“The current environment is challenging,” CFO John Killian told analysts during an earnings call Monday, noting that the layoffs we’ve read so much about the past year have badly hurt demand for wired and wireless connections, PC laptop cards and other business services. In fact, so challenging is the environment that Verizon (VZ), which has already eliminated 8,000 jobs in the past year, plans to cut another 8,000 in the second half of this year. “Candidly, we are looking at all other areas of expense,” Killian said.

And what of Verizon’s disputed claims that it plans to add Palm’s (PALM) Pre to its lineup in the near future? The company insists they’re true. During this morning’s conference call, company execs confirmed they plan to carry the Pre “early next year.”

And that makes perfect sense really. A touch with an integrated camera and mic is more an inevitability than anything else at this point. And the rumored September launch jibes with the timing of Apple’s (AAPL) iPod announcements for the past several years.

So, if the rumor proves true, we’ll soon see the touch transform from a media-player to a media-creator and VoIP device as well. Outfitted with Skype or a similar application, the touch would make a slick home phone–and give a nice little sting to AT&T (T).

[Image Credit: TechAu]

“The human imagination is an amazing thing. As children, we spend much of our time in imaginary worlds, substituting toys and make-believe for the real surroundings that we are just beginning to explore and understand. As we play, we learn. And as we grow, our play gets more complicated. We add rules and goals. The result is something we call games.”

– Will Wright, Wired, April 2006

Celebrated game designer Will Wright has a new job: doing whatever he damn well pleases. He’s leaving Electronic Arts (ERTS), the game publisher for which he developed Spore and the wildly successful Sim City and The Sims franchises, to run Stupid Fun Club, an entertainment think tank developing ideas for everything from toys to TV. “The entertainment industry is moving rapidly into an era of revolutionary change,” Wright said in a statement. “Stupid Fun Club will explore new possibilities that are emerging from this sublime chaos and create new forms of entertainment on a variety of platforms.”

Wright and EA each own equal percentages of Stupid Fun Club, and the company has first right of refusal for game concepts that arise from the venture, so this isn’t quite the blow to EA it might at first seem. In fact, it may turn out to be a boon. With the novelty of EA franchises like Madden NFL, Need for Speed and the Sims fading and sales declining, the company desperately needs some big, new, innovative ideas. And who better than Wright to fish them out? Certainly, there must be far better games than Need for Speed XXX waiting to be developed in that “sublime chaos” Wright hopes to explore.

Everyone loves Google. Sounds like so much hyperbole now, but at the time it was essentially a truism.

Eight years later, that’s no longer really the case. Today, Google seems a distorted reflection of the ideals that made it so beloved. Google’s enormous success and relentless pursuit of new markets have inspired some to take an evil-empire view of the company. And Google (GOOG), by virtue of its protean business model and the arrogant righteousness with which it executes on it, perpetuates that view–although the company likely considers those who hold it to be Luddites.

Sure, everyone loved Google in 2001. But in 2008 they fear it. The Google of 2001 was a fascinating corporate anomaly, a company known for its colorful campus, lunar exploration grants and a cafeteria so good it was profiled in Food & Wine. The Google of 2008 is a different beast entirely. It’s a company accused of privacy violations in the states and abroad. It’s a company whose fast-broadening reach has given it unchecked power. And, it’s a company that last month came within three hours of a Department of Justice antitrust suit.

No wonder it’s fallen off the TRUSTe/Ponemon Institute’s list of the top 20 most trusted companies in the United States.

And it’s quite a tumble Google’s taken. The company ranked 10th in the Ponemon opinion surveys conducted in 2006 and 2007. This year it didn’t even merit a ranking. Quite a blow for a company for whom user trust is critical. But then consumer perception is a fickle animal, as Google founder Sergey Brin once noted. “Some say Google is God,” Brin said back in 2003. “Others say Google is Satan.”

Seems the latter camp’s picked up quite a few new members in the ensuing years….

[Image Credit: Google Blogoscoped]

What a lousy week for the digital GOP.

First, John McCain’s domestic policy adviser conjures up a PR disaster by crediting the senator with the development of the Blackberry–odd, since McCain’s not exactly a digital native. Then former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina says U.S. vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s not qualified to run HP. And now, Palin’s Yahoo email account has been hacked and its contents published to Wikileaks. Serves her right for using Yahoo Mail.

What at astonishingly tech-savvy presidential ticket. Keystone Kops on the campaign trail.

The McCain-Palin campaign and Yahoo (YHOO) haven’t yet confirmed the authenticity of the hack or the published emails, but Amy McCorkell, a member of Alaska’s Advisory Board on Alcoholism and Drug Abuse, tells Wired that one of her messages to Palin is among those posted to Wikileaks.

An ugly turn of events for Palin, who’s been criticized recently for using her Yahoo Mail account to conduct official government business. Uglier still if the deletion of Palin’s Yahoo accounts is considered an obstruction of justice.

UPDATE: McCain-Palin 2008 Campaign Manager Rick Davis just issued the following statement on the matter: “This is a shocking invasion of the Governor’s privacy and a violation of law. The matter has been turned over to the appropriate authorities and we hope that anyone in possession of these emails will destroy them. We will have no further comment.”

That response would seem to resolve the authenticity issue. Now whom do we have to bomb to get those emails off the Web?