Yet another home movie product has turned into a color war between red and blue.

Republicans versus Democrats, Bloods versus Crips, HD DVD versus Blu-ray -- whenever two groups are vying for some territory claim, they mark it with a red or a blue flag. Coinstar's Redbox DVD rental kiosks have marked off some 15,000 locations across the United States with a big red...well, box.

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It's a chapter from the dark side of Dell's history that you'd think it would have worked to put behind it sooner: Last year, a New York state court found Dell guilty of deceptive business conduct and misleading advertising. Specifically, Dell had offered "no interest" financing for customers, and then not only found ways to charge "non-qualifying" customers interest, but to use collection services to hassle customers who didn't think they owed it.

It's taken nearly 16 months for Dell to come to any decision about how much restitution New York customers were owed. This morning, the state's Attorney General Andrew Cuomo announced that amount would be $4 million, which either suggests that fewer customers were "baited-and-switched" than was previously thought, or that Dell is getting off easy.

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Google's Android development team has made the latest Android SDK available, providing a complete view of all the new features that "Donut" (Android 1.6) will provide.

While most of the features included in this incremental update are no secret, this is the first time they have been presented to the public in a single package.

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Today's launch by Google of a beta service of something it's calling Fast Flip fits the profile for what could become the company's bid to republish and redistribute most of the world's online news content, in a manner which claims to benefit the publisher. My partner Tim Conneally took a look at the mobile version of Fast Flip earlier today.

At a book festival last April, Google CEO Eric Schmidt let loose another interesting fact about its business plans: He told Hollywood reporter Sharon Waxman of The Wrap that his company was working on a new and advanced news search algorithm, that would automatically serve users the topics and news providers they're interested in, based on its assessment of what the reader has pulled up in the past -- "to determine what the reader is looking for without knowing they're looking for it," Waxman wrote.

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In just over a year's time, Facebook has doubled its user base. Now, the social networking site now has more than 300 million users the company said at TechCrunch50 today. And with that size increase comes the company's first cash profit, which it also announced today.

Facebook has been a profitable business for nearly a year, but it didn't expect to start pulling in a cash surplus until 2010 due to investments and acquisitions.

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In a blog post earlier this month that didn't raise any eyebrows at the time it was released, Microsoft Windows Deployment team leader Chris Hernandez posted the results of an internal company study gauging the amount of time required by different profiles of Windows Vista-based computers for an upgrade to Windows 7. According to Hernandez' numbers -- which did not surprise me in the least; in fact, at the time, I didn't think they were significant enough to highlight here in Betanews -- Hernandez' team estimated it could take as much as 20 and one-half hours to complete a Windows 7 upgrade, for an Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600-based system with 4 GB of DRAM, and a 1 TB Western Digital hard drive full of 650 GB of data, including 40 pre-installed applications. (For the record, that hardware profile is very much like the system I use for testing Web browsers.)

Hernandez' objective was to demonstrate that it takes less time to upgrade to Windows 7 than it did to upgrade from XP to Vista, usually on the order of 5%.

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Nine is supposed to be greater than four. But when it comes to iTunes 9 and Zune 4, four is more. You disagree? That's what comments are for.

Microsoft released highly anticipated Zune 4 software today -- New Music Tuesday -- one week after Apple debuted iTunes 9. Zune HD also is available today, but I don't have the music player for testing.

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We're standing on the cusp of a new chapter in video game history: the era of microgames, where titles $10 and under take on a starring role, and attach rates (that is, games sold per console) skyrocket.

The charge is being led by Apple with its iPhone and iPod Touch, two devices without gaming as their stated purpose, both of which have found unmatched success in the downloadable gaming industry. The other video game consoles have their own "app stores," where games can be downloaded directly to the system, but none have reached the heights that the iTunes App Store has...yet.

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With the October 22 rollout of Microsoft's new operating system now little over a month away, Lenovo today introduced portable PCs with two unique screen options: a multitouch screen, enhanced by a new application called SimpleTap, plus a super bright screen visible even under the sunniest skies.

Lenovo is offering the new multiscreen technology with both its T400s laptop and X200 tablet PC. The super bright screens, however, will be available only with the X200 tablets, said Mika Majapura, worldwide segment manager for ThinkPad X-series, in a briefing for Betanews.

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In the first public record of the contents of private European Commission hearings last July 22, only now being published (PDF available here), Intel defended itself against the EC's charge that it engaged in exclusionary conduct within the EU's boundaries. According to the official record, Intel argued that the EC failed to meet its own burden of proof -- specifically, the company said the Commission could not prove that Intel's alleged conduct actually did result in reduced competition.

If Intel is only guilty of intent to be anti-competitive, then the formula the EC used to compute its fines against the company of €1.06 billion, may not be applicable.

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Call me crazy, but aren't Web apps just a kind of reversion back to the "Mobile Web" that was so furiously chastised when the full Web browsing experience came to smartphones?

I understand that our modern Web Apps are being rendered by a "desktop browser" engine, and not some junky WAP browser circa 2002, but I can't help but feel that an "application" designed specifically for a mobile phone's browser is the same thing as a Web site stripped down to mobile phone size and speed.

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Just about four months after the WiMAX Forum published its White Paper on WiMAX Roaming Models, leading network provider Clearwire has announced its first international roaming partners: Russia's Yota and Japan's UQ.

This is an important step for Clearwire because even though the company has the largest footprint of any single WiMAX operator in the world contained here in the United States, WiMAX is spreading much more quickly in the rest of the world.

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When a Web site takes reasonable measures to prevent the distribution of unauthorized videos, it's protected from infringement of copyright. That's the finding once again in another case against another of the "other" video sites, Veoh, which has been taken to court before and which has prevailed before.

This time, Universal Music Group alleged that Veoh did not do all that it could to prevent the spread of music videos uploaded by individuals, containing music belonging to UMG's portfolio. In a ruling in US District Court for Central California today, Judge A. Howard Matz upheld a lower court's finding, and sided with findings in other cases against Veoh. In a summary judgment requested by Veoh, the court ruled that it's protected by the "safe harbor" provision of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

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One year ago, Lehman Brothers failed, setting off a disastrous downturn in the global economy. For the United States, there is no recovery in sight -- or so I assert. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer is right to call any recovery a "reset" to a lower level. One question to ask: What is Microsoft's position -- and that of some other high-tech companies -- now compared to September 2008?

Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy a year ago today, Sept. 14, 2008. On Sept. 12, 2008, Microsoft's market capitalization exceeded Walmart: $252.18 billion to $245.52 billion, respectively. Metaphorically, Lehman Brothers' collapse pulled water from the shore, before sending a mountainous tsunami through global stock markets. The Sept. 29, 2008, U.S. stock market collapse washed away billions of dollars in public company value. That day, Barron's compiled a Top 10 list of tech losers, which combined shed $111 billion in market capitalization.

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Last week, in what was probably an intentional promotional ploy, Microsoft showed off to some of its 40,000 employees and close colleagues, during an employee rally at Seattle's Safeco Field, some features of what it was touting as "Bing 2.0," with a warning that users everywhere could start to see these features go live as soon as today. While there is no official word of a "Bing 2.0" launch, one new feature has gone live today, and not quietly -- its curtain was officially raised during a ceremony at the TechCrunch50 conference in San Francisco today.

Visual Search is being described as a way to search for items by sight instead of by text. Shoppers will be able to locate digital cameras, for example, says Microsoft, by way of "an engaging visual experience without having to sort through page after page of links."

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