WEEKLY RECAP
Jobs Wows Apple Faithful, Oracle Seals the Deal, Exploding Batteries

Of all the products Apple unleashed Tuesday, the MacBook Air seems to be drawing the most user interest. Its display is 13.3 inches, same as a standard MacBook. However, it's only three quarters of an inch thick, and it weighs three pounds -- small enough to fit into an intraoffice envelope. The touchpad incorporates some of the same multitouch elements as the iPhone and the iPod touch. What's most interesting, though, is that it has no CD drive -- if you want that you'll have to attach a peripheral. It's somewhat reminiscent of the first iMac, which came out with no 3.5-inch floppy drive. Contrary to many Macworld predictions, nothing Apple did on Tuesday touched on Blu-ray, the format that looks most likely to win the high-def DVD format war. High-definition did come up in the keynote when Jobs mentioned that some iTunes rentals would be available in HD for an extra dollar. It looks like Apple may be trying to ween us all off CDs and DVDs, and draw us into an all-iTunes world.

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Big Blue Saves the Day

IBM (NYSE: IBM) spelled relief for Wall Street on Monday. The company posted strong fourth-quarter results, beating profit and sales targets and providing renewed optimism about technology earnings. Big Blue's profit rose 24 percent to US$2.80 per share in the fourth quarter of 2007, while revenue increased 10 percent to $28.9 billion. For the full year, IBM posted an 18 percent increase in profit to $7.18 per share when compared with the full year 2006, and an 8 percent revenue boost to $98.8 billion. The company's stock surged on the news and pulled up the overall stock market, reversing a trend of strong sell-offs that continued through much of last week amid concern that the U.S. economy had fallen into a recession.

After a lot of chest-thumping over BEA Systems (Nasdaq: BEAS) ' worth, enterprise software giant Oracle (Nasdaq: ORCL) upped its final final offer, and the two companies shook hands over the $8.5 billion price tag. That's a 14 percent increase over what Oracle first offered, and pretty much the mid-point between the numbers neither would budge from during the last go-round. Oracle benefited from the involvement of activist investor Carl Icahn, who worked with BEA management to reach a deal. The acquisition is a clear win for Oracle, which has been building its software stack through such acquisitions as Hyperion, Siebel and PeopleSoft. The move also likely means that competitors SAP (NYSE: SAP) and Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) will be out shopping for middleware companies to round out their own offerings.

For a lot of brick-and-mortar retailers, the last holiday season didn't offer much in the way of cheer. That wasn't the case for Best Buy (NYSE: BBY) , though. The electronics retailer reported a fairly decent fiscal December with an 11 percent increase in total revenue. Entertainment software -- read, video games -- showed the biggest growth. Growth in flat-panel TVs and GPS devices was offset by dips in MP3 players and older tube-style televisions. In all, Best Buy took in a total of $7.3 billion for the month. I don't publicly report my own holiday revenue figures, but I will say that I did make a contribution to the store's performance . You're welcome, Best Buy.

The Meter's Running

Meters are a given for billing utilities like gas and electric, but high-speed Internet access? Time Warner (NYSE: TWX) Cable is testing the metered approach through its Road Runner cable broadband service in the city of Beaumont, Texas. For the time being, only new customers will get this option. After a yet-to-be determined test period, Time Warner will revisit the idea before considering whether to expand it. While popular in other countries, metered broadband represents a major departure from the one-size-fits-all approach that's dominant in the U.S. Other high-speed access providers have tossed the idea around but apparently were afraid of customer backlash. Time Warner's move could have implications for the net neutrality controversy.

In other news on that front, the FCC has asked Comcast (Nasdaq: CMCSK) for a response to complaints by a group of public policy organizations over its Internet traffic management practices. Last year, Comcast allegedly rationed bandwidth available to users of the peer-to-peer file-sharing technology BitTorrent.

