AT&T has announced a new line of Android-based smartphones for 2010. Dell , HTC and Motorola will make the five new devices, which are scheduled to be released during the first half of 2010. Endgadget is predicting that AT&T will be using the Motorola Backflip, while Slashgear has confirmed that the Mini 3i will be the choice for Dell . The other three, Endgadget says, will most likely go to HTC. Sponsor The announcement is good for AT&T customers who wanted an Android phone but are held under contract with the company. Up until now, AT&T has offered the iPhone and a variety of Palm and Blackberry devices, but nothing operating the Android OS. The company made the announcement today at CES where they also announced new initiatives to increase the number of applications available to their customers. To this end, the company is offering a new software developer kit and is looking to sign new distribution deals in order to offer its phone apps worldwide. Nokia also announced today that its Ovi mobile application store will be available to AT&T customers in the United States. Full details can be found in the company's press release . Discuss

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AT&T Comes Over to the Android Side

Nobody puts it in a square box, at least. Boxee , the software that brings Internet media to your television, has been seen in the flesh at CES today. We first heard about the Boxee Box in November , but the announcement was light on details. This time around, D-Link offered a list of specifications and media-format compatibilities at the oddly-shaped device's unveiling. Sponsor According to D-Link's press release , the device will retail for under $200 and will come embedded with support for a number of web sites, including Netflix , Facebook , Pandora , Twitter and Flickr . As for media formats, the Boxee Box will handle a majority of necessary file formats, including DiVX, MPEG1 through 4, VOB, Flash, and most standard video and image types. Most notably missing from the mix are GIFs and QuickTime files. The device comes prepared to handle RSS and XML feeds to keep its users up to date. Discuss

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Nobody Puts Boxee in a Box

Correction : An earlier version of this story incorrectly reported that BreakingNews.com was opperated by the same people who started the @breakingnews Twitter account. MSNBC announced this morning that it is buying the BreakingNews.com URL from a company called PV Media Group. This follows November's purchase of @breakingnews and its 1.4 million followers. The two companies were not connected before MSNBC's acquisitions of their various projects. When we profiled @breakingnews founder Michael van Poppel in July, the company was just about to release its iPhone app and had over 800,000 followers on Twitter. That number is now over 1.5 million. Sponsor "Not everyone wants news surrounded by commentary or features," said Charlie Tillinghast, president of the MSNBC Digital Network in the company's press release about today's purchase. MSNBC Spokesperson Gina Stikes told us in an email that "Msnbc has acquired the URL only." She did not disclose any further details, such as the purchase price. For more background about BreakingNews.com, see today's coverage at DomainNameWire . Discuss

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MSNBC Buys BreakingNews.com to Go With With @breakingnews [UPDATED]

ShoZu Goes to Critical Path - Cross Network Publishing Doesn't Seem to Be a Stand-Alone Business Hours after high-profile Silicon Valley social aggregation service Seesmic announced that it acquired angel-backed cross-network publishing service Ping.fm , a similar deal was announced in Europe. Identity management service Critical Path , maker of software called Memova, announced that it has acquired mobile uploading service ShoZu , a company that had received an enormous amount of venture capital. Sponsor Rumors of the deal were first reported in mid-December by Robin Wauters of TechCrunch . Now the deal is done, reports leading European mobile blogger Ewan Spence . We're hearing that the announcement will be officially released later today. Update: We just received the official press release as well. ShoZu raised more than $30 million to build a mobile app that allows users to publish photos, videos and text to more than 50 different destination social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Blip.tv and more. The service has long been popular on Nokia phones and sells an iPhone app for $5. Shozu was voted one of our readers' favorite mobile apps in 2007. For more about ShoZu see this Techcraver interview with the company's CEO. Critical Path is a little like a combination of Plaxo and Verisign. It offers messaging and social apps, APIs, Identity Management and Access Control. Was this the big exit that ShoZu's investors sought? Almost definitely not. Critical Path is an innovative service that's got some big customers like BT, France Telecom and Orange, but it's unlikely that ShoZu came at a high price. Spence alludes to the same when he writes that Critical Path "saw the potential of combining their Memova platform suite with ShoZu's engineering." Update: In the official release, ShoZu Board Director Nigel Pilkington from lead investor SEB Venture Capital UK, called the deal "a successful outcome for us." Maybe that's being polite, maybe it's true or maybe it was a small success financially. It's most likely a talent deal and evidence that cross-platform publishing tools like ShoZu, Ping.fm and competitor Pixel Pipe are probably not stand-alone businesses. Just like FriendFeed's aggregation across scores of APIs wasn't enough to make it a success outside of being scooped up by the much, much larger Facebook - these other companies that create the pipes for the tubes just aren't compelling enough to a large number of consumers. They do make nice acquisition targets, though, and show that the future of the social web may not be found in reading and writing to one single network like Twitter or Facebook. The savvy companies that are building value on top of those networks are also dedicating resources to bring on engineers skilled at working with far more networks to publish to or read from. Discuss

