United Kingdom

With the holiday season approaching, the nonprofit One Laptop Per Child is looking to use advertising and an alliance with Amazon to provide more low-cost laptops for children in developing countries.

To promote this year's version of its Give One/Get One (G1G1) program, the Cambridge, Mass.-based OLPC has arranged for donations of television time, billboards and magazine ads by such major media companies as the News Corporation, CBS and Time Warner, according to a story in Sunday's New York Times.

Amazon Fulfillment

Microsoft on Friday opened an online store for U.S. customers. The company already has online marketplaces in the United Kingdom, Germany and Korea.

The home page for the Microsoft Store features the Microsoft Xbox 360 hit Gears of War 2, but also offers various flavors of the Microsoft Office productivity suite. Microsoft also features the Zune and a small ad for Vista Ultimate.

Airplanes are some of the most gas-guzzling players in our transportation industry, which makes them a good place to start implementing renewable biofuels. Boeing has recently announced plans to do just that, phasing in 30% biofuel blends within the next 3 to 5 years, depending on when the fuels obtains enough industry commercialization.

If you visit the Web sites or look at the ads from the major wireless carriers, smart phones aimed at both consumers and businesses are front and center.

What was once a niche aimed at road warriors, sales types and techies is rapidly going mainstream. There's a very good chance that if you can afford it a smart phone is in your future.

In a startling move, Sony Entertainment has postponed the release of the PlayStation 3 game LittleBigPlanet (LBP), one of its most highly anticipated holiday releases. According to Sony, the decision to delay the game's release came after the company learned that a song in the game uses language from the Quran, the sacred text of Islam.

HAL. WOPR. KITT. R2-D2. C3PO. Hollywood films and television shows are filled with examples of computers capable of having an intelligent conversation with humans. The reality is somewhat different: Even the simplest ATM or gas-pump activities are beyond the grasp of computer chit-chat. But an annual test of silicon-based conversationalists suggests that might be changing.

A disk which a tabloid said carries personal details on some 100,000 serving British military personnel is missing, the Ministry of Defense said Friday.

The military acknowledged a report in The Sun newspaper that contractor EDS lost track of a portable hard drive, but said it could not comment on the claim that it contained names, addresses, passport numbers and driver's license information of service personnel along with data on 600,000 potential recruits.