BetaNews Staff

Toshiba and Hynix said Tuesday that they had settled their disputes over patents surrounding NAND memory chips, agreeing to cross-license each other's intellectual property surrounding the technology. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. The settlement ends a nearly three-year fight between the two companies that resulted in several suits and countersuits.

Both companies tried to halt sales of the other's products into the US, but the courts dismissed both motions. Toshiba and Hynix had a previous agreement, extending from 1996 through 2002, however disagreements over the terms of a new deal caused the two sides to part ways. The term of the new deal is unknown, with the companies only sharing that it was "long term."

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TechCrunch has hired a CEO in order to continue to expand its editorial operations, site owner Michael Arrington announced over the weekend. Heather Harde, who currently serves as the senior vice president of mergers and acquisitions for Fox Interactive Media, would begin working for the blog at the end of the month.

She will run all business aspects of the site, while Arrington will focus on the editorial, he wrote in a blog post. "TechCrunch has grown faster than I could manage over the last couple of years," he wrote. "Heather's job will be to leverage the opportunities that we have sometimes let slip by, and to manage our organic and acquisition growth going forward."

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Verizon on Thursday announced the availability of Novatel Wireless' V740 ExpressCard for EV-DO wireless networks, which brings support for Revision A. Verizon recently began rolling out the faster Rev. A technology across its wireless broadband network.

The V740 card, which works in ExpressCard capable notebooks such as Apple's MacBook line, will run $179.99 USD with a two-year contract and $229.99 USD with a one-year contract. EV-DO Revision A promises average download speeds of 600 kilobits per second to 1.4 megabits, and average upload speeds of 500 to 800 kbps.

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NAVTEQ, the leading provider of mapping data for GPS devices and services such as Google Maps and Yahoo Maps, announced Thursday a new Visual Content suite that adds three-dimensional models of cities and major landmarks.

While services like Windows Live Local currently offer such capabilities in a handful of cities, NAVTEQ's content is more widely utilized around the globe and could easily bring the feature to online maps that use its database. The company says the 3-D city models and landmarks are available for major cities in Europe, North America and Asia.

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Despite two high-profile departures and continued confusion over branding, Microsoft delivered some positive Windows Live news Wednesday, announcing a deal with Lenovo to pre-load Windows Live services with the manufacturer's ThinkPad notebooks and desktop PCs.

Live.com will become the default homepage for those systems, and the Windows Live Toolbar will be pre-installed. Lenovo indicated it will deliver PC updates and other information through the customizable Live.com site to customers. The OEM deal is the first involving Windows Live for Microsoft; previously, the company offered its MSN portal to PC markers.

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Motorola said Tuesday that it had made an investment in Amimon, a company that specializes in technologies that allow for the wireless transmission of high-definition video. Terms of the investment were not disclosed. It is likely that the electronics maker made the move in response to increased competition in the wireless entertainment industry, and build on the company's strengths in wireless.

"Our investment reflects our belief that Amimon's solution is well positioned to offer a high quality wireless uncompressed HDTV link between video sources such as a digital set-top and a high-definition TV," Motorola Ventures chief Reese Schroeder said. Animon's technology uses the 5GHz unlicensed band to transit video data through a technology called WHDI (Wireless high-definition interface).

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Nintendo is working on several new features that will be added to the Wii console over the next few months, gaming blog Joystiq reports. Among the new functionality would be new text-to-speech capabilities, a feature that would allow the console to detect where you are and where you might go next, and a Mii popularity channel where two Mii characters battle to be the most popular.

Text-to-speech would allow the console to read news, e-mail and other items while you are gaming. The motion sensing capabilities would likely be used for features like menu shortcuts. Details were scant on the Mii Popularity Channel, but it sounds like an America's Next Top Model of gaming, where two Miis walk the runway to be voted the most popular.

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Former Disney CEO Michael Eisner said Monday that he was turning his attention to online video, announcing the launch of Vuguru, an independent studio that will focus on online video content. Its first project would be Prom Queen, which will be released on April 2. Instead of long-form episodes, the program will be split into about eighty 90-second long clips more suitable for online video.

