There’s plenty of high-profile buzz coming from Sun Valley, Idaho, where media executives have gathered for the annual Allen & Co. conference, considered to be an exclusive event for the who’s who in the world of media and technology. Among the big questions capturing some attention:

• Will News Corp.’s (NWS) Rupert Murdoch broker a deal to buy Twitter?
• What does Bill Gates (MSFT) think of Google’s Chrome OS?
• Will Google (GOOG) CEO Eric Schmidt be recusing himself from more discussions on the Apple (AAPL) Board of Directors? And what did he know about Steve Jobs’ liver transplant?

Of course, these are the questions being asked. That doesn’t mean there will be any answers.

Any share price weakness related to the early success of Microsoft Corp.’s (MSFT) Bing search engine should be used as a buying opportunity in Google Inc. (GOOG), according to a new report from RBC Capital Markets.

Analyst Ross Sandler said Google remains the best way to play a global recovery in online advertising, and maintained an Outperform rating and $500 price target on the stock.

I’ve said it time and time again. When it comes to buying a wireless phone, my best advice is to shop the service, not the device. It’s common sense. The device can be the best in the world but if the service is unreliable or filled with extra charges, then what good is it?

I raise this point again because of the launch of Amazon Wireless this week. If you are one of those people who shops for the device first, then this is the site for you. Pretty much every link on the home page will take you to a place where you can shop for a phone.

Google (GOOG) is due to report earnings next Thursday, July 16th (likely due after the market closes). This is one day before July Options expire on July 17th, so it provides an interesting situation to examine for option traders. This article is for educational purposes only and is not to be considered a specific trade recommendation on GOOG options, I do not have any current positions or recommendations on the shares, and other BigTrends analysts may trade GOOG in either direction before next week's earnings. These are the kinds of techniques and analysis we utilize in BigTrends Advanced Options Strategies advisory service program and in BigTrends ACE Live Coaching.

The following chart shows data captured today from OptionVue regarding GOOG options prices. You can see that with the stock around 409, the July 410 Straddle (which is the Call & Put combined) was priced a bit under 28, which is around a 54% implied volatility. The August options, on the other hand, are only priced around a 37% implied volatility -- this discrepancy can largely be explained by the fact that earnings are due before July Expiration.

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Note: The Hitwise data featured is based on US market share of visits as defined by the IAB, which is the percentage of online traffic to the domain or category, from the Hitwise sample of 10 million US internet users. Hitwise measures more than 1 million unique websites on a daily basis, including sub-domains of larger websites. Hitwise categorizes websites into industries on the basis of subject matter and content, as well as market orientation and competitive context. The market share of visits percentage does not include traffic for all sub-domains of certain websites that could be reported on separately.

By Leena Rao

Microsoft’s (MSFT) competitor to Adobe Flash, Silverlight, has officially rolled out the new version, Silverlight 3, Thursday. Silverlight is a cross-browser, cross-platform, and cross-device plug-in for delivering media experiences and interactive applications for the Web. The first version was launched in 2007 and the second version was launched in September of 2008. In April, Microsoft reported 300 million downloads of Silverlight between September 2007 and April 2009, with an estimated 300,000 developers and engineers working off the Silverlight platform.

PCI – What is it? We can only begin to imagine the losses, liability and other consequences resulting from unauthorized access to credit card information, which, unfortunately, happens all the time. To attempt to deal with this problem, the credit card industry developed the Payment Card Industry (PCI) Data Security Standard (DSS) or PCI DSS to ensure that companies that process, store or transmit credit card information maintain a secure environment. Compliance with these standards is required of all merchants authorized to accept credit card payments. In 2006, the major credit card companies (Visa (V), MasterCard (MA), American Express (AXP), Discover (DFS) and JCB) created the payment Card Industry Security Standards Council (PCI SSC) to manage the ongoing development of the PCI DSS. However, the credit card companies and not the PCI SSC, are responsible for enforcing compliance. For those interested and brave enough, a copy of the PCI DSS can be found here. It is important to note that PCI compliance, for the most part (more on that later), is not law.

Scope of Obligation: Using a third party to process, store or transmit credit card information does not remove a merchant’s obligation to comply with PCI DSS for these functions. Therefore, the merchant is responsible to see to it that the third party providing these functions is compliant, or face the consquences. Section 12.8.2 of PCI DSS requires a merchant to “[m]aintain a written agreement that includes an acknowledgement that the service providers are responsible for the security of cardholder data the service providers possess.” Merchant’s can’t assume that third party vendors are PCI compliant. Also, don’t assume that if your site has SSL certificates that you are compliant with PCI DSS. Remember, all service providers that touch, manage and/or store a merchant’s credit card information are the direct responsibility of the merchant.

Bing increased Microsoft’s (MSFT) share of the US search market by 1% last month and continues to slowly but steadily chip away at Yahoo (YHOO) and Google (GOOG), according to an analysis conducted by StatCounter.

Microsoft (MSFT) has seen the enemy, and it increasingly looks like Microsoft. Google (GOOG) has announced its intention to begin attacking Microsoft at its very heart, by offering a competing operating system that will include the Google web browser Chrome.

