The trickle of information about Microsoft's Windows Marketplace for Mobile increased substantially this morning as the company unveiled its developer program for the mobile app store. Microsoft today opened the Windows Mobile 6.5 developer program.

Developers will pay an annual registration fee of $99 which covers five submissions (selling more than five apps will cost an additional $99 each), and will receive 70% of the revenue drawn from sales in the Windows Marketplace for Mobile. The fees and revenue share are in the same league as those laid down by Apple with its iPhone Developer Program.

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IT really is getting greener, notes a new report out from Forrester Research, and now it's time for the green effort to get, well, IT-er. Forrester researchers suggest that the stimulus may spur plenty of advances to business process and strategy as well as public policy and infrastructure.

The "Mapping IT's Green Opportunities" report, released last week, doesn't dismiss what it calls "Green IT 1.0" -- the efforts to improve the energy and carbon footprints of corporate IT departments with virtualization, improved power management and the data-center-centric like. But, say the analysts, there is "a new horizon of green IT 2.0" ahead, involving both business and public concerns.

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After first cutting deals with the likes of Apple and Sprint, developer Judah Klausner has now added four more big names to his list of legal settlements. On Tuesday, Citrix Systems agreed to license Klausner's "Visual Voicemail" -- a technology that sends visual alerts about voice messages -- for use on IP-based phones such as Cisco's that utilize Citrix' Visual Voicemail software.

Klausner Technologies arrived at a similar deal on Monday with Google, covering Android-based phones along with VoiP services offered by Google-acquired Grand Central.

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In the latest turn of events in a patent infringement case characterized by strange turns of events, a move by plaintiff Nokia to force defendant InterDigital to settle their unique dispute through arbitration backfired, when a judge said they can't. Last Thursday, as first detected by The Wall Street Journal's Julia Angwin, New York District Judge Deborah Batts ruled that Nokia waived its right to arbitration by essentially making this dispute the court's business in the first place.

It is the weirdest dispute one can possibly imagine, which boils down to this: Nokia claims it bargained for and received VIP status with regard to licensing fees for InterDigital's patents. But Nokia's complaint is that when InterDigital settled with Ericsson on another matter related to the same patents, the amount of the settlement gave Ericsson the better deal. After what appeared to be an initial settlement, suddenly InterDigital complained that Nokia was using its patents without license during the settlement period itself.

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The Enterprise Agreement (EA) product promotion is one of a wide range of customer pricing incentives for businesses of various sizes now highlighted on the Microsoft Incentives Web site.

Under the EA promotion, customers can get 25% off the cost of the License and Software Assurance (L&SA) contract on subscriptions to the enterprise editions of Windows Server, Exchange Server, Office Communications Server (OCS), and Server Management Suite. Microsoft is also offering 15% discounts on the L&SA for standard editions of nine server software products.

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The first American woman to earn a Ph.D in computer science has won the Association for Computing Machinery's AM Turing Award. Barbara Liskov, who currently heads the Programming Methodology Group in MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, has helmed innovations in software design that provide the underpinnings of every significant programming language introduced since 1975 -- not to mention much of the Internet as you know it.

Dr. Liskov's earliest work brought the concept of data abstraction into a central role in software engineering, making development and maintenance a much easier proposition; she created the CLU proto-OOP programming language as part of her teaching workload at MIT in 1974 and 1975. Her later work on distributed system design makes possible scalable systems with millions of concurrent users -- a crucial component of the very largest Web sites (think search engines). Currently, she's pondering ways of improving system fault tolerance, especially as it relates to arbitrary failures, including such problems as errors and intrusions.

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The typical security vulnerability and patching story paints security researchers as the good guys in the white hats, the straight shooting style, and the soda pop. But on this particular Patch Tuesday (a lighter one than most) Microsoft is crediting not some white-hat researcher but a really good guy -- a fellow who's the author of a simple Sidebar gadget that displays the contents of your clipboard -- as having done the right thing and notified Microsoft of a critical hole.

German developer Helmut Buhler, whose other claim to fame is a portable wrapper function that makes dialog boxes in Windows 95 and XP look like those in Vista, was credited by Microsoft today for discovering one of the critical vulnerabilities being addressed by the March edition of its Patch Tuesday bug fixes.

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An undue amount of attention is being paid to BlackBerry App World's "overpriced" $2.99 minimum charge in the soon-to-be-released app store, when there's the specter of PayPal and eBay lurking just behind it.

