Skype has announced that it’s newest beta release supports up to 10 users on video at once.  The beta is for Skype 5.0, and also adds automatic call recovery, and a cleaned up interface.  Of course, since this is a beta, it’s going to be buggy, so it probably isn’t for everyone.  That being said, if you want to have 10-person video chats, everyone involved has to have the same Skype beta.  Right now that means that they all have to be Windows users since the beta is only for Windows. {Mashable}

The real question is if you really want to have 10-person Skype video chats.  It might make sense for small businesses, but for the average user, it doesn’t seem too useful to go all the way up to 10.  The previous version of the beta supported up to five people on a video call at once, which seemed to be a good number.  Who knows, maybe we’ll never be able to live without 10-person video chat when it hits everyone.  Or maybe we’ll stick just stick to voice chat to cut down on potential service issues that seem to plague some Skype users no matter what.

Competition for eReading consumers†affection sizzled on Monday as Barnes and Noble dropped the price of its well received Nook e-book reader 23 percent to $199 and introduced the Nook WiFi at an even bigger bargain $149, though the latter device can only be used in a WiFi environment. Amazon, whose $259 price tag for their Kindle eReader (which comes with 3G technology by default) previously matched the Nookâ€s cost exactly, responded by dropping the price of the Kindle to $189, and they aren’t stopping their competitive advances there. Amazon.com plans to introduce a thinner Kindle with an upgraded screen this August. Sonyâ€s cheapest eReader is still $169. {Fortune}

Get yourself a price gun: the war for th eReader market is on

At this rate, eReaders will be cheaper than the actual books in their stores in no time.

In addition, Apple updated the iPhone and iPod Touch today to include available iBook software. The iPadâ€s price tag for the entry-level model remains near $500, though the additional tablet computer functionality give it an advantage over single purpose eReaders. It would be difficult to justify a $500 eReader purchase, but when that device doubles as a place to play games, browse the web and check on email, it’s a lot easier to rationalize.
“Their sales have obviously been impacted by the iPad,” Charlie Wolf, a senior analyst at Needham & Co. in New York, said. “These price cuts are almost an act of desperation.” {Bloomberg Businessweek}

Meanwhile, Kobo, the e-book retailer that offers eReading software for an array of devices, released free software on Monday that is available through the Android marketplace and allows eReaders to be used on Smartphones with the Android operating system. The e-book retailer already produces software for other Smartphones, iPad, iPhone, Blackberry, Palm WebOS and the newly released Kobo reading device.

Users who buy Kobo e-books with one device can read their purchase on any of the devices for which Kobo offers software.

“We’ve adapted the features our customers love and expect from Kobo to ensure that we provide the best reading experience for Android-enabled smartphones,” Kobo CEO Michael Serbinis said. {Publishers Weekly}

Borders is also holding steady with eReaders that began selling for $119.99-$149.99 in May. {Bloomberg Businessweek}

Need to catch your breath? We sure do! We canâ€t wait to see which devices prove most popular among consumers and how low the prices will need to go to woo customers who are interested in an e-reading device but not its expense.

Soluto is one of the three companies that survived the first round of TechCrunch Disrupt, and the company eventually came through to win the grand prize of $50,000. {TechCrunch} The Israel based company’s pitch is that it helps relieve you of your PC frustrations. The first place that Soluto will help is during the boot-up period of your Windows PC to make it run faster.

Rather than make it confusing or complicated so that only a few people can access it, Soluto makes it incredibly easy to see what programs are starting when you start up your PC.  The beta software will allow users to pause or delay those applications to make the PC boot up faster than usual.  To make sure users don’t kill an important program or application, everything is uploaded to a wiki by “techies” who know what they’re doing, making it easy for other users to handle the tasks.

Another interesting part of Soluto is it’s PC Genome project.  The PC Genome will take the anonymous data Soluto has about users’ PCs to tell consumers how different PCs handle different tasks.  Those tasks can include how well a company’s computers handle Photoshop, or Windows 7, or just which programs tend to boot up faster. While there are several reasons people offer for switching to Macs, one of the most common is that the system seems easy to understand. A quick Google search turns up a solution for removing extraneous programs from the startup process (Start > Run msconfig > select Startup > uncheck boxes > done), people who know that they don’t want 20 programs launching when they start their computer may go with Soluto for the sheer simplicity of not even having to search for a solution at all. With the right partnerships, it could help users to make more informed opinions about which PCs they’re buying and what’s really to blame when things slow down (hint: it’s not always Windows).

A small amount of negative feedback that followed Soluto’s win is on the amount of funding they went into the competition with. {TechCrunch} While many of the companies had seed funding of a few hundred thousand dollars, Soluto had nearly $8 million in funding before launching. So while the service could certainly be useful to a very large number of people around the world, some are wondering if the significant financial advantage Soluto had entering the competition made for a level playing field with their competitors.