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If you were hoping to get one of the last TouchPads at the fire sale price of $99.99 or $199.99, your chances just got a little smaller unless you are an HP employee.

After a HP announcement last month that they will discontinue the TouchPad, the initial production run sold out quickly at the highly discounted prices. Soon after, they announced plans to produce just 200,000 more in order to fulfill contracts with suppliers.

In an email recently leaked to TechCrunch, HP employees were told they will get exclusive access to the additional stock:

After a thorough review of options, I'm pleased to share that starting at 9:00am (Pacific Time) on Wednesday, September 28^th, HP employees in the United States will have one last chance to buy an HP TouchPad through the Employee Purchase Program on a first come first serve basis. Pricing will remain the same as it has been during the wind down process -- $99.99 for the 16GB TouchPad, $149.99 for the 32GB TouchPad...while limited supplies last.

Recent lawsuits filed by Samsung against Apple may be a sign of a new strategy for defending their smartphone and tablet business based on recent comments.

Beseiged by lawsuits from Apple around the globe, Samsung filed a lawsuit of their own last week in France. The suit alleges violations of 3G related patents.

They also filed a countersuit in Australia, on similar grounds, as a response to Apple's lawsuit there. That suit has resulted in delays to the launch schedule for Samsung's Galaxy Tab 10.1.

According to a new report, Samsung plans to continue on the offensive when the next iPhone comes out. A Samsung executive, speaking off the record, told The Korea Times, "Just after the arrival of the iPhone 5 here, Samsung plans to take Apple to court here for its violation of Samsung’s wireless technology related patents."

Although South Korea is a relatively small country, high smartphone penetration rates make it an important one to compete in. The country's two biggest mobile carriers have accounted for more than 3 million iPhone sales.

Netflix CEO Reed Hastings has posted a lengthy blog entry tonight, explaining the new service and apologizing to customers.

Qwikster is the name for the newly separated DVD-by-mail business, while the streaming service will remain with the name Netflix.

Says the CEO of the newly named service:

So we realized that streaming and DVD by mail are becoming two quite different businesses, with very different cost structures, different benefits that need to be marketed differently, and we need to let each grow and operate independently. It’s hard for me to write this after over 10 years of mailing DVDs with pride, but we think it is necessary and best: In a few weeks, we will rename our DVD by mail service to “Qwikster”.

We chose the name Qwikster because it refers to quick delivery. We will keep the name “Netflix” for streaming.

Qwikster will be the same website and DVD service that everyone is used to. It is just a new name, and DVD members will go to qwikster.com to access their DVD queues and choose movies. One improvement we will make at launch is to add a video games upgrade option, similar to our upgrade option for Blu-ray, for those who want to rent Wii, PS3 and Xbox 360 games. Members have been asking for video games for many years, and now that DVD by mail has its own team, we are finally getting it done. Other improvements will follow. Another advantage of separate websites is simplicity for our members. Each website will be focused on just one thing (DVDs or streaming) and will be even easier to use. A negative of the renaming and separation is that the Qwikster.com and Netflix.com websites will not be integrated. So if you subscribe to both services, and if you need to change your credit card or email address, you would need to do it in two places. Similarly, if you rate or review a movie on Qwikster, it doesn’t show up on Netflix, and vice-versa.

CyanogenMod7 for the TouchPad will likely be here within weeks.

The team continues to work at creating a working port and the latest video (below) shows their progress.

Working now are Wi-Fi, audio, the accelerometer, the Android Market, Angry Birds and YouTube (within the browser).

For now, the audio is still not perfect as it only works on a single core (the TouchPad is dual-core) and is classified as a work-in-progress.

A full release to the public is expected by early-mid October for those who definitely want Gingerbread on their $99 TouchPad.

Joel Tenenbaum, the graduate student who was convicted of illegally sharing 30 tracks via P2P has had his original massive damages verdict reinstated.

Tenenbaum was originally fined $675,000, but the fine was reduced to $67,500 last summer, after a judge deemed the original penalty unconstitutional and "excessive."

Seeking an even further reduction, Tenenbaum has been rejected, and his initial reduction has also been reversed back to $675,000.

DigitalTrends explains that the main issue the appeals court had with the original reduction was that the ruling Judge "jumped over other procedures and went directly to the constitutional argument."

In a perfect world, Judges should "exhaust all other options for jumping to the Constitution for support."

Could the discount be extended to everyone soon?

RIM has begun discounting its PlayBook tablet for Rogers employees this week.

Slashing the price of the 16GB to $250, the 32GB to $350 and the 64GB to $400, the discounts range from 42-50 percent, significantly marked down.

Furthermore, the offer has been extended until December 1st.

RIM sold 500,000 PlayBooks in its first quarter of availability but sales have dried up now, with the company only moving 200,000 last quarter.

According to the WSJ, Yahoo continues to be contacted by potential bidders that are interested in purchasing the company or at least taking a large stake.

Private equity firm Silver Lake Partners is said to be very interested, although Yahoo has not yet met with them.

Peter Chernin, the former COO of New Corp and current owner of Chernin Entertainment has also had discussions with the company, but those talks are still in the early stage.

Chernin is also talking to private-equity firm Providence Equity Partners to be part of the deal.

Yahoo is worth around $18 billion, currently, but around 40 percent of the company's value is based in two long-term investments, their 35 percent stake in Yahoo Japan and their 40 percent stake in Alibaba. Most PE firms have noted they are not willing to purchase the company until those Asian stakes are sold or spun off, making Yahoo lighter and easier to purchase.

