AP - Google Inc.'s share price crossed the $400 threshold to a new all-time high Thursday, marking a gain of nearly $100 a share in the four weeks since the Web-search giant reported impressive quarterly financial results.

AFP - The Internet in China is heavily driven by entertainment but has the potential of becoming a powerful political weapon, according to a poll.

Reuters - Alltel Corp. , the leading rural U.S. telephone company, is expected to announce that it agreed to buy privately held rural cellular operator Midwest Wireless for $1.08 billion, the Wall Street Journal reported.

TechWeb - BellSouth is bringing back mobile technicians in a big way, and now they can install and repair PCs, MP3 players, and digital cameras.

TechWeb - The joint venture, still unnamed, will combine Sony's present optical disk business, worth about $1.26 billion, with NEC's DVD disk drive business, worth about $589 million.

TechWeb - A study by independent market research firm Strategy Analytics gave the Treo a 'best in class' designation based on that devices user-friendly interface and design, just nudging out the Samsung i730.

TechWeb - Gawker publishes more than a dozen blogs covering media gossip, politics, Hollywood, electronic gadgets, and more--and they will all now be available on Yahoo.

Reuters - Seven-Eleven Japan, the convenience store unit of Seven & I Holdings Co. Ltd., said on Friday it was in talks with Yahoo Japan Corp., the country's top Internet portal, on a comprehensive operational tie-up.

TechWeb - Sun says there are now 3.3 million registered users of its open-source Solaris 10

LONDON (Reuters) - British computer graphics firm DA Group Plc DAG.L said on Friday it had signed a deal to create interactive characters for TV, web and mobile based on the MTV series Dirty Sanchez.

AP - German semiconductor maker Infineon Technologies AG posted a loss Friday of euro100 million ($118 million) for its fourth quarter as overall sales fell 13 percent and losses continued at its communications chips business.

PC World - Federal action could allow unused channels at lower frequencies to be used for unlicensed wireless networks.

PC World - Some of the best Web sites, Internet radio channels, blogs, and podcasts to broaden your musical horizons.

AP - Ailing German semiconductor maker Infineon Technologies AG plunged to a loss of 100 million euros ($118 million) in its fiscal fourth quarter as overall sales slipped and profits dwindled in its automotive and memory products businesses.

USATODAY.com - How did Sony BMG find itself caught in a copy-protection nightmare? Sony has declined to comment on details of its agreement with First 4 Internet. But clues come by looking into the merger of two record labels, the executives in charge of them and what massive staffing cuts can do to an organization.

USATODAY.com - Hewlett-Packard's fiscal fourth-quarter profit fell 62% Thursday after the computer and printer company took a $1.1 billion adjustment for restructuring-related costs and other expenses. But excluding charges, the tech firm beat Wall Street expectations.

Reuters - Ubisoft's 'Peter Jackson's King Kong: The Official Game of the Movie' has been building buzz since it was previewed at the E3 conference in May.

AFP - Japanese electronics maker Sanyo said it sank deep into the red in the first-half and forecast a bigger full-year loss, wounded by a price war in televisions, DVD players and other markets.

AFP - Attempts by a United Nations communications and technology summit to expand the availability of the Internet turned the spotlight onto a dispute about censorship.

AP - Alltel Corp. said Friday it will purchase regional wireless-services provider Midwest Wireless for $1 billion in a deal that will give it 400,000 customers in a territory including southern Minnesota, northern and eastern Iowa and western Wisconsin.

PC World - Updated Helix Server Unlimited supports streaming multimedia to handhelds.

PC World - MIT developers show U.N. delegates a prototype of its $100 laptop designed to promote tech around globe.

Gizmodo - Kenwood's joining the party with the M1GB5 1GB ($200) and the M512B5 512MB ($150) flash memory MP3 players, weighing in at a dinky 1.

Macworld.com - How high can Google Inc. fly? That was the question of the day for technology investors as company shares cracked the US$400 mark, in a generally upbeat market led by Hewlett-Packard Co. (HP) and other IT companies.

