LG, Sharp and Chunghwa Picture Tubes agreed on Wednesday to cooperate in an antitrust investigation being run by the Justice Department.

Every year at the Web 2.0 Summit, Morgan Stanley Internet analyst Mary Meeker gives her view of the world, the Web, and the technology industry by quickly going through about 50 slides that illustrate the major trends she is tracking. Last year, she zeroed in on the China Bubble. This year, she talks about the root causes of the current economic downturn, the outlook for Web businesses, and where she still sees major growth (mobile and emerging markets). She singles out the mobile industry as the one where both the most opportunity will be found and disruption will occur ...

Once again AT&T is offering free Wi-Fi access at Starbucks and McDonald’s hotspots in the US. The system is fairly simple: just type in your AT&T phone number when you fire up your mobile browser get 24 hours of connectivity automatically. iPhone users, get started with Wi-Fi * [...]

The liquidity drought for venture-backed startups, which was already declared to be a crisis in the second quarter when not a single VC-backed IPO went out, continued in the third quarter. For the first three quarters of the year combined, IPOs brought in only $470 million and M&A activity totaled $11.3 billion, a steep decline from prior years (see chart). Don't expect the situation to get better any time soon. Although there was one IPO in the third quarter, RackSpace, which brought in $187.5 million, that was less than half of what the company had expected ...

I had a beer recently with Dave McClure of 500 Hats. As is always the case when I get together with Dave, we had a long, rambling and enjoyable conversation about how the Web is changing the way businesses get...

It appears as if the bad overall economy is nailing some key tech stocks this morning. Apple, Google and Yahoo are all down significantly right now in early afternoon trading on the stock market. None are faring worse right now than Apple which is currently down over 16 percent, in the $107-per-share range. It had dipped [...]