If you're an iPhone user with a Facebook account, chances are good that you have Facebook for iPhone. In fact, it has roughly 17.3 million users, or about 28% of the 60 million users accessing Facebook on a mobile device.

One of the developers who worked on that app is Joe Hewitt, who today tweeted: "Time for me to try something new. I've handed the Facebook iPhone app off to another engineer, and I'm onto a new project."

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Once you've selected a video from a site that supports video embedding (so that you don't leave the context of the search engine), Bing is capable of displaying it in a more pleasing frame than Google. A dark grey viewing region, coupled with light grey text on dark for the description, is much easier on the eyes than Google's layout, which essentially hands over a pre-annexed rectangle to whatever service is providing the feed (YouTube, DailyMotion, MySpace, etc.).

Google Video does add an extra space below the playback region, for "Related Videos." Now, you'd think that your other query results would be full of related videos; but there's a good reason why these are here: A pre-catalogued index placed these items here, as belonging to the same general category as the video being viewed.

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HP announced this afternoon that it has entered into an agreement with network switch, router, security, and solutions company 3Com for approximately $2.7 billion in cash.

"By acquiring 3Com, we are accelerating the execution of our Converged Infrastructure strategy and bringing disruptive change to the networking industry," Dave Donatelli, executive vice president and general manager, Enterprise Servers and Networking, HP said today. "By combining HP ProCurve offerings with 3Com's extensive set of solutions, we will enable customers to build a next-generation network infrastructure that supports customer needs from the edge of the network to the heart of the data center."

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Since Microsoft's Bing search engine debuted, it's made a strong charge against Google, the search market's dominant player. It has had diverse and attention-grabbing advertising campaigns, its partnership with Yahoo is one of the biggest search collaborations of the last decade, and it regularly rolls out timely and compelling new features like the recent integration of Twitter and Facebook feeds.

Because of this, Bing has been steadily gaining traffic and revenue, according to recent figures by Hitwise and IDC.

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Two universities running Kindle DX pilot programs have rejected the device as a potential textbook replacement, citing a poor feature set and the controversial accessibility issues. Primary among these is the text-to-speech capability.

This capability came under fire shortly after the Kindle 2 debuted, as the Author's Guild wanted writers to be compensated for the spoken "performance" of books, or otherwise have the text-to-speech function disabled.

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content behind a paywall and remove that content from crawling by Google search bots. Is Google doing evil to traditional media publishers like Murdoch, by making their content easily available for free? In August, over at my Oddly Together Website I tackled this topic in post: "Can You Charge for News? Ask Google."

As Google's might increases, it's reasonable to ask how the company's business practices are changing and whether or not it can stick to corporate philosophy "Ten things we know to be true." Perhaps the best known is No. 6: "You can make money without doing evil." But can Google does this? That's the question I pose to Betanews readers.

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The heads of state and high ministers of Europe's 27 member nations are now putting the finishing touches on a sweeping new telecommunications regulatory framework, some of whose provisions would go into effect as soon as the first quarter of next year. One of the provisions that appears likely to be approved without much debate would prohibit any Internet service from saving anything whatsoever to individual users' systems without their prior consent. And if they don't give consent, Web sites will just need to find a way to deal with it.

Although Europe's member states would be charged with enforcing this framework, technically there appears to be nothing that would prohibit any of them from taking action against non-conforming Web sites outside of their own borders -- even outside of Europe -- on the grounds that they publish to European readers.

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Business users whose lives revolve around their mobile phones won't be disappointed with Samsung's Intrepid smartphone. The handset, which uses Sprint's 3G network (EV-DO Rev.A) domestically and also connects to 3G networks abroad, is packed with features aimed at the pinstripe crowd.

Intrepid (USD$149.99, excluding taxes, with two-year service agreements, $50 instant savings and $100 mail-in rebate) runs under the latest version of Microsoft's cellphone operating system, Windows Mobile 6.5 Professional.

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Download Mozilla Firefox 3.6 Beta 2 for Windows from Fileforum now.

After several weeks of delay for the release of Firefox 3.6 Beta 1, you might say the Mozilla team had some ground to make up. Flying squarely in the face of any commercial company that says it gets bogged down with so much user feedback, the organization accelerated the release of the public Beta 2, in response to 190 major issues with Beta 1 detected and reported by a multitude of users.

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Download Amazon Kindle for PC 1.0.25338.0 Beta for Windows from Fileforum now.

Amazon today opened the beta of Kindle for PC, a free application which can act as a PC-based companion to your Kindle e-reading device or as standalone e-reading software.

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The question before the European Council -- made up of heads of state and key ministers from the EU's 27 member nations -- was whether Internet access should be interpreted as a fundamental human right, and whether obstructing access could be construed as a rights violation. The answer came this morning, and it is apparently no.

A declaration from the European Parliament this morning provided glimpses of a newer round of compromise language for the EU's new regulatory framework for telecommunications. That language will be even more conciliatory than last week, when the European Commission (EC) announced the new regulatory authority. Although the EC made it appear at the time that adoption of its new framework was merely a formality at that point, that wasn't actually the case.

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Yesterday evening, Apple rolled out the 10.6.2 update to its Snow Leopard operating system, which concentrated mostly on general bug fixes and stability issues as well as some issues in Mail, MobileMe and Safari. In all, there are more than a hundred improvements, and more than 40 security related fixes.

But the big talk today is that this update officially terminates support for Intel's Atom processor family. These low cost, low power processors have become the standard in many nettops, netbooks, MIDs, and ultraportables, and Apple has made a concerted effort to stay out of the way of most of these device categories.

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Late yesterday, Sun Microsystems gave the first public notice to the US Securities and Exchange Commission that Oracle Corp., its prospective suitor, had received a Statement of Objections from the European Commission with regard to Oracle's plan to acquire Sun. Not only had 62% of Sun shareholders already cleared the deal last May, but the US Justice Dept. cleared the deal last August.

At issue was the fate of MySQL, the open source database product that Sun acquired in January 2008. In Sun's one-paragraph 8-K filing, it mentioned the EC's sole focus: "The Statement of Objections sets out the Commission's preliminary assessment regarding, and is limited to, the combination of Sun's open source MySQL database product with Oracle's enterprise database products and its potential negative effects on competition in the market for database products."

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#1: Integrated archiving

During the late 1980s and into the '90s, Microsoft liked to centralize things, thinking that if everything were in one big pile -- as Arlo Guthrie put it -- that would beat two or more little ones. The System Registry is, and remains, one big pile. Another -- which can stink just as bad -- is the .PST file, the single personal folder file that is created on the client side by Outlook.

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South Korean consumer electronics giant and number two mobile phone seller worldwide, Samsung has re-negotiated its cross-licensing agreements with Qualcomm to the tune of $1.3 billion plus continuing royalties.

Though most of the terms and conditions of the deal are confidential, Samsung has said that the deal will give Qualcomm access to 57 of its mobile technology patents, and in turn receive access to Qualcomm's 3G CDMA/WCDMA and 4G OFDM patents for the next fifteen years.

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