Verizon has a new WiFi hotspot program where any of its "Mobile Broadband" customers get free access to hotspots across the country. The advantage is for the same price you were paying yesterday, you can now transfer more data without worrying about the typical 5GB per month limit since none of the hotspot transfers count against your monthly limit. The bad news is, being a Verizon smartphone owner doesn't get you any of these benefits.

Google recently released beta versions of its Chrome browser for the Apple and Linux platforms. After they became available, the number of Chrome users surged past Apple's own Safari browser to become the third-most used browser. But...

Hope you're not tired of buzzwords. After "the network is the computer" and "the cloud", welcome to "data-intensive computing". This time, however, there's far more at work here than a clever turn of phrase.

The Android space continues to heat up. Today, we learned that the Android Market has reached the 20,000 apps milestone, the Android Facebook application has been updated, and Android OS 2.1. has been ported to the Droid.

In the medical world, every day brings new research findings that can potentially alter the prescribed "best practices" for treating patients with any given medical condition to facilitate the best outcomes. But keeping up with volumes of new medical studies is one of the biggest challenges for clinicians wanting to provide the best care possible for patients. That's where clinical decision support tools hold great promise.

Hmm, this is interesting. In order to "send a message to AT&T," Fake Steve Jobs is suggesting all iPhone customers hop on their phones Friday afternoon and run a data-intensive application in an attempt to crash AT&T's wireless network. I have a few thoughts about this.

Sprint has presented its users with an opportunity to get out of their contract without incurring any early termination fees. They are increasing the Regulatory Charge to $.40 per line. This is enough of a change in terms apparently that if you disagree with the new charge, you can simply reject the fee increase, and your service.

According to news reports, the American and Russian governments are engaged in talks designed to pave a way for a more secure Internet and a treaty to limit certain types of cyberweapons.

Believe it or not, there's actually a few interesting tidbits of iPhone-related news floating around out there today. Some are blaming Apple for the iPhone's connectivity woes, others predict that Apple will sell 10 million iPhones this quarter, and yet others say evidence of the next iPhone has been spotted.

That's the essence of the challenges posed by MySQL originator Monty Widenius in his newest blog post about Oracle's ongoing acquisition of Sun and MySQL. His confidence in Oracle to do the right thing remains thin. Very thin.

The amount of information that has hit the Internet about the Nexus One Google Phone is bordering on the ridiculous. Not all of it is accurate. Here's a quick look at what's real and what's not.

Oracle has just released 10 commitments to customers and developers about MySQL's future accessibility and openness in the hope of gaining EU approval to acquire Sun. Combined with the powerful customer endorsements given to the EU late last week, these promises would appear to put Oracle on the verge of gaining approval to acquire Sun and all of its assets.

It looks like Windows Mobile 7 has been pushed back to the fourth quarter of 2010. Actually, Microsoft has not published any release date for the mobile platform so what is really being pushed back are the expectations that the previous round of rumors had. This pushes the release closer to the holiday season though. Any release after that wouldn't bode well at all.

I keep my list of items I need to complete on a piece of paper. Actually a few pieces of paper. A new application launching this weekend aims to help me (and you) increase our effectiveness.

Accenture has dropped Tiger Woods as a featured advertising icon for the company after a six-year sponsorship, the Wall Street Journal has just reported. Ironically, a recent column in the Journal focused on one of the key lines from Accenture's long-time and hugely successful partnership with Woods: "It's what you do next that counts."

Mere hours after Google posted a blog about an unnamed Android device that it gave its employees, the Wall Street Journal confirmed that the device will in fact be sold to consumers as the Nexus One. This is the real, actual, Google Phone, and it will be available in early 2010.

A few bloggers such as Ed Bott have noted that Microsoft quickly retracted its special offer of the Windows 7 Family Pack, which allowed home users to upgrade 3 PCs for a reasonable $150 price. Instead, you'll need to shell out about $120 per PC for an upgrade now. But I have a feeling Microsoft wasn't the driving force behind the demise of the Family Pack.

