But it's sure trying hard, and it would be dangerous for anyone to write off Microsoft. Its determination was on display today at the Search Engine Strategies conference in San Jose, Satya Nardella, Microsoft's senior VP of search, portal, and advertising platform group, told the crowd that he sees searchers moving from merely typing keywords into Google to getting tasks done.

Not coincidentally, getting tasks done is essentially Microsoft's main business, so that sounds a little too convenient. But in fact, searchers are already doing that to varying degrees. Nardella cited an interesting figure: About half the queries on Microsoft's Live Search site are part of search sessions that extend over 30 minutes.

At the same time, Microsoft is trying some interesting new things in search, from paying searchers through its new Live Search cashback to buying startups such as Powerset and Farecast for new features to search distribution deals with Hewlett-Packard and Facebook.

Not least, I don't think, as some folks do, that Google inevitably keeps getting more share of queries forever. When you get to around 70% share, with margins as fat as an Olympic shot putter, the market ecosystem gets out of whack and everyone in the pond works to get it back to some equilibrium. Even Google probably can't stop that in the long run.

For all that, though, I still don't see a killer strategy from Microsoft to really take on Google. Except maybe one, and it's risky: time. Right now, Nardella told me and my colleague Peter Burrows in an interview afterwards, search is mostly text-based. "But that will change," he said. "We just have to keep at it." Essentially, he's saying, Microsoft has time to keep chipping away at its archrival and pounce at the first signs of weakness or a market disruption.

Despite many missteps, including the handling of its attempted Yahoo acquisition--still its best chance to jumpstart its online ad strategy--Microsoft's pretty good at that game. It has the money to both spend on startups and new search features and wait watchfully for search to evolve beyond Google's iconic "ten blue links." If and when there's a shift to new modes of searching, as there inevitably will be, Microsoft may have an opening.

Problem for Microsoft and everyone else is that Google isn't standing still. Arguably, it's in the best position to revolutionize search before anyone else. Time may be Microsoft's best hope, but only if it doesn't run out of it first.

But while the idea has appeal, and has gained support from FCC Chairman Kevin Martin, I just don't see it going anywhere any time soon -- despite this additional pressure from Google. Television broadcasters and wireless service providers are dead set against it. Devices supposed to work over white spaces keep failing government tests. And Google's publicity campaign doesn't help address either of these problems.

According to Google, the FCC will finally make its determination on white spaces this fall. But I wouldn't be surprised if the vote is delayed yet again, as it has been for more than a year, due to industry resistance and technology issues. Perhaps Google hopes the FreeTheAirwaves campaign will help move the needle. I am not so sure.

To me, the most amazing event of the Beijing Olympics was the record-shattering victory of Jamaica's Usain Bolt in the 100 m sprint. Video of the race--it lasts less than 10 seconds--is widely available on the Web. But the best you can get on nbcolympics.com is a still photo. And don't think about YouTube either--Bolt videos are being taken down, apparently at the demand of NBC Universal, as fast as they go up.

I thought for a brief moment that NBC had allowed some actual news to penetrate the calculated staleness of nbcolympics.com when a search turned up the headline: "Bolt strikes again, sets 200m mark." But, alas, it was a report of Bolt's month-old victory at an Olympic warmup meet in Athens.

Software is, in fact, what will make or break this gadget, which some call the gPhone. There have been plenty of touch-screen iPhone clones already, several of them from HTC. They've done well, but not nearly as well as Apple's iPhone. Could the Android phone change that? Perhaps.

Here's Tanabian's run-down on the Android phone's software features:
-- If you want to receive push e-mail, you'll have to use Google's Gmail. It's unclear that the phone will support Microsoft Exchange.
-- The phone will have access to upcoming T-Mobile App Store, which will be very similar to Apple's store featuring third-party iPhone applications. Only T-Mobile will likely place fewer restrictions on software developers, so that Android phone users may have more games and productivity apps to choose from.
-- The phone will come with Google's advertising software pre-installed. Customers who opt in to receive mobile ads from Google may be offered to buy the phone for a lower price, and may also pay lower monthly service fees. The Google platform will serve ads based on your interests and location, provided by the phone.

Tanabian has also provided me a few additional details on the hardware:
-- The Android phone's screen will be larger than the iPhone's, he believes.
-- The handset will feature a track ball, making it easier to navigate menus with one hand.
-- Down the road, perhaps the phone may be able to hook into T-Mobile's Hotspot @Home service, allowing people to make unlimited calls via the Android phone from home or office.
-- The Android phone will hit stores around Thanksgiving, not in September-October, as some news outlets have reported.

