Ed Oswald

For Apple, 2006 marked yet another year in the company's dramatic resurgence. This included the transition of the Macintosh platform to Intel processors, the continued dominance of the iPod music player, and the company's continued evolution into an entertainment provider.

It wasn't all roses however: the company had to deal with accusations of improper stock option granting, and had to deal with legal issues surrounding iTunes and the iPod from its competitors.

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American auto maker Ford is hoping an agreement with Microsoft to outfit its entire fleet of vehicles with computer and Bluetooth technology will help to turn around the company's fortunes. The announcement is expected to be made in January.

The system will be called "Sync," and will eventually be offered as an option on all Ford vehicles. According to a report in the Wall Street Journal, car owners will be able to use the system to place hands-free cell phone calls or transfer information wirelessly, such as music or e-mail.

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Virtualization software provider VMware released a public beta of its software for Intel-based Macs on Thursday, code-named "Fusion."

Like Parallels, the software enables users to run a host of operating systems, including Windows, Linux, NetWare and Solaris, without the need to reboot.

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According to patent applications recently made public, it now appears that shortly before Microsoft publicly announced integrated RSS support within Internet Explorer and Windows Vista, it filed for two patents with the US Patent and Trademark Office surrounding Web-based feed readers.

The first patent application covers technologies that will find and consume feeds into a web browser. It will also provide ways to allow a user to organize and view web feeds through an API, as well as methods to discover new feeds.

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It may have missed its earnings per share target by a single penny, but it seems as if Research In Motion investors don't care. The company beat both revenue and subscriber targets by a large margin. Key to RIM's success has been high demand for the BlackBerry Pearl.

The Pearl addressed a segment of the market that the company had largely ignored in its path to success: the consumer. Based on Thursday's results, that might no longer be the case.

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Call it a Christmas present to the nearly ten million Xbox 360 owners worldwide. Microsoft said Friday it would extend the warranty period from 90 days to one year for all consoles sold in the future, as well as those still in their first year of ownership.

The Redmond company said the move was meant to benefit customers, and those who may have had to pay for out-of-warranty repairs can expect to receive reimbursement checks from Microsoft within the next 10 weeks.

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After winning the contract to build a wireless network in New Orleans, EarthLink said Thursday it had officially launched services in the Crescent City. A slower free tier would be made available while the city rebuilds, plus a faster, fee-based service.

The Wi-Fi service was first announced and launched in November of last year in the French Quarter and Central Business District. Mayor Ray Nagin said its purpose was to provide Internet access to citizens while the heavily damaged telecommunications network was repaired.

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In an effort to become more relevant in the search market, Ask has begun to quietly test a new three-paned interface for its search results, bringing together the strengths of its parent company InterActiveCorp's varied holdings.

Ask holds about a 5.9 percent search share according to research firm comScore Networks, and has shown some upward momentum in recent months. However, this remains far behind market-leading Google, who had a 45.4 percent share as of October of this year.

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Alibaba.com, which owns Yahoo's operations in China, said Thursday that it had won a unfair competition lawsuit against another China search engine operator. The owners of Qihoo will be required to compensate Yahoo China and end their anti-competitive practices.

Qihoo is operated by Beijing Sanjiwuxian Internet Technology, and is run by a former Yahoo employee who left shortly after the announcement last year that Alibaba would take over Yahoo's China operations. Zhou Hongyi created 3721, which Yahoo bought in 2003 to enter the Chinese market.

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Having developed a successful business in hard disk drives, Seagate moved into online storage Thursday with the acquisition of privately held EVault for $185 million USD in cash.

The acquisition would close in Seagate's third fiscal quarter pending regulatory approval, which runs from January through March of next year.

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German electronics company Siemens said Wednesday that it had set a new network speed record, achieving a speed of 107 gigabits -- the equivalent of roughly two DVDs worth of data -- per second, two and a half times faster than the previous record.

The test transmission was conducted on a 100-mile stretch of fiber-optic cable in the U.S. It also marks the first time such a test was performed outside of the laboratory. Siemens says the continuing surge in multimedia applications necessitates such high bandwidth needs.

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California consumers affected by Sony BMG's decision to place rootkits on some of its music CDs will be compensated under a $750,000 settlement with Los Angeles County and the State of California.

The suit accused Sony of not properly notifying consumers about its actions, as well as creating a potential security hole for hackers to compromise affected consumer's computers. A similar settlement has been filed in the state of Texas, according to media reports.

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Following requests by a Japanese entertainment group for Youtube to implement stricter copyright policies, the social video site has acquiesced to some of its demands and plans to meet with the group in Japan shortly, it said Tuesday.

As requested, a notice in Japanese will be posted on the site notifying users about the penalties for copyright infringement. In addition, YouTube will send a delegation of executives to Japan to talk with the Japan Society for Rights of Authors, Composers and Publishers (JASRAC).

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Comcast's on-demand service is quite popular, mainly due to the wide array of free programming. But the cable provider now wants to turn it into a revenue driver, and is testing a service that would allow its customers to rent movies on demand on the same date it is released on DVD.

The films would cost $4, roughly the same price as renting it from the local video store. According to The New York Times, the service is currently offered in Pittsburgh and Denver. Normally, it takes as long as one to two months before movies make it to on demand services.

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The end of the year is approaching, and that means its time for Google's yearly look at what we've all been searching for. Topping that list were two social networking sites, and a appetite for news on the ever-controversial Paris Hilton.

Google's annual zeitgeist, which is a snapshot of trends observed through its users' search patterns, showed the increasing influence of social media. The two top searches during the year were Bebo and MySpace in first and second, both social networking sites.

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