Starting today, people living in Austin, Boston, Denver, Seattle and Washington, DC, can get local discounts from Google Offers. These five cities join New York, Portland, Ore. and San Francisco. The Groupon competitor may not have anywhere as much reach, yet, but Google Offers' expansion comes as concerns continue to rise about the category leader's longevity.

Like Groupon, Google Offers provides daily deals with hefty discounts. For example, today's Seattle deal is half off a day pass to the local aquarium -- a fee that can be applied to a year's membership. Google plans to expand Offers to 27 more cities, including Atlanta, Baltimore, Houston, Miami, Pittsburgh and San Diego.

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Fresh off its $12.5 billion acquisition of Motorola Mobility -- which by the way, was about both its patents and the hardware too -- the company is now said to be the high bidder in the race to acquire Hulu.

After being shut out in the bidding for Nortel patents, Google is suddenly willing to spend what's needed to get hot products/services or perhaps, with Hulu, end bidding altogether.

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Last March, I said low-end Android handsets had already begun their market takeover, and cited a half dozen companies that had released, or were planning on releasing mass market Android smartphones in 2011 and 2012.

One of the companies I mentioned, Chinese telecommunications equipment maker Huawei, had just released the Ideos X3, which had a consumer-friendly unsubsidized price of $199, falling in line with the company's tradition of releasing cheaper mass market handsets and modems.

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The good news: Facebook 3.5 for iOS is available, packing some new privacy controls. The bad news: There's still no dedicated iPad app. For now we’ll have to content ourselves with a less major updates. The v3.5 app reflects some of the privacy changes that have been made to the Facebook website, as well as bringing in tagging and location options.

New privacy settings are in place that can be configured to control who will be able to see and comment on the posts you make. You can choose to make posts public, limit them to your friends list or a particular group you have already set up. The settings you choose for a particular post remain in place until you change them for a future post, so be sure to check before making more status updates.

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Hard drives are larger and cheaper  than ever before, meaning there is less of a need to reclaim disk space for reasons of capacity. But there is still a market for disk cleanup and uninstaller software. It's a perception thing: switching from the idea of looking at such tools as freeing up megabytes to instead regarding them as clearing up the mess left behind by other programs;  it’s then easy to see their worth. One such utility is IObit Uninstaller 2.0, which comes with the added benefit of having being free.

Windows includes a dedicated section of the Control Panel to help make it easier to remove software you have decided that you no longer need, and used in conjunction with an application’s own uninstaller things generally go smoothly. But can you really be sure that all traces of the program you just nuked has been completely wiped out? The obvious program folder may have disappeared, but what about entries that may have been added to the registry, or files that have been added to system folders?

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Ed Oswald argues that TechCrunch embodies some of the worst ethics in journalism today. In counterpoint "AOL will ruin TechCrunch," Joe Wilcox argues that under Huffington Post management the tech site's good original reporting will greatly diminish.

I have been thinking about writing a story on the sorry state of tech journalism for a good part of my seven years in this business. Why's that? All too often objectivity, ethics and accuracy seem to have taken a backseat 'round these parts.

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German developer O&O Software has announced the immediate release of O&O DiskImage 6, its drive backup tool. DiskImage 6, which is also available as a separate 64-bit build, allows users to take exact byte-for-byte images of their hard drives, adds a plethora of new features, including the ability to back up individual files and folders.

Other new features include the ability to mount standard ISO image files as virtual drives as well as DiskImage backup images, plus a revamped user interface designed to make the backup process simpler and clearer for less experienced users, which includes a one-click backup option.

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She has guts and character and should be CEO somewhere. Just not Yahoo.

But Carol Bartz deserves better treatment than this, if the account of her dismissal is correct. "I’ve just been fired over the phone by Yahoo’s Chairman of the Board", she claims in an email sent to Yahoo employees. I believe it. This stinks of boardroom coup.

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About to enter her third year as CEO of Internet services company Yahoo, Carol Bartz on Tuesday reportedly sent a message to all Yahoo employess stating that she had been fired.

