Tim Conneally

In response to the current state of the United States' patent system (and its parasitic twin, the industry of patent litigation), Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham has launched what he calls "The Patent Pledge," a brief, thirteen word long statement for technology companies to sign to affirm that they have no interest in suing startups over software.

The Pledge itself is quick, and to the point:

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OS X virtualization software company Parallels on Wednesday released the latest version of its eponymous desktop virtualization suite for Mac, Parallels 7, which adds support for new Lion-specific features and improves overall performance from the previous generation.

Apple began including iSight webcams in all its laptops in 2006, and since that time, Parallels support for them has been less than perfect. In fact, in some cases it's been downright terrible, requiring the camera to be dismounted from OS X before starting the Windows virtual machine, and remounting it once Windows had booted.

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Square, the innovative mobile payment collection system and credit card swiping peripheral for iPhone caught on like wildfire when it launched last year. With just an iPhone and the card scanner, users could set up retail shops and begin accepting credit cards just about anywhere.

…But not in Canada.

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The U.S. Department of Justice has moved to block the mega-merger between AT&T and Deutsche Telekom's T-Mobile USA, a merger that could completely throw off the competitive landscape for wireless communications for the next decade. Communications industry representatives Wednesday are stepping forward one by one and issuing support or condemnation for the DOJ's move.

The potential merger faced criticism from all sides of the industry, from smaller regional wireless carriers, to advocates for infrastructural growth, but there were a handful of supporters of the merger outside of AT&T and Deutsche Telekom who believed the combination of two of the U.S.' four biggest wireless networks would have been beneficial.

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Four months ago, Sony unveiled its first two Android tablets, a wedge-shaped slate and a dual-screen clamshell model which at the time went by the names S1 and S2, but became the Tablet S and Tablet P.

Today, Sony officially launched the Sony Tablet S, the wedge-shaped tablet.

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AT&T on Wednesday announced it will start selling HTC's Jetstream tablet on September 4th. The 10.1" Android Honeycomb tablet was known internally and in the Android rumor community as "Puccini."

HTC Jetstream has the honor of being AT&T's first 4G (LTE/HSPA+) tablet, and it is priced accordingly: a staggering $699.99 with a new two-year contract.

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HP announced it would cease production on its WebOS tablet, the TouchPad, just two months after releasing it because of a lack of consumer interest and because of an overall move by HP away from the consumer hardware space toward enterprise services, hardware, and printers.

But when HP slashed the price of the two TouchPad models to $99 and $149, they suddenly became the most desirable tablets on the market.

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Fifty Betanews readers and I were among the very first people to test a content discovery engine called Zite last year. It was a solid idea --harvesting keywords from your Twitter feed and Delicious bookmarks to learn the things you might be interested in, and subsequently finding and suggesting news articles to you-- but it still had a long way to go.

That service eventually grew into an iPad magazine in the vein of Flipboard, but with the underlying content recommendation engine that we saw very early on in the Zite beta. After the positive reception it received as a standalone iPad app, CNN Worldwide president Jim Walton today announced that CNN has acquired Zite.

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Users of some of Google's SSL-encrypted services in Iran were the subject of man-in-the-middle attacks earlier this week, the search giant reported. The attacker was using fake SSL certificates from certification authority DigiNotar who does not officially certify Google sites. Google and Microsoft promptly blocked DigiNotar's certificates, and today it has suspended its sale of SSL and EVSSL certificates.

"We plan to disable the DigiNotar certificate authority in Chrome while investigations continue. Mozilla also moved quickly to protect its users," Heather Adkins, Google Information Security Manager said yesterday. "This means that Chrome and Firefox users will receive alerts if they try to visit websites that use DigiNotar certificates."

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Last week, we heard a report that CNET's Download.com had recently begun enclosing all its downloadable software in a proprietary "wrapper" unless the developer paid a premium subscription to have his software available unaltered.

In my brief article about the issue, I quoted a comment posted by independent developer Stephen Greenberg, maker the GSpot Codec appliance (a five-star application in Fileforum), who said he was pulling his software from Download.com because of the change.

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iTunes Match, the iTunes portion of Apple's iCloud was rolled out as a developer beta last night. The service scans a user's local library of music files and mirrors the content on an iCloud server so it can be accessed on any connected device. The service will cost $24.99 per year and let users store as many as 25,000 songs.

In the message Apple sent to developers last night (embedded below), the company noted that developers participating in the beta of iTunes Match will receive "an additional 3 months for free with their 12 month paid subscription."

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Today, VMware kicked off its VMworld convention in Las Vegas, and dozens of companies have announced new products supporting VMware's various virtualization services, including Dell, Wyse, Citrix, NEC, Huawei, and Cisco, to name just a few.

In response to the convention and the support from hardware companies, Microsoft, a major competitor to VMware in the enterprise virtualization space, has released a hilarious caricature of VMware in video called "Don't get stuck in the IT past" which shows the exploits of IT salesman Tad and his company VMlimited.

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After steadily gaining popularity among professionals and receiving a $3 billion valuation in its IPO, LinkedIn has become the gold standard of work-related social networking.

But LinkedIn isn't really well-tailored for finding jobs and employees without becoming a paid member. It's more about posting résumés and creating a network of contacts exclusively for professional purposes.

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Diebold, the United States' largest manufacturer of Automated Teller Machines (ATMs) will be unveiling its prototype of a virtualized ATM today, the first day of the annual VMworld conference in Las Vegas.

Like most of the products coming out of VMworld this week, the virtualized ATM was developed jointly by Diebold and VMware. Unlike the traditional standalone ATM model, the virtual ATM has no onboard computer driving it, and it is effectively a thin client tied to a central management server.

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Samsung is expected to launch a new cross-platform mobile chat service called ChatON* this week at the IFA Conference in Berlin. Like Apple's new iMessage, ChatON will be very similar to RIM's BlackBerry Messenger, letting users set up individual or group chats that support multimedia messaging, as well as location, calendar and contact sharing.

The service will also include some unique features, such as Animated Message Service (AMS), short animations which can be sent like e-cards; and Interaction Ranking, a metric that shows how often you interact with certain contacts.

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