Credit card company American Express on Monday launched Serve, a payment system that allows customers to make person-to-person payments online, via mobile phones, or at merchants who accept American Express credit cards. Serve launched just two weeks after Visa Inc. announced a similar person-to-person service powered by Popmoney and ZashPay.

Users set up an account on Serve.com or through the Android or iOS apps, and then link their bank accounts, debit or credit cards, or other Serve accounts to add funds. At its most basic, Serve works like a prepaid credit card that can receive funds from any linked bank account or registered Serve user. Without adding any information other than name, age, address, and phone number, a Serve account can receive up to $500 per month.

There's little doubt that solid-state drives (SSDs) are the future for hard disk-based storage. They're quicker, quieter and cooler than the drives we've come to rely on over the past few decades. But with SSDs now entering the mainstream as prices fall within the reach of consumers, there's one potential performance hurdle to overcome.

TRIM is a command designed to fix a problem whereby over time the write performance of a SSD starts to degrade to as little as 50 per cent of its original speed. Unfortunately, TRIM isn't supported on a lot of operating systems, and while newer drives boast their own technologies to combat this problem with relying on the OS, older drives rely on TRIM being supported. Apple plans to rectify this with the upcoming release of Mac OS X Lion (and possibly in the next update for Snow Leopard too), but there's still no guarantee it'll support TRIM on non-Apple SSDs. But now there's a possible solution that's small, free and quick. It's called TRIM Support Enabler.

This morning, Apple announced that Worldwide Developer Conference 2011 will be June 6-10 in San Francisco. "Join us for a preview of the future of iOS and Mac OS X" Apple's WWDC 2011 info page proclaims. Which has me scratching my head. What about all those rumors that Mac OS X 10.7 "Lion" is near golden master. Isn't the future coming sooner?

Apple is known for being indirect -- and, yes, secretive -- where the subtlest information in an announcement can convey other meaning, or rumormongers make subtleties to mean more than they should. So I'll watch with interest to see how the Mac fan club of bloggers and journalists interprets Apple's press release quoting Phil Schiller, senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing, and not CEO Steve Jobs. Remember, Jobs is on medical leave. Surely someone will ask if this means he won't give the keynore. Relax the interpretations. WWDC 2011 is months way, I say.

In the early battle for users, Firefox 4 handedly beats Internet Explorer 9, according to NetApplications. As of March 26, IE 9 usage share was 1.78 percent (in 12 days), according to NetApplications. By comparison, Firefox 4 had 3.64 percent usage share (in just 5 days) -- or twice as much in less than half the time.

Microsoft released Internet Explorer 9 at Midnight ET on March 15, but Net Applications is on Pacific Time, so its measurement of usage share is from the 14th. Mozilla released Firefox on March 22nd. Firefox 4 outpaced Microsoft's browser in first-day downloads. IE9: 2.35 million. Firefox 4: 6 million -- 15.7 million in first 48 hours. Last week, Mozilla also issued the Firefox 4 Mobile Release Candidate for Android and Maemo.

Ed Bott's March 22nd ZDNET post "Why Internet Explorer will survive and Firefox won't" answers the question yes. "So long, Firefox. It was nice to know you," he writes about the browser's future. Well, I don't agree with that. But Bott makes another prediction that rings right. If so, the new browser wars will make the 1990s skirmish between Microsoft and Netscape look like kids fighting with sticks.

Bott puts Firefox's future in context of a new platform war, as the computing market transitions from the PC era to the cloud connected device era. I riled some Betanews readers regading this transition with February 9th post: "The PC era is over."

The second really big wireless tradeshow of the year concluded yesterday. Although, for all practical matters it was over a day earlier. My colleague Tim Conneally told me about Day 3: "You should see it down here, it's a ghost town compared to Day 1." Like I said yesterday, there was something missing from this years CTIA Wireless. That's not to say there was no news or no worthy gadgets coming out of the show. I've collected our coverage here into a single post for quick reference.

1. AT&T and T-Mobile USA merger. On March 20, a Sunday and two days before CTIA Wireless, Deutsche Telekom agreed to sell T-Mobile USA to AT&T for a whopping $39 -- $25 million in cash. In an analysis, we looked at how the merger will affect you. In a follow-up post, you expressed your reaction to the proposed merger. Today, we returned back to topic. The U.S. Federal Communications Commission may resist the major merger.

Aiming to clear remaining stocks of the original iPad from their shelves, Verizon on Friday began a sale at its retail stores which lowers the price of the entry-level 16GB Wi-Fi only model to $299. This would be $130 less than AT&T's current offer.

