Tim Conneally

Though "Cyber Monday" was already a painfully outdated-sounding term when the National Retail Federation's Shop.org began using it as a marketing buzzword five years ago, the phrase appears to be sticking around, and Verizon Wireless grabbed a firm hold of it today.

Verizon Wireless bought the hashtag #CyberMonday on Twitter, which turns the term into a "Promoted Trend" that all users of the microblogging service see in their list of trends.

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Today's Wall Street Journal features an article by Christopher Lawton that talks about the difficulty independent app stores face when competing with Apple and Google for developer and consumer attention. Paul Reddick, chief executive of third-party app store HandMark told WSJ that he couldn't simply bet the whole company's fate on independently distributing apps with a presence like Google to compete against.

It may not even be a prudent bet to be in the app store business at all.

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Sony PlayStation 3 users can now download and stream high definition movies from Wal-Mart's video on demand service Vudu, with an application released in the PlayStation Store today.

Unlike Netflix and Hulu Plus, two streaming content services previously available on the video game console, Vudu is not subscription-based. It is instead a pay-per-view or download-to-own service like the "Movies" section in Sony's own PlayStation Store.

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Personal computing giant Acer on Tuesday took the wraps off of three tablet computers it plans to launch in 2011, powered either by Windows 7 or Android.

Since earlier this year, Acer has been rumored to be working on at least two Android-powered tablets for the United States market, and the company today confirmed that it does have Android tablets in the pipleline for an April launch.

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At an event in Arlington, Virginia Tuesday morning, the Federal Communications Commission and Arlington County public safety officials outlined upcoming plans for "Next Generation 911," an update to the United States' 42-year-old national emergency hotline that brings it into the broadband age.

"The current 9-1-1 system is efficient and reliable -- handling more than 650,000 calls a day," FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski said this morning. "Well, 450,000 of those calls are made from mobile phones...Even though mobile phones are the device of choice for most 911 callers, and we primarily use our phones to text, right now, you can't text 911. Let me reiterate that point. If you find yourself in an emergency situation and want to send a text for help, you can pretty much text anyone except a 911 call center."

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Netflix today announced a revision to its subscription tiers that simultaneously increased the price of its DVD-by-mail plans, and introduced a new bottom-tier plan solely for streaming TV and movies.

Similar to the streaming-only plan Netflix launched in Canada in September, Netflix subscribers will pay $7.99 a month for unlimited access to the Netflix Instant Streaming library. Previously, the cheapest plan cost $8.99 per month and included one-at-a-time DVD rentals as well.

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Apple today has rolled out the final version of iOS 4.2 for iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad. The software update brings more than 100 new features to the mobile operating system, including multitasking, folder organization, AirPlay (the ability to stream content from iOS handhelds to Apple TV,) AirPrint (wi-fi printing,) and free Find My iPhone (geolocation of lost iOS hardware.)

In early September, Apple released iOS 4.1 for iPhone and iPod Touch, an update which brought the mobile operating system some highly anticipated features, such as HDR composite photography, HD video uploading, and Game Center functionality. But this update was quickly overshadowed just a week after that, when the beta version of iOS 4.2 was released, revealing some of the functionality that was made available to the public today.

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Amazon today announced that customers can now give Kindle books as gifts to anyone with an e-mail address for consumption on any Kindle app or dedicated e-reader.

In the Kindle Store on Amazon, books have a new button marked "Give as a Gift." When clicked, users are prompted to enter the recipient's email address, and are given the option to include a personal message. The books can be viewed in any Kindle app or device.

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The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is funding a proof-of-concept study at Virginia Tech to create a distributed computing solution that operates in a totally wireless environment and includes multiple computers and handheld devices.

DARPA's interest in distributed computing stretches back more than 40 years, to the beginnings of what we now know as the Internet, when computer resources were scarce.

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At the grand opening of the Microsoft Store in Bellvue Square Thursday, Dell began accepting pre-orders for the Inspiron Duo, a convertible Windows tablet PC that takes a completely new approach to the form factor.

Though there have been a handful of different designs for convertible tablet PCs over the last decade, the design most manufacturers have settled upon involves a rotating joint where the screen meets the chassis. Dell's Inspiron Duo, first debuted at IDF earlier this year, mounts the touchscreen on a bezel so that it can be flipped on its horizontal axis like a spinning target in pinball. When facing one direction, the Duo is a touchable netbook, when facing the other, it's a multi-touch tablet.

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At GSMA Mobile Asia Congress yesterday, Sina Mobile general manager Gaofei Wang said his company's 15-month old microblog Weibo is well on track to hit the 100 million user mark by the second quarter of 2011. The Twitter-like service launched in August 2009, and recently hit the 50 million registered user mark. It took popular microblog Twitter a little more than three years to hit the same milestone.

One week ago, Microsoft's Web services branch MSN announced it had partnered with Sina.com to team up and offer a comprehensive web services package to Chinese users.

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Today, just under one month after last update from PDC10, Microsoft has rolled out Internet Explorer 9 Platform Preview 7.

The last update included new support for two HTML5 technologies: CSS3 2D Transforms, and recognition of HTML5 Semantic Elements as object-type HTMLElement. This time around, the focus is on improving the browser's real-world performance with hardware-accelerated HTML5.

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In the first big partnership announcement related to its upcoming 4G LTE data network, regional wireless network operator Cellular South today said that Samsung will be providing consumer LTE hardware in its upcoming 700 MHz-band LTE network.

In an FCC filing from the Rural Cellular Association (RCA) earlier this week, Cellular South said that it would not be participating in Verizon Wireless' "Rural American Partnership" LTE licensing plan, where regional LTE networks license their coverage out to Verizon.

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Google on Wednesday announced that it will add support for real-time document editing in Google Docs on iOS 3.0+ and Android 2.2 (Froyo) devices.

The feature is an extension of the real-time document editor that Google added last April, and it will be rolled out at docs.google.com over the next few days. The new web-based document editor lets multiple users access the same document or spreadsheet, and changes show up in real time. For Android users, the added benefit of speech-to-text is available, letting users dictate their document changes.

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Hulu Plus, the premium version of popular streaming TV website Hulu designed for set-top boxes and mobile devices, officially launched to the public today.

The service gives subscribers access to every available episode of currently-running TV shows on ABC, Fox, and NBC, and a large catalog of back episodes and movies that they can watch on their PC, mobile device, or connected TV.

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