Like me, the Wi-Fi Alliance is based in Austin, so I asked them if they wouldn’t mind setting up a home tour that would allow me to see the future of Wi-Fi in action. In the segment below, I sit down with Kelly Davis-Felner, marketing director of the Wi-Fi Alliance, whose home I visited to talk about Wi-Fi on handsets as well as the future of Wi-Fi peering, which would create device networks independent of the Internet.

Davis-Felner says the Alliance has certified 249 mobile handsets since 2003, 106 of them this year alone. She expects Wi-Fi on handsets to be more common in the years to come — a prediction that, after reading our readers’ opinions of the BlackBerry Storm shipping without Wi-Fi, I wholeheartedly agree with. And in the last two minutes of the video, Davis-Felner talks about networking WiFi-enabled devices for sharing photos, playing games or printing without ever having to access the web.

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With the change in administration it’s time to stop pussyfooting around the issue of broadband access in the U.S. It quite honestly sucks. Yes, some people have access to FiOS, but others have access to speeds that rank even lower than the lame 768 kbps classification of broadband adopted this year (!) by the FCC. Uneven coverage and a lack of competition mean that we in the U.S. pay more for our broadband than many other countries and that about 1 percent of the population can’t get access at all. This has got to change, and the private market isn’t going to do it because it simply isn’t profitable to string fiber, coax or even copper everywhere people have settled.

With consumer groups and industry players calling for a broadband bailout, I’m inclined to agree, even if it does mean Google gets more broadband subscribers for free. The government needs to get involved, and it needs to throw some money at the problem — albeit in a highly organized way. I’ll argue later about what should be done, but first here’s a few reasons why it’s important. Broadband is like electricity and running water — every town, if not every person, needs access to it. Not to watch cats on treadmills or download porn, but because it gives people cheaper access to the world.

Educational Access

Today the New York Times ran an article about the rising costs of a college education and offered up the idea of distance learning as being one solution to rising costs. I don’t think distance learning can substitute for the entire college experience, but having participated in several distance learning classes, it can be used in conjunction with meetings online or weekly in-person meetings  to create a rich learning and discussion environment. Broadband makes that possible today, and faster speeds will only add to the interactivity of those online environments — making a college education more accessible. The kids who most benefit from this are not living in FiOS areas; they are in poorer areas where ISPs try to avoid or delay launching high speed services. I know, I live in one of those areas. The government needs to step up to improve this access divide.

Medical Care Improvements

Broadband also can save on medical costs and improve access to health care. A release issued today highlighted radiologists’ frustration with quality of care. Ninety-four percent of radiologists surveyed blamed missed or delayed diagnosis on the inability of medical imaging systems to communicate with information systems of physicians and hospitals. Delivering radiological scans via broadband requires fat pipes and rapid speeds, but the benefit to patients, insurers and doctors would be many: fewer scans, faster delivery of images where they are needed, and lower costs associated with the process.

Telecommuting Expansion

Another benefit of better broadband would be the ability for people to telecommute. This has far-reaching benefits, from fewer cars on the roads to increasing a family’s resilience in the face of economic uncertainty. As a telecommuter, when I change jobs I don’t have to sell my house, uproot my husband’s career or leave the network of friends and family who support us. The more people who have that flexibility, the less traumatizing job loss can be both for the individual family and for a particular region.

Those are a few of the reasons the government should care about broadband access. Broadband can help promote an educated citizenry, could help lower the costs of providing health care and could increase workforce flexibility and decrease traffic. So while older generations of legislators might deride the web as a series of tubes, the truth of the matter is those tubes could be the lifeblood for citizen access to education, information and services. We need policies and funding to make sure broadband reaches everyone, and we need it today. It would’t be a bailout. It would be an investment.

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The New York Times’ Claire Miller attended a Churchill Club function to fete Twitter co-founder Evan Williams last night. In an onstage interview, Williams talked about many different aspects of his micro-blogging service, which now has 6 million subscribers. First of all, wow — that is an impressive jump in the number of subscribers.

