During dual briefings in New York and San Francisco, Sony provided a "sneak peek" -- and not much else -- of the two new tablets it plans to launch later this year, emphasizing the handful of ways it's attempting to differentiate its tablets from those that have already hit the market.

Speaking to a gathering of about 15 journalists that included me, Kunimasa Suzuki, a highly placed exec from Sony's Tokyo headquarters who sits at or near the helm of several company units that are working together on the tablets, emphasized four ways the company is trying to make the two tablets, code-named the S1 and S2, are "uniquely Sony":

Well, so much for the 23 million subscribers Netflix worked so hard to get. Based on Betanews poll results, currently with more than 1,600 responses -- 59.52 percent of Netflix users will "cancel account".

We asked: "Netflix has separated DVD and streaming plans -- raising prices 60 percent for many customers. How will you respond?" The company announced the pricing increases yesterday. Under the old arrangement, subscribers could rent one DVD at a time and get unlimited streaming for $8.99. Under the new scheme, 1-disc rentals and unlimited streaming are $7.99 a piece. To get both, the new price is $15.98, or a $6.99 increase.

I told you so. In April, citing unnamed sources, Business Insider set the web aflame with rumors that Microsoft would back away from its retail store strategy. I asserted that Microsoft wouldn't and shouldn't. Today during his Worldwide Partners Conference keynote, Microsoft COO said that more stores would be coming. Lots of them.

"We're going to open up to 75 more stores over the next 2 to 3 years and continue to bring our stores outside the US as well", Turner boomed. I hope that's clear enough for all the web's rumor-peddlers.

Digital payment company PayPal on Wednesday debuted its person-to-person payment technology that utilizes Near Field Communications (NFC) embedded in Android smartphones. To initiate payments, users need to only type in the amount of money they want to share, and then hold their phone up to the phone belonging to the recipient.

This is a major advancement for NFC mobile payments, a field where banks, payment companies, and software makers are all scrambling to establish early dominance.

Better late than never, as they say.

Despite being one of the last big electronics players to hit the market with a tablet, Sony underscored it's no less serious about one of the hottest tech segments with a pair of concrete announcements about the two tablets Sony intends to deliver sometime this fall.

AT&T said Wednesday that it will advertise on the Kindle 3G to allow Amazon to lower the cost on the ad supported model another 15 percent. The 'Kindle with Special Offers' with 3G access previously cost $164; it will now cost $139.

The move is a win for AT&T, who has provided the 3G data for the Kindle since its launch back in 2009. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Amazon covers the cost of providing data to its Kindle customers, unlike tablet devices where the user is responsible for those charges.

If you're always struggling to make scripts and batch files do what you need, then you could try extending Windows' own capabilities with a few command line tools. There are plenty of freebies around to help you manipulate processes, work with application windows, and generally automate just about any Windows task.

You'll have to find them first, of course. And it may require a sizeable library of tools before your batch files are able to do everything you'd like.  So if you'd prefer your system to stay uncluttered then it may be easier simply to download WinAPIExec, a tiny program (3.5KB) that allows you to call any Windows API function from the command line.

Romanian security company BitDefender on Wednesday released statistics from its analysis of more than 25 million spam messages, which reveal the most common celebrity names used to entice users to view junkmail.

1. Jay Leno
2. Madonna
3. Cameron Diaz
4. Barack Obama
5. AC/DC
6. Stephen King
7. George Lucas
8. Kenny Chesney
9. Howard Stern
10. 50 Cent

COMODO has made a third beta of the next version of its backup product, COMODO BackUp, available for download. The major change in COMODO BackUp 4 is the switch to a two-tier product, with a function-limited Free version now being joined by a fully functional Pro version, pricing details of which will be made available on the program's final release. At the present time, the Pro beta version functions as a 30-day trial.

This seems to be the major driver for version 4, with other improvements and changes being relatively minor, while the user interface itself remains largely unchanged from the current version 3 release.

Yesterday, Netflix did something almost unthinkable in this economy -- dramatically increased prices for many customers. I asked for your reaction, and, whoa, did you give it.

To recap: Netflix separated its DVD and streaming plans. Under the old arrangement, subscribers could rent one DVD at a time and get unlimited streaming for $8.99. Under the new scheme, 1-disc rentals and unlimited streaming are $7.99 a piece. To get both, the new price is $15.98, or a $6.99 increase.

Windows Intune 2.0, the first major update to Microsoft's cloud-based PC management solution for small and medium sized businesses, is now available in beta to qualified users.

Interested testers must sign up on the Windows Intune
TechNet site with their Windows Live ID, and they can preview all the updates to Intune that have taken place since the RTM in March.

Netflix helped kill Blockbuster.

Its DVD-by-mail service, in conjunction with Redbox's 24-hour $1 rentals drove brick and mortar video store chain Blockbuster from market dominance into bankruptcy and near irrelevance.

Facebook has successfully conquered the smartphone market, with its apps for both Android and the iPhone consistently one of the most downloaded. However, the company has done little to focus on the so-called "dumb phone" market -- that is, until now.

The company announced Tuesday that it was releasing Facebook for Every Phone, a Java-based app which will work on over 2,500 phones. With a good deal of the phones today here in the US and elsewhere now smart phones, the move appears more to increase Facebook's reach in developing markets.

Will the Google makeovers never end? I sure hope not.

Google has started to roll out yet another new version of the Android Market. The revamped store client is going out to Android 2.2 or higher handsets now, on a rolling basis expected to take several weeks.

Electronic Arts on Tuesday announced it will acquire PopCap Games for $650 million in cash and $100 million in EA stock. PopCap is known for creating some of the most popular mobile and browser-based video games of the last few years, including Plants vs. Zombies and Bejeweled, and the company is squarely focused on the strongest growth areas of the video game industry.

There's no doubt that mobile and Web-based video games have the potential to be hugely profitable for game studios. With advertisement and in-game purchases, each game title can have multiple recurring revenue streams in addition to the upfront purchase price.