The app store bubble continued inflating today, with Intel's announcement of the beta of its week-old Atom Developer Program. It's a system which will ultimately create app stores for netbooks running on Intel Atom processors, irrespective of the operating system.

"The netbook has become one of the most popular consumer devices in the market today, but its true potential has been limited by applications that are not optimized for its mobility and smaller screen size," said Renee James, corporate vice president and general manager for Intel's Software and Services Group, during a presentation at IDF today. "The Intel Atom Developer Program provides a great opportunity for developers to create useful and inventive applications that will unlock a netbook's potential while opening a new sales and distribution channel."

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Today, Google has announced that Gmail push updates have been added to Google Sync, the Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync-based tool that lets BlackBerry, iPhone, Symbian S60, and Windows Mobile devices to share calendar entries and contact info with a user's Web-based Google account. The service, which debuted in beta earlier this year, automatically pushed Gmail inbox content to the synched phone's native e-mail reader.

This announcement comes as good news for iPhone users who have, until now, had to pay for push Gmail updates by including it in their MobileMe subscription, or by paying for apps like PushMail or G-Push Mail. But it's also especially unfortunate for Tiverias Apps, makers of GPush for iPhone, an application which received a considerable amount of attention in mid-Summer, but didn't get approved until August, and has only been available in the App Store for a month and a half.

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In yesterday's highly anticipated policy speech from newly appointed FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski, the FCC under the Obama Administration has officially appointed itself the federal regulatory body overseeing "net neutrality." Since the term was coined by Congress in 2006, the phrase has morphed radically to mean many things. Originally conceived as a principle preventing an ISP from offering certain content providers premium bandwidth unavailable to, or unaffordable by, others, it came to mean a principle preventing an ISP from limiting users' access to certain content or applications.

But the concept has morphed so many times now that even the reader discussion of yesterday's Genachowski speech centered around an argument over what it meant. Yesterday, local TV news reports about the speech defined the principle as preventing Apple from denying access or placement of applications on its mobile App Store.

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Earlier this month, Microsoft announced support for Windows Mobile 6.5 from North American mobile carriers including AT&T, Sprint, Verizon Wireless, Telus, and Bell Mobility; along with major phone makers Samsung, HTC, LG, HP, and Toshiba. But not Palm...and it's that fact which got the most attention.

But while Palm shoveled out plans last week to dump Microsoft's mobile OS, support for Windows Mobile is now popping up from places ranging from AT&T to innovative new VoIP provider Zer01 and media content specialist (and iPhone/Android/RIM developer) FlyCast.

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In March, Ericsson launched an always-on mobile broadband chip for notebooks which could leverage the power of a persistent HSPA/GPRS/EDGE connection on remote security and monitoring features in addition to standard wireless use.

Today at the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco, Ericsson has announced it has made a similar module that's one third the size, and that consumes 40% less power.

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It's not uncommon for bloggers and journalists to get hung up on the present. For Apple, there's big noise about soaring stock price, even considering economic recession, and increasing demand for iPhone. But the past defines the present. For Apple, products or services launched in a single calendar year -- and the consistent execution that followed -- define current successes, including iPhone.

I contend that next to 1984, when Apple launched Macintosh, 2001 was the most important year in the company's history.

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The Helsinki Institute for Information Technology (HIIT) today announced the impending publication of the results of its microblogging study. In a peek forward, the Institute revealed that most respondents using Google-owned "lifecasting" service Jaiku are either very bland, or are not using the service properly.

According to the Institute, the five most common status updates on the service are:

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The "Keep It Simple, Stupid" rule works in business as well as in everyday life, primarily because it forces us to focus on the one or two basic issues we need to make the right decision. My kindergarten teacher shortened it to "KISS," perhaps in the interest of simplicity. When you're driving a car: Know where you are, know where you're going. Leader of the free world: Keep your hands clean, know what you're aiming at. Reprogramming your iPod/in-vehicle audio system interface: Pull over, let the semi pass you.

More data, please

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Similar conclusions about Intel's possible retaliation were drawn by Dell for over three years, according to a plurality of e-mails cited by the EC. But a statement from Dell to the European Commission on precisely this subject actually begins with the following two words: "Dell assumed."