And where they go, dissatisfied users follow.

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This afternoon, the US Justice Dept. announced that Hitachi would be the fourth company to plead guilty in a TFT-LCD price fixing investigation that has already seen LG, Sharp (now becoming part of Panasonic), and Chunghwa pay collectively over half a billion dollars in fines.

Hitachi would pay the least of the four companies thus far: $31 million. In turn, the Antitrust Division said today, it will agree that it participated in meetings with representatives of its competitors in which they conspired to set the price that Dell Computer would be charged for TFT-LCD displays. From April 2001 through March 2004, Hitachi then quoted Dell the agreed upon prices, the DoJ said, and then reported its progress back to other cartel members.

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Streaming digital video showing activities inside and outside the International Space Station and the view of Earth from up there will now be available for about twelve hours every day, according to NASA. The feed will also contain audio of communications between Mission Control and the astronauts, including (for instance) live video of maintenance activities outside the station during today's prep for the incoming space shuttle.

The ISS is 200 miles up and moving at 17,500mph, posing a unique assortment of problems not encountered in the average video stream. Satellite coverage can occasionally drop out as well. (On the upside, there's a sunrise or a sunset every 45 minutes, and many views of activity outside show the Earth below looking ridiculously lovely.) When no spacewalks are underway, video will originate from inside the station during on-duty hours. Don't expect The Real World: ISS from the video setup, though; off-camera time is expected to run about 12 hours each day, from 2pm to 2am EDT. During those hours, the familiar location-and-path map will be streamed from Mission Control in Houston.

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The appointment of William Morrow -- a former executive at Vodafone and Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) -- as Clearwire's new CEO comes at a time when the company badly needs to gain industry traction to offset financial losses and retain an early market lead in the US over LTE, a rival 4G technology set for deployment in 2010 by both Verizon Wireless and AT&T.

Morrow said in a statement on Monday that Clearwire now intends to deploy WiMAX in over 80 markets -- to as many as 120 million people -- by 2010.

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In YouTube's
blog yesterday, Patrick Walker, Director of Video Partnerships (Europe, Middle East, and Africa), announced that premium music video content would be blocked from view in the UK.

Citing a failure in negotiations with the publishing, composing, and songwriting organization PRS for Music (Performing Rights Society), Walker said, "The costs are simply prohibitive for us -- under PRS's proposed terms we would lose significant amounts of money with every playback. In addition, PRS is unwilling to tell us what songs are included in the license they can provide so that we can identify those works on YouTube -- that's like asking a consumer to buy an unmarked CD without knowing what musicians are on it."

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In a statement this morning, graphics chip maker Nvidia said it is willing to join with others in investing in early-stage companies that seek to produce general computing software products that leverage graphics processor technology. It's the manufacturer's latest step in drumming up support for CUDA, the library that enables developers to offload heavy mathematical functionality away from the CPU and onto the GPU.

"These companies are the innovators that will fuel the continued growth of the GPU platform," reads a prepared statement this morning from Nvidia VP for Business Development Jeff Herbst. "Through this program we will provide financial, marketing and other support to help start-up companies realize their full potential and we strongly encourage interested entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and others to reach out to us with their ideas."

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Elevation Partners' Managing Director and Co-Founder Roger McNamee -- whose firm has a big stake in the restoration of Palm -- was interviewed by Bloomberg last week, both for television and print, discussing the upcoming launch of the Palm Pre. This morning, Palm issued everything short of a full retraction of McNamee's statements, in a statement filed with no less than the US Securities and Exchange Commission.

McNamee's casual and plain-spoken rapport with Bloomberg interviewers raised eyebrows in the tech community and has led Palm to print a disquisition of McNamee's statements.

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A memorandum published by the White House this morning made good on a campaign promise by President Obama to discontinue the Oval Office practice of disregarding or even suppressing certain scientific and technological information when crafting executive policy.

"Science and the scientific process must inform and guide decisions of my Administration on a wide range of issues, including improvement of public health, protection of the environment, increased efficiency in the use of energy and other resources, mitigation of the threat of climate change, and protection of national security," reads the President's memorandum this morning. "The public must be able to trust the science and scientific process informing public policy decisions. Political officials should not suppress or alter scientific or technological findings and conclusions. If scientific and technological information is developed and used by the Federal Government, it should ordinarily be made available to the public."

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