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BNO News, the news wire service famous for publishing breaking news stories through its @BreakingNews Twitter feed, just announced that it plans to launch a new news wire service early next year. In order to focus on this project, the BNO team will hand over the management of the @BreakingNews feed to MSNBC.com. According to BNO News, MSNBC will provide 24/7 breaking news headlines via BNO's Twitter feed, which will include updates from the new BNO wire service and other news organizations.

Opera just announced the release of Opera 10.10. This latest version of Opera's desktop browser now includes Opera Unite, the company's browser-based web server. With Unite, users can share photos, music, notes, websites, forums and calendars - but unlike standard web apps, these apps are hosted on the user's computer. When Opera first talked about Unite, it claimed that this service would "reinvent the web." This resulted in a lot of hype before the announcement and the inevitable backlash right afterward. When we tested the first alpha version of Opera with the built-in Unite feature, however, we came away quite impressed.

Having just launched a new real-time mobile search engine in conjunction with OneRiot only weeks ago, mobile search company Taptu is now expanding their revamped service to the Android platform. Today, they're launching a new application designed specifically for Android phones running version 1.5 and above. Like their brand-new mobile website, Taptu for Android includes real-time search results thanks to OneRiot integration. It also offers a touchscreen interface for viewing the results without having to pinch, resize, or refocus the screen.

Late last night, AOL revealed a sneak peek at their new branding campaign for their soon-to-be standalone content-focused business. The rebranding effort will officially launch on December 10th when AOL begins trading on the New York Stock Exchange as a separate company from Time Warner, its current owner. The new logos - yes, there are more than one - feature a lowercase "aol" on top of various colorful images that range from an orange goldfish to a green scribble. The odd designs are definitely different than AOL's "running man" or "triangle with swoosh" logos of years past - logos that became synonymous with the service that a large part of America once used to go online. But are the new logos any good? Or do they look more like the joke that AOL hopes it's not becoming?

Zoho is making another move to serve as the IT department for the small business market. Its latest offering is a service for staffing agencies and human resources to automate the process for hiring people.

The new service, available now, is an applicant tracking system that helps staffing agencies and recruiting departments track job openings, resumes and candidates. The enterprise is stil heavily dependent on email and manual processes for any number of practices with human resources being no exception to the rule.

Over the past decade, Amazon.com and eBay have continued to dominate the online retail market in the United States. However, there have been signs that more social and distributed forms of online shopping are gaining traction. eBay, in particular, is beginning to lose ground.

In this post, we review the past decade of e-commerce and the key trends. Advances in recommendations technology, together with the emergence of social media and mobile commerce, have combined to change the way e-commerce is transacted.

China enjoyed center stage this week thanks to President Obama's visit. Naturally, trade relations were on the agenda.

For Internet companies sitting in the US, news reports that chronicled the President's every move in China were a visible reminder of the business opportunity that may seem a click away.

A few weeks ago, I spoke to someone who had finally reached the end of her rope with an obdurate boss. Having suggested a series of social media initiatives, only to see them wither on the vine as he refused to either push them forward or cancel them, she was ready to move on - not just to another job, but a whole different organization. (Possibly the mob. She has recently dreamed up some innovations on the homicide front that she's eager to try.)

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Here is this week's ReadWriteWeb events guide. As always, you can download the entire event calendar in iCal format or import it into your Google Calendar. You can also import individual events using the link beside each entry. This events guide is a weekly feature here on ReadWriteWeb. We publish it every weekend, as good a time as any to review your conference plans.

Know of an event taking place that should appear here? Let us know in the comments below or contact us.