The US government is attaching new priority to the task of reducing nationwide energy waste, with one approach being to modernize the country's aging power grid. By creating a "Smart Grid," or a self-monitoring and balancing network of electricity, the US may be able to utilize all forms of power (solar, fossil fuel, hydroelectric, wind, nuclear) in a more efficient and less wasteful manner.

Because $4.5 billion of national stimulus funds have been allocated to the creation of such a smart grid, a host of companies have sprung up, ready to provide the technology. However, just as the forms of energy are coming from disparate sources, there are different communications networks, metering software and central management systems at play. Just one week ago, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) released its first preliminary List of Smart Grid Interoperability Standards, and according to the group, it could take several hundred different standards to achieve a secure, end-to-end interoperability across a fully implemented smart grid.

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Both Sprint and Verizon will be getting Research in Motion's new BlackBerry Tour 9630 later this summer. Both "America's most dependable 3G network" and "America's best 3G network" will make the device available for $199.99 with a two-year contract and related rebates.

The BlackBerry Tour is a hybrid of features found in other BlackBerry models, such as the Bold and the Curve 8900. Its chassis is slightly slimmer and lighter than the Bold, but larger and heavier than the Curve. The Tour measures in at 112mm x 62mm x 14.2mm with a weight of 130g, while the Bold is 114mm x 66mm x 15mm and 160 grams in weight and the Curve is 109mm x 60mm x 13.5mm and 109.9 grams.

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In an announcement early Tuesday morning, Opera revealed the parameters of Unite, a product it says will "enable a whole new class of social software on the Web." The platform is designed to better facilitate multiuser online applications and to give users greater control of their data even while making it available (if they so choose) to others online.

The Unite platform converts any PC that runs it, as Opera puts it, into both a client and a server; a small Web server lies at the heart of the browser-based system itself. For instance -- as Opera demonstrated in an application already written for Unite -- perhaps you'd like to share a file with a friend, but don't want to end up like Jammie Thomas. The file-sharing functionality Opera showed generates a URL for the folder in which you've stored your file on your own machine. Give that URL to your friend and she can simply browse over to it, with no third-party service required.

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Twitter is currently doing landmark work in providing a voice for the events in Tehran, but on a much smaller scale, it and larger blogging services served well on Monday as Jammie Thomas-Rasset's second trial kicked off in Minnesota. Several bloggers were present in the audience, and readers following the #riaa tag on Twitter were likewise treated to multiple sources of information.

Some of the observers present are "blawgers" -- lawyers who blog. Marc Bourgeois, blogging for Recording Industry vs. The People this week, was in the house, as was Copyrights and Campaign's Ben Sheffner. In all, Bourgeois estimated in a tweet that 15-20 media folk were present. Not tweeting, however, was the seven-woman, five-man jury -- Judge Michael Davis specifically warned them not to tweet, post, email, text, IM, ping, pong, bing, bada or do anything else about the case that could cause a third trial.

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It sounds reasonable enough on the surface to say that a cellular carrier should be able to make a deal with a phone manufacturer for exclusive distribution rights. AT&T used to have one of those for several decades with a company called Western Electric. And while folks complained about the service from time to time, they didn't complain much about the phone...back before they had touchscreens. But what if you're a rural communications company, and you can't exactly make such exclusive deals. Is it unfair that you're not entitled to make a deal for something as hot as the iPhone? Think it doesn't matter much? Ask the state of Vermont, where you can't buy an iPhone...because AT&T doesn't cover Vermont except for roaming. Imagine, the nation's second largest carrier doesn't sign up customers in an entire state represented by Patrick Leahy. That might not be a good thing.

Congress asks about AT&T/iPhone deal, text charges

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By all accounts thus far, last Friday's shutdown of the VHF and UHF video frequencies that supplied Americans with television service since the 1940s, took place without serious incidents. Although the Associated Press over the weekend cited FCC officials as estimating over 800,000 calls to its nationwide DTV call center, that number was trimmed significantly over the weekend, with estimates provided to Broadcasting & Cable up to Sunday coming in at 525,000.

While Friday alone saw a record 317,000 calls within a one-day period, believed to be a single-day record for a federal call center network, all reports indicate the network was prepared to handle the volume.

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After nearly a year, Apple has chosen to issue patches for a notorious security flaw in Java long since addressed by other operating systems. The move follows the release late last month of a zero-day release by a security researcher frustrated by the lag in Apple's response to the problem, not to mention a blitz of highly negative press coverage (here and elsewhere) for a company that has historically claimed its products to be more than ordinarily secure.

Both Java 1.4.2_18 and Java 1.5.0_16 have been known to contain multiple vulnerabilities for quite some time. Those vulnerabilities could if exploited allow an attacked to gain elevated privileges on a system, from which s/he could execute other attacks, scoop up sensitive information, or undertake any of the usual sorts of mayhem. The problem was especially dangerous because it was "purely Java" in nature. That is, an exploit could be written in Java and executed on any platform running it -- Windows, Mac, whatever.

