Amid the flurry of Android news as part of Google's annual I/O Conference last week, a news item that slipped through the cracks was that Adobe released a native PDF reading app for Android phones.

The software, which went up in the Android Marketplace Friday, lets users quickly open up PDFs they download from a browser, or that they've received in e-mail attachments. It packs multitouch gestures for zooming, landscape orientation, and a tool that will resize the text on wide documents to fit your phone's narrow screen.

After a quick spin with the software on a Nexus One, I found it to work quite well, even on large files. A 12MB, picture-rich PDF file I had downloaded in Android's stock browser opened up in just four seconds and zipped around like butter on a hot pan. Part of the reason for that is that the software only renders around four pages of a long document at a time, and will load in the rest when you stop. It's kind of a bummer when you imagine trying to use this to pinpoint a specific part of a document by sight, but for most other reading tasks it's no biggie.

The real downer is the lag that occurs when zooming, as it takes the software a second or two to re-render the text and images. This may not seem like a big deal, but it can be annoying when trying to peruse a large document that requires a lot of zooming around; media-rich PDFs seemed to aggravate this.

The app weighs in at 4.3MB, which is a bit heavy for a PDF reader. By comparison, the free version of QuickOffice's PDF reader that comes pre-installed on the Nexus One is just 36KB. Adobe's app also requires Android 2.1 or higher, which means users without a Droid, Nexus One, Eris, or the other handful of 2.1 devices will be left in the dust. This may come as bad news to those of you with what Google's Android chief Andy Rubin is calling "legacy" handsets.

Besides the wheel, fire, and air conditioning during the month of August, caller ID is on the short list of life-changing inventions. Though its one hang-up (no pun intended) is that its directory of phone numbers, which is attached to names and readily available for landline phones, has not been carried over to mobile phones. Instead, mobile-phone users get numbers only.

One company that's helping to change that is PhoneTell, which is launching at Monday's TechCrunch Disrupt conference in New York. Formerly CallSpark (which debuted at last year's DemoFall) PhoneTell aims to help you figure out who's calling your phone, even if they're not in your own personal phone book.

To accomplish such a feat, PhoneTell maintains its own directory of 200 million contacts from sources including the yellow pages and white pages, Yelp, OpenTable, and Zagat. The company also has a graylist that's made up of known telemarketers. More importantly though, its system can tap into various services you're a part of, like Gmail, LinkedIn, and Salesforce, to grab contacts behind a log in.

To plug into the directory, mobile-phone users need to install a software application that runs in the background and pops up to check unrecognized numbers every time you get a call. If it's one of the numbers in PhoneTell's directory, this information pops up in just a few seconds as long as you've got a cellular data connection.

Beyond the incoming phone call lookup, the application can also augment your phone's dialer. On the Android version, which CNET got access to Friday, it runs as its own app which you use instead of Android's native phone dialer. The two share the same list of favorites, as well as the call log. What PhoneTell adds to the equation is a search box that taps into your location to find you nearby services. If you've used Google's MyLocation-enabled search on a mobile phone recently, the experience here is quite similar, except that this lives outside the browser, and right where you're planning to make outgoing calls.

One neat trick that's worth mentioning, is that if you decide to not answer an incoming phone call the service pops up with a dialog that lets you send that caller a text message telling them why you didn't pick up. There's even the option to create custom messages for specific people, so you can send either a business or personal one depending on who's calling. Even better, the system can be set to remind you to call these people back later on, which will add an event to your phone's calendar, complete with a reminder and that person's phone number so you don't have to remember a thing.

At launch--er, re-launch--the company will have an app for Android users, which is already live on the Android Marketplace. In about a month the company plans to release a version for iPhone users that won't be able to do the same caller ID magic for inbound calls, but brings the geo-based search complete with a dialer. BlackBerry users will also soon be getting a version that can run in the background, just like on Android.

Dear Google,

I try not to write too many of these open letters because, well, they're a gimmicky way to hook readers on a Monday after a long week of news. But your relative silence since last Friday's revelation that you collected personal data from unsecured Wi-Fi hot spots all over the globe shows you are underestimating the slow burn this incident has sparked among your user base, otherwise known as basically everybody on the Internet.

This isn't like Facebook exposing the pictures from your 5-year college reunion, the one where you learned that no, you can no longer funnel beers quite so easily. This is every modern privacy advocate's worst nightmare and every Google critic's fantasy: the most information-hungry company the world has ever known has gotten caught going a little too far.

