The smartphone that was supposed to save Palm last year has actually sold very well. The problem up to now has been pitifully low margins -- Palm can certainly sell Centros, but not enough to substantially profit from them.

While the world awaits the Pre -- a phone whose margins will hopefully be higher for Palm -- the Centro has finally made its way to one more Canadian carrier today: Bell. This will apparently end the phone's exclusivity with Rogers in the region, which has been selling the phone for $299 (with a three-year contract) since its introduction there last June. Bell's price has yet to be announced.

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For about 40 minutes early Saturday morning, a URL with a single forward slash was inadvertently checked into a list of potential malware sites operated by Google, with some help...maybe...from StopBadware.org.

As a result, its search results partner, Google, was flagging nearly every Web site on the planet as a potential conveyor of malware, from about 6:40 am to 7:25 am PST.

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Even the ravaged economy can't hamper the growth of IPTV on a global basis, according to an analyst report released today.

In spite of the global economic crisis, worldwide subscriberships to "telco TV" -- a category encompassing TV delivered by telecom operators through IP in addition to other technologies -- will more than triple by 2012 to 71.6 million, according to the report from In-Stat.

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If you're an American, imagine if you will the sudden disappearance of a retailer whose brand is as big as Target. The recent loss of Woolworths in Great Britain is at least proportional. The great five-and-dime retailer -- the namesake of an institution that was actually founded in Pennsylvania in 1879 -- filed for bankruptcy (administration) last November, and began shutting the doors on all its UK retail outlets soon afterward.

Now, that nation's largest online retailer -- which also happens to operate conventional retail stores -- is gearing up to resurrect "Woolies," at least for now as a direct online merchandiser.

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The press service AFP this morning is citing reports in the Asian press as stating that Panasonic will report an operating loss this past quarter of ¥350 billion (about $3.9 billion USD) on Wednesday, partly due to the bad economy and partly to its ongoing acquisition of Sanyo. This would be the first quarterly loss for the former Matsushita in about seven years.

However, the exact source of the AFP's news this morning is uncertain. In what could be a possible rewrite error, the name of the newspaper ("Shimbun") was attributed by the AFP to two different cities. The Asahi Shimbun and the Mainichi Shimbun are two different sources entirely, and the Web sites for neither paper are carrying any such news this morning.

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Certain Netflix members this weekend received a survey from the company in their inbox which asked if users would pay more for premium content.

The survey focused on HBO content, which would add $9.99 per month and give the user instant access to HBO original series and movies. While it is still only an idea by the company, the introduction of a tiered streaming model is a logical next step for the company. It would move the streaming business out of the auxiliary position it currently holds and closer to the company's mail order business which currently has nine different monthly rental plans.

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Bloggers from Verizon and The New York Times slugged it out on Friday over parts of the economic stimulus package considered by Congress that give broadband providers extra incentives for ultra-fast services like FiOS.

In the NYT's Bits blog on Friday, Saul Hansell suggested that wording tucked into the Senate version of the economic stimulus bill would supply Verizon with a larger share of the stimulus pie than most of its rivals.

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For comics geeks, any tech that unfurls the promised "infinite canvas" of digital comics is something to behold. Microsoft Live Labs has taken a crack at bringing that ideal -- a comics layout and viewing page in cyberspace, unconstrained by print thinking and limitations -- with a "funky side project" that's attracting attention from some of the greats.

"Infinite canvas" is a phrase coined by Scott McCloud (Understanding Comics, the tech introduction to Google Chrome), and he's one of the creatives highlighted on the site. The idea is that since a screen doesn't have to behave like a printed page, the possibilities for storytelling are expanded. Images can be of various sizes and can be arranged or overlaid in various ways. Text can escape bubbles and captions and behave in ways that emphasize (or subvert) what the words say.

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At CES 2008, Intel's Paul Otellini used eJamming Audiio, BigStage, and the band Smashmouth to show off how a group of musicians located on various corners of the globe could get together via P2P and play live in a virtual environment.

BetaNews tested the eJamming Audiio software last year and found that it was suitable for recording and collaborating with others in a VoIP-enhanced environment, but playing instruments live had too many latency issues to be feasible. In using MIDI drums, a guitar and bass in three different locations in the United States, each musician found they had to get accustomed to latency in their own signal, and then the latency of the others as well. In the end, it was nearly impossible to play live.

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The BitTorrent-fed set top box by Myka which was promised to be released by April has evoked skepticism in some, but the company persists. Today it has updated its site, complete with a UI walkthrough (on a prototype device) and a new look for its product...with no BitTorrent logo on it. Last week, BitTorrent told us that Myka had not been cleared to use the BitTorrent logo despite being cleared to use the technology. Myka appears to have remedied this swiftly and simply.

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From the Red Tape blog over at MSNBC.com, an amazing tale of a vicious -- and profitable -- phishing scheme that appears to be extraordinarily targeted toward its victim and his friends. It ends poorly, especially if you were hoping Facebook wasn't going to give you the creeps afterward.

Microsoft employee Bryan Rutberg was the target, and Bob Sullivan's description of his ordeal is great reading. The criminals guessed or figured out Rutberg's Facebook password, then locked him out of his own account. They then posted a frantic status message ("BRYAN IS IN URGENT NEED OF HELP!!!") and started sending emails requesting money to various of his friends -- but not to Rutberg's wife, whom the scammers had de-friended.

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A disgruntled contractor at Fannie Mae, fired for coding incompetence, attempted to stash a logic bomb on the mortgage giant's servers. Fortunately, it was incompetently implemented, and the 35-year-old accused man is in custody.

Rajendrasinh Babubha Makwana, an Indian national, was employed by a subcontractor for OmniTech as a Unix engineer at Fannie Mae's Urbana, Maryland facility, according to an affidavit sworn by the FBI agent investigating the case. On October 24 at about 1:30 pm, Makwana was fired by Fannie Mae for inadvertently writing a script that switched up permissions on the company's Unix servers. He told his supervisors at OmniTech and turned in his badge and laptop to Fannie Mae around 4:45 pm that day.

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A video of a working prototype of the open-source gaming handheld Pandora, nearly complete in its fabricated case, has emerged. The device has been in the later stages of development since late last year.

Pandora is like the mutant offspring of a Fujitsu Lifebook u2010 and a Nintendo DS with mitochondrial DNA from the Sony PSP. It is powered by a Texas Instruments OMAP3 system on a chip and Linux-based OS and has been regarded as a sort of abandonware, open source, and PC gaming console-slash-PDA-slash-portable media player. Perhaps it would be best described as a GP2x with a keyboard and touchscreen.

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Remember Google Chrome? The new browser that was one of Betanews' Top 20 Stories of 2008, and certainly across the Internet as a whole? Well, after the initial hype that Chrome (and its subsequent first vulnerabilities) caused, the browser quietly broke the 1 percent mark of browser share this month. Google this week released updates addressing one moderate, and one severe security threat, and provides fixes for Yahoo Mail and Windows Live Hotmail.

The Moderate security update addresses a cross-site scripting vulnerability linked to the Adobe Reader plugin, and the severe update is for a bug in the V8 JavaScript engine that could allow malicious users to "clickjack" sensitive information by bypassing same-origin checks.

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comScore data released this week showed online casual gaming has reached 86 million users in 2008, an increase of 27% year over year. Additionally, the time individual users spend on gaming sites increased 42%.

Casual gaming is the category where Yahoo is definitely king, with 19.5 million unique visits in December, a 20% increase over 2007 and 4 million visits more than second place EA Online, and 6 million more than Disney Games, which holds third place.

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