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With virtually every major TV manufacturer now eyeing the release of 3D HDTVs, almost 200 companies in the global entertainment and consumer electronics industries are now working on uniting behind a common set of technology standards for consumer viewing of movies and other 3D content on home TVs.

Their hope is to avoid a repeat of the ugly HD video disc format war, which left Toshiba badly bruised and HD DVD a distant memory.

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Microsoft last week released guidance for webmasters and search-engine optimization strategists, explaining what Bing's up to in the background. A look at the white paper revealed some smart thinking about where viewers' eyes move on a page of search results, as well as a much more determined "scraping" effort than Google currently uses.

Betanews asked Dan Rosenbaum, a New York-based SEO expert, to walk with us through the white paper and note any features or telling omissions that caught his eye. Overall, he says, "the big changes from Google are in the user interface, and they look pretty interesting and effective. [Microsoft] took the standard heat map of a search engine results page and said, 'How can we make that useful?'"

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When Antares Audio Technologies founder Andy Hildebrand filed for the patent for his digital pitch correction technology more than ten years ago, I wonder if he ever thought that it would be such an inescapable and controversial part of modern music.

After the pop-consuming world was exposed to producer Mark Taylor's use of the inhuman, disjointed vocal effect on Cher in her 1998 single Believe, Antares Auto-tune and its scions became a mandatory fixture in any modern studio. Soon, it catapulted to the position of best-selling audio plug-in of all time. This tool could turn weak tones into strong ones, add vibrato to held notes, and turn a mediocre (or even terrible) singer into a good one, provided a certain willingness to overlook the cyborg-sounding artifacts.

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At first glance, today's netbook still looks like a laptop that spent a little too much time in the dryer. But after a few false starts and barely two years of serious evolution, netbooks have the first seriously unique market niche in hardware since laptops initially hit critical mass in the mid-'90s. And what's not to like about them? They're incredibly inexpensive, a lot easier on travellers' already overburdened shoulders and backs, and more than capable of handling the kind of routine work most of us churn through over the course of the average workday.

They're also ridiculously underpowered for anything beyond basic workflow like editing documents, managing e-mail, and accessing the Web. Their tiny, often laughably laid out keyboards make touch typing a fond memory. The small, low-resolution screens turn scrolling into a national sport -- which you'll probably want to avoid given the ergonomically frightening trackpads that are typically crammed wherever there's space. Battery capacity is lousy, too, often barely stretching beyond a couple of hours, if that much.

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A few weeks ago, in our ongoing series of duels between the reigning champion search engine Google and the contender "decision engine" Bing, we gave Bing the edge in a battle of the image filters: With both search engines' explicit image filtering turned on, we were able to explore a very sensitive topic -- breast cancer -- and have Bing yield sensible and respectful, but sometimes graphic, images without presenting offensive content.

Since that time, as we reported last week, Microsoft has implemented a very practical concept for helping individuals and businesses to ensure filtering takes place -- this after complaints were raised about how ridiculously simple it is for any user to turn filtering off in both Bing and Google. As Bing General Manager Mike Nichols announced on Friday, the thumbnails of images which Bing deems to be of a sensitive nature will be sent through a specific URL, explicit.bing.net. That way, users can take extra steps to filter questionable content.

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Apparently Palm is perfectly fine with cracking open the Pre and enabling tethering, but the smartphone company doesn't think Sprint will be too keen on the idea.

In the Pre Developer Wiki, the subsection dedicated to tethering has been pulled down at Palm's request, because "any discussion of tethering during the Sprint exclusivity period will probably cause Sprint to complain to Palm, and if that happened then Palm would be forced to react against the people running the IRC channel and this wiki."

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Many legislators believe the cornerstone to halting the illegal trade of copyrighted music, movies, and software is to work with ISPs. Now, rather than debut a new punishment for downloaders, like the controversial HADOPI law in France, British ISP Virgin Media will offer downloaders the option to pay up front.

Virgin Media announced today that it has partnered with Universal Music Group to launch a new tiered music download service. For a reported £10-15 a month, Virgin Media broadband customers will have unlimited MP3 downloads from an ISP-provided catalog. With that service in place, there will be a diminished need to resort to illegal downloading.

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O NOES!!! 12 Friday was supposed to be disastrous for both Facebook, which threw open the doors on its new personalized URLs for the masses, and Twitter, which some predicted would experience "twitpocalypse" when the number of Tweets passed 2,147,483,647. Both events were far less dramatic than the hype.

Facebook's engineers were prepared for server trouble during the land grab, which kicked off at 9:01 pm PDT. But though the traffic was considerable -- CNET reported 200,000 new URLs registered in three minutes, and Mashable (hunkered down in the Facebook war room) claimed a million settled within the first hour -- the event passed with no reports of even palpable delay in page service.

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