Happy Black Friday! As traditional as turkey dinners, football and extended family dysfunction; Black Friday is, of course, the day after Thanksgiving that traditionally is the biggest shopping day of the year kicking off the holiday season.

Given the economy, I'm guessing it will be more like Grey Friday.

I must share a little something I found on the Consumerist site; Black Friday bingo.

Not that retailers will have time to play, but do take a look and have a laugh.

For retailers that do have time to play today; fyi, that should be a spot on the card.

This is easy!

- Windows Vista (Number one two years in a row now)

- The economy

- All the VC money that went with it.

- Microsoft's attempt to buy Yahoo!

- Yahoo! management ignoring that the offer was actually a good price for shareholders and telling Microsoft to take a hike without running it by said shareholders.

- Spammers, phishers and hackers (Destined to be on this list longer than Dark Side of the Moon sat on Billboard)

- The people at Verizon who peeked at President-elect Obama's Blackberry records. Naughty!

- Anyone who still charges for WiFi.

- Apple's MobileMe

- Circuit City closes one in five of its stores. Now where can I go to do my geeky impulse shopping?

Have a great Thanksgiving!

Go Texas!

- Renee Oricchio

I wasn't going to say anything. As a tech journalist, it's a little too close to the bone speaking of the deceased. But, I have to throw in my two cents worth after reading Alice Hill's (of RealTechNews) column within a column about the death of computer magazines. Most recently, I'm referring to the announcement that the long venerated PC Magazine has announced that January will be it's last hard copy issue (it will continue online).

It took ten years, but Alice can now say it; I told you so!

And so she has.

Alice saw trouble a decade ago with computer magazines noting how thin and increasingly irrelevant they were quickly becoming despite the exploding interest and advances in technology.

Is there a market for technology journalism? You betcha (to borrow from Sarah Palin). Just look at how much of your capitol budget is dedicated to IT. Have you ever felt overwhelmed keeping track with all the latest updates, patches, price drops, flash in the pan gizmos versus new must-have technologies?

Truth be told, tech journalism has a long history of being way too cozy with the companies they cover often resembling cheerleaders rather than sober, impartial reviewers.

Other inherent problems:

- It's not just for hobbyists. Computer magazines started out as fun reading for geeks! Early adopters! Hobbyists! When computers and the Internet went mainstream, that paradigm in tech reporting didn't shift along with it.

- Too inside baseball! Real people who don't work in IT or live in their parent's basement want to know about technology. English, please. Hold the acronyms.

- Magazines are planned three months out in advance. In high tech, that's an epoch ago. It doesn't surprise me that PC Mag is staying alive - online.

Business people want to read about technology in terms of what is meaningful to business.

Parents want to read about technology in terms of what's safe for their kids.

Educators want to read about technology in terms of how it can be used to impact learning.

Consumers want to read about technology in terms of the most features for the most bang for the buck.

In other words, technology needs to be covered in the context of how it is used.

If I'm not doing that for you, let me know.

Just how pervasive is Facebook? Here's a neato visualization of "Facebook actions" developed by a group of Facebook engineers. They call it Project Palantir (yes, there's a Lord of the Rings homage in there). It's a view from space of all the data transfers on Facebook. I recommend watching it with the sound down and perhaps listening to the theme song from 2001 or Pink Floyd or something while viewing. No need for the geek speak. The pictures do the talking.

For those businesses contemplating whether to use Facebook or any of the other major social networks as a marketing channel, this just might be your tipping point.

A little known company, Boston Power, that makes laptop batteries is reportedly close to announcing its first major customer.

Word is, Boston Power's Sonata battery could be coming to a laptop near you in the near future. No word on which PC maker is in talks to bundle them in, but the buzz is that it is likely Hewlett-Packard.

Here are some comparisons between Sonata and today's typical battery:

- Current batteries (no pun intended) can be recharged about 150 times. Sonata can be recharged about 1000 times.

- Sonata also is greener technology. It uses no heavy metals and less toxic chemicals than traditional batteries.

It's nice to know innovation and entrepreneurship is still alive and well despite Wall Street.

