At the same time that the US makes its first transition to an all-digital terrestrial broadcasting system for television, member states of the European Union may all be rolling out mobile satellite services (MSS) for no less than satellite television. Imagine a Sirius/XM-style portable network, whose receivers will likely be integrated into cellular phones, on a continental scale as soon as 20 months from now.

It's an ambitious idea, and it's not nearly a done deal. But yesterday, a proposal was introduced before the European Parliament for a timetable by which the EU would select a few choice service providers, for the precious and narrow spectrum it will be making available for the entire continent. It will require the consent and cooperation of all 27 member states - something the EU rarely gets even with less ambitious proposals.

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Sony disclosed more information about its joint venture in the UK and Ireland with British Sky Broadcasting to bring video downloads to its popular handheld system, as well as a DVR device to bring television programming to the PS3 and PSP.

Called ‘Go!,’ the service will launch in early 2008 and be the first service of its kind in Europe. Programs available include sports, entertainment, movies, music and animation from Sky, as well as third-party content pending deals with other entertainment providers.

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Days after announcing the industry's largest notebook hard drive with a capacity of 320GB, Toshiba says it will ship early next year a 32GB memory card for cameras and digital audio players. In the SDHC format, the card will have a Class 4 rating, the middle level offering 4MB/sec. transfer speeds.

In addition, Toshiba announced a 16GB SDHC card that is due out in October, along with an 8GB microSDHC card for mobile phones and other small devices that will ship in January. Pricing for the new memory cards was not given, but Toshiba will likely make an announcement regarding the 32GB and 8GB cards at CES 2008 early next year.

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The man credited with making the global CPU industry a two-horse race once again in the public mind is leaving next month the company he helped put back on the map. Henri Richard, who put a personable, approachable, practical face on AMD as its senior vice president for marketing over the past five years, will pursue other interests outside the PC industry, AMD confirmed last night.

It was Richard's strategy to re-develop AMD's product offerings into discrete product lines that targeted customer segments instead of manufacturing generations. The Athlon/Sempron/Turion/Opteron subdivisions, and the subsequent introduction of Athlon FX, Phenom, and the possible future Fusion series, were all part of Richard's and AMD's strategy to combat Intel on multiple levels individually and simultaneously.

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In a blog post on Monday, the development team for Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 Service Pack 1 showed screen shots of an enhancement to Outlook Web Access that enables encrypted e-mails to be sent and received through a Web browser. The demo marks the return of S/MIME support, which had been introduced to OWA before, but which had temporarily disappeared with the first release of ES 2007.

As with Exchange Server 2003 and prior editions, the demo clearly shows that users will need to download and run an additional S/MIME control along with their browsers. For now at least, that makes S/MIME support a Windows-only function, even though OWA itself can be used through browsers in Linux and other environments.

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Google turned its eyes to the stars on Wednesday, introducing Sky, its complement to the Google Earth ground mapping product. The new feature, to be made available in 13 languages, will allow the navigation of the 100 million known stars and 200 million known galaxies through the application's interface. The search company has provided a YouTube video to help users get started with the application.

To help promote the new feature, the company invited former astronaut Sally Ride to promote it in the company's official blog. As part of the promotion, Ride developed a KML showcase featuring her favorite extra-solar places. "Sky in Google Earth is great, and we plan on using it in some of our programs," she said. Ride now runs Sally Ride Science, a company that specializes in creating science materials for elementary and middle school students.

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The performance rights organization that collects royalties from streaming music providers on behalf of recording artists and copyright holders, has offered small streamers a reduced rate that caps royalties collected at 10% to 12% of their annual revenue. But for selected streamers to qualify, they would need to sign an agreement with the SoundExchange organization that would include a cap on growth, and a possible penalty for growing too fast.

In a statement late yesterday, SoundExchange described the restriction as "a usage cap to ensure that this subsidy is used only by webcasters of a certain size who are forming or strengthening their businesses." Webcasters would have until September 14 to sign on the dotted line, which is not long after Congress reconvenes after summer recess.

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Microsoft has brought back its Sidewinder line of gaming peripherals, beginning with a mouse that is customizable to a user’s specific gaming needs.

