A web app for wine snobs? Yup, Washington State's Chateau Ste. Michelle has just unveiled a "digital sommelier" and "digital wine cellar" in an attempt to engage imbibers who carry iPhones, BlackBerries and Windows Mobile smartphones.

Enthusiasts can use their mobile devices to access "insightful food and wine pairing recommendations" and get instruction on the finer sensory qualities of foods combined with wines.

 “These new digital applications will allow us to also inspire our online visitors by giving them tools to expand their wine and food experience in their own environment in such an accessible way.” says Jan Barnes, Marketing Director for Chateau Ste. Michelle.

By Byron Acohido
Photo: Leslie Smith, USA TODAY

Pronunciations tripping up Kindle's speech function ... Study finds women more affected by ID fraud ... Google working on its image ... iPhone boosting music sales for Pandora ... Nokia prepares to open its own App Store ... Using virtual worlds to explore epidemics ... How gadgets lose their luster ... Finally, a Ford car mouse.

By Brett Molina

Cycling enthusiasts bummed by limited U.S. TV coverage of the Giro D'Italia race in Italy this weekend have an online option.

Starting Friday night, Demand Media's Livestrong.com, a collaboration with Lance Armstrong, will provide exclusive video footage, and tweets and blog posts from Armstrong and others. It is Armstrong's second competition since he was injured in a race in Spain in late March.

The unfettered views and opinions of Armstrong are the latest example of how athletes and/or sporting teams are offering intimate access through social-media tools. "This is a great example of making an event available to millions who would otherwise not see it," says Richard Rosenblatt, CEO of Demand Media and former chairman of MySpace. "There is a hunger to follow Lance's comeback."

By Jon Swartz
Photo: Astana rider Lance Armstrong of the United States waves to supporters before the official presentation in San Marco square in Venice, May 7, 2009. The Giro d'Italia cycling race will start on May 9 from Venice and finish in Rome on May 31, a journey of 3,456 km (2,147 miles).  (Stefano Rellandini/Reuters)

Some members of the Twitter generation are taking a crack at channeling the spirit of road warriors such as Jack Kerouac and Alexis de Tocqueville.

Kurt Daradics (@KurtyD), Jolie O'Dell (@JolieODell) and Jonathan Dingman (@Dingman) are on a so-called #RoadTwip, where they are using social-media tools -- including Twitter, Brightkite, Flickr, YouTube and Qik live-streaming video -- to visit 10 cities for tweet-ups and interviews with Web thought leaders.

The triumvirate will tweet through Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, Nashville, St. Louis, Kansas City, Omaha, Neb., Chicago, Toledo/Cleveland, New York before heading back to D.C.

By Jon Swartz
Photo: View of Gateway Arch and St. Louis skyline on the bank of the Mississippi River. The arch reaches a height of 630 feet, which is also the distance from leg to leg at ground level. Construction of the arch began February 1963 and was completed July 1965. The arch is made of 142 sections of 1/4 inch stainless steel. (Sean Dougherty, USA TODAY)

Cisco forecasts steady tech sales ... FBI agent discusses his life posing as cybercriminal ... Why Twitter should pass on buyout offers ... FriendFeed experiencing increase in user sign-ups ... Facebook e-mail censorship scrutinized ... The winners and losers following revelation of Amazon's new Kindle ... Finally, Blu-ray sales rising.

By Brett Molina

Amazon is hosting a big press conference in New York this morning starting at 10:30 ET.  We're on the scene and will be liveblogging the news -- might it be a new Kindle?

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It's only been about three months since Amazon's Kindle 2 came out at a similar press conference at the Morgan Library.  Here we are again, this time at Pace University near the Brooklyn Bridge.

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is on stage.  He says the Kindle launched 18 months ago with 90,000 books available.  Today they're up to 275,000.

Kindle editions account for about 35% of Amazon's sales, for books that have the electronic edition available, Bezos says.

The Kindle is great because it eliminates paper, and allows you to easily carry 1,500 books, Bezos says.  But personal documents remain a problem.

Now there's a new Kindle for that -- the Kindle DX.  Its 9.7-inch screen is 2.5 times the size of a regular Kindle display.  That makes it better for reading 8 1/2 x 11 documents, cookbooks, and other formatted material.

It has 3.3 GB of storage, enough to hold about 3,500 books.  The price: $489.

Textbooks are another good application for a wide-screen Kindle.  Amazon has partnerships with the three leading textbook publishers -- Pearson, Cengage Learning and Wiley.  The new Kindle will allow students to carry smaller backpacks, Bezos says.  The cost of these textbooks is unknown, but Bezos says these will likely be priced lower than physical copies.

