Tim Conneally

Netflix helped kill Blockbuster.

Its DVD-by-mail service, in conjunction with Redbox's 24-hour $1 rentals drove brick and mortar video store chain Blockbuster from market dominance into bankruptcy and near irrelevance.

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Electronic Arts on Tuesday announced it will acquire PopCap Games for $650 million in cash and $100 million in EA stock. PopCap is known for creating some of the most popular mobile and browser-based video games of the last few years, including Plants vs. Zombies and Bejeweled, and the company is squarely focused on the strongest growth areas of the video game industry.

There's no doubt that mobile and Web-based video games have the potential to be hugely profitable for game studios. With advertisement and in-game purchases, each game title can have multiple recurring revenue streams in addition to the upfront purchase price.

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California-based mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) Telestial on Tuesday announced it had dropped its international 2G and 3G roaming rates to the lowest in the industry.

Customers who buy one of Telestial's Passport or Passport Plus SIM cards can now connect to data networks in France, Germany, Italy, Sweden, Switzerland, the UK and 21 other European countries for as low as $1 per megabyte. The company's prepaid SIM cards are compatible with mobile networks in 180 countries worldwide and require a SIM-unlocked GSM 850/900/1800/1900 phone for activation.

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Android Open Source Project engineer Jean-Baptiste Queru on Tuesday announced the portions of Android 3.2 covered under the GNU General Public License (GPL) and GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) have been released to the Android Open Source Project.

Android uses several different Open Source licenses, but the majority of the code falls under the Apache Software License 2.0. Things like the Linux kernel and Bluetooth stack fall under the GNU licenses.

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Black hat security group Anonymous has exposed 90,000 military email addresses stored on servers from consulting firm and U.S. government contractor Booz Allen Hamilton. The hacker group said the breach was done to expose the corruption of government and related corporate entities.

Booz Allen Hamilton deals with all branches of the armed services as well as the defense and intelligence communities of the U.S. Government. It claims to provide, among other things, "strategy and technology solutions that help deter 21st century threats and meet complex mission requirements."

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It's been a little more than a year since HP acquired struggling smartphone pioneer Palm, and now the Palm name is history.

HP on Monday announced it is reorganizing its HP Palm brand into a new group called the webOS global business unit, led by Stephen DeWitt, who replaces former Palm CEO and webOS leader Jon Rubenstein.

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The graph I've embedded above comes from a survey conducted on behalf of virtualization software company Parallels, and it succinctly illustrates one of the main questions related to the value of mobile and embedded technology: When one machine duplicates the functionality of another, do you consolidate?

The survey, which polled a modest group of 210 individuals, shows a nearly perfect split between those who would consider consolidation and those who wouldn't (50.5% said they would, 49.5% said they would not.) It is a question of special value to a virtualization company like Parallels, and proof that device convergence is still a tough nut to crack. When one device gains the ability to do the job of another, users still aren't convinced they should drop the device that's been "replaced."

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The withering newspaper and magazine industries began to gravitate toward Apple's iPad as a possible anchor publishing outlet last year, but a pair of Philadelphia newspapers are taking a different approach and bundling cheap Android tablets with a subscription.

Last year, Conde Nast's Wired showed off an impressive iPad-optimized version of its magazine, and News Corp released The Daily, a subscription magazine designed from scratch for consumption on the iPad. These major ventures didn't simply re-format existent content for the iPad, but rather designed their content around the tablet itself.

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The first e-reader to be integrated with the Google eBooks platform will be the iriver Story HD, and it will be available across the United States on July 17, Google announced Monday.

Google eBooks launched last December and included a browser-based e-bookstore, and reader apps for Android and iOS as well as JavaScript-supportive Web browsers. Because Google utilized Adobe's e-book publishing platform, books purchased through Google's bookstore could be read on the long list of devices that support it.

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On July 6, Facebook is hosting an event where it will unveil an unnamed new product, which TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington says will be an in-browser video chat client from Skype.

Though we haven't yet received an acknowledgement of this report today from Facebook or Skype, Arrington's proclamation is entirely plausible.

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Zynga, the Maryland-based social gaming company responsible for such popular time-wasters as FarmVille, CityVille, and Mafia Wars, filed for an initial public offering with the Securities and Exchange commission on Friday that values the company at one billion dollars.

In the company's S-1 filing with the SEC today, it neatly lined up all the important statistics that led to the billion dollar valuation: 232 million monthly active users, 60 million daily active users engaging in 2 billion minutes of play per day. When tallied, that amounts to 3805 years worth of gameplay every single day.

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Wristwatch blog ablogtoread.com caught the exclusive debut of Tag Heuer's Link Smartphone, another device in the very small "Luxury Android" category that carries an almost $7,000 pricetag.

Tag Heuer is a division of the Louis Vuitton Moet Hennessy luxury goods conglomerate, and this is only its second luxury mobile phone.

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Bankrupt Canadian telecommunications company Nortel Networks Corp. has been slowly selling off its assets since 2009, and this year it put its most valuable intellectual property up for auction: essential patents for approximately 6,000 telecommunications and Internet technologies, including fundamental patents included in the LTE wireless standard.

In 2009, Research in Motion co-CEO Mike Lazardis called these patents a "national treasure that Canada must not lose."

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First launched in alpha under the name "Paymo" more than one year ago, Mobile payment startup Boku launched the SDK for its 1-Tap Billing solution for Android in 56 countries on Thursday, giving Android app developers another alternative for in-app transactions.

Instead of billing in-app purchases to the user's credit card or debiting from their bank account, Boku adds in-app purchases to the user's monthly mobile phone bill. To do this, users just click on "buy" in an app, confirm their phone number for the purchase, and that's it; no credit card info is collected, no additional registration or work is necessary.

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Virgin America is maintaining its reputation as the darling airline of the tech sector, and today it announced a new partnership with Google that will give travelers the option to test Google's Chromebooks in their flight beginning tomorrow.

The promotion will last until September 30, and passengers will be able to check out a Chromebook at their departure gate and use it freely with Gogo in-flight Internet on their whole flight. In addition to the currently available Chrome apps, Virgin America has co-developed a special Chrome app with Google that includes discussion boards about Virgin America's trip destinations, city guides based upon data from UrbanDaddy, and information about packing and travel planning. The app will be available in the Chrome Web Store later this month.

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