Time Warner’s management is hoping that Armstrong’s magic touch will help revive the ailing AOL.

Armstrong, who started with Google in 2000, was a member of Google’s Operating Committee and served as the president of the Americas Operations. He is best known for developing Google’s online advertising business.

Current AOL Chairman and CEO Randy Falco and President and Chief Operating Officer Ron Grant will leave AOL after a transition period. Armstrong, a sen

Instead, it’s going to boil down to whether mobile device makers open smartphones as widely as the personal computer. Manufactures and carriers, scared to death about the possible security implications, may decide that it’s wiser to instead keep their devices closed. How long they can ignore the pressure is unclear.

That’s because it’s only a matter of time before smartphones supplant mobile and desktop PCs–maybe not today, but eventually. A recent report on mobile Web usage for

Microsoft says that the successful use of these tactics has let third parties obtain these users’ personal account information, then exploit it by sending mass spam and phishing messages to the contacts of users whose accounts have been breached.

In the suit (which is embedded below), Microsoft cites a multitude of attacks including IMs that appear to be coming from users they know, as well as phishing attacks that mimic the look and feel of an outside service, or an official Micro

Leave your questions in the comments section, and we’ll select some of the more interesting ones to ask Ballmer. Leave your name, title, and company, and we’ll give you credit during the interview.

Court docs: Ballmer vowed to ‘kill’ Google
Steve Ballmer is a dissin’ machine
Ballmer: We’re cheaper than Apple! (but not Linux)
Ballmer: Google, Google, the economy, Google
Ballmer on car insurance and gay rights
The worst Microsoft promo videos ever! (scroll down to see Ballmer pit

The auction giant’s solution, according to a Bloomberg report on Thursday: Build a new one.

Here’s what has happened: Skype’s founders have established a company called Joltid Ltd., which still owns the rights to some of Skype’s technology. Joltid has made the accusation that eBay doesn’t have the right to do everything it wants with all of Skype’s code as a result; eBay is suing Joltid to get that technology back (is this like the Silicon Valley equivalent of body-snatching?) But t

One of the things I was most interested in was the rationale for a new Guitar Hero game. To be sure, game companies like Activision Blizzard, Electronic Arts, and Take-Two have a mandate to generate massive revenues, and so franchises like Guitar Hero are tried and true in that regard. But in spite of that, each new edition of a franchise game has to have something significant to offer to entice enough customers to earn its keep.

(Credit:
Activision Blizzard)

Among the big-na

Thanks to Dictionary.com, I won a contest this weekend. The challenge: who could find synonyms for a word fastest (it was “fancy,” as in “stop being so fancy about everything.”) I had Dictionary.com loaded on an iPhone; my colleague, the BlackBerry Storm browser. Had he had the free Dictionary.com for BlackBerry, my challenger might have beaten me to the word bank.

At 250KB, Dictionary.com 1.0 is almost identical to the
iPhone version. It, too, packs in a dictionary, a the

(Credit:
CNET)

That’s not to say Google hasn’t included a few things to help speed up the process. For one, if you’ve got photos that are both hosted online and on your hard drive–and that have already been scanned for faces, the Picasa software can grab that information and add it to your local library. This saves it from having to scan the same photos twice.

The new version of the software should appear as an update for users of Picasa v3.1 the next time they

“We see a lot of applications, but this is really a showcase of what is possible to do with our technology. We picked health because it is such an incredible information-overload space; 8 million people per day use the Internet to search on health information. It’s something that is very important for people…. But our end customers today are really health publishers and portal providers we’d like to provide information to.”

(Credit:
Screenshot by Elizabeth Armstrong Moo

“We are aware of these reports and we are waiting to receive the iPhones from the customers,” Apple said in a statement late Tuesday afternoon. “Until we have the full details, we don’t have anything further to add.”

I do not want this in my pants.

Updated at 4:43 p.m. PDT with comment from Apple.

There have been many well-documented cases of laptop batteries bursting into flames, so it’s plausible that iPhones could heat up too, given that they use the s