Microsoft's just-announced Live Mesh platform is a complex offering that can be difficult to understand, even to those familiar with the company's typical marketing-speak and software-plus-services buzzwords. In turn, we have broken down Live Mesh into some easily digestible bullet points.

- What is launching today is an initial look at Live Mesh's core experience for consumers. It has two key components: an online service that lets users register their devices, and a 2MB software client -- called the Mesh Operating Environment -- that links and integrates the service into Windows.

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Exactly who should be buying whom? With only minimal mention of Microsoft from both Yahoo executives and analysts this afternoon, suddenly the "big deal" between the software giant and the portal keeper doesn't seem to be "on."

It is one of the biggest uphill battles in the technology industry, and last quarter, it seems "uphill" is the only direction Yahoo knows: Revenues up 9% on the year to nearly $1.82 billion, and gross profit up 11% annually to $1.06 billion versus Q1 2007. Operating income was down 28%, though actually that percentage can fool you: Last year's operating income at this time was low to start with, so the reduction is only $48 million. And the shock of the day, if there was one, is that this reduction was much less than expected.

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The plunge in AMD's worldwide CPU market share in 2007 may have finally stopped in the fourth quarter of last year, according to the most recent statistics from hardware market analysis firm iSuppli.

Though the gap between it and Intel widened by 7.3 points of market share by revenue (as opposed to units shipped) for the total year 2007, the tick went up for AMD in the fourth quarter -- by pretty much as small as a tick, 0.3%, according to iSuppli's latest figures supplied to BetaNews this morning.

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HP Upline hosted storage has been suspended for five days (and counting) allegedly due to some potentially disastrous bugs. Already, competing services are attempting to cash in.

The service from Hewlett-Packard offering unlimited online storage of user data was launched only 15 days ago, and has been out of commission for just over a third of that time.

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The Mac clone company said Monday that it had begun shipping PCs that had been ordered during the week of April 7, while a news outlet confirmed the company indeed is building an office at its Miami location.

If indeed true -- it is not known yet since no one has reported receiving the Open Computer yet -- it would end a tumultuous week for the Florida company. Its online store was down Friday, but had returned Monday.

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In just under 30 years, Seagate has become the first manufacturer to ship one billion hard drives, and it expects to double that number within the next five.

In recent years, worldwide shipments of hard drives has soared -- a statistic that's not surprising considering the advent of portable digital media players and rising demand for laptops, which are typically replaced much sooner than traditional desktop PCs, as well as online data storage.

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Nokia's subscription-based music download service that was announced at the tail end of 2007 has added another major recording label's content to its catalog: Sony BMG.

Initially a partnership with Universal Music Group, Nokia's Comes With Music service offers unlimited downloads of PlaysForSure-protected tracks to those who purchase compatible Nokia handsets.

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At the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco today, photo sharing site Photobucket announced that it is opening its API to developers, with the hopes of generating new applications based on its Web services.

The API allows applications to be developed which access a user's account, create and edit albums, upload, search and share content, and update metadata of media files.

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With the myriad changes that had to be made to DIS 29500 before it could be approved by three-fourths of the ISO subcommittee's voters, there was a very high chance that by the time Microsoft saw its offspring once again, it wouldn't recognize it.

As a consultant for conformance testing agency Griffin Brown confirmed last Thursday, indeed, Office 2007 may require an upgrade before it can say it faithfully adheres to an international standard.

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