Tax Time or Prime Time for Identity Theft

By now, most of you have received your W-2's and other tax reporting forms used in preparing your taxes. The question is: where are those forms kept in your home? Are they lying on a table top or somewhere anyone can see them? Or, are they in a locked box or file cabinet?

Your W-2's, and other IRS reporting forms, include your Social Security Number and, in some cases, financial account information. These numbers can be a gold mine for identity thieves. They literally can kidnap your identity: obtain a job, open up new lines of credit, access existing financial accounts or stock portfolios, get welfare, avoid a criminal history and generally create havoc in your life.

For the identity thief, tax time is a prime time of opportunity. With that in mind, the Identity Theft Resource Center(R) wants to remind consumers and businesses to be careful when handling tax-related documents and information.

PriceGrabber.com Encourages Voters to Use Its New Election Guide to Find the Right Candidate

PriceGrabber.com Candidate Match Survey available on the site's Election Guide.

PriceGrabber.com, a part of Experian, announces its new Election Guide to help voters "comparison shop" for their 2008 presidential candidate. This new guide is available at
http://elections.pricegrabber.com/ and features a Candidate Match Survey that has been completed by more than 15,000 PriceGrabber.com users.

PriceGrabber.com's Election Guide launch comes in an unpredictable election year. The early primaries have demonstrated that every vote counts and that the race for the Democratic Party and Republican Party nominations is still undecided. The Election Guide is a valuable tool for voters to ensure they are making an informed decision when they vote.

BroadbandTV and World Wide Entertainment Enter Into Strategic Partnership

BroadbandTV to acquire and monetize powerful line up of premium video content from World Wide Entertainment

Live from the 2008 National Association of Television Program Executives Show (NATPE), BroadbandTV Corp. (BroadbandTV) the web's leading video monetization agency and World
Wide Entertainment, Australia's leading supplier of content to broadcasters around the globe, today announced a strategic partnership that will enable BroadbandTV to deploy select premium World Wide Entertainment content to leading tier 1 IP-based networks across the World and monetize it principally on an ad supported basis.

BroadbandTV will also leverage its state-of-the-art technology to enhance the entertainment experience by helping viewers discover World Wide Entertainment's top programme lineup through annotating videos with popular and relevant keywords.

Through this new alliance, BroadbandTV will merchandize and distribute two top shows connecting with the online young demographic through the BroadbandTV Hub on channels such as YouTube and Vuze.com: "Stars", featuring celebrity profiles of all the big names in film, music, television and fashion world, and "Invent", a global gateway to the future now covering the trendiest technology.

What Were China's 600 Million Mobile Users 'Searching' For Last Year?

The top five search topic categories for 2007 were:
1. Dining/Entertainment
2. Stock/Financial
3. Ring tones/Pictures
4. Weather/Travel information
5. Leisure/Recreational Content

Compared with 2006, Dining/Entertainment is still the most popular search topic, but Stock/Financial searches have jumped from fourth place into second, with a traffic increase almost eight times greater. This is certainly not surprising given the mass interest in the financial markets after another year of over 100% growth.

The data showed some interesting trends, like that SMS and IM users had a greater tendency to do Local and Informational searches, whereas WAP and applet users tended to do more rich content searches. SMS and IM users were also more geographically diverse having a greater spread of users across a broader set of cities compared to WAP users, which were overrepresented in the Guangdong province. Since mInfo also operates the leading English language mobile search service in China (Guanxi(R)), it has some unique views on the behavior of English-speaking foreigners in China. Foreign
mobile search users were on average twice as active as Chinese users and tended to focus more on Local Search instead of other categories of services. They also tended to be on average older and had a larger proportion of professionals and executives than the Chinese user base.

AT&T: Wireless Boosts the Bundle

AT&T chairman and CEO Randall Stephenson said that the anchor for the triple-play bundle of the future will be wireless telephony, not wireline service. The telecom giant will be more aggressive this year both within its region and possibly outside its territory with the three-product bundle that includes wireless phone service, he said last week.

"In-region, without a doubt, it will continue to get more aggressive," Stephenson said at the Citigroup Entertainment, Media & Telecommunications conference in Phoenix last Tuesday. "The triple-play option " wireless, broadband and video " that will be our strategic product set in the marketplace in-region. Out of the region, we'll see."
That could bode well for the telco, which owns the largest wireless-telephony service provider in the country, AT&T Wireless.

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Muhammad Ali Enterprises Launches Online Store on 66th Birthday of The Greatest of All Time

Plans for authentic autographed items and online chats at www.ALI.com

Muhammad Ali's unique brand of courage, integrity, humor and determination continues to inspire millions of people around the world. To celebrate his 66th birthday tomorrow, on January 17, Muhammad Ali Enterprises LLC will launch the first-ever official Muhammad Ali online store at www.ALI.com, featuring authentic autographed items and licensed products.

In addition, MAE will also go online at http://www.ALI.com to offer photographs that have never been available to the public before, as well as the opportunity to chat with Ali's friends and entourage. The public will even be able to send a birthday greeting to The Greatest of All Time himself.

