Nine months after Apple introduced the iPad, Qualcomm has finally admitted that the smartbook market it envisioned is essentially dead. Amid much criticism, I explained in January how Apple beat everyone to this market and that it simply wouldn't matter what features iPad was missing.

If you're sold on the idea of a plug-in car, one of the next questions to answer is whether to lease or buy your chosen model. Here are five things to consider as you hunt for a plug-in car deal that fits your budget, driving habits and preferences.

Mobile computers will chip away at the desktop PC market according to research, led by notebooks that will be shipping 291 million units by 2014. The mobile segment -- notebooks, netbooks and tablets combined -- will ship over 400 million units in that same year.

Today Google announced a "fundamental shift" in search, where results are displayed before a user finishes typing a query. We're covering the launch event at San Francisco's MOMA, and will be updating this post as it proceeds.

Samsung's Galaxy S is headed to the big three carriers in China, which gives the company a realistic shot at selling 10 million Galaxy S handsets by the end of 2010. How is Samsung able to shoot for large sales numbers? It's taking an Apple approach.

The world of mobile content is perhaps one of the most vibrant in all of digital media, and if you are a part of this fast-growing market, you won't want to miss a free, hour-long roundtable conversation with GigaOM Pro.

Kno, a California-based startup that plans to launch a two-screen "digital textbook" later this year, today announced that it has raised a $46-million financing round led by Andreessen Horowitz, with Silicon Valley Bank and TriplePoint Capital also participating in the debt and equity funding.

When it comes to ousted HP CEO Mark Hurd joining Oracle and HP's subsequent lawsuit, Om speculates that this is a Machiavellian plot cooked up by Hurd and Larry Ellison to distract HP from business as usual, and settles in to watch the show.

ResearchGATE, a social network for scientists aimed to facilitate their collaboration on research, has raised an unspecified amount of money in its first institutional round of funding. The site has amassed 500,000 members in the last two years, with strong contingents from biology and medicine.

Cassandra, the NoSQL software is being blamed for scaling problems being faced by Digg, which led to the yet-unconfirmed departure of Digg VP of Engineering John Quinn, a champion of Cassandra. Still, we hear the social news site isn't giving up on the software - yet!

Hunch.com co-founder and angel investor Chris Dixon has some advice for big venture capital firms: Try to think more like, and behave more like, the startup companies you invest in. That includes cutting down on excessive management fees and not tweeting about your golf game.

The tech industry has pretty much determined that mobile is the future of the Internet -- on your cell phone, on your tablet and in your car. Despite this, there's still a huge reluctance to allow the infrastructure to helps deliver mobile connectivity -- the towers.

As Android veers toward domination of the mobile market, Apple's iOS lead may soon take a hit. Google still needs to iron out some wrinkles like hardware fragmentation, but Android's open approach and growing market share mean it should be a startup's first choice mobile platform.

With worldwide carrier distribution, Android is on the march to dominate over the next four years, according to IDG. Nokia will still be the top dog, but it needs to be confident and deliver the strategies it has in place, else Google could own it all.

Our future is wireless at high speeds anywhere we'd like. This may be a decade away and if carriers make wireless data truly unlimited this will be a reality, but it scares me for a few reasons that simply can’t be fixed by technology.

We are now entering the "age of augmented humanity," Google CEO Eric Schmidt today in Berlin. Schmidt tied together Google's efforts in artificial intelligence, on smartphones and on connected devices like the coming Google TV platform to draft a master vision for the future of technology.

Hewlett-Packard is suing its former chairman and CEO, Mark Hurd, alleging breach of contract and potential misappropriation of trade secrets. Hurd left the company last month, after allegations that he was involved in a number of improprieties related to a human resources consultant the company hired.

Samsung could build TV sets with the Google TV Internet and video platform built in, despite concerns about the high cost of components necessary to run the software. The decision could come down to which content providers Google brings on board for the Android-based OS.

As we create more information on the web, how do we keep from drowning in the data deluge? "Digital intuition" software such as my6Sense can help -- the free software arrives today for Android and aggregates information from multiple data source while surfacing important content.

We are in middle of a smartphone boom. Dozens of new devices are coming to the market. And that means customers need help buying these complex handsets. This is why where and how you buy a device is now as important as hardware and software.

amsung today introduced Orion, the company's next-generation, dual-core smartphone chip based on the ARM Cortex-A9 architecture. Orion uses two 1 GHz processors and Samsung says Orion will offer up to five times the 3G graphics performance over its prior smartphone application processor.

As Twitter focuses on building up its own services and applications, financing for pure-play Twitter-based startups has dropped sharply, according to CB Insights. The investment-tracking firm says figures show funding for Twitter apps and services has fallen by more than 50 percent over the past year.

Author Nicholas Carr has argued that hyperlinks in online content impose a "cognitive load" on readers that distracts them and makes them less capable of understanding what they are reading. But Salon founder Scott Rosenberg says that links are the heart and soul of the web.

Research in Motion, the company behind the iconic Blackberry smartphones is rumored to have snapped up DataViz, a Milford, CT.-based company that is well known for making mobile productivity suite, Documents to Go. The Canadian handset maker is said to have paid $50 million.

As it stands now, Ping is explicitly about selling music on the iTunes store. And while the new service is making us wonder whether Apple could build a viable social network, perhaps the real question is, "Does Apple want to build a real social network?"

As we in the tech world gear up for the busy fall season, I'm struck by the fact that there really didn't seem to be a summer slowdown this year. The funding rounds, product releases, acquisitions and corporate scandals didn't calm down one bit.

Just in time for the Labor Day weekend, we bring you the second installment of our web TV series BBQ&A. In this episode, oDesk CEO Gary Swart turned up the heat with a homemade feast fit for a Silicon Valley king.

While settling on a standard big data stack is deeply important to the big data industry as a whole, I’m nonetheless questioning the operational and competitive consequences for companies who choose to buy into this standard without first considering the value of building a proprietary solution.

The Web of Intent will be largely driven by consumers' interests. Much will be based on implicit actions consumers take around what is most important to them. Content publishers will be able to easily improve and customize how they serve consumers.

The collective groans of supervisors was heard this week as the successful Angry Birds game was released for Android. Samsung unveiled the Galaxy Tab this week, a competitor to the iPad. We took doubleTwist for a spin and found it to be iTunes for Android.