After ten years, Yahoo is finally updating its online calendar, with new capabilities ranging from Flickr-based photo integration to iCal compliance for sharing information with friends all over the Web.

Yahoo today launched the beta release of a new online calendar. While delivering its own new twists, Yahoo's revamped calendar adheres to the same iCal calendar standard used by Google, Microsoft, Apple, Microsoft, Mozilla, and IBM's Lotus.

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When the going gets weird, the weird... grow up? That's the bet Burst Media is making with its new Thought Leaders network.

Among advertisers online, where so much can be known about individual site visitors, demographic targeting is king and A/S/L information is mapped to every group from gamers to moms to trendsetters. Within the blog-advertising ecosystem, Burst Media puts together bundles of 100-200 sites that appeal to a particular demographic and sells ad space on those sites.

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After initial testing with social media game maker Playfish, Google is now launching a beta that will include Sprint and Sony as advertisers and Zynga and Konami as game creators. Is this the beginning of an ad-supported virtual world?

Can online gaming and advertising co-exist, or will gamers tune out the ad-supported games at too intrusive? Google will soon find out, with the beta rollout of AdSense for Games software.

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"The world's first touchscreen BlackBerry...What will it feel like?" asks Verizon's teaser page for the upcoming BlackBerry Storm that was announced today.

Verizon's EV-DO Rev. A network will carry the Storm in the US, while Europe, India, and Oceania will offer the device through Vodafone. In India last August, however, the launch of the 3G iPhone was heavily qualified with disclaimers on the 3G network's limitations. Like the complaints about AT&T's 3G in the US, Indian consumers, too expressed frustration at the unreliable service provided by Vodafone's less-than-ready 3G network.

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Yesterday was the last day that U.S. District Court Judge Marilyn Patel would be available for hearings until November 17, putting the case between Real Networks and the MPAA on hold.

In the meantime, Judge Patel said the temporary restraining order placed on RealDVD would remain. "I am extending the temporary restraining order because I'm not satisfied in the fact that this technology is not in violation. There are serious questions about copyright violations. There are questions about violations of the [Digital Millennium Copyright Act], and violations of these companies' agreement."

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Cross-site scripting vulnerabilities remain the most difficult for Web browser and tool manufacturers to thwart, especially because legitimate sites may be hosted by multiple domains. Today, Adobe Flash finds itself in the crosshairs.

A relatively ancient technique for hijacking a Web page's hyperlinks by overlapping them with different, invisible hyperlinks that lead the user someplace else, has reared its ugly head again, but this time outside the realm of HTML: Recently revealed proofs-of-concept show that invisible Flash elements can maliciously lead users to mock Web pages; and now it's been revealed that Adobe was already working with security engineers to fix the problem before the latest proof-of-concept was leaked.

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Feeling hemmed in by the boundaries of Sun's corporate structure, MySQL co-founder David Axmark shot off a resignation letter telling Sun that he 'hates rules,' and he also 'hates breaking them.'

Complaining vividly about the corporate rules inflicted on him at Sun, MySQL co-founder David Axmark has quit his job there, leaving his own future -- and that of the Sun-acquired MySQL open source database project -- in some doubt.

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A Pennsylvania judge has ordered the owner of a Web site dedicated to Lackawanna County, PA political affairs to disclose the identity of six anonymous posters for posting defamatory remarks about the Scranton City Council President.

This is a "Lackawanna Six" of a completely different nature. In a case centering around whether anonymity protects citizens from responsibility for defamation claims, an initial complaint was filed last year by Joe Pilchesky, a Scranton resident and webmaster of DohertyDeceit.com, a journal of local political criticism. Pilchesky claimed that he and his site were the victims of harassment, retaliation, and defamation at the hands of City Council President Judy Gatelli.

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Mozilla on Tuesday launched another new experimental Firefox plug-in that adheres to the nascent W3C specification for geolocation APIs, and that's built to understand and manage users' location information.

Mozilla Labs' new Geode add-on communicates with sites that want to know where the user is, passing along as much or as little data as the user wishes to allow -- city, neighborhood, or exact location.

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Tuesday, IBM added two new PowerVM servers for bringing together mixed Unix, x86 Linux, and IBM i workloads. And with IBM's PowerVM Active Memory Sharing now entering beta, virtualization moves from processors into the realm of memory.

On Tuesday afternoon, IBM launched a pair of new Power6-based servers for Unix, x86 Linux, and IBM i environments, along with hardware and systems management software enhancements.

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So how close is a real, supported version of Firefox for mobile devices? Prototypes have been under way for months, but last weekend, Mozilla's CEO indicated a real Firefox-branded alpha could be made available "in a few weeks."

In an interview with San Jose Mercury News reporter Pete Carey published over the weekend, Mozilla CEO John Lilly made a statement that Carey didn't appear to follow up on: The first official test versions of Firefox Mobile should come this month.

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Although the telecom industry lost 3,400 jobs from August through September of this year, the computer manufacturing business lost virtually none, and "computer systems design and related services" picked up 8,500 more employees.

With more workers from a lot of fields already hitting the unemployment lines in September, how are jobs at computer companies doing? Although it's too early to tell about the future fallout from the current global economic crisis, results were decidedly mixed in September, with some types of computer businesses losing jobs and others actually gaining, say the latest numbers from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics released Friday.

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There's a difference between building a new database engine, and building tools that are bundled with an existing database engine for a new product. So even analysts may be surprised to learn the next SQL Server is not two years away.

At a conference in Seattle yesterday that was apparently accompanied by at least one demo that was not on its original schedule, Microsoft made mention of a product with the code-name "Kilimanjaro," in association with SQL Server.

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With consumers suffering huge losses on investments in their homes and retirement funds, will they really spend more on CE products this holiday season than last? Two categories should do well, a CEA analyst predicted today.

Regardless of the admittedly massive impact of the financial crisis, this year's holiday sales will increase 4.7 percent for flat panel TVs and other A/V equipment, and 3.5 percent for gaming hardware, an analyst for the Consumer Electronics Association said during an industry webcast today.

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What do the Blackberry Bold, Nokia 5800, and the HTC Touch HD have in common? They're all 3G smartphones that have no US release date.

Research in Motion's latest BlackBerry, the 3G Bold, was released in Canada in August, but continues to be delayed in the US due to extensive testing of AT&T's HSPA network.

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