One year ago, Google gave the world its first look at Chrome OS, a project taking a new approach to thin clients and terminal computing. The long and the short of Chrome OS is: if the browser is the most-used application on a PC, why would you load it down with anything else?

Chrome OS focuses on computers that are permanently connected, where all apps, data, and user identities and desktops are stored in the cloud. The computers running the OS are designed to be as unencumbered by software as possible, so they can run quickly and reliably. Businesses can run them in secure private clouds just as well as consumers can run them on the public Web.

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After surrendering to UK police on Tuesday, Wikileaks founder Julian Assange was denied bail after being deemed a flight risk by a British court. Swedish officials are asking for his extradition to face rape and molestation charges, however Assange has refused.

With that refusal, a lengthy legal process that could take weeks or months to resolve begins. While this is being decided, the courts have taken Assange into custody until December 14.

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Aiming to streamline operations and reduce operating costs, Sprint on Monday said it would begin the process of transitioning Nextel customers to its CDMA network beginning next year. The process of phasing out iDEN cell sites will begin in 2013, it said.

Combining the two technologies is expected to save Sprint up to $11 billion over a seven year period. It will also phase out a technology that has increasingly become obsolete as consumers and businesses alike require more robust data technologies.

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As previously rumored, Google on Monday confirmed that it had tapped Samsung to manufacture the second incarnation of its Nexus Android phone, which will be the first to run the company's Android 2.3 "Gingerbread OS."

The Nexus S will sell for $199 with a two-year service contract through T-Mobile here in the US beginning December 16. It will also be offered without a contract for $529. Either way, Google has hopes that the second incarnation does a whole lot better than the first.

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Google's rumored ebookstore is here at last, begging the question: Who has the better price on ebooks? It's certainly the question I'm asking looking ahead to holiday shopping. Ebooks are definitely on my list of gifts this year -- and yours? Early this afternoon, I did a quick comparison, so you won't have to. The results are disturbing. Something stinks like a diaper. It's not the differences in pricing but the uniformity across ebookstores that surprises. Shouldn't competition in a hot new category drive pricing variations?

The first consideration buying ebooks is consumption. On what device? Google's new store appeals for much the same as Amazon's: Broad device support. While Amazon and Google approach the solution in different ways, the result is essentially the same -- ebooks available for reading on Macs, PCs, smartphones and tablets. Uh-oh, there's no native Google ebookstore app for BlackBerry, Kindle or Windows Phone 7. Hey, but Google has got Barnes & Noble Nook and Sony Reader. Eat those bananas, Amazon. Of course, Nook does run Android. I wonder how those B&N folks are feeling about open source -- in this case open competition -- now?

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Monday was a big day for Android as Google simultaneously unveiled the latest Android Developer phone, the Samsung-built Nexus S, and Gingerbread, the newest version (v 2.3) of the Android mobile operating system.

Android 2.3 includes performance upgrades and a few superficial additions for users, but the major new additions to the platform have been made with developers in mind, and they may not be visible to users right away, but they will result in exciting new devices a little further down the road.

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On Monday morning, Google officially unveiled its entry into the hotly competitve e-book market with an e-reader app called Google eBooks and a store called the Google eBookstore. The products are not new, but are rather a unification of many of Google's digital book efforts.

Like Amazon has done with its own Kindle platform, Google eBooks is a cross-platform solution for reading digital books across multiple devices. Currently, users can read Google eBooks in JavaScript-enabled browsers, in iOS and Android-powered devices, and on any e-reader supporting Adobe's eBook platform (which includes Barnes and Noble's Nook, Sony's Reader, and at least one of Borders' many e-readers.) There is not yet support for the Amazon Kindle, Kobo, BlackBerry, or Windows Mobile 7.

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Though it is primarily known as a social networking site, Facebook is actually one of the top destinations for photo sharing, and a new user profile design change unveiled Monday ups the visibility of Facebook photos and encourages users to share personal information in a more visual way.

Two years ago, Facebook came forward with some staggering figures about the photo sharing taking place on its sites, which amounted to between 2-3 Terabytes of photos being updated daily with a peak of 300,000 images per second. Facebook would serve about 15 billion photos, and the storage dedicated just to photography amounted to more than a petabyte.

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Google announced on Friday that it has entered into an agreement to acquire Widevine, a Seattle-based company that has focused on DRM and security for streaming internet media for the last decade.

"The Widevine team has worked to provide a better video delivery experience for businesses of all kinds: from the studios that create your favorite shows and movies, to the cable systems and channels that broadcast them online and on TV, to the hardware manufacturers that let you watch that content on a variety of devices," said Mario Queiroz, Google Vice President of Product Management.

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Market research firm Gartner has named Samsung Mobile both the top mobile phone manufacturer in the United states, and the top seller of Android Smartphones as well. In less than one year, Samsung has gone from having practically no Android phones in the U.S. market to outselling the market's early entrants HTC and Motorola.

Samsung's very first Android smartphone was announced in late April 2009, but the company was concentrating its initial efforts on the European market. Coming into 2010, Samsung's only Android smartphones in the U.S. market were the Moment on Sprint and the Behold 2 on T-Mobile.

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Continuing its public feud with Comcast, Level 3 Communications Friday released its own FAQ to explain to both the public and public policy makers, why their fight is important.

The disagreement between cable operator Comcast and content delivery network (CDN) Level 3 turned into a minor public relations war earlier this week when Level 3 announced that Comcast was demanding higher fees because of Level 3's bandwidth-consuming streaming video traffic.

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In a keynote presentation at the Silverlight Firestarter event this morning, Corporate Vice President in Microsoft's developer division, Scott Guthrie officially announced Silverlight 5, and outlined its new features and 1H 2011 beta availability.

Silverlight 5 adds more than 40 new features to the Web application framework that focus on improving its streaming media functionality for users and on improving application development for engineers.

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In the last week of November, the New York Times ran an article that showed how one retailer could use customer complaints and negative reviews to boost its search ranking in Google. Within a couple of days of the article's publication, Google was receiving complaints of its own, but this time it was from the media, who questioned the search engine's ethical responsibility in the matter.

Not even a week later, Google has replied by applying a new search algorithm that detects and downranks online retailers that "provide extremely poor user experience."

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Back in March, Google announced it would be bundling the Adobe Flash plug-in with future versions of the Chrome browser. Naturally, this caused a few questions to arise about how Google planned to tackle the security and stability risks inherent in Flash, and whether the plug-in would work with Chrome's secure Sandbox environment.

Yesterday, Google and Adobe announced that the next developer build of the Chromium Project, coming as an update soon, will include the first sandboxable version of Chrome's integrated Flash Player (gcswf32.dll) for users running Windows XP, Vista, and 7.

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Three years after committing to LTE as its fourth-generation network standard, Verizon Wireless announced on Wednesday that it will be launching the new network on December 5th in select U.S. cities.

A total of 38 cities in the United States will make up the first crop of LTE-enabled networks, as well as 60 airports across the country.

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