Sure, you claim the data collected as part of the Street View project was random and not necessarily identifiable. And yes, you were the one to notify the world what you had done, blaming it on an inadvertent oversight. Still,your blog post on the matter raises more questions than it answers.

For example, why did a Google engineer ever write code that was designed to, in your words, "(sample) all categories of publicly broadcast WiFi data"? For what possible reason could such comprehensive code be used other than to collect payload data from unsecured wireless access points?

You said you never used any of this data to help build or refine Google products. How do you know that? If this data was kept completely and totally separate from benign data gathered as part of the Street View project, how did you not realize that you were gathering this type of data years ago? It's hard to believe that any form of data--the lifeblood of Google--could get tossed in the digital equivalent of a garage closet for years and forgotten.

It's not enough to admit in the precise words of your co-founder that "we screwed up." Pushing the boundaries and then apologizing after the fact is a business strategy that can only work for so long; you can't fool all the people all the time.

Google collects more data on personal activities than just about anyone outside of the credit card industry, and most of the time that data improves your products and services. Yet your data-hungry culture can at times appear out of step with the mainstream world, and your tendency to brush off concerns about what your company might do with that data and how it protects that data troubles many who would otherwise see your company in the brightest of lights.

In 2003, the New York Times faced up to one of the worst crises in its history--the Jayson Blair fraud scandal--by publishing a thorough account of what had happened, how internal conditions at the paper allowed it to happen, and what would be done to prevent this from happening again. The painful exercise was cathartic for Times writers and readers, and went a long way toward restoring trust in one of America's best news organizations.

You call yourself a company committed to openness and transparency? Prove it.

Publish a detailed account of why this Wi-Fi software was created, how it was allowed to permeate a high-profile Google project for several years, and what Google employees knew about the collection of this data. I know you love to remind critics of your data gathering that users have control over their data through features like Google Dashboard, but Google Dashboard only gives the user control over the data that Google tells that user they're gathering.

It would be a grave mistake to let this matter go much further. Already governments skeptical of your power are licking their chops over this issue, and the lawsuits are also mounting.

You may be tempted to let the whole thing blow over and wait for Facebook to screw up some other privacy-related matter this week, diverting the nanosecond attention spans of the tech media and its readers. Don't.

Earn back the trust you have so often stated is the contract between the users of your free services and your engineers. Explain clearly what was collected, how it will be deleted, and how this will never happen again.

Collecting data that users of your services submit willingly to the Internet is one thing. Driving the streets of the world and absorbing packets of data that come your way--no matter how inadvertent it may have been--is quite another.

Sincerely,

Tom Krazit
CNET

Third-party ad networks have been officially banned from Twitter, according to a post on the Twitter blog on Monday from Chief Operating Officer Dick Costolo. It's a move that could drive some of the advertising start-ups that have built around Twitter out of business.

"We will not allow any third party to inject paid tweets into a timeline on any service that leverages the Twitter API," the post read, explaining that the exception will be Twitter's own "promoted tweets" program that it announced earlier this year.

"Third party ad networks are not necessarily looking to preserve the unique user experience Twitter has created," Costolo's post read."They may optimize for either market share or short-term revenue at the expense of the long-term health of the Twitter platform. For example, a third party ad network may seek to maximize ad impressions and click through rates even if it leads to a net decrease in Twitter use due to user dissatisfaction."

But the straight story is that these third-party networks--include Adly and the just-launched TweetUp--now compete with Twitter itself for advertising dollars.

As Twitter has moved from open-ended communication platform (and investment dollar black hole) to structured company with a nascent business model, many of the third-party companies that built businesses (in some cases, profitable ones) on top of its API have felt the heat. Prior to its unveiling of the Promoted Tweets advertising program, Twitter announced that it had acquired iPhone client Tweetie and would launch other official mobile clients as well

Twitter confirmed to CNET that this does not have any bearing on marketers working directly with prominent Twitter users to post paid tweets--reality show star Kim Kardashian reportedly has a rate of $10,000 per sponsored tweet.

