Tim Conneally

At the annual Nokia World conference in London Wednesday, Finnish mobile phone company Nokia officially unveiled its first two smartphones that will run the Windows Phone mobile operating system: the Nokia Lumia 800 and Lumia 710. These will be the first smartphones Nokia will sell in the United States since it partnered with Microsoft earlier this year.

The Lumia 800 is the device that was known as "Sea Ray" in leaks back in June, and it offers a 3.7" AMOLED curved glass display, a 1.4 GHz Qualcomm MSM8255 processor with 512MB of RAM, 16GB of onboard storage, and an 8 megapixel camera. The software it runs is Windows Phone 7.5 "Mango" and it will be available internationally in both GSM and WCDMA varieties.

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Leading online retailer Amazon submitted its third quarter 2011 sales and earnings figures on Tuesday, revealing a big jump in sales -- especially in its Kindle product line -- but an overall decline in income.

Sales increased 44 percent sequentially, going from $7.56 billion to $10.88 billion; this represented a 39 percent increase over the same quarter last year.

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To accompany the new stable version of the Chrome browser Tuesday, Google updated its Chrome App Store Apps with a new look and new interface.

The new App Store is marked by big images for the featured apps and extensions, that users need only to hover over to reveal a short review, user rating, and "add to Chrome" button. A left-hand navigation panel contains the store's search feature, and lists of popular apps and extensions, collections, and categories.

Individual pages for apps and extensions have been updated as well with a tabbed interface that breaks the app up into Overview, details, and reviews. The reviews interface now links to a user's real identity with their Google+ profile.

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DVD rental and streaming video provider Netflix has posted its third quarter 2011 earnings, and though the company's revenues are higher than they were last year, decreasing subscriber acquisition and increasing costs of content licensing will have a significant impact on the company's bottom line next year.

If we were to go strictly by Netflix's earnings data, it would look like the company is continuing to do well: $822 million in revenue (49% higher than 2010,) $62 million in net income (63% higher than 2010,) and earnings per share exceeded Wall Street expectations by more than 20%.

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Texas PC maker Dell on Monday took the wraps off of the newest in its 18-year old line of XPS laptops, the 13-inch XPS 14z. Like it has done with all the products in its "Z-series," Dell is billing the 14z as the thinnest fully-featured laptop in its size class.

It falls in line as the higher-end cousin to the Inspiron 14z that Dell released just shy of two months ago, and smaller counterpart to the XPS 15z that was released earlier this year.

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Leading enterprise IT company Oracle announced on Monday that it will be acquiring cloud customer service company RightNow for approximately $1.5 billion.

Since CRM is a major aspect of Oracle's business, RightNow's cloud-based customer experience suite, RightNow CX will make an attractive addition to Oracle's cloud CRM platforms. RightNow CX is already used by almost 2,000 companies internationally, by companies such as NASA, eHarmony, Yahoo, Reuters, Overstock, The U.S. Army, and Nikon to name just a few.

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Information Technology market intelligence company International Data Corporation (IDC) released a report on Friday that forecasts the future growth in corporate spending on cloud-based storage. According to the report, spending on equipment for both public and private cloud storage systems will reach $22.6 billion by 2015.

IDC says we should expect public cloud service providers to increase their spending on storage hardware, software, and professional services over the next five years, and that it should amount to a compound annual growth rate of 23.6%.

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Following a brief leak onto Amazon yesterday, Samsung on Friday officially announced the availability of its second generation 7" Galaxy Tab in the United States, The Galaxy Tab 7.0 Plus.

With its 1.2GHz dual core processor, 16GB of built-in storage, Android Honeycomb, a 7" screen and a 9.96mm profile, the Galaxy Tab 7.0 Plus offers a considerable jump in power over its predecessor.

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At its keynote presentation at the Electronic Entertainment Expo 2011, video game company Nintendo had a full orchestra perform symphonic arrangements of music from The Legend of Zelda video game series to simultaneously celebrate the 25th anniversary of the action role playing game franchise, and to ramp up excitement for the latest installment in the series, the Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword which launches on November 20.

Legend of Zelda game designer Shigeru Miyamoto said in the presentation that the symphony would be touring around the world in the Fall, and so far the group has only put on one show besides the one at E3.

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Taiwanese consumer electronics company Asus has been heavily teasing the impending release of its second-generation Transformer Android tablet, known as Transformer Prime. On Tuesday, it pushed out the teaser video we've embedded above, and last night at the AsiaD conference, the company's president Jonney Shih brought the tablet on stage for another quick look before its official November 9th debut.

The Transformer Prime has a 10" screen, an 8.33mm thick chassis, and a laptop dock comparable to its predecessor; but of the features that we know so far, it will have one that makes it different from all the other tablets out there: a quad-core Nvidia Tegra processor.

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IT communications and collaboration leader Avaya announced on Wednesday that it has acquired UK-based speech recognition and analysis company Aurix. The acquisition will add Aurix's audio and video identification, search and data mining technology to Avaya's communications products, giving the company a better way to catalog interactions.

Avaya said on Wednesday that Aurix's speech technologies will be incorporated into all of its biggest offerings, including its Contact Centers CRM product, as well as the Unified Communications and Aura communications and collaboration platforms.

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Cisco announced on Thursday that it intends to acquire Massachusetts-based video services company BNI Video, a company in which the United States' two largest cable providers, Comcast and Time Warner Cable, have already invested.

BNI's video back office and CDN analytics capabilities will be incorporated into Cisco's service provider-facing Videoscape TV platform, which was announced at the beginning of 2011.

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Microsoft on Wednesday released the community technology preview of Project Roslyn, a new type of compiler (considered a "Compiler-as-a-Service") that was first debuted at BUILD earlier this year.

Based on the Mono Project, Roslyn is designed to be a more open compiler (and not just "a black box," as Microsoft says) that lets developers access and utilize the data that it is generating on the Visual Basic and C# code it is compiling.

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For the last two years, the FCC has warned that our consumption of wireless broadband bandwidth is far outstripping its growth, and that if more of the wireless spectrum isn't allocated to broadband services, we're all in for a massive slowdown.

But that message hasn't really stuck.

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Just over a month ago, U.S. regional wireless carrier Cellular South changed its name to C Spire wireless in a move to become a more data-centric carrier.

Today, scrappy C Spire Wireless announced it will be getting the iPhone 4S "in the coming weeks" before its larger competitors T-Mobile, MetroPCS, and U.S. Cellular do.

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