Will Google actually pay OEMs to use Android? That's what Wall Street analyst turned Silicon Valley venture capitalist Bill Gurly claims in his latest Above the Crowd blog.

Thanks to a licensing deal with STMicroelectronics reported today, ARM is headed into set-top boxes, the home turf of the MIPS Technologies core. This is just the latest move in a cross-market processor mania.

The Department of Energy is expected to give away tomorrow all its $3.4 billion in economic stimulus funds earmarked for smart grid projects. More than 400 groups will be waiting to see if their proposals got picked.

Steve Jobs might want to change the name of his company back to Apple Computer Inc. after the latest quarterly financial results reported today.

On vacation in Michigan last week I watched a little more TV than usual and saw for the first time on live TV the Intel commercial about engineering "rock star" Ajay Bhatt. It's an interestingly ironic PR move in the light of yesterday's reorg.

So Dell has confirmed the speculation it is developing a device for China Mobile. I would be more surprised if they were NOT developing a cellphone for China Mobile.

Is a built-in projector the next big thing for digital still cameras? Nikon thinks so, debuting its S1000pj camera that can project up to two meters images up to 40 inches in size with a VGA resolution.

Is IBM's head of intellectual property the right person to dig the U.S. patent office out of its historic backlog? You can watch online the confirmation hearings of David J. Kappos this Wednesday at 10 a.m. EST and answer the question for yourself.

Thanks to Verizon, PC servers can now be certified for the Network Equipment-Building System standards set for U.S. telephone companies, a fact Hewlett-Packard just clarified to me following their release of telco systems.

Copying a movie or a TV show for the purpose of offering a "networked DVR" service is apparently OK, given the Supreme Court's decision today not to review a lower court's ruling on the matter involving Cablevision.