Five universities will test the Kindle DX this fall: Arizona State, Case Western, Princeton, Reed College, and the University of Virginia.

Another application: newspapers.  The Boston Globe, New York Times, and Washington Post will run Kindle pilot projects this summer.  They will offer subscribers a reduced-price Kindle DX along with a reduced-price, long-term subscription.  The Globe and Times will also offer the DX in areas where regular newspaper delivery is not available.

New York Times Chairman Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr. has joined Bezos on stage, to talk about his company's "commitment to reinvention."

The Kindle DX can also be used to view PDFs and other documents, such as business reports, sheet music, and newsletters.

Uh oh -- the demonstration screen was showing everything backwards, and now it has blacked out completely.

The screen is working again.

Bezos says there are multiple ways to read newspapers on the DX.  You can jump from article to article, or browse sections with a five-way controller.  There are also article summaries.

Like other Kindles, the DX features dictionary summaries for difficult words.  That will be handy for textbooks.

You can change the font size on the DX, as on other Kindles.  But there's a new feature on this model: the ability to change the line length.  Bezos says he can read faster with shorter lines, but other readers prefer longer ones.

Amazon is taking pre-orders for shipment this summer.  The Kindle 2 remains available for $359.  That's disappointing -- I was hoping Amazon would lower prices.

By Ed Baig
Photo: The Kindle DX, as compared to the Kindle 2. (Amazon)

How developers of free iPhone apps make their money ... Apple weighs age controls for App Store ... Hacker indicted in Cisco, NASA attacks ... Prepaid services could start wireless price war ... Company tracks why Internet users ditch websites ... Is an upgraded BlackBerry Storm in the works? ... Virtual currencies becoming more popular ... Finally, a very tiny computer mouse.

By Brett Molina

The small- and medium-sized  businesses Dell and Hewlett-Packard are eagerly pursuing are vital to "strengthening America’s competitiveness in an increasingly global economy," says SBA chief economist Chad Moutray in this presidential report.

An average of 320 out of 100,000 adults created a new business each month last year,  even as the recession took hold,  according to this new study by the Kauffman Foundation. That's up from 300 out of 100,000 adults in 2007.

To put a face on this metric, consider Rebecca Zweig, sole proprietor of Business-Smart Solutions of  Boulder, Colorado. Ask Zweig how come she left her job as Director of Executive Education for the University of Colorado at Denver's Business School, and she'll instantly respond, "I am very entrepreneurial and a huge risk taker, and those things don't necessary match well with a large highly bureaucratic environment." Only as an afterthought does she add that budget cuts were about to eliminate her position.

"It was the perfect time for me to take the leap," she says. "I have known since the age of six that I wanted to have my own business. I love being an entrepreneur.  It allows me to live out my dreams."

That was in 2004. Zweig starting booking speakers and providing other services  for conferences and steadily built up her clientele. Today she's on the cusp of upgrading from one Dell desktop PC to a Dell server, workstation and  laptop to use for a software project she says will significantly increase the number speakers and clients she works with each year.

Zweig is nothing if not determined. She lost her biggest client at the start of this year but was non-plussed. It freed her up, she says, to rethink her business model. "I started by writing a list of dream clients," she says. She's landed five clients from her list of 10,  and came up with the idea for her software project. "I can now see the light at the end of the tunnel," Zweig says. "Though it is currently just me and a couple contract employees, I hope to hire my first employee by this fall."

By Byron Acohido
Photo: Rebecca Zweig (Business-Smart Solutions)

FTC probing board ties at Apple and Google ... Apple enters Twitter buyout rumor mill ... Amazon may launch Kindle for textbooks ... Pics of new Kindle surface ... BlackBerry gets full support from Google Apps ... Social site Meebo expands ... A Segway knockoff ... Finally, how close are we to Star Trek tech?

By Brett Molina

Apple's iPhones may get the most of the publicity. But the best selling consumer smartphone line in the U.S. during the first three months of 2009 is none other than Research In Motion's BlackBerry Curve, says researcher NPD.

The iPhone came in second, followed by two more BlackBerry models, the Storm and the Pearl. T-Mobile's G1, the first phone to run Google's Android mobile operating system, rounds out the top five. In compiling sales data, NPD included all BlackBerry Curve 83XX models, all iPhone models, and all Pearls except the flip.

RIM's market share increased 15% to nearly half the U.S. smartphone market during the first quarter, compared to the prior quarter, NPD says. Apple and Palm's share each slipped 10%.

Still, it's important to keep these figures in perspective. RIM benefited from Verizon Wireless's "buy-one-get-one BlackBerry" promotion, says Ross Rubin, the director of industry analysis at NPD, in a statement. "The more familiar, and less expensive, Curve benefited from these giveaways and was able to leap frog the iPhone, due to its broader availability on the four major U.S. national carriers."