More importantly, Williams talked about why he chose not to sell to Facebook when the Palo Alto-based startup offered to buy it for $500 million in stock. “It definitely made sense — the strategy we talked about with them — but it wasn’t the right time.” Or the right price. Here’s why:

Facebook offered $500 million of its stock, or roughly 3 percent of the company based on an inflated $15 billion in valuation. In October 2007, when Microsoft invested $240 million in Facebook, it valued the social network at $15 billion. Since then various different reports have emerged which point to a more somber valuation of $5 billion. Three percent of $5 billion actually works out to about $150 million. Given that Twitter was valued between $80 million and $120 million in its last round, the monetary incentive just wasn’t there to sell to Facebook.

More importantly, Twitter’s rejection of Facebook shows that the fast-growing social network has a new headache: Using its stock as currency to acquire companies that can play a meaningful role in its future isn’t going to work.

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Google recently announced an extension framework for Chrome, adding the ability to run extra software in the browser. It’s a feature many had long considered missing from Google’s browser — and one that has been key to Firefox’s popularity. But with the Chrome extensions, Google is doing much more than just playing catch-up with Firefox. An extensible browser is the missing piece of a much bigger puzzle: By tying its App Engine to Google Apps (more details in the App Engine blog), the company has delivered a complete ecosystem for cloud ISVs.

All software ecosystems need four basic things:

1. A platform — A complete cloud platform is distributed, ubiquitous, and works both offline and on. App Engine lets developers build the server-side portion and not worry about scaling. And Chrome’s extensions let coders build a cross-platform user interface that leverages the Gears framework to work even when disconnected.
2. Rich APIs — All those apps can use authentication, chat, OpenSocial, calendaring, Checkout, search, mapping, and other Google services. That makes it easy to build rich apps with familiar components.
3. Administration — Google Apps lets an administrator purchase, provision and manage permissions for an app. Deployment is easy: Once you’ve found the app you want in the Google Marketplace, just click the “add” button, then install the Chrome extension.
4. A market — Google Apps has 10 million active users and is signing up some 3,000 new companies a day, according to Matthew Glotzbach, product management director of Google Enterprise.

With the Chrome extensions, Google has made it possible for ISVs to launch ready-made niche applications for the cloud. It’s the same thing Facebook did with its API and Salesforce did with AppExchange; in Google’s case, ISVs now have a turnkey channel that can reach small businesses easily.

The ability to let Apps customers buy third-party software isn’t quite ready yet. “Now, Google Apps administrators can also deploy several new Google applications hosted on App Engine to members of their organizations with Google Apps Labs,” said Pete Koomen, product manager for App Engine.

So for example, a dentist’s office could use Google’s Docs suite for word processing and spreadsheets, but also buy third-party apps from Marketplace — one for patient scheduling, and another for invoicing. They’d all work smoothly together, online and off, using the Apps/Docs/Chrome ecosystem.

With Google looking to find revenues beyond advertising, monetizing those 10 million accounts has got to be a big priority. Selling third-party applications can’t be far off. Of course, these apps will work with any browser. But they’ll likely work better with Chrome and its extensions.

Want to know more about the rapidly changing Cloud Computing landscape? Preview our Cloud Computing Briefing or purchase the full version.

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Two of the biggest challenges facing our society — economy and climate change — are so intertwined that it is virtually impossible to solve one problem without fixing the other. To eternal optimists, these challenges also offer opportunity and we are seeing that with major investment interest in alternative energies from folks as diverse as energy baron T. Boone Pickens to former Vice President Al Gore.

The cleantech movement is vital for our little corner of the world. If today’s broadband pipes are the 21st century highway system, electric power is the engine that keeps the traffic moving. From expensive data centers and large central offices, to routers and switches and all the way down to our iPhones — every single device depends on electricity. If we want our technical nirvana, we need to figure out ways to reduce our energy footprint.

