Thursday, at the annual Microsoft Financial Analyst meeting, CEO Steve Ballmer gave a somewhat baffling explanation about Microsoft's position on tablet/slate computing that seems to run contradictory to the strategy of one of the company's biggest manufacturing partners.

Though Microsoft is focusing this year on Kinect, Bing, and Office as areas of consumer growth, the biggest consumer product for Microsoft, beyond all others combined, is Windows.

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At the National Press Club in Washington, DC Thursday, the X PRIZE Foundation launched its $1.4 million oil spill clean-up competition called the Wendy Schmidt Oil Cleanup X Challenge. The Foundation, which currently also has a $10 million challenge to develop a 100 mile per gallon car, first announced this competition at an independently organized TED event in June dedicated to the Deepwater Horizon oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico.

But it was not announced at that time who the benefactor of the prize would be. Today, it was announced that the funds for the challenge have been put up by none other than Wendy Schmidt, wife of Google CEO Eric Schmidt, and president of the Schmidt Family Foundation.

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Using publicly available information on Facebook, a researcher has been able to gather personal details of nearly 170 million users of the service, or about a third of all users. The data includes names, addresses, e-mails, phone numbers, and birthdays: essentially anything that was not marked as private is now part of this file.

The file has now ended up on The Pirate Bay, and so far has seen over 10,000 downloads. This could mean hackers would have an easy way to obtain personal information necessary for identity theft and other malicious uses.

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While the superstar of the Black Hat USA 2010 security conference in Las Vegas this week was Barnaby Jack from IOActive showing off techniques for "Jackpotting" Windows CE-based ATMs, research from security company Lookout has had a much broader impact on consumers, especially those using Android smartphones.

Lookout's "App Genome Project" is an ongoing study of the millions of mobile applications available, the user data that they collect, and threats they present. During their research for the project, the team found a series of simple Wallpaper apps in the Android Market which were suspiciously collecting more data than they needed to.

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Cloud computing dominated the morning's Microsoft Financial Analyst Meeting 2010 presentations. COO Kevin Turner and Chief Research Strategy Officer Craig Mundie spent more time talking cloud computing than any other topic. For Mundie, it was a bold departure from previous years, where he spoke broadly and almost exclusively about forthcoming technologies -- typically years from release, if ever. Last year, he asserted that the successor to the PC would be "a room."

Some reasons for Microsoft's cloud focus should be obvious:

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Shaumberg, Illinois electronics company Motorola Inc. on Thursday posted its earnings for the second quarter of 2010. The company's total revenue was $5.41 billion, which beat Wall Street's estimates of $5.19 billion, but was still down against last year's $5.49 billion. The company reported a strong flow of cash for the quarter, with overall earnings of $162 million, up sharply from last year's $26 million. Total sales, however, were down some $83 million against the same quarter last year.

Of Motorola's four divisions: Mobile Devices, Home, Enterprise Mobility Solutions, and Networks, the latter two divisions were the main drivers of profit for the company.

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Microsoft COO Kevin Turner made the bold statement this morning during the company's annual FInancial Analyst Meeting. "One of the most exciting things about our cloud strategy is that 70 percent of the wins in the cloud that we had in Q4, ladies and gentlemen, were new Microsoft customers," Tuner told financial analysts. "Yeah, new Microsoft customers. They were IBM Lotus Notes customers, Novell e-mail customers. They were all this other stuff, in addition to the Microsoft customers, that we're actually able to grow our portion of the pie this next year in a very dramatic way, because we can explode worker productivity."

"New" and "customers" are two words not often conjoined at Microsoft. The company's enterprise products are so well established, new sales are usually to existing customers. That Microsoft is adding any new customers from its cloud services is significant. The number Turner stated is staggering, assuming his definition of "new" means a customer who isn't using Microsoft products somewhere else, which is a tough claim for this reporter to believe.

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Amazon, online retailer and e-book pioneer announced Thursday the latest generation of its popular 6" Kindle e-book reader.

The Kindle received an overhaul similar to the one its big brother Kindle DX got on the first of July, with a new graphite chassis, improved screen resolution, and lower price.

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Facebook today officially introduced a new feature called Facebook Questions, the social network's take on crowdsourced question and answer sites like Yahoo Answers, Quora, and Hunch.

The new feature, still classified as a beta, lets users ask questions of the vast Facebook community of more than 500 million simply by typing them into a new field labeled "What do you want to know?"

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July 29, 2010 may be remembered as the most important day in Steve Ballmer's career at Microsoft. Tomorrow, the company hosts its annual Financial Analyst Meeting, or FAM. How much Ballmer and his core leadership team spend concretely talking about the future, rather than the past, will foreshadow how long the chief executive can remain the big boss. Nearly as important: Which executives will make presentations.

Microsoft closed fiscal 2010 on June 30 and last week announced record fourth quarter and yearly results. (I skipped covering Microsoft earnings for the first time in nearly a decade, to attend San Diego Comic-Con. I will likely post a belated "by the numbers" analysis after FAM.) Microsoft uses the event to offer financial analysts a long look back at the old fiscal year and to give a sneak peak at the FY ahead.

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Delivering on a promise the company made back in June, Apple on Wednesday released an update to Safari 5 which turns on extensions support akin to what browsers such as Firefox and Internet Explorer have been offering for years.

In addition to the debut of these plugins, Apple also plugged several security issues, including a widely publicized flaw in the AutoFill feature that could open up users to information disclosure.

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This week, Yahoo Japan announced it reached a deal with competitor Google to utilize its search engine technology and advertising and distribution platform while retaining its current appearance. Despite protests from Microsoft, Japanese fair trade organizations today said the deal does not appear to create monopolistic conditions.

Historically, Yahoo and Google have dominated the Japanese search market, and Tuesday, Microsoft Vice President and Deputy General Counsel Dave Heiner said the deal would create a search monopoly for Google.

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Today, Panasonic announced its first consumer camcorder capable of capturing both 2D HD and 3D video, the $1,399 SDT750.

Panasonic was one of the most vocal early supporters of 1080p 3D. The Japanese consumer electronics company threw its weight behind James Cameron's Avatar, and commenced work on its 3D Blu-ray authoring center at Panasonic Hollywood Labs in 2008.

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Online retail giant Amazon on Tuesday launched a beta of new functionality intended to use data from Facebook to make recommendations. Once connected, the retailer would comb through the data in both your own profile and that of your friends.

Amazon said it would share no personal data with Facebook. The social networking site would be sending data over to Amazon, however: this would include the user's likes and favorites on Facebook as well as his or her friends, and their birthdays. In addition, Amazon would make it easier for a user to find a friend's wish list once the services are connected, but this would be a guess based on given information.

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On Tuesday, Apple launched its second multi-touch peripheral, the Magic Trackpad, which elicited an immediate reaction from tech spectators. TechCrunch's MG Siegler declared it to be the harbinger of the end of the mouse era, and 90% of the more than 700 readers who answered Macworld's informal poll "would you buy this input device?" said they would.

A spark in multi-touch trackpad interest could prove to be a great boon for Wacom, the company synonymous with pen and touch tablet interfaces. For nearly a year, Wacom has had its own multi-touch trackpad called Bamboo Touch on the market, which is $20 cheaper than Apple's Magic Trackpad, offers similar functionality, and does not require two AA batteries (because it runs on a powered USB connection instead.)

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