...There's no place to go but up. But up doesn't have to be an arduous climb.

That's the attitude Microsoft product managers and marketers should adopt when launching Windows Phone 7. Microsoft has been humbled by upstarts Apple and Google; from that admission comes a fresh start. Windows Mobile has already lost the major battles of the mobile phone wars. Windows Phone cannot win if Microsoft plays by the rules set by its adversaries. The company must instead engage guerilla tactics, starting by leveraging off core strengths -- and Xbox gaming and mobile Office simply aren't enough. This kind of thinking might yet pull Microsoft out of the mobile OS gutter.

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Consumer electronics company Sharp on Monday announced its plans to launch an E-reader business in Japan under the name Galapagos which will include two Android-based E-book readers and a cloud-based bookstore with about 30,000 pieces of content.

The two Galapagos devices Sharp unveiled today are the 5.5 inch "mobile" model and the 10.8 inch "home" model, and they both come equipped with 802.11 b/g Wi-Fi. Outwardly, the devices are similar to a number of Android-based tablets that straddle the line between mobile tablet and e-reader, but internally, Sharp's products offer a major differentiator: support for the next generation XMDF e-book format.

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Mark Zuckerberg, 26 year old Facebook CEO and 35th richest man in the United States today announced his new Startup: Education foundation, which focuses on rebuilding failing education systems one city at a time; treating them as if they were startup companies.

"School districts need more autonomy and clearer leadership so they can be managed more like startups than like government bureaucracies," Zuckerberg said today. "Many people are working on solving a single part of the problem broadly across the whole country. But recently, a few leaders are getting significant results by taking more of a startup approach and moving fast to do all these things at the same time in just one city. If they can prove that it's possible to turn around some of the most difficult urban districts in the country, then that will generate enough momentum to take the same approach and improve education everywhere."

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That Blockbuster filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection isn't surprising. Holding out for so long is the real shocker. I expected today's filing at the beginning of 2009. This outcome was inevitable and may yet foreshadow future bankruptcy filings from other dinosaurs of the retail analog age, such as Borders Books.

But Blockbuster can't just blame digital delivery for its demise. Based on my own experience -- and surely that of others -- the movie rental retailer failed to adapt its business and technology practices to the Internet era. Blockbuster will need to do more than restructure its debt to survive Chapter 11. Executives will have to fundamentally restructure the business and most importantly the customer experience. Other armchair analyses surely will highlight the external problems, such as competition from digital content delivery and high-cost of maintaining retail stores. I'll focus on customer experience and expectations in the instant, connected era.

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While outages have become an expected part of the Twitter experience, social network Facebook has a pretty good reputation for staying available. Beginning on Wednesday evening, and carrying over into Thursday, the site experienced rare outages that affected not only the main Facebook.com site, but also the elements of Facebook that are shared among other sites, such as the ubiquitous "Like" button.

In addition to API latency issues mentioned on the Facebook Platform site, a statement from Facebook on Thursday said:

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As expected, today's Federal Communications Commission (FCC) meeting introduced new rules about "white space" adoption that allows unlicensed wireless devices to operate in the spectrum between broadcast TV stations.

The legislation to free up these bits of spectrum for unlicensed usage has been in debate for more than three years, and the Second Memorandum Opinion and Order adopted today by the FCC addresses some technical and legal issues in their implementation.

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In the Windows Team blog today, Brandon Watson announced that the "biggest request from the WP7 developer community" has been answered: the latest community preview of Windows Phone Developer Tools now includes support for Visual Basic.

Unfortunately, there is no word when this will be fully supported, and currently it stands as more of a proof of concept that it is a viable mobile development language. This is because there are a number of limitations involved: there is no "Go Live" license, so any apps that are put together in VB will not be able to be uploaded to the Windows Phone Marketplace; and developers can only make Silverlight apps and not XNA games.

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Microsoft's suite of free, browser-based productivity tools called Office Web Apps received a handful of feature upgrades today, which don't act as substitutes for desktop Office functionality, but instead bring Office documents out onto the Web.

As of right now, Office Web Apps users can embed Powerpoint presentations and Excel spreadsheets in blogs and websites via the PowerPoint and Excel mini Web apps. Below, I've embedded Microsoft's example Powerpoint slideshow, which shows the relatively simple process of uploading a .PPT file to SkyDrive, setting permissions, and embedding it. Clicking on the "full screen" icon in the lower right hand corner opens the full version of the PowerPoint Web app, and with appropriate permissions, users can edit the presentation and automatically update it while it's on the Web.

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Dell rolled out two new PCs on Thursday- the Inspiron One 23 all-in-one, plus a refreshed Inspiron Zino HD home entertainment PC -- along with a new touch interface called Dell Stage which is expected to appear on devices ranging from PCs to smartphones.

Priced starting at $299, the revamped Zino HD is designed to increase multimedia home theater support by adding better processing, memory, and more I/0 ports on the back, including a new SPDIF port and two eSATA ports.

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Roku Wednesday introduced its new line of streaming set top boxes, which promise better performance, smaller physical footprint, and lower prices than the previous versions of the popular net TV appliance.

The new lineup includes: Roku HD for $59.99, Roku XD for $79.99, and the Roku XDS for $99.99.

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Market research company ChangeWave today published the results of its latest survey, which focuses on corporate smartphone spending, and the market segment that is the stronghold for Research in Motion's BlackBerry platform.

According to ChangeWave, BlackBerry continues to dominate the enterprise sector, but it dropped three percentage points from the team's last survey in May. The interesting discovery is that Google's Android operating system has jumped up another six percentage points since May, meaning it has grown five-fold since last November.

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Microsoft on Wednesday announced it will be making its free Security Essentials product available to small business in a 10-pack of licenses in October. The anti-malware product has thus far been aimed at the consumer market, and has garnered quite a bit of recognition as a high quality free software antivirus.

This new availability is thanks to a change in the software's end user licensing agreement (EULA), which now lets business customers put Security Essentials on individually managed PCs.

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Google TV is launching to the public in just a short few weeks after being in development for more than a year. The platform will let users stream video content from Netflix, Amazon Video On Demand, and YouTube, browse the Web with Chrome, search for and organize content, and eventually install Android apps.

The first piece of Google TV-compatible hardware expected to hit the market is Logitech's Revue set top box, which adds a layer of home automation control with its "Harmony Link" Infrared (IR) Blaster capabilities.

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Enterprise customer relationship management (CRM) software leader Salesforce today unveiled a revamped version of its still-new, social media-inspired collaboration tool Chatter, which is expected to come to customers in October.

Salesforce is calling the new version "Chatter 2," and it adds more than a dozen new features to the available version of the product, which is essentially Facebook for enterprise. Even though it has only been available since June, Chatter has already been picked up by more than 20,000 companies, including Dell, Hitachi, Misys and Softbank. So this update is no small affair.

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Netflix Instant streaming, the increasingly popular and ubiquitous subscription movie on demand service has officially launched in Canada after more than three years of availability in the United States. This is the first time the service has been made available outside of the U.S.

Fortunately for Canadian Netflix subscribers, there are already a wealth of devices which will let them watch videos on their TV: iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch, Sony PlayStation3, Nintendo Wii, Samsung and Toshiba connected Blu-ray players, and TiVo.

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