AT&T sells the 16GB model for $399, however it also offers a free month of data to any customer purchasing the tablet. Prices range from $429 to $629 in store (although the 64GB version is on sale for $529 online where it is the only one available), and checks seem to indicate the sale is having its intended effect of clearing out the older models.

An FCC official told the Wall Street Journal that AT&T's effort to acquire T-Mobile may face steep resistance to gain approval from the regulatory body. The comments echo similar concerns of some on the left who are leery of less competition in the wireless market.

"There's no way the chairman's office rubber-stamps this transaction," the source said, declining to be named in the story. "It will be a steep climb to say the least." That said, the FCC has done little to block recent blockbuster mergers -- most notably Sirius and XM Satellite Radio's $13 billion merger in 2007.

In case you missed the announcement yesterday, Google has started testing in-app billing, which goes live next week. It's not exactly loads of notice for developers but still opportunity to test apps before Google turns on the feature.

"In preparation for the launch, we are opening up Android Market for upload and end-to-end testing of your apps that use in-app billing," Eric Chu writes at the Android Developers blog. "You can now upload your apps to the Developer Console, create a catalog of in-app products, and set prices for them. You can then set up accounts to test in-app purchases. During these test transactions, the in-app billing service interacts with your app exactly as it will for actual users and live transactions."

Google's decision to withhold Android 3.0 "Honeycomb" from the open-source community is nothing but shocking. From a business perspective, the company's reasons make sense. But Google has put principles before business before, like its stance with China or H.264 support. There is also the broader question of leadership and what the move means, if anything, about Eric Schmidt soon stepping down as CEO and Google cofounder Larry Page replacing him. There's a new sheriff in town. Will he enforce the law differently?

Google dropped the Honeycomb bomb late yesterday. In a statement the company said that Honeycomb "was designed from the ground up for devices with larger screen sizes and improves on Android favorites such as widgets, multi-tasking, browsing, notifications and customization. While we're excited to offer these new features to Android tablets, we have more work to do before we can deliver them to other device types including phones."

On Tuesday, AT&T announced it would begin selling the 4G Acer Iconia Tab A501 in the second quarter of 2011. Naturally, it became one of the devices on my list to get some hands-on time with.

The tablet, however, wasn't out on the show floor of CTIA this week like it was last month at Mobile World Congress. That's because the devices on display there were running FroYo, and the model AT&T announced this week will be running Gingerbread.

Non-profit organization VideoLAN has released a minor update to its open-source and acclaimed cross-platform media player, VLC Media Player 1.1.8. This release is notable largely for the fact the Mac OS X version sports a subtly redesigned interface, but also includes various codec, demuxer and language updates, some new encoder packages and various fixes that apply to all platforms.

VLC Media Player is renowned for being able to handle most video formats without requiring the installation of additional codec packs. All major formats -- including Windows Media Video, QuickTime, Real and Flash -- are supported by VLC, which is also capable of capturing, playing and even streaming video from external sources. These include online streams, DVD, DVB and supported MPEG encoding devices, making it a popular one-stop solution for video playback.

There are numerous reasons why anyone would like to browse the Internet anonymously, and there are various programs available that can clean up traces of Internet activity after the fact. There are also great concerns about IP addresses, which can be used to track users and even restrict access to web sites. CyberGhost 2011 is a free VPN tool that can be used to route web traffic through anonymous servers, hiding users' real IP addresses.

The main purpose of the program would appear to be ensuring that you remain anonymous online, but the 'Video portal' section of the software interface reveals that the tool can also be used to watch online videos that might ordinarily be subject to regional restrictions. With various servers in use around the world, CyberGhost can make it appear as if users are actually located in different countries.

A decade ago today, Apple released Mac OS X 10.0. But the real celebration should be for v10.1, which released in September 2001. Apple gave birth to a new operating system that spent six months in an incubator, having been born prematurely. How strange that yesterday, a day before Mac OS X's tenth anniversary, Apple announced the departure of Bertrand Serlet, who is regarded as the father of Mac OS X.

Into the Incubator

Startup mobile application developer Color Labs launched a new social networking app Wednesday night, while simultaneously announcing that it had secured a staggering $41 million in funding for its project. Called Color, the application shares your photos and videos with those within 150 feet of you.

It's not like other social networking services, where you find and connect to friends on your own. Instead, by using the integrated GPS within smart phones, Color decides what pictures and videos you see based on two variables: your location and how often another Color user is near you.