A round-up of the companies, deals, and trends that made headlines.
Every day, the Fortune staff spends hours poring over tech stories, posts, and reviews from all over the Web to keep tabs on the companies that matter. We’ve assembled the morning’s most newsworthy bits below.
- Best Buy (BBY), which saw a 61% spike in profit last quarter, is changing up its store layouts this holiday season to make way for more portable devices: smartphones, e-readers, and touch-screen computers, particularly the Kindle and the iPad. Microsoft (MSFT) and Sony’s (SNE) motion-based controllers, Kinect and Move, will feature prominently, too. (Wall Street Journal)
- Microsoft’s Bing search engine surpassed Yahoo (YHOO) in market share this past August, making it the number two search engine in the U.S. Though much of that achievement can probably be attributed the fact that Bing now powers Yahoo in the U.S. and Canada. (ArsTechnica)
- Twitter announced a new look for Twitter.com with a two-column interface that takes cues from the recently-released iPad app. Embedded content now shows up in the right column. (Engadget)
- Ever visit a domain name and gotten content completely unrelated? You may have been a victim of “cybersquatting,” individuals who buy up domains and use them for malicious purposes. (New York Times)
- Intel (INTC) awarded four promising companies over $30 million from its Intel Capital Invest in America Technology Fund: Adaptive Computing, an automation software developer, Ciranova, which develops software so engineers can design communication capabilities into chips, Joyent, a cloud-computing provider, and energy software maker Nexant. (GigaOM)
- Michael Gartenberg over at SlashGear spent a week with Nokia’s (NOK) N8 smartphone. The verdict? While the hardware gets an “A+,” the OVI store gets an “F” for lack of apps.
- VantagePoint Venture Partners created a $100 million fund for future investments in China cleantech, with a particular focus on investment opportunities in Tianjin and the Tianjin-Bohai region in Northeast China. (GreenBeat)
- Gilt Groupe’s local shopping site, Gilt City, is expanding from three cities (New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles) to six (Boston, Chicago, and Miami). (TechCrunch)
