Last month, for example, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone told an audience of software developers at the website Chirp conference in San Francisco that Twitter was not a triumph of technology, but a triumph of humanity.

Techonomy Some who think the popular site deals too much in the trivial and banal might take exception. But underlying the statement is an essential truth: Technology dreamed up in this hotbed of innovation is not only transforming how we communicate and live, but it also holds great promise extending into business and politics to take on some of the world´s most intractable and complex problems.

That the idea behind Techonomy, a new media venture from veteran journalists David Kirkpatrick, Peter Petre and Brent Schlender. The three former editors of Fortune magazine this August are launching an all-star conference in Truckee, Calif., with such headliners as former Microsoft CEO Bill Gates and Google CEO Eric Schmidt.

Techonomy is not so much a technology conference as a conference about how "humanity can invent its way out of the messes it has helped create," according to a philosophy statement on its website.

"It a conference about the centrality of technology to everything else," Kirkpatrick said. "It intended to symbolize or evolve the societal dialogue about the role of technological innovation for progress."

Sun Microsystems co-founder and Kleiner Perkins venture capitalist Bill Joy is advising Techonomy founders, who are planning a companion online publication this fall.

Kirkpatrick, who has a new book out on Facebook, will bring to bear his experience in launching Fortune´s Brainstorm conference, which was famous for drawing powerful figures from the worlds of politics and business. CNBC will be an official broadcast partner of the Techonomy conference which has already lined up some well-heeled sponsors including Chevron.

It´s a necessary effort to shape — and protect — your online brand.

And online reputation monitoring is on the rise, with 57% of adult Internet users using search engines to find online information about themselves, up from 47% in 2006, according to a report from Pew Research Center´s Internet & American Life Project which examined online identity management in the age of social media.

Some of the increased activity is in response to social networking sites such as Facebook making more personal information public. Young adults actively manage what they share online: 71% of social networking users ages 18 to 29 have changed the privacy settings on their profile, Pew found. In fact, with the number of adults on social networks more than double the amount in 2006, 65% of these profile owners have changed the privacy settings to restrict what they share with others online.

The report was based on a telephone survey of 2,253 adults ages 18 and older conducted in August and September. Pew found that Internet users fell into two categories: those who carefully sculpt their online image and those who let it all hang out.

Those ages 18 to 29 are more likely than older adults to limit the amount of personal information available about them online, with 44% of young adult Internet users doing so compared with 33% of Internet users ages 30 to 49, 25% of those 50 to 64 and 20% of those 65 and older.

In fact, the report torpedoes the popular perception that young users are less vigilant than adults in managing their online reputations. According to Pew, 71% of social networking users ages 18 to 29 have changed the privacy settings on their profile to limit what they share with others online compared with 55% of social networking users ages 50 to 64. Nearly half of younger social networking users delete unwanted comments on their profile, compared with 29% of users ages 30 to 49 and 26% of users ages 50 to 64. They also are more likely to remove their name from photos: 41% of social networking users ages 18 to 29 have untagged photos compared with 24% of users ages 30 to 49 and 18% of those ages 50 to 64.

The technology behemoth, known for its work with computers, is now trying its hand at traffic. The company recently filed a patent application for a system that could remotely stop and start vehicle engines at traffic signals in order to save fuel and prevent crashes.

The system would sense vehicles´ positions and send a "stop engine" notification – either by automatically turning off the engine or displaying an alert telling drivers to manually switch off power.

At intersections, railway crossings and other locations, the system could use anything from weight sensors to camera and GPS units to track vehicles. The technology could also be used to calculate when cars have been idling for too long and should be shut down.

Once the light turns green, the system may be able to time when drivers should crank up the ignition based on where they are in the line.

Drivers might also be able to sign up for a sort of service that would use Wi-Fi, cellular networks or satellite communications to tell inform them when to cut their engines.

The blogosphere is ablaze over the proposal: What about hackers? What about glitches? What happens when I need to get my pregnant wife to the hospital?

The deal gives Zynga a new outlet for its games, which reach 230 million players a month, mostly on Facebook. For Yahoo, Zynga´s hyper-popular social games are part of a broader strategy to add more content to its sites, including news, Web shows and games.

The deal comes on the heels of a truce between Zynga and Facebook over the social network´s proposal to split revenue that application developers such as Zynga generate from Facebook´s 400 million users. Zynga had balked at the proposal and threatened to take its games elsewhere.

At the time, Zynga Chief Executive Mark Pincus alluded to "other platforms" where the company could take its games, which include Mafia Wars, Farmville, Zynga Poker and Treasure Isle.
Zynga did not say which of those games would be ported to Yahoo, or when they would launch. The titles would be integrated on Yahoo´s home page, Yahoo Games, Yahoo Messenger and Yahoo Mail.

The Zynga games are the latest in a string of deals by Yahoo to beef up its content in a bid to maintain and grow its user base. It recently snapped up Associated Content.