The Gmail mandate also raises all those old, hairy questions about just how much control Google will exercise over the Android project. Lots of the world's best independent developers and software companies actually compete with Google. And if they sense that Google is always getting the upper hand with Android, they will not back this phone. End users will suffer, as they won't have access to the best applications out there.

If you get cable (or satellite) through a set top box, absolutely nothing will happen when the analog stations go dark next Feb. 17. You service provider will take care of all the transition issues ansd the box will continue to supply analog signals to your analog TV, typically through either a coaxial cable or a yellow-red-white composite video/audio set of cables.

One problem is that cable operators are pushing their own digital transition, separate from the government mandated Feb. 17 switchover for broadcast TV. Digital cable offers higher quality and more efficient use of the network, and is the only way to supply high definition signals. But digital cable can only be connected directly to TVs equipped with something called a ClearQAM turner, and these tend to be sets that also have digital tuners (also known as ATSC tuners.) If your cable service is changed to digital and you want to go on using and analog set, you're almost certainly going to need to hook up a set top box.

So instead, I decided to pay a visit to my local Goodwill. Sure enough, there were plenty of CRT TVs. And there on the linoleum floor was a very nice Sony Trinitron from 2002, for just $29.99. Sold!

And you know what? The picture quality is a whole lot better than my old one, with an extra inch of screen size to boot. Oh, I've seen those delicious HDTVs, and yes, I'd love to have one. But right now, I'd rather have the extra $770. Easy decision for someone who's working in an imploding industry during an economic downturn.

The thing is, technology advances so quickly these days that even the old stuff is pretty darn good to someone like me who, despite writing about the latest technology, tends not to like being a guinea pig beta tester for tech companies that consider obsolescence a feature, not a bug. At least not on my own dime. Somehow, I don't think I'm alone, and I think that doesn't bode well for consumer electronics manufacturers.

But while some developers have since struck gold, many others are seething with resentment. After submitting an iPhone application early, in June, one developer is still waiting for Apple to approve this software and to put it up for sale. From what I am hearing, the queue is enormous.

Perhaps Apple doesn't have enough staff power to review the flood of applications it receives fast enough. But developers who are used to having their applications approved within days are stuck in review with no end in sight.

Some developers tell me their software has been rejected for reasons they don't find satisfactory. In several cases, one application might get rejected, while another one -- just like the first one -- gets approved. There's no consistency. No one seems to know the criteria Apple's reviewers use to give a thumbs up or thumbs down. That's troubling, and this problem has to be corrected, fast. Or, as fast as the software industry embraced Apple, it could turn to someone else.

The pair's experience in media and technology would actually seem to offer some benefits to Yahoo--though given their connection with Icahn, their counsel may end up at odds with what CEO and cofounder Jerry Yang and his allies on Yahoo's board want.

On the other hand, does Yahoo really need two more strong voices on its board? Trip Chowdhry, an analyst with Global Equities Research, raises a valid concern that Yahoo could suffer from "too many cooks in the kitchen" as a result of their addition to the now 11-person board. Chowdhry thinks the restructuring and plotting the new board will engage in will only give rivals Google and Microsoft more time to grow stronger.

Given that the Icahn trio will continue to be a distinct minority, it seems unlikely they'll be able to change Yahoo's direction much. What Yahoo really needs to do, after years of losing ground to Google (and losing a lot of talent), is execute on a strategy that on its face makes sense to many people. And that's not something most boards have much power to influence directly.

Chairman Lee holds roughly 36.4% of the company’s 50.05 million outstanding shares, either directly or through his company e-commerce company Interpark. At the current share price of $24.82, the deal is valued at $453 million. Should eBay and Chairman Lee agree on a price, the KFTC would still have to approve the transaction.

The move will give eBay a long desired foothold in the Asian market. EBay, like many U.S. companies, has repeatedly tried and failed to extend its success in the U.S. and Europe to Asia, where local competitors have strong ties to users. More than $927 million in goods were sold on the site in the second quarter of 2008. The company made $35.7 million in transaction fee revenue from those sales. Its net income, which includes money from advertising on its site and other items, was $15.4 million for the quarter.

The move will also help eBay counter growing competition for the Asian e-commerce market from Yahoo, which had purchased a 10% stake in GMarket in 2006 and has a 40% stake in the Alibaba Group, the parent company of China’s largest e-commerce company.