Google’s intention is clear. It plans to do what the now-defunct Netscape attempted when it launched its first browser in the mid-1990s: to make Windows obsolete and turn the browser into the dominant computing platform. Eventually Chrome OS will be used to power full-fledged PCs. All applications written for the software will be web-based and will work with other browsers that are compliant with the latest web standards (even those running on Windows). Chrome OS would also allow users to work offline and synchronise changes later.

Google’s (GOOG) been accused of many things but having slight ambitions isn’t one of them.From the company’s stated mission, to its search efforts, from book search to Android, the company always aims high. Google’s latest plans stick with the formula.

Following an increasingly popular trend of pre-announcing potentially big news, the company announced Tuesday on the Google blog that their Chrome web browser will have a new cousin in 2010: Chrome the Operating System.

Google’s Chrome OS, which generated an extreme amount of hubbub, is a defensive move as much as it is an offensive one, say analysts. Nevertheless, Google’s move will have a wide impact on the industry.

Analysts were handicapping Google’s move into operating systems on Thursday and some of the ripple effects they cooked up were interesting (Techmeme). Here are the more notable comments from the research notes:

The techno-worlds of open-source and standards-compliance are united in celebration on the heels of Google's (GOOG) announcement of a new and upcoming platform called Chrome OS. A new giant has awakened to try and breach the Windows stranglehold of the modern world. Free and widely available Linux couldn't do it, the fawned-over and renowned Mac OS X still can't do it, but perhaps the quirky little giant that is Google can lead a way towards universal, free and open salvation.

Google's announcement that it is in fact working on a full fledged Personal Computer Operating System shouldn't really come as a surprise given that over the past year and a half it has launched the Android OS for Mobile Devices and Chrome, the first browser to have individual process management, a staple of every flavor of operating system in the modern computing world. Rumors of Google's OS work span back years in the blogosphere, but nothing was concrete until Wednesday's unveiling of Chrome OS, an operating system to run on full household computers based on Google technology and an open source Linux under-pinning.

Google (GOOG) may eventually solve the problem of finding data on the web. Too bad its first effort reports the wrong numbers for unemployment.

Since leaving public service, I have occasionally pondered whether to start a company/organization to transform the way that data are made available on the web. The data are out there, but they remain a nuisance to find, a nuisance to manipulate, and a nuisance to display. I cringe every time I have to download CSV files, import to Excel, manipulate the data (in a good sense), make a chart, and fix the dumb formatting choices that Excel makes. All those steps should be much, much easier.

It’s difficult to imagine a global internet giant with nearly a $140 billion market cap, $16 billion in cash reserves and $7 billion in annual free cash flow having a potentially menacing weakness. But in a digital marketplace hell-bent on making consumers pay for preferences, Google (GOOG) could be the odd man out.

Apple (AAPL) and Amazon (AMZN) are demonstrating that paid content and apps are the internet’s “new frontier,” particularly on mobile devices and in emerging markets. They are driving user payment revenues to an average annual 17 percent growth through 2012 — more than twice the rate of online advertising revenues, slowing to average annual seven percent gains.

In the past 36 hours, I've seen 37 stories in my Google reader about the the Michael Jackson webcast and unless I missed it, not a single article talked about anything pertaining to the business side of live broadcasting. Every time a large webcast takes place on the Internet, the industry wants to speculate about the Internet breaking or failing in some way and everyone seems to want to cover the story only from an infrastructure angle.

While some seem to think it makes for great headlines by asking if the Internet will crash under the strain and want to imply some sort of doom and gloom from too much traffic, in reality, the titles of many of these articles should be seen for what they really are, a headline.

The news that Google (GOOG) is turning its Chrome browser into a full blown linux-based operating system for netbooks has the tech industry buzzing. There's so much to like about this story; Google vs Microsoft (MSFT), Google vs Apple (AAPL), the rise of netbooks, the browser as an OS, freeconomics at work in the OS market, etc, etc.

I'm not going to add much to the discussion, particularly almost a full day after the news hit and literally hundreds of blog posts later. But I did enjoy Fake Steve Jobs' rant even though it was tongue in cheek. Fake Steve lists eight reasons why Chrome OS is "no big deal" including this one:

TMZ, which first broke the story of Michael Jackson’s death, continued to out-reach celebrity gossip rags in covering the superstar’s funereal final curtain Tuesday.

TMZ was acquired as part of Jason Calcanis’ Weblogs, Inc. for $25M by AOL/Time Warner in October, 2005. The deal brought several other notable blogs like Engadget, Joystiq, TV Squad and Autoblog to the massive audience at AOL.com, which had 55M UV in June and ranked as the 11th largest domain in the US.

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Note: The Hitwise data featured is based on US market share of visits as defined by the IAB, which is the percentage of online traffic to the domain or category, from the Hitwise sample of 10 million US internet users. Hitwise measures more than 1 million unique websites on a daily basis, including sub-domains of larger websites. Hitwise categorizes websites into industries on the basis of subject matter and content, as well as market orientation and competitive context. The market share of visits percentage does not include traffic for all sub-domains of certain websites that could be reported on separately.