Tim Conneally

Leading media research company Nielsen posted a report Monday called "What Americans Do Online..." that details how U.S. Web users spend their time online. According to the research, use of social networks has risen 43% since last year, and they now take up more than a third of the total time an average user spends online.

"Despite the almost unlimited nature of what you can do on the web, 40 percent of U.S. online time is spent on just three activities: social networking, playing games and emailing leaving a whole lot of other sectors fighting for a declining share of the online pie," Nielsen analyst Dave Martin said in the company's blog.

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Microsoft's Mac business unit today released the final pricing of Office for Mac 2011 when it is released in late October. The productivity suite will come in three different editions, and will include a couple of multi-pack options.

Office for Mac Home & Student Edition will come with Word, PowerPoint, Excel and Messenger 8 and will be available for $119 for a single install, or as a Family Pack (3 installs) for $149. This particular edition does not include Outlook for Mac, but it can be added through an online upgrade program.

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Thursday, at the annual Microsoft Financial Analyst meeting, CEO Steve Ballmer gave a somewhat baffling explanation about Microsoft's position on tablet/slate computing that seems to run contradictory to the strategy of one of the company's biggest manufacturing partners.

Though Microsoft is focusing this year on Kinect, Bing, and Office as areas of consumer growth, the biggest consumer product for Microsoft, beyond all others combined, is Windows.

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At the National Press Club in Washington, DC Thursday, the X PRIZE Foundation launched its $1.4 million oil spill clean-up competition called the Wendy Schmidt Oil Cleanup X Challenge. The Foundation, which currently also has a $10 million challenge to develop a 100 mile per gallon car, first announced this competition at an independently organized TED event in June dedicated to the Deepwater Horizon oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico.

But it was not announced at that time who the benefactor of the prize would be. Today, it was announced that the funds for the challenge have been put up by none other than Wendy Schmidt, wife of Google CEO Eric Schmidt, and president of the Schmidt Family Foundation.

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While the superstar of the Black Hat USA 2010 security conference in Las Vegas this week was Barnaby Jack from IOActive showing off techniques for "Jackpotting" Windows CE-based ATMs, research from security company Lookout has had a much broader impact on consumers, especially those using Android smartphones.

Lookout's "App Genome Project" is an ongoing study of the millions of mobile applications available, the user data that they collect, and threats they present. During their research for the project, the team found a series of simple Wallpaper apps in the Android Market which were suspiciously collecting more data than they needed to.

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Shaumberg, Illinois electronics company Motorola Inc. on Thursday posted its earnings for the second quarter of 2010. The company's total revenue was $5.41 billion, which beat Wall Street's estimates of $5.19 billion, but was still down against last year's $5.49 billion. The company reported a strong flow of cash for the quarter, with overall earnings of $162 million, up sharply from last year's $26 million. Total sales, however, were down some $83 million against the same quarter last year.

Of Motorola's four divisions: Mobile Devices, Home, Enterprise Mobility Solutions, and Networks, the latter two divisions were the main drivers of profit for the company.

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Amazon, online retailer and e-book pioneer announced Thursday the latest generation of its popular 6" Kindle e-book reader.

The Kindle received an overhaul similar to the one its big brother Kindle DX got on the first of July, with a new graphite chassis, improved screen resolution, and lower price.

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Facebook today officially introduced a new feature called Facebook Questions, the social network's take on crowdsourced question and answer sites like Yahoo Answers, Quora, and Hunch.

The new feature, still classified as a beta, lets users ask questions of the vast Facebook community of more than 500 million simply by typing them into a new field labeled "What do you want to know?"

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This week, Yahoo Japan announced it reached a deal with competitor Google to utilize its search engine technology and advertising and distribution platform while retaining its current appearance. Despite protests from Microsoft, Japanese fair trade organizations today said the deal does not appear to create monopolistic conditions.

Historically, Yahoo and Google have dominated the Japanese search market, and Tuesday, Microsoft Vice President and Deputy General Counsel Dave Heiner said the deal would create a search monopoly for Google.

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Today, Panasonic announced its first consumer camcorder capable of capturing both 2D HD and 3D video, the $1,399 SDT750.

Panasonic was one of the most vocal early supporters of 1080p 3D. The Japanese consumer electronics company threw its weight behind James Cameron's Avatar, and commenced work on its 3D Blu-ray authoring center at Panasonic Hollywood Labs in 2008.

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On Tuesday, Apple launched its second multi-touch peripheral, the Magic Trackpad, which elicited an immediate reaction from tech spectators. TechCrunch's MG Siegler declared it to be the harbinger of the end of the mouse era, and 90% of the more than 700 readers who answered Macworld's informal poll "would you buy this input device?" said they would.

A spark in multi-touch trackpad interest could prove to be a great boon for Wacom, the company synonymous with pen and touch tablet interfaces. For nearly a year, Wacom has had its own multi-touch trackpad called Bamboo Touch on the market, which is $20 cheaper than Apple's Magic Trackpad, offers similar functionality, and does not require two AA batteries (because it runs on a powered USB connection instead.)

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Bangalore, India-based software startup Hidden Reflex has launched the beta of a new Web browser for Windows called Epic. The new browser is heavily focused on three areas: In-browser user multitasking, customization through plug-ins, and mashing up mobile Web content with full Web content.

Epic has a relatively predictable design across the top, with tabbed browsing, a standard address bar and neighboring search bar; but the real difference with Epic is the long list of standard tools shown as icons in a sidebar on the left hand side of the browser window. Here, some truly unique features have been incorporated as gadgets that give the distinct feeling of a browser-based OS.

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Last Week, the future of Qualcomm's FLO TV mobile TV business came into question after CEO Paul Jacobs said the chipmaker was "engaged in discussions with a number of partners," about what to do with the asset-rich service. The company recently gave Betanews some further information on what to expect from MediaFLO and FLO TV moving forward.

In talking with GigaOM, Jacobs said "We want to see FLO continue so it's not like we'd want to sell the spectrum, but there are certainly people who would buy it for the spectrum. The spectrum is extremely valuable. So what that means is there's a high bar. The business that's generated through that spectrum, by the broadcast system needs to be valuable too…whether it's an operator, a content player, a web company -there's a wide range of companies that could make use of [MediaFLO] and deal with the business model where they are trying to get a lot of content down to a lot of people and they can't really afford to do it on the cellular network."

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Brick and Mortar retailers haven't quite figured out the perfect way to utilize location-based "check in" services like Foursquare, Gowalla, and Latitude, but mobile rewards app CardStar today presented a new option for retailers.

Retailers like Starbucks, Domino's Pizza, Chili's, Ann Taylor, and Sephora have all tried promotions where the people who check in most at their stores (the "mayors") get special coupons or prizes.

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After Apple temporarily closed down its Web-based store on Tuesday, the company announced its annual desktop product line refresh, which included new Mac Pro, iMac, and Cinema Display products.

Apple's new iMacs are equipped with Intel Core i3, i5, or i7 processors offering speeds between 2.93 GHz and 3.6 GHz, have up to 16GB of faster 1333 MHz memory, discrete ATI Radeon HD craphics cards, (including the HD 5750 with 1GB GDDR5 on the top end,) and configure-to-order storage solutions with up to 2TB hard drives or 256GB solid state drives.

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