EBay’s decision is in keeping with its overall strategy to acquire or buy stakes in companies that can expand its core shopping business to new markets. The company has an 18.7% stake in MercadoLibre, a leading Latin American shopping site. More than 41% of eBay’s revenue has come from acquisitions, most notably from payments giant PayPal.

This is the second time eBay has purchased a large minority stake in an Asian company. It has a 49% stake in Tom Online, a Chinese mobile Internet company, similar to Skype.

EBay does not yet have plans to acquire all of GMarket. However, it has used minority stakes in the past as a precursor to acquisition, or attempted takeover. The company is currently battling U.S. classified site Craigslist in court over what Craigslist has characterized as a hostile attempt by eBay to turn its minority stake into an acquisition.

Earlier this year, eBay’s mergers chief Lorraine McDonough said the company was on the lookout to make acquisitions to bolster is shopping business. It began the year with about $5 billion on the balance sheet and anticipated generating an additional $2.3 to $2.4 billion in cash by the end of the year.

The platform, which was in a closed test with some 50 developers starting in March, will let Web users update their location manually or give permission to other Web services, such as Dopplr, Brightkite, and SearchQuest, and others to come, to update their locations automatically using Fire Eagle technology. The basics from the release:

-- For users, Fire Eagle acts as a simple interface for managing location information and deciding how -- and with whom -- to share it. Users can authorize Web, mobile or desktop applications to update their location automatically, or they can do it themselves manually on the Fire Eagle Web or mobile sites. Then they can decide how much of that information to share with their favorite services. At any time they can hide themselves, change their sharing preferences or delete any of their stored information.

-- For developers, Fire Eagle takes away much of the costly and complicated heavy-lifting of developing geo-aware applications. Developers can focus on how they can use location in their services without having to build the infrastructure to work out where their users are. Fire Eagle -- combined with Yahoo!'s full suite of geo technologies -- now makes it practical for any service to become location-aware easily and inexpensively.

So why would you want to tell people where you are? You might be able to see where your friends on Facebook are, and if some are close by, grab a drink with them. You could search for restaurants, and your computer or mobile device could provide only ones in a two-mile radius. You could share a photo on Pownce, and it would be automatically geotagged so people know where you took it. Possibilities abound.

For Yahoo, and for its advertisers, your location is also potentially valuable information, since marketers can target goods and services to you based on where you are--though Yahoo says ad opportunities are down the road a bit.

Privacy obviously can be a concern here, and Yahoo seems to have been careful in giving people control over how much can be shared to each service that uses Fire Eagle. You can hide yourself for a period of time, or even wipe out all your information from Fire Eagle if you want. (However, as TechCrunch notes, once you update your location on the Fire Eagle site and you've given permission for that data to be sent to other applications, you can't take it back from those applications except by updating your location again.)

The key for Yahoo will be persuading developers--especially developers of applications that automatically log your location--to use Fire Eagle. With Yahoo's talent drain of the past year or more continuing, more than ever it needs help from outside developers. And as Yahoo cofounder David Filo, who was on hand at the platform's debut at Yahoo's Brickhouse incubator in San Francisco, notes, "If you really want consumers to adopt this, they need to be able to do it throughout the Web."

I have planned, a little bit obsessively I admit, for exactly this sort of thing. I pay Google Apps $50 a year for a 25-gigabyte account. But everything that goes to that address is forwarded on to a free GMail account and the backup Yahoo account for which I pay about $20 a year. Some people call me nuts for having backups on top of backups, but today I'm the one who still has access to my mail. Until of course Yahoo and GMail crash at the same time. Then what?

Update:Maybe not entirely systemwide. Our Albert Sun in Silicon Valley reports he's had access to his GMail account all day without interruption. No word yet on the issue from the offical GMail blog. Meanwhile, my service has come back in the last few minutes.

Update 2:Google says it pinpointed the error.

Keeping data flowing to a U.S.-based phone in Europe ofter requires a lot of fiddling with manual network selection to find a carrier that works properly. Comparing how this task is done on an iPhone and my Windows Mobile 6-based Motorola Q9h was highly educational.

Getting to the same point on the Q required the following steps: Press and hold the Home button to get the Quick List and choose Wireless Manager. Select phone and press the Menu button. Select Phone Settings, then More, then Network. Choose Setup, the only choice on the superfluous menu that appears next. Press Menu again and choose Available Networks from the menu that appears. (As on the iPhone, this choice disappears when connected to AT&T.) Go through this process three or four times a day and you really appreciate the iPhone. The BlackBerry, which I did not have with me in Europe, is about as easy as the iPhone: Choose Settings from the home screen, then click Options and choose Mobile Network.