We will explore some of these themes at Green:Net our one-day conference that will be held in San Francisco’s Golden Gateway Club on March 24, 2009. At the conference we will look at how software, the web and communication networks will help companies shape the future of our electrical system, deliver transportation infrastructure, create social movements and help reduce carbon emissions.

A team led by Katie Fehrenbacher, editor of our Earth2Tech blog, has helped put together the agenda for this conference. Here are some of the topics we are going to be exploring at the conference:

• Dotcom to Greenboom
• The Green Web Effect
• Green Data Centers: Low Carbon Diets for Your Data Center
• The New Networked Car
• Power Grid 2.0

Among our scheduled keynote speakers are:

• Bob Metcalfe, Inventor of Ethernet, General Partner at Polaris Venture Partners and proponent of Enernet, the energy network.
• Rob Bernard, Microsoft’s Chief Environmental Strategist

Other confirmed speakers include:

• Saul Griffith – Co-founder of Makani Power, Squid Labs, Potenco and Wattzon, and MacArthur Prize Winner
• Jonathan Koomey – Professor, UC Berkley and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
• Dr. Albert Esser – VP of Data Center Infrastructure Group, Dell
• Rob Aldrich – Principal, Energy Efficient Solutions, Cisco
• Bill Vogel – CEO, Trilliant
• Andy Tang – Director of Smart Web, PG&E
• Sunil Sharan – Smart Grid Director, GE
• Erin Carlson – Director, Yahoo for Good, Yahoo!

In days to come we will be updating the list of speakers and will update the conference web site accordingly. The event will also include a startup launch session, which will introduce 10 up and coming startups that are leveraging digital technologies for green aims. Speakers from companies including Microsoft, Yahoo, Dell, Cisco, Mohr Davidow Ventures, Foundation Capital, JP Morgan, GE and Pacific Gas & Electric have also been added to the event schedule.

You can register for the conference at the conference web site, which also details information about schedule, speakers and the venue itself.

See you in San Francisco in March 2009!

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Updated: Yahoo, one of the largest web sites on the planet, is being plagued by series of problems related to Domain Name System (DNS). A test using Gomez’s testing service shows error messages in certain cities such as Chicago. Others are experiencing slower access to Yahoo web sites, including the home page. There is already some chatter about this on Twitter, where people are pointing to problems with Yahoo Finance pages. If you have experienced these problems do let me know in the comments. I am going to try and talk to Yahoo and get to the bottom of it as quickly as I can.

Update: In response to my inquiry, Yahoo sent over an official statement via email, which reads:

“Yahoo! experienced a disruption in service earlier today that affected users in some geographic areas. We’ve addressed the issue and full service is now available. We apologize for any inconvenience.”

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As expected, the FCC said today it will take up the issue of creating yet another wireless network, and set rules on cable pricing and programming, at its Dec. 18 meeting. As commenter Tom Evslin pointed out, the alternative wireless broadband network proposed is slow, will likely be filtered and will deliver yesterday’s technology in five or 10 years into the future. However, the rule-making on cable could be a win for consumers.

The cable efforts have the potential to bring more independent channels to cable systems as well as create rules designed to halt the disputes that arise between cable companies and content providers that can leave consumers without broadcast channels and force them to pay more for channels they once received as part of a cheaper package. Looks like Kevin Martin’s last fight as FCC chair will be against T-Mobile — which opposes the wireless efforts — and the cable guys.

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Microsoft Data Center Chief Mike Manos posted a blog entry yesterday on the company’s vision for next generation data centers. The blog post (and the accompanying animated video) has extensive details on how Microsoft envisions building the data center of the future — and it definitely has some of the “trailer park” modularity and scalability attributes that I mentioned in my post last week.

Some of the key features of the Generation 4 Modular Data Center design are the use of an innovative spine infrastructure for cooling, power and connectivity; the use of pre-fabricated and completely modular server containers and buildings; and ambitious goals for energy efficiency (an average power usage effectiveness (PUE) of 1.125 for all data centers by 2012).

