Acer Aspire 5738DG-6165 has a 15.6-inch screen that, with the help of special glasses, appears to take on depth if used with the right games or movies.

It’s not the first laptop with a 3-D screen. Sharp Corp. introduced one in 2003. It worked without glasses, but the viewer had to be somewhat careful to keep his head in the right place for the 3-D effect to work. The screen worked similarly to 3-D postcards - the kind with the ribbed plastic layer - but looked more convincing. Like Acer’s model, the 3-D effect could be turned off with a button.

Sharp’s model cost $3,300 and was aimed at engineers and other professionals who might be helped by being able to show objects in 3-D. Acer’s laptop costs just $780, barely more than a comparable, normal laptop.

Windows 7 doesn’t have special features for 3-D screens, so Acer will ship the computer with special movie player software. Finding movies to play on it won’t be easy, however - there’s no real consumer distribution system for the new 3-D movies that are shown in theaters, such as “Monsters vs Aliens.”

Hulu, the free online video site where television shows and movies can be watched in their entirety, will start charging fees at some point, one of its owners said.

Hulu has struggled to make money despite its popularity as an ad-supported site. News Corp., which co-owns the site with NBC Universal, Walt Disney Co. and Providence Equity Partners, said it hasn’t decided what form the subscription model would take.

Chase Carey, News Corp.’s president and chief operating officer, said at a conference in New York on Wednesday that subscription fees could come as early as 2010.

Microsoft Corp and Google Inc secured separate agreements to access real-time content from Web phenomenon Twitter, intensifying their battle for a search market that Google dominates.

Google, and Microsoft’s 5-month-old Bing, each announced deals to access Twitter’s store of public data in real time on Wednesday, in the latest sign of escalating competition between the two search engines.

The long-expected deals are expected to ramp up the efficacy and lure of search results, by allowing users to scan real-time Tweets: 140-character stream-of-consciousness messages that Twitter hosts on its popular website.

The back-to-back announcements underscored how real-time data in search results is shaping up to be a pivotal battleground in the search arena.

Microsoft Corp launched Windows 7 on Thursday, its most important release in more than a decade, aiming to win back customers disappointed by Vista and strengthen its grip on the PC market.

The world’s largest software company, which powers more than 90 percent of personal computers, has received good reviews for the new operating system, which it hopes will grab back the impetus in new technology from rivals Apple Inc and Google Inc.

“They met expectations but that was pretty much it,” said Michael Gartenberg, a long-time Microsoft analyst at market research firm Interpret after a launch event in New York. “They showed off some very cool things, but now they have to keep the momentum going.”

The new system — which is faster, less cluttered and has new touch-screen features — comes almost three years after the launch of Vista, whose complexity frustrated many home users and turned off business customers.

Apple Inc rolled out a new line of redesigned Mac computers on Tuesday, hoping to build up sales momentum for its biggest business heading into the all-important holiday season.

Sporting new features such as touch-based mice and edge-to- edge glass, Apple hopes to sustain the fast-growing sales of its computers. Allaying initial worries about its premium pricing, Apple’s Mac business has been surging despite a recession that has pinched consumer spending.

Mac unit sales — the largest single contributor to Apple’s revenue — leaped 17 percent in the quarter, far outpacing the PC market. That helped Apple blow by Wall Street forecasts on quarterly earnings and revenue. Its shares rose 5 percent to $198.99 in afternoon trading on the Nasdaq.

You’ll be able to watch popular cable television series such as HBO’s “Entourage” and AMC’s “Mad Men” on your computer by the end of the year without paying extra - as long as you’re a Comcast Corp. subscriber watching at home.

Comcast will be the first cable TV operator to unlock online access to a slate of valuable cable shows and movies, aiming to replicate what’s available on television through video on demand.

Time Warner Cable Inc. and others plan to follow as the pay-TV companies look to satisfy growing consumer appetite for online video while preserving subscription revenue.

Access will be carefully guarded: Comcast subscribers can initially watch shows and movies only on their home computers after being verified by the cable system. And for now, the online viewing will be restricted to those who also get Internet service through Comcast, not through competitors like phone companies.

Comcast, wanting to make sure the shows will remain off-limits to non-subscribers, still is working on providing access over competing home broadband systems as well as on the go - at work, on laptops and, one day, over cell phones.

With so many firms jumping on the 3D TV bandwagon, Sony has obviously felt compelled to push the envelope further still. So it has developed a 360° 3D display.

Confused by the term? You shouldn’t be, because the prototype display is essentially a tube-shaped unit able to show a 3D image to anyone looking at it from – presumably - a face-on angle.

Sony’s 360° 3D display could be used for videocalls

It isn’t yet clear if all viewers all see the side of the 3D image, irrespective of their viewing angle, or if you see a different side of the image depending on how you’re facing it.

The display also works without glasses, Sony claimed. In its current form, the 13cm wide by 27cm high unit can display images in 24-bit colour.

The new electronic reader from Barnes & Noble Inc, expected to launch on Tuesday, features color, a touchscreen display and the same price tag as Amazon.com Inc’s Kindle, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday.

The device, which the newspaper said was called “Nook,” will compete with the Kindle and Sony Corp’s Sony Reader among other electronic readers that allow users to read digital content on a tablet-sized device.

The Journal said the details came from a print advertisement slated for the New York Times’ October 25 edition.

Barnes & Noble and the New York Times did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

A host of competitors are trying to grab market share from Amazon, which is believed to dominate the fast-growing yet still small industry.

The past month has been characterized by a flurry of activity as booksellers, manufacturers, publishers and wireless operators all hope to gain a toehold in advance of the key holiday selling season.

