SAN FRANCISCO

Meraki, a WiFi company that sells its mesh WiFi networks all over the globe, has just made wireless that much more wireless – starting in December they will be offering solar powered router to their customers. The units will be pricey - $1,500 for a model that comes with its own solar panels – although there is a cheaper version for half the price that comes without the solar panels (you attach them yourself).

Adobe Systems is poised to launch several key enhancements to its Adobe Flash platform in San Francisco this week at its MAX 2008 conference.

Any major upgrade to Flash is significant because 81 percent of worldwide online videos are viewed with Flash technology, making it the number-one format for video on the Web, according to comScore. Adobe's Flash Player is also installed on 98 percent of Internet-connected desktops and a growing number of mobile devices.

A new billboard is going up in the middle of Times Square that will be powered with 16 wind turbines and 64 solar panels instead of the usual electricity. When it's windy and sunny, the billboard will be able to generate enough electricity to light up.

I knew I was on board with Josh Warner, the president of video syndication shop Feed Company, when he told a crowd at the WOMMA Summit that it’s time to kill the word “viral” as a prefix for “video.” My San Francisco teammates are probably tired of hearing me make the plea not to describe short videos as viral until online viewers have deemed them so. It’s a word that should be limited to describing branded entertainment after the fact, not in proposed scopes of work.

YouTube will venture into Webcasting this month in an effort to take the site's popularity to a new level by showcasing the talent behind its most-viewed videos.

YouTube, which is owned by Google, has matured from a Web start-up to a site with loyal fans. But as any good television industry executive will say, it needs fresh content to keep its audience.

On Nov. 22 in San Francisco, it is introducing "YouTube Live," a show featuring well-known stars like the rapper Will.i.Am and the singer Katy Perry, as well as YouTube sensations like Esmee Denters.

Three Asian electronics firms have agreed to plead guilty and pay $585 million in fines for conspiring to drive up the prices of LCD screens used in computers, TVs, cell phones and other electronic devices.

In a plea deal filed Wednesday, LG Display Co. Ltd., Sharp Corp., and Chunghwa Picture Tubes Ltd. agreed to cooperate in an antitrust investigation headed by the U.S. Justice Department. The plea agreement was filed in federal court in San Francisco.

LCDs, or liquid crystal display monitors, are the glass display screens on many laptop computers, cell phones and new TVs.

Before you wake up in the morning, your iPhone downloads your news and tells your coffeemaker to start brewing. Then when you're up and you wave the device at your TV, the news feeds get transferred to your TV.

That's how AT&T's iPhone chief Ralph de la Vega envisions the popular Apple device in the future, according to a public discussion Wednesday at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco.

Lock Your Door, Start Your Car

If an ancient writer was alive today, he might post something like this to his Twitter account: "Hell hath no fury like a software giant scorned."

For much of the year, it looked like a proposed advertising partnership between Google and Yahoo would bring vitally needed liquidity of about $800 million to Yahoo. The economic downturn hit Yahoo particularly hard, with online advertisers moving away from banner ads to Google's more cost-effective text-based ads.

If an ancient writer was alive today, he might post something like this to his Twitter account: "Hell hath no fury like a software giant scorned."

For much of the year, it looked like a proposed advertising partnership between Google and Yahoo would bring vitally needed liquidity of about $800 million to Yahoo. The economic downturn hit Yahoo particularly hard, with online advertisers moving away from banner ads to Google's more cost-effective text-based ads.

Intel has big plans for its little chips. The chipmaker is looking to the future with its Intel Core i7 microarchitecture, code-named Nehalem, which is being described as "mind-blowing" by some observers after it was offered for review earlier this month.

Nehalem, the successor to Intel's Core microarchitecture, spans a range of products, but the first group of products will include the Intel Core i7 processor.