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Even though Dell had a tough first quarter, it is sitting on nearly $10 billion in cash and equivalents and is "looking for opportunities" to expand its business through acquisitions, according to a Dell executive.

The executive quoted in the IDG News Service article is Steve Felice, president of the company's small and medium business unit. Felice refused to name the companies under consideration, but the article said unnamed observers believe that Palm or Acer are potential targets.

Michael Dell recently said that his company is interested in "smaller-screen devices", which could mean smartphones or some other sort of mobile device. Palm is getting ready to launch its new smartphone, the heavily hyped Palm Pre, and Acer has a strong netbook line as well as a huge footprint in the PC market.

The need for customized electronic health records software may be pricing out some hospitals, according to a collaborative study done by a Harvard Medical School doctor and an MIT Sloan School of Management professor.

The study, which will be published in the journal Management Science, found that because privacy laws differ across states, EHR software often has to be customized to account for these differences. This is a potential barrier for many hospitals, because customization costs money.

States that had unique health privacy laws in place experienced a 20 to 30 percent reduction in EHR adoption rates, Catherine Tucker, an MIT Sloan School of Management professor and the study's coauthor said.

"What we found is that when we were talking to hospitals, a lot of the costs came because these state laws are very different and so it meant that a vendor couldn't sell a standardized solution," she told The Boston Globe. "Any time you mention customization and software, it gets costly."

However, there is one potential way to hold costs down for hospitals that can't afford commercial solutions: Using open-source software.

For instance, the EHR package built by the Veteran's Administration using taxpayer dollars is free and open source, although hospitals will need to spend money and time to customize it to fit their needs.

In addition, West Virginia senator John J. Rockefeller last month introduced Senate Bill 90, the Health Information Technology Public Utility Act of 2009, which would help promote open source EHR and offer grants to hospitals willing to implement it.

Medsphere, a company that has helped commercialized VistA, sells its EHR software "for comparative pennies on the dollar," CNET reported. Proprietary systems comparable to what Medsphere offers typically run between $10 and $20 million dollars.

In late Jaunary, the bookmark-sharing website ma.gnolia suffered a "catastrophic" failure that took the service offline. The data could not be recovered. Founder Larry Halff decided to shutter the service, but according to a message left on the front page of the site, Ma.gnolia will re-open as a "by-invitation community bookmarking service" by the of the summer.

The technology industry was taken by surprise earlier this week, when Oracle CEO Larry Ellison made some unexpected comments about his company's hardware plans. As described by one source,

... Ellison broadly hinted that Oracle would get into the consumer electronics business, offering netbook-like machines that would compete with the Acers, HPs, Dells, and Lenovos of the world. 

Another source reported Ellison making the following remark:

"I can see lots and lots of Java devices, some coming from our friends at Google," said Ellison. "But I don't see why some of those devices shouldn't come from Sun/Oracle." 

Ellison did not give any details, and many observers did not take the comments seriously considering Oracle's historical roots as a provider of enterprise software. 

Nevertheless, there are several factors that would make Oracle consider a move into the consumer hardware arena, including Oracle's planned acquisition of Sun Microsystems, which brings new hardware and software skills and technologies into the Oracle fold. Ellison clearly sees huge potential in Java -- at his speech to the JavaOne attendees in San Francisco on Tuesday, he pledged to develop Java applications for phones and netbooks, saying "There will be computers fundamentally based on Java and JavaFX, not only from Google but also from Sun."

The FCC adopted rules to prohibit unsolicited commercial e-mail messages to wireless devices in the 2003 CAN-SPAM Act. However, the ban does not cover SMS messages.

Now, a new act has been proposed. The "Stop M-Spam Abuse as a Sales industry Habit Act of 2008" (H.R. 5769, also known as the SMASH Act of 2008) would require the Federal Trade Commission to "issue regulations to revise the Telemarketing Sales Rule to explicitly prohibit, as an abusive telemarketing act or practice, the sending of any electronic commercial message containing an unsolicited advertisement to a telephone number that is assigned to a commercial mobile service and listed on the FTC's do-not-call registry."

The act already has some early bipartisan support and the Obama administration has shown its willingness to quickly target commercial practices which hurt consumers, such as its call to reform the credit card industry. On the other hand, marketers and the telecommunications industry may push back against any regulation of SMS messaging, and may enlist sympathetic members of Congress to scuttle the bill, water down its provision, or delay its enactment.

Some observers have reacted with dismay to parts of yesterday's subcommittee meeting of the Senate Commerce Committee, in which Senator John Kerry (D-Mass.) expressed concern that online media may not maintain the same high standards of journalism that he believes print media has.

Players in the online media world have hammered newspapers and magazines for years, saying that they are too large and dinosaur-like. Yesterday's meeting brought out a new wave of criticism.

