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The White House also claimed victory. Although some stakeholders complain the FCC’s order goes either too far or not far enough, Genachowski and top Democrats say it represents progress on an issue that has been mired in political wrangling for years. President Barack Obama made Net neutrality a campaign promise, and the FCC’s action allows the administration to show advancement on an important policy priority.

Further, we recognize that there have been meaningful recent moves toward openness, including the introduction of open operating systems like Android. In addition, we anticipate soon seeing the effects on the market of the openness conditions we imposed on mobile providers that operate on upper 700 MHz C-Block spectrum, which includes Verizon Wireless, one of the largest mobile wireless carriers in the U.S. In light of these considerations, we conclude it is appropriate to take measured steps at this time to protect the openness of the Internet when accessed through mobile broadband.

HP will introduce three models of the PalmPad at CES, with minor hardware differences distinguishing them. All three will run a new iteration of the WebOS operating system, version 2.5.1; they're collectively a spin-off of the never-released HP Slate. A fourth version won't be shown off at CES, I'm told, but it will be custom made for university students to prove how versatile the machines can be.

Part of what made the Gmail project so fun was that we had a lot of independence and could pursue ideas that other people inside Google thought were "the wrong way to do it". Most other tech companies do not offer that kind of freedom.

Amazon.com Inc. is likely to sell more than 8 million Kindle electronic-book readers this year, at least 60 percent more than analysts have predicted, according to two people who are aware of the company’s sales projections.

The Sony Ericsson PlayStation phone will hit shops in April, after a February Mobile World Congress launch, sources close to the matter have confirmed to Pocket-lint.

Microsoft Corp., the world’s largest software maker, will announce a version of its Windows computer operating system that runs on ARM Holdings Plc technology for the first time, said two people familiar with Microsoft’s plans. The new product will debut at the Consumer Electronics Show in January, said the people, who asked not to be identified because Microsoft’s plans are confidential. The software would be tailored for battery-powered devices, such as tablet computers and other handhelds, the people said.

The number, detailed in a soft-ball interview on Microsot’s own News Center, notes that there have been 1.5 million phone manufacturer sales: in other words, “phones being bought and stocked by mobile operators and retailers on their way to customers.”

Google, whose $6 billion buyout offer was spurned by online coupon site Groupon, is in talks with much smaller rivals of the two-year-old firm, a source close to the situation told The Post. The deal talks show that the search giant is intent on jumping into the fast-growing local coupon market through acquisitions and not through organic growth. There was some thought that after Groupon this month rejected Google's offer that the Mountain View, Calif., company would build its own coupon service.

In August, Google announced that Wave would no longer be developed as a standalone product, but that the Wave technology would survive in other products. Today, I am happy announce the launch of Google Shared Spaces in Google Labs as one of those off-shoots. A bunch of us who had been working on the Wave APIs were brainstorming about what it would take to just run a Wave gadget. Developers had been doing wonderful stuff --building real-time mini applications--and rather than let that effort go to waste, we wanted to create a new way for people to continue to use these tools and games. Google Shared Spaces is exactly that. A shared space turns a (Wave) gadget into a standalone collaborative application. Just click on the gadget you're interested in to start a new shared space, and then simply send the URL around to share it with your friends and colleagues. You don't need to sign up for a new service - if you have a Google, Twitter or Yahoo account, you're good to go.

It’s been a big week for numbers about photos. Yesterday, location-based service Foursquare launched the latest version of its app with support for photo-sharing, and chief executive Dennis Crowley said later in the day that the service was already approaching one photo uploaded per second. Competitor Gowalla said today that its users have posted 1 million photos. And mobile photo app Instagram also said it has hit 1 million users.

After the vote...

“We just attended this great Google conference and heard that Android was open. Therefore, we see no need to regulate mobile broadband. It’s open, you see. That’s good for everyone. That means that everyone is going to do the right thing. An open operating system ensures there won’t be any throttling or filtering. Why? Because. Well. Open! Verizon agrees.”

An anonymous tipster informed me on Friday that Microsoft had shut down its Office Genuine Advantage (OGA) program as of Thursday, December 16. Previously, if you wanted to download an Office add-in or template, you had to pass through a validation step first, confirming that your copy of Office was “genuine.”

Here are three major challenges Google needs to surmount: Make software usable by tens of millions of people on a disparate array of products. Overcome its history of only using data to define its future. Figure out how to keep people in their playground, rather than helping people find the information they were looking for and sending them elsewhere: a radical new approach to business.

Leo Laporte Builds Empire With ‘This Week in Tech’ - NYTimes.com

The BlackBerry maker reportedly held multiple "all-hands meetings" the day after the first-generation iPhone was announced, MacNN reports. According to Shacknews poster Kentor, employees at RIM and Microsoft were "utterly shocked" by the iPhone. RIM was allegedly "in denial" about the iPhone, claiming "it couldn't do what they were demonstrating without an insanely power hungry processor, it must have terrible battery life, etc" Kentor wrote.

--Put simply, products made by Apple, Asus, Brother, and Canon are typically reliable and well supported. --Products made by Dell and Hewlett-Packard often aren't, especially if you're a home user. --Laptops are slightly more reliable than before, and have fewer serious problems than desktops. --Business PC customers are generally more satisfied than their consumer counterparts.

“Some apps are also selling additional information to ad networks, including users’ location, age, gender, income, ethnicity, sexual orientation and political views,” according to the suit. The suit, filed on behalf of Jonathan Lalo of Los Angeles County, identifies applications such as Pandora, Paper Toss, the Weather Channel and Dictionary.com, and names them as defendants along with Apple. Lalo is represented by Scott A. Kamber and Avi Kreitenberg of KamberLaw LLC in New York.

Internet retail giant Amazon may sell a lot of stuff, but nothing has sold like the Kindle. The company said Tuesday that the third generation of the book reader has become its best selling product of all time, surpassing 2007 bestseller Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. As has been the case with the Kindle since its initial release, Amazon still has refused to give an exact number of devices sold. An educated guess on sales can be made, however: Harry Potter sold about 2.5 million copies during the first quarter following its release.

The last time the New York Times did a feature about me TechTV imploded shortly after. Hope this isn't an omen.

Congrats to Dimitry Lyalin - his TWiT app is #4 of all Windows Phone 7 apps in user rating. Version 1.2 just came out.

Rather, Booker was using Twitter to communicate directly with tens of thousands of stranded constituents. He repeatedly asked the good people of Newark to DM him (Direct Message, for you Luddites) their phone numbers if they had problems.

Leo's Pick

Speaking of Android, the upstart mobile platform will turn a very important corner in 2011. Forget Gingerbread. That 2.3 update is just a weigh station between the mobile-friendly Android 2.1 and the tablet-ready Honeycomb (3.0). OEMs may show some Honeycomb tablets at CES and many manufacturers will deliver product in 2011. A few of them will offer the Apple iPad its first serious challenge.

The bug didn't impact other clients or older or newer versions, but according to Skype, about 50% of all users globally were running the affected version of Skype for Windows. And the crashes caused about 40% of these clients to fail. As these clients included about 25-30% of publicly available supernodes, the crashes were amplified. Then, as the peer-to-peer network tried to cope with the number of supernodes offline, failover mechanisms were triggered, which according to Rabbe "led to the near complete failures that occurred a few hours after the triggering event."