By measure of sheer punditry, rumors and competitor jocking, Google TV is dead on arrival. Hardly. But rumors -- hey, published in the mother of business reporting, the Wall Street Journal -- claim that Google has yanked the software (and, therefore, third-party hardware) from next month's Consumer Electronics Show. Meanwhile, today, Apple gave Google a noggie by announcing Apple TV shipments would reach 1 million units this week. Perhaps worse, Chip Trick is reporting a tempting last-minute holiday deal -- the Roku XDS for a cool 80 bucks. The cheapest Google TV device costs $300. Yeah, Google TV isn't having a good week, and it's only Tuesday!

Google TV has a future, despite all proclamations of its early death. Television is important to Google, because of advertising competition. According to research released this week by MagnaGlobal, US online ad revenue surpassed newspaper advertising in 2010, with projections of topping all print ad spending in 2014. But TV still tops all categories, and by considerable margin -- more than twice as much as Internet advertising, and that continues through MagnaGlobal's forecast period when in 2015 TV ad revenue will near $100 billion and online ad revenue tops $44 billion. Ad dollars aren't moving fast enough online for Google, with TV being the jewel the information giant needs to add to its advertising and search crown.

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The Securities and Exchange Commission has begun a far-reaching investigation into the circumstances surrounding former CEO and now Oracle executive Mark Hurd's departure from Hewlett Packard, the Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday.

The regulator is looking into claims that he may have passed insider information to a female contractor, who later became central to his resignation from HP. In addition, his use of corporate expense accounts will be studied: a matter which the HP board used in its efforts to get Hurd to step down.

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On December 13th, I received from Google the unbranded Cr-48 laptop running Chrome OS, which I've been using and writing about for the last seven days. Whew, it has been quite the journey and not one that's over. I will continue using the Cr-48 as my primary computer through the end of December and quite likely much longer. I say primary, because testing Mac OS and Windows apps will require some time on the other operating systems. I'll be front and center looking at the Mac App Store, for example, when it launches on Jan. 6, 2011.

How much longer I can use Chrome OS for daily work (including Betanews writing) greatly depends on how quickly Adobe Flash is fixed to run right. Many of the Web services that replace my desktop apps require Flash, something I discover as things go wrong. While writing this post, for example, the Flash plugin crashed, pulling AIM Express offline and stopping Mog streaming. AIM Express replaces the IM client I used previously (and I will switch to an alternative Web service in the next day or so). AIM Express is a real hassle if the Net connection goes down or Flash crashes. There's no indication of a problem, unless I go to the tab and check -- and logging back in is a manual process (It's not automatic like the desktop client).

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The net neutrality regulations known as the Open Internet Order are coming up for vote before the Federal Communications Commission tomorrow, and it is now believed the order will pass, based upon statements from FCC commissioner Michael Copps on Monday.

Copps was formerly the "swing vote" for the Open Internet Order, Commissioners Baker and McDowell are expected to vote against the order, while commissioners Clyburn and Genachowski are expected to vote in favor of it. Until recently, Copps was in favor of reclassifying the Internet as a Title II telecommunications service, but that position was denigrated not only by Chairman Genachowski, but also by former Commissioner Michael Powell who is considered the "founding father" of the regulation.

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Motorola will be showing off its mystery tablet product at CES 2011, according to a teaser video released by the company on Sunday.

It is the first really enticing move from Motorola since co-CEO Sanjay Jha announced the company's intention to make a tablet back in September.

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Qualcomm on Monday announced that it will be selling its valuable Lower 700 MHz D and E Block wireless spectrum licenses to national service operator AT&T for $1.925 billion. The precious wireless licenses were being utilized in Qualcomm's mobile television service FLO TV which will be shutting down in March 2011.

Less than one year after FLO TV launched as a standalone service with its own HTC-made "Personal Televisions", Qualcomm CEO Paul Jacobs told investors that the company was looking to sell off the service, but provided little in the way of detail as to whether it would be sold off as a package, or piecemeal.

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Chrome OS demands computing differently, but not as radically as some people think, or so I have concluded six days into using Google's unbranded Cr-48 laptop. Persistent Net connection is required and storage is generally on the InterWeb rather than on the computer; these changes take some adjustment.

I'm accustomed to running applications locally. I can't on Chrome OS.

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Settling into the cloud is taking longer than I expected, as I try to root out enough applications to make up for what I used locally on my last laptop -- the 11.6-inch MacBook Air. The simple reality: There aren't enough good applications yet, or perhaps I'm just too slow finding them. Strangely, if I were living in a different cloud -- from smartphone or tablet -- I could choose from plenty of apps and many of them would be better than those available on the PC (the difference, of course, being something running locally and connected versus something running in the browser that must be connected).

