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 weekend’s most newsworthy bits below.
- Given Intel’s (INTC) mergers and acquisitions track record — it spent $11 billion-plus for some 40 companies between 1999 and 2003 only to shutter or sell them all — the outlook for its recent spending spree for TI’s cable mobile division, McAfee (MFE) and Infineon’s (IFNNF) Wireless Solutions looks iffy. (TechCrunch)
- HP (HPQ) is reportedly looking internally for its new CEO. Among the potential candidates: Todd Bradley, Executive VP of HP’s $28 billion Personal Systems Group, Ann Livermore, Executive VP of Enterprise Business, and Dave Donatelli, Executive VP of Enterprise Servers, Storage and Networking. (Wall Street Journal)
- Verizon Communications (VZ) intends to make Verizon Wireless chief executive Lowell McAdam its president and COO, which would make him next in line for company CEO. (Reuters)
- With domestic traffic down nearly 50% from April to July, social news site Digg is repositioning itself as an alternative social network, starting with the August redesign, V4, that emphasizes stories that users’ friends are “Digging” over traditional “Top News” pages. (New York Times)
- Having trouble keeping up with all the major players in the evolving mobile payments space? Here’s a handy “cheat sheet” that sums up each platform quite nicely. (PayPal)
- Despite cloud computing’s expected 17% growth this year to $68.3 billion, it’s expected Europe will only play a small role in overall sales — about 26% of that amount — due to various countries’ strict privacy laws. (New York Times)
- Techies, rejoice! Much-maligned Web search engine Cuil, started by several ex-Google employees back in July 2008, may be off-line for good. (VentureBeat)
- Three winners split the $10 million Progressive Insurance Automotive X Prize: the four-passenger Team Edison2 Very Light Car, which claims a 102.5 miles per gallon equivalent (MPGe) on E85 ethanol, Team Li-On’s two-seater Wave-II EV which gets 187 MPGe and Team X-Tracer Switzerland’s E-Tracer, a two- wheeled enclosed motorcycle that runs 205.3 MPGe and gets zero to 60 in under seven seconds. (Engadget)
- Speaking of, director James Cameron, harbinger of contemporary 3-D cinema (for better or for worse), says he wants to travel 6.8 miles beneath the surface of the ocean to shoot footage for the Avatar sequel and win a $10 million dollar X-Prize for it. How’s that for ambitious? (Mashable!)
- Members of the 4chan user group “Anonymous” launched a coordinated attack against the Motion Picture Association of America’s (MPAA) Web site yesterday to protest increased anti-piracy efforts. (Reuters)
- Industry insiders are buzzing about Dell’s (DELL) 10-inch netbook, the Inspiron Duo. Running off a dual-core Atom N550 processor and Windows 7 Home Premium, the “netvertible” swivels into a seemingly-compact tablet and back again into a traditional netbook pretty quickly. Expect this baby to drop in time for the holidays. (Tom’s Hardware)
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