Overall, NPD reports that smartphones comprised 23% of first quarter sales, compared to just 17% of handsets during the first period of 2008.

But the second quarter of the year and beyond could look very different.

In coming weeks, Apple is reported to be readying new iPhone hardware to complement the impending version 3.0 of the iPhone software. And Palm is expected to bring out its new Pre smartphone before the end of June. Pre is arguably the most anticipated new handset since the iPhone launched.

By Ed Baig
Photo: A customer samples a Sprint Nextel BlackBerry Curve at a Sprint Nextel store in San Jose, Calif., Wednesday, Feb. 18, 2009. (Paul Sakuma/AP)

Given the ongoing struggles of the newspaper and magazine business, those of us in the media will pin our hopes wherever we can find it.

So it goes that the larger Kindle reader Amazon is expected to unveil at a Pace University press conference in Manhattan Wednesday morning -- not to mention rival devices still in the pipeline -- is being hailed by some as the print industry’s next great hope, with the idea that it costs less to deliver information digitally than it does to print paper.

It's not nearly that simple, of course, and if you believe that these devices by themselves are going right all that is wrong with the media biz, then I’ll sell you the Brooklyn Bridge, which is conveniently located right next to Pace.

Speaking of that university, as Peter Kafka at the All Things Digital reminds readers, the Pace location sits on the site of the 19th-century headquarters of The New York Times, a rumored partner with Amazon on this latest Kindle.

Don’t get me wrong -- large, dedicated electronic readers do make a certain amount of sense. I like reading books on the Kindle 2. But its relatively small screen and e-Ink technology just doesn’t do justice to the far more appealing layouts found in an actual newspaper or magazine, or even on the Web. Color, for one, is lacking, as is video.

Still, you can already purchase low-priced Kindle subscriptions to several periodicals (including USA TODAY), and I am curious to see what Amazon has up its sleeve. I already have high hopes for the prototypical reader -- said to arrive in 2010 -- shown publicly by a startup called Plastic Logic.  And while I panned an early beta version of the iRex reader from a Dutch company of the same name, its 10.2-inch display is well suited for digital newspapers.

Rumors also abound that Apple may also enter the fray in some fashion. The plot, as they say, only thickens.

By Ed Baig
Photo: The Kindle 2 (File photo, Reuters)

Could big-screen E-readers save the press? ... Pirate Bay defendants could face trial in Italy ... The White House on Twitter ... YouTube helps British man deliver baby ... A competitor to TwitPic ... Dark Horse Comics coming to iPhone ... Finally, the ugliest cellphones.

By Brett Molina

Manage your privacy on Facebook ... Turf battle set to begin over U.S. cybersecurity ... Integrated search now available on Twitter ... Quicken app debuts on iPhone ... Analyst paints bleak picture for future of Palm Pre ... What the deal between Disney and Hulu means for Apple ... How to use a G1 cellphone as a metal detector ... Finally, how did Twitter get its name?

By Brett Molina

Bad news for TriQuint Semiconductor, Infineon Technologies, Samsung, Broadcom, and other companies the sell computer chips to Apple: the electronics giant is taking steps towards designing its own chips.

Last year, Apple bought chipmaker P.A. Semi, a small chip company that specializes in low-power processors, or computer "brains."  Now Forbes reports that Apple is boosting its chipmaking know-how even more, by hiring leading designers from IBM and Nintendo.

Computer chips can be a commodity.  Nearly every PC has a processor from Intel or its rival Advanced Micro Devices, for example.

But speciality chips can help differentiate one product from another -- especially if they're designed with a specific purpose in mind. A chip for a portable device, such as the iPhone, could be designed to preserve battery life, for example.

There's big money at stake.  Researcher iSuppli estimates that each iPhone 3G costs about $174 to make.  Apple spends most of that money on components, such as chips, that it buys from other companies.

Even if Apple plunges into chip design, don't expect the company to build a giant chip factory, called a fab.  They cost billions.  Apple would likely design the chips, then outsource their manufacture to a for-hire chipmaker, such as TSMC or UMC.

By Michelle Kessler
Photo: A customer looks at a new iPod Nano at the Apple store in Salt Lake City, Utah, U.S., on Wednesday, April 22, 2009. (George Frey/Bloomberg News)

New Flip Ultra cameras might flip your switch ... Apple builds team to design chips ... Time Warner moves closer to spinning off AOL ... Twenty useless Firefox extensions ... IBM's developer site gets more social ... Google stands by book search deal ... Why most Twitter users quit ... Finally, AT&T's dilemma over the iPhone.

