Boeing’s long-delayed 787 Dreamliner finally took flight on Tuesday to the ecstatic cheers of thousands watching from a wet runway at Paine Field in Everett, WA. The composite wings flexed, and the Rolls-Royce engines roared as the first entirely new commercial jet from the Boeing Co. since launching the 777 in 1995 headed out toward the Pacific for a four-hour spin.

(Click here to tour the inside of the Boeing 787)

There are thousands of hours more to go in flight tests and other system tests, before Boeing (BA/$55) can deliver the first of the fuel-efficient jets to All Nippon Airways. Boeing plans on putting the first of 840 jets ordered, worth some $140 billion, in customer hands by the end of 2010. The plane’s first flight is clearly a huge step toward getting there. But with a program already more than two years behind schedule, customers, and Wall Street, will be keeping on a close watch on the next phase of testing to see if the planes are likely to be delivered on time.

Even as the plane was still on its maiden flight, Morgan Stanley analyst Heidi Wood cautioned her clients to, “sell the news.” Wood, who has an “underweight” rating on Boeing and a $43 price target on shares, cautions that if investors behave like they did the last time a new Boeing jumbo jet performed its first flight when the 777 debuted, Boeing shares could see a hit. In the 30 trading days leading up to the Dreamliner’s first flight, Boeing stock rallied 9% relative to the S&P 500 (it’s up 30% so far in 2009).

Back in 1995, Boeing shares rallied 6% (relative to the S&P 500) ahead of the 777's first flight. That was followed by 11% percent underperformance (again compared to the S&P 500) for the 60 trading days after. “If history,repeats itself, Boeing may see a shift in sentiment towards the downside post 787 first flight,” Wood told clients.  On Tuesday, Boeing shares closed down almost 1%.

So if you own Boeing shares, keep a close eye. What you want to see is the next nine months going flawlessly. More than anything, Boeing needs to get its fancy new planes into the hands of customers.  Any more delays, and Boeing shares take a hit. If you are a passenger, you’ll want to keep tabs on things too.

When these jets start serving commercial routes, it’s going to be an upgrade like you haven’t experienced since they put those screens into the back of headsets.

Few people are more delighted that Skype cofounders Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis finally settled their lawsuit with eBay (EBAY) on November 6 than Marc Andreessen. The venture capital firm he cofounded last summer is one of a group of investment outfits that will now take control of the Internet communications company in a planned $2 billion deal. I caught up with him just after the settlement was announced to ask a few questions:

Q: What does this mean for the company?

A:  Everything is settled—all the lawsuit and intellectual property issues are resolved.  Skype now owns all the intellectual property. The deal continues to move forward as planned. The company is able to focus 100% on its opportunity, which we think is very large.

Skype added 40 million new registered users in the last three months. It has entered a whole new phase of growth. These things grow and grow for the first few years and then they punch through and become mainstream and everybody starts to use them—like Facebook a couple years ago. It's happening at Skype right now.

Q: What’s the opportunity ahead?

A: We think Skype is one of the most important companies in the industry. A small number of companies are critical to how the Internet works and this is one of those. It has been extremely successful, but it still occupies only a small percentage of the global telecommunications market. It has the been the main way that people make use of video for communcation.

In the old days, the purpose of networks was to do voice. It's why networks got built out. In the new world networks fundamentally do data. When you have highspeed data, it makes sense for voice and video to be a software application top of it. All kinds of things become possible because you have moved into software. As one example, you can do free calls all over the world.

Q: How involved will you be with the company?

A: As an investor I will be a board member. But I won’t be a manager.

Q: How will the Skype team build out the business?

A: Skype did $185 million in revenue last quarter. Right now, it charges to connect calls into and out of the phone system. The global market for international long distance is $40 billion right now and Skype has only a small percentage of that.

Skype is increasingly used in businesses so I think there is a real opportunity for business applications. Skype also has a new presence in mobile with the iPhone application.

The trouble with being number one in any industry is that you have nowhere to move but down. Few companies know this better than Nokia (NOK), the Finnish telecommunications giant that has dominated cell phones for so long that in some parts of the globe the brand itself has become synonymous with the device.

Nokia has long excelled at making beautiful phones, but in today’s competitive smartphone market, beauty is just a start. The devices that make consumers salivate are the ones that have great software, offer the most games and social networking features, get great service, and come attached to fast networks. Oh, and they have to be cheap.