You likely won't see people camped out in lawn chairs (for one thing it's November and too cold) to purchase one, but Blackberry Storm is hitting shelves of Verizon stores tomorrow with much hype regardless.

It's the first touchscreen Blackberry with built-in GPS, Mp3 and html web browser (and yes, it does the turn it sideways thing).

It's also priced at $199 competitive with the iPhone and the Google Android phone.

Am i missing something? The Blackberry Bold launched earlier this month through AT&T stores. It prices out between $299 up to more than $650.

All I can say is poor President-elect Obama. Looks like he'll have to take a pass on both.

I'm rethinking my e-mail address. It's a huge decision to switch e-mail accounts. But Google you are weirding me out!

You get what you pay for. I understand that. So naturally, there are ads displayed down the right side of my email client (gmail). There's nothing new about this. What's new is my growing discomfort with it.

I've just been paying attention more to the content of those ads (happy news for Google and it's advertisers, admittedly). The ads are clearly triggered by keywords in the content of my e-mails; those being drafted and those being read.

File this under "when intuitive becomes intrusive". There's a line and gmail continues to cross it.

If I'm writing an e-mail about my kids, then toy ads pop up on the right side. If I'm writing a whiny e-mail to a girlfriend about my daily emotional dramas, I get self-help ads. You get the idea.

There's just something inherently wrong about this. It's one thing to cull information from my profile and pigeon hole me into a demographic and market to me accordingly (slimy, but I accept that). Sending bots to crawl through my e-mails for key words to trigger appropriate content ads is too far. It's ingenius from a marketing standpoint. But for a company whose mantra is "don't be evil"; well, memo to Google.

This is evil!

Although no firm decisions have been made (forced) on our new President-elect, Barack Obama. It's not looking good. Blackberry is likely to lose its most famous customer. It's likely President-elect Obama is more upset about it than RIM (Blackberry's parent company).

If he kept it, Obama would be our first president that does "the e-mail". In retrospect, we all laughed at John McCain's disconnect with e-mail. But, sadly maybe he was on to something. It appears e-mail presents just too many security risks for POTUS (President of the United States). There's the risk of hacking, of course, of both the e-mail client and the servers where e-mails are archived. There's also a little thing called the "President Records Act", which puts all of his correspondence written or digital under the scrutiny of public record keeping.

Questions that come to mind:

- Aside from the President Records Act, if the Blackberry isn't secure enough for the President; then how is it secure enough for anyone else sending and receiving sensitive data. The President isn't the only one with secrets to keep. His are just more important.

No wonder it's become an echo chamber.

This weekend I was baking bread and experimenting with bread starters, some of which
can require extreme dedication and along the way I came across this research.

Turns out USC scientists have found a way to extend the life of yeast 10-fold in a
way that is applicable to humans. How would you like to outlive Methuselah?

Expect real estate prices to increase as the world gets more crowded.

Curt run a project management software company in Austin Texas.

From the "why didn't I think of that" file, American Airlines is allowing passengers to check in with their cell phones, rather than a paper boarding pass. The boarding pass is sent to the passenger's cell with a barcode. Zip, zip, you're on board.

So far, you might say it's a pilot program (pun intended). It's only available at Chicago's O'Hare. However, boarding by cell or PDA will also be available at LAX and John Wayne Airport in Orange County this week.

I expect this trend to spread. I can't resist making a pithy remark, however.

How is it that airlines can roll out new forward thinking services like mobile boarding passes, while the meals on wheels are an atrocity?

Here's some weekend reading for you. Cisco has released an exhaustive white paper on their latest findings on data leakage from a global survey of IT professionals,

Interesting nuggets:

- One third of IT professionals in the survey worry most about data leaks via USB devices. E-mail ranks number two at 25%.

- Nearly half admit they are not properly training their employees about data security.

Where's your weak point? If you don't know, you don't need to conduct a worldwide survey. Just poll your employees. Their responses may surprise you.

