EU: Rambus overcharging for chip patents

[AP] European Union regulators have charged Rambus Inc. with antitrust abuse, alleging the memory chip designer demanded "unreasonable" royalties for its patents that were fraudulently set as industry standards.

More women joining causal games boom

[Mercury News] You might think the face of one of the hottest areas in gaming right now is a young male in his 20s who owns the latest supercharged gaming system from Microsoft or Sony - or both. But you'd be wrong.

Intuit CEO resigns, as company beats the numbers

[AP] Intuit Inc. said Wednesday Chief Executive Steve Bennett will step down at the end of the year, and the financial software maker reported a narrower loss and higher revenue than Wall Street expected during the typically unprofitable fourth quarter.

Net radio stations cool to latest proposal

[AP] Some small Internet radio broadcasters are rejecting a new offer from a music industry group to pay discounted royalty rates for streaming music online through 2010.

Google 'probably' will bid on spectrum

[TopTechNews] "They clearly want to be the nation's contact to the Web and communications," Rob Enderle said. "It's a very ambitious plan -- they could be vastly more powerful than any technology company has ever been."

Internet to be bigger than TV

[TopTechNews] 66 percent of the new survey's respondents reported viewing television programs from one to four hours per day, versus 60 percent who reported the same levels of personal Internet use. Moreover, researchers said the traditional TV set is increasingly taking a back seat to PCs and cellular handsets among consumers between the ages of 18 and 34.

Sub-prime fallout a blessing for VCs?

[NYT] “People are being scared away from other investment strategies,” said Keith Benjamin, a partner at Levensohn Venture Partners, a San Francisco firm that focuses on technology investments. “The credit crunch can help venture,” he wrote on his blog. “One man’s ceiling is another man’s floor.”

AT&T's overstuffed iPhone bills

For the last several weeks, iPhone users have been by turns amused or enraged over the sheer heft of the bills they are receiving from AT&T.

NYT launches MyTimes

[Mashable] In a scaled-down RSS reader, users select feeds they want to add: initially, these are the picks of editors - in my case, a selection of blogs from technology columnist David Pogue. These picks are added to a Netvibes-style startpage. It’s nothing new for those of us used to the sites it’s cloning (Netvibes, Pageflakes etc), but neither is it a misstep: it’s extremely useful for those NYTimes readers who want more control, but aren’t aware of the opportunities on the open web.

Yahoo Teachers: social net for teachers

[Mashable] Yahoo is building a combination of social network, collaborative space and (most of all), lesson plan creator for educators called Yahoo Teachers. The first part of the site is the “Gobbler” - a browser add-on that helps teachers save photos, text and sites from around the web in one place (see this video). Once Gobbled, users move to the second stage: organizing that information into lesson plans and worksheets, tagging them and sharing them with others to save time.

That's personalization: Facebook ties ads to profiles

[Mashable] Utilizing the information users share about themselves on their profile, Facebook will enable very targeted advertising options for businesses. Taking it a step further, the model will also allow for a bit of predictive marketing to take place, making assumptions about a user’s interests based on what information is on their profile, including gender, zip code, date of birth, occupation, music preferences and more.

AMD's Richard quits

[News.com] Advanced Micro Devices will announce the imminent departure of Henri Richard, the company's chief sales officer, later this afternoon, CNET News.com has confirmed. A source familiar with AMD's plans confirmed the news, first reported earlier Wednesday.