Microsoft is promoting its Tag barcode system over at its PressPass this week. The PR is a big marketing pitch showcasing brands like Ford and Proctor & Gamble; it's a sensible approach for the technology. But I see another: Making augmented reality more real, and in so doing recover Microsoft's botched handset strategy. AR isn't new, but it's all the geek rage now that iPhone has a compass: BBC, CNET News, Robert Scoble and Telegraph UK, among many others.

A quick AR primer: Augmented reality is essentially the overlay of additional visual information onto something real. American football is great example, where during TV broadcasts yellow lines and other information overlay the field of play. What? You thought those lines were really there? You experienced augmented reality.

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During yesterday's quarterly earnings call, Palm CEO Jon Rubenstein confirmed that webOS is going to be the sole operating system coming from Palm as the company goes ahead.

"Due to importance of webOS to our overall strategy, we've made the decision to dedicate all future development resources to the evolution of webOS. Which means that going forward, our roadmap will include only Palm webOS-based devices," Rubenstein said.

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The text of a letter from Google to the US Federal Communications Commission dated last August 21 -- the un-redacted contents of which were only made available today -- directly contradicts information given by Apple and iPhone partner AT&T, regarding the apparent rejection of a key Google mobile app from Apple's iTunes App Store.

Google Voice is a beta project which allows several phone lines to be united under a single new number, accessible from any phone. Earlier this year, Google submitted to Apple an app that would make the service usable on the iPhone. The fiasco over Apple's rejection of the Google Voice application from the App Store came to a head when the FCC began a formal inquiry into whether the relationship between AT&T and Apple is fair and encouraging to innovations in communication.

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In the midst of my own Comcast outage today, I began to contemplate the alternatives to my current cable Internet connection and the satisfaction of customers elsewhere. Being a Baltimore native, I'm fortunate enough to have a number of options at my disposal, including WiMAX. It's a technology that I've frequently covered here at Betanews, and one which we've been following for a long time.

For a little while, we had a WiMAX connection in our headquarters and I was using it without even being aware of a difference. I probably wouldn't have even found out if Nate hadn't asked me what wireless network I was connected to one day and informed me that it was actually our Sprint/Xohm WiMAX test line.

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The problem with sleeping giants in recent years is that "terrible resolve" hasn't necessarily gotten them very far. Of course, this applies outside the information technology industry as well. But not even the Internet -- the biggest revolutionary IT technology since the personal computer -- is creditable to any one major player or allied force. Historians will note that almost every company or group to attain success through the Internet did so either 1) completely by accident, and/or 2) without any substantive plan as to what to do with that success once it attained it.

But the last great "sleeping giant" episode in the history of the IT industry was one of absolute, intentional, and steadfast resolve. The landscape of our lives and work has been shaped by this chain of events. It was triggered by WordPerfect, and the terrible resolve was manifest in Microsoft Office. I watched from very close range as, within a span of mere months, the axis powers that commanded respect and even awe -- WordPerfect, Lotus 1-2-3, dBASE, and Harvard Graphics -- deflated to mere also-ran status. Their manufacturers, in an often comical display of poor timing and miscommunication, self-destructed.
As a result today, when you ask businesses worldwide why they use Microsoft Office, the majority of responses you'll get say it's because it's the productivity suite for Windows. And when you ask those same businesses why they use Windows, the answer is because it's the operating system that runs Office.

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Palm limped toward the launch of the Pre, relying on cash and short-term investments to pull it through eight consecutive money-losing quarters in an attempt to turn things around. And now that the Pre has been turned loose, and Pixi, Palm's second WebOS, device is on the way, the struggling company's long-term outlook remains modest, and it continues to post losses. Yet it doesn't want to get too specific about numbers.

For the quarter ending on August 31, Palm reported a loss of $161.1 million with revenues that dropped 82% to $68 million.

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In the Northern Hemisphere, Autumn is typically a time of bright colors and falling leaves. Perhaps Microsoft has moved south of the equator to Spring, because the company is poised for brand rebirth -- a reawakening of key consumer brands.

Six brands -- Bing, Xbox, Windows Live, Windows Mobile, Windows 7 and Zune -- are coming to market as new versions and/or marketing campaigns. No single brand will revitalize Microsoft's overall consumer image. But combined, these brands could revive the company's consumer brand profile. I predict that they also are Microsoft's last stand. Failure now will resign Microsoft's brand image to large businesses.

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This afternoon, a Microsoft spokesperson told Betanews that the company is now beginning the process of notifying selected participants that they have been accepted for inclusion in the company's Technical Preview program for Office Web Apps. But in another huge example of burying the lead, a blog post that went live minutes ago from Windows Live General Manager Brian Hall states that the complete Web Apps suite, once officially released, will be "available" to all Windows Live users.