By putting forth its plans for the Generation 4 Modular Data Center, Microsoft is simultaneously throwing down the gauntlet in the data center arena and showing its cards. By openly sharing its data center plans it is taking the technology and thought leadership away from Google in the critical area of Internet and services infrastructure. At the same time, in somewhat typical Microsoft fashion, it is asking (or perhaps requiring) the industry to standardize on its data center design approach. Given its influence and buying power with vendors it may get its wish.

Viewing this information in conjunction with announcements of the Azure Services Platform and Office Live, there is no doubt that the giant in Redmond is aggressively focused on delivering enterprise cloud computing. To top it off, market timing could not be better for Microsoft, as its hordes of cash and diversity of enterprise products should prove one version of the Golden Rule: “He who has the gold makes the rule.”

Related stories:

• Inside Microsoft’s Internet Infrastructure & Its Plans For The Future
• GigaOM Interview: Ray Ozzie

Want to know more about the rapidly changing Cloud Computing landscape? Preview our Cloud Computing Briefing or purchase the full version.

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Japan’s second largest wireless carrier, KDDI, has taken the plunge into the Long Term Evolution (LTE) standard, by building an LTE overlay on top of its existing CDMA network. KDDI is using equipment from Nortel and Hitachi for the fourth-generation wireless network, which will be operating by 2010. For those of you in the U.S. eager to see what the 4G future holds, Verizon is expected to start deploying LTE in 2010 as well. Vendors such as Ericsson expect LTE to be widely deployed in 2012. As a footnote, KDDI also has a WiMAX network deployed in parts of Japan that it has said it plans to begin operating next year. If the two technologies are ever to merge, perhaps we can watch that unfold in Japan.

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Updated with correction: A few months ago, Sequoia Capital doused the ever-ebullient Silicon Valley with a bucket of ice cold reality when it laid “good times” to rest. Today, one of Sequoia’s all-time stars laid a big wreath on that grave in the pages of The Wall Street Journal: Google. And while it didn’t implicitly state that it might face tough times next year, comments by its CEO amount to a proverbial bear call, which could mean bad news not only for Google but also for the rest of the media and advertising sector.

“We have to behave as though we don’t know what’s going to happen,” Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt told the Wall Street Journal. It seems like a prudent move. But I see it as a big red flag and I think Schmidt is preparing us for what could be a terrible 2009. The WSJ says that Google executives have been preparing for slower growth for a year but that “the economic crisis is forcing them to step up their efforts.”

According to conventional wisdom (and investors), Google is the best-positioned company to survive and perhaps thrive in the current advertising slump. If the leader of the pack is feigning ignorance about its chances, what can one say about mere mortals?

I find it hard to believe that a company that keeps world-famous economist like Hal Varian (who muses on the economy and Google’s prospects often on the investor calls) doesn’t know. As a company, Google collects enough data on a daily basis that it can take a fair pulse of the broader economy. Remember, they could accurately track the spread of flu across America just based on searches, so why can’t they track economic sentiment? Additionally, it sells ads to everyone from mom-and-pop shops to consumer durable goods giants and as such it has a fair idea on the degree of tightness with which people are holding their billfolds. They have enough intellectual horsepower on campus to put two and two together.

Beyond Schmidt’s statement, one has to look at their other moves, such as plans to slash 10,000 or so of their contractors, slowing cap-ex investments and killing off projects. These point to tough times for the company that has lived a lush life so far.

Projects that are too pie-in-the-sky are going to be killed. Schmidt calls it the “dark matter.” Google Lively and Google SearchMash are two of the many projects which will soon not matter. Google is contemplating killing off Google Notebook and Google Audio Indexing as well. Google Page Creator has given way to Google Sites. In that vein, Google is going to prune overlapping products. No more the 20-percent time for pet projects for engineers, though it might come back once the economic wheel churns. These are smart and prudent moves even if they are prompted by desperate need to control costs and meet their numbers.Update: I totally misread the WSJ post and made an incorrect interpretation. In other words, I totally messed up about the 20 percent timing thing. A commenter from Google was quick to point out that the 20 percent rule still stands and I am just flat-out wrong. This is what Schmidt said, which I misread:

He says the company is “not going to give” an engineer 20 people to work with on certain experimental projects anymore. “When the cycle comes back,” he says, “we will be able to fund his brilliant vision.”

