YYahoo is moving into favor with consumers, scoring higher than Google in a survey of consumer satisfaction published by the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI). Meanwhile, Apple experienced some growing pains.

Yahoo moved up four points to a score of 79, a sign of good news for a company following what could be considered disappointing financial results. The search engine recently redesigned its site, along with adding new functionality.

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The US signaled that its patience was wearing thin with China on Monday, as it asked the World Trade Organization to crack down on piracy within the country. The Bush administration is especially concerned over the economic losses sustained to American businesses by the problem, which it says costs the country billions of dollars per year.

Both countries had previously met on the subject two months ago, but were not able to come to terms. While China has taken some steps to improve the situation, the US government said that significant issues still remain. "We will pursue this legal dispute in the WTO and will continue to work with China bilaterally on other important intellectual property reform issues," US Trade Representative Office spokesman Sean Spicer said.

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Nokia said Tuesday that about 46 million units of its BL-5C cell phone battery may be at risk of overheating, and is offering to replace them free of charge.

The Finnish phone manufacturer has several companies who produce the battery, and together they have shipped about 300 million units in total. This particular recall would target those produced by Matsushita between December 2005 and November 2006.

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Google took a shot at Viacom on Monday by calling two of the company's best known personalities from the Comedy Central network to give depositions.

According to court documents, both Jon Stewart of The Daily Show and Stephen Colbert of The Colbert Report have been asked to testify. Google has also asked for nearly three dozen others to testify as well.

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XM debuted its latest radio Monday, complete with a full-color screen and various recording capabilities.

The XpressRC features a split-screen color display that shows the currently-playing song title and information to the left, and data on what's playing on up to three other channels to the right. The device, while produced by Delphi, will only carry the XM brand name.

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Shape Services said Monday that it had made a version of its IM+ for Skype client that works with the Apple iPhone. The application is already available for several other platforms, including BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, Palm OS, Symbian, and J2ME devices. Shape said the Web application had been developed specially for the touchscreen interface of the iPhone.

IM+ allows users to place calls using SkypeOut credits or Skype plans to any Skype PC or phone number. "Noticing the public interest for Skype on iPhone, we decided to use our mobile IM and mobile Skype experience and develop an application for [the device's users]," Shape Services CEO Igor Berezovsky said in a statement. iPhone users can access the service by visiting skypeforiphone.com.

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A European Commission study has found that children in the EU know that downloading pirated music is illegal, however they justify it with a wide variety of excuses. Among the most popular were that everyone was doing it; downloads were for their use only; and that CDs and DVDs are too costly. Many didn't believe that downloading harms the artist at all.

The threat of legal repercussions is not what is stopping many from downloading pirated MP3s. In fact, many cited the risk of infecting their computers with a virus as a bigger deterrent. Almost all polled said they also planned to continue downloading music.

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aQuantive said Monday that it is now a fully-owned subsidiary of Microsoft, after the acquisition cleared all regulatory concerns and was approved by aQuantive shareholders on Thursday. As per the deal, the board of the company has resigned, although its CEO will serve within Microsoft as the head of its newly formed Advertiser and Publisher Solutions Group.

The new division takes responsibility for building and marketing all ad platforms, and reports to Kevin Johnson, Microsoft's chief of the Platforms & Services Group. "The addition of aQuantive's technologies and people to the Microsoft portfolio is a core, strategic investment and step forward in our plans to become one of the top two online advertising platforms in the industry." Johnson said.

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Apple debuted a new social networking feature for its iTunes Music Service that would allow customers to share their purchases, reviews, and favorite artists through a customizable widget.

Called My iTunes, the service includes three flash-based widgets that use a customers account information to create customized lists of music based on that users purchase history. The widgets can be placed on a user's blog, Web site, or social networking profile.

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Microsoft plans to dispute an FCC ruling striking down a proposal brought forth by several technology companies that utilizes unused portions of TV spectrum for high-speed Internet. According to the Washington Post, Microsoft will show that the devices would not cause interference.

Apparently, the first prototype demonstrating the use of "white space" to deliver Internet to rural areas was defective, causing the FCC review to show static on existing broadcasts. Microsoft has submitted a new model to the FCC, which it says causes no interference. The unused TV spectrum is set to be opened in early 2009.

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In a move that may have some wondering whether the proverbial left hand knows what the other left hand is doing, Google issued a notice to its Google Video customers last week informing them that it is discontinuing its video sales business on Wednesday. But that wasn't all: The notice explicitly says that videos purchased or rented, and then downloaded to customers' PCs will no longer be viewable on or after August 15.

In other words, if you were to use this page to search for a video within a specific price range today, regardless of what you pay for it, due to DRM restrictions it will not play after Wednesday.

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Last Friday's news that Microsoft's Office Open XML failed to pass a letter ballot for recommendation by the Executive Board of INCITS to the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) without comments, was interpreted yet again by press sources as an outright failure of the standard, and the end of the road for global acceptance. But a check of comments posted by voting members, and a re-read of what rules the INCITS group has posted, says otherwise.

The test which OOXML failed last week was whether it could be recommended by the Board without any concerns being raised by members, regardless of whether they approve or disapprove. BetaNews has been told conflicting accounts of how the rules of INCITS actually work.

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The long-term effects of last week's scathing redress of Qualcomm's conduct by a federal court judge, have yet to be fathomed. In the short term, Qualcomm will probably have to pay rival Broadcom $39.3 million in damages and costs, which is not the treble damages it had been seeking, though it is double.

This tentative award comes late Friday as a result of a jury trial in US District Court in Santa Ana last May, which awarded Broadcom $19.64 million plus costs. There, the jury found Qualcomm guilty of nine counts of infringement on three Broadcom patents under dispute. The jury award entitled Judge James Selna to as much as triple that amount if he found Qualcomm acted with malice.

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With the ballot having closed among members of Technical Committee V1 of the InterNational Committee for Information Technology Standards (INCITS) advisory board over whether to recommend Microsoft's Office Open XML format to the International Standards Organization as a standard, although more members voted aye than nay, an abstention by the IEEE forced the committee not to recommend it without comments.

The 8-7-1 vote deals a setback to Microsoft's hopes to be able to fast-track OOXML's approval by the ISO without being encumbrance. Due to the Committee's unorthodox rules, a 9-7 vote would have meant passage. But the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers' abstention actually dealt a more serious blow than if it had voted no, by kicking in a provision whereby a two-thirds majority of the remaining votes would have been required for the measure to pass: meaning, the vote would have to have been 10-5-1.

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As the technology law blog Groklaw broke late this afternoon, Utah District Court Judge Dale Kimball has handed Novell a partial, but still sizable, chunk of victory in its very, very long-running dispute brought on by SCO Group: Even after an asset purchase agreement between Novell and the Santa Cruz Operation (SCO's predecessor company), it is Novell that owns the copyrights to the UNIX operating system and to UnixWare.

The ruling effectively dismisses two of SCO's claims against Novell in full, along with substantive parts of two other claims, leaving its remaining premises for its multitude of complaints hanging by a tangle of questionable procedural threads, which may not hold up for very long.

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