Of course, the designers of user interfaces have to make choices about what features to bring forward and which to hide. It might make sense to bury manual network selection, something that most folks won't use very often. The problem is that while this is an extreme case, just about everything on Windows Mobile requires more clicks (or taps) than the equivalent function on competing systems. Add to that the fact that the Windows Mobile clicks often bring up an annoying "wait until I'm finished" rotating color wheel for at least a couple of seconds and the annoyance grows.

On Tuesday, Weplay, a social networking start-up aimed at young athletes, announced that it closed an $8.6 million round of series B financing. Deep Fork Capital led the round, with Derek Jeter, Peyton Manning and LeBron James also contributing.

What do these jocks know about web 2.0? Probably, very little. Will they make their money back from this investment? Bob Goodson, CEO and co-founder of YouNoodle, thinks he knows.

YouNoodle is a social networking site for entrepreneurs and start-ups. The site launched in February and starting Thursday, it will make its Startup Predictor engine public. The predictor uses an algorithm that crunches start-up data to determine the potential success or failure of a company. It’s backed by a few investors with successful track records who never needed an algorithm to spot a good idea—Max Levchin of PayPal, Slide and Yelp fame, as well as Peter Thiel, an early investor in Facebook, LinkedIn to name a few as well as a managing partner in the Founders Fund.

“There was $67 billion invested in the U.S. alone last year in start-ups from VCs and angels,” says Goodson, “Yet, there is no standardized scoring system to help make the decision about how to invest.” He hopes YouNoodle will aid investors in deciding how to spread their money, as well as people considering working for new start-ups and even journalists trying to decide what companies to report on.

If the Startup Predictor had been around earlier this week, Peyton Manning could have logged onto YouNoodle’s home page and filled in detailed information to get a predicted valuation for Weplay. A few of the necessary details: what valuation the founding team was aiming for, when the company was incorporated, if there are patents in development, as well as the names of the founders. Some of the information is difficult to attain without doing some serious research. YouNoodle asks the salary of the CEO, his or her email, age, degrees and when they first started to attend university. YouNoodle gets a tremendous database of information about start-ups companies. With that information, YouNoodle may end up with a valuable asset that it could use in the long run to sell to entrepreneurs and Venture Capitalists. Currently, the site is all free.

In addition to the valuation, Manning would get a YouNoodle score as well as recommendations of people on the YouNoodle site that would be able to assist in developing the Weplay website. I took over for Peyton, and guessed on some information like amount of employees, CEO’s current salary, his salary at his last job, etc. and I got a valuation of $37 million for the company in three years as well as a 611 YouNoodle score.

“All other industries use credit ratings like S&P and Moodys,” says Goodson, who hopes the YouNoodle score, which is a number between 1 and 1000, will one day be seen in a similar light. “It’s not supposed to replace the way a [Venture Capitalist] makes a decision, but a high YouNoodle score should supplement people’s decisions.”

While many Venture Capitalists would probably balk at the idea of using a start-up with a goofy name to make decisions, many General Managers in baseball also laughed at the idea of using statistics to make player choices. Then Moneyball came out and the idea didn’t seem so silly.

What does the Startup Predictor say about YouNoodle? In September of 2010, the company ought to be worth $98 million. It has a YouNoodle score of 496. But, will that score mean anything in two years?

What do you think, would you trust YouNoodle to assist you in deciding where to work or invest?

What I don't understand is, why Apple needs the capability. Purportedly, it's to deal with viruses that may jump onto the phones. But the thing is, wireless carriers' networks catch and disarm viruses already. For years, wireless service providers have been responsible for protecting handsets from attacks, and they've done a decent job. And while today's phones are much smarter and more vulnerable to attacks, carriers' security has been beefed up as well.

One could argue that Apple needs to be more involved, since the iPhone can also access Wi-Fi networks. But I don't buy that: For starters, most iPhone users tap into Wi-Fi at home, and their networks are likely to be secured. If you accidentally download a virus over a public hotspot, the next time you log into your wireless carrier's network, the carrier will isolate and destroy that virus. The only instance when Apple may need to get involved is in the case of customers using their iPhones exclusively on Wi-Fi connections. But I bet the percentage of people like that is quite small.

Apple's meddling raises a lot of privacy concerns. If Apple can disable your applications, it may also know whom you call, which Web sites you go to, how much time you spend Web browsing. It already knows which applications you download via iTunes. My feeling is, Apple has just opened a whole can of worms.