The majority of Windows Mobile users have no idea what operating system is running on their phones, a recent survey from the CFI Group found. Microsoft is hoping to change that with the release of Windows Mobile 6.5 and the opening of Windows Mobile Marketplace, its long-awaited answer to Apple’s iTunes App Store.
Development for Palm’s new webOS platform will begin in earnest come winter with the official opening of the company’s developer program. At a small gathering in San Francisco Monday night, Palm said its developer program will open in December and when it does, it will be a different beast entirely from rival programs by Apple, Google et al.
“Want 5 times more 3G coverage? There’s a map for that.” That’s the cheeky slogan of a new Verizon ad reportedly set to debut during tonight’s Monday Night Football game. Riffing on the tagline from Apple’s iPhone commercials, it essentially turns widespread complaints about the quality, coverage and speed of AT&T’s network into one grand Verizon marketing campaign.
As launch dates go, the timing could not be better. Less than a week after Google’s Gmail suffered its fourth service disruption this year, IBM announced a competing Web mail service intended to undercut it. Called LotusLive iNotes, it’s an email, calendaring, and contact management system aimed squarely at the enterprise space Google has been so diligently courting.
Microsoft’s efforts to bolster Bing’s market share are no longer paying off as well as they have been. After months of slight but steady increases in market share, Bing’s percentage of the search market in the U.S. and abroad fell in September for the first time.
Get ready for metered broadband. Speaking at the FTTH Conference and Expo in Houston Tuesday, Verizon Communications CTO Richard Lynch said the broadband industry is headed toward a pricing paradigm shift that will see it embrace the usage-based pricing common to the wireless broadband industry.
Palm has begun rolling out webOS 1.2.0, a minor point release to its new flagship operating system, which boasts some 70 improvements. Notably absent from this update: The reenabling of iTunes synchronization, which Apple spannered when it released iTunes 9.0 earlier this month.
Google is violating the Net neutrality principles it so strongly advocates–according to AT&T, anyway. In a letter to the head of the Federal Communications Commission’s Wireline Competition Bureau Friday, the telephone company described Google as “one of the most noisome trumpeters of so-called net-neutrality” and asked the FCC to order it to “play by the same rules as its competitors.”
Evidently, Google’s efforts to create a new CAPTCHA system that requires people to rotate images until they’re upright aren’t moving as quickly as the company would like. Because this morning, the search giant said it had acquired reCAPTCHA, developer of the Web’s preeminent CAPTCHA technology.
While the highlight 
of the week was undoubtedly Apple’s Rock and Roll event on Wednesday featuring Steve Jobs 2.0, that was only the anodized aluminum, candy-colored, video-shooting cherry on top of another week of tech sector reporting from All Things Digital.
The week that took us from August to September was one for the books over at BoomTown, especially if you’re 12.
Kara spent Monday morning at Activision Blizzard, where they are pushing forward with the entire Guitar Hero line, even as the game industry faces a nearly 50 percent decline in U.S. sales this year. Kara got to play hero to several of the forthcoming releases, including previewing the much anticipated DJ Hero console.
Yahoo’s search advertising partnership with Microsoft and its embrace of Bing don’t mean the company has given up on its search business. During a presentation at its headquarters in Sunnyvale, Calif., Monday, Yahoo unveiled a number of new features in its search product that show it’s intent on competing with its new partner in the only way it can–by mimicking the features of Microsoft’s new Bing search engine, and Google’s search engine as well.
Google’s acquisitive appetite has returned. This morning the company said it will acquire On2 Technologies, which develops video compression technology, for $106.5 million. A stock-for-stock transaction, the deal will see each share of On2 exchanged for 60 cents worth of Google class A common stock.
John Paczkowski has been poking fun at the tech industry and the personalities that drive it since 1997. From 1999 to 2007, he wrote the award-winning tech news Web log Good Morning Silicon Valley for the San Jose Mercury News, Silicon Valley's daily newspaper. Read more »
Here is a statement of my ethics and coverage policies. It is more than most of you want to know, but, in the age of suspicion of the media, I am laying it all out.
12:58 AM: Breakfast: Two schools of fish from Tokyo Bay. Calories: 782,000. How I was feeling when I ate this: confused, irradiated, hating my size.
11:37 AM: Exercise: “Taxi Stomp” (alternating legs, for 30 blocks). Calories burned: 148,900,183.
1983. The Beatles announce their first tour in thirteen years, but likewise announce that Michael Jackson will be going on tour with them as a one gigantic mega-concert event.
Best video mashup ever.
A Facebook Memorial
Wow.
Worth it for the Rickrolling photo alone.
Excellent.
Flughumor!
… you vacuous, toffee-nosed, malodorous perverts
Stephen Fry and zoologist Mark Carwardine meet the kakapo — a fat, flightless and very randy rare parrot.
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