TiVo (NSDQ: TIVO)—which has seen the ranks of its subscribers drop—and Best Buy—which is ramping up its digital initiatives—think they can help each other out. The two companies are forming a partnership to promote each other’s offerings. The basics, via the NYT and the San Jose Mercury News: Best Buy…

*DirecTV* has reached out to Blake Krikorian as a possible successor to Chase Carey as CEO, paidContent has learned. If that doesn’t work out, another option could be joining the DirecTV (NYSE: DTV) board. Carey started his new job as vice chairman, president and COO of News Corp (NYSE: NWS)…

Update: And lo behold: with 30 minutes of launching, the fanboys brought down the site. It is unreachable as of 11:30 AM PST. Delicious irony here. The founders of two of the biggest and most well known gadget sites Engadget and Gizmodo have finally launched their gadget site, appropriately titled…

With Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) demonstrating that there is almost as big of a market for the iPod Touch as there is for the iPhone, it’s no wonder that Dell is considering crafting a pocket-sized device that will connect to the internet (but won’t be capable of making calls). The WSJ…

Amazon.com’s Kindle DX is now sold out “due to heavy customer demand” and is taking four to six weeks to ship, according to a message on the Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN) website that apparently went up this weekend. If that sounds familiar, it’s because the device’s two predecessors—the Kindle and the…

Thomas E. Weber is the Editor of SmartMoney.com and a veteran business and technology journalist. A former Wall Street Journal senior editor and bureau chief, he created the paper’s first column devoted to the Internet. Those with short attention spans can follow him on Twitter @tweber, or email .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).…

RealNetworks (NSDQ: RNWK) released its latest media player today, called RealPlayer SP, which stands for “social” and “portable.” It makes it easier to record online videos to a computer and then send them to social networks and devices, such as mobile phones, iPods or the Xbox. The free version is…

Don’t expect the majority of Kindle books to be priced at $9.99 for too much longer. In a report Friday, Bernstein Research Analysts Claudio Aspesi and Jeffrey Lindsay say that the average price of Kindle books will have to increase to improve the economics for both publishers and Amazon (NSDQ:…

Steve Jobs is coming back. According to the WSJ.com’s sources, Apple’s CEO who is a pancreatic cancer survivor, will return from medical leave this month. But what everyone wants to know, is will he be back at the company’s annual software developers conference on Monday, to possibly debut a new…

After a long period of uninterrupted growth, Sony (NYSE: SNE) has announced its first full-year loss in 14 years due to a downturn in consumer spend on gadgets and the collapse of financial markets and currencies in Japan and worldwide. In its full-year results to March 31, the company announced…

Updated: A big-screen Kindle may be coming to the market sooner than anybody expected. The New York Times reports that a larger version of Amazon.com’s e-reader could be introduced as soon as this week, optimized for newspapers, magazines and possibly textbooks. And the paper should know: the story says it…

Last week was the first week of iTunes’s new, steeper pricing on some tracks, and consumers voted with their wallets, according to Billboard. Sales figures from iTunes show that tracks that now sell for $1.29, up from $0.99, sold 12.5 percent fewer units than during the previous week, while tracks…

Cisco (NSDQ: CSCO) is making an even bigger bet on consumer electronics in a direct way than it has ever done before: it is buying Pure Digital, the maker of the popular Flip video cameras, for about $590 million in an all-stock deal. In addition to the price, Cisco will…

Google (NSDQ: GOOG) will provide Sony (NYSE: SNE) with some 500,000 copyright-expired titles for its e-book Reader, giving both companies the chance to take jabs at Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN) and Kindle. Sony can claim that it has a much-larger library and is more open; Google gets prime placement at the…

After admitting it faces its first full-year loss this year, Sony (NYSE: SNE) is slashing its annual dividend by 15 percent from 50 yen per share ($0.50) to 42.5 yen per share ($0.43) for the 12 months to March 31. The move won’t go down well with Sony’s shareholders around…

This morning at Apple’s headquarters, just off Infinite Loop in Cupertino, Calif., reporters, analysts and developers arrived early to snack on bagels and sip coffee, eagerly awaiting juicy details on the iPhone’s latest software update. At similar events in the past, we heard industry-shattering news, like the advent of the…

In January, Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) announced it had launched over 15,000 applications on its iPhone. In two months, that number has already jumped to 25,000. VentureBeat uses public information and findings from 148Apps to analyze pricing and popularity trends. —The most popular pricepoint is $0.99, not free. Some 10,274 applications…

Following criticism by some authors, Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN) is pulling back on the experimental Text-to-Speech feature in the new Kindle 2. Instead of making the automated reader available across the board, the company announced late Friday it will let rightsholders choose title by title. Amazon maintains that it has the…

An interesting discussion over on our sister site mocoNews.net, where Mark Cuban gave us permission to publish a post about the mobile future that first appeared on his Blog Maverick. An excerpt ( keeping Mark’s punctuation): “I would love to be able to ditch my laptop and desktop and only…