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2 Cross-Publishing Services Get Acquired in 1 Day: Critical Path Buys ShoZu

Flixster just announced that it has acquired Rotten Tomatoes , the popular movie review site, from IGN Entertainment. IGN is a division of Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation. Flixster is one of the world's most popular movie communities and currently features about 2.3 billion user ratings and reviews from its users. Rumors about this acquisition first surfaced in late December, when Kara Swisher first reported that a potential acquisition of Flixster by MySpace would hinge upon a merger of Rotten Tomatoes and Flixster. Sponsor The financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. A Natural Fit Combining Flixster's user-generated reviews and Rotten Tomatoes, which aggregates reviews from top movie critics, seems like a natural fit.

Amazon just announced that November was its best month ever for Kindle sales. This excludes sales from today's so-called Cyber Monday. According to Amazon, the $259 Kindle is the "most wished for, the most gifted, and the #1 bestselling product across all product categories on Amazon." Barnes & Noble is also seeing strong demand for it's new nook e-reader , but is unable to fulfill current orders before Christmas. The company has also delayed shipments to its stores until December 7. Sponsor Neither Amazon nor Barnes & Noble have announced any exact numbers for their e-reader sales. At the beginning of the holiday season, many pundits assumed that e-readers would be extremely popular gifts this year. Counterpoint: 7 reasons why e-book readers make lousy gifts this year Judging from Amazon's press release and the fact that the B&N nook is already virtually sold out for the holidays (current orders will ship January 11), it definitely looks like this prediction could come true. In a thinly veiled swipe at the fact that B&N isn't able to fulfill demand, Amazon's Ian Freed also notes that a lot of people are buying numerous Kindles at once. We haven't heard any numbers from Sony yet, but chances are that the Sony Reader Pocket and Touch editions are also doing quite well. Discuss

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Amazon Announces Record Sales For Kindle While B&N Misses Deadline

BNO News , the news wire service famous for publishing breaking news stories through its @BreakingNews Twitter feed, just announced that it plans to launch a new news wire service early next year. In order to focus on this project, the BNO team will hand over the management of the @BreakingNews feed to MSNBC.com . According to BNO News, MSNBC will provide 24/7 breaking news headlines via BNO's Twitter feed, which will include updates from the new BNO wire service and other news organizations. Sponsor The @BreakingNews feed currently has about 1.4 million subscribers. MSNBC's own breaking news feed only has 41,000 followers and the main MSNBC account only has 27,000 followers. BNO News' founder Michael van Poppel also announced that the company will focus on doing more original reporting. According to today's press release, BNO News is also "in talks with other publishers." Given that the company is now closely aligned with MSNBC, however, it remains to be seen if other publishers will be willing to work with BNO News. iPhone App Daniel E. Shipton, CEO of BitMethod, the developers of the push-enabled BNO News iPhone app, was less than pleased with today's news. In a press release , Shipton states that he is "disappointed that BNO is choosing to leave behind their 1.4 million Twitter followers." Indeed, it will be interesting to see how the @BreakingNews feed will change under the new management. The iPhone app will stay under BNO News' control. It is not clear with it will continue to feature all the content from the MSNBC-managed @BreakingNews feed or just content from the new BNO news wire service. Is This a Good Thing? It was exciting to see the rise of BNO News over the last few months and today's announcement comes as quite a surprise. BNO News was founded by Michael van Poppel, a 19-year old student in the Netherlands. Our own Marshall Kirkpatrick profiled the company in great detail earlier this year. We are not sure why BNO News didn't just make a deal with MSNBC to syndicate its feed. Given that BNO is a small business, chances are that the company just didn't have the resources to run the news feed and build a wire service at the same time. With a stable income stream from syndication and its iPhone app however, we have to wonder why BNO News would leave its 1.4 million Twitter followers in the hands of MSNBC. Discuss

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@BreakingNews: MSNBC.com Will Now Manage Twitter's Most Popular Breaking News Account