The Redmond company first launched its line of Sidewinder products in 1995, which included game pads, joysticks, and steering wheels. The gaming mouse marks the return of the line, which Microsoft says includes nearly 5,000 possible combinations.

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According to revelations made public today by California Secretary of State Debra Bowen, as many as 972 electronic voting machines sold to San Francisco and four other counties by Election Systems & Software, Inc., may never have actually been certified by the state prior to their sale.

The systems in question were all AutoMARK A200 version 1.1, some of which were apparently delivered throughout 2006, prior to their having been certified by the federal government. The A200 has never been certified by California state government, because ES&S never submitted it to the state for its certification.

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Attorneys General across the country banded together Wednesday, calling on social networking sites to strengthen parental controls to keep minors from accessing questionable material on their sites.

The efforts are being headed by Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, who worked previously to get MySpace to disclose the identities of sex offenders on its Web site, and North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper. While both are working to have the companies voluntarily change their policies, they are also pushing for actual laws.

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BetaNews reported yesterday that Skype issued an update notice to its users for downloading the new release of its VoIP client software, on the Monday prior to what Skype engineers are now calling a "perfect storm" of events which took down its network for about 48 hours. In our report, we posed the question of how a mass Microsoft software update on Patch Tuesday have triggered such a storm on a Thursday. This morning, BetaNews' tests revealed a possible clue to an answer.

On one system last Monday, August 20, at approximately 11:00 am ET, we installed an upgrade to Skype bringing it up to version 3.5.0.214. The upgrade immediately brought up the new program, which appeared to be - and still appears to be - fully functional and in good working order. Wednesday morning, after two full system standbys (S3 sleep mode hibernation) had passed though without a full system reboot, and without the Skype client actually running, a "Restart required" message appeared on that system's screen.

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Apple’s computer business continues to grow, with its share of the notebook business in June 2007 growing to 17.6 percent according to one market research firm.

NPD says that the Cupertino company gained 2.2 percentage points since the same period last year, while data from competing research outfit IDC indicates that Apple has moved into the third place overall in US shipments.

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A high-level representative of Adobe told BetaNews late yesterday that "Moviestar," the code-name for the latest upgrade to its Flash Player 9 software, will indeed be capable of playing back H.264-encoded video at modern high-definition: 1920 x 1080.

Mark Randall, Adobe's Chief Strategist for Dynamic Media Organization, also told BetaNews that the newly supported H.264 format will be capable of playing back videos encoded for Apple's QuickTime. H.264 is the video encoding codec currently used in MPEG-4.

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Panasonic said Wednesday that it had begun shipping the first of its high definition televisions to include a proprietary technology called LIFI, which is said to both ensure image brightness for a longer period of time than the standard LCD HDTV, and have a quicker start up time. The first TVs will be available in 50, 56, and 61-inch models, and will be available in both 720p and 1080p versions, ranging in price from $1700 to $2200.

LIFI HDTVs do not use electrodes as the light source, Panasonic said, which results in longer life. Additionally, that same technology reduces the time that it takes for the television to start up from around a minute to 15 seconds. “The fact that the bulb will virtually never need to be replaced is a great benefit to the consumer and one of the reasons we strongly believe that LIFI will be successful,” Panasonic vice president Dennis Eppel said in a statement.

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Reuters broke the news this morning that, at a leadership conference in Aspen, Colorado, Google CEO Eric Schmidt responded to a question from a representative of T-Mobile USA by saying his company may be inclined to participate in the Federal Communications Commission’s auction of UHF television frequencies, now set for January 16, 2008.

While all versions of Reuters’ stories in the US, Canada, and the UK had been yanked from online access for unexplained reasons at the time of this writing, GigaOM’s Paul Kapustka apparently reporting from the conference itself gave an account that validated the spirit of the Reuters report, citing Schmidt as saying his company would “probably” place a bid. Reuters had quoted Schmidt as responding to T-Mobile’s question about whether Google would bid by saying that placing a bid “probably would be the way to answer that.” T-Mobile is itself a likely bidder in this auction.

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