It's a sign of the times: the city's Wi-Fi network has been turned on, but nowhere near what it was initially billed to be.

The mesh network covers a single square mile of St. Louis' downtown from North Tucker Boulevard to the Mississippi River from west to east, and Carr Street to Highway 40 from north to south.

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Qualcomm today brought the era of video entertainment on the road one precarious step closer to reality...thankfully for the backseat. As if typing on your BlackBerry and eating yogurt while driving wasn't enough of a pre-occupation.

At NAB in Las Vegas, Qualcomm is showing off a proof-of-concept display of a MediaFLO in-car entertainment system.

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Popular id Software game Quake 3 Arena has been successfully ported to the Apple iPhone and iPod Touch MP3 player by Canadian game makers, though don't expect it to be available to everyone just yet.

Game developer HermitWorks managed to get two iPod Touch users playing a head-to-head death match using built-in WiFi after eight to twelve hours of coding. The HermitWorks' version uses an accelerometer to control the player and taps on the screen to fire weapons.

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Today, Google helped Salesforce.com pour more fuel onto the fire of its already heated rivalry with Microsoft's Dynamics CRM Online, a software-as-a-service product rebranded by Microsoft late last month.

Specifically, starting today, Salesforce.com's CRM Online service is tightly integrated with Google's online word processing, spreadsheet, and e-mail applications suite.

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Using the NAB's yearly meeting as a backdrop, Sony reaffirmed its commitment to Blu-ray Java by announcing new upgrades to authoring software from in-house and third-party sources.

Sony has hopes that pushing BR-J harder will help silence critics who often pointed out Toshiba's now defunct HD DVD format was far more advanced in authoring functionality. Making BD-J easier to use is likely a top priority for the Japanese company.

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It had to happen sometime: Microsoft announced today DRM is making its way onto the Silverlight platform, powered by none other than the company's elusive PlayReady content access technology.

Silverlight, Microsoft's cross-platform answer to Adobe's Flash, was unveiled last year just two months after their PlayReady "cross platform" DRM was announced.

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Likely a move to avoid the legal pitfalls besieging other file sharing sites at the moment, YouTorrent has announced that it will only index sites that compile licensed content.

The indexer only launched in early January, but it has quickly become one of the Web's most visited BitTorrent sites. According to the company, the site now averages about 10 million unique visitors a month.

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With the format war over, the half-life of disc-based video in the US may already have been expended. So the survival of Blockbuster as a brand may depend on a device that helps move its storefront directly into the household. Enter Circuit City.

In his public letter to the CEO of Circuit City requesting that negotiations commence on a merger deal, Blockbuster CEO Jim Keyes suggested that the combined retailers would not only be able to secure exclusivity deals for content -- as Blockbuster has already been known to do for its 7,800+ rental outlets in the US -- but might also have the ability to market and sell an undefined, exclusive content delivery device.

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In the interest of keeping the individual identities of the whole family of Acer properties alive, Gateway has announced an expansion of its notebook lines.

During the launch of Acer's Gemstone, analyst John Spooner of TBR remarked to BetaNews that the company looked to be positioning itself at the high end of the market, above Gateway and Packard Bell. If that is the case, then today's announcement makes Gateway look appealing to the "top 2/3" gamer/enthusiast market. All models will include Windows Vista SP1, with some offering an upgrade to Vista Home Premium 64-bit Edition SP1.

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At this time last week, Yahoo was said to have reached the end of its rope. It didn't appear very viable on its own, and certainly no one would be crazy enough to try to top Microsoft's cash offer. Seven days later, and it's a different world.

Just days after Microsoft's February 1 bombshell that it was going after Yahoo directly, many financial analysts declared Yahoo to be headed to that great collection of defunct Internet brands in the "cloud" someplace, perhaps alongside Netscape.

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Will there ever come a day when a single handheld MP3 player can store 3,500 movies? IBM researchers think that a new technology called "racetrack" memory will make this possible within the next ten years.

Aside from performance, better relability and lower prices could be on the way, too. Unlike magnetic disk drives, racetrack memory has no moving parts. Moreover, unlike flash memory, it can be endlessly rewritten with no wear and tear, according to IBM Fellow Stuart Parkin and his colleagues at the IBM Almaden Research Center in San Jose, California.

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This morning, Oracle rolled out an ambitious strategy aimed at achieving more consistent security in large organizations, along with the first four software components of its new "Service-Oriented Security" architecture.

But given all of Oracle's software acquisitions in recent years, how well will the new security model support Oracle's entire customer base?

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During an analyst meeting yesterday, the head of NVidia stated clearly that NVidia is a GPU company and not a semiconductor manufacturer, destroying any flicker of hope that it and Intel may jointly combat AMD and its ATI division.

"We're going to open a can of whoop ass," boasted NVidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang during an NVidia Financial Day analyst meeting yesterday, invoking a word that BetaNews' own automatic comments parser system would splash an asterisk in the middle of.

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A federal appeals court this afternoon turned down Dish Network parent company EchoStar's petition to rehear its long-fought patent infringement case, which was only partially reversed in EchoStar's favor last January.

Having attained a glimmer of hope last January with a partial reversal and partial remand -- amid a partial upholding -- of an April 2006 verdict in TiVo's favor, EchoStar this afternoon lost its appeal to the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals to have the entire case reheard. The Dish Network parent went for all the marbles and lost.

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Analysts from Gartner said earlier this week that Windows is collapsing under its own weight. Talk in the blogosphere keeps pointing to a Windows 7 release date earlier than 2010. Is Vista already a lame duck?

ANALYSIS Certainly Microsoft wants to avoid another debacle on the scale of Windows Me, an operating system release that tilted more toward a mistake than an upgrade, and whose publicity turned into pushback from both customers and the press.

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