One company has shaped this new competitive environment, and it’s not Nokia—nor was it even a telecommunications company until 2007 when it debuted the iPhone.

Apple (AAPL) is eating Nokia’s lunch.

With the iPhone, Apple created a consumer lust for smartphones by showing us we could browse the web from our palms and enjoy it. It launched a device so perfect in form that it has become the gold standard by which all other devices are measured. And it moved the global hub of telecommunications innovation from Asia, where form factors had previously trumped all else, to Silicon Valley, where software makers now race each other to come up with the coolest applications.

None of this has been good for Nokia, which had already lost substantial ground in the North American cell phone market (see “Nokia’s North America Problem”). Their struggle for market dominance in the age of the iPhone has been less about nailing an innovation strategy than playing a hardcore game of block and tackle.  Enter the latest move: on October 22, Nokia filed suit against Apple in a Delaware federal court claiming infringement on 10 patents it holds on the integration of several technologies at the heart of Apple’s iPhone.

As my colleague Philip Elmer-deWitt points out, you can’t blame Nokia for having its nose out of joint.  Apple, according to Nokia, has gotten a free ride since the iPhone launched—a very fast ride. Apple commands 22% of the smartphone market in the US, according to IDC. Globally, it holds 12% of the market, more than doubling its share from last year.

Meanwhile, despite its best efforts, Nokia has steadily lost ground. It holds 40% of the market, down from 43% last year, according to IDC. And in the competitive North American market, Nokia is barely holding its own with just 3%.

Recognizing that the North American market is more crucial than ever, Nokia has spent the last couple years retooling its strategy. It installed its chief financial officer in the U.S. It opened new offices in Atlanta to be close to AT&T Mobility (AT&T) and in Parsippany, N.J., to be near Verizon Wireless (VZ). And it put several hundred product developers in its San Diego design center to work in collaboration with AT&T and Verizon Wireless on some new products.

The efforts have begun to yield dividends as North American carriers have started to support a slew of new cell phones—and even a couple of smartphones—but progress is slow going. “We’ve not been good at delivering promises in the past,” Niklas Savander, who heads up Nokia’s services division, told me recently, in describing Nokia’s relationships with the carriers. “It’s a trust thing and it doesn’t go away easily.”

Savander said he's also stepping up the company’s efforts with its Ovi store by making strategic acquisitions, mostly as a way to hire new software development talent. In September, Nokia bought social networking company Plum Ventures and traveling startup Dopplr.

So far, these changes have not been enough to jumpstart Nokia’s smartphone growth. On October 15, the company reported a third-quarter loss of $836 million as sales fell 20% from a year earlier (in North America, sales dropped 25%). And as the Christmas season approaches, bringing a gaggle of gadgets for Santa to deliver, Nokia has a paltry smartphone offeri. It’s easy to understand why the telecommunications giant, explaining that it has sunk $60 billion into the research and development that has helped enable the devices to take off, might at least want Apple to share the wealth.

It has 55 million users and no business model. But that's a touchy subject.

Ask Evan Williams whether Twitter ought to be trying harder to identify ways to make money, and the founder of the short-burst messaging network just laughs.

"It's funny," he says, in a mid-October interview in the young company's warehouse-like offices in a gritty part of San Francisco's South of Market neighborhood. "People think we're back here in the office looking around saying, 'Where is that business model? Is it in the couch cushions?' There's a very logical process we've gone through, and you could say we've set the wrong priorities. But if you look at building long-term value, then generating cash isn't necessarily the highest priority." Read the rest of the story here.

Imagining life at Bizarro Google.

Schmidt says consumers would revolt if Google started acting evil. Photo: Google

On Wednesday morning Google (GOOG) CEO Eric Schmidt and co-founder Sergey Brin met with a group of reporters and talked about a number of issues, from the outages its Gmail service has experienced to its efforts to digitize books to the company's culture.

Schmidt repeatedly deflected questions about the competition, saying Google prefers to focus on, well, Google. (In response to a question about Microsoft (MSFT) CEO Steve Ballmer's assertion that adoption of Google's Chrome operating system amounts to little more than a "rounding error," Schmidt quipped: "I don't respond to Steve Ballmer questions.")

