Ed Oswald

In an effort to take on CDMA market leader Samsung, mobile phone manufacturers Sanyo and Nokia announced Tuesday that they would be combining their respective CDMA businesses to form a single entity separate from its parent companies.

Both companies have struggled to compete with Samsung -- Nokia due to its resistance over using Qualcomm chips, which ended up causing delays in bringing phones to the market. Sanyo, while doing well in the US through its partner Sprint Nextel, has run into troubles in attempting to expand its reach elsewhere.

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Yahoo on Monday issued a statement of beliefs on is positions regarding privacy and free speech, and said that American businesses and the government need to take a proactive role in shaping the global dialogue. Additionally, the company responded to criticisms of its compliance with the Chinese government.

Information provided by Yahoo to the Chinese government has already led to the arrest and jailing of at least one Chinese national, which human rights activists soundly criticized. The company defended itself, saying it had no choice but to comply and it never was informed of the intended use of the information.

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Can't name that tune? Cingular has introduced a new service that will help its users do just that -- by identifying the song for them. Announced Monday and called MusicID, the service uses the cellular voice network to listen to a recorded song and identify it based on what it hears.

The service is a collaboration between Cingular and London-based Shazam Entertainment, the creator of the MusicID technology.

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T-Mobile USA debuted its SDA and MDA phones on Monday, ending months of speculation as to the carrier's future plans for the Windows Mobile platform. The SDA, available today, sports a candy-bar form factor with additional keys that will provide the user easy access to music on the device.

The MDA, to be available February 21, comes in a traditional PDA shape that can be pushed up to reveal a full QWERY keyboard and allow the screen to be used in landscape mode, much like the popular Sidekick device that is also sold by T-Mobile.

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MSN has come up with a new plan to draw users away from Google: free stuff. The company launched a contest on Monday that will give users a chance to win prizes simply by using the service's search engine. Over $1 million in prizes will be available during the months of February, March and April.

Prizes include gift certificates from American Express, Target, REI and Nike. MSN will also be giving away Canon PowerShot digital cameras, HP Digital Entertainment Centers, and Creative Zen Sleek MP3 players.

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Microsoft and Motorola announced on Monday that the two companies were collaborating to bring to market several handsets equipped with Windows Media technology. The new phones would be PlaysForSure compatible, allowing consumers to use them with a wide variety of music services.

Users would be able to connect their phones to a PC through a USB 2.0 cable, which would use the Media Transfer Protocol to "seamlessly" copy music from Windows Media Player to the phone.

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Nokia made a host of announcements Monday in conjunction with the opening of the annual 3GSM World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, including its first UMA capable device, a deal to increase usage of the S60 smartphone platform, and a cooperation agreement with Sony Ericsson regarding DVB-H technology.

The Nokia 6136 phone will be the company's first entrant in the UMA space, a technology that supporters say is useful in areas of little or no coverage. The 6136 would be able to switch between a GSM and wireless network without dropping the call, Nokia says.

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Microsoft will release a total of seven updates as part of its monthly Patch Tuesday program, the company announced Thursday. One targets a flaw in Windows Media Player, four for Microsoft Windows, one for both Microsoft Windows and Office, and one for Microsoft Office only.

Of the two former sets of updates, the highest severity rating for any of the updates would be critical, and for the latter two important. The Redmond company said that some of the updates may require a restart.

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Google will hold special auctions to sell ad space in 28 magazines as part of a plan to expand its venture into print advertising. Advertisers would be able to bid for quarter, half, and full-page ads within several popular magazines, including Martha Stewart Living, Car and Driver, and Computerworld among others.

The Mountain View, Calif., company is looking into ways of expanding its hugely successful online advertising business into more lucrative businesses of print, radio, and television advertising. This plan is only a small part of realizing that goal.

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Microsoft publicly announced Thursday that it had named John Nicol to head its MSN.com division, who pledged to push for increased investment and "and acquisitions if we need it," however he declined to be more specific.

Nicol had previously served as the head of MSNBC.com several years ago.

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GSM continued to grow in the Americas during 2005, approaching a 43 percent market share by years end. The technology added 81 million customers in the region and 392 million globally during the year, 3G Americas reported on Friday.

In comparison, CDMA added only 30 million customers in the Western Hemisphere during the same period. The number of global additions annually last year actually surpassed the total number of customers of any other technology, the organization said.

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The U.S. Federal Trade Commission is considering using humiliation as a tactic in deterring companies from using adware as a means to advertise their products, a commissioner said Thursday.

The comments came from Commissioner Jon Leibowitz at an event held by the Anti-Spyware coalition in Washington, D.C. There, Leibowitz said in an interview with CNET News.com that he felt such a program would be effective in curbing the ever-growing problem of adware.

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EXCLUSIVE Following three months of internal testing, Microsoft has announced that it is opening its classified listing service Windows Live Expo, formerly code-named "Fremont," to select businesses in the Seattle metropolitan area. The company says a nationwide beta will begin this spring, although it declined to elaborate as to how that would proceed.

Microsoft has marketed Windows Live Expo as a way for businesses to connect, and Windows Live Expo Product Unit Manager Garry Wiseman told BetaNews that it plans to allow Washington-based institutions and businesses, including the University of Washington, Safeco, Washington Mutual and Boeing access into the initial beta.

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Microsoft said Thursday that it was pumping an additional $1 billion into its planned 15-20 year plan to expand the company's Redmond campus.

With the additional funds, about half of the project would now be completed in three years. Upon its completion, Microsoft would become one of the largest corporate campuses in the world.

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The Korean Fair Trade Commission paid the South Korean offices of Intel an unannounced visit Wednesday to seize more documents to support an antitrust claim in the country. The chipmaker is fighting numerous antitrust cases worldwide, and settled with the Japanese FTC last year.

The Korean inquiry revolves around the use of marketing practices such as sales quotas to gain an unfavorable advantage over its competitors. While the company has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing, the company's marketing practices have been a common theme in antitrust hearings.

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