It's never a good thing when batteries start to explode -- and it's even worse when the company that made them is no longer in business. That's the dilemma AT&T (NYSE: T) is facing with the streetside cabinets it has been using to bring its U-verse fiber-optic service to customers' homes. A few of the batteries -- which are there only to provide emergency power in case the electricity cuts out -- have blown up in recent weeks, and now AT&T has set out to replace them all. The telecom will have to go it alone, however, because the battery supplier is no more. Avestor, formerly based in Quebec, closed its doors in late 2006. Just four exploding-battery incidents have been reported, in Houston, Cleveland and Wisconsin. In two cases, the batteries blew up, and in two others, they ignited small fires. None of the equipment involved is in people's houses, fortunately. It's all located in those greenish boxes you see near curbs.

Power Down

Interested in lowering your home energy bills without consuming less energy? Two approaches on the horizon are the use of power grid management tools in your home, and the use of so-called intelligent appliances. Both can save you money while improving power grid efficiency, according to a pair of year-long studies. Researchers found that advanced technologies saved consumers 10 percent on their electricity bills, on average. Homeowners were willing to adjust their individual energy use based on price signals provided online, in the grid management study. In the appliance project, household appliances fitted with special controllers automatically responded to increases in power grid demand to reduce energy consumption during peak times. The Department of Energy provided funding for the studies, and IBM contributed the software.

"Random js toolkit" might not sound all that menacing, but the bland name is attached to a pretty vicious Trojan that has infected some 10,000 otherwise legitimate Web sites. The random part refers to the fact that the malware gives itself a new, randomly generated file name every time it's accessed, making it harder to target with antivirus software. The attack was discovered by Finjan Software during an analysis of Web traffic for its clients. Finjan found that the malware uses several techniques to make itself hard to detect, including changing the code itself, staying out in front of filters and blacklists, and serving up legitimate code to the crawlers employed by security firms. Once a Web server for a high-traffic Web site has been hijacked, the exploit delivers malware to the computers of everyone who visits the site. The hackers then can receive information from the infected computers, including passwords, account information and surfing habit data.

Predator Preventer

MySpace has launched a new offensive against sexual predators. The social network has forged a deal with 49 states to introduce aggressive new measures to protect children and adolescents. The most important measure is MySpace's agreement to create and lead a task force to develop technology and processes to verify ages and identities online. More immediate measures include allowing minors on MySpace to automatically default their profiles to private. Also, users 18 years or older will not be able to browse for users under 18; no user will be able to browse for users under 16 years of age; and users older than 18 years cannot add those under the age of 16 unless they know either the individual's last name or email address. Parents who don't want their children on MySpace at all can submit their kid's email address to MySpace and have it blocked. In case you're wondering, Texas is the lone state not participating in the effort.

Americans apparently don't want to work too hard to get information on political candidates. That's one possible take-away from a recent study conducted by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, which found that Americans still prefer to get their political information from the television. Although the Internet is gaining ground as a political information medium, the TV is still the top choice of 60 percent of Americans. That's down from 68 percent in 2004. Not surprisingly, age breakdowns tell a slightly different story. For example, forty-two percent of the 18-to-29 crowd regularly learn about political candidates on the Web -- making it their top information source -- compared with only 20 percent in 2004. However, most of those people admitted they were surfing the Web for some other purpose when they just happened to stumble on some election coverage.

It looks like Amazon's (Nasdaq: AMZN) MP3 music store might soon have some songs people will want to pay to download. Sony (NYSE: SNE) BMG -- whose stable of artists includes Alicia Keys, the Foo Fighters, Jennifer Lopez, Carlos Santana and Michael Jackson -- will abandon its die-hard insistence on digital rights management and allow its music to be sold in the MP3 format. The idea so scared Sony BMG that for a short time it only would sell complete albums without DRM -- and even then, you had to go to the store to buy a card with a code that would let you download the music. Songs from Sony BMG artists should begin showing up on Amazon MP3 later this month.