Delicious today has received an upgrade with a Twitter mashup component originally designed for Yahoo News.

TweetNews took Yahoo News articles (which are ordered chronologically) and compared them to Twitter's trending topics (which are based on a subject's popularity.) The result was a news search that could not only determine the freshest articles, but also those based on the most popular subject at the moment. The app also used social commentary to determine the pertinence of authoritative news sources when determining search results.

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Canadian mobile network operator Bell Mobility will be getting the Palm Pre on August 27.

In May, Palm Inc. announced that it would be bringing its flagship touchphone to Bell Mobility "in the second half of 2009" with no specific date.

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Following the resignation of Google CEO Eric Schmidt from Apple's Board of Directors, Google and Apple face further scrutiny from the Federal Trade Commission for more potential problems.

The FTC first began investigating Google and Apple's relationship in May, and Schmidt's position as CEO of Google was causing an increased amount of conflict as an Apple director, especially as Google started working on the Android Operating System. Schmidt's resignation yesterday looked like it could have brought a swift end to the potentially anti-competitive relationship.

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Responding to the FCC's probe of the rejection of the Google Voice app for the iPhone, AT&T said it has no input in the approval or denial of applications in the iTunes app store.

"AT&T does not manage or approve applications for the App Store. We have received the letter and will, of course, respond to it," the company said in a statement today.

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