Earlier this year, Yahoo signed a deal to host articles from Appolicious, a site that reviews applications. And in January, Yahoo teamed up with Ben Silverman´s Electus production house to create original webisodes for Yahoo.

The fake BP Twitter page was created a week ago and already has 42,000 followers — dwarfing BP real account, @BP_America, which has 5,700. The person pulling the strings of @BPGlobalPR, who refused to reveal himself or even break character in an interview with The Times, spills barrels of dark humor onto the international calamity.

@BPGlobalPR fictional character, Terry, moves to stir up further controversy beyond the real-life disaster and so-far disastrous cleanup attempts that have sent BP stock sliding 17.5 points since the April 20 Deepwater Horizon spill.

Since then, we have seen a ludicrous parade of headlines, toxic name-calling, contributions from Kevin Costner and numerous TV appearances by Bill Nye the Science Guy, the children show host who is apparently now an authority on the issue.

"We are concerned that Google did not disclose until long after the fact that consumers´ Internet use was being recorded, analyzed and perhaps profiled,” wrote Reps. Joe Barton (R-Texas), Edward Markey (D-Mass.) and Henry Waxman (D-Beverly Hills). “In addition, we are concerned about the completeness and accuracy of Google´s public explanations about this matter.”

On Tuesday, Google confirmed to The Times that before regulators questioning, the company had never disclosed its Wi-Fi collection practices directly to its users. The company pointed out that the practice was not secret — it had been documented in a Wikipedia article and elsewhere — but Google had not itself told users that its cars were recording Wi-Fi information.

Whether its Wi-Fi data collection practices were “widely known,” as it claimed in a letter to several international data collection agencies, is less clear.

In a potential boon to street vendors, mom-and-pop shops and those who just want to lend a few bucks to a friend, several companies have rolled out ways to use cellphones to process credit-card payments instantly.

Square, a brainchild of Twitter Inc. creator Jack Dorsey, enables anyone to accept credit cards using a tiny white attachment and software that can be downloaded to a smart phone.

The future has arrived, tweeted Mayer Hawthorne, a singer and songwriter who used Square to sell his CDs and merchandise while on the road.

The plastic card reader plugs into the headphone jack on an iPhone or Android-based phone and interfaces with the phone software, then the transaction is processed through Square secure servers. Apps for the Palm Pre and BlackBerry are said to be in the pipeline.

After swiping the card through the reader, the buyer signs for the transaction by using finger strokes on the touch screen, then can type in an e-mail address where a digital receipt will be sent. Square charges a fee of 15 cents and 2.75% of the transaction amount to the person processing the credit card. That would amount to 42.5 cents for a $10 purchase.

That prompting the FCC to seek 10,000 volunteers who would have special hardware installed at home to measure the Internet speed, writes our Washington reporter Jim Puzzanghera. It would be part of a nationwide study of the performance of major providers, the Business section article says.

But updating that software automatically is not in favor-only 5% of those covered in the survey trusted retailers to do that, according to the report titled “A Landscape View of Online Software Purchasing 2010.”

“People like being asked before giving away their money again,” said Stephen Baker, an NPD analyst who worked on the study. “While there are a lot of good reasons why something like security software should be on an automatic-renewal program, the fact is most consumers don´t feel comfortable having something automatically charged to their credit cards every year or two, or however long.”

More than half of consumers said they would rather update their software annually via digital download, he said.

The study, which surveyed about 4,000 consumers, found that 65% of people buying their software online preferred digital distribution over a physical format, Baker said. In the 2009 study, which was the first year it was conducted, 63% of those surveyed preferred downloads to discs, he said.

Trial-to-paid software conversions were 8% of sales, up from 6% from a year earlier, Baker said. Digital downloads of new products accounted for 23% of online purchases, up slightly from 22% a year earlier, he said.

Online subscription renewals were down 1% from 2009, accounting for 34% of online software sales this year, he said.

Baker said he expects to see an even larger increase in those choosing digital downloads over mail-delivered software next year, especially if the economy improves.

Alongside the announcement that AT&T will cap its data plans — finally bringing its Internet offerings more in line with the guessing game that is the cellphone calling plan — Skype says it intends to charge iPhone users for calls made over AT&T 3G network later this year.

Skype said it has no plans to charge Verizon Wireless smart-phone customers to get the same feature.

Skype has traveled a long road in bringing an application to the iPhone that allows calling over AT&T wireless network. AT&T, the nation second-biggest telecom did not allow voice-over IP transmissions until it changed its policy in October.

For its part, Apple didn´t accept VoIP apps for its online marketplace until this year, and it wasn´t until this week that Apple approved a new version of the Skype app, Skype spokeswoman Jennifer Caukin said. In three days, it was downloaded 5 million times. The previous version, which allowed calls only when the phone was connected to Wi-Fi, was downloaded 12 million times in the 14 months it was available.