Skype founders Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis have given a name to their new Internet television startup, which formerly went by the code-name The Venice Project. Now officially dubbed Joost, the company intends to combine a TV-like experience with the flexibility of the Web.

Boasting itself as a "secure, efficient, piracy-proof Internet platform," Joost hopes to lure television networks and content providers to distribute their videos online, although specifics of the technology are still under wraps. What is known is that Joost will make use of peer-to-peer streaming.

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Yesterday, with a minimum of fanfare, the member organizations of the PCI Special Interest Group (PCI-SIG) ratified its 2.0 draft for the PCI Express bus standard. On the surface, it seems the vote marks a victory for speed, with the interconnection rate on the bus doubling to 5 billion transfers per second. But just that fact alone could trigger a generational shift in motherboards, the end result of which could be tremendously reduced costs, and more rapid "mainstreaming" of current top-of-the-line features.

Understanding why this could be so takes you on a virtual road trip through the global information economy.

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Customers of the DVR service TiVo began reporting over the weekend that the fast forward ads which appear during commercial breaks have reappeared. The ads appeared last in March 2005, when the company was testing new ways to generate money from the service.

However, TiVo has made changes in response to the initial customer backlash. The ads only appear when a user fast-forwards through a commercial that matches the pop-up ad's content. Additionally, when the commercial is played at regular speed, a flashing green "thumbs up" key is placed on the screen.

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Subscribers of the movie service Netfilx will gain the capability to stream movies to their PCs. About 1,000 films and television shows would be made available through the service, which will be rolled out to current customers over the next six months.

Netflix is facing an ever more competitive Blockbuster, which recently added new rental options to lure customers away from its bigger rival. The streaming feature will be provided at no additional cost above the standard monthly charge.

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At a wisp past the stroke of twelve tonight, in boroughs scattered like seeds throughout the realm where humans and beasts alike share free parking, shopkeepers and merchants will unlock their gates and conduct business under the moonlight. "The Burning Crusade" will at last begin, and players of the ingenious and massively successful role-playing game will have their first chance to finally, after years of torment, upgrade their "60" characters to "70s."

All right, so I'm a little rusty with my gothic literary motifs. In any event, at three Fry's Electronics locations in Sunnyvale, Fountain Valley, and Anaheim, and at the GameStop location in Universal City, developers of the most anticipated expansion package in the history of multi-player games will be on hand late tonight to sign the first copies of "World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade."

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Microsoft announced Friday it has hit the 100 million installation milestone for Internet Explorer 7, a figure that makes the new browser the second most used behind IE6. Web analytics firm WebSideStory reports that 25 percent of all Web surfers in the United States are now running IE7.

"We expect these numbers to continue to rise as we complete our final localized versions, scale up AU distribution, and with the consumer availability of Windows Vista on January 30, 2007," wrote IE group program manager Tony Chor on the IEBlog. Because IE7 is built into Windows Vista, Microsoft expects adoption rates to jump further as consumers upgrade. Already, Microsoft is preparing to discuss the next version of Internet Explorer at the company's MIX conference that begins April 30.

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T-Mobile will be introducing a white version of the BlackBerry Pearl, while at the same time bringing the price down to $149 with a two-year contract. The Pearl has quickly become the carrier's top-selling smartphone.

The phone will be available exclusively through T-Mobile, as was the original version of the phone when it was released last September. It is widely credited with catapulting Research In Motion, the maker of BlackBerry devices, into the consumer segment.

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Microsoft is preparing to launch its next-generation console in China in the next few months, according to industry sources. As part of the process, the company is currently working with the Chinese government to gain approval and will be prepping sales channels shortly.

Preparations have been ongoing since late last year, according to Reuters. The biggest roadblock to the availability of the Xbox 360 within the country would be the government itself. Video games are reviewed by the government before being approved for sale in China.

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A Colorado private investigator has pleaded guilty to identity theft and conspiracy charges, both felony counts, in association with the boardroom leak scandal that shook electronics maker Hewlett Packard to its core. Bryan Wagner, 29, admitted that he had used social security numbers and personal information of board members and press to gain access to confidential information such as phone records.

HP has declined to comment since Wagner is not a direct employee of the company. Wagner himself was unavailable to comment. Four others have been charged in the scandal on similar charges. They include former chairwoman Patricia Dunn, former ethics Officer Kevin Hunsaker, and security contractor Ronald DeLia.

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Any possibility of the Internet being turned over to a UN-controlled authority lost serious momentum on Friday. The newly appointed head of the International Telecommunications Union believes things are fine the way they are.

At a news conference, Hamadoun Toure said that better cooperation was best and setting up a new system would be difficult to implement and very controversial. The ITU will focus on cyber security and closing the "digital divide" between countries, he said.

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During BetaNews' CES coverage this week, we examined the integration of AOL Video accessibility into Sony's high-end Bravia video components, particularly through the Bravia Internet Video Link. AOL Video has scrambled in a very short period of time to embrace the burgeoning world of user-generated content, which recently earned its own media industry abbreviation: UGC.

In our segment on Bravia, I asked our Senior CES Analyst, Sharon Fisher, how long such an interface between Bravia and AOL Video could last, particularly in light of the fact that the service was working to make a living for itself from distributing what I called "people's low-definition, amateur backyard animal videos." Later, in providing an example, I used the metaphor "possums chasing squirrels," which I admit to having used several times before, sometimes in ordinary conversation.

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In examining the margins between Sony's end-of-2006 sales goals for PlayStation 3 and the actual numbers reported this morning by NPD Group - the accounting for which, Sony told BetaNews today, makes sense if you count those PS3s still on trucks - Parks Associates analyst Michael Cai told BetaNews there could be more serious factors at play...or at work.

There were several factors behind Sony's debacle, said Michael Cai, an analyst with Parks Associates.

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In a statement to BetaNews this afternoon, a spokesperson for Sony Computer Entertainment of America said that NPD Group estimates of 687,300 PlayStation 3 consoles sold in the US - a figure which Sony did not deny - effectively meets the company's most recently stated sales goal of one million units in North America.

"As we announced on January 8, 2007, we met our previously stated goal of 1M units in North America by December 31, 2006," the spokesperson told BetaNews. The spokesperson goes on to point out that NPD Group's numbers fail to take into account units sold in Canada (which Sony estimates at 90,000), units sold in the final week of the year (whose sales figures Sony estimates to be 170,000) [CORRECTION: By "last week," we've now ascertained that Sony meant "the last week of the year 2006," not "this past week"], plus an estimated "units at retail that are in transit or on their way to from the warehouse to the store" (approximately 100,000 units).

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It has been a few days since Steve Jobs took the lid off the iPhone. Now that Apple's stock price has come back to earth, and the millions of the Mac faithful have had their chance to drool over the highly anticipated device, is it really that great?

PERSPECTIVE Everyone saw it coming. Following the disaster of the Motorola iTunes phone, it was all but a certainty that Apple would come back and prove that it could indeed produce a phone with the beauty of the iPod.

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Political blog The Huffington Post wants to try something in 2008 that's never been done before: an online presidential debate. Run by conservative-turned-liberal political commentator Arianna Huffington, the site has quickly grown into one of the most widely read political blogs on the web. If it becomes a reality, it could solidify the Internet and the so-called 'netroots' as a serious force in politics.

Even though the site focuses more on liberal-leaning commentary, Huffington wants both sides to participate. Thus, both sides have been contacted about the prospect of such an event. Invitations have been sent out to likely candidates, although none have formally confirmed they would participate in any online debate.

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