In July, Barnes & Noble, the largest brick-and-mortar bookseller in the United States, debuted what it called the world’s largest online digital bookstore with over 700,000 titles, readable on devices like Apple Inc’s iPhone.

Analysts say that Barnes & Noble’s advantage could be in its physical stores where users will be able to test out the device, as well as its strong relationship with publishers — an advantage that Amazon also enjoys.

With a $259 price tag, the same as the Kindle’s recently lowered price, Barnes & Noble could potentially lure users away from the Kindle, which some critics say is short on design and functionality.

A color touchscreen display would be considered a plus by some users, who have grown accustomed to higher functionality on devices such as Apple’s iPhone and iPod Touch.

JetBrains, the maker of the popular IntelliJ IDEA Java integrated development environment, plans to deliver an open-source version of its tool set.

JetBrains, the maker of the popular IntelliJ IDEA Java integrated development environment, has decided to deliver an open-source version of its tool set.

JetBrains on Oct. 15 announced a public preview of the free Community Edition of IntelliJ IDEA.

Moreover, “Starting with the upcoming Version 9.0, IntelliJ IDEA will be offered in two editions: Community Edition, [which will be] free and open source, and Ultimate Edition, which until today has been referred to as simply IntelliJ IDEA,” JetBrains said in a news release. The release continued:

“The brand-new Community Edition is built on the IntelliJ platform and includes its sources. JetBrains has made it as easy as possible to access and use the source code of the Community Edition and the IntelliJ platform, by applying the democratic Apache 2.0 license to both of them.”

Sergey Dmitriev, CEO of JetBrains, said in the release, “We’ve always been open to the community—with our public Early Access Program (EAP), issue trackers, forums and so on. This made for a tight and direct feedback loop with our users, even at a time when this wasn’t a widely accepted practice in the industry. Since then, we’ve supported hundreds of open-source projects with free product licenses, contributed code to various open-source projects like Groovy and Scala, and developed several open-sourced IntelliJ IDEA plug-ins ourselves. So, you can see how offering the IntelliJ IDEA experience for free, through an open-source license, goes hand in hand with our focus on the community. Open source has become the mainstream, and we continue to embrace it as an exciting challenge. In brief, we’re not changing direction—we’re moving forward.”

The JetBrains release described the Community Edition of IntelliJ as a good choice for developers “working on pure Java/Groovy applications, or doing Swing development.” This edition contains IntelliJ IDEA features such as “various refactorings and code inspections, coding assistance, debugging, TestNG and JUnit testing; CVS, Subversion and Git support, as well as Ant and Maven build integration.” It continued, “To learn more and download the Community Edition Public Preview, please visit: http://www.jetbrains.com/idea/nextversion/free_java_ide.html.”

The Ultimate Edition will continue to be offered commercially as a “complete set of Web and enterprise development tools. … The new features of Version 9 include:

- Java EE 6, with JSF 2.0, JPA 2.0, Servlets 3.0, Bean validation, etc.

- Android, Google App Engine, GWT

- Adobe AIR, FlexUnit

- JavaScript refactorings and debugging

- Tapestry, OSGi

- PHP and more…”

Google’s Street View trike is hitting the road throughout the U.S., and the company is seeking your input as to where it will go next.

In the past, Google Maps’ Street View has largely restricted your virtual trips to spots accessible by car. But the company’s trike, a 250-pound tricycle outfitted with GPS and a camera that looks like a submarine periscope, can virtually take you places you can’t drive–anywhere from a school campus to a theme park.

To help its cyclists go where no trike has gone before, Google needs your help in deciding where it should travel next.

The company is asking you to vote on the locations you’d most like to see from among six categories:

1. Parks & trails
2. University campuses
3. Theme parks & zoos
4. Pedestrian malls (i.e. outdoor shopping areas, boardwalks)
5. Landmarks
6. Sports venues (i.e. golf courses, racing tracks, stadium grounds)

You have until October 28 to cast your vote at Google.com/trike. Google will then pick a winner for each category and send its trike cyclists on their mission.

Google Inc. is launching a new online service that will let readers buy electronic versions of books and read them on such gadgets as cell phones, laptops and possibly e-book devices.

The company said Google Editions marks its first effort to earn revenue from its Google Books scanning project, which attempts to make millions of printed books available online. Although the scanning program has faced complaints from authors and publishers over copyright, Google Editions will cover only books submitted and approved by the copyright holders when it launches next year.

It’s part of an ambitious plan that Google first publicly discussed several months ago at a book conference in New York.

By the time Google Editions makes its debut, the Internet search leader hopes to have an even larger selection of digital books available as part of a legal settlement with authors and publishers. The year-old settlement still requires U.S. court approval and is being revised to address the U.S. Justice Department’s worries that the arrangement could be abused to drive up the prices for electronic books.

The books bought through Google Editions will be accessible on any device that has a Web browser, including smart phones, netbooks and personal computers and laptops, putting Google in competition with Amazon.com Inc. and its Kindle e-book reader.

Consumers can buy directly from Google or from any number of online booksellers and other retail partners using the Google Editions platform. Google will actually host the e-books and make them searchable.

Taking a page from its original playbook, Wal-Mart Stores Inc. launched a full-fledged price war with Amazon.com Inc. and a nation of book retailers, lowering online prices on certain highly anticipated hardback titles to $9.

The volley of discounts, which began Thursday when the retailer listed prices for some upcoming hardcover releases such as Dean Koontz’ “Breathless” and Stephen King’s “Under the Dome” at $10, was answered with a similar price cut by Amazon, the largest online bookseller. Then the two competitors lowered the prices even further to $9.

The book discounts, the latest in a series of aggressive online maneuvers by the world’s largest retailer, could position the company to do to the online marketplace what Walmart stores did to local merchants decades ago.