Happy 235th Birthday, America!

What better way for Technologizer to celebrate Independence Day than with a drawing of Uncle Sam from one of many, many patents involving the old gent?

Apple OKs OS X Virtualization

For some folks–developers, especially–this is great news: Apple says you can run virtualized copies of OS X 10.7 Lion, as long as you’re doing it on a Mac with a paid-for copy of the operating system.

The Google+/Picasa Connection

One of the big questions about Google+ is “how does all this new stuff relate to all of Google’s old stuff?” In some cases, new features (like Google+ photo sharing) will be connected to existing ones (such as Picasa Web Albums). In others, I’m pretty positive, Google+ will replace weaker Google offerings (you can read Buzz within G+, which just makes it all the more clear that Buzz will be redundant if G+ catches on).

For now, things are a tad confusing. Over at ReadWriteWeb, Sarah Perez explains how Google+ interconnects with Picasa. The good news is that you can now get unlimited photo storage; the bad news is that there are catches and complications.

TechCrunch: Facbook’s Announcement Next Week is Skype Video Chat

Maybe Facebook’s event next week doesn’t relate to the iPad at all. TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington says that the news is something entirely unrelated, but potentially cool: Skype-powered video chat within Facebook.

Gmail: What a Difference a Little White Space Makes

Almost every week is a big week for Google news–but this one has been particularly jam-packed. There’s Google+, its pretty cool answer to Facebook. There’s the refreshed Google home page. There are rumors that it’s interested in buying Hulu.

But my favorite Google news of the week is an item that doesn’t sound all that explosive: it released a couple of new themes for Gmail. I’m using one of them now. All it does is to give Gmail a bit of the new look that’s also visible in Google+ and the revised home page. And that turns out to be a big deal.

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BlinQ TV, a $9.99 Social Universal Remote for Your iPhone

Back, in July, I wrote about Peel, a software-and-hardware system that turns an iPhone or iPod Touch into a slick universal TV remote. It’s neat. But it costs $99.95, and involves two doohickeys–one that you plug into your router, and one that sits near your TV.

Ryz Media’s BlinQ TV has a new twist on the same basic idea–and the most striking difference is the hardware. Instead of routing commands from your iPhone over Wi-Fi into a gizmo like the Peel’s “Fruit” and then into the TV via infrared, BlinQ gives you a lollipop-shaped IR blaster that plugs into the phone’s headphone jack and lets you control a TV, set-top box, and other living-room devices with no intermediary hardware. It costs one-tenth as much as Peel: $9.99.

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Join Me at Facebook Next Week

Is Facebook going to announce an iPad app next week? I hope so. If it does, I’ll be among the first to know, because I’m attending the company’s press event–as usual, involving unspecified news–at its headquarters in Palo Alto on Wednesday, July 6th at 10am. And I’ll liveblog the news as I get it at technologizer.com/facebookevent. Hope to see you there.

AT&T Approves BlackBerry/PlayBook E-Mail Tethering App

One reason why RIM’s decision to let the PlayBook tablet access e-mail only via a BlackBerry phone wasn’t such a hot idea: it’s only now that AT&T customers are able to do it.