You know the rest. The two are reportedly very close to inking a partnership deal that would make Microsoft's mobile search engine the default search engine on all of Verizon's cell phone accounts. The two would share the ad revenues, with Microsoft guaranteeing $550 to $650 million in revenues for Verizon over the first five years. Apparantly, Google was also courting Verizon for the same deal. However, it would only guarantee about half of that.

Word is, Microsoft is also negotiating a separate deal to bundle in the Windows Mobile operating system on more Verizon phones.

So much for Google Android showing up at the Verizon store.

The battle lines are drawing up. AT&T has the iPhone. T-Mobile, so far, has Google Android. And Verizon may be jumping the broom with Microsoft.

About a year ago, I got fed up with iGoogle and switched to Pageflakes. Big mistake! I used PageFlakes as both my Internet dashboard and my RSS reader.

It's gone.

Pageflakes got sold to LiveUniverse last spring. Here's a quote from PageFlakes CE0, Dan Cohen:

"You can count on the fact that everything that you (and we) love about Pageflakes will remain the same, while the resources Brad and LiveUniverse will be investing in us will help us make it even better,"

So much for that. PageFlakes doesn't exist anymore. One day (albeit a number of weeks ago now) I tried to launch my dashboard of widgets and incoming feeds and nothing. I tried going to PageFlakes home page. Nothing. No explanation. No splash page with a word on what next. No notification to save my bookmarked feeds in the reader. Nothing. Just all gone.

This is the risk you run by using a free webware tool as a business tool. You get what you pay for. I cheaped out and now all those dozens of feeds are lost with no notice.

File this under "cautionary tale".

We've all heard the horror stories (some of have lived them); dropping your mobile device in the toilet, running it through the washing machine after it was left in a pants pocket and, of course, letting your dog or children anywhere near it at anytime.

SquareTrade has released a "failure report" on the three most currently popular smart phones (iPhones, Treos and Blackberries).

Surprise, surprise (at least to me); the iPhone came out the hardiest of the three with only a 5.6% failure rate on average within the first 12 months of ownership. Blackberry's failure rate is double that. Treo is triple that for the same time frame. Wow!

Let's look a little closer at the findings:

- One third of all iPhone problems are due to accidents (imagine dropping one in the toilet!). The study concludes that iPhones are more prone to accidents because what reviewers call "sleek in design" is actually slippery to hold in real life.

- Another third of all iPhone failures are due to the touchscreen. Treo, however, actually has more malfunctions related to screen and touchpad problems.

- Across the board, the minimal areas of concern are battery life and hardware accessories like Bluetooth and cameras.

We've all heard the horror stories (some of us have lived them); dropping your mobile device in the toilet, running it through the washing machine after it was left in a pants pocket and, of course, letting your dog or children anywhere near it at anytime.

SquareTrade has released a "failure report" on the three most currently popular smart phones (iPhones, Treos and Blackberries).

Surprise, surprise (at least to me); the iPhone came out the hardiest of the three with only a 5.6% failure rate on average within the first 12 months of ownership. Blackberry's failure rate is double that. Treo is triple that for the same time frame. Wow!

Let's look a little closer at the findings:

- One third of all iPhone problems are due to accidents (imagine dropping one in the toilet!). The study concludes that iPhones are more prone to accidents because what reviewers call "sleek in design" is actually slippery to hold in real life.

- Another third of all iPhone failures are due to the touchscreen. Treo, however, actually has more malfunctions related to screen and touchpad problems.

- Across the board, the minimal areas of concern are battery life and hardware accessories like Bluetooth and cameras.

One of my favorites is Business Radio, where they have new content every
week of different business people getting interviewed.

I think it is now safe to say that Microsoft finally gets it and is willing to let us know... that we know... that they know... that Vista is a dud.

Microsoft is pushing its next generation of Windows hard. Windows 7 isn't due out until some time next year. But here are the promises as delivered by senior executives at Microsoft's Window Hardware Engineering Conference:

- Windows 7 will boot up and power down faster, using less power and memory in the process.

- Windows 7 will use up to 11% less in battery life than Vista.

Change really is in the air. Let's see if Microsoft delivers.

