Tim Conneally

GenosTV, a company billing itself as the first "virtual cable TV provider" is looking for beta testers for its IPTV platform. The service will differentiate itself in three ways: by not requiring a dedicated set-top box, by offering complete à la carte pricing, and by not being an on-demand service like Hulu and its competitors.

The service aims to be a platform agnostic linear streaming service, so any connected TV, media player, or set top box will be able to access the GenosTV service.

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HP Chairman, CEO and President Mark Hurd resigned from his positions in the company on Friday after sexual harassment claims were brought against him by a former HP contractor.

"As the investigation progressed, I realized there were instances in which I did not live up to the standards and principles of trust, respect and integrity that I have espoused at HP and which have guided me throughout my career. After a number of discussions with members of the board, I will move aside and the board will search for new leadership." Hurd's official statement said Friday. "This is a painful decision for me to make after five years at HP, but I believe it would be difficult for me to continue as an effective leader at HP and I believe this is the only decision the board and I could make at this time. I want to stress that this in no way reflects on the operating performance or financial integrity of HP."

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Google on Friday officially announced it has acquired Slide Inc., confirming rumors circulating earlier in the week. Slide creates entertainment products that tie in with social networks and online communities such as SuperPoke! and its family of related games, Top Fish, and FunSpace.

"For Google, the Web is about people, and we're working to develop open, transparent and interesting (and fun!) ways to allow our users to take full advantage of how technology can bring them closer to friends and family and provide useful information just for them," David Glazer, Engineering Director at Google said Friday.

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Just ahead of the August recess Thursday, the U.S. Senate passed a $600 million border security bill introduced by Senators Chuck Schumer (D- NY) and Claire McCaskill (D- MO). The bill, according to McCaskill's press office, will "raise fees on a handful of foreign corporations that exploit U.S. visa programs to import workers from abroad."

"What a relief that the Senate is still capable of passing measures that are really needed without playing political games," McCaskill said in a statement.  "America must do a better job of securing our borders. This bill will help in a big way."

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Thursday, the Federal Communications Commission said it had called off private discussions with network operators, service providers, and Internet lobbyists focused on network neutrality legislation. Participants included representatives from Google, AT&T, Verizon, Skype, NCTA, and the Open Internet Coalition.

"We have called off this round of stakeholder discussions," FCC Chief of Staff Edward Lazarus said on Thursday. "It has been productive on several fronts, but has not generated a robust framework to preserve the openness and freedom of the Internet -- one that drives innovation, investment, free speech, and consumer choice.  All options remain on the table as we continue to seek broad input on this vital issue."

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The first two "active content" apps for the Amazon Kindle e-reader have been released for download, consisting of the word games "Every Word," and "Shuffled Row."

In the first weeks of 2010, Web retailer Amazon released the Kindle Development Kit to partners to begin work on interactive applications for the popular e-reader. Formerly, the Kindle platform supported only a very limited amount of interactivity, which included note-taking, highlighting, and later, the ability to send clips and quotations to social networks Twitter and Facebook. Early attempts at games for the platform had to be corralled into the device's experimental browser, which made for a poor overall experience.

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Just shy of one month before Internet Explorer 9 is expected to launch in beta, Microsoft Wednesday released the fourth and final IE9 platform preview. The release is meant to give developers and designers an opportunity to observe the enhancements to the Internet Explorer platform so they can adjust their sites to take advantage of the new technologies it uses.

Microsoft's strategy for IE9 has been to make it synonymous with the HTML5 standard, and to give the development community something new to work with about every eight weeks.

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The patent infringement cases between Microsoft and Salesforce in both the U.S. District Courts of the Western District of Washington and in Delaware have been settled, Microsoft announced today.

Last May, Microsoft sued CRM software company Salesforce for nine counts of patent infringement, and Salesforce followed with its own countersuit a month later, saying Microsoft's .NET platform and SharePoint products violated five Salesforce patents.

