Tim Conneally

Yesterday, discount retailer Wal-Mart began selling the iPhone 3G, and as if to welcome customers to their new devices, AT&T suffered a substantial network outage.

AT&T representative Meghan Roskopf told the Chicago Tribune that at 9:30 am Eastern Time, only a matter of hours after Wal-Mart locations opened for business, the Bloomfield, Michigan AT&T facility experienced a power outage, causing "intermittent disruption of mobile services for customers in some Midwest states."

Screenshots and user-uploaded videos of OS X 10.6 (aka Snow Leopard) have been popping up as the first quarter of 2009 inches ever closer.

During WWDC last June, Apple's Jordan Hubbard gave a presentation which included a slide saying that Snow Leopard was slated for a Q1 2009 release. The OS update is comprised mainly of un-flashy improvements that are geared toward increased performance and optimization of the new hardware architecture of the latest Macs.

Last year, one of the most stunning announcements to come out of CES was from, of all places, Comcast -- a CATV provider. One reason could be because technology is giving viewers clear alternatives to scheduled programming.

2008 was a monumental year for television. NBC declared this year's Olympics the most-viewed event in television history, with the 17-day coverage attracting 86% of US television viewing households, or 214 million viewers.

Social network MySpace pulled down all of the Project Playlist widgets reportedly at the behest of unspecified "major music companies." Meanwhile, major label Sony BMG gave the service its stamp of approval.

Last week, MySpace issued a statement announcing the immediate removal of Project Playlist widgets from its site. They have received complaints at several different times that Project Playlist was engaging in copyright infringement.

After a two-year relationship, major label Warner Music Group has moved to temporarily terminate its partnership with video sharing site YouTube.

A statement from the record company said, "We simply cannot accept terms that fail to appropriately and fairly compensate recording artists, songwriters, labels and publishers for the value they provide."

This just in, the format war is over. The 18-month honeymoon analysts had given Blu-ray has prematurely ended, and while sales have risen from nothing to something barely eclipsing okay, its successor may already be over the horizon.

In paleontology, there is a concept known as the Alvarez Hypothesis. This hypothesis originally suggested that a giant asteroid impacting the Earth's surface triggered the subsequent extinction of the dinosaurs.

Pending updates to the Android mobile operating system were made public this week as a part of the Google's "Cupcake" roadmap, revealing new functionality that will endow future Android devices with abilities beyond those in the G1 now.

According to the roadmap, development taking place privately will soon be made available to the public source code via a single large development branch update. It will be followed by a series of smaller, incremental updates as time passes. Among the numerous bug fixes listed on the roadmap are some serious functionality upgrades that promise to add some highly desirable features previously absent from Android 1.0.

Google's popular video site YouTube yesterday unveiled a dedicated HD section for US users to watch videos in 720p high definition.

When a video's source upload supports higher resolution, YouTube will have a "watch it in HD" button below the player's lower right hand corner in the space where some videos had the "watch it in high quality" button. Clicking this button expands the standard viewing window to 16 x 9 with a 1280 x 720 resolution.

Last week, Apple evangelist John Geleynse reportedly called the iPhone a gaming console in various capacities. With a deluge of top-tier licenses coming to the iPhone this week, we have begun to see what Geleynse was presaging.

Apparently Geleynse's comments at last week's Apple Developer Conference in San Jose weren't so much predictions as fanfare preceding a veritable onslaught of iPhone games.

Sony's ACID Music Studio is a loop-based music creation tool favored by electronic and hip-hop artists. Now in its tenth year, Sony announced its social network for Acid artists will be more tightly integrated with Acid Xpress 7.

AcidPlanet is a social network for musicians with a popularity-based ranking system similar to PureVolume or Reverb Nation. Users can upload their original music to connect with fans and other musicians, or to compete popularity contests such as "The Duel." There is also an associated Web radio station that plays the best artists from the site.

Yesterday, local TV stations in 42 states and DC participated in the first nationwide digital television consumer readiness test. Broadcasters turned off their analog signals some time between 5:00 and 7:00 pm ET.

Aside from some noteworthy exceptions, the results so far seem largely favorable.

Google Search Suggest, the predictive text dropdown gadget that suggests search terms, will soon provide direct links, information, and sponsored links.

Search Suggest has been a default feature on the Google home page since the end of August. Now, testing has begun on providing more than just a prediction of what the user is searching for based upon the most popular queries. A random selection of US-basedGoogle users have found that their suggested searches offer slightly different results.

Early this morning, Yahoo announced that it will be reducing its data retention period to 90 days, a dramatic drop from its prior 13-month limit on keeping user search data.

Yahoo's Vice President of Policy and Head of Privacy Anne Toth posted on the official Yahoo Blog this morning, "Our content and advertising customization will remain cutting-edge and relevant to your interests -- but the data we use to provide those services will only be kept for as long as we really need it."

Storage company Western Digital today joined the ranks of companies scaling back their workforces, announcing a cost restructuring that will involve a worldwide headcount reduction and closure of manufacturing facilities.

"We expect demand weakness to last well into the middle of the 2009 calendar year," John Coyne, president and CEO of WD said in a prepared statement. The company has seen increasingly competitive pricing from the likes of Hitachi and Seagate coupled with a decreased demand for hard drives overall. The projected revenue ceiling for the December quarter has dropped from $2.15 billion down to $1.8 billion.

The UK's Advertising Standards Authority has asked EA to cease broadcasting its commercial for Tiger Woods PGA Tour '09 for Wii. Although Woods himself "plays" the Wii, the graphics shown were from the Xbox 360.

In the commercial, professional golfer Tiger Woods is shown using the Wiimote to play his signature PGA Tour game, yet the corresponding game actions displayed behind him are from the Xbox 360 version. Though the message "Available on all formats" appears in the commercial, the ASA determined the implication was that a Wii game being played, augmented by the Wii logo at the end of the spot.