But Schmidt did offer a long explanation of why Google isn't Microsoft — like when it comes to hemming customers in to its technologies and systems.

"There are many, many reasons why we are not going to be like Microsoft," he said. "The first has to do with the culture of the founders, the culture of the company, the value systems.

"The second has to do with the majority of the users, and usage is one click away from moving to a competitor, which is not true of more embedded platforms in high tech. It is very difficult to move out your database system, it is very difficult to move out of Windows, for technological reasons whereas it is quite easy to move out of these online services."

He then began a riff on Google's "Don't be evil" motto, in which he talked about a hypothetical world, let's call it Bizarro Google, in which the executives decided to use their power for the dark side. "If somehow we went into a room with the evil light…and we announced an evil strategy, we would be destroyed," he said. "There is a fundamental trust relationship between Google and its users."

Schmidt added: “We have not yet found the evil room on our campus."

Schmidt and Brin cited example after example of how the company fights for consumers, and how innovation at Google has unlocked new products and services in entire industries. A favorite example is Google's Android operating system for mobile devices. (The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Dell (DELL) will build a mobile phone for AT&T (T) using the Android platform.) Brin noted that it wasn't until Google released its software development kit for Android — a set of tools that allow developers to create applications for Android-powered phones — that Apple (AAPL) enabled third parties to build applications for the iPhone.

But whether such pro-consumer behavior means Google is always on the side of angels is a topic that the tech giant's competitors would gladly debate.

Tech journalism loses Corcoran and Anders

It's a sign of the times that two of the tech world's finest, most seasoned, intelligent and nicest journalists no longer are plying their trade for the mainstream media. That they're also married means an entire household's prodigious output isn't finding its way anymore into the pages of two important business publications.

Elizabeth Corcoran and George Anders, she formerly of Fortune competitor Forbes and he formerly of The Wall Street Journal, are on their own these days.

Anders, a bigshot columnist and book author who spent years at the Journal in multiple postings, left a while ago. He reports that he's working on a book on talent. He writes: "It's a panoramic look at all sorts of fields ranging from venture capital to pop music, sports, teaching and medical-school admissions.

"The core idea is that the people who do it really well have a surprising amount in common. The book will explain why picking talent is so hard for most organizations, how some folks get it right — and what the rest of us can learn from them."

His editor is Adrian Zackheim of Penguin Group's Portfolio imprint, the same fellow who edited Anders's previous book, Perfect Enough, about former HP (HPQ) CEO Carly Fiorina. Anders says the book will be done within the next year.

Corcoran is a keen science writer who worked at the Washington Post and other places before joining Forbes. She's leaving the writing trade altogether to do an education-oriented startup. "The goal," says Corcoran, who, like her hubby, I'm proud to call a friend, "is to help teachers find and share the 'best practices' for using technology in the classroom so that they are freed up to inspire kids and help get them ready for the challenges of the future." The startup is  called Lucere, and it's tagline is "Learn. Share. Teach. Inspire!" Look for its Web site, lucere.org, soon.

Daily and bimonthly journalism's losses are the book writing and startup world's gains. Good luck, George and Betsy.

Topic A in the blogosphere: An agency wants to suss out paid endorsements on blogs.

Log on to New York food blog AmateurGourmet.com today, and you’ll see an advertisement for cookbook publisher Cook’s Illustrated, served up by Google’s (GOOG) AdSense service.

No surprise, really, since AdSense matches advertisements to website content. Indeed, Adam Roberts, who writes the blog, has twice tested and reviewed recipes from Cook’s Illustrated. What could be more relevant to readers than a link from one recipe site to another?

Yet despite their utility to readers, ads like these might get Roberts, Cook’s Illustrated and Google in trouble with the Federal Trade Commission.

Today, the Commission announced its new “Guide Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.” The announcement marks the first regulatory update since 1980, and a long overdue attempt to grapple with the digital transition.

Explains Richard Cleland, a staff attorney at the Commission’s Bureau of Consumer Protection: “We’re required to update our rules periodically to ensure that they address relevant issues in the marketplace."

"Social media has become a relevant marketing force, so we started looking at it in 2004," Cleland adds. "These guidelines take a long time.”

Of particular concern to Cleland are pay-per-post websites, where consumer bloggers receive direct income or in-kind gifts from companies in exchange for endorsements of their products, and official blogs and social media sites that companies set up to create buzz around their products.

Disclosing the blogger-advertiser relationship

“The issue here,” says Cleland, “is whether, if the consumer knew of the relationship between the advertisers and the blogger, would it affect the credibility of the blogger’s statements?” If so, the new guidelines would permit the FTC to demand that the blogger disclose the connection, with failure to comply resulting in fines as high as $11,000.

As real as the problem of advertising payola may be, the guidelines are causing alarm among bloggers, amateur and professional, who see the FTC’s move as an impingement on free speech. Jeff Jarvis, a technology and media blogger and journalism professor at the City University of New York sees the guides as “dreadful overreach that will drag a lot of innocent people into a bureaucratic dragnet.”

The problem, critics contend, is the lack of clarity in the FTC Guides on what will constitute a violation. Beyond direct payments from companies to reviewers in exchange for specific coverage, the guidelines seem to extend to consumer and personal websites where advertising content and editorial content overlap.

The trouble with targeted ads

Trouble is, targeted advertising is the norm on most websites today, and is often provided by third party services like Google’s. Both blogger and advertising service pocket revenue from readers’ clicks, but the blogger has no power to select his advertisers, while Google has no power to write disclosures or control content. Whom should the FTC hold responsible?

While Cleland agrees targeted advertising is a less cut-and-dry issue than sponsored content, he won’t rule it out as subject to the new rules: “It’s something we’d look at on a case-by-case basis.”

Bloggers like Jarvis say advertising should be off limits to these regulations, since consumers recognize ads as paid content, an implicit form of disclosure and since third party ad services, who make their money on clicks, have an incentive to keep ads relevant rather than fraudulent.

Other bloggers are less worried about the regulation’s impact. Says Amateur Gourmet’s Adam Roberts: “I don’t think they’d spend the time and resources to go after small blogs.” Roberts may have a point—the FTC has never sued a consumer endorser, but has instead historically placed the onus on advertisers to insist upon disclosure from their endorsers.

Still, the vagueness of the FTC Guides is troubling. “I’m not familiar enough with the way that things are working to be more specific,” says Cleland. If regulators aren’t familiar with the models they regulate, that may be the most worrisome thing of all.

Think of the new Via product as "instant 2.0"

It’s been decades since coffee has received an upgrade. Sure, there has been a steady beat of packaging improvements. All those cute, colorful foil pods that get popped into machines that then spit out a variety of brews. But according to coffee historian Mark Pendergrast, not since coffee giants General Foods (now part of Kraft (KFT) )and Nestle (NSRGY) spent millions in the late 1960s figuring out how to freeze-dry our morning addiction, has the actual coffee been the subject of a technological push forward.

Let’s face it, that has been a good thing. No offense to all you Taster’s Choice die-hards, but trying to improve upon a well-roasted coffee bean, ground to perfection and then brewed to your personal taste (I’ll take a double espresso with a little bit of foam) has mostly been a big mistake. We have all benefited from coffee’s return to its low-tech origins. But now the company that arguably has benefited the most from the artisan approach to coffee, Starbucks (SBUX), is taking us back to the future with its new line of instant coffee dubbed Via.

You no doubt already heard this was coming. The rollout of Via started in Starbucks’ home turf Seattle, and in recent months has been expanding to places like New York and London (both tremendous cities with on-average tremendously bad coffee). This week it went nationwide. So early-adopters, now is your chance.

In making its bid for a chunk of the $20 billion worldwide instant coffee market, much of that is the United Kingdom and Japan where instant is the de-facto coffee mode, Starbucks Chairman and CEO Howard Schulz says his company spent 20 years perfecting a top-secret technology that ultimately results in a cup of coffee made with Via, that is indistinguishable from Starbuck’s typical brewed coffee.

So, of course we want to know what this patent-pending process is all about.  I called Andrew Linnemann, director of green coffee quality and operations at Starbucks. He’s the guy who makes sure all the beans are up to snuff before they get roasted. For the last two years he’s been focused on making sure Via lived up to the Starbucks’ reputation (this the perfect spot for all you Starbucks haters to draft your inevitable rude comments).

Via is a combination of dried coffee and “micro-ground” coffee. According to Linnemann the dried part follows what is recognizable as industry procedure. Starbucks takes its beans and makes a liquid coffee extract, which gets reduced to dried form. But whereas your typical instant coffee maker is focused on yield and output, the Starbucks gang focused on taste, Linnemann says. Start with better beans, brew the coffee, and then break the coffee drying process down into smaller sub-steps to preserve the flavor. All with no chemicals. “We use the same equipment as the other guys, but how we use the equipment is much different,” Linnemann says. What that likely means is that the yield in the Starbucks process is much lower (the extraction level is lower). That is by far a more expensive way to go but one that preserves more of the flavor. It may also explain why Starbucks is charging around $1 per packet of the stuff.

So far so good. “But it is the micro-grinding technology where we really cracked the code,” Linnemann says. Aha! Now we are getting to the real “bean” of the matter. “The key is how do you grind freshly roasted coffee fine enough to preserve its character, add flavor and texture without adding grit?” Linnemann says. And how does Starbucks do it? “I can’t tell you that,” Mr. Green Bean says laughing. He did say, “it’s as if the coffee bean went to a spa.” Which means exactly what?

So Starbucks is serious about keeping this micro-grinding technology a secret, at least for another 18 months or so and the patent is made public. Clair Hicks, a professor of food science at the University of Kentucky, figures what Starbucks does is a lot like grinding pepper. “You can seen how it would release more of the flavor components, and could improve the taste,” Hicks says. ‘My first bet is that they take the extract and the micro-grounds and run the whole thing through a freeze-drier.”

Whatever the ultimate secret technology is revealed to be, you can taste the results at your neighborhood Starbucks. Samples of Via are being offered  in a free side-by-side taste test with brewed Starbucks coffee through Monday. Free coffee? Now that is an upgrade I can get behind.

Watch me and fellow Fortune writer John Fortt taste the new Starbucks Via on Techmate:

Otellini predicts computer sales will be slightly up in '09 even as he promotes new chipset for portable devices that are not-so-PC-like.

Otellini predicts PC sales will be flat or up a bit. Photo: Intel

Intel (INTC) CEO Paul Otellini, with a more bullish call than many analysts, expects sales of PCs in 2009 to at least rival 2008. “My own bet is that we are likely to see unit (sales) flat to slightly up,” Otellini told analysts and developers gathered in San Francisco Tuesday morning for the annual Intel Developer’s Forum.

Otellini described that kind of resilience as astounding given the dismal economy.

“The PC market flat-to-up in the midst of the worst recession in 70 years shows that we have built something that is indispensable," he said. The Intel boss also predicted resurgence in the computer market in the coming year. “We’ll see how 2010 plays out,” he said. Earlier this month, Goldman Sachs (GS) revised its forecast for PC unit sales to “roughly flat.” Analysts for the investment bank had previously predicted a 4% decline in PC unit sales.

Otellini’s remarks came at the beginning of three-days of geeking out by hardware and software engineers around all things Intel. What is clear, not just from remarks by Intel brass, but from the cross-section of people gathered for the developers' event, is that the world that Intel encompasses is expanding dramatically beyond the PC. There were software people rubbing elbows with hardware purists alongside consumer electronics and mobile device folks.

Otellini made the point numerous times during his talk that Intel is moving from serving the personal computer industry, to serving the world of “personal computing.” That world includes more than desktop and notebook computers; it includes all sorts of consumer electronics gadgets that can fit in your pocket, your home, your office and your car.

Driving much of that growth, so far in the netbook category but eventually in smart phones, is Intel’s low-power Atom chip. Intel plans to put these chips and so-called system-on-chips into as many things as developers can think of uses for computing power. To help that effort along, Otellini announced an Atom developer’s platform, a framework of tools and software developer kits, which will allow developers to write an application once and have it work across multiple devices and operating systems running Atom chipsets.

Acer, Asus and Dell (DELL) announced they will support the framework, and you can expect applications for Atom devices to be sold in storefronts operated by these three PC makers (Intel is not getting into application sales business, its customers are).

Think of it as the first wave of app stores for Atom devices, in the same vein as Apple’s (AAPL)  app store for the iPhone and the iPod Touch. Otellini expects fun, consumer-tailored applications for netbooks first (translation: games and other time wasters), but expects a wide spectrum of applications eventually.

Expect to see the first application efforts in the next year-plus, Otellini says.