BoomTown’s week began onstage in front of thousands of chanting women. No, Kara wasn’t filling in for Oprah; she was doing something much cooler.

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Six months. That’s how long it’s going to take Acer to surpass Dell in market share. Speaking at a news conference in London, company President Gianfranco Lanci took a few moments to talk a bit of smack about his rivals. Said Lanci: “Between this quarter and the next, we can finally pass Dell.”

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Google and Verizon Wireless have evidently gotten over their 700-MHz spectrum auction-inspired differences. This morning, the two companies announced an agreement to deliver mobile applications and devices.

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Reporting second-quarter results earlier this year, Microsoft cited “a continued shift to lower-priced netbooks” as one factor degrading its financial performance. The netbook’s ascension meant, and continues to mean, that Windows client-licensing revenue is down. So the company will surely be aghast to learn that netbook sales are growing twice as quickly as those of full-sized laptops.

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Could the global semiconductor industry be heading for a much anticipated recovery? It’s starting to look that way. Chip sales rose in July for the fifth consecutive month on a month-to-month basis, according to the trade group, Semiconductor Industry Association. Which is not to say sales are robust; down 18.2 percent year-over-year, they’re abysmal, but they are showing continuing signs of recovery.

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The world’s largest mobile phone maker has finally entered the PC market. Not a week after confirming its interest in the netbook market, Nokia leapt into it, uncrating the Booklet 3G–a 2.8-pound “mini-laptop.”

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Microsoft is prepping a slimmed down version of the forthcoming Windows 7 operating system to work on so-called netbooks. Asustek is mulling a mini-laptop that runs on Google’s Android OS. Now, Nokia is looking with interest at the netbook market as well.

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It’s been a long time between weekend updates, and a long week without Peter Kafka, All Things D’s intrepid MediaMemo reporter. He returns Monday, and just in time, too, since John Paczkowski and Digital Daily will be out all next week. Must be August–do Europeans still take the whole month off? Or is that an urban legend? No matter; it definitely has not been sleepy around here.

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Microsoft might worry more about Google’s new Chrome OS if it knew what it was. At the company’s Worldwide Partner Conference in New Orleans today, CEO Steve Ballmer said he was mystified by the dual-OS strategy Google seems to have adopted with Chrome. “Who knows what that thing is,” he said.

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Consumers may have trouble distinguishing netbooks from notebooks, but that’s clearly not preventing people from buying them. DisplaySearch, an NPD Group subsidiary, estimates that netbooks will claim a 20 percent share of the world-wide market in 2009.

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So that mysterious touch tablet Apple’s rumored to be developing? It’s about to go into production in advance of an October launch date. This according to a report in the Information Times, which claims that three of Apple’s manufacturing partners–Foxconn, Wintek and Dynapack–have received orders from Apple that suggest the company is building a “netbook” with a 9.7-inch touchscreen.

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So Google has finally copped to developing an operating system–Chrome OS, a software platform “created for people who spend most of their time on the Web, and…designed to power computers ranging from small netbooks to full-size desktop systems.” It is an extraordinary market play. And an unsettling one. For it seeks to place Google, which already collects vast amounts of data about our Internet use, at the very center of our information experience. The privacy implications of that are, of course, horrendous.

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If the netbook market is a race to the bottom, then Sony is bringing up the rear. Not a year after Sony execs disparaged netbooks as undeserving of its premium brand attention, the company announced its token entry into the market: the Vaio W.

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