"Dell assumed that shifting some purchases to AMD would result in a reduction of MCP. But Dell did not know precisely how much MCP would decline, in what manner and over what time period. Dell understood that Intel would not welcome such a decision, as it would be viewed as a significant shift in the historical relationship between the companies," Dell told the EC. "As indicated in the documents, the Dell team sought to forecast this negative impact across a range of potential scenarios, including some which predicted a substantial reduction in MCP, and did not rule out the possibility that such reduction might be disproportionate to the reduction in the volume of Dell's purchases from Intel."

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Though Dell has extended its brand to consumer electronics of all sorts, the company's latest drive is straight into enterprise services, a segment of the IT market which has helped HP retain a competitive edge on Dell in hardware sales.

Today, Dell announced it will be acquiring Perot Systems in a $3.9 billion all-cash transaction expected to be completed in January.

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In a court filing that seriously jeopardizes a proposed settlement of the e-book publishing dispute between Google and members of the Authors Guild and other publishing groups, the US Dept. of Justice has raised serious allegations that the settlement as it stands now may violate the country's antitrust law. The keyword here is "may," as that final determination "may" be up to a judge.

The main problem is this: Google would like to be able to electronically publish a wide variety of titles, including out-of-print works whose publishers or former rights holders may not even exist anymore. The keyword here is still "may." The settlement as proposed is clearly between those publishers that do exist and Google; but can Google necessarily claim the right to unilaterally assume that all those who didn't respond, aren't necessarily present?

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In a flashback to the more prosperous years before the current "deep recession," hordes of truly enthused journalists crowded dozens of vendors' booths at a revitalized Pepcom pre-holiday event in New York City last week, waiting for their turns to get up close and personal with forthcoming consumer electronics wares.

ViewSonic, a company known until now mostly for its monitors, introduced a total of four new PCs at Pepcom's press event Thursday night.

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The Betanews Comprehensive Relative Performance Index (CRPI)

Click here for a complete introduction to the Betanews Comprehensive Performance Index.

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The additions and changes we've made to our performance index

The Mozilla 3D cube by Simon Speich (Testcube 3D) is an unusual discovery from an unusual source: an independent Swiss developer who devised a simple and quick test of DHTML 3D rendering while researching the origins of a bug in Firefox. That bug has been addressed already, but the test fulfills a useful function for us: It fills precisely the gap in our test suite that we've been needing to fill, testing only graphical dynamic HTML rendering -- which is finally becoming more important thanks to more capable JavaScript engines. And it's not weighted toward Mozilla -- it's a fair test of anyone's DHTML capabilities. There are two simple heats whose purpose is to draw an ordinary wireframe cube and rotate it in space, accounting for forward-facing surfaces.

Each heat produces a set of five results: total elapsed time, the amount of that time spent actually rendering the cube, the average time each loop takes during rendering, and the elapsed time in milliseconds of the fastest and slowest loop. We add those last two together to obtain a single average, which is compared with the other three times against scores in IE7 to yield a comparative index score. The SlickSpeed CSS selectors test suite is a new and probably controversial addition to our suite, but as you'll see, we addressed the reason for the controversy and compensated for it. As JavaScript developers know, there are a multitude of third-party libraries in addition to the browser's native JS library, that enable browsers to access elements of a very detailed and intricate page (among other things). For our purposes, we've chosen a modified version of SlickSpeed by Llama Lab, which covers many more third-party libraries including Llama's own. This version tests no fewer than 56 shorthand methods that are supposed to be commonly supported by all JavaScript libraries, for accessing certain page elements. These methods are called CSS selectors (one of the tested libraries, called Spry, is supported by Adobe and documented here).

So Llama's version of the SlickSpeed battery tests 56 selectors from 10 libraries, including each browser's native JavaScript (which should follow prescribed Web standards). Multiple iterations of each selector are tested, and the final elapsed times are rendered. Here's the controversial part: Some have said the final times are meaningless because not every selector is supported by each browser; although SlickSpeed marks each selector that generates an error in bold black, the elapsed time for an error is usually only 1 ms, while a non-error is as high as 1000. We compensate for this by creating a scoring system that penalizes each error for 1/56 of the total, so only the good selectors are scored and the rest "get zeroes."

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At the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC today, Federal Communications Commission chairman Julius Genachowski discussed the Commission's plans for preserving net neutrality with the addition of two new tenets to the FCC's existing open Internet principles.

"Why has the Internet proved to be such a powerful engine for creativity, innovation, and economic growth?" Genachowski asked, "A big part of the answer traces back to one key decision by the Internet's original architects: to make the Internet an open system."

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