Vuguru video will be not only distributed from its own Web site, but on a variety of platforms as well. YouTube, Veoh, and its sponsors will also gain rights to distribute the video. Although the exact plot of Prom Queen was not disclosed, it appears to be somewhere in the murder-suspense thriller genre that has become popular for filmmakers targeting the same demographic as Vuguru.

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While Google Earth has primarily been touted for its uncanny ability to take users on a tour of the world's most beautiful sights right from their desktop, a new feature added Monday highlights the immense destruction human beings leave in their wake.

Environmental advocacy group Appalachian Voices has joined to Google to deliver a special interactive layer for Google Earth that tells the stories of over 470 mountains that have been destroyed from coal mining, and its impact on nearby ecosystems. Separately, the World Wildlife Fund has added the ability to visit its 150 project sites using Google Earth.

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After a beta test last year, NVidia on Monday released the final version of Gelato 2.1, the company's GPU-accelerated 3-D rendering software. The tool was originally developed for film and animation, but has been expanded for game development, industrial design, and general CAD use.

Gelato 2.1 features texture baking, enhanced raytracing performance, and improved lighting functionality for 3-D rendering. The software ships for Windows XP and Linux with plug-ins for Autodesk Maya and Autodesk 3ds Max. The basic version of Gelato is available at no cost, while Gelato Pro adds advanced scalability and support features for $1,500 USD.

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Apple has issued a fix for its Airport Extreme product, which it says would prevent attackers from causing system crashes on computers connected to a network. By sending a specially-crafted string of data, Core Duo versions of the Mac Mini, MacBook, and MacBook Pro could lock up. Core 2 Duo versions are not affected by the issue, the company said in an advisory.

To fix the vulnerability, Mac OS X would now perform additional validation of data received in order to prevent the crashes. Although this vulnerability had been fixed in a previous update for the product earlier in the year, Apple said it reissued to fix to address compatibility issues with some third-party access points.

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Treo smartphone maker Palm has hired a former Apple engineer who developed the foundation for the iPod operating system after he left the Cupertino company in 1996 and founded Pixo. Paul Mercer will help Palm develop future products, the company confirmed to the WSJ.

Palm has been facing increased competition in the smartphone space, with rivals Motorola, Nokia and Samsung all stepping up their efforts. But the company also has a new rival in Apple, which in June will debut its much-anticipated touch-screen iPhone device. In joining Palm, Mercer will be leaving Inventor, a company he founded in 2000 to build mobile phone interfaces.

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Microsoft this week released a minor update for Windows Vista that adds support for Windows Help files, recognized by their .hlp extension. Such help files have been in use since Windows 3.1, and are still found in a number of applications.

"The Windows Help program has not had a major update for many releases and no longer meets Microsoft's standards. Therefore, starting with the release of Windows Vista, the Windows Help program will not ship as a feature of Windows," Microsoft says. Users can download the Windows Help update from FileForum.

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After a whopping twelve security updates last month, March will bring Windows users a welcome sigh of relief: Microsoft has no patches planned for next week. The company will, however, release a number of non-security updates; 2 will appear on Windows Update and 4 on Microsoft update.

Because there are no security bulletins for March, Microsoft will not be holding its monthly webcast on TechNet. An update to the Windows Malicious Software Removal Tool will be made per usual. Microsoft released six critical security updates last month, correcting flaws in Windows, Office and its anti-malware products.

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Google on Thursday rolled out a new version of its Picasa Web Albums service, which enables users to upload their photos free of charge. While the service previously focused on private use, the update brings new community features like those offered by Yahoo's Flickr.

A search function now enables users to search for and browse photos from any public photo album. In addition, photos can be more easily linked within e-mails, IMs and Web sites. Storage space has also been increased for users of the free service, who can now upload up to 1GB worth of photos. Those needing more space can pay an annual fee for up to 250GB.

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