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4G network operator Clearwire Wednesday launched a WiMAX hotspot especially designed for Apple's iOS-powered mobile devices called the Clear iSpot.

The iSpot connects to WiMAX signals and provides a WEP/WPA/WPA2-protected hotspot with up to a 150 foot range. It weighs 4.5 ounces, offers about 4 hours of battery life, can connect with up to eight iOS devices simultaneously, and is available until August 5th for a promotional charge of only $29.99 with no contract. The MSRP is $99.99.

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Long-running Voice over IP company Vonage released a mobile app for iOS and Android Wednesday called "Vonage Talk Free" that lets users call each other for free over 3G or Wi-Fi. Calls placed over 3G will incur the usual carrier data charges.

Vonage has taken a new and brilliant approach to getting customers hooked into its VoIP architecture. Instead of requiring a Vonage account to make calls, Vonage Talk Free requires only a user's Facebook account, and calls can only be made to other Facebook users with the mobile app installed on their phone. Phone numbers are not assigned, so the spread of the app will be largely done by Facebook's half billion users sharing it amongst themselves.

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Microsoft's Bing Maps unveiled a host of new features and functions this week, including the public beta of a revamped user experience with new visuals and dynamic map labels, and a handful of new Bing Map Apps submitted for the King of the Maps competition. One of the newest apps now ties Bing Maps into the OpenStreetMap community, the online map comprised entirely of free and open geographic data, edited by users in the fashion of Wikipedia.

"We've taken the OSM data as is, created tiles to fit our tile schema and are hosting it on our Windows Azure [Content Delivery Network]," Chris Pendleton said in the Bing Maps community blog. "This means, pure OSM data coming down at screaming fast speeds from the massive Windows Azure infrastructure built out to support globally distributed applications…like Bing Maps."

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Tuesday, BlackBerry maker Research in Motion confirmed that it will not provide a backdoor into its encrypted messages for the purposes of local government surveillance, despite the demands of certain countries.

Since 2007, Research in Motion has had difficulties building a BlackBerry service in India, due to the Indian Ministry of Telecommunications' demands for an unencrypted e-mail messaging system. The Ministry expressed concern that the BlackBerry messaging system could serve as a method of communication for dissidents who want to be untraceable.

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AT&T and Research in Motion Tuesday morning officially debuted the new BlackBerry Torch, the first BlackBerry to use the portrait slider form factor and the first device to launch with BlackBerry 6 OS.

After many months of unofficial reports and spy camera shots of the device, today the Torch officially went live. It features the standard BlackBerry keyboard hidden under a 3.2" capacitive touchscreen similar to the Palm Pre. It has 512MB of RAM and 4GB of built-in memory expandable via microSD, a 5 megapixel camera, Bluetooth 2.1, GPS, and 802.11 b/g/n. The wireless radios inside include UMTS: 2100/1900/850/800 MHz, and GSM/GPRS/EDGE: 850/900/1800/1900MHz.

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Independent tech analyst group Canalys issued its own analysis of the smartphone industry on Monday, which found that Android-based handsets experienced an incredible 886% growth worldwide during the second quarter of 2010.

In July, market research firm GfK announced it had tracked a 350% growth in Android shipments in the UK, bringing it to a 13.2% share of the postpaid market. During the same quarter in the United States, Canalys says Android shipments increased by 851%, which dove it to a 34% market share, ahead of both the iPhone and BlackBerry devices.

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Cloudmark today announced an update to its e-mail filtering software for Outlook, Outlook Express, Thunderbird 3, Windows Mail, and Windows Live Mail. The software, formerly known as Cloudmark Desktop, is now called Cloudmark DesktopOne, and unlike previous versions, the shareware version can now be used in Basic mode for an unlimited length of time.

Cloudmark Desktop was formerly available as a fully-featured 15 day trial, but now, DesktopOne limits the number of inboxes monitored to just one IMAP, POP, or webmail account at a time, and gives users just one Spam folder, but does so with no time limit. The inbox being protected by the software can be changed at any time as well.

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