Access 1 User Portal

AP - Victor Pauca will have plenty of presents to unwrap on Christmas, but the 5-year-old Winston-Salem boy has already received the best gift he'll get this year: the ability to communicate.

Reuters - Online travel agency Expedia Inc is making users take extra steps to get American Airlines listings after the U.S. airline stopped selling tickets through rival Orbitz Worldwide Inc earlier this week.

Reuters - U.S. online shopping rose 15.4 percent to $36.4 billion for the holiday shopping season, a MasterCard Advisors' SpendingPulse report showed.

AP - Lots of military secrets are hidden behind the gleaming walls of NORAD'S headquarters building, including this one: Just how do they get Santa's flight path onto their computer screens every Christmas Eve?

PC World - We are just two weeks away from CES and the rumor mill keeps on churning. A mobile HTC site has been spotted touting a mystery 4G phone under a veil.

Mashable - Time magazine selected Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg as the person of the year. The Financial Times, however, decided that Apple CEO Steve Jobs was more worthy of that title in 2010.

Reuters - Wal-Mart Stores Inc, the world's largest retailer, has invested in China's top online seller of consumer electronics and communication products, in a push to extend its reach to more Chinese buyers.

Mashable - Facebook game developer Zynga has proved once again that it knows exactly what it needs to do to keep millions of Facebook users happy and occupied. In less than a month, its latest game CityVille has become the most popular Facebook application, and has surpassed Zynga's previous major hit FarmVille in all areas.

PC World - Google is so well known for Web search that its name is now a verb, but the company does not limit itself to that one role. From robust and well-established applications such as Picasa to cutting-edge Google Labs products that may become next year's game changers (or next year's punchline), Google offers far more than just a search engine.

Macworld - The iPad has taken yet another step toward becoming a full-fledged laptop replacement for business users with Quickoffice’s release of a free update for its Quickoffice Connect Mobile Suite for iPad. The 2.0.0 version of the suite adds extensive text formatting and graphical editing abilities for PowerPoint 2003 files as well as viewing and presenting capabilities for PowerPoint 2007 files.

Mashable - Facebook's users are updating their status millions of times per day.

PC World - IBM researchers are now a step closer to commercializing an experimental technology that could be used load up a mobile phone with so much storage that it could keep copies of every movie made this year.

Reuters - U.S. online shopping rose 15.4 percent to $36.4 billion for the holiday shopping season, a MasterCard Advisors' SpendingPulse report showed on Thursday.

AP - Internet calling and messaging service Skype SA mostly recovered Thursday from an outage caused by an undisclosed glitch, but problems lingered for its worldwide user base.

PC World - While work continues on developing the fundamentals for super-fast quantum computers, a group of researchers has shown that, at least for some sorts of problems, classical computing could match the eventual speed of a working quantum computer -- with the correct software algorithms in place.

Investor's Business Daily - Digital entertainment software maker Rovi (NMS:ROVI) will pay $14 or 0.2468 shares of Rovi stock for each share of Sonic Solutions (NMS:SNIC). With Rovi down 1.9% to 57.26, the stock offer is worth $14.13 as of Thu. But Sonic shot up 28.7% to 14.42. Rovi program guides find content from all over. Sonic has a platform for delivering TV shows and movies by Internet. Rovi also lifted its 2010 EPS guidance from a range of $2-$2.10 to $2.08-$2.12. Analysts saw $2.08. Rovi expects the deal to close in Q1 and to add 5-10 cents to 2011 profit.

Reuters - The Federal Communications Commission's top official has backed Comcast Corp's NBC Universal purchase, subject to conditions addressing competition in areas like online video and program access.

NewsFactor - Almost two months after its iPhone version effectively sold out on Apple's App Store, Skyfire's browser for the iPad went live on Thursday. The cost is $4.99, compared to $2.99 for the iPhone version.