By Brett Molina

Spammers and data thieves are capitalizing on the swine flu media blitz, too. While many folks are flocking to Google and Yahoo for legit information on the outbreak, cybercriminals are infesting email inboxes with tainted messages keying off curiosity about swine flu.

Symantec researcher Mayur Kulkarni isolated a tainted Adobe PDF email attachment titled "Swine influenza frequently asked questions.pdf."  If you see this in your inbox, delete it. Clicking on the PDF can deliver a data stealing program.

Analysts at Cisco's Ironport messaging security division say swine flu-themed spam on Monday accounted for 4 percent of global spam. These messages try to get you to click on tainted weblinks, purportedly leading to swine flu-related news stories. Instead, you land on a website controlled by the bad guys from where they can install various malicious programs on your PC. In many instances, you'll get directed to websites selling fake pharmaceutical drugs, according to Cisco Ironport.  Symantec and Cisco Ironport recommend immediate deletion of email messages  with  these subject lines:

-- Swine flu worldwide
-- Swine flu in the USA
-- US swine flue fears
-- First US Sine flue victims
-- Swine flu in Hollywood
-- Salma Hayek caught swine flu
-- Madonna caught swine flu
-- US swine flu statistics
-- NY victims of swine flu
-- First US swine flu victims
-- Will swine flu attack USA?
-- US swine flu fears

By Byron Acohido
Photo: A couple wears masks to prevent contagion of the swine flu in the International Airport of Mexico City, on April 29, 2009. (Luis Acosta/AFP/Getty Images)

Are Microsoft, Verizon creating an iPhone rival? ... Antitrust inquiry opened into Google books deal ... AOL revenue continues to plunge ... U.S. cybersecurity described as "embarrassing" ... Not many users sticking with Twitter ... Breaking down the Palm Pre ... Study finds iPhone users love their apps ... Finally, a USB drive with fingerprint scanner.

By Brett Molina

Opera Mini, the nifty little free browser, continues to be a hit with users of BlackBerries and other mobile devices, particularly south of the border.

According to this survey released by Oslo, Norway-based browser maker Opera, users of Opera Mini spiked 157% to 23 million people last month vs. March 2008. Those folks browsed 148 million compressed megabytes of data on their handheld devices, up 319% from the year earlier period.

Opera Mini is catching fire with users Brazil, Mexico and Venezuela, says Falguni Bhuta, Opera Communications Manager, Americas. The most visited websites by Latin Americans include Google, Live and Facebook. Orkut remains the dominant social network in Brazil and Paraguay. And smaller social-networking sites, such as hi5, are also strong in several Latin American countries.

"Opera Mini has always been popular with BlackBerry customers because they are not happy with the native browser on their devices," says Bhuta. Opera Mini's user-friendly features and fast rendering of pages on mobile phones, not to mention low cost (free) are the big attractions, she says.

Jon von Tetzchner, Opera's CEO, predicts mobile phones are destined to become "the device most people use to access the Web."

By Byron Acohido
Photo: Opera

Apple, Verizon to reportedly reveal two iPhone-like handhelds ... Monster Cable drops prices ... Knockoff cellphones big in China ... New GE disc can store 100 DVDs ... Mozilla releases Firefox 3.5 beta ... Report sheds light on hottest apps ... Quub offers alternative to Twitter ... Microsoft debuts social app Vine ... Finally, a Samsung phone inside a Nintendo controller.

By Brett Molina

Facebook’s 200 million active users will soon be able to share their status updates, photos and other personal information without checking into the site.

A new set of third-party development tools unfurled Monday by the world’s most popular social-networking site will soon extend its reach to more websites, cell phone applications and other online services.

“In the coming months, you’ll be able to interact with your stream on even more websites and through more applications, in ways we’re only beginning to imagine,” Facebook engineer Justin Bishop wrote on the company's blog.

In essence, Facebook is taking a page out of the Twitter playbook. That microblogging service — which has emerged as a major threat to Facebook — derives much of its traffic from web sites other than its own.

“So much of Twitter lives outside of Twitter.com,” says Harry McCracken, editor and founder of web site Technologizer.  “A majority of Twitter users tweet (offer updates) outside the Twitter.com web site” at sites like TweetDeck and TwitterGadget.

Facebook’s move is its aggressive yet to make its content available across the Internet, and could open up advertising opportunities. Facebook rang up about $210 million in revenue in 2008 and could double that this year — primarily through ads.

Today’s announcement comes on the heels of a redesign of Facebook’s news stream — the personal information its users share about themselves with friends on the site — that now dominates a users’ profile page.

By Jon Swartz
Photo: Facebook