Gabe Rivera, the founder of Techmeme and several other niche news aggregators, hinted that the current rounds of layoffs that many newspapers are going through are necessary.

"Kerry's premise is false. They weren't competitive. There was redundancy. Trimming the fat yields a competitive organization," he wrote on Twitter.

In his testimony, Sen. Kerry also said steps need to be taken to make sure news media stays diverse and independent.

Implying that the Internet already lets consumers access diverse sources of news, Mike Steib, director of TV Ads at Google tweeted, "There are 90 feeds in my Google Reader."

The hearing was prompted by the crisis facing traditional media outlets, especially newspapers and magazines, as advertisers and readers have migrated to the Web. Close to 9,000 layoffs and buyouts have occurred in 2009 alone at U.S. newspapers, according to Paper Cuts, a blog about the news industry. 

But some see opportunities in the disruption of the news industry. 

Journalist David Cohn, founder of community journalism website Spot.Us, believes that this is an exciting time for news media.

"I think what journalism needs is 10,000 different start-ups," he told CNN.

TechCrunch has been teasing readers with pictures and video of a prototype touchscreen Web tablet (also known as the "CrunchPad" or "Crunch Tablet") for several months. The most recent photos, released in April, show a slim, Atom-powered device that has an on-screen keyboard and even packaging.

The CrunchGear post brags that "it's real and it's spectacular," but a new hardware launch in a market crowded with sub-$400 netbooks, iPod touches, and the Kindle 2 will be a challenge. Manufacturing, distribution, and sales all have to be worked out before launch can occur.   

"More than anything, let's give this company some friggin' breathing room," newly-arrived Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz told reporters on a conference call in January. "It's been too crazy, everybody on the outside deciding what Yahoo should do, shouldn't do, what's best for them. That's gonna stop."

But last week, Bartz made the decision to cut staff at Flickr, the widely used photo-sharing site. GigaOm editor Om Malik listed five Flickr engineers who had left the company. Some, he said, were laid off, while others resigned. Most notable is Cal Henderson, chief architect of Flickr.

Bartz' decision to fire Flickr engineers caused Seeking Alpha blogger Joel West, a business professor at San Jose State University, to turn from Bartz booster to Bartz basher: 

Yahoo is now cutting heavily at Flickr, including its top development talent.

This reminds me of how CEO Ed Zander closed Motorola’s talent-laden software lab near UIUC two years ago. Ironically, Yahoo created a new office to hire that talent.

West's post won't start a backlash by itself. But it seems like an early example of how Web 2.0 boosters will view Bartz' move. Her decision to shut down GeoCities was an acknowledgement that GeoCities' build-it-yourself Web 1.0 homesteads have been replaced by simple, turnkey Facebook profiles and no-brain-required Twitter streams.

Flick, by contrast, is a successful product, at least in terms of mass-market adoption. Bartz cut technical staff at Flickr in the same week that President Obama's administration began using it to distribute official photos as part of its WhiteHouse 2.0 strategy to establish a high-profile presence on top social networks.

Financially, Bartz' decision probably makes perfect sense. Millions of mainstream Flickr users may not even learn of the staff reduction, let alone become upset by it. Layoffs are now business as usual in America. But Bartz has hurt Flickr, a prized brand and daily destination for many Internet users. The lesson for Web 2.0 boosters: As the world's economy continues to slide, no one is safe.

This year's All Things Digital conference featured a fascinating on-stage interview of Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz by Kara Swisher. Besides delving into Bartz's short history at the company, the talk also covered some potential strategic moves. According to AllThingsD's account, Bartz said Yahoo was "very interested in social."

Of course, this is not the first time Yahoo has talked about big social networking plans. But what makes this different is Bartz's drive to execute quickly and decisively on reforming the company, and her stated desire to turn Yahoo into users' "home on the Web." 

An article in the Hollywood trade publication Variety has revealed a new partnership to make Twitter -- one of the hottest Internet media phenomenons -- the focus of an "unscripted TV skein."

Reveille and Brillstein Entertainment are behind the deal, which Twitter co-founder Biz Stone calls "a lightweight, non-exclusive, agreement." The show is further described in the Variety article as "putting ordinary people on the trail of celebrities in a revolutionary competitive format."

While the concept and executive producers have apparently been worked out, other details are notably lacking -- such as what the show will be called, where it will be shown, and when it will air. But pressure will be on to reveal some of these details soon, before the Twitter buzz fades.

Prediction: The producers of the Twitter-based television program will reveal the general start date (i.e., month or season) and channel on which it will be shown by October 1, 2009. The announcement must come from the producers, the cable or broadcast television channel (or Internet site), or Twitter, or be made by a named executive at one of these organizations and quoted by a media outlet. However, the name may not be revealed in the announcement.

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