AP - Samsung Electronics Co. said Friday it will consolidate four key businesses — semiconductors, liquid crystal displays, mobile phones and televisions — into two divisions as the company deals with the slowing global economy.

AP - Intel Corp. appears to be playing it safe with an ugly first-quarter forecast.

AFP - Nintendo sold 10.17 million Wii consoles in the United States in 2008, setting a new video game record despite dismal economic conditions gripping the country, according to NPD Group statistics.

CNET - Each time our little world suffers a disaster, man-made or otherwise, count on the usual suspects to rush to their keyboards and pound out yet more bloviation about the existential importance of Twitter to our 24 x 7 ecosystem.

AFP - Steve Jobs exiting the Apple stage, perhaps not to return, signals a close to an Internet Age era with roots stretching back to the radical hippie movement of the 1960s.

AFP - The global music industry is making progress in clamping down on online piracy by evolving radical new ways of selling tunes, but 95 percent of downloads remain illegal, a report said Friday.

AP - Mobile phone maker Sony Ericsson said Friday it swung to a net loss in the fourth quarter, pressured by lower volumes due to the global financial crisis.

CNET - When I head to Washington, D.C., this weekend for the 44th president's inauguration, there's one major question burning in my mind: Will my cell phone work?

CNET - Despite the fact that security programs are often some of the toughest code to make work with a new operating system, Windows 7 already has several companies ready with products aimed at keeping it safe from attackers.

Reuters - Former Culture Club frontman Boy George was sentenced on Friday to 15 months in jail after being found guilty last month of falsely imprisoning Norwegian male escort Audun Carlsen, whom he met over the Internet.

InfoWorld - The browser wars are back. Dignitaries from major browser makers -- including Microsoft, Mozilla, Opera, and newcomer Google -- served on a panel Thursday evening that discussed the apparent re-emergence of competition in the browser space after several years of dormancy.

PC World - Nintendo’s Wii nabbed the lion’s share of December’s game sales, just as it snapped up the lion’s share of 2008 revenue, according to NPD Group’s end-of-year wrap. Both Microsoft’s Xbox 360 and Sony’s PlayStation 3 advanced hundreds of thousands of unit sales each, toward a relatively strong 2008 finish.

PC World - Busted! In an apparent gaff that undermines Microsoft's multi-million dollar 'I'm a PC' campaign an ad for a PC-only software program Songsmith, made by Microsoft, features a MacBook Pro.

Macworld.com - A study to be published in the January 16th edition of the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin indicates that violence and gore do not make games more attractive to players.

AP - Advanced Micro Devices Inc. plans to cut 1,100 jobs, 9 percent of its global staff, and slash the remaining employees' pay as the chip maker hopes its third round of layoffs in a year can help it get through a brutal market for computer sales.

Macworld.com - Apple’s App Store hit another milestone this week. Apple says its online retail outfit for iPhone and iPod touch programs now has 15,000 apps available for download and that customers have downloaded 500 million apps.

NewsFactor - Sony Ericsson posted a loss of 133 million euros (US$176.3 million) for the fourth quarter and offered investors a gloomy outlook for cell-phone sales in the year ahead.

PC World - The Mac Mini hasn't been updated in a long time, and many wondered if that meant the death of the platform. But according to 'confirmed' rumors circulating the Web today, the Mac Mini is set to receive the awe-inspiring Nvidia Ion as a graphics processor and a release date as early as March 2009.

PC World - Couch potatoes, rejoice: now you can watch YouTube right in your living room on your big-screen television. YouTube announced its union with Sony and Nintendo to bring YouTube for Television (that's http://www.youtube.com/tv -- a link only accessible via a game console) through the PlayStation 3 and Wii, respectively.

NewsFactor - The Windows 7 beta buzz is alive and strong a week after Microsoft made the operating system available to the masses.

PC World - Symantec and the U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team are warning about a serious vulnerability within the company's AppStream product, used for steaming applications from a central server to thin-client desktops, though a patch has been released.

Macworld.com - Sometimes being one of the best, most full-featured Twitter clients for the iPhone just isn’t enough. Take the case of Atebits’ poor Tweetie. It’s a really good $3 Twitter client—I find myself moving back and forth between it and Twitterrific (). But with 15,000 apps and half a billion app downloads, how do you keep in the public eye and compete with the likes of world phenomenon and app juggernaut iFart Mobile?

NewsFactor - The video-game industry has officially defied the economic downturn, although Sony's high-priced PlayStation 3 lags lower-priced consoles. The NPD Group reported a record-breaking year for video games.

PC World - It's a sad day for electronics shoppers: Circuit City, the second-largest retailer of consumer electronics, has announced it is forced to close all its remaining 567 U.S. stores and sell all its merchandise. The closing also leaves 34,000 Circuit City employees out of a job.

