Amazon.com has launched new online payment options which are clearly stiff competition to the current dominant payment platform on the Web – PayPal. One one hand you see the practical nature of having its own payment system, but on the other there’s a certain amount of reservation about going for a player that does a job as reliably as PayPal does.

Dell’s launched new desktop PC models with one particular standout – its Dell Studio Hybrid. Dell claims the PC is 80% smaller than the average desktop minitower, and uses 70% less energy.

Billionaire investor T. Boone Pickens has dumped all of his 10 million shares in Yahoo for an undisclosed loss, stating management issues and a non-merger with Microsoft as reasons for the sudden sale. 

A judge in California ruled that Sprint Nextel Corp’s early termination charges violate state laws. This will certainly put cell phone carriers in a frenzy as they’ve been used to heavily penalizing customers who skip on over to the competition.

Major technical business companies like HP, Intel, and Yahoo, along with several educational and research organizations are coming together to create a global research test bed for cloud computing. They’ve also partnered with organizations like Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA), the University of Illinios, the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), and the National Science Foundation. Their goal is to create an environment where companies from different industries, academia, and governments can come together and research different cloud computing technologies without any financial or logistical barriers.

The Blackberry world is abuzz concerning all the hot new handsets coming out in the upcoming months, from the release of the Curve Sunset to the Bold, and eventually the Thunder. Though none of RIMs upcoming handsets are available right now, it is getting so close many addicts can almost taste it.

Microsoft just unveiled some videos of its ongoing Mojave Experiment, which places an unwitting user in a room with a Microsoft representative and a rebranded version of Windows Vista. The representative shows some features of Mojave then reveals that it’s actually Windows Vista. Typically the reaction is a pleasant surprise from the participant, but does any of this address the functional problems that gave Vista a bad reputation in the first place?

A new search engine was launched on Monday called Cuil, and unlike the hundreds of other search engines launched in the past few years, this one got massive amounts of press. Not only did blogs and technology websites all talk about the new “Google killer”, but so did newspapers around the world. The reason for all this fuss? Because the people behind Cuil are ex-Google employees. But what is the reality behind all the fuss made over this launch? Can Cuil actually compete with Google?

A super-high-bandwidth network is being switched on in August that will pump out 15 petabytes per second or 15 million GB.  The extreme speed will push data to some 5000 scientists in 500 institutions across the world to help speed access to the vast amounts of research data being collected all the time.

Scrabulous, the Facebook application which bore too close a resemblance to the official board game Scrabble, has finally bitten the dust.

Polar Cities or Lovelock Retreats as they are sometimes called, are self-contained cities.  These cites are created to house the population that manages to survive the extreme effects of global warming.  Projected need for such cities ranges from 2300 to 2500.

Imagine the world, as we know it, has come to an end due to global warming.  Much of the world has been radically changed by the rising of the oceans.  Life has devolved to survivability and little else.  Welcome to Polar City.

Oracle’s ongoing war with SAP is scaling new heights – it’s now calling out its closest rival over alleged theft.

Samsung has signed a multi-year deal with location-based social networking provider GyPSii.  The move should position the device maker perfectly for the future of social networking using mobile devices, which is poised to expand exponentially as the technology catches up.

Mob wisdom is a cornerstone of web 2.0 applications and for the most part it provides good insight and direction on many topics. Popular sites like Digg, Fark, and Google Trends all provide a window into that behavior, but they also can influence it on a grand scale. Spurred on by the blitz debut success of Batman in The Dark Knight, the mob mentality flung it to a glamorous position: top movie of all time on the Internet Movie Database (IMDB).

People who use the Web often forget that many of the same rules that apply in the real world also apply online. Be it copyright laws, defamation of character, or libel, this type of legislation governs people’s behaviour regardless of the medium they choose to display it on. So when a guy set a fake Facebook account up for an old friend of his, he mustn’t have realised the consequences could be as dire as they turned out to be.

There was me thinking the high definition format war was well and truly over, with Blu-ray being declared the future format of choice as soon as HD DVD took a tumble earlier this year. But maybe not, as China is set to launch CBHD (China Blue High-definition Disc) later this year. The question I have: What is the point?