In a cryptic post on The Official Google Mobile Blog today, Google admitted that a Google phone does indeed exist. But it's for employees only, and only for "dogfooding" activities. Oh, and Google doesn't call it the "Google Phone."

A virtual machine in Amazon's EC2 cloud has been used as a command and control host for a password stealing version of Zeus, says a senior researcher in the Internet Security Intelligence Initiative, part of CA's security unit. "This is a particularly juicy target," says another security expert.

Here's a warm holiday thought for you: dozens of your colleagues getting iPhones, netbooks, or new home PCs as gifts, then pestering you to let them use the new gadgets on the corporate network.

Time Magazine has named its top ten gadgets of the year. To what I am sure is the bitter disappointment of Apple, Motorola's Droid took the top spot. Does the Droid deserve such honors? Who was left out?

IBM's new Linux-based mainframe says a lot about the way a company can make Linux a cornerstone of its business. It's an all-Linux machine, one which might well spell out a high-end strategy for other hardware vendors to follow.

IBM has announced a new chip that could help a supercomputer achieve 10 petaflops, which is calculating power tantamount to the speeds Nature uses to form bubbles in sea foam and keep planets in orbit.

Automated tiering, the transparent movement of data based on activity or type, is quickly proving itself to be a hot consideration for storage managers but why stop at automated tiering? Can’t we make the entire storage ecosystem respond automatically based on environmental conditions and its available resources?

In response to the lawsuit that Nokia filed against Apple in October, Apple has responded with one of its own. It goes so far as to say that Nokia "stole" from Apple. This could get ugly.

The Motorola Droid review unit I have recently updated itself to system 2.0.1. The changes are subtle, but executed perfectly. Not that the Droid was a dog before, but it now operates much better.

Some Palm Pre owners are less than pleased with the backup system that Palm and Sprint use to ensure that user's data is retained. One customer has sued Palm and Sprint in Federal court and is seeking class action status.

Want a better idea of how organizations get infiltrated, including detailed synopsis of how many successful data breaches occur? Sit down with a copy of the just released Verizon Data Breach Investigations Supplemental Report and you'll get a great idea.

T-Mobile is rolling out an update to its Android customers that enables one important new feature: carrier billing. With this feature now working, customers will be able to have Android Market purchases added to their monthly bill rather than their credit card.

For the last few days, I've been mulling over the top semiconductor stories of the year. Clearly, the settlement by Intel and AMD of their ongoing antitrust and patent/licensing disputes is the biggest business news. Picking the tech champ is tougher, because it's not about where we've been in 2009, but rather where we're headed in 2010.

President Barack Obama allocated almost $600 million to build community health centers and implement electronic medical records, part of the $787 billion stimulus bill. The White House framed the funding as means of adding jobs to the economy, and overhaul the nation's health system.

For the first time, Skype is offering a version of its software to Symbian S60 3rd Edition devices. It covers the basics, such as Skype-to-Skype calling and instant messaging. The initial set of devices it works with is limited, but Skype promises that will grow quickly.

The Oracle/European Union drama never stops. Now IBM's stuck their collective necks into the fray and said that Oracle's acquisition of Sun should go through if they make some positive open source gestures to all parties. Meaning what exactly, though?

Google has taken the opportunity to offer a new version of its mobile search application for the iPhone. The new software makes several improvements to the usability of the application, including the ability to recognize Australian accents.

I'll make a prediction that 2010 will be the most exciting year yet for cloud computing, and that's partly related to Microsoft's ramp-up of Azure. Anyone attending Salesforce.com's Dreamforce conference last month understands the potential of cloud platforms for rapid application development. And this is all coming together at a time when IT shops need to quickly and cheaply turn out innovative new applications for the business.

Verizon Wireless has announced a software update for the HTC Droid Eris. This is not the promised update to either Android 2.0 or 2.1. Instead, this new boot ROM and radio software fixes some minor performance issues on the device.

Skyfire has just taken their browser and upgraded it for Windows Mobile phones. The browser now supports Flash and Silverlight right in the browser just like your desktop. It also supports Ajax, which is what Gmail and other sites use to easily change what is on the screen without forcing a refresh.