PC World - A patent-holding company from Texas is seeking to bar six companies -- including BlackBerry maker Research in Motion, Palm and Nokia -- from importing handheld devices into the U.S. for allegedly violating its patents.

AP - Senate Republicans have blocked a bill that would delay the nationwide switch from analog to digital television broadcasts until June 12. But Democrats say they will try again to pass the measure next week.

Reuters - Legitimate digital music sales grew strongly in 2008 but were still dwarfed by the scale of illegal downloads, despite industry efforts to adapt to the Internet and offer more choice to customers.

Reuters - Sprint Nextel Corp , the third biggest U.S. wireless company, wants the government to fund a $2 billion emergency network to make first responders better able to communicate during disasters.

AP - The European Commission said Friday it has begun legal action against Microsoft Corp. saying the American software giant's practice of linking its Internet Explorer web browser to its Windows operating system violates European Union antitrust rules.

PC World - IBM is planning to buy the e-mail service assets of Outblaze, a large Hong Kong application service provider, to help beef up its Bluehouse social-networking and collaboration platform, IBM said late Thursday. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

NewsFactor - Leading chipmaker Intel announced Thursday that its net income for the fourth quarter plunged 90 percent compared to the same quarter in 2007. Its profit was $234 million vs $2.27 billion.

Investor's Business Daily - Chip bellwether Intel met the fourth-quarter guidance that it had lowered just last week, but for the first time in at least a decade opted not to issue formal guidance for the current quarter.

PC Magazine - The company has introduced its first netbook, the Archos 10, with a 10-inch screen, a 160GB hard drive, and an Intel Atom N270 processor.

PC Magazine - World number three mobile phone maker Sony Ericsson posted a much bigger than expected quarterly loss and announced plans for further cost cuts, possibly including jobs, as it braced for even weaker demand.

PC Magazine - A so-called 'cloaking device' or 'invisibility cloak' invented in 2006 may have a more practical, immediate purpose: hiding mobile-phone static, according to a paper published in the journal, Science. The idea is to make possibly conflicting antennas invisible to one another.

CNET - The European Union's new complaint against Microsoft really takes one back. Like, a decade or so.

NewsFactor - The Win32.Worm.Downadup is raging across the Internet, using new tricks to spread undetected. The worm spreads by exploiting a vulnerability in the Windows RPC Server Service and has infected millions of Windows PCs in the last two weeks.

AP - The European Union said Friday that Microsoft Corp.'s practice of selling the Internet Explorer browser together with its Windows operating system violates EU antitrust rules.

AFP - Burger King said Friday that pressure from Facebook has caused it to yank an application that gave members of the hot social networking website a Whopper for every 10 friends they dumped.

Reuters - Advanced Micro Devices Inc will eliminate 1,100 jobs, cut salaries and take a new $622 million charge for its acquisition of graphics chip maker ATI, bringing total writeoffs for the deal to $3.17 billion.

Macworld.com - Steinberg unveiled the next major version of its digital audio workstation, Cubase, at the NAMM music show in Anaheim, Calif.

NewsFactor - YouTube has partnered with Nintendo and Sony to put YouTube on TV and now has a YouTube for Television Web site for Nintendo Wii and Sony PlayStation 3 users.

AP - If you can't wait until the end of the month to hear Bruce Springsteen's new CD, just tune into NPR's music Web site just before midnight Monday.

PC World - Millions of Windows computers have been infected by a new computer worm dubbed 'Conficker.' The situation is 'not getting better,' but rather is 'getting worse,' according to security software vendor F-Secure.

AFP - Despite legal and security hurdles, president-elect Barack Obama says he has a plan to retain his beloved Blackberry once he moves into the White House next week.

AP - In a Jan. 15 story about video game sales, The Associated Press reported erroneously that Nintendo boosted the production of the Wii by 50 percent in July. Nintendo increased production by 33 percent worldwide, which led to a 50 percent supply increase in U.S. stores during the recently ended holiday period.

PC Magazine - Panasonic avoided getting lost in the sea of product announcements at last week's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas by waiting until Friday to announce three sub-$200 cameras. One selling point: a focus lock feature that can target, focus, and lock on a target, even if it is moving.

Reuters - The European Commission accused Microsoft Corp on Friday of stymieing competition by bundling its Internet Explorer Web browser with Windows systems, firing the latest salvo in an expensive, years-long battle with the software titan.

Reuters - Wireless carriers appear poised to deliver on what the mobile industry has long seen as its holy grail -- location-based services.

PC World - Microsoft has been sued by a small Wisconsin business for allegedly misrepresenting the capabilities of its Live Communications Server product, selling the company more licenses than it needed and not providing a refund or other products to solve its original problem.

PC World - Timing is good for consumer electronics vendors that are interested in selling green technology.