Ed Oswald

Aiming to make Flash more nimble and less power-consuming, Adobe on Wednesday introduced Stage Video as part of an overall larger update to the multimedia platform. The technology takes advantage of hardware acceleration which in turn uses less processing power and thus less battery power.

With an increasing amount of Flash content being played back on mobile devices, it has become necessary for Adobe to deal with the power-intensive playback of content. The company said 1080p video playback was now possible with only 1-15% CPU usage, up to 34 times more efficient than earlier versions.

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Both Facebook and Google announced expansion plans on Tuesday, with the social networking site moving into the former headquarters of Sun Microsystems, and the search engine opening new offices near Los Angeles. The moves likely indicate the tech sector is poised for a recovery as the economy as a whole rebounds.

Few companies have been as resistant to the economic downturn as Facebook. Just two years ago, the company moved to its current headquarters in Palo Alto, Calif. But with a workforce increasing at a 50% annual rate, moving to Sun's nine-building campus in nearby Menlo Park makes sense.

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While declining to be specific, Sprint executives on Monday said 70 percent of the phones the carrier will release in 2011 will run on Google's mobile operating system, and at least 20 of them will be 4G-capable.

Sprint was one of the first carriers to commit to 4G, announcing its plans to use WiMAX back in 2006, although the rollout did not occur in earnest until last year. The company believes its commitment to 4G is one of the reasons the carrier was able to stop hemorrhaging customers in 2010.

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These days, it's hard to tell what AOL is trying to accomplish with its acquisitions. From its purchase of Engadget and Weblogs, Inc. in 2005, to TechCrunch last September, each time the company appeared to be attempting to buy its way to the top of the digital media heap.

The acquisition of Huffington Post announced early Monday morning was no different. AOL paid $315 million for the site, and put its figurehead Arianna Huffington as the president of its media division, which now would include all the disparate blogs that the Reston, Va. Based company has amassed over the years.

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Google has donated $20,000 to a yearly hacking competition to be awarded to the first researcher able to crack its Chrome browser. The Mountain View, Calif. company's move marks the first time a browser developer has contributed money to the contest.

The Pwn2Own competition is in its fifth year and is held at the CanSecWest security conference. Participants are tasked with cracking a variety of other browsers too (Apple's Safari, Microsoft's Internet Explorer, and Mozilla's Firefox) on computers supplied by the contest creators running Windows 7. Those that perform a successful crack win the computer it was done on as well as a $15,000 cash prize.

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Ahead of its planned investor meeting on Feburary 23, Apple is once again having to deal with questions on a succession plan. The Cupertino company might have been able to avoid a lot of publicity surrounding an effort to force it to publicly disclose its plans, but Steve Jobs' indefinite leave of absence couldn't have come at a worse time.

Institutional Shareholder Services, a group that advises shareholders on how to vote on proxy ballot issues, has now said that it is advising a yes vote for the proposal. Under it, the company would be required to publicly disclose its plans for succession, and do so yearly.

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The last IPv4 addresses have been allocated, highlighting the need for companies and organizations to move to a new system amid the ever increasing number of net-connected devices. The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) made the announcement at an event in Miami on Thursday.

Each of the five regional Internet registries has been allocated a single block of around 16 million addresses. While true exhaustion would be hard to gauge -- a small number of IP addresses will be held for several years for the transition -- the rate at which the different registrars will burn through their allocations will likely vary.

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Amid what it called "unprecedented" demand for the iPhone as pre-orders began Thursday morning, Verizon is now quietly taking measures to curb those that may put a strain on its data network. Effective immediately, those who fall in the top 5% of data users may find their throughput speeds reduced.

The change in policy could affect around 1.1 million customers: Verizon counts about 21 million smart phone users. Those throttled would find their speeds reduced for the remainder of the current cycle, as well as the next full billing cycle, a document posted to the Verizon website reads.

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Internet access started to return across Egypt on Wednesday, nearly one week after the government cut access over increasing civil unrest in the country. By midday local time, many websites were once again accessible within the country according to local ISPs.

Facebook and Twitter were once again accessible, which are said to play a key role in helping organize anti-government protests. It is not exactly clear why the government decided to restore Internet service, although it may be part of a wider effort to restore some sense of stability to daily life in Egypt following President Hosni Mubarak's statement that he would step down in September.

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In a move that had been widely expected for months, News Corp unveiled its new news effort called "The Daily." The currently iPad-exclusive app would provide a much needed bridge between the declining state of print media and the rising fortunes of online news, the company hopes. The first edition released today at 12pm through the app store.

The Daily also signals an important change in how Apple handles subscriptions: users will be able to do so within an app, and be automatically billed if they request to. Previously, subscriptions were hindered by the cumbersome process of having to manually renew through the App Store itself.

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A design flaw within the chipset supporting its new line of Sandy Bridge processors may delay the launch of next-generation computers, and Apple could find itself affected the most.

Intel's latest chip is the first from the company to include integrated graphics silicon on the chip, while also using the company's advanced 32-nanometer manufacturing. This is said to allow PC manufacturers to offer systems that have much better graphics capabilities and much greater power efficiency than its predecessors.

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A California man has sued AT&T for over billing him on data charges for his iPhone, a move that could raise new questions on the carrier's billing practices. Patrick Hendricks claims that the carrier was charging him for usage even when he wasn't using any.

Hendricks uses the $15 monthly 200MB plan, and apparently became suspicious after he was charged overage fees for using 223MB worth of data across 259 data connections. His lawyers say that their research showed that AT&T was regularly over billing customers between 7 and 14 percent over actual data usage, and in some cases as much as 300 percent.

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The FBI said Thursday that it had executed more than 40 search warrants across the US, part of an expanding global probe into the attacks by hacktivist group Anonymous on several companies. The move followed another by British authorities also on Thursday that resulted in the arrests of five suspected participants.

Law enforcement agencies in at least five countries are now conducting their own investigations. The arrests in the UK are the only ones to occur as part of the investigation, although the FBI's move may signal arrests here in the US may not be too far behind.

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Facebook has denied reports that it had partnered with Taiwanese smartphone manufacturer HTC to release its own phones, calling the reports "overblown" in comments to Reuters. Reports of a possible partnership first surfaced in London-based business website City A.M. on Wednesday. The site claimed that the phones would be launched at an event at the Mobile World Congress, to be held February 14-17 in Barcelona.

While not saying that HTC was not developing some type of Facebook-enhanced phone, it would not be branded as such, the site's business development chief Dan Rose said. "This is really just another example of a manufacturer who has taken our public APIs and integrated them into their device in an interesting way," he said. Regardless, mobile is an ever bigger portion of the social networking site's business, a quarter-billion users visit its mobile site every month.

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Google took steps Thursday to honor a previous commitment to root out piracy in its searches, beginning to censor torrent searches from its Autocomplete and Instant functionality. The Mountain View, Calif. company's efforts don't seem perfect: several torrent searches still seemed to be available.

Among the terms apparently filtered out include popular clients BitTorrent and Rapidshare according to reports. On some built-in search functions in browsers such as Internet Explorer and Safari, the terms appear to have disappeared. Betanews was still able to search for specific torrents such as "windows xp torrent," however, and Google was still returning torrent links through Instant at least for our testers.

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