Through partnerships with top wireless phone carriers, Wal-Mart continues to expand its presence in the field. The retail giant is now introducing a cell phone plan that uses the chain's own branding, and runs on T-Mobile USA's network. According to the Associated Press, the move is "further demonstrating its clout in getting special deals from wireless carriers." Unlimited calling and texting will cost $45 per month for the first line and $25 for each additional line for the family. The service is expected to be offered shortly in most Wal-Mart stores across the nation. Since last year, Wal-Mart has …

Potentially putting the country's biggest cities to shame, Chattanooga, Tenn. plans to offer local businesses Web service of up to one gigabit a second by year's end. "That is 200 times faster than the average broadband speed in America," reports The New York Times. The only problem? The service will cost $350 a month -- "a price that may appeal to some businesses but few households." According to The Times, "Chattanooga's effort is the byproduct of an aggressive high-tech economic development plan in recent years, helped along by funds from the federal economic stimulus program." As The Times notes, …

In a move with big implications for programmers of sports and other live events, YouTube has unveiled its live-streaming video service, YouTube Live."The one thing that the Internet hasn't quite mastered yet, however, is live events like news and sporting events," writes Fortune."YouTube has launched its grand live TV experiment and it works well, but what you see today is a far cry from what you'll see in the future," writes ZDNet. "In the future, you can see news networks utilizing YouTube and potentially sports leagues.""Sports and News are, in my mind, …

Google has agreed to buy Israeli startup Quiksee for around $10 million, according to Israeli publication Haaretz.com. Also known as MentorWave Technologies, Quiksee lets users create location-based interactive media content. In the company's own words, it "lets you quickly and easily create stunning virtual tours." To date, two investment groups have put $3.5 million into Quiksee, Ofer Hi-Tech and Docor International, according to Haaretz. The reported deal follows Google's acquisition of Israeli startup LabPixies in April for about $25 million. Quiksee was founded in 2002 by Gadi Royz, Assaf Harel, Pavel Yosifovich and Rony Amira. "While the firm's sales …

On the heels of Apple announcing its kinder gentler developer guidelines for its app store, comes a reminder of one of the elements that forced Apple's hand: Per a Gartner report Google's Android OS is poised to become the second-biggest mobile platform worldwide sometime this year, vaulting past Research In Motion's BlackBerry at a blistering pace. "According to Gartner, Android had just 3.9% of the market in 2009, less than a third of Apple's share. For 2010, that number will be up to 17.7%, edging out the sinking BlackBerry for second place," reports Silicon Alley …

Google would like you to know that not only does it know what you are searching for, but it knows what display ads you want to see, or at least that's the aim of its new effort to advertise its own display advertising services. Writes the new Your Times Media decoder, "A video for the campaign highlights the different features of the advertising platform like its targeting technology, which allows advertisers to serve specific ads to specific users, its ability to support a variety of creative elements like rich media and video, its measurement analytics, its …

A judge in Delaware granted EBay a partial victory in its lawsuit against Craigslist. EBay, which is a minority stakeholder in Craigslist (with 28 percent of the company) charged that the classified service had planted a poison-pill provision, which it used to strip EBay of a board seat and weaken the value of its holdings. "Craigslist owners Craig Newmark and James Buckmaster were driven by 'animus toward EBay and a desire to cement their own control' when they adopted corporate governance changes that diluted the Internet auctioneer's stake, EBay said in court filings," reports Bloomberg. The measure, …

Now that Twitter clients have found their ways onto your desktops, they seem to be asking themselves what they're going to do there. Thursday Hootsuite announced an Omniture integration that would provide sophisticated analytics about followers, if you were into that sort of thing. And Friday Seeesmic has laid a bolder claim, moving beyond Twitter in an effort to become mission control for all things real-time -- complete with its own app marketplace of plug-ins. ReadWriteWeb gives the Silverlight-based platform and a big thumbs up and hopes that more clients will adopt the marketplace approach, "After …

Business Insider has a Q+A with Adam D'Angelo the former Facebook CTO who left the social network -- for the second time mind you -- to start the knowledge Quora. Quora is a question-and-answer engine not unike Yahoo Answers, but unlike Yahoo Answers it counts among its power users the likes of Mark Zuckerberh (who D'Angelo went to high school with), Marc Andreessen, and Fred Wilson. When asked why on earth he would leave Facebook -- twice -- D'Angleo responds, "I felt I could make a bigger impact on the world by starting something new rather …

The Web site PleaseRobMe.com a spoof using the Foursquare API to show how people could take advatage of the information posted on check-in services never actually resulted in any crimes being committed (as far as police know, at least), but Facebook Places has. A burglary ring in New Hampshire used Places to alert them when people were out, and sucessfully robbed 50 houses before police caught up with them. Techcrunch's Eric Schonfeld offers, "This seems like a good time to revisit Please Rob Me's mission statement."