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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.