Software company Adobe Systems Inc. has acquired e-signature technology company EchoSign, the two parties announced on Monday. EchoSign's technology will be integrated with Adobe's document solutions including SendNow, FormsCentral, and CreatePDF.

EchoSign's e-signature technology has already been integrated into Salesforce, Google Docs, NetSuite, Oracle CRM on Demand, SugarCRM, and SAP CLM, so Adobe, in addition to gaining the tech for its own document solutions, gains a foothold into document authentication for these major enterprise solutions.

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Second in a series. On Saturday, I let AT&T bill me for another month of U-verse service, even as I try to switch to over-the-air broadcasts and Internet streaming. To be honest, cutting cable's cord is more difficult than I anticipated.

Key points in this post: 1) I don't get OTA reception with antenna attached to Tivo. 2) I do get nearly a dozen stations clearly with antenna attached to TV. 3) TiVo, which was supposed to be the hub to OTA/streaming, has proved incapable. 4) There are more local channels available OTA than are typically carried on cable/IPTV.

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For the past few days I've been hanging out in Jackson Hole with a bunch of geeks and one thing I've noticed over and over is how boring Twitter has gotten when compared to Google+.

Why has Twitter turned boring?

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When Sony provided a select group of journalists and bloggers a sneak peek at the two new tablets planned to launch later this year, it also offered a glimpse into its strategy for separating itself from the growing pack of iPad rivals.

Along the way, Sony also gave us a gander at something else: The huge risk it's taking in coming to market with something so different, perhaps even too different, for you to buy.

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When things go wrong with your Windows PC, or someone else's, you don't want to fish around or Google for the appropriate tool. Have it right there when you need it, and you'll feel clever for it.

I usually carry a key ring of USB thumb drives with me with a variety of tools on them. Yes, some people laugh at me for it, but they turn out to be handy more often than you'd think.

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I stopped following the spam problem in detail a while ago, but assumed that China was a major source of the stuff.

It just sort of seems like it would be, but it turns out this is no longer the case.

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Friday, Apple released an update to its mobile operating system (iOS 4.3.4) which patches a couple of vulnerabilities that left a door open for malware infections on the iPad, 3rd and 4th generation iPod touch, iPhone 4, and iPhone 3GS.

Apple's update describes the CoreGraphics vulnerability as "A buffer overflow…in FreeType's handling of TrueType fonts. Viewing a maliciously crafted PDF file may lead to an unexpected application termination or arbitrary code execution."

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Yesterday's Flurry blog post "iPad 2 and Verizon iPhone Take Some Wind Out of Android's Sail" sent the Apple Fanclub of bloggers and journalists into a tizzy. They're still blogging about this great news today. But is it really so great?

I don't think so, because the data is limited in reach and the analysis supporting it overlooks too much. So I'm asking for your help in getting different perspective. If you develop for multiple mobile operating systems, please tell us which matter more to you -- in comments or by sending email to joe at betanews dot com. I'll explain more in the closing paragraphs. Meanwhile please answer the two polls below -- one for developers and another for mobile device buyers (which could be developers, too).

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It's got a funny name, and it may be Microsoft's next big thing. Microsoft Research employees accidentally published this week an internal project known as "Tulalip" which appears to be some type of social networking platform. The site has since been removed, but the questions still remain.

The name Tulalip comes from the name for a group of Native American tribes that call the Redmond, Washington area home. It's not known why Microsoft chose the name as the company isn't answering many questions on it.

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The Windows Home Server team on Friday announced the final release of Windows Server Solutions Phone Connector, an add-in utility that lets users turn their Windows phone into a remote Windows Home Server 2011 management terminal or media streamer.

With the server-side add-in and the appropriate mobile application, the user's Windows Phone gets a hub specifically for "My Home Server" where he can view alerts, initiate backups, manage user access, or view and access content located on the server.

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Everyone with writing sensibilities dreams of becoming a published author. Magazine publishing houses are full of frustrated novelists "getting by" writing magazine and online articles while trying to find time to cram in a novel or two.

The self-publishing route is nothing new, but it's only now you can actually get published for no upfront costs by publishing digitally using a service like Lulu. The problem is, Lulu wants to distribute your finished work in the EPUB format, and if your manuscript is in Word format, how can you avoid paying a hefty fee in order to generate the required file? The answer lies in a simple, open-source and cross-platform solution called Sigil.

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You could spend real money for virtual goods on the farm, or earn merit badges for being an informed citizen instead. For free.

Late yesterday, Google announced "News Badges" -- more than 500 of them -- for readers of Google News. I was feeling crappy yesterday (still am today -- and I'm not looking for sympathy badges), otherwise you would have read this story last night. Maybe. I kind of chuckled about the whole concept and joked with other Betanews writers about it.

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In May, Nature Publishing Group and California State University announced a three-year partnership to use $49 e-books for certain Biology classes over a more expensive and less versatile paper book. Soon, state universities in Texas and Florida will follow suit. While there are hundreds of startups pitching various ways to bring e-textbooks to universities, Nature's initiative is one of the first widespread e-textbook programs to come from the publishing industry.

The most interesting part?

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Install one program, run another, remove a third, and all kinds of changes will be made to your system: files added, others deleted, Registry keys modified and more. Understanding exactly what's going on can help you uncover malware, troubleshoot conflicts and solve many other problems, and the latest beta of OSForensics makes this very easy indeed.

The program has always been able to monitor and report on file-based changes. So you could use it to create "before" and "after" signatures of your current system, then compare the two for a report of all the files that have been created, modified or deleted. And OSForensics 0.98 has extended this by adding the ability to check for Registry changes, too.

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Investors rewarded Google on Friday for strong second quarterly earnings results, with shares up more than 13 percent in early trading. Google traded $599.69, up $70.75, or 13.38 percent soon after the opening bell. The stock closed at $528.94 yesterday. Shares rose more than 10 percent overnight in after-hours trading. Google opened at $597.87 this morning.

Google announced Q2 earnings late yesterday. Revenues rose 32 percent to $9.03 billion, year over year; net income climbed to $2.51 billion up from $1.84 billion a year earlier. That's $7.68 earnings per share. Operating income was $2.88 billion.

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