The Maxthon development team announced this morning that advanced testers with a user level greater than 10 will now find a link in their Maxthon Passport that allows invite links to be sent to friends.

Maxthon is a customizable Web browser which offers skinning, tabbed browsing, mouse gestures, privacy controls and ad blocking, as well as third party toolbar support. But the key feature of Maxthon 3.0 is its use of dual rendering engines: both Trident and Webkit. While it strives to retain Internet Explorer-style compatibility with "compatible mode," (Trident) it offers the option to kick into "turbo mode" (Webkit) with reduced compatibility but higher speed.

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Last February, Intel made some changes and adaptations to its processor roadmap in what was generally perceived as a sensible move in light of the current economy: It's expediting its move from the 45 nm to the 32 nm generation of CPUs with increased investments in facilities, but then extending the market lifespan of the 32 nm generation to compensate, and to help reap back the costs incurred. That extension will include the introduction of a "mainstream" 32 nm architecture code-named Westmere, as part of its continued strategy -- successful so far -- to introduce certain elements of its newer designs to a broader market of buyers first.

That strategy was confirmed Monday during Intel's quarterly conference call -- where it also revealed sharply lower profits on much lower revenue: "We have pulled in Westmere, our first 32 nanometer product family, and will now be shipping those products later this year," reported CEO Paul Otellini (our thanks to Seeking Alpha for the transcript). "We have shipped thousands of Westmere samples to over 30 EOM customers already. We also look forward to the launch of our new consumer ultra-low voltage products, which will enable many new...light notebooks at very compelling price points."

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The YouTube Symphony Orchestra gathered last night at Carnegie Hall to play an original Tan Dun piece composed specifically for the global competition that brought the group together. It's lovely. But I'm willing to bet that instead you were listening to a heretofore obscure singer absolutely flatten a roomful of doubters with a show tune.

Like a lot of us, I've been watching the Susan Boyle video repeatedly this week, trying to get at what it means for the Internet to have taken to heart, as the Britain's Got Talent audience took to heart, a middle-aged Scotswoman with ungroomed eyebrows and a frumpy Best Dress and a voice that seems to have broken something that needed breaking in hearts around the world.

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Download Trillian Astra beta from Fileforum now.

What next, Duke Nukem Forever? All right, that may be a cheap shot -- we've only been waiting three years for the release of Trillian Astra, the update of the IM software that once owned the multi-service chat realm. The software moved from alpha to beta late last week.

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For a great many Internet users -- perhaps a majority -- who believe they're already paying monthly fees for content, the thought of paying a subscription fee for online news may be akin to yet another "tax." Certainly the purveyors of the news-is-by-nature-free argument may elect to characterize such a fee as a "tax." But challenging and defeating the new conventional lack-of-wisdom is just one of the challenges facing a group of businessmen at the nucleus of a new online news coalition.

Perhaps if there were just one fee that pertains to a whole portfolio of news providers, enough readers would see enough value in their product as a collective, to subsidize it through a single subscription fee. That's the bet being placed today by Journalism Online, LLC, the latest venture from business innovator and Court TV founder Steven Brill, venture capitalist and former TCI CEO Leo Hindery, and former Dow Jones executive vice president and The Wall Street Journal publisher L. Gordon Crovitz.

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With a handful of Zune HD leaks now out in public, and a semi-solid release schedule for Windows Mobile 6.5, we're now beginning to hear some development in the "Pink" category.

"Pink" is Microsoft's code name for a mobile product with very little in the way of concrete information behind it. What is known is that it will likely be coming from Danger, makers of the OS found in the T-Mobile Sidekick which Microsoft acquired in February of last year. Before CES this year, CNBC's Jim Goldman said "Pink" was going to be a device that would "provide true competition to the iPhone."