What else is a multi-national telco to do with $275 million laying around in cash? AT&T is using it to buy up Irving, TX-based, WayPort, and pick up another 3,000 WiFi hotspots around the United States.

This brings AT&T's domestic total of Internet watering holes to 20,000 around the country and 80,000 worldwide.

Meantime, here's another word to add to your vocabulary if you haven't already;

Tethering

Tethering means attaching your wireless mobile device to a PC, Laptop or PDA and using it for WiFI access to the Internet. Everything old is new again. In other words, this is using a phone as modem hookup of sorts to dial up the Internet.

By the way, AT&T also announced this week it will soon allow customers to use their iPhone 3G's for tethering in places where there's no other WiFi connection available.

Can't find a hotspot? Tired of paying for hotspot time? Tethering could be a good solution. Just keep an eye on what it's doing to your battery time.

Have a great weeked. We'll get back to business on Monday.

Universal Serial Bus (USB) is going turbo. Later this month, the new and much faster version of USB will be unveiled at a (what else?) USB conference. That would be the USB Implementers Forum to be exact.

Also called Super Speed USB, the new 3.0 version is expected to become available next year. This will surely be a welcome upgrade to anyone who transfers big moosey files like pictures, graphics and straming media files. The new Super Speed USB reportedly transfers data 10 times faster than the current USB.

Cool!

As you continue to nurse your election week hangover, here's a twitter I must share.

From CrunchGear blogger, Peter Ha, on the night of the election:

"If you can wait 3+ days to buy a damned iPhone, then you can wait in line to vote!"

Stick a fork in it. The proposed deal for Google and Yahoo! to join forces running Google ads on Yahoo web sites is officially dead.

This deal was originally announced months ago (June to be exact). Since then there's been much queasiness at the idea of the two search engine monoliths partnering up. I believe the words "possible anti-trust lawsuit" have been used. Google pulled the plug announcing it on their public policy blog (yes, they have a public policy blog).

Meantime, Yahoo! is apparantly not happy. They really needed this deal, which was announced on the heels of Microsoft's failed hostile takeover bid earlier this year. Microsoft's failed overtures left Yahoo! stock in the tank. This deal was supposed to bring in $800 million in added revenue in its first year. So ouch!

Marc Benioff, Chairman and CEO of Salesforce.com made a doozy of an annoucement this week. Benioff is sweetening the pot to get businesses to use Salesforce.com's cloud billing it as one stop shopping to host internal intranets and web sites.

More interesting to me, Benioff also announced a new partnership with both Amazon and Facebook. Salesforce.com customers will be able to seamlessly use Amazon's web development arm to build applications. Meanwhile, those applications will be able to seamlessly interface with Facebook.

I'm guessing Facebook will be the biggest winner in this deal. Facebook is a great place for grownups who can't stand black backgrounds (yes, that was a slam on MySpace) to socialize. But Facebook desperately wants that business crowd too.

It'll be interesting to watch Facebook vs. LinkedIn continue to go toe to toe. I'm not placing bets on either.

FBR Capital Markets is projecting iPhone production could cut back as much as 40 percent in the fourth quarter from a year ago. Okay, this recession is officially not funny anymore when the iPhone juggernaut is, well, a jugger-not!

There are a number of explanations floating around (read that: spinning around) the blogosphere. One of the rosier theories is that Apple is cutting back iPhone production at home to churn out more abroad in overseas markets.

Yup, that could be it.

Then again, maybe it's; hmmm... oh say, hmmmm again... THE ECONOMY!

Even with the price cut down to the $200 starter price, there's still that sizeable monthly nut it costs for the AT&T plan.

Just a casual observation: but seven - eight years ago when the country went into a much smaller swoon over the burst of the tech bubble, the post y2y bug slowdown and then 9/11, technology was on the precipice of all kinds of nifty things. Streaming video and DVRs come to mind. All of that eventually happened. But, there was a game delay for awhile due to the troubled economy. The technology was ready. The market was not.

3G mobile technology may not become as ubiquitous as quickly as everyone had hoped. I'm guessing more people will decide to stick with their Razr or last year's Blackberry a little longer. Just a thought.