Tim Conneally

Following last week's debut of "Kindle Singles," a new shorter-form publishing format exclusively for Amazon's Kindle e-reader, book retailer Borders has announced its own blogger-centric e-reader publishing platform called "Borders -- Get Published."

Powered by BookBrewer, "Get Published" will let independent authors publish and sell their e-books through the Borders e-book store in a quick and easy fashion. Borders is specifically targeting bloggers with this service, promising "Blog to e-book in 10 minutes."

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Very soon, the first build of Opera 11 will be released, and with it will come the long-awaited support for browser extensions.

Yesterday at Up North Web, Opera Software's global press day in Oslo, Norway, it was confirmed that Opera 11 will support browser extensions, the plug-ins that users can incrementally add to their browser to customize the experience. All of Opera's competitors: Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, and now Safari, each offer their own extension architecture already.

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Netflix and Dolby Laboratories today announced that Netflix Instant streaming will be enabled with 5.1 channel surround beginning on October 18.

The first consumer device to support the higher quality audio will be the Sony PlayStation 3, but Netflix says the feature will eventually come to more hardware, like the many connected HDTVs, Blu-ray players, set-top boxes, video game consoles, and mobile handsets supporting Netflix streaming today.

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Verizon Wireless and Apple today announced that the iPad will be available in 2,000 Verizon Wireless Stores on Thursday, October 28th.

But don't jump out of your skin just yet, it's not a CDMA iPad.

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Mountain View software company Intuit has launched a new version of its Quicken personal finance software that offers a slick new interface that comes from the Mint.com product engineering team the company acquired one year ago.

For the 20th anniversary of Quicken, Intuit has taken big steps to make the software more approachable for new users, more in tune with online financial services, and better at automatically categorizing transaction data it receives.

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Microsoft and Facebook Wednesday unveiled some new search tools for Bing which integrate data from a user's circle of friends into Bing's search results.

In the Bing blog on Wednesday, Microsoft Senior Vice President of online services Satya Nadella said 50% of users consider their friends' opinions when making a decision online. Bing is trying to capitalize on this by incorporating the "likes" of a user's friend list into search results.

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On 10/20/2010 at 10am Pacific, Apple will be hosting an event that promises to take a look at the Mac OS platform, which has been suffering a decreased amount of attention since iOS became a multi-device platform for Apple.

In typical Apple fashion, the press invitation, shown above, gives a clue as to the subject of the event. This time around, it's a picture of a Lion peering around the Apple logo. This image fits into Apple's OS X nomenclature, which has included Cheetah, Puma, Jaguar, Panther, Tiger, Leopard, and Snow Leopard.

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The latest developer preview of Google Chrome 8 has been released through the Chromium Dev channel, giving users a taste of the browser's improved GPU acceleration feature, better stability, and a handful of new labs including Google Instant in the browser's omnibar/omnibox search fields.

Many of the interesting features in this build are deactivated by default, so users must go to About : Labs to switch them on. This includes the GPU Accelerated HTML5 Canvas 2D option, and the Google Instant in Omnibar feature.

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Consumer electronics company Sony on Tuesday evening introduced its first Google TV-powered line of products it's calling Sony Internet TV. The line includes four LCD televisions and a connected Blu-ray player which Sony put up for pre-order today.

The Sony Internet TV line of LCD TVs includes a 24-inch model for $599 (NSX-24GT1,) a 32-inch model for $799 (NSX-32GT1,) a 40-inch model for $999 (NSX-40GT1,) and a 46-inch model for $1399 (NSX-46GT1.) All models carry just about the same specs, with the exception of the backlighting. All include edge-LED backlighting except the cheapest model, which uses CCFL. Otherwise, they're all equipped with an Intel processor, built-in Wi-Fi, four HDMI ports and four USB ports, support for Android apps, and the ability to watch TV and run apps at the same time with "dual view" mode.

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This week, at Robotics Rodeo 2010 at Fort Benning, Georgia, researchers from the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) will be showing off a system they have developed to let airborne and ground-based robots communicate and interact with one another without the need for a human intermediary.

The system is called CUSTD, which stands for Collaborative Unmanned Systems Technology Demonstrator, and it teams two model aircraft with nine-foot wingspans, with an unmanned Porsche Cayenne SUV. Utilizing a complex system of sensors, cameras, and computers, the two aircraft can, for example, search for a target and mark its position with GPS coordinates which are sent back to the unmanned car, which can then navigate to the target using the shortest accessible route.

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Symantec today opened the public beta of Norton 360 5.0, the latest version of the company's end-to-end security suite. This beta builds upon the updated versions of Norton Internet Security and Norton Antivirus released in September, and improves the usability and performance in the backup and tune-up features exclusive to Norton 360, redesigns the UI, revamps the online backup user experience, and integrates with Norton's free online tools.

New Features

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Amazon on Tuesday announced it will be trying a new format for the Kindle e-reader which it is calling the "Kindle Single."

Longer than a magazine article, and shorter than a full novel, Amazon says the Kindle Single could be the "perfect, natural length to lay out a single killer idea...well researched, well argued and well illustrated."

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The latest version of Sony's desktop video editing and production software, Vegas Pro 10, launched in retail on Monday, the company announced.

Sony's Vegas Pro is a full-featured video production suite comparable to Avid Composer, Adobe Premiere, and Apple's Final Cut. While it may not have quite the level of prestige among professionals that its competitors have, Vegas retains a strong presence among the consumer/prosumer segment thanks to the widespread retail availability of the lower-tier Vegas Studio software.

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Monday morning, Microsoft revealed the first handful of Windows Phone 7 devices. These nine new handsets will be available in North America on November 8th, and in Europe, and Asia on October 21. As a bit of a bonus, HTC announced an additional WP7 phone which will arrive a little bit after the first batch, some time early next year.

Microsoft has set a pretty high bar in terms of a baseline device specs. They are all on par with the top-of-the-line devices on Google's Android platform, offering 1GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon processors, five megapixel cameras, and each with a price around $200 US.

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American automobile company Ford today announced it is now releasing its software development kit to developers looking to make their smartphone apps compatible with Ford SYNC's voice command system.

SYNC debuted in the 2008 Ford Focus, and after it proved to be much more than a sales gimmick, discussion that cars could be the next big platform for apps began to arise.

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