Skype said Thursday that it had acquired streaming video service Qik for an undisclosed amount, believed to be around $100 million USD. The VoIP provider says it plans to use Qik's technology to enhance its own video calling functionality.

Qik was founded in 2006 and is compatible with about 200 phones across several platforms including the iOS, Android, Blackberry, Symbian, and Windows Mobile platforms. The company has also struck several partnerships to have its applications come preloaded on select devices.

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Olympus announced two new cameras at the Consumer Electronics Show, and, man, are they hot -- the diminutive XZ-1 and classy PEN E-PL2. Both cameras should appeal to enthusiasts and to pro photographers looking to carry a lighter kit. Honey, get the credit card. I want both.

The XZ-1 is Olympus' response to other high-end compacts, such as the Canon S95, Nikon Coolpix P7000, and Panasonic Lumix DMC-LX5 (I got the Lumix DMC-ZS7 for Christmas; get the gift receipt because it's going back for refund). These cameras generally pack high-end features, such as big-aperture lenses and RAW-capture capability. The XZ-1's f/1.8 lens is remarkable in a compact and will let in lots of light (the PowerShot S95 is f/2.0) for shooting in dimly-lit areas or for better producing the bokeh, or background blur effect, popular for portrait photography. Perhaps more than any other feature, the lens distinguishes the XZ-1 from other high-end compacts.

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Aiming to provide Mac users with a one-stop shop for basic applications, Apple on Thursday launched the Mac App Store. Much like its sister App Store for the iOS platform, the offering allows users to purchase and install applications from a single place.

Currently about 1,000 apps are available for download, ranging in price from free to as much as $79.99 for Apple's Aperture 3 product. Indeed, Apple is committing itself to the product, offering the Pages, Keynote, and Numbers applications from its iWork suite and the GarageBand, iMovie, and iPhoto apps from iLife '11 for individual download.

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Every year, the average megapixel count of consumer mobile devices takes an incremental hop upward. Last year, the most common mobile phone cameras hovered around 5 megapixels. The phones being debuted at CES 2011 seem to be sticking around 8 megapixel with 720p video capture capabilities.

But at the same time as their internal sensors are getting more sophisticated, they're also becoming more sophisticated remote viewscreens. Today, Samsung launched a line of "DIY" video security cameras that can broadcast to smartphone or connected TV apps located either within the camera's local network, or remotely.

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The days of teasers and rumors are over. At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Sony Ericsson unveiled the sleek and sexy Xperia Arc. Hell, I thought my Nexus S was bendy-looking with its curved screen. Curved doesn't aptly describe Sony Ericsson's new handset. It truly is arced.

The Xperia Arc has a curved 4.2-inch screen and measures a slim 8.7 mm, which makes it thinner than yesterday morning's CES hotness, the LG Optimus Black. Oh, how quickly these phones are outdated. ;-)

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Is iPhone 4 too rich for your recession-weary wallet? Can't spare $199 or $299 for Apple's newness but iPhone-envy is making you an insomniac? Today, AT&T announced the deal, or is that steal, of the week: iPhone 3GS for a sweet 49 bucks. Starting January 7.

The timing is baffling with the Consumer Electronics Show officially starting today and so many hot, Android phones being introduced -- the Motorola Atrix 4G and LG Optimus Black, among them. These are dreamy handsets. Who can get any work done just thinking about them?

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Critics, and even customers, accuse Microsoft of being empty, of having exhausted its innovation -- and for many of them that means imitation. Microsoft is often called he great imitator. At first glance, last night's opening Consumer Electronics Show keynote given by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer fits the bill. The keynote felt empty, and short. Microsoft didn't even show off something substantially new about tablets, which is one of the event's hottest product categories this year. The rumors about a tablet operating system were wrong.

What is Las Vegas? It's a place to be entertained (and, yes, gambling is one of the recreations). I think of Vegas as where entertainers who have passed their peak of popularity go. It is the city of celebrity has-beens. Perhaps then, Ballmer was where he belonged.

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Motorola Mobility was very deliberate with news about its intentions to release a tablet. Back in September, CEO Sanjay Jha announced the company would have a product out in 2011, but wouldn't be rushing it, and then in December the company released something of a "diss" video, denigrating the other popular tablets.

