Technology - NewsFactor

Flying in the face of recessionary cautions about the video-game industry, Activision Blizzard is shattering record after record with its latest release. Infinity Ward's Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 continues to break box-office and sales records for a five-day worldwide sell-through.

Microsoft has released the beta version of Office 2010, along with betas of the 2010 versions of SharePoint Server, Visio, Project and Office Web Apps for business customers. Office Mobile 2010 has also reached the beta milestone.

Social networking has been the face of Web 2.0 for many years now. But until now the phrase has been synonymous with Facebook, MySpace and YouTube. Despite the efforts of companies like LinkedIn to bring social networking into the business world, in many ways organizations have been slow to adapt to the new technology.

Microsoft told its Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles Wednesday that it's already working on the next version of Internet Explorer. In addition to demonstrating some of the progress on performance and interoperability standards in IE9, Microsoft said it intends to make more PC hardware capabilities available to web developers from within the browser.

Microsoft showed Tuesday that it has its head firmly in the clouds as it announced the Windows Azure platform will be at full capacity on Jan. 1. The announcement by Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie at the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles described Azure and SQL Azure as "core elements of the company's cloud-services strategy."

Bing is up. Yahoo is down. Google still dominates. That's the latest story line from comScore. The market-research firm just issued its October U.S. search-engine rankings.

Verizon Wireless has filed a legal response to a complaint before the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia in which AT&T claims that its wireless rival's "There's a Map for that" ad campaign has been distorting facts about AT&T's wireless coverage. The dueling lawsuits demonstrate that the smartphone battle lines are being sharply drawn around the issues of 3G coverage, speed and reliability.

Apple rumors are always the most popular during the holiday season. With Black Friday coming next week, the rumor mill is operating at top speed hinting that Apple is about to offer super-steep discounts on iPods and Macs (but not iPhones). The rumors also say that an Apple posting for a game designer verifies the long-awaited Apple tablet.

Observers say T-Mobile's resumption of sales of the Sidekick -- which had been sidelined since last month's massive loss of customer data -- is a good start. But, they say, the incident has proven costly and points to a risky tactic that the carrier's competitors have stopped using.

Social networks such as Facebook and MySpace have invaded families' living rooms, corporate offices, and mobile phones. Now they are making their mark on the New American Oxford English Dictionary.

The pace of interactive multimedia continues to evolve with the release Tuesday of Adobe Systems' beta versions of its AIR 2 and Flash Player 10.1 software. The updates are available for Windows, Mac and Linux operating systems. The 10.1 player is also available for x86-based netbooks and, at some point in 2010, for smartphones and other mobile devices.

On Tuesday, YouTube announced a new service that lets news and media outlets request, review and even rebroadcast clips YouTube users shoot and upload to the site. Dubbed YouTube Direct, the new tool is built from YouTube's API. YouTube Direct is an open-source application that makes it possible for media organizations to allow customized versions of YouTube's upload platform on their web sites.

The early returns are good for Motorola's Droid, the Android-based smartphone that the company introduced on Nov. 6 on the Verizon Wireless network. While most quantitative measures won't be available for a while, an early assessment by Flurry, a mobile analytics service provider, estimates that 250,000 Droids were sold during its first week of availability. This compares favorably to the 60,000 estimated sales for the myTouch 3G.

Cray Systems' Jaguar supercomputer, running Advanced Micro Devices six-core Opteron processors, was awarded the top slot Monday among the world's fastest 500 machines after running an industry benchmark at an astounding performance level of 1.759 petaFLOPS, or 1.759 quadrillion calculations per second. By contrast, IBM's BlueGene/P supercomputer achieved just 825.5 TeraFLOPS on the identical Linpack benchmark.

Apple has won its lawsuit against Psystar, which has been selling Mac OS X in Mac clone computers. The decision in Apple's favor is expected to pave the way for Apple to argue its copyright-infringement case against future violators.

YouTube has inked a "bueno" deal with Univision Interactive Media. The digital division of Univision Communications -- and the leading Spanish-language media company stateside -- has partnered with YouTube to broadcast short-length and long-form Univision videos on the popular viral video site.

The Google Books settlement is back. On Friday, Google and the author and publisher groups that originally sued over the search engine's massive scanning operations offered a revised version of the settlement.

Palm released its new Pixi smartphone Sunday, hoping to keep its new and well-received webOS mobile platform moving forward. The smartphone, which will be available through Sprint Nextel, comes amid rumors that Nokia is interested in buying the struggling device maker.

Just in time for the holiday shopping season, Samsung is rolling out the Go netbook through AT&T next week. The 2.8-pound device will operate Microsoft Windows 7 Starter Edition and connect via AT&T's 3G network.