I know it might sound hokey, but the rich don’t stop driving their Aston Martins just because the price of gas is going up. They do so when they are not as rich! The same analogy holds for Google and its cost-cutting efforts. Just remember how much of PR they milked out of their 20-percent philosophy. They are essentially eating a cow-pie on that. (Now I am the fool for making the wrong assumption on the 20-percent philosophy, though the rest of my sentiment still stands.) They wouldn’t be doing this unless things are really really REALLY tough.

Google needs to keep its sales machine going at a time when it is facing the same malaise as that of the broader market – slowing spending on marketing and advertising. There is some argument that Google is going to win because of their performance-based advertising system.

While that is true to some extent, what happens when the economy goes into a deep freeze? If you don’t have the money to splurge on a large-screen plasma TV, there is little chance you are going to search for that, and thus there are fewer opportunities for Google to sell more ads against those searches. Of course, if there is no intent to buy amongst the searchers, then there is less inclination to click on those ads as well. And that is not good news for Google.

Google, of course, is going to try and meet its targets by taking more out of the pocket of its “adsense” partners and undercutting competitors. The WSJ points out that the company is focusing heavily on display, mobile and other ad opportunities, which can only mean bad news for their rivals.

Related: Why Silicon Valley Should be Worried

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Netbooks are all the rage at the moment, with Asus predicting that it will sell 5 million of its Asus Eee PC netbooks by the end of this year. However, one of the tricky aspects of netbooks is that they have much more limited hardware resources than larger, traditional notebooks. For that reason, it makes sense to put applications on your machine that are both lightweight and powerful. The good news is that many of the best choices are free. In this post, you’ll find 10 ways to pimp out your Windows or Linux netbook, without breaking the hardware resources bank. OpenOffice Whether your netbook is Linux- or Windows-based, one of the best free downloads you can get is this suite of open-source productivity applications. OpenOffice includes lightweight but robust applications that compete with the expensive Microsoft Office alternatives: Writer (word processing), Calc (spreadsheet), Impress (presentations), Base (database), Draw (diagram creator) and Math (editor for math formulas).

PortableApps For Windows-based netbooks, this is a great collection of pre-selected free and primarily open source applications that you can stick on a netbook — or even a USB drive — in one quick download. It includes the portable editions of ClamWin (antivirus), Mozilla Firefox (web browser), Gaim (instant messaging), OpenOffice (office suite), Sudoku (puzzle game), Mozilla Sunbird (calendar/task manager) and Mozilla Thunderbird (email client), among other applications. You can cherry-pick the applications you want, or run the whole suite in under 512MB.

Google Chrome I usually favor Firefox when using a high-end computer or laptop, but on a netbook, Google’s open source Chrome browser is an extremely lightweight browser that is winning lots of speed competitions. It’s only available for Windows for the moment, but will be out in a Linux version early next year.

LXDE The “Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment” is a fast, energy-saving Linux desktop environment maintained by an international community of developers. It has a slick interface and lots of useful features, including tabbed file browsing. Plus, it takes fewer resources than the popular KDE and GNOME Linux desktop environments.

GNOME The GNOME desktop environment is very popular with many Linux users, and is lightweight enough for netbooks. Within GNOME, you get e-mail, groupware, web browsing, file management, multimedia, games and more. The new version 2.24 includes the GNOME Mobile Platform for the first time, which will keep developers focused on mobile applications for GNOME on an ongoing basis.

KDE The K Desktop Environment (KDE) Project is a very good choice for Linux-based netbooks. It includes slick desktop applications, including the Kontact personal information manager, Dragon Player for multimedia applications, and the Konqueror web browser.

