Tim Conneally

Just minutes after viewing the first installment of Microsoft's new $300 million TV ad campaign featuring comedian Jerry Seinfeld and Chairman Bill Gates, BetaNews' Tim Conneally filed this video to record his first thoughts.

In response to the discovery of an expansive black market trade in stolen bank data, German Interior Minister Wolfgang Schäuble assembled a summit to rein in the illegal collection and sale of private data in Germany.

Schäuble has been at the forefront of technological policy reform in Germany, proposing a measure late last year that would give authorities access to terror suspects' personal data in crisis situations.

New York triple-play telecommunications provider Cablevision announced that it has completed the initial phase of its municipal Wi-Fi coverage for the Nassau and Suffolk county areas in Long Island.

The company first announced its Optimum Wi-Fi plans in May, with a two-year deployment schedule that will eventually comprise much of the New York tri-state area. This leg of the rollout appears to have been designed around the Long Island Railroad system, with station stops along a number of lines receiving connectivity first. Cablevision had previously set up "Wi-Fi Community Zones" in the Bridgeport and Port Jefferson ferry stations, and also in commercial areas Sag Harbor, Northport and Huntington.

Today at the Custom Electronic Design & Installation Association (CEDIA) expo in Denver, Colorado, The Blu-ray player market got bigger by a fraction as Sony and Pioneer debuted new hardware.

Sony introduced its BDV-IT1000ES and BDV-IS1000, single-disc "theater-in-a-box" systems that feature Sony's S-AIR wireless 5.1 channel audio, and up to 1080p video quality.

Amazon's Video On Demand, which began beta testing in July, was officially released in its working form yesterday.

Movie, TV, and Web-exclusive content can now be streamed or downloaded using Amazon Video On Demand. While downloading still requires the Amazon Unbox Video Player, it does make purchased content available for later viewing on PCs, portable devices, as well as media center-connected Xbox 360s. Sony Bravia Internet Video Link and certain TiVo boxes will also enable customers to peruse and purchase Amazon Videos On Demand directly on their TVs.

Sony this morning announced the recall of certain Vaio TZ series notebooks after a number of consumers reported overheating, with one even resulting in minor burns.

The notebooks, according to Sony, contain "irregularly positioned wires near the computer's hinge and/or a dislodged screw inside the hinge [that] can cause a short circuit and overheating."

At the Virtual Worlds conference in Los Angeles this week, entrepreneurs have gathered to discuss the big business that online worlds have become. Linden Labs' successful Second Life received some noteworthy "fourth wall breakers" today.

Linden Labs and Vivox partnered to create SLim, a messaging client scaled to the massively multiplayer world. SLim is a discrete VoIP/IM client that is meant to run alongside the Second Life viewer. It can complement onscreen interactions, or it can communicate with others not necessarily running the Second Life application.

Samsung has agreed to sell its stake in Symbian to Nokia for a reported $410 million this week, pushing Nokia ever closer to total ownership.

In early 2003, Symbian announced that Samsung had joined the likes of Ericsson, Matsushita, Motorola, Nokia, Psion, and Siemens as a 5% shareholder in the company and its eponymous mobile operating system. At the time of Samsung's entry as a shareholder and on Symbian's supervisory board, Nokia held a 19% stake in the company, equal to Ericsson and Motorola.

Download Google Chrome 0.2.149.27 Beta from FileForum now.

Google is already a dominant force in search and cloud services. So its touchdown on the world's desktops yesterday points to a possible change in the way casual to moderate Internet users will interact with their computers.

Yesterday Apple distributed conspicuously designed invitations to an event on September 9, widely expected to be the third annual iPod refresh event.

While the event hasn't received an official moniker yet, San Francisco has played host to Apple's iPod announcements for the last...three...Septembers. This year's announcement looks like an iPod screen that says "Playing Soon: Lets Rock."

The first US market to officially cease analog television broadcasting is Wilmington, North Carolina, but an approaching tropical storm could force all local stations to continue use of their analog frequencies for emergency alert.

Though the rest of the country has until February 2009 to cease analog broadcast operations, broadcasters in Wilmington, North Carolina decided they would test their "big switch" on September 8. There is no significance to that date, as WWAY ABC 3 General Manager Andy Combs told us this afternoon. Broadcasters just arbitrarily chose a date because they were all prepared.

Intel has acquired Linux development startup Opened Hand as a part of the chipmaker's Moblin mobile Linux project.

Moblin is an open source software stack specifically designed for integration with Intel's Atom processors in Mobile Internet Devices (MIDs), netbooks, and embedded systems. The project started last year, prior to Asus' release of its Celeron M-based Eee PC -- which is credited for ushering in the netbook craze.

Several weeks after announcing the departure of CEO Patricia Russo and Chairman of the Board Serge Tchuruk, networking technology giant Alcatel-Lucent has named their successors.

Following a two year "transitional phase" of profitless quarters, French telecommunications company Alcatel-Lucent's CEO Patricia Russo announced that the company was actively seeking her replacement. Today, the company has named Ben Verwaayen as Alcatel-Lucent's new CEO.

Sony has been sued for patent infringement for its Blu-Ray technology once again, this time by California intellectual property company Orinda IP USA.

In May 2007, a company called Target Technology sued Sony, alleging that Blu-ray infringed on patents discussing the reflective materials used on optical discs. The suit from Orinda, filed on August 20, involves the method of reproducing data on "disk-shaped media," namely Blu-ray discs.

This week, Beta 1 of Debian Live 5.0 bootable CD image was made available for download. This is the first official release of a Live 5.0 build for the OS also known as "Lenny."

The Debian Live team has been working for over two years on its initiative to create the definitive live Debian framework that runs on as many architectures as possible, consisting of unchanged and official packages and an unaltered Kernel.