Steve Woda

t Internet Retailer 2009 in Boston, TheFind announced that it is integrating the VeriSign Secured Seal into their search results. TheFind - who delivers a comprehensive shopping search engine with over 350 million products from more than 500,000 stores - is the first search engine to address online shoppers' need to trust merchants by incorporating the VeriSign seal directly into its search results. - Steve Woda

Motorola (MOT) has yet to unveil its new lineup of phones based on the Android operating system, but already analysts are placing bets on its likely success. While the new devices are likely to fetch higher prices than Motorola's current phones—and could give the ailing handset division a much-needed boost—they probably won't approach the popularity of the Razr, the best-seller that earlier in the decade set handset design standards, say industry analysts. Nor are Motorola's new handsets likely to vie directly with today's most popular smartphones, including Apple's (AAPL) iPhone, Palm's (PALM) Pre, and Research In Motion's (RIMM) BlackBerry, these experts say. Most of Motorola's new models appear to target the mid-to-low end of the market and "won't be competing with today's best-selling smartphones," says Matt Thornton, an analyst at Avian Securities. - Steve Woda

Considering it didn't even exist 19 years ago, the Web browser has done pretty well. No other program on a computer can do so many things -- e-mail, mapping and calendars, to name a few -- thanks to all the Web services now available. And few other software markets offer as much competition as the browser business. Microsoft's Internet Explorer, after years of neglect, has seen welcome upgrades lately, but competing browsers have advanced further. The one most responsible for terminating IE's monopoly, Mozilla Firefox, received a major update days ago, following new releases of two others, Apple's Safari and Google's Chrome, over the past two months. - Steve Woda

A federal judge on Thursday tentatively threw out the convictions of a Missouri mother for her role in a MySpace hoax directed at a 13-year-old neighbor girl who ended up committing suicide. U.S. District Judge George Wu said he was tentatively acquitting Lori Drew of misdemeanor counts of accessing computers without authorization. Drew was convicted in November, but the judge said that if she is to be found guilty of illegally accessing computers, anyone who has ever violated the social networking site's terms of service would be guilty of a misdemeanor. - Steve Woda

A local teacher accidentally put pornography into a DVD that was meant to be filled with school memories from the past year, and nobody caught the error until after it was sent home, shocking parents and students alike. Parents of students who attend Isabelle Jackson Elementary said that the woman is a good teacher, but just made a mistake that may become the most embarrassing moment of their life. - Steve Woda