At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen spoke yet again of the company's continuing interest in porting Flash to the iPhone.

"It's a hard technical challenge, and that's part of the reason Apple and Adobe are collaborating," Narayen said to Bloomberg Television, "The ball is in our court. The onus is on us to deliver."

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Certain Netflix members this weekend received a survey from the company in their inbox which asked if users would pay more for premium content.

The survey focused on HBO content, which would add $9.99 per month and give the user instant access to HBO original series and movies. While it is still only an idea by the company, the introduction of a tiered streaming model is a logical next step for the company. It would move the streaming business out of the auxiliary position it currently holds and closer to the company's mail order business which currently has nine different monthly rental plans.

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At CES 2008, Intel's Paul Otellini used eJamming Audiio, BigStage, and the band Smashmouth to show off how a group of musicians located on various corners of the globe could get together via P2P and play live in a virtual environment.

BetaNews tested the eJamming Audiio software last year and found that it was suitable for recording and collaborating with others in a VoIP-enhanced environment, but playing instruments live had too many latency issues to be feasible. In using MIDI drums, a guitar and bass in three different locations in the United States, each musician found they had to get accustomed to latency in their own signal, and then the latency of the others as well. In the end, it was nearly impossible to play live.

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The BitTorrent-fed set top box by Myka which was promised to be released by April has evoked skepticism in some, but the company persists. Today it has updated its site, complete with a UI walkthrough (on a prototype device) and a new look for its product...with no BitTorrent logo on it. Last week, BitTorrent told us that Myka had not been cleared to use the BitTorrent logo despite being cleared to use the technology. Myka appears to have remedied this swiftly and simply.

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A video of a working prototype of the open-source gaming handheld Pandora, nearly complete in its fabricated case, has emerged. The device has been in the later stages of development since late last year.

Pandora is like the mutant offspring of a Fujitsu Lifebook u2010 and a Nintendo DS with mitochondrial DNA from the Sony PSP. It is powered by a Texas Instruments OMAP3 system on a chip and Linux-based OS and has been regarded as a sort of abandonware, open source, and PC gaming console-slash-PDA-slash-portable media player. Perhaps it would be best described as a GP2x with a keyboard and touchscreen.

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Remember Google Chrome? The new browser that was one of Betanews' Top 20 Stories of 2008, and certainly across the Internet as a whole? Well, after the initial hype that Chrome (and its subsequent first vulnerabilities) caused, the browser quietly broke the 1 percent mark of browser share this month. Google this week released updates addressing one moderate, and one severe security threat, and provides fixes for Yahoo Mail and Windows Live Hotmail.

The Moderate security update addresses a cross-site scripting vulnerability linked to the Adobe Reader plugin, and the severe update is for a bug in the V8 JavaScript engine that could allow malicious users to "clickjack" sensitive information by bypassing same-origin checks.

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comScore data released this week showed online casual gaming has reached 86 million users in 2008, an increase of 27% year over year. Additionally, the time individual users spend on gaming sites increased 42%.

Casual gaming is the category where Yahoo is definitely king, with 19.5 million unique visits in December, a 20% increase over 2007 and 4 million visits more than second place EA Online, and 6 million more than Disney Games, which holds third place.

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President Obama's TIGR (Technology, Innovation and Government Reform) team has already extolled the merits of mashups, and now we're seeing the beginnings of mashup language RDFa take root on WhiteHouse.gov.

Viewing the site's copyright policy source reveals the use of RDFa tags such as xmlns,and property. These provide a set of XHTML attributes (metadata) to augment the visual data with information meant for other machines to read, recognize and catalog.

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ABI research released the results of a survey today called "U.S. Consumer Interest in Netbooks," which found that of more than 1000 netbook users, only 11% used theirs as their primary household computer.

Sales of netbooks in 2008 were in excess of 11 million, and analysts began to track the effect it was having on notebook and desktop sales. In November, marketing executives from Acer and Asus estimated between 8-20% of netbook buyers were lost notebook sales.

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T-Mobile's Senior Vice President of Engineering and Operations Neville Ray was quoted yesterday in an interview as saying: "We will be launching more G series phones and other products. You will see us launch a data card product. This will be happening in the coming weeks and months."

Ray discussed T-Mobile's expanded 3G coverage in the U.S., and elaborated a bit on the company's plans for its AWS spectrum, saying, "We did purchase a large volume of spectrum and doubled our spectrum assets in the U.S. with the 1700 MHz spectrum and 2100 MHz spectrum. We effectively doubled our assets. So the network we are launching uses 10 MHz of spectrum and we have 30 MHz so we have headroom to grow. There also are spectrum efficiencies with HSPA and HSPA+.

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Networking and Telecommunications researchers The Dell'Oro Group published a report yesterday forecasting the next five years for DWDM in long haul fiber optic networks that expects the market for 40 Gbps wavelengths to grow by 50% every year. Short for Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing, DWDM is an optical technology used to fit more traffic (thus making it "dense" with signals) on existing fiber optic backbones.

This week, General Cable Corp and Fujitsu won their bid for a 1,000 mile long haul submarine fiber optic cable project connecting the Indonesian islands of Kalimantan and Sulawesi. That project is scheduled for completion in mid-2010.

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This Morning, Japanese electronics company NEC posted its third quarter earnings, showing a ¥124.8 billion drop year-over-year. Part of the cost-cutting measures the company announced today included workforce reductions to its chip, component, and LCD divisions, which will total 20,000 employees. 60% of these layoffs will take place outside of Japan, and the majority of those cut will be full-time employees. All cuts are expected to be completed before March 2010.

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Like Acer, number two computer company Dell is expected to unveil its long-rumored smartphone products at GSMA in Barcelona on February 16. According to Wall Street Journal reports, Dell has been working for over a year on Android and Windows Mobile devices and will have prototypes to show off at the convention, one of which is a touchphone, the other a slider of some sort. Details remain scant, but when Dell enters the smartphone business it will mean all of the US top five computer manufacturers will be represented in the mobile handset sector.

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Studio 3 Networks, a joint venture of three major production groups, revealed today that Epix -- the name for which it had filed multiple trademark applications in early December, will be a streaming on demand Web service.

Originally thought to be a premium television channel and companion on demand service, Studio 3 president Mark Greenberg said yesterday that it will actually be the other way around: a Web service with a cable channel planned for the future. Studio 3 is a joint venture of Viacom and Paramount Pictures, MGM Studios and United Artists, and Lionsgate Films.

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According to reports, President Obama has selected Google (and former Yahoo) group product manager Katie Jacobs Stanton as the country's first "Director of Citizen Participation."

Citizen Participation has been a key phrase in Obama's technological policy vernacular since the start of his campaign. From campaign literature: "Barack Obama will use the most current technological tools available to make government less beholden to special interest groups and lobbyists and promote citizen participation in government decision-making."

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