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After a Financial Times report this morning cited April 28 as the deadline for Microsoft to comply with a request by the European Commission to respond to its latest Statement of Objections, reporters close to the story wondered why that seemed like one week too many. As it turned out, the FT had something of a scoop and didn't even know it, as Microsoft confirmed the news to Reuters later in the day. April 21 had been the company's anticipated deadline.

Last January, the EC issued a formal objection to Microsoft regarding its practice of bundling Internet Explorer with Windows, which it claims doesn't give browser competitors a level playing field. Statements of Objections are the first steps taken in launching formal court proceedings against a prospective defendant; yesterday, the EC issued a similar notice against the government of the United Kingdom, for interpreting or "transposing" an EU law in a way which could enable interception of private Internet communications data.

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Exactly three years ago, Sprint unveiled its plans for a child-tracking phone service. The $9.99 monthly plan hooked a kid's phone up with a piece of software that pinpointed the handset's location on a map.

Today, AT&T has debuted FamilyMap, its version of essentially the same service, which will also cost $9.99 for two trackable phones, and $14.99 for up to five. Compatible handsets do not require full GPS connectivity, but can be made visible through A-GPS or cell tower pings.

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Time Warner Cable's proposed trials of consumption-based billing were originally slated to begin in several markets this summer, where customers would be a part of a tiered pricing scheme. Pricing would have started at 1 GB per month for $15, and go up to 100 GB per month for $75, and include a per-gigabyte overage fee.

The public's reaction was less than favorable, and the trials in Texas have been rescheduled.

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Without a reprieve from the governor this time, Microsoft's free product support for paid users of all versions of Windows XP officially ended as of April 14. What this means is that the company will no longer give complementary product support to XP users.

This doesn't mean the end of the free security updates, however, and there could very well be a big batch of those as soon as next Tuesday. Customers can still purchase product support for XP from Microsoft per-incident for at least the next five years.

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The Mozilla organization's developer's wiki has sent out the call for a code freeze for what will very likely be the final beta of Firefox 3.5 -- now fully renumbered -- prior to the first Release Candidate. The Quality Assurance process for the frozen code will begin Friday, which means it will be another busy weekend for developers and testers.

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Another promotional shot of the Zune HD has leaked out, this time to Windows Mobile Power User, fleshing out the appearance of Microsoft's newest PMP a bit more, and revealing a few more details.

According to the report, the Zune HD is equipped with a capacitive OLED screen that supports multi-touch and offers a 16:9 aspect ratio. Further, the device and updated Zune Marketplace will offer HD media and support for "3D Xbox games." The report claims that the visible port on the side of the device is an HDMI out, but that looks to be mostly wishful thinking, since the device's slim profile leads one to believe it is actually Micro USB.

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Download Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 Public Beta from Fileforum now.

What may be no surprise to businesses that have already been paying close attention to Microsoft's expansion into the cloud, is that ES 2010 will be available in two forms -- both as conventional server software hosted by businesses on-premise, and as a communications service hosted by Microsoft.

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Big businesses are now moving to the clouds "en masse," through a deal between Capgemini and RightScale. The 50-or-so corporations are all clients of IT consulting firm Capgemini's emerging Cloud Computing Center of Excellence, said RightScale CEO Michael Crandell, in a briefing with Betanews.

After starting to migrate the customers' existing Web sites to "cloud-style, elastic-type applications and grids" in Amazon's EC2, Capgemini turned to RightScale's pre-configured templates for assistance.

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Microsoft confirmed to Betanews Tuesday that the first technical previews of the applications suite we can now call Office 2010, will be distributed to special participants -- probably in limited number at first, just like before -- in the third quarter of this year.

Julia White, a product manager for the Exchange Server team (which also has a major announcement this week), told Betanews that this limited number of initial testers will probably still number in the hundreds of thousands, suggesting that it will go beyond the usual MSDN and TechNet subscriber crowd. In tandem with this development track, SharePoint Server 2010, Visio 2010, and Project 2010 will all also enter technical preview during the same timeframe, especially since they will need to be tested together in order to take advantage of new features.

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