Tim Conneally

The new Windows Live profile features that were recently announced have begun to take effect, turning the formerly sterile Windows Live into a more cohesive portal for online content consumption.

New versions of Live Home, Spaces, Events, Skydrive, Groups, and Photos have been pushed out to users, joined by the Windows Live header bar. Since Microsoft is pulling together a number of disparate services, however, there is still a feeling of disconnection throughout the site.

Sling Media has launched the beta of Sling.com for watching online video content or remote Slingbox content from a user's home. It's not nearly as splashy a beta as when Joost first arrived on the scene.

Sling.com is one part destination video site, and one part remote access to home Slingbox content -- sort of like Hulu for Slingbox owners. In fact, a majority of the programming initially available on Sling.com comes directly from Hulu -- at some points, the content actually says so in the lower right corner.

In the EU's long-running front against cyber-crime, the Council of Ministers has proposed a five-year plan to tackle the problem, including collaboration with regional law enforcement branches and the implementation of remote searches.

Citing problems such as information and identity theft, spam, and child pornography as growing threats to society, the Council's new plan involves setting up a single communications network to allow EU member nations and Europol to pool information on offenses and their perpetrators.

Outspoken European Commissioner Viviane Reding has received backing on her group's move to end "roaming rip-offs," with the Council of EU Telecoms ministers agreeing to place limits upon roaming text messages and data charges.

In the ever-important interest of keeping competition fair and affordable in the EU, regulators sought to bring down the price of text messages sent from a member nation other than the sender's homeland, and to ensure transparency in billing. In 2007, the European Commission enacted similar regulations on roaming voice calls.

Mobile phone leader Nokia posted a countdown timer that ticked away the seconds until the company officially unveiled its newest mystery product. Early this morning, it was revealed to be the latest N-Series device, the N97.

As with the other N-series devices, Nokia calls the N97 a mobile computer rather than a handset. It runs S60 5th edition and offers 32 GB of on-board storage which is expandable as much as 16 GB via MicroSD. Communication protocols for the device are HSDPA, quad-band GSM, GPS and A-GPS, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth 2.0.

Blockbuster's MediaPoint set-top box which began selling for $99 last week, as a late and seemingly understocked competitor to Netflix's Roku set-top component. Now, Blockbuster's CEO suggests it will add downloadable content to more devices.

Netflix has already found its way onto a host of connected devices -- namely the Xbox 360, TiVo, Blu-ray players from LG and Samsung, and onto the elusive Mac. In an interview with E-Commerce Times, Blockbuster CEO Jim Keyes said that his company's streaming rental service will go everywhere that Netflix has gone.

2:56pm PT: Geeks.com includes some less commonly seen devices in its holiday sale such as a cassette-to-MP3 convertor, and the Dell Axim PDA.

2:47pm PT: While not precisely a "Cyber Monday" deal, Amazon Web Services has announced a new free tier on its SimpleDB service today.

Today could be the day for some of the best online deals to be found all year. But will consumers bite? Internet market research firm comScore released its early holiday figures, showing a drop in online sales by 4%.

Here at the peak of the shopping season at what US government economists this morning officially proclaimed a "recession," the behavior of consumers is closely monitored. In the tech sector, groups such as comScore are paying strict attention to e-commerce traffic and consumer online spending. The group today has released its "Black Friday" sales data.

In anticipation of the coming annual Black Friday spending surge, analysts have come out of the woodwork to voice their predictions. This afternoon, we took some time to parse some of them.

ComScore has predicted that this holiday season will have the exact same average online holiday spending as last year: $29.2 billion dollars. Though it is the same amount for this period as last year, it marks a decrease when compared to the whole year. Last year, consumer spending from January to October was $93.6 billion, and this year it has been $102.1 billion, a 9% increase overall.

Despite TiVo's recent SEC filing that showed it would be laying off employees to cut expenses during the economic downturn, TiVo posted another "best quarter ever," bringing it closer to its first profitable year ever.

The positive closure of the third quarter was almost entirely thanks to the $105 million patent settlement from EchoStar, which came after a long legal battle over the time-shifting technologies used in both companies' DVR products. According to TiVo's President and CEO, Tom Rogers, there could be yet more money coming from that suit soon enough.

The Google Maps interface has been redesigned, putting ever greater emphasis on the Street View tool.

The new Google Maps control bar on the left hand side of the window has been redesigned to look more like that of Google Earth, with a "peg man" key that switches between traditional map view and the new full-screen street view.

The UK's Advertising Standards Authority determined today that an Apple TV ad's claims about its iPhone 3G's relative download speeds is misleading and exaggerative, and must be pulled.

The ASA received 17 complaints from television viewers who believed Apple's "So what's so great about 3G?" ad for the company's latest iPhone inaccurately portrayed the speed of the iPhone 3G. In the ad, Web pages are loaded in a fraction of a second with a voice-over stating (four times) that news, directions, and the Internet are each "really fast."

Crackle, Sony Pictures Television's streaming Web TV service formerly known as Grouper, has announced a new programming lineup that will begin on Monday, December 1.

Six new shows will have an increased emphasis on production values, while retaining the five-minute-or-less webisode timestamp, and will be "aired" at specific times of the week, adopting more of a broadcast television schedule. This moves Crackle even further away from its roots as a viral distribution platform, and more toward the pattern of a traditional broadcast network.

Tremendous lines reportedly amassed outside of several metropolitan Verizon Wireless stores awaiting the new BlackBerry Storm, only to have eager fans turned away empty handed.

Today, shares in parent company Verizon have jumped in value nearly six percent in midday trading, but many BlackBerry fans are skeptical about the efficacy of Verizon Wireless' Storm launch.

Two weeks ago, Opera released the beta of Opera Mini 4.2. This morning it's been made available to Android users directly from the Android Market.

Android Market, the open mobile OS's app store, has been graced with only a handful of blockbuster applications, most of which were released when the T-Mobile G1 was released.