NETGEAR Wins LAPTOP Magazine's Best of CES 2008 With Best Product in the Wi-Fi/Home Networking Category

Best of CES Award Recognizes NETGEAR HD/Gaming 5 GHz Wireless-N Networking Kit (WNHDEB111) as the Most Innovative and Exciting Wi-Fi Home Networking Product at CES, Bringing Total Number of CES Awards to Ten

NETGEAR, Inc. (Nasdaq: NTGR), a worldwide provider of technologically advanced, branded
networking solutions, today announced that the NETGEAR HD/Gaming 5 GHz Wireless-N Networking Kit (WNHDEB111) has been selected as the best Wi-Fi/home networking device at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) by LAPTOP Magazine and received their Best of CES Award. The award recognized the HD/Gaming 5 GHz Wireless-N Networking Kit as the most innovative and exciting Wi-Fi/home networking product at CES.

Google Embellishes iPhone Apps

by Cassimir Medford

Just ten days before its much-anticipated first bid in the United States 700 MHz spectrum auction, Google on Monday underscored its advocacy of open mobile networks by upgrading its iPhone applications interface little more than a month after its initial release.

The Mountain View, California-based search giant, a strong proponent of unfettered access to mobile networks for independent application developers, appears to be demonstrating the benefits of its quest by its unusually rapid iPhone upgrade cycle.

Apple's iPhone is one of the few devices on the U.S. market to be opened up to application developers. The U.S. mobile phone market has been dominated by carriers that tightly control what applications are installed on the phones.

Many application developers, led by Google, prefer an open access model akin to the Internet, where developers of legitimate commercial applications do not have to seek the specific blessing of the carriers to gain access to their subscribers.

"This rapid upgrade cycle certainly helps Google drive home its point that open networks improve the flexibility and functionality of mobile devices," said Joe Nordgaard, director of wireless consulting firm Spectral Advantage.

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Wi-Fi Camera Card Gets a CES Prize

By BRIAN BERGSTEIN

LAS VEGAS (AP) — A memory card that wirelessly sends pictures from a digital camera to a computer — letting you skip the tedium of plugging the camera in to upload images — got bragging rights Wednesday at the International Consumer Electronics Show.

Eye-Fi Inc.'s wireless card beat nine other contenders for the top spot in the traditional Last Gadget Standing session, a breezy and informal CES contest staged by Yahoo Inc.'s technology section. The winner is determined by the volume of audience applause.

The $100 Eye-Fi card, which has 2 gigabytes of memory, uses Wi-Fi to instantly zap pictures to computers and photo-sharing Web sites. The company, based in Mountain View, Calif., announced earlier at CES that it had a deal to get its technology into memory cards made by Lexar Media.

Eye-Fi's diverse set of rivals included a golf simulator, a Toshiba Corp. wireless projector and the Sansa TakeTV, a USB memory stick from SanDisk Corp. that is designed to transfer video from the Internet to the TV.

8x8, Inc. Introduces Small Business Videoconferencing Solution for Packet8 Virtual Office Hosted iPBX Subscribers

2008 International Consumer Electronics Show -- 8x8, Inc. (Nasdaq: EGHT), provider of Packet8 (www.packet8.net) broadband Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), videophone and mobile VoIP communication services, today introduced the Packet8 Virtual Office Tango Video Terminal Adapter (VTA), a convenient and affordable desktop videoconferencing solution that enhances the functionality of the Packet8 Virtual Office hosted iPBX phone system, now in use by over 10,000 U.S. based small businesses.

NBC Universal and Microsoft Team Up On Unprecedented Web Offering for 2008 Beijing Olympic Games

NBC's Olympic on-line coverage will be delivered by the MSN Network- "NBCOlympics.com on MSN"-- and use Microsoft's Silverlight Technology to Stream Thousands of Hours of Exclusive Interactive Video from Beijing Games

NBC Universal, owner of the exclusive U.S. media rights to this summer's Olympic Games in Beijing, China (August 8-24, 2008), announced today that it was teaming up with MSN
and Microsoft in an unprecedented strategic alliance to create "NBCOlympics.com on MSN", a next-generation online experience for Olympic fans across the United States. With thousands of hours of competition video in both live and on- demand formats, deep analysis and results delivered from NBC's award-winning broadcast and digital media teams, and Microsoft's Silverlight technology to deliver deeply immersive user experiences, NBCOlympics.com's coverage will be powered by MSN and Microsoft technology
to complement NBC's broadcast programming and put millions of fans in control of the Olympic sports, athletes and countries they want to watch.

Vonage and Nortel Agree to Settle Patent Dispute

Vonage and Nortel today announced that they have agreed in principle to end the litigation pending between them. The contemplated settlement involves a limited cross
license to three Nortel and three Vonage patents and will not call for any monetary payments by any party. Claims relating to past damages and the remaining patents will be dismissed without prejudice. The settlement is subject to final documentation.

"We are pleased to resolve this issue and enter into a productive relationship with Nortel," said Vonage Chief Legal Officer Sharon O'Leary.

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