When federal CTO Aneesh Chopra and federal CIO Vivek Kundra unveiled the Obama Administration's Open Government Directive on Dec. 8, it marked the end of one long, drawn out process and the beginning of what's sure to be another. Good luck making it work.

No one ought to be surprised by the notion that Chrome is Google's big cross-platform play -- a way to get their app-delivery system running everywhere. It's not just a way to soften people up for the arrival of Chrome OS, either.

It's unwise to expect much intellectual integrity from the European Union bureaucrats as they put the screws to Oracle, but leader Neelie Kroes has set a new low by dismissing and mocking an official letter of support for Oracle from the U.S. Senate. This is the most disgraceful proof yet that the EU is purely playing politics while thousands of Sun employees lose their jobs.

What are the chances of a controller failing in a storage system? I don’t know the exact statistic but its safe to assume that its pretty low. When they do fail, the ramifications can be extreme, especially in the increasingly virtualized data center that counts on shared storage. Active-Active controllers provide the protection from controller failure but they are a bit of a misnomer. Both controllers are being used but they are assigned to specific workloads.

2009 has definitely been the year of acquisitions and mergers and strong alliances, as far as the technology industry is concerned.

Lots of people run multiple operating systems on their PC. Some PC users have been dual or multibooting between various versions of Windows and Linux for a number of reasons. It isn't unusual for an Apple OS X user to have a copy of Windows they can boot into on their Mac. Through the use of virtual machines, you can run these operating systems simultaneously and switch just as easily as you switch apps on a single OS. Now it seems you may be able to do the same thing with Windows Mobile and Android.

Vevo, a presumed successor to MTV, debuts today to much less fanfare than its progenitor, what with video having killed the radio star over 25 years ago. Do you think the world needs a for-profit web site that plays music videos?

The JooJoo Web tablet has sure caused a stir with all of its issues with TechCrunch, but is the device good enough to overcome all this drama? I spent a little time talking with Fusion Garage CEO Chandra Rathakrishnan today going over the JooJoo and feel like it's an impressive product that may be hindered by its price. Hit the jump for deeper impressions and a demo video.

In the final part of this three-part video interview series with San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, we talked about the role of social networking, not just in winning a political race, but in ongoing government -- in building participation among citizens. He talks about his successes and failures, and what he's learned along the way.

As Microsoft and SAP prepare giddily to hammer Oracle in Brussels this week, those two big and dominant global companies damn well better remember that they could be next on the EU rack because the EU's objectives aren't about "fairness"--they're about politics and power. Appeasing the EU now won't grant them sanctuary later--it will only embolden the bureaucrats of Brussels.

Cisco released its Cisco 2009 Annual Security Report this morning, and it contains some interesting insight on many of the vulnerabilities and threat vectors we face today.

Google has updated Maps for Mobile again for Android phones. There are several new features with this latest update, but the new version isn't compatible with all the variants of Android that are out there.

That's the thesis behind a piece by Sascha Segan over at PC Magazine, where he blames a good deal of the lack of geek-friendly Linux handsets on the wireless carriers themselves. But how much of it is also end-user indifference?

Mac users rejoice! Today Google has made the beta version of its Chrome browser available for Apple computers. The download is free.

Samsung herded up the tech press in London today to share more information about Bada, its new homegrown mobile operating system. Yours truly hopped the Atlantic to attend. Unfortunately, all Samsung demonstrated was its ability to fling every buzzword in the book at attendees.

Verizon Wireless has started updating the system software of the Motorola Droid. The changelog is pretty long, and includes, among other things, better battery life, a fix for the camera, and more OS stability.

Today's experience of upgrading one's PC to a new operating system is qualitatively different from that of a decade ago. It's no longer so much about the OS. You've already got something decent; you're mostly adding new bells and whistles. What's different now is there's a lot more user data--pictures, e-mails and music/video files--to move over. And that experience, quite frankly, stinks.

HTC's roadmap for the first half has been leaked and there are tons of pictures and specifications. Looks like there will be plenty of Windows Mobile 6.5 devices as well as some based on Android.