After 30 days on the job, FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski told Broadcasting & Cable magazine that promoting universal broadband is essential. Of course he's working with a mandate from the Whitehouse that says at much. "We are a country in need of a national broadband strategy 10 years ago," said Genachowski, calling the project "our generation's major infrastructure challenge." Nearly 50 years ago then-FCC Chair Newton Minnow famously called television a vast wasteland, and he was only speaking of a few broadcast station. Genachowski was asked how that statement compares today, when he is no longer faced with …

The heady days of rival consumer RSS platforms could be behind us as NewsGator has announced plans to shut down its NewsGator Online Reader come the end of August. The company behind the popular FeedDemon and NetNewsWire feed readers will provide users with instructions on how to migrate to Google Reader. NewsGator's desktop and mobile feed readers already support synchronization with Google Reader. Until now, however, users could choose between syncing with NewsGator or Google Reader. This move might just make sense for NewsGator, which plans to focus more on working with its enterprise and government customers.

Hey, Zuckerberg, you listening? Slate has come up with some easy steps to fix Facebook -- or what it describes as "one of the world's most-annoying, least-intuitive Web sites." (Not alone in its distain, an online poll of over 1 million respondents found that 94% of Facebook users panned its most recent redesign.) Firstly, to make it easier to find your own stuff on Facebook, it should add a link to the home page called "Your Stuff," which would take you to a page that lists your groups, your photos, and all your other things on the …

The Wall Street Journal is gunning for the LinkedIn crowd and all its monetization opportunities -- jobs, ads, and, a marketing pool for WSJ subscriptions -- with a new social network called WSJ Connect, according to TechCrunch. Apparently, they're even calling it "LinkedIn Killer" internally. Instead of building it internally, like they did with its existing WSJ Community, they've tapped another arm of parent company News Corp. -- Slingshot Lab. WSJ Connect is still in the planning/conceptual stages, says one source, but there is "strong interest" to move the project forward. Importantly, it would …

Yahoo's agreement this week to put Microsoft in charge of its search business officially ends its run as a technology company, according to BusinessWeek. With the deal, Yahoo is shelving a half-decade-long effort to rival Google in the market for search-related advertising, thus going further than ever to dismantle a culture of technological innovation, engineers and former staffers tell the business magazine. Yahoo, BusinessWeek admits, will still employ plenty of engineers who work on products other than search, including e-mail, instant messaging, and mobile applications. But, according to sources, search is what gave Yahoo its real tech credibly.

In a call with analysts Thursday Motorola CEO Sanjay Jha confirmed that many of next year's Motorola phones will run the Google Android OS. The move is a switch from Window's mobile, which Motorola has run for years. Incidentally, Microsoft let slip at a conference earlier today that it is changing the name of "Windows Mobile" to "Windows Phone." Which, perhaps clears the way for the company to roll a new Android competitor. Jah said two new Android-powered phones would be in stores for the holidays. "The majority of our new devices will be smartphones, as we …