When Twitter confronted nervous developers at its Chirp conference earlier this year, the company insisted that they would not be snuffed out because it would be launching deeper and more advanced ways for third parties to tap into its system. In the blog post Monday, Twitter kept up this olive-branch mentality with regard to the "Annotations" metadata product that it announced at Chirp. "When Annotations ship, there are going to be many new business opportunities on the Twitter platform in addition to those currently available," Costolo wrote. "We know that companies and entrepreneurs will create things with Annotations that we couldn't have imagined."

Still, at least for now, a handful of companies are going to have to scramble or else risk being snuffed out. First it was Twitter clients, and now advertising start-ups--other niches of Twitter developers must surely be concerned they might be next.

The United States could fall behind China and other countries in clean-energy technology unless Congress passes energy legislation, U.S. Commerce Secretary Gary Locke said on Saturday.

Many U.S. investors were reluctant to plough money into big solar, wind, and other clean-energy sectors until they knew what technologies the U.S. government policy was going to favor, he said.

"There's too much capital sitting on the sidelines for lack of an energy policy," Locke said during a stop at a U.S. and Chinese joint venture project to build batteries for electric vehicles.

"The longer we wait, the more that others, whether it's China, Germany, and other countries, will be moving ahead."

While legislation to fight global warming and provide stronger economic incentives for renewables energy still faces an uncertain fate in Congress, China is pushing clean-energy projects on a number of fronts.

"The opportunities are stunning in China because China has enormous economic growth and that economic growth has led to enormous demands for energy," said Locke, who headed a group of 24 U.S. clean-energy companies on a trade mission to Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Beijing this week.

The joint venture between California-based company Coda and its Chinese partner, Tianjin Lishen Battery, was a model of how cooperation in the clean-energy sector could create jobs in both countries, Locke said.

Lishen builds the batteries for an electric vehicle that Coda plans to sell in the United States. The Chinese state-owned oil company, CNOOC, is also an investor in the project.

Locke also visited the Tianjin facility of a joint venture between United Solar Ovonic, a subsidiary of Energy Conversion Devices, and Tianjin Jinneng Investment Company to convert U.S.-made solar cells into solar modules for the Chinese market.

"We do about 75 percent of the manufacturing in Michigan and then we roll it up and we ship it to Tianjin, where they finish it, cut it up into the sizes that they need," said Uni-Solar Vice President Martha Duggan.

Uni-Solar signed an agreement during Locke's trip to sell 500 kilowatts of its thin-film solar laminates to NYKE Solar Integrators, a Chinese company, for a demonstration project.

"Our theory is that by doing this particular business model, we're creating and sustaining jobs in Michigan and in China," Duggan said.

Story Copyright (c) 2010 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved.

Update, May 22 at 1:35 PDT: The story has been updated to indicate that the original "Everybody Draw Mohammed Day" Facebook page is back up, with an explanation of its removal.

A Facebook page that led Pakistan to temporarily block the social-networking site reappeared on the social-networking site Saturday morning, two days after it was taken down.

The page promotes "Everybody Draw Mohammed Day," scheduled for Thursday following an American cartoonist's satirical suggestion that people draw images of the prophet to promote free speech.

By Friday, the page no longer appeared on the site. Facebook said Friday it had not taken any action on the page,according to the Associated Press. It was speculated that the creator removed it, possibly because "Everybody Draw Mohammed Day" was over, but the reason was unclear.

On Saturday, however, the following explanation appeared on the wall of the page, which had upward of 109,000 supporters and more than 12,000 photos as of Saturday afternoon at 1:30 PDT.

"This page was removed two days ago, after one of our moderators had his e-mail and Skype hacked. His personal data was revealed. He then got scared and deleted the...page, the blog, and the e-mails. The rest of us are now back without him after he backed out. This is another scare tactic from the Islamic extremists. We won't fall."

A blog spawned by the idea of "Everybody Draw Mohammed Day," however, on Saturday remained virtually devoid of content, still renamed "nothing," after featuring several caricatures of Mohammed earlier in the week.

Pakistan's Facebook closure happened Wednesday after an Islamic lawyers association in Lahore argued that the contest essentially equaled blasphemy and won a court injunction against the social-networking site. In what could be a wider Internet crackdown, Pakistan also banned YouTube over "sacrilegious" content. Some Muslims consider images of Mohammed to be blasphemous.

