Apple executive briefing at first Apple retail store, May 2001.

Ten years ago -- that's right, 2001 -- Apple made four investments that bore fruit in a 21st-century success story. Everything that came afterwards, even iPad and iPhone, traces back to what I call the "2001 Four."

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Uh-oh, the plot thickens in the war of words between Google and Microsoft over pilfered search queries. No less than Yusuf Mehdi, senior vice president of Microsoft's Online Services Division, has piped up a fervent denial. You know what, emotionally, I want to believe him. Mehdi is one of the few at Microsoft I respect, and he doesn't get enough respect inside the company.

He blogged this afternoon: "We do not copy results from any of our competitors. Period. Full stop. We have some of the best minds in the world at work on search quality and relevance, and for a competitor to accuse any one of these people of such activity is just insulting." Well, I'm glad that's cleared up, or is it?

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Mozilla on Wednesday released the fourth beta version of Firefox 4 for Android and Maemo mobile operating systems. The update fixes some compatibility and performance issues, and attempts to provide an overall faster browsing experience.

In the Mozilla Blog today, the team wrote "Our recent tests on JavaScript benchmarks show Firefox 4 Beta is faster than the stock Android browser; roughly three times faster on Kraken, about twice as fast on SunSpider and slightly faster on V8. Everything from start-up time and page load time to responsiveness and panning and zooming are snappy in this release. Other advancements in this release include increasing stability, reducing installation memory usage, improving readability with zooming, and fixing some keyboard issues."

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Internet access started to return across Egypt on Wednesday, nearly one week after the government cut access over increasing civil unrest in the country. By midday local time, many websites were once again accessible within the country according to local ISPs.

Facebook and Twitter were once again accessible, which are said to play a key role in helping organize anti-government protests. It is not exactly clear why the government decided to restore Internet service, although it may be part of a wider effort to restore some sense of stability to daily life in Egypt following President Hosni Mubarak's statement that he would step down in September.

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Piriform Software has released a new monthly build of its free defragging tool. Defraggler 2.02 includes a number of enhancements to increase performance, such as improvements to the speed and accuracy of the program's search algorithm, and a redesigned NTFS process for optimising both performance and memory.

Defraggler is a fully functional defragmentation tool for Windows users that has evolved from a program that originally defragmented selected files and folders only. Version 2, which was released late last year, featured a new tool for defragging system files at boot time along with a redesigned interface.

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At a special event in Mountain View, California Wednesday, search leader Google gave the first in-depth look at "Honeycomb," the tablet-specific version of the Android operating system. This is the biggest overhaul the platform has gotten since it debuted in 2008.

The arrival of Honeycomb is important because it means the Android-based tablets that were announced at the International Consumer Electronics Show in January can finally be shown off in full working order.

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At Noon ET today, News Corp. launched its original iPad newspaper The Daily. During an event that started an hour earlier, News Corp. president Rupert Murdoch said the target audience is the 50 million American users expected to have purchased iPads by end of this year.

The Daily means nothing to you if you don't live in the United States, don't own an iPad or don't plan to buy Apple's tablet. For US iPad users, The Daily builds on some other innovative publications already available for iPad, such as Virgin's Project or Wired. From a user experience perspective, what really differentiates The Daily, immediately anyway, is the subscription model -- "14 cents a day," Murdoch says. Right now, iPad publications like The New Yorker and Wired are only available on one-off bases, and they cost lots more.

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In a move that had been widely expected for months, News Corp unveiled its new news effort called "The Daily." The currently iPad-exclusive app would provide a much needed bridge between the declining state of print media and the rising fortunes of online news, the company hopes. The first edition released today at 12pm through the app store.

The Daily also signals an important change in how Apple handles subscriptions: users will be able to do so within an app, and be automatically billed if they request to. Previously, subscriptions were hindered by the cumbersome process of having to manually renew through the App Store itself.

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This week, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) announced that it will analyze the 1755-1850 MHz band for commercial broadband licensing. This would be part of the 500 MHz of additional spectrum planned to be re-claimed over the next ten years for mobile broadband, as detailed in the National Broadband Plan.

"NTIA is conducting this evaluation as directed by President Obama to reach his goal of nearly doubling the amount of commercial spectrum available over the next decade, an initiative that will spur investment, economic growth, and job creation while supporting the growing demand by consumers and businesses for wireless broadband services. We look forward to our continued work with the FCC and other federal agencies as we work to free up additional spectrum while protecting vital government spectrum uses," said Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Communications and Information and NTIA Administrator Lawrence E. Strickling on Monday.

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When Microsoft announced its July 2009 search deal with Yahoo, and even before, Steve Ballmer said the increased scale would help improve the quality of Bing search results. Perhaps Microsoft's CEO was wrong, or Yahoo search didn't give enough scale. Bing started serving up Yahoo search results late last year. But Bing also is serving up Google results, as was widely reported yesterday. How desperate is that -- or is it, gasp, clever?

To briefly, recap: Yesterday morning, at Search Engine Land, Danny Sullivan reported that "Bing has been watching what people search for on Google, the sites they select from Google's results, then uses that information to improve Bing's own search listings. Bing doesn't deny this." They say imitation is the greatest form of flattery, but c`mon, what's right about this and wrong with the math behind Microsoft's search algorithm?

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A few short hours after the Consumer Electronics Show finished setting the stage for the industry's year, AMD added a new wrinkle to the outlook when it revealed that CEO Dirk Meyer was leaving. Effective immediately.

Meyer likely was a casualty of an increasingly fierce debate at AMD over what the tablet market means to the company and how it should respond. Meyer laid his cards on the table, both publicly and privately, asserting that tablets are companion devices that would not have a major detrimental impact on the PC market. Intel CEO Paul Otellini says much the same, by the way.

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As the balance of power in many domains shifts from the United States to China, computer makers are also refocusing their strategies to include a larger China component. China is key both as a market and a supply base. And Asian vendors, from both mainland China and Taiwan, have become contenders rivaling the top US firms.

For years, the large PC brands were American and the big makers were Taiwanese. China was at best a low-cost production site. Now, several of the former Taiwanese makers have become international brands, and mainland China has risen to become a full player as both a market and a supplier. The Chinese national champion, Lenovo, is the fourth largest PC vendor in the world. The third largest is the Taiwanese firm Acer.

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A design flaw within the chipset supporting its new line of Sandy Bridge processors may delay the launch of next-generation computers, and Apple could find itself affected the most.

Intel's latest chip is the first from the company to include integrated graphics silicon on the chip, while also using the company's advanced 32-nanometer manufacturing. This is said to allow PC manufacturers to offer systems that have much better graphics capabilities and much greater power efficiency than its predecessors.

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If you abandoned Internet Explorer long ago then the news that it can waste a great deal of RAM probably won't come as much of a surprise. But if you still use the browser, even only occasionally, then it's worth checking your current configuration, because it could be using three times as much memory as is actually necessary.

To be fair, this isn't entirely the fault of Internet Explorer itself. The problem lies more with its add-ons. You may only have installed one or two yourself, but other applications may have added more, sometimes without telling you, and these can have a significant effect on your PC.

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For United States citizens interested in getting continuous news coverage of the Egyptian revolution, the options are limited to one: the live Al Jazeera feed on its website. Even though United States cable companies don't carry the station, it is easy to pipe that streaming news feed to your HDTV with a variety of Web-connected devices.

Set-top box maker Roku today announced that users of its popular set-top streamer can now push Al Jazeera's live and on-demand streams to their HDTVs with just a few steps.

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