Tim Conneally

A report from analysts at ThinkPanmure indicates AT&T will be releasing its own femtocell system with hardware provided by UK-based ip.access Ltd.

UK-based picocell and femtocell infrastructure vendor ip.access Ltd, whose Oyster 3G won the 2007 GSM Association "Best Radio Access Product" award, will reportedly be providing AT&T with seven million femtocell access points. Though it has not been disclosed if it will be the same Oyster model or a newer device, they will reportedly cost around $100.

An April 15 vote by Milpitas, California's City Council was 4-0 in favor of transferring the Earthlink Wi-Fi assets back to the city. In 30 days, Milpitas will be the among the first cities to assume ownership of Earthlink's network.

Earthlink's Milpitas launch took place in December 2006, opening the ten square mile mesh network of Tropos Wi-Fi routers to residents for rates raging from $3.95 an hour to $21.95 a month. This service will no longer be offered once Milpitas has assumed control, and total coverage will be stripped down to a size that will not present operating costs that are too restrictive.

According to French Web metrics firm XiTi, Mozilla Firefox continues its unabated growth in popularity, reaching around 29% usage share in Europe overall in March.

Microsoft Internet Explorer saw its usage share begin to drop in the at the end of 2005, roughly one year after Firefox 1.0 was released and began to be embraced internationally. In 2006, the XiTi Monitor reported Firefox had continued its market share increase to around 23-25%.

A popular feature on social networking site Facebook, the ability to adorn a profile with multiple mini-applications, was unveiled today on MySpace in its Application Gallery.

In February, the MySpace Developer Platform was created, allowing original applications to be integrated with MySpace. To test these third party apps out, MySpace rolled out a beta of the Application Gallery, which facilitated over 2 million installs of the over 1,000 third-party applications posted there.

Motorola posted a sharp 39 percent annual decline in mobile device sales and revenue during the first quarter of this year, but a company restructuring plan is looking to bring sales back into control.

During this quarter, Motorola decided to "pull the chute" on its plummeting mobile division and create two discrete publicly traded companies. President and CEO of the Schaumburg, Illinois company Greg Brown said that improvement of the mobile product portfolio is a prime concern.

Twitter, the moment-by-moment status update ("What are you doing now?") site that's the buzz among social networking circles, was shaken by a potentially embarrassing foul-up.

Especially popular among Silicon Valley's big names and linkable to many other sites, most notably Facebook, Twitter allows users to create a pseudo-RSS feed of the often inane and meticulous details of their day. Some users, however, found their not-so-inane private messages had been broadcast to all their friends through no fault of their own.

On Monday, Netflix discussed its favorable first quarter 2008 and tempted investors and subscribers alike with references to four mystery hardware manufacturers working on Netflix-enabled products.

Netflix executives made reference to a LG "product launch" scheduled for the second half of this year, which will bring to the market a Netflix-integrated set-top box.

Yesterday an e-mail was sent out from the Windows Live Mail Team announcing that Outlook Express would be dropping the legacy DAV protocol on June 30 2008, severing access to the Hotmail Inbox from Outlook Express.

Users are encouraged by the team to download Windows Live Mail as Outlook Express' free replacement. Live Mail replaces Distributed Authoring and Versioning with Microsoft's proprietary DeltaSynch protocol, which detects changes in the e-mail server, allowing the client to only download the changes, instead of all the headers in every folder as DAV does.

In-Stat has published a report that forecasts the future of the worldwide mobile TV market, anticipating a total of $12 billion dollars in revenue in 2012, but it appears the fragmented nature of standards is here to stay.

Much like PAL and NTSC on analog sets, different nations adhere to different mobile broadcast standards. DVB-H, ATSC-M/H, CMMB, ISDB-T, DVB-SH, T-DMB, and MediaFLO are just some of the most common standards currently in place or in development. And among these, there is even further disunion between free, pay-as-you-go, and subscription-based services.

HP Upline hosted storage has been suspended for five days (and counting) allegedly due to some potentially disastrous bugs. Already, competing services are attempting to cash in.

The service from Hewlett-Packard offering unlimited online storage of user data was launched only 15 days ago, and has been out of commission for just over a third of that time.

Nokia's subscription-based music download service that was announced at the tail end of 2007 has added another major recording label's content to its catalog: Sony BMG.

Initially a partnership with Universal Music Group, Nokia's Comes With Music service offers unlimited downloads of PlaysForSure-protected tracks to those who purchase compatible Nokia handsets.

At the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco today, photo sharing site Photobucket announced that it is opening its API to developers, with the hopes of generating new applications based on its Web services.

The API allows applications to be developed which access a user's account, create and edit albums, upload, search and share content, and update metadata of media files.

Under indictment for tax evasion, Samsung CEO Lee Kun-hee said he is stepping down from his position, claiming full responsibility for the affair. Lee Hak-soo, Vice Chair also departed, as well as heir apparent Lee Jae-yong.

An investigation into the South Korean electronics giant's business practices began early this year with a January raid of Samsung offices. A former lawyer for the company tipped off the government to suspicious practices, including allegations of a slush fund for bribes related to protecting the transfer of power between Lee and his son.

Maintaining its free computer-to-computer video, voice, and instant messaging, peer to peer telephone company Skype announced today an "unlimited" €8.95 monthly calling plan for connecting to international cell and landlines.

"Unlimited" is a bit of a misnomer, as the plans are limited to 10,000 minutes per month, which Skype equates to more than 5 hours a day, but the flat fee allows users to call any of 34 countries.

LA-based social media site Buzznet, which provides audio, video, blogs and editorial content about the popular music scene, has just received an equity investment from major label Universal Music Group.

Terms and conditions of the deal were not disclosed, but some are estimating the value of the transaction to be as high as $25 million, with both companies equally sharing revenue drawn from UMG's content on the site.