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.

Google and Microsoft have long been at each others’ throats in the fight for dominance. As investors look for a way to play the face-off, here’s a reason why ETFs may be the way to go.

Although the official lifting of “beta” off of Google’s (GOOG) Gmail service means nothing to daily Gmail users, it gives the company the chance to get the paid version of Google Apps adopted inside big companies. Miguel Helft for The New York Times reports Google is trying to compete with rival offerings from other companies.

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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.

A Look at Insana's Bullish Calls: Pfizer (PFE), Microsoft (MSFT), Disney (DIS), Bristol-Myers Squibb (BMY), Time Warner (TMW), Verizon (VZ), Cisco (CSCO), Bank of America (BAC), Citigroup (C), Wells Fargo (WFC), Huntington Bancshares (HBAN), JP Morgan (JPM), U.S Bancorp (USB), Hovnanian (HOV), Toll Brothers (TOL), Lennar (LEN)

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.

All the talk about Chrome OS (GOOG) got me thinking about operating systems and how different OSes are used by people. Also, a comment on my post yesterday by Scott Shapiro got me to segment my blog reader base by Windows and Mac (AAPL) users in Google Analytics this morning. I looked at all the visits to my blog year to date by Mac users and Windows (MSFT) users and then looked at where each set of users come from. The data is interesting (click to enlarge) and here it is:

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.

Monthly NPD sales data paints one picture of how the video game industry is faring in this economy. Tracking firm Nielsen has crafted an alternate perspective. In a new study, Nielsen turned the lens on the recession’s impact by measuring how much time is being spent playing and how many used games gamers are buying. Not surprisingly, the survey found both game engagement and used game purchasing have been trending up.

According to Nielsen, metered minutes, the firm’s broad metric for time spent playing games, was up throughout the first quarter. Key demographics including men between 18 and 24 and female gamers between 13 and 17 showed significant gains. The male group saw year over year gains of 16 to 29% for each month of '09. The 13 to 17 year old female demographic was up between twelve and thirty percent. [click images on right to enlarge]

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.

As recently posted on my blog, I believe the market is due for a pull back, so it may be a good time to purchase protection on some of your long positions. I decided to write about the 50 largest stocks (by market cap) in the S&P 500 and give a put protection strategy for each of them.

This is the first part of three, in which I'll be including 20 stocks in this analysis and 15 in each of the next two. The stocks will be listed in order from largest to smallest market cap.

By MG Sielger

By Paul Carton

ChangeWave’s latest Corporate IT survey shows U.S. tech spending in the process of rapidly stabilizing – with a dramatically improved outlook for the 3rd quarter.

Google (GOOG) is starting to respond to questions about the just announced Chrome operating system. In a short FAQ Wednesday they talked about cost and initial partners.

3 Stocks for the Recovery: Blue Nile (NILE), UPS (UPS), Visa (V)

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: