HP Executive Vice President Vyomesh Joshi isn't as close to Hurd as colleagues Livermore and Bradley are. Photo: HP.

If HP CEO Mark Hurd does merge the PC and printing businesses, what will that mean for printing chief Vyomesh Joshi?

A few months back, I spent some time at Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) headquarters with Joshi, who’s known around HP simply as “VJ.” We talked about how he led the printing group to become a sales and profit powerhouse, the how the slowdown in printer sales growth is unfolding, and how he’s trying to get things going again. And we talked about how he’s doing under Hurd, an unsentimental numbers guy who hasn’t been shy about saying the printing business needs to shape up. More

User-generated video goes mobile – and live

Ramu Sunkara was at home in Silicon Valley three years ago, chatting with a friend in Moscow, when inspiration struck. He didn’t just want to hear about his friend

Sunkara: inspired by a Moscow snow frolic. Photo: Qik

playing in the snow with his kids. He wanted to see it, live.

Now he can. Soon after that phone conversation, Sunkara and two friends started Qik (pronounced "quick"), a company whose software lets cell phones broadcast video live to the Internet.

Today, Qik and other mobile video services are still in their infancy. But consumers finally have an excuse to try them, now that they have access to 3G networks and a new crop of video-equipped smartphones. According to Nielsen VideoCensus, Qik has so far attracted just a tiny audience, though its popularity seems to have spiked recently. Since its iPhone app began working over 3G networks in August, viewers have stayed on the site six times longer.

"When we launched, only two phones were capable of doing live video," says Sunkara, Qik's CEO. "Now practically every new phone can."

Cell phone video in general is a fast-growing category. Google (GOOG) says that YouTube's cell phone video uploads increased fivefold just a week after the release of the latest video-capable iPhones (AAPL). Facebook has begun adding video capture to its cell phone apps. And sites like Ustream and Flixwagon are experimenting in the same live mobile video niche where Qik is making a name for itself. More

Billionaire Oracle CEO Larry Ellison doesn't expect the U.S. economy to significantly improve until halfway through the next decade – a gloomy scenario he dubbed an L-shaped recovery.

"The American consumer is so deeply in debt, this is not going to come back, certainly for five years," he told a packed ballroom at a Churchill Club event in San Jose. "I believe we're going through some fundamental changes." More

Computer makers hope that stylish new laptops like Hewlett-Packard's Pavilion dm3 will lure shoppers away from low-cost netbooks. Photo: HP.

There’s going to be a PC retail showdown this holiday season. Let’s call it the netbook vs. the nymph.

In the netbook corner: the cheap, small, underpowered laptops that are all the rage lately. Asian manufacturers like Asus first introduced them, and consumers love them because they handle documents, e-mail, and web surfing for as little as $300. The big PC makers offer their own models, but also secretly hate that netbook fever is sucking the profits out of the industry.

In the nymph corner: a newer class of svelte yet powerful laptops that could steal some attention from netbooks. (The industry calls them “thin and light,” but hey — nymph is more fun.) Like their competition, nymphs are slim — some of them less than an inch thick — and they often eschew extras like DVD drives for the sake of portability. Perhaps best of all, they do a solid job running Microsoft’s eagerly anticipated Windows 7 operating system, which arrives next month. More

The view from inside the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Photo: Jon Fortt.

Will we get new iPods with video recording? Will Steve Jobs show or won't he? Refresh this page during the event for live updates. It all begins at 10 a.m. PT, 1 p.m. ET. The presentation is about to begin.

Steve Jobs walks out on stage to a standing ovation. He clearly appreciates the reception. He still looks quite gaunt — much like he did before he took his leave. Applause lasts a good 45 seconds.

He says he has the liver of a person in his or her mid-20s who died in a car crash and donated organs. He asks everyone to consider organ donation. He thanks the Apple community, and Tim Cook and the rest of the Apple executive team.

Steve Jobs announces sales of 30 million iPhones. More

The Interact S605, Lexmark's new high-end home office inkjet, comes with a touchscreen. Image: Lexmark

In this era of Kindle books, text messages and Facebook photos, printed information is taking it on the chin – and perhaps no company has been hit harder than Lexmark. The Kentucky-based printer company is one of the worst performing stocks in the hardware sector this year, down about 30%.

But Lexmark (LXK) CEO Paul Curlander hopes a new line of printers will help him climb off the canvas.

The eight new machines for small and medium-sized businesses, which Lexmark is launching today, sport eco-friendly features designed to conserve paper and ink. Some have touchscreens. And they should get more attention than usual, thanks to expanded distribution deals Lexmark signed earlier this year with retailers like Staples (SPLS), Office Depot (ODP) and OfficeMax (OMX). More

I'm sorry, Microsoft. On behalf of Silicon Valley, I’m sorry.

We cursed you, mocked you, labeled you the Evil Empire. Your crime: trying to control the technology world. Sure, we had reason to be upset. During the dawning of the PC era, the Windows operating system made you the most powerful company in tech, and it went to your head.

Your detractors say you intimidated PC makers, crushed Netscape, and tried to turn the web into an extension of the Windows platform. As it turns out, local darling Apple (AAPL) probably would have done the same thing. More

Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz said two months ago that Microsoft would have to cough up “boatloads of money” to get Yahoo’s search business. In the end, it took nothing of the sort.

Apparently, all Microsoft (MSFT) CEO Steve Ballmer had to do was let Yahoo (YHOO) take the lead in selling search to premium advertisers, and promise to supply Microsoft’s Bing search technology on the cheap. Under the terms of a 10-year deal announced Wednesday, the software giant will take a slim 12% cut of the search revenue Yahoo makes from its huge network of sites. More

Google's location-based Latitude service is coming to the iPhone within hours, Google mobile VP Vic Gundotra said at the Fortune Brainstorm Tech conference this morning.

Gundotra said the latest iPhone OS update, which enables location-based services in the browser, paved the way for Latitude.

UPDATED: Google's blog post on the news is here.(AAPL) (GOOG) (RIMM)

Jon Fortt of Fortune, Jon Swartz of USA Today and Scott McGrew of NBC chat with Mozilla CEO John Lilly about the future of Firefox. (AAPL) (GOOG) (MSFT)