RocketDock RocketDock is an animated application launcher that I highly recommend for owners of Windows-based netbooks. It is much faster and more flexible than the object docks on most netbooks, and it has an easy drag-and-drop interface. Check out a video of it here.

TinyResMeter TinyResMeter is a lightweight application for tracking system resources in use. Netbooks, of course, often have stripped down hardware resources, so this is a good way to get on-the-fly views of memory usage, CPU usage and much more. Keeping it on hand will help you stay under the system resource wire.

VLC Media Player Depending what hardware resources you have on your netbook and the media player you currently use, you may occasionally run into problems running video and audio content. VLC Media Player is a lightweight, free and open source media player that will work on either a Windows or Linux netbook. It supports nearly every popular file format and is specifically designed for portability.

Online Hosted Apps. Of course, one of the fundamental concepts behind netbooks is that you can use them with applications that are hosted online. If you don’t already use these, there are excellent, free choices from Zoho and Google Apps. Ulteo gives you 1GB of free online storage, and access to all of the OpenOffice productivity apps online.

Finally, don’t forget that a USB thumb drive can be an excellent adjunct to your netbook. You can get lots of capacity for very little money, and one simple download such as the PortableApps download above can put countless free applications in your pocket for use on your netbook whenever you want.

Image courtesy Asus

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In a measurement of statewide web-surfing speeds, Nevada came out on top with speeds of a mere 781 kbps, and that was far above the not-even-broadband speeds of 322 kbps experienced by users in New Mexico, the lowest ranked state, according to PCMag.com. The technology magazine published today its list of top Internet Service Providers, as well as the nation’s fastest states for broadband.

For those of you who looked at those speeds and noticed how much they differ from the multiple megabits per second most of us buy from our ISP, Jeremy Kaplan, executive editor for PCMag.com, explains that the publication’s measurements are a reflection of typical web surfing rather than a straight-up broadband speed test.

PCMag’s SurfSpeed application isn’t measuring speeds the way the ISPs or popular applications such as Speedtest.net do. Instead of sending a large file to test speeds, SurfSpeed measures how fast normal web sites can load the multiple frames of information sent down from a variety of servers. This is affected not only by broadband speeds but by the processing engine inside your browser, the latency on the servers delivering the web content and countless other points where a data packet might pause.

To see how your state ranked, check out the PCMag article and charts. I was bummed to see Texas, my home and the headquarters of AT&T, the nation’s largest ISP, was ranked 19th.

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Never before have Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales been so carefully tracked as they were this year. The scrutiny makes perfect sense, for the outcome of this shopping season will directly impact our collective economic future. But while there were numerous reports claiming that sales on those two crucial days were better than most had been expecting, my friend Barry Ritholz, a respected Wall Street contrarian, is skeptical — and says as much on his blog.

Later this week, we should get Master Card’s ShopperPulse data. It is the actual measurement of what people spent (via their MC Credit Card) and has proven to be more reliable than either foot traffic, surveys and other biased sources.

While we wait for that data, here are some facts from various sources which show that things are not as sanguine as people might think.

• comScore says Black Friday e-commerce sales were $534 million, up 1 percent from last year’s sales of $531 million.
• The number of page and product views across the online retail sector in general was down 8.55 and 8.29 percent, respectively, compared to Black Friday 2007, according to Coremetrics, which also points out that there was an 18-percent drop in average session length — a clear sign that retailers are struggling to keep customers on their sites. In addition, the number of people who actually completed a purchase dropped by 1.69 percent to 3.49 percent. In other words, there is a lot of hesitation on the part of consumers when it comes to spending.
• That 1-percent gain in online sales may not translate into profits for etailers. People are buying more per order (4.56 items vs. 4.45 items in 2007), but paying less for it. The average value of their orders dropped by more than 6 percent, to $126.04 from $134.29. It also points to people opting for lower-priced items.
• On the web sites of department stores, Coremetrics data finds a 12-percent increase in order sessions, a 30-percent surge in average items per order, and a 10-percent rise in average order value — none of which is good news for specialty retailers.