At CES 2011's press day yesterday, the company officially announced its XOOM tablet and showed it off, but clearly didn't have a finished product on its hands. This is likely due to the unreleased nature of the OS it will be running, Android 3.0 "Honeycomb."

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The Federal Communications Commission's Wireline Competition Bureau has released its 2010 E-Rate Program and Broadband Usage Survey, which gathered data from E-rate funded schools and libraries to assess the current state of broadband in our education system. The "E-rate" is a discount on telecommunications services and Internet access that the Schools and Libraries Universal Service Support Program offers to eligible institutions.

The report collected the various broadband connection types and speeds across urban and rural schools, districts, libraries, and consortiums; and then polled the administrators about whether they felt their speed and coverage were adequate.

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On the same day when Microsoft announced that it had sold eight million Kinects, the company is now finding itself facing criticism as consumers claim the accessory is reportedly causing "red ring of death" failures on Xbox 360 consoles.

A report from the BBC as well as posts scattered across Microsoft's Xbox support forums have highlighted the issue. The problems appear shortly after the Kinect is connected, and will render the console unusable. So named because the normally green lights of the Xbox 360's power button turn red, the "red ring of death" indicates a serious error that typically cannot be fixed without sending the console back to Microsoft.

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It wouldn't be the Consumer Electronics Show without Microsoft kick-off keynote. For about a decade, cofounder Bill Gates assumed the role. More recently the burden belongs to CEO Steve Ballmer.

Considering all the accolades given Apple chief executive Steve Jobs during 2010, I wonder if he would give the keynote if asked. After all, Job's is tech's CEO-darling of the hour, he runs the tech company with largest valuation and Apple's most successful products -- at least released during the new millennium -- are consumer electronics: iPad, iPhone, iPod touch and newer MacBook models. Apple's products have lots more to do with consumers and electronics than do Microsoft's. Ballmer's company mostly sells to enterprises and earns nearly all its profits from software. Apple sells hardware, and of course bundled software and services, to consumers.

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At a pre-keynote briefing Wednesday, Microsoft unveiled Surface 2.0, the company's newest build of its touchscreen display that has thus far been employed mostly in signage and kiosk interfaces.

The first generation of Surface utilized cameras to sense where the user was touching the screen, and this made it a gigantic, immobile table. Now, in partnership with Samsung and AMD, Surface is only 4" thick, and it comes with the biggest piece of Corning's Gorilla Glass that has ever been bonded to an LCD screen. It's not unlike a big smartphone, and because it is so much thinner, it can now be mounted upon vertical surfaces.

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Microsoft is taking notice of industry trends, and told attendees Wednesday at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas that the next version of Windows would run on ARM chips. The move is an acknowledgement of the changing face of consumer electronics -- that smart phones, tablets, and portable devices are indeed the future.

The move is also significant for another reason -- up until now, Microsoft on ARM was relegated to the stripped down versions of Windows, either Windows Mobile, CE, or Embedded. Having the capability to run a full version of the operating system natively on these mobile processors opens up more possibilities for manufacturers in developing compact devices, the Redmond company believes.

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It's the question I've been asking all week. The Consumer Electronics Show doesn't officially start until tomorrow but unofficially tonight with Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer's 9:30 ET keynote. Yet there have been major announcements and press briefings all week. It's as if vendor attendees are rushing and stumbling over one another to get out their news before January 6. Now why is that?

There's more than CES going on tomorrow. Apple will launch the Mac App Store. In mid December, when the launch date was announced, I asserted: "Apple crashes CES party with Mac App Store." Perhaps many vendors fear the same. I don't recall there ever being so much news before the show's start. Amazon, ASUS, AT&T, Intel, Lenovo, LG, Netflix, Samsung and Vizio are just a sampling of major vendors holding big press events and/or making major announcements since Monday.

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The freshly spun-off Motorola Mobility has made a huge impact at CES 2011 with the new Android-powered Atrix 4G, a dual-core Android smartphone with 1GB of RAM that can be docked in a multimedia desktop dock or an 11" notebook dock, making it a full-blown Android PC either way.

Atrix 4G, simply stated, is the most powerful smartphone that has ever been announced. It has a dual-core Nvidia Tegra 2 processor, 1GB of RAM, support for up to 48GB of storage, a 4" (960 x 540) screen, 5 megapixel flash camera and front-facing VGA cam, HSPA+ mobile broadband, 802.11b/g/n, and Android 2.2 with MotoBLUR.

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