Amazon hosted an event today at the Morgan Library in New York that officially unveiled the second generation Kindle which surfaced in leaked photos as far back as October 2008.

The new Kindle has the same screen size as the original version, but has received an upgrade to the shape and durability of the chassis. Now only a fraction of the thickness (0.36" at its thickest), and stuffed with a purported seven times the amount of storage of the first generation Kindle, the latest version has incorporated a metal back plate into the body design.

The $99 Roku set top box that ushered in the age of streaming Netflix became an open platform late last year and will soon be offering Amazon on Demand to all. The streaming service this week entered private beta for select Roku users.

Amazon's Video on Demand, a sort of re-thinking of Unbox, left its beta stage in September. At launch, the service offered over 40,000 movies and television episodes with fees ranging from free to $3.99 per rental. Amazon support on the Roku device balances the Netflix content with new releases, an area where the subscription service remains weak.

Reporting fourth quarter revenues that were down 4% year over year, Corel closed out fiscal 2008 with full year revenues up 7% over 2007, with $268.2 million.

Corel's interim CEO Kris Hagerman said, "Despite facing a tough economic climate as we closed out the fourth quarter, revenues for the full year were up across all geographies and business units...Looking ahead to 2009, we have an exciting slate of new product introductions that we believe will further enhance our market position, even in a challenging economy."

Microsoft's MSN together with BermanBraun Interactive yesterday launched Wonderwall.com, a celebrity gossip site like the popular TMZ.com or People.com. Sites like these are in no short supply, but neither is their demand. Yahoo's top ten search terms overall are consistently dominated by celebrity names. 2008's top 10 from Yahoo, for example, included Britney Spears, Miley Cyrus, Jessica Alba, Lindsay Lohan, and Angelina Jolie. Google Zeitgeist year-end summaries have shown the celebrity search trend every year since 2001.

BermanBraun was founded in 2007 by ex-Paramount Pictures executive Gail Berman, and former Disney, ABC and Yahoo executive Lloyd Braun. The company focuses on providing the content and advertising on the site, MSN handles the rest.

Of Microsoft's anticipated "Sky"-prefixed services: SkyMarket, SkyLine, and Skybox, which are all cloud-based services for Windows Mobile consumption, Skybox has made an advance appearance, but with the title Microsoft My Phone beta. The My Phone service, which is located at getskybox.com (link currently inactive), will be a cloud sync tool similar to the one used natively by Android with Google services or MobileMe on the iPhone. Contacts, calendar information, emails and texts, photos, music, and video can all be synched between the Windows Mobile 6+ device and the related Windows Live service. Microsoft will be premiering the free service at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain next week.

Intel is now shipping the next generation of its Atom processor, the single core N280, to PC manufacturers. This iteration of the Atom microarchitecture has already been slated for use in Asus' latest Eee PC Netbook, the 1000HE. Asus has increased the battery life of this Eee to a purported 9.5 hours on a single charge, thanks to the new Atom processor which only consumes 2.5 Watts of power.

The Atom N280 runs at 1.66GHz, FSB 667MHz, and Pre-orders for the first netbook equipped with it, Asus' 1000HE, began this week.

It's been just under a year since TiVo last updated its Desktop software which allows videos to be shared between a user's TiVO DVR and PC or other networked devices. Now there's a new version for both Desktop and Desktop Plus users.

TiVo Desktop has received some noteworthy improvements, chief among them being the software's ability to group .tivo recordings on the PC by series when they are viewed on the DVR. Also, automatic transfers from the DVR now have the "Keep at Most..." value like Season Pass allows, and .vob are now treated the same as MPEG-2 files.

On Wednesday at the Technology Entertainment and Design Conference, Dr. Pattie Maes, founder and director of the Fluid interfaces group at MIT presented a smart device with ordinary parts that can turn any surface into a touchscreen.

Using a webcam, battery-powered projector, and mobile phone, the device acquits itself like a portable Microsoft Surface display built from $300 worth of consumer-grade hardware. The interface is generated by the phone which is in turn projected onto nearly any surface, and the camera is used to recognize gestures that interact with that projection.

In light of the Thai government's strict censorship rules, anti-censorship group Freedom Against Censorship Thailand (FACT) released information yesterday that it describes as "easy, legal tools for circumventing Internet censorship."

The government of Thailand has repeatedly come to blows with Web sites both domestic and foreign over free speech issues. YouTube, for example, was banned for four months in 2007 for hosting content deemed offensive to Thais, and a reported 4,800 sites were blocked by the Information and Communication Technology Ministry (ICT) in March 2008.

Yesterday, Norway's PMP interoperability champion, Consumer Ombudsman Bjørn Erik Thon, said there is no reason to continue his fight against Apple now that iTunes is DRM-free.

Thon called January 6 an "historic day for consumers of digital music," when Apple announced iTunes was going DRM-free. This action summarily ended the more than two-year-long demand for interoperability from Thon.

Yesterday, after Orange lost its appeal to retain its position as the exclusive iPhone carrier in France, complainant rival mobile operator Bouygues Télécom was reportedly ready to move on and start offering its own iPhone deals.

Apple's iPhone was made available unlocked through Orange, but at approximately double the price (€749) of a phone under contract with the mobile operator. The deal between Apple and Orange was for five years, with a three year exit provision for Apple.

While visual voicemail through Verizon carries an additional charge, and is only offered on select devices through others, YouMail today launched its carrier-agnostic free visual voicemail app for BlackBerry. Betanews took a look.

The YouMail application is available directly through the native browser on handsets running BlackBerry OS version 4.3 and up. Only T-Mobile, Verizon, and AT&T Wireless subscribers can currently use YouMail's new utility after first signing up for a YouMail account. That is best done through the YouMail Web site, as the application is still rough around the edges.

California's Federal District Court placed an indefinite delay on Rambus' coordinated SDRAM patent infringement suit against Micron, Hynix, Samsung, and Nanya yesterday.

District court Judge Ronald M. Whyte based his ruling on the January 9 Delaware District Court decision by Judge Sue L. Robinson that Rambus' patents are unenforceable due to conflicting views of the two courts.

Research in Motion announced that it has reached an agreement with the Staff of the Ontario Securities Commission in the investigation of the company's backdating practices.

RIM came under investigation nearly two years ago for granting backdated options to employees without reporting their value as a charge against the company's income. Backdating options is fully recognized by law, but improperly filing them with securities agencies is an illegal practice which put the Canadian company in considerably hot water.

This morning, Google announced the availability of Latitude, a social location tool for Google Maps accessible through BlackBerry, Windows Mobile 5.0+, and Symbian S60 devices or the corresponding iGoogle gadget.

Users with Latitude turned on show up as an icon on their buddies' Map, which acts as an interface to launch SMS, Google Talk, or GMail communications. Similar to mobile social network Brightkite, Google Latitude's locations are granular and can be as specific as a user's GPS coordinates, or as vague as his hemisphere.