"The IEEE has finally approved the 802.11n high-throughput wireless LAN standard. Bruce Kraemer, the long-time chairman of the 802.11n Task Group (part of the 802.11 Working Group, which oversees the WLAN standards), has sent out a notification to a listserv for task group members, which includes a wide range of Wi-Fi chip makers, software developers, and equipment vendors. A press release is available now as well. This process began in 2002."

Motorola introduced the first of a new generation of smartphone Thursday that it hopes will reverse it's plummeting cellphone sales. The phone, called the Cliq, is meant for young people obsessed with social networks. Instead of the traditional menu of features, the Cliq’s home screen is an ever-changing mosaic of e-mail, Twitter tweets and status updates, superimposed over photos of the people sending those messages.

“It’s alive,” said Sanjay Jha, the co-chief executive of Motorola, who was hired a year ago fromQualcomm to revive its cellphone business. “Think of it like the text bubbles in cartoons, with new information pushed to you all the time.”

The Cliq will be available through T-Mobile in the United States in the fall. The price has not been announced, but analysts expect a $100 price tag. The phone has a 3.1-inch touch screen and a slide-out keyboard. Motorola is expected to introduce a second, more expensive smartphone in a few weeks that will work on the Verizon network. More...

"The Linux kernel v2.6.31 has been released. Besides the desktop improvements and USB 3.0 support mentioned some days ago, there is an equivalent of FUSE for character devices that can be used for proxying OSS sound through ALSA, new tools for using hardware performance counters, readahead improvements, ATI Radeon KMS, Intel's Wireless Multicomm 3200 support, gcov support, a memory checker and a memory leak detector, a reimplementation of inotify and dnotify on top of a new filesystem notification infrastructure, btrfs improvements, support for IEEE 802.15.4, IPv4 over Firewire, new drivers and small improvements. The full list of changes can be found here."

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone told reporters in Mexico City this week that the companmy expects to add revenue generating features to the microblogging site in the fourth quarter, according to a report from Bloomberg.com.

After a year or more of speculation by bloggers and financial pundits on ways that Twitter could generate revenue, Stone on Tuesday said the company is building an 'analytics dashboard' designed to help businesses keep track of what is being tweeted about them.

The dashboard is expected to be ready by the end of the year

As online job boards have grown crowded amid the recession, many big companies, including Microsoft Corp., Verizon Communications Inc., Raytheon Corp. and Viacom Inc.'s MTV Networks, now list job openings on the Twitter microblogging site. For employers, Twitter—where users post updates, or "tweets," of no more than 140 characters—offers one more way to find and attract candidates, and a cheaper alternative to big online job boards. It also helps companies target social-media-savvy job hunters and convey an innovative image. For job seekers, Twitter offers the chance to interact one-on-one with companies' recruiters and can be more convenient than job boards. Job hunters can sign up to follow a company's listings on Twitter or receive tweets about jobs through a third-party service. They usually need to click a link in the tweet to access the listing online, where they can submit their résumé or application. They can also reply to the tweet with a question or comment; sometimes, employers tweet back.

Taking the next step toward rebuilding its lineup of smartphones, Palm announced on Wednesday a new cellphone called the Pixi. Palm also announced it was dropping the price of its Pre smartphone by $50 to $150, with a two-year service agreement and after a $150 instant rebate and $100 mail-in rebate. Given the name, the Pixi is aimed at younger customers than those who bought the Pre. The company said the phone would have a smaller touch screen and be slimmer than the Pre, but it would share many of the same features, including eight gigabytes of storage and GPS navigation capabilities. Like the Pre, the Pixi runs on the company’s new operating system, called WebOS, which promises speedy Web browsing. To capture the fancy of younger users, the Pixi will also have a removable backplate that can be swapped with a series of interchangeable panels, the first of which the company plans to commission from illustrators, graphic artists and fashion designers. Instead of having a slide-out keyboard like the Pre, the Pixi has a full, exposed keyboard, which Palm executives hope will attract a younger buyer who favors features like text- messaging.

"Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA), Microsoft's euphemistically named digital restrictions scheme, is the target of another spyware and false advertising lawsuit. 'Microsoft this week was sued in a Washington district court for allegedly violating privacy laws through Windows XP's Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA) copy protection scheme. Similar to cases filed in 2006, the new class action case accuses Microsoft of falsely representing what information WGA would send to verify the authenticity of Windows and that it would send back information [daily IP address and other details that could be used to trace information back to a home or user]. The complaint further argued that Microsoft portrayed WGA as a necessary security update rather than acknowledge its copy protection nature in the update. WGA's implementation also prevented users from purging the protection from their PCs without completely reformatting a computer's system drive.' There were at least two other lawsuits launched in 2006 over WGA. According to the Wikipedia article, none of them have been resolved. The system is built into Vista and Windows 7."

"Two teenage girls (aged 10 and 12) found themselves trapped/lost in a stormwater drain in Adelaide, South Australia. The interesting point of this article that makes it FreeFellows Blog worthy, is that although the teenage girls had mobile phones, instead of calling for help using 000 (Australia's 911 number), they decided to notify people through Facebook. My guess is it was something along the lines of 'Jane Doe is like totally trapped in a stormwater drain, really need help, OMG!'. Luckily a young friend of the girls was online at the time and was able to call the proper authorities."