Who Buckled Under the Buying Rush?

Our friends at Gomez, a company that tracks the technical performance of web sites, sent us a long list of sites that went down and/or couldn’t keep up with consumers.

• On Monday, Victoria’s Secret had major problems. It was unable to complete shopping cart transactions (2:15pm ET) and was down completely between 10:06 am-12:00 pm ET, with a message on its site saying it was “down for maintenance.”
• Availability (defined as the percentage of times that a shopper’s end-to-end transaction is accomplished without error) was not up to par among major brands on Friday. Amazon’s availability was 73.49 percent, while Apple came in at 87.35 percent and Circuit City at 63.75 percent.
• Sears had just over 61 percent availability, but turned in a performance of 100 percent on Saturday.
• Dell saw downtime of around 35 minutes between 9:40 am and 10:15 am ET.
• Staples availability was somewhat off, at 84 percent, on Friday, but rose to 95 percent by Saturday.

What Was Hot — and What Was Not

• HDTV’s were the hot item this season, thanks to prices that literally nosedived. According to Retrevo (see disclosure below), a Sunnyvale, Calif-based company that tracks the consumer electronics market, by Black Friday, interest in HDTVs had surged by more than 250 percent compared to interest at the beginning of November. Indeed, Samsung’s LN52A650 52″ LCD TV was the fourth best-selling product over the web on Black Friday, according to PriceGrabber.
• Nintento Wii topped PriceGrabber’s list of Black Friday products, followed by Ugg boots, the Sony BDP-S350 1080p Blu-ray Disc Player, Samsung’s LN52A650 52″ LCD TV and Nintendo’s Wii Fit. According to PriceGrabber, year-over-year interest in Blu-ray/HD-DVD Players was up 147 percent.
• The Wii was a big winner on Cyber Monday as well, according to Price Grabber. In their list of top products, the Sony BDP-S350 1080p Blu-ray Disc Player came in at No. 3, Apple’s iPod Touch 8GB MP3 player was No. 4, followed by Samsung’s LN52A650 52″ LCD TV in the No. 5 spot. Apple’s iPod Nano 3rd Generation 4GB MP3 Player and the Apple iPod Touch 16GB MP3 Player were ranked No. 10 and No. 11, respectively, followed by the Samsung LN46A550 46″ LCD TV (No. 12), the Sharp AQUOS LC42SB45U 42″ LCD TV (No. 14) and the PanasonicTH-42PX80U 42″ Plasma TV (No. 16).
• According to RBC Captial Markets analyst Mark Sue, consumer electronics retailers used navigation devices as a lure this holiday season. The Garmin Nuvi 200 was available for $97, the TomTom One 125 for $99, the Garmin Nuvi 260w for $189, and the Magellan 1212 for just $79. Sue points out that Garmin’s mid- to higher-tier products were being discounted as well. While this might mean good news for consumer electronics retailers in the short term, I get the feeling they might have pulled too much of their sales forward and will struggle in the coming months.

Image courtesy of tshein via Flickr.

Full disclosure: Retrevo is backed by Alloy Ventures, an investor in Giga Omni Media, the parent company of this blog.

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The closure of Pownce, which was announced Monday via posts by co-founder Leah Culver and her new employer, blog software company Six Apart, didn’t come as much of a surprise to anyone who’s followed Pownce since its launch last year. Despite help from co-founders like Kevin Rose of Digg and usability guru Daniel Burka, the service never really found an audience, or at least not one big enough to make a go of it. In the end, Pownce was just too much like Twitter (and Jaiku and Plurk, for that matter); the added features it had — including the ability to transfer files — weren’t enough to set it apart in people’s minds, much less turn it into a must-have utility.

