Tim Conneally

U.S. Wireless network operators AT&T and T-Mobile began selling their first three Windows Phone 7 devices today: the Samsung Focus, HTC Surround, and HTC HD7. These are the first of ten Windows Phone 7 launch devices to be made available to United States customers.

Today is an important day in the life of Microsoft's new mobile operating system; it's the first day it steps out into the U.S. smartphone market where Google's Android and Apple's iOS operating systems have been gaining momentum.

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Skyfire, the mobile Web browser that has made a sensation on all the mobile platforms it's launched upon, will be available again in the iOS App Store after "selling out" five hours after it was made available.

Skyfire has been available for more than two years on Symbian S60, Windows Mobile, and Android, and on all platforms it has been heralded as a triumph. Thanks to server-side rendering, recompression, and transcoding of Web content, Skyfire is able to bring content to mobile devices without the need for certain codecs (such as Flash and Silverlight) on the user's phone.

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Xserve, Apple's eight-year old line of server modules will be discontinued on January 31, 2011, a note from the company said today. The company is moving away from the dedicated server business and pushing its non-portable Macs as servers.

"Mac mini with Snow Leopard Server has become Apple's most popular server system," Apple's Xserve Transition Guide says. "Perfect for small business and workgroups of up to 50 people, a single Mac mini can run the full suite of Mac OS X Server services. A single Mac mini can also be deployed as a single-task server for a larger number of users in a business or education environment. Depending on the workload and number of users, a single Xserve could be replaced with one or multiple Mac mini server systems."

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Popular TV-over-the-Web service Hulu announced its subscription service Hulu Plus will be extended to Sony's 2010 line of Bravia HDTVs, and all PlayStation 3 owners next week. Previously, Hulu Plus on the PlayStation 3 required a PlayStation Plus membership.

With the PlayStation Plus requirement dropped, the price of Hulu Plus has effectively been cut by more than 29%, but the question remains: is it a worthwhile investment for those people looking to finally quit cable?

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More than six months after the Skype 5.0 beta came to Windows machines, the popular VoIP, IM, and video chat client has been updated on OS X.

Like its Windows counterpart, the big addition to Skype 5.0 for Mac is five-way group video chatting; but it's also received some Mac-exclusive treatments. For example, the Mac address book is now integrated into the Skype app, a revamped mini Skype toolbar, and an overall refreshed appearance. Additional new features include: searchable chat history, offline IM, floating contacts monitor, and improved call rejoining.

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It's been just shy of one month since the developer build of Chrome v8 was rolled out in Google's Chrome developer channel, and Chrome 8 beta still hasn't come out yet. Today, v9 of Chrome's dev build has been made available.

When this happens, the public beta version of the previous dev build has usually already been pushed out. However, Chrome 8 beta still is not out in the beta channel.

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ABI Research today made a bold prediction regarding WiMAX adoption in the United States: that Sprint will sell nearly 3 million WiMAX-capable smartphones by the end of 2010.

"Sprint's 4G smartphone sales have been partially responsible for its recent subscriber growth. ABI Research forecasts that the carrier will ship almost three million 4G handsets for its WiMAX network by the end of 2010,"
ABI Research director Philip Solis said in a statement today. "That number is greater than many observers expected."

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This week, government technology and communications contractor ManTech announced it had scored a $68 million contract to build a cellular network for the U.S. Army in Afghanistan.

ManTech will design and build the Expeditionary Cellular Communications Service (ECCS) in Afghanistan, which will include both permanent and moveable cell towers and the infrastructure to provide both voice and data coverage to forces stationed there.

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Google TV launched with a great deal of both fanfare and controversy in the United States, and products supporting the new Internet TV platform are available for purchase in the States now. Interested users in Europe and Asia, however, have to wait until an unspecified time in 2011 for the service.

So to capitalize on that downtime, Yahoo is stepping up the presence of its one year old Yahoo Connected TV service, which offers consumers a streaming video and app interface not too far from Google TV on televisions from Samsung, Toshiba, Sony, LG, Vizio and HiSense, 6 of the top 10 global TV manufacturers.

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In FileForum, We're hosting a piece of freeware you may have heard about after it became the first TechCrunch Disrupt Cup winner back in May, Soluto.

Soluto, in short, lets users quickly and easily customize the Windows boot process by breaking applications into three categories: Ones that are completely unnecessary to the boot process, ones that are potentially removable, and ones that are absolutely necessary to boot Windows. Soluto collects anonymous user data to give you an idea of what other users do with their applications, so if you have a piece of software that lots of other people pause during startup, you're presented with a pie chart telling you what percentage pauses, and what percentage keeps it in the boot process.

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ComScore's most recent qSearch Web search market share analysis gave Google 66% of the core search business, with the closest competitor, Yahoo trailing by 50%.

Of the more than 16 billion explicit core searches conducted in September, Google handled 10.6 billion of them. Yahoo sites handled 2.7 billion, Microsoft sites took care of 1.8 billion, Ask Network fielded 593 million, and AOL sites took 362 million.

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Today, Windows Live Hotmail users will begin to be able to send email from other existing email addresses while using Hotmail.

In the Hotmail Options menu under the heading "Sending/Receiving email from other accounts," users can add their other webmail addresses, and then use hotmail to send and receive messages.

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Keeping true to the promises made by Sprint and Clearwire in October, the New York City WiMAX network was "switched on" today, along with Tampa, Florida, Trenton and New Brunswick, New Jersey, and Hartford and New Haven, Connecticut.

"Sprint is the first national wireless carrier to make 4G a reality for our customers and with the addition of these six new markets we are now in 61 cities, including Chicago, Baltimore and Houston, and are growing. By the end of the year Sprint 4G plans to light up several major new markets including Los Angeles, San Francisco, Miami, Denver and Washington DC to name a few," Matt Carter, president of Sprint 4G said in a statement today.

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Every year, cable companies have to re-negotiate their carriage fees with broadcasters. These negotiations are essentially an evaluation of how much certain channels are worth to the cable company, and then the cable company agreeing to pay a certain amount of money to the broadcasters in exchange for the right to feature those channels in their subscription packages.

In a power play to show the value of its stations, Fox blocked Dish Network from broadcasting 19 Fox Regional Sports Channels for the entire month of October while the two companies negotiated their contracts.

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The Federal Communications Commission announced Thursday that Verizon Wireless will be paying a $25 million settlement to the U.S. Treasury, and a refund to some 15 million customers totaling at least $52.8 million as an answer to the "mystery fees" it has been charging its customers for the last three years.

"Today's consent decree sends a clear message to American consumers: The FCC has got your back," said FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski today. "People shouldn't find mystery fees when they open their phone bills -- and they certainly shouldn't have to pay for services they didn't want and didn't use. In these rough economic times, every $1.99 counts."

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