A partnership between TiVo and BlackBerry maker Research in Motion (RIM) was announced today, promising a future synergy between the popular smartphone and DVR products.

Unfortunately, we are not yet seeing the ability to stream TiVo to BlackBerry handsets, like Sling Media promised earlier this year. Instead, TiVo subscribers will first be given access to their program guide and scheduling functionality on their BlackBerry.

Alcatel-Lucent has extended its tender offer to purchase US software company Motive yet again, stretching the offer into its fifth month.

In early August, Alcatel-Lucent had collected approximately 27 million shares in Motive, but its tender offer was set to expire, and had to be renewed if any deal was to proceed.

Qualcomm's "global mobile Internet chip" Gobi, announced last October, is an SoC that enables connectivity to EV-DO Rev. A, UMTS, and HSPA networks as well as GPS. Today, Panasonic announced the chips will be used in upcoming Toughbooks.

According to Gartner research, embedded wireless broadband was seen as a problem for notebooks because of the disparity between available technologies, rapid evolution in the field, and the limitations of aligning with just one network. This is why Qualcomm developed the multi-connection software-swappable modem used in Gobi.

The Wilmington, North Carolina area has become the first all-digital TV broadcast market in the United States, despite tropical storms, and despite what some media outlets called an unprepared populace.

BetaNews spoke to Wilmington local television stations last week about the potential for Tropical Storm Hannah to interfere with the official "switch throwing," and the consensus among station managers was that the whole affair was under control and they were ready.

AOL's Truveo has opened a mobile search site, culling results from 300 participating sites and moving AOL further into the mobile space where it intends to become an important fixture.

Earlier this year in Barcelona, AOL demonstrated its Open Mobile Platform concept, where it converted many of its Web properties into lightweight cross-platform applications and wrapped it together with AOL's Platform-A advertising services. This platform is based upon proprietary AOL technology common among many handsets, and is comprised of an XML-based markup language, a mobile device client, and an application server.

Sony's PlayStation Network, while considerably less mature than Microsoft's Xbox Live, especially in terms of software support, will soon grow with the release of banner online titles for the Christmas season.

For annual subscribers to Qore, the PlayStation online magazine, and North American customers who pre-ordered Resistance 2 from retailer GameStop, a beta of the online FPS has begun. The title is the sequel to the popular PS3 first person shooter Resistance: Fall of Man.

The latest platform innovation from Google enables advertisers to place bids for on-air commercial time that Google has already purchased. Now that time will come at a higher premium, with the entry of NBCU into the mix.

Google launched TV Ads last year, a means for businesses to selectively purchase television ad inventory using similar tools to what Google AdWords provides its clients for text ads, complete with minimum bids and budget maximums. After airing, customers can measure the efficacy of their campaigns. Google even provides the an Ad Creation Marketplace to assist in the creation of the commercial.

As Nokia debuts new services and acquires yet more developers, we're beginning to see the global cell phone leader emerge as a fully-fledged software producer. This from a company whose executives had set its sights on the Internet.

While its strategy to establish itself as a viable name in the Internet services field appears to be gaining a foothold, Nokia also appears -- if inadvertently -- to be attempting to trump Microsoft in the "unsellable name" department. Where Microsoft tends to have comically long and overcategorized product names (yesterday's announcement by Microsoft of "System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 Enterprise Server Management License" immediately comes to mind), Nokia's nomenclature route has veered toward the nonsensical.

Today, Amazon announced its indie publishing service CreativeSpace is now tied with its MP3 shop, allowing independent artists and labels to release DRM-free materials in Amazon's MP3 store.

Artists can set up an account on CreateSpace and sell their materials with no upfront charges; however, accounts are arranged in such a way that money is not directly distributed to artists. Instead, royalty checks are given out with expenses subtracted.

Following yesterday's big announcements in the E-paper category, Adobe this morning announced Content Server 4, server-side software for copy protecting, selling and lending eBooks for Adobe Digital Editions.

Adobe's Content Server 4 lets independent publishers, bookstores, or libraries encode, host, share and sell their eBooks. Each hosted eBook can be assigned its own permissions, allowing shoppers for example, to borrow an eBook with an encoded expiration date, or to buy one outright which can be printed or shared between devices.

To celebrate its 75th anniversary, ever-urbane magazine Esquire will include "disposable" electronic paper display (EPD) panels in its October 2008 issue.

The same magazine that has featured John Wayne with angel wings, and Muhammad Ali as St. Sebastian, proclaims "The 21st Century Begins Now," with its E Ink cover insert. The display is provided by E Ink Corp., the company responsible for providing displays for every other commercially available "e-paper" device.

The new .mp and .tel top-level domains, intended to serve as vehicle for personal identification, are being premiered this week. Though similar in purpose, the two are very different in function.

Telnic has marketed its .tel domain almost like a ".tel-ephone book," where the user keeps the personal domain as an updatable contact sheet. It provides a simple back end interface with contact information fields (physical address, mobile number, skypeid, email, weblink, fax, IM, etc.) which can be filled in and published.

More than two years after debuting the concept, Plastic Logic will premiere its first demo model e-book reader at DEMOfall in San Diego.

Like most other E-books, Plastic Logic's Reader is built around E-Ink's VizPlex imaging film. This Electronic Paper Display (EPD) technology can be found in the Amazon Kindle, Phillips spinoff iRex's Iliad, the Sony Reader, and the soon-to-be-available Readius from Polymer Vision.

The National Football League, NBC Sports, and Adobe have announced their collaboration on Sunday Night Football Extra -- full-length live streams of NFL Sunday night football games.

Delivered in Adobe Flash, the games are promised to include the ability for viewers to change their camera angles, as well as access live statistics, in-game highlights, picture-in-picture views, and live blogs from color commentators.

Internet retail giant Amazon will be running the One Laptop Per Child "Give one / Get one" (G1G1) program for this year's holiday season, confirming announcements made in May.

Matt Keller, director of Europe, the Middle East and Africa at OLPC, recently told IDG that Amazon will be handling the sales of the G1G1 program due to its size and ability to handle a large volume of customers. The program will be roughly the same as last year's, where customers buy an OLPC XO to donate to a developing country and get one of their own in return.