Tim Conneally

Russian media, including the Moscow Times have been posting reports that the son of Yvegny Kaspersky, head of leading international data security firm Kaspersky Lab, has been kidnapped.

At about 4pm EST on Thursday, the Russian government's daily paper Rossiyskaya Gazeta published a report which said local law enforcement had confirmed the kidnapping of 20 year old Ivan Kaspersky.

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When Microsoft and Nokia announced in February that they would be partnering for the production of Windows Phones, we outlined ten main points about the partnership that were important for consumers to know. The list inspected the effect the partnership would have on Nokia's Ovi services, Microsoft's Bing, Nokia's Finnish workforce, and Windows Phone as a whole.

On Thursday, Microsoft provided further information about the partnership, giving slightly deeper insight into how the Nokia Windows Phones ecosystem will look.

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Ricoh, the Japanese company best known for its printers and imaging equipment, released a social photo sharing app for iOS and Android on Thursday called EventJot which seeks to be a slightly more conservative version of Color.

In late March, there was a big buzz spike for a mobile app called Color. That app lets users create group photo albums where any user could upload and share their photos as long as they're in a certain location, as determined by their GPS. The idea is that users at big events such as political rallies, sporting events, concerts, parties, and so forth can all take pictures that are automatically cataloged and indexed according to date, time, location, and event.

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Amazon on Wednesday announced Kindle Library Lending, a program that will let Kindle users borrow books from more than 11,000 libraries in the United States. The program follows Amazon's person-to-person Kindle Book Lending feature that debuted at the end of 2010 and addresses long-running concerns that e-readers like the Kindle would bypass libraries entirely.

In the program, users will be able to check out Kindle books from their local library, and then add notes and highlights which are synced to the user's Kindle account. If the book is re-rented or purchased, all the annotations and highlighted passages are retained. They do not pass from user to user.

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Music creation apps on Android, be they beatmakers, step sequencers, drum machines, or virtual synths, are pretty rare for as advanced as the platform has become. Despite the thousands of Android users, the platform is nowhere near as robust as iOS for the musically inclined.

But that isn't to say there aren't many potential Android musicians out there. Quite the contrary, I know there is a big potential audience to be had (at least anecdotally,) because most of the traffic on my Android-specific blog goes to my music app reviews.

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LightSquared, the hybrid 4G/Satellite network wholesaler has announced a bilateral LTE roaming partnership with Cellular South, the United States' largest private wireless provider and ninth largest mobile network altogether. This is the first major wireless carrier partnership to be announced by LightSquared.

In January, LightSquared received clearance from the FCC to sell its network bandwidth wholesale, which is ultimately the company's plan. Its 4G and Satellite networks are being built to sell to current network operators fleshing out their 4G coverage or to sell to startup operators looking to offer unique services. LightSquared has no plans to be a consumer-facing network operator.

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Finally, after three years, Google on Tuesday opened the United States maps in its Google Map Maker project to public editing.

Now, any user can submit or update mapping information in the browser-based Map Maker interface, from buildings and businesses to streets, footpaths, and bike trails.

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LocalResponse on Tuesday launched the beta of its platform that lets businesses search and instantly respond to customers who have "checked in" at their location using Facebook, Twitter, foursquare, Gowalla, Yelp, Loopt, Flickr, Instagram and more.

Social media has allowed companies to more directly engage with consumers and tackle customer service issues or even sales head on.

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At the Philadelphia Police Academy on Tuesday, Motorola Solutions demonstrated the public safety LTE network technology it hopes to use to link up many of the cities that have already committed to constructing networks this year.

Philadelphia is part of the United States' East Coast megalopolis that is treated to the best in new communications technologies and infrastructure. Just about four months ago in December 2010, Verizon Wireless launched Philadelphia's 4G LTE network along with 38 other major metropolitan areas.

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One of the conditions put into the 2008 merger of satellite radio companies Sirius and XM by the Federal Communications Commission was that the merged company had to allow unaffiliated third parties to lease channels on a long-term basis (.PDF here). On Monday, nearly four years after the merger was first announced, the FCC announced the condition has been implemented at Sirius XM, and listed the first third-party lessees.

The first stations involved in the program are by no means commercial in nature and instead are geared toward providing programming for a very specific audience:

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Monday, California-based technology company Spring Design announced that it had been granted the patent for multiple-screen technology that resulted in a lawsuit with Barnes and Noble over the Nook e-reader last year.

Spring Design debuted its Alex dual-screen e-reader literally one day before Barnes and Noble announced its Nook e-reader in 2009. Both devices utilized a similar LCD and E-Paper design and had similar Android-based architectures. Naturally, a lawsuit was not far behind.

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Early on Monday, Microsoft announced the availability of the full public beta of Office 365, Redmond's cloud-based enterprise productivity suite that puts Office, SharePoint Online, Exchange Online, and Lync Online into a single subscription package.

It's been just about six months since Microsoft rolled out the first limited beta of Office 365, and now the company is releasing the public beta just about six months before the product's anticipated final launch.

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Every industry that deals with traditional "content" of any sort will feel the icy touch of technology on its profits at some point. But what will be the next industry to be shaken by the growth of information technology? It could be law. More specifically, it could be legal discovery.

The music industry after more than a decade in decline still hasn't found its bearings in the post-Napster age, the newspaper industry has collapsed without the support of ad revenue, and the streaming video model threatens to completely disrupt the established profit models for television and cinema.

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Two years after acquiring Pure Digital and its Flip camcorder line for $590 million, Cisco this week announced it is terminating the product line and laying off all 550 employees in the division, a shocking announcement for fans of the iconic pocket camcorder brand.

Flip was responsible for nothing less than inventing the pocket camcorder form factor that dozens of consumer electronics companies now produce.

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Memjet, the super high speed inkjet printer design company announced a manufacturing partnership with Lomond for the Russian and Eastern European markets at the Consumer Electronics and Photo Expo in Moscow on Thursday.

When we last saw Memjet and its impressive 70 page per minute inkjet printer in January, the company had just three partners who had committed to producing Memjet printers in China, Taiwan, and India (Lenovo, Kpowerscience, WEP.)

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