So why did Six Apart, the blogging software provider founded by husband-and-wife team Ben and Mena Trott, decide to buy the company? It’s possible that they just saw Culver and her fellow Powncer Mike Malone as valuable hires in the programming department, and decided to acqu-hire them, as Google has done with so many startup founders over the years. But while the Pownce service is being shut down, could its features live on inside Six Apart and its Vox blogging service? I think that’s a very real possibility. Culver, for example, notes in her blog post that she hopes to “come back with something much better in 2009.”

Twitter and its ilk are often referred to as platforms for “micro-blogging,” because (in the right hands at least) a 140-character message posted to the service can be almost as good as a blog post. More than one blogger has said that the frequency of their blog posts has decreased since they began Twittering, and some have given up full-blown blogging altogether. Others, however (myself included), use Twitter as a kind of feeder system for their blogs. Not only do they use it to find ideas, links and conversation that spark longer blog posts, but they use it in reverse — to alert potential readers to their posts. And in many cases the conversation extends from the blog to the chat service and vice-versa. There’s an almost symbiotic relationship between the two services, with each feeding off and benefiting from the other.

Six Apart has made a number of acquisitions that indicate the company is thinking about how to extend its services, including social media application maker Apperceptive. Much like its blog software competitor Automattic, the home of WordPress (see disclosure below), the company seems to be looking for tools that can be incorporated into its platforms to make them more robust as media publishing services. Could a Twitter-style tool be part of that vision for Six Apart? It would make a lot of sense, just as WordPress buying Buddypress (a startup that added social networking functionality to the platform) and launching a Twitter-style chat theme called Prologue made sense.

There are already a variety of plugins and tools that allow WordPress and Movable Type bloggers to incorporate Twitter into their blogs, either by posting their messages automatically in a sidebar, or in some cases, by allowing them to post to Twitter from their blog dashboard. But having someone who understands how such services operate could help Six Apart integrate these kinds of features more fully into their platforms, as well as making it easier to develop new ones that could merge micro-blogging and “real” blogging. At the end of the day, Six Apart and Automattic aren’t just blogging services but content-management and content-publishing companies, and Twitter messages are just another form of content that needs to be managed and published.

Auttomatic is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

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Phorm’s chief operations officer and several members of its board have left the company, citing disagreements with CEO Kent Ertugrul. According to a regulatory filing, Steven Heyer, David Dorman, Christopher Lawrence and Virasb Vahidi — who also served as the controversial ad firm’s COO — have stepped down from the Phorm board. The four blamed their departure on “a result of differences with Mr. Ertugrul as to the management and future direction of the Company.”

Phorm has already replaced them, and plans to continue selling ISPs on a program that delivers targeted advertisements based on where a customer surfs on the web. However, with other UK broadband providers rejecting Phorm’s rather invasive technology, another investigation into the legality of Phorm’s actions and worries in the U.S. over privacy, maybe the executives were getting out while the getting was still good.

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Sierra Wireless, the maker of wireless data cards, today said it’s agreed to spend about 218 million euros ($274.9 million) to buy Wavecom, the Paris-based maker of machine-to-machine communications chips. It’s a good move for Sierra, which is paying a 108-percent premium over Wavecom’s last trading price, in order to beat rival bidder Gemalto. For Sierra, the deal gives it the ability to follow the growth of the web as it moves beyond people to machines. The deal also provides a new avenue for growth as Sierra sees interest in wireless cards fade as communications chips are embedded directly into laptops.

A leader in this trend is Qualcomm with its Gobi platform. Gobi contains a variety of wireless chips embedded into the laptop that are activated by the user if and when they need them. Like any other external card for computers, as wireless networks become more commonplace, and users are willing to pay for connectivity everywhere, the card’s functionality gets embedded into the machine. This is already happening, albeit slowly.

That means rather than working with Qualcomm to buy chips for the Sierra wireless cards, Sierra finds itself competing with Qualcomm’s Gobi platform. The deal for Wavecom offers Sierra an entry into the growing market for Internet connectivity for other devices — from the telematics in cars to point of sales systems — as its wireless card business faces its likely decline.

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