I got a stronger-bitter sweet taste of the difference between the clouds on the evening of Day 5, when I bought the Nexus S smartphone running Gingerbread (aka Android 2.3) from the local Best Buy Mobile.

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Few months ago, while walking around Apple Store, minutes after leaving Microsoft Store, I suddenly thought: "My next laptop will run Chrome OS." Well, almost. I ended up with 11.6-inch MacBook Air first. But four days into using the unbranded Google Cr-48 laptop running Chrome OS, I can see living in the cloud as a reasonable future -- not just for me but many other computer users. Problem: It's a residence not quite finished. There's a roof overhead and enclosed walls, but rooms are drafty, electricity works only in some places and the appliances are portable temporaries.

Running Chrome OS on Cr-48 reminds me of testing Windows NT 4 and Mac OS X 10.0 as beta and final release. Windows NT 4 debuted ahead of its time. The hardened security model meant problems connecting peripherals and running many applications. NT 4 was a lonely domicile -- analogous to the first house finished in a new community. Mac OS X 10.0 was similar. Apple made the outrageous decision to ship the operating system before there were adequate drivers for optical drives on existing Macs. Mac OS X also was a new platform for which there were few applications and for which Apple's low PC market share gave developers little incentive to write native ones.

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The end of the calendar year is a time to reflect on our experiences of the last twelve months, and to look ahead to what the next twelve have in store. For many, this means getting together with the family, exchanging gifts and sharing stories of the year's adventures.

For the technology and information industries, it doesn't mean sitting around the fireplace and getting nostalgic over a cup of hot cocoa, though. It means year-end statistics; and for the rest of us, this is far more exciting.

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The end-of-year retrospectives are popping up everywhere as Christmas and New Years approach. This morning, Soma Somasegar's walk down 2010 memory lane caught my attention. He posted "A Year of Excitement" late-day yesterday (Eastern Standard Time). Whether or not there is any Microsoft "excitement" is topic for discussion in comments. But the tone of his post and emphasis is something other Microsoft bloggers -- and employees from other tech companies -- should try to imitate as they look back on the year or even ahead to 2011.

Somasegar writes: "I'm always impressed with the work we do here at Microsoft -- you can see how unbiased I am :) -- but this year I'm especially proud to see some of the work having a real impact in my house and with my family members." Stop right there. Somasegar is senior vice president of Microsoft's Developer Division. He's not a consumer evangelist but a developer. He works for a company selling most of its products to businesses, and he engages developers among them.

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Following a reported four percent staff reduction announced this week, search engine and web portal Yahoo! will also be restructuring its large roster of sites by terminating some, merging others, and turning still others into "features."

According to a presentation slide leaked from an internal Yahoo product meeting on Thursday, Altavista, Yahoo Picks, Yahoo Bookmarks, Yahoo Buzz, Delicious, MyBlogLog, Alltheweb, and MyM are all slated to be shut down for good. Additionally, Yahoo says its Traffic APIs will be shut down as well.

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I've spent the last six weeks living the serene computing life, like being back on a Maine farm, with dusty roads, upward-reaching pines and Milky Way spanning night skies. Switching from the 11.6-inch MacBook Air to Google's Cr-48 brought back city congestion and bursting neon signs. Adobe Flash is back in my life, and it's hurting my Chrome OS experience.

"Whether or not Flash?" is topic for Day 3 of my week-long usage experiment, and it's a question many other people are sure to ask. Previous posts in this series: "A week with Google's Chrome OS laptop, Day 1: Getting acquainted" and "A week with Google's Chrome OS laptop, Day 2: Becoming a cloud citizen."

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Opera Software Thursday released the completed version of the Opera 11 browser, which has been available in various states of pre-release since October. This version of the browser breaks new ground for Opera, and includes support for extensions and introduces a new tab management system.

If you have been using the beta version of Opera 11, which was last updated on November 23, there isn't going to be a tremendous amount of change that is immediately visible aside from a few changes to the search dropdown, speed dial background, and extension installer UI, but a handful of usability improvements have been made.

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I ask because of a surprising mobile shopping report made available today. What caught my interest was methodology -- survey by mobile phones -- and sample size of 12,533. Briabe Media put together the survey, conducted on MocoSpace's mobile network of 14 million registered users. Among the 31-page PowerPoint report's findings: 62 percent of respondents used their phones to research products or pricing before going shopping. Forty-six percent used their phones to comparison shop once in the stores.

Can you say personal shopping assistant? What the report doesn't reveal is where mobile users do their comparison shopping. Is it using the Amazon app or perhaps Google Googles? Something else? I rarely buy anything selling for more than $20 without comparison shopping in the store. What about you?

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