The annual Allen & Co. retreat for media company execs begins tomorrow in Sun Valley, Idaho, with the ominous backdrop of a global recession, shrinking advertising sales and fears that the Internet could render big media empires obsolete, Reuters reports. The annual conference will feature panel discussions about everything from globalization to the financial crisis, but the "real action" usually revolves around deals. Whereas last year was dominated by Microsoft's failed bid to buy Yahoo, this year's drama could lie with the likes of Time Warner, Viacom and CBS Corp, Reuters says, adding that bankers in particular expect dealmaking in …

Twitter is set to officially enter the Collins English Dictionary as both a noun and verb, when the 30th anniversary edition is published later this year. The entry under noun will read: "a website where people can post short messages about their current activities" and under verb it will read: "to write short messages on the Twitter website". Other Twitter-related words, like Twitterati, which refers to the site's users, will also be entered, as will Twitterverse, which refers to the Web site and its users. Elaine Higgleton, Collins editorial director, told the Daily Mail: "Hardly a day …

Finnish cell phone maker Nokia is developing a mobile phone that runs on Google's Android software platform, The Guardian reports. The new touchscreen handset will be unveiled at the Nokia World conference in September, industry insiders said. The company, which currently makes roughly four out of every ten mobile phones sold, is trying to revive its fortunes in the fast-growing smartphone market, where it is losing out to the likes of Apple's iPhone and Research in Motion's BlackBerry Storm. The smartphone segment is the only part of the mobile phone market that is growing, as cash-strapped consumers …

Tim Armstrong is now two weeks shy of completing his first 100 days at the helm of AOL. At the beginning of his quest, the former Google sales head said he would examine "how to bring back the magic of AOL." As Armstrong promised in his first memo to the troops, "The culmination of the 100-day process will end in Dulles with an All-Hands meeting in mid-July. At that meeting, we'll review the feedback we've received-both internal and external. We'll also discuss our strategic direction for the coming years, and highlight areas that will bring AOL and AOL properties into …

Twitter has applied with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to trademark the word "tweet." The L.A. Times' David Sarno notes that this raises the "perennially tricky question of whether a company can own the rights to a word that has so penetrated the English lexicon that, some argue, trying to own it is like trying to own the ocean or the atmosphere." Because that's what happens when a trademark is "genericized," Sarno says-just think of Xerox, Kleenex or Google. All of these names became synonymous with their products. However, ironically, their legal claim to the word that bears their …

When the Iranian government started cracking down on journalists following its recent election crisis, the world turned to social media sites like Twitter for real-time information coming out of the country. However, as Fortune's Jesse Hempel notes, it was hard to find reliable, useful information from the scores of tweets and updates "that included plenty of spam, useless remarks, and stray sentiments." In many ways, the Iranian crisis points to the newest problem on the Web, Hempel says: how to make sense of the real-time information emanating from sites like Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, and blogs. And Google, he says, "isn't …