As the spokesperson confirmed to Betanews, Hall's implication is accurate: Everyday users of Windows Live services (which are already free) and who have SkyDrive storage on those services (the first 25 GB of which are free) will have the entire suite available for use from any modern Web browser. A video released today showed Excel Web App (that's the formal name for it now) running on a Mozilla Firefox 3.5 browser, and on a Windows 7 platform. We're still awaiting word on non-Windows browsers.

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Yesterday, Skype's founders sued eBay for copyright infringement, claiming that eBay has been using Skype's underlying technology without permission since March, when eBay's license to use that technology ended.

The auction service eBay bought popular VoIP and instant messaging software company Skype in 2005 for a total of $3.1 billion, but allegedly did not buy the software's core P2P technology, which is owned by Joltid, a separate company run by Skype founders Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis.

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A boxing match can be a fascinating thing to watch, especially when it's between deliberately mismatched fighters who probably have no business being in the ring at the same time. But since these things are more about business than fighting, anyway, audiences are often treated to cruel spectacles of an overwhelmingly powerful athlete beating an out-of-his-league opponent to a bloody pulp.

If the poor shlub doesn't collapse in a heap or put his gloves down and head for the corner, you can always count on the ref to step in and stop the carnage. But only after the members of the audience have been satisfied that they saw what they came to see.

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The One Laptop Per Child project is certainly divisive. The press has largely presented the project as one of big promises and few results. But the project's signature laptop -- the sturdily built, low-cost, resource-constrained XO-1 -- has never failed to capture the imagination of techies.

Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, for example, said last year that he is a huge fan of OLPC, and that its CEO Nicholas Negroponte deserved a Nobel Prize. He said he even intended to switch over to full-time use of the XO-1, but "didn't make it that far."

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Two days ago, Google signed off on a stable version of series 3 of its Chrome Web browsers; and since that time, users everywhere are noticing two not-so-subtle changes: First, the New Tab panel has a different (and, we feel, better) layout. Second, it's noticeably faster.

Google promised speed increases of about 30% (often quoted as "one-third") for users who'll find themselves bumped up to Chrome 3 (Google's browser diligently updates itself). Last month, Betanews tested that claim, and projected speed increases of more like 24.5% -- still in Google's ballpark, just along the edge. But since that time, we noticed the company had made dramatic strides, with both beta and dev channel (Chrome 4) builds posting record speed numbers in our tests, for gains that could possibly break the 40% barrier.

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Last week, I returned to using Windows 7 after spending the summer on a 13-inch MacBook Pro. Apple almost had me there for awhile, but I'm back where I belong and satisfied with the switch. Given that Apple released Snow Leopard a couple of weeks ago, Windows 7 officially launches October 22nd and there is plenty of geek debate about which OS is better, it's appropriate time to tell the story about how I went -- in the words of J.R.R. Tolkien -- "there and back again."

First, some background. I am a longtime Mac and Windows user. I have used Windows pretty much since its release in the early 1990s and Macs since December 1998, when I carted a Bondi Blue iMac out of a CompUSA. Based on my reading comments, many Betanews readers are religious about their platform choices; I am not. Mac OS and Windows are just tools to me. I don't dogmatically defend either platform. I'm neither Mac or Windows fanboy. My work requires using both operating systems, and for convenience one usually is primary. That said, I've flopped between platforms for more than a decade.

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Opera software is really on a roll. On the first day of September, the final version of Opera 10 Web browser was released. Today, the Opera Mini 5 beta has been released, porting all the successful design elements down from Opera 10 to even the most sluggish Java phone.

The latest Opera Mini 5 features tabbed browsing, the "speed dial" homescreen with thumbnails of the user's top six most visited sites, support for both touchscreen and keypad-based devices, a password manager, and an interface that is by far the best design work the company has done in the Mini format.

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Two years ago, as Betanews reported at the time, a security engineer testing Adobe's CS3 Web content creation suite for Mac discovered to his surprise that the code it was generating sent data over a network back to a very odd address. It was masked to look like a local network address, with the usual "192.168" prefix, but it used a capital "O" instead of a zero. As it turned out, the address 192.168.112.2O7.net was registered to Omniture, a Web analytics company with which Adobe was apparently doing some interesting business.

Only after the engineer publicly discussed his discovery did Adobe come clean about the fact that yes, CS3 and Flex-based applications were transmitting data back to an analytics company. "Omniture is a client-based analytics platform that uses information stored in both JavaScript variables and the user's cookie to track a user's progress through a site, giving business insight into how to create better user experiences," the company's admission read.

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