Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer’s keynote last night was one of the most anticipated events of the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas. It was expected that he would unveil a device to compete with a supposedly upcoming tablet from Apple, but people anticipating such news were met with the unveiling of a different device – the HP Windows 7 slate device, which apparently doesn’t live up to some of the tech crowd’s expectations.

HP unveiled a few new mobile devices today at CES. These include a new TouchSmart notebook, and a handful of minis.

Flickr, the Yahoo-owned photo-sharing site so many people love, announced an important deal today as it named HP’s Snapfish its preferred photo printing and gift creation partner.  Thanks to the arrangement, printing pictures is about to become a lot easier for some folks, and for others, this will even be the first time a certain printing option has been available at all.

HP announced today that it is acquiring 3Com, makers of network switching, routing, and security solutions, for $2.7 billion in cash (at 7.90 per share). Both boards have already approved the transaction.

HP says the combination of these two companies will transform the networking industry and "underscore HP’s next-generation data center strategy." The company believes this will help customers simplify networks and improve IT service delivery capabilities.

Frequent flyers say staying connected via Wi-Fi is their top priority when traveling, according to a new survey by American Airlines and HP.

Nearly half (47%) of business travelers said Wi-Fi was the most important airport amenity, outscoring basic travel needs such as food by nearly 30 percent.

"We know that our business customers rely on technology to be as productive as possible while on the road," said Manuel de Oyarzabal, Director – Customer Research at American Airlines.

Yahoo has introduced a new partner program for third party advertising technology companies to use its Smart Ads platform.

Yahoo and Tumri worked with Hewlett-Packard to create a Smart Ad campaign that reached more than 140 million U.S. users. The campaign resulted in a return on ad spend that was more than 20 times higher than traditional display ad campaigns. HP has developed separate Smart Ad campaigns with Yahoo and Teracent that also produced better results than traditional campaigns.

On Black Friday, Microsoft Live Search along with HP promised a 40% refund on items purchased in HP’s online store. The only problem was that the site for what was called Microsoft Live Search Cashback experienced an outage and then started delivering 3% refunds instead of 40%. Obviously, there were some unhappy campers as a result.

Hewlett-Packard has an interesting new service that allows users to turn RSS feeds into deliverable, printable PDFs. The service is called Tablloid and works basically like other feed readers.

MySpace and HP have teamed up on a deal that will see HP printing technology used across multiple areas on MySpace, including all photo sections. You will be able to easily print pictures from not only people’s profile photos, but ones that are inserted into blog posts, comments, messages, etc. 

The first stage of the partnership is anticipated to include an HP branded print button enabling MySpace users to preview and print photos directly from their MySpace profiles.

Uber-geeks have been talking for a while about cloud computing and how it’s the future, especially the geeks at Google, and later, Microsoft. Today, though, it’s a partnership between Hewlett-Packard, Intel, and Yahoo generating the next wave of cloud computing buzz.

Global PC shipments hit 71.9 million in the second quarter of 2008, a 16 percent increase over the same time period in 2007, according to Gartner.

PC shipments in the United States reached 16.5 million in the second quarter, a 4.2 percent increase from 2007. PC shipments rose during the quarter, despite the sliding economy. This was due to vendors cutting prices on PCs due to economic conditions.

Less than two years ago, Yahoo was on a roll and had just signed a deal with computer manufacturer HP that would see its search engine as the default on all new HP computers.

Consumer PCs from HP will arrive with default search and a toolbar from Microsoft in the browser, linked to the Live Search service.

Global PC shipments grew by 14.6 percent to 69.5 million units in the first quarter of 2008, which beat previous estimates of 13.2 percent according to IDC’s Worldwide Quarterly PC Tracker.

The U.S. market showed signs of the economic slowdown, but growth remained positive at 3.5 percent for the quarter. The other international markets compensated for the U.S. coming in more than 2 points above estimates due to continued strength in developing countries.

Kentucky’s moving up in the tech world, some parts of it already (and unfortunately) dubbed "Silicon Holler." The latest success comes out of Lexington now that Exstream Software is being acquired by Hewlett Packard.