Bartz ascended to the rank of CEO of Yahoo in early 2009, after the departure of the company's co-founder Jerry Yang.

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Music creation software has something of a poor reputation, with many people regarding it as being expensive to buy and complicated to use. This is a reputation that MAGIX is trying to change with its Music Maker program, and the latest version, MAGIX Music Maker MX goes a long way to achieving this aim. While the program is incredibly simple to use, the music creation you produce using the software can be made as basic or as complex and involved as you like.

Used at its most basic, MAGIX Music Maker MX provides you with 64 audio tracks onto which you can arrange a series of samples to create the skeleton of a musical composition. If you want, you can leave things as they are, but even the least musically minded of people could not resist tinkering with special effects, dropping in a few loops here and there, and then there is the drum machine to play with. Before you know it, you have become fully engrossed in the process of putting together a piece of music -- and it does not matter that you’ve never picked up an instrument in your life.

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Google has set a pretty high bar for itself, guaranteeing 99.9% availability of Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Talk, Google Docs, Google Groups and Google Sites to its Google Apps customers. If it cannot meet that level of availability, all of its customers are entitled to a certain amount of free days worth of service in each billing cycle.

In a somewhat self-aggrandizing blog about Google's cloud services today, Google Apps product manager John Collins reiterated that Gmail was up for 99.984% of 2010, and revealed that it's currently at over 99.99% uptime for the first half of 2011.

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MiniTool Solution Ltd has released a brand new version of its non-destructive partitioning software. MiniTool Partition Wizard 7.0, available as a free-for-personal-use Home Edition, is also can be had in a  number of paid-for editions, with prices starting from $30 for Partition Wizard 7.0 Professional.

The biggest update in Partition Wizard 7.0 is actually restricted to paid-for editions of the program, namely the added support for Simple, Spanned, Striped, Mirrored and RAID-5 volumes, with the addition of a brand new Dynamic Disk menu offering a host of new options for handling such volumes.

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On the last day of August, the U.S. Department of Justice filed an antitrust lawsuit in the District of Columbia to block the proposed merger of national wireless network operators AT&T and T-Mobile. Tuesday, competing national carrier Sprint Nextel announced it had filed a similar antitrust suit in federal court, saying the $39 billion merger is, in short, illegal.

"Sprint opposes AT&T’s proposed takeover of T-Mobile,” a statement from Susan Z. Haller, vice president of litigation at Sprint, said today. “With today’s legal action, we are continuing that advocacy on behalf of consumers and competition, and expect to contribute our expertise and resources in proving that the proposed transaction is illegal.”

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Joe Wilcox argues that TechCrunch produces boatloads of original content using a method called process journalism. In counterpoint, "TechCrunch just exposed what is wrong with tech journalism today", Ed Oswald contends that the blog is rife with conflict of interest and questionable news reporting ethics.

Have you been on the Internet long enough to remember Global Network Navigator -- yeah, that's GNN. It was the first web portal I used to get news and quick access to other useful sites. O'Reilly & Associates (now O'Reilly Media) launched the site in 1993. AOL bought GNN in 1995 and closed it in 1996, quite unceremoniously. The domain is still active and points to Huffington Post. Old-time Netters will remember GNN and a long list of other properties and products purchased by AOL that were later abandoned or closed -- all part of a decade-and-a-half plan to reinvent as a new media company.

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While the short-range wireless technology known generically as Near-field communications (NFC) is still in its early stages of consumer adoption, the technology is already in its seventh year of development and it is maturing beyond the point where it can be used simply for exchanging small bits of information or payment authorization. Imagine if companies could make a single production run of smartphones, tablets, or notebooks without having to regionalize the software on it, and that was done the moment the machine was purchased.

Switzerland-based semiconductor company STMicroelectronics on Tuesday launched a new dual-interface EEPROM memory unit (M24LR64) that is specifically designed to make a system's data available via NFC at all times. EEPROM is a non-volatile form of memory commonly used in microcontrollers in industrial machinery, and can often be found in digital sensors and timers.

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