Pakistan has said it would consider restoring Facebook and other sites featuring offending content if the content was removed. While the country's telecommunications regulator said Thursday that the YouTube ban had been lifted following the removal of "blasphemous" footage, a YouTube spokeswoman said the video site is still being blocked there, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Published caricatures of Mohammed also led to massive protests in the streets of Pakistan this week. Pakistani protesters shouted "Death to Facebook" and "Death to America," and burned U.S. flags to vent growing anger over online depictions of the prophet that they view as sacrilegious.

The idea for "Everybody Draw Mohammed Day" went viral quickly after Seattle cartoonist Molly Norris posted a drawing last month depicting objects like a domino, a spool of thread, and a handbag, saying they were the "real likeness of Mohammed." The cartoon also included a fake group called Citizens Against Citizens Against Humor calling for an "Everybody Draw Mohammed Day."

Norris said she drew her cartoon as a show of support for the creators of Comedy Central's "South Park," which earlier this year featured an episode depicting the prophet Muhammad in a bear suit.

That episode led a New York-based Web site called RevolutionMuslim.com to warn creators of the animated series that "what they are doing is stupid, and they will probably wind up like Theo van Gogh," a Dutch filmmaker who was murdured in 2004 after producing a film exploring violence against women in some Islamic societies.

Norris, who strongly distanced herself from the concept of "Everybody Draw Mohammed Day," did not create the Facebook page touting the event and actively opposed it. Instead, she joined a Facebook group called "Against Everybody Draw Mohammed Day - May 20." Its page still appeared live on the site Friday afternoon, with more than 43,000 members.

Update, 9:15 p.m. PDT: Thanks to reader Josh Diekmann for writing in to point out that at least one additional"Everybody Draw Mohammed Day" Facebook page has gone up, with more than 17,000 "liking" it as of Friday night. In addition, another reader notes that Facebook now hosts a page promoting "Show Mohammed Day," a scheduled day of rallies June 3 "in celebration of freedom of speech and religion, honoring the spirit of the First Amendment." The organizer says the June 3 rallies are a direct response to the controversy surrounding "Everybody Draw Mohammed Day."

One of AT&T's new TV spots seems to be covering itself with something considerably less than glory, as all sorts of people toss accusations of, if not plagiarism, then at least strange insensitivity.

The spot is the one where large orange-colored drapes are tossed over buildings and beaches to prove that the company covers 97 percent of all known germs. Oh, wait, perhaps I've muddled a couple of ads up. But I've embedded it for your satisfaction.

When this ad first emerged a few days ago, the art world's beady Cyclopian eye bulged like the national debt and its voice uttered a scream that could be heard at the bottom of that accursed Icelandic volcano.

You see, it does bear some resemblance to the work of Christo and Jeanne-Claude, the folks who covered up the Reichstag in Berlin in 1995 with drapes and then obfuscated parts of Central Park in New York in 2005 in a project called "The Gates."

Perhaps not understanding that "The Gates" was, indeed, a tribute to Microsoft's great ability in covering New York and the world with its software, members of the art fraternity offered the word "shocking" when they saw the AT&T spot.

Their feelings might well have been exacerbated by the fact that Jeanne-Claude died in November of last year, her memorial service being held in New York on April 26. Some people even thought this was an official tribute to the art of Christo, in which case they were, perhaps, slightly unfamiliar with the import that many in the commercial world hold for art.

Still, art might have some power, as the end frame of the spot now reads "The artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude have no direct or indirect affiliation or involvement with AT&T."

It's a difficult area, this. Who was inspired by what pictures, what ideas, what narcotics consumed late on a lonely night? Sometimes the people themselves don't really know.

However, please hold on to your objectivity for as long as you can while I tell about Bosnia and Herzegovina. There you will find a cell phone provider called Eronet. And the company created an ad that involved, well, its workers covering large swaths of Bosnia with large red/orange drapes. This was in 2007 and is now embedded right here.

Not for one moment would I suggest that anyone at AT&T's ad agency saw the Bosnian spot and was inspired by it. Any more than I would suggest that the same creative group was inspired by Christo and Jeanne-Claude. And I am a loyal AT&T customer and have been for a long time.

However, there are those who work in ad agencies and, indeed, in client marketing departments, who spend some of their days looking at ads from their categories--in this case, telephony--from all around the world.

Is it possible that there was some telephony telepathy here? Is it possible that when you're being told to "Rethink Possible," you never know whose thinking you might rethink?

I did contact AT&T, but have yet to receive a reply.