NewsFactor - Legions of the world's poorest students soon could be sporting low-cost laptops at school and at home if a United Nations-led initiative announced Wednesday succeeds.

Reuters - Retailers are expecting this year's holiday shopping season to be one of the best in recent years for PC sales, but consumers may want to think ahead as Microsoft Corp. prepares to launch a new version of Windows in 2006.

AP - The House on Friday backed a plan to require television broadcasters to switch to all-digital transmissions by December 2008, three months earlier than they would have to under provisions of a Senate bill.

NewsFactor - With an eye on the United Nations-sponsored technology summit taking place this week, Congress passed a resolution Wednesday stating that U.S. control of the Internet is inviolable.

AP - Regulators on Friday approved Eircom Group PLC's takeover of Meteor Mobile Communications Ltd., clearing the way for the Irish fixed-line phone provider to re-enter the cell phone market in Ireland.

NewsFactor - While Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) has had some 20 years to make Office what it is today, most industry analysts say that new open-source contenders, such as OpenOffice, measure up reasonably well against Redmond's suite. But they also say that while these suites do have most of the features of Microsoft Office, they lack certain advanced capabilities that make all the difference.

InfoWorld - Unilever confirmed Friday it has engaged in talks with Accenture and IBM over outsourcing parts of the company's finance, human resources, and IT functions, but said that a deal has not been reached.

The Motley Fool - Reliability is the name of the game for semiconductor company Microsemi (Nasdaq: MSCC - News). Not much works without power these days, and many of Microsemi's chips help to reliably control and regulate the flow of power through gizmos as varied as laptops, ICDs, and satellites.

Reuters - In an attempt to make up with consumers whose PCs have been exposed to unsecure copy-protection software which acts like malware, music publisher Sony BMG said on Friday it would swap unsecure CDs for new unprotected disks as well as unprotected MP3 files.

Reuters - Microsoft Corp. hopes to gain an advantage over rivals Sony Corp. (6758.T) and Nintendo Co. Ltd. (7974.OS) by being first to launch a next-generation video game console when its Xbox 360 debuts November 22.

AP - It's been the better part of a decade since Napster and other free song-sharing services began scaring the daylights of the music industry. And still recording companies can't find an effective anti-piracy technology to save their hides.

AP - The United States claimed victory this week in the contest to keep control of the computers crucial for directing Internet traffic. But approval Friday of a plan to leave Washington squarely in charge hasn't fully ended the debate: The European Union and a host of other countries are suggesting that a new multinational forum, which delegates to a U.N. technology summit also agreed to set up, simply delays the battle for another day.

AP - The stock of Autodesk Inc. fell Friday after the maker of design software gave a cautious forecast for the next fiscal year, creating concerns that its recent period of robust growth is winding down.

Macworld.com - After agreeing to settle a class action lawsuit brought by customers of its iPod music player, Apple Computer confirmed the settlement is being appealed. The lawsuit claimed Apple misrepresented the capabilities of the iPod’s rechargeable battery

Reuters - Advertisers wishing to place ads on Google-supported Web sites can sign up directly on those sites, the Web search leader said on Friday, in a move analysts said addresses concerns about its growing advertising clout.

BusinessWeek Online - Two years ago, when William Harnisch, CEO of hedge fund Peconic Partners, saw the explosion in the use of cellular telephones, he started buying shares -- not of phone providers but of SBA Communications . The company owns the towers where cell-phone carriers put up their antennas. Harnisch figures the tower companies will grow much faster than the wireless carriers. Since Harnisch bought SBA's shares, they have leaped from 4 to 16. ...

AP - A federal judge sentenced a former Microsoft Corp. employee on Friday to four years in prison for illegally selling millions of dollars of company software.

AP - The CEO of satellite software company Integral Systems Inc. has been charged with misdemeanor sex offense and assault of a 14-year-old girl, according to a Securities and Exchange Commission regulatory filing Friday.