Verizon, as of their latest "Data Disclosure" FAQ dated September 15th, has confirmed they will begin throttling 3G users with unlimited data plans.

The new policy means users who hit over 2GB of mobile bandwidth per month will have their connection throttled, at least in high congestion areas (looking at you NYC and San Francisco), during high congestion times of the day.

As of August, Verizon says the top 5% of subscribers used over 2GB, so it says the new policy will not affect the vast majority. Some (very) quick calculations show there will around 2 million of Verizon's 106 million subscribers affected.

Verizon does note that 4G LTE is not affected (at least for the time being) so if you have a new fast 4G device, do not fret. (That is until Verizon gets enough 4G users and implements the same throttling).

The most notable user base to get screwed is likely the new iPhone 4 owners, who were given unlimited data with the phone's launch in February as a means to keep customers away from AT&T.

Read the whole FAQ, at 9to5

Get them while their hot.

Amazon Wireless has launched a new promotion that will run until the 26th.

Reads the site:

Get a $50 Amazon.com Gift Card code when you purchase a Verizon phone or mobile broadband device with a new line of service between midnight PDT September 16, 2011, and 11:59 p.m. PDT September 26, 2011. Your code will be sent via e-mail on October 10, 2011. This offer is limited to one per customer. See complete terms and conditions at www.amazon.com/gc-legal.

The deal includes contract and off contract devices, and there are new and very expensive devices in the list. The newly released Droid Bionic 4G, as well as the Thunderbolt 4G and Incredible 2 4G are on the list and so is the Samsung SCH-LC11 4G Mobile Hotspot. Many of the phones are selling at $0.01.

Check the rest here: Amazon Verizon 50 promo

Facebook has quietly integrated Twitter into its social networking service.

The integration means Twitter fans can now update their streams from within their Facebook profile.

Facebook's "Subscribe for Public Figures" guide has the following:

Yes, soon you'll be able to update your Twitter account directly from Facebook.

To get started:
1) Go to facebook.com/twitter
2) Link your profile or Page to your Twitter account

Once you link your accounts, your Twitter account will be updated every time you post a public update to Facebook.

There has been a similar service for Facebook "Pages" but not for your own personal profile.

Rovio general manager Andrew Stalbow announced the number this weekend.

Additionally, mobile gamers now play 300 million minutes of Angry Birds, collectively, on any given day.

Stalbow, who joined the company earlier this year after being a Fox Entertainment exec, wants to move the popular series from a game to a full multimedia franchise.

One of Stalbow's first deals was the "Rio" version of AB, where Rovio created a version of the game that included the birds of Rio (instead of the standard evil pigs) and had cross-promotion with the movie.

Adds the general manager (via VB):

People in Hollywood are really surprised with the quick acceleration in the way consumers engage with entertainment on their mobile phones. There will be some interesting entertainment partnerships that will hopefully take what we had from [Angry Birds Rio] to a totally different level.

RIM, on the same day they reported horrible earnings, is hit with a massive BBM disruption.

On Friday, BlackBerry maker RIM's BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) was hit with a huge outage in Canada and Latin America.

The company, based in Waterloo, Canada, confirmed the disruption via their Twitter page in the afternoon.

Support teams were investigating into Saturday.

Users affected were sent this warning message:

Esteemed user, BlackBerry informs us that the chat service is unstable at the international level. We will advise you when it has been re-established.

Messages in the U.S. and Europe were delivered with no issues.

SanDisk has launched their latest and greatest memory cards aimed at mobile devices.

The company says mobile phone sales are expected to reach 1.7 billion by 2014, and pretty much all current devices have a microSD slot in addition to internal memory.

At 64GB, the memory cards will offer a huge amount of storage for a tiny footprint, but there is one catch. Because they are microSDXC, there are very little, if any devices that currently have compatible slots. The cards are not backwards compatible with microSDHC.

Says the press release:

SanDisk's new 64GB microSDXC card can double the capacity of even the most advanced smartphones and tablets. The UHS-based, high-capacity card features up to 30MB/sec4 transfer speeds and offers the Class 6 performance needed to capture Full HD videos. The card is compatible with any tablet or smartphone equipped with a microSDXC card slot.

Apple's change to the store is effective as of this week.

According to Macworld, users who are forced to re-purchase their Mac apps will at least now be warned that they will be paying again for the pleasure to do so.

Says the new pop up warning:

[App name] is already installed and was not purchased from the Mac App Store

Do you want to buy [app name] again?

Many users, who prefer to purchase the app from the developer directly than through Apple as a middle man, were shocked when it was revealed the Mac Store does not allow them to integrate their newly purchased apps without a repurchase directly from the store.

As a note, if you have an older version of the app, the warning will not be triggered and you may purchase the app again without even knowing you had already installed.

According to sources close to the process, Hulu's auction to sell it off could be in serious jeopardy.

There are complications over digital rights, say the sources, as well as a huge bid-ask gap between bidders and Hulu.

Furthermore, Yahoo in the midst of firing its CEO and restructuring, is likely out of the running for the time being. They were a top choice for the auction.

During his company's Q3 earnings last month, News Corp (one of the studios behind Hulu) even acknowledged that the sale may not even happen this year, says Reuters.

There is a new round of bids upcoming this week, and will be the catalyst as to whether the auction moved forward at all.

Current bids have ranged from $500 million to $2 billion coming from giants like DirecTV, Google, Amazon, Yahoo and DISH. All bids, so far, have had complications, either in price or licensing agreements. The main issue at hand is how long exclusive rights will be given to the new owner. Hulu has stayed steadfast on 2 years, while the bidders want 3-5.