Julius Genachowski was sworn in today as chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, beginning a tenure that is expected to bring more attention to new mobile and Internet technologies.

Genachowski also announced his key staff, stressing the private and public sector experience they will bring to the agency. Genachowski has been widely lauded for his experience in Washington as an entrepreneur and later as an investor. He served two clerkships and as general counsel for former FCC chairman Reed Hundt. Later he became an executive for IAC/InterActive, which bought several Internet firms, and founder of LaunchBox Digital and venture capital firm Rock Creek Ventures.

"The FCC should be a model of excellence in government," Genachowski said. "The agency will benefit enormously from their leadership, from their private and public sector experience . . ."

He chose as his chief of staff, Edward Lazarus, a relative unknown in the telecommunications industry. Lazarus comes from the law firm Akin Gump, where he supervised the Los Angeles office of 800 employees and was the co-head of the firm's global litigation practice.

Genachowski also appointed two senior advisors.

Colin Crowell, a veteran telecommunications aide for Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass), will be a strategic advisor to the chairman, who will oversee communications, legislative and intergovernmental affairs. The role, which is a newly created focus for the chairman's office, indicates an emphasis on relations between the FCC and other agencies and the FCC's relationship with members on Capitol Hill. President Obama has stressed the importance of broadband Internet development as a tool for solving problems in education, healthcare and other areas and the FCC has been charged with coming up with a plan by next summer to bring high-speed Internet to all Americans. Crowell, who worked for Markey for more than 20 years, helped craft the clause in the stimulus plan that assigns the FCC its mandate for a national broadband Internet plan.

The other senior advisor, Bruce Gottleib, comes from Commissioner Michael J. Copps' office, where he specialized in wireless Internet and public safety issues. Gottleib will be Genachowski's senior legal advisor and will manage the agency's overall agenda and coordinate policy between the FCC's bureaus.

Genachowski has several issues lined up for his start. He will have to come up with a national broadband plan that not only connects all homes to high-speed Internet but also addresses issues of affordability and lack of training on how to use the Web. Public interest groups and small telecommunications firms, meanwhile, have pushed for reforms that would increase competition. Genachowski has promised Senate Commerce Committee leaders he will review a complaint by rural wireless carriers that exclusive deals between large carriers and handset makers are anticompetitive.

ZeniMax Media, the Rockville-based parent company of videogame publisher Bethesda Softworks, announced today that it has acquired game development studio Id Software.

Id is famous among gamers as the Texas-based studio behind bestselling action videogame franchises like Doom and Quake. Bethesda Softworks, meanwhile, is known for games such as last year's blockbuster hit Fallout 3.

"Our role will be to provide publisher support through Bethesda Softworks and give id Software the resources it needs to grow and expand," said ZeniMax chairman and chief executive Robert Altman, in a statement.

The move is just the latest expansion by the privately-owned local company, which happens features boldface names like Jerry Bruckheimer and Cal Ripken, Jr. on its board of directors. Two years ago, ZeniMax announced that it was opening a new game studio in Hunt Valley with the aim of creating an online game in the same genre as the popular computer title World of Warcraft.

Id is a legendary game company, said Edward Wu, an industry analyst at Wedbush Morgan, "But it seems that they lost some of their momentum to other companies in recent years and that may have prompted them to do the merger."

Consolidation in the videogame industry is certainly nothing new: Over the last several years, many local game development studios have been snapped up by major publishers like Electronic Arts.

Update: Oh yeah. I am stuck in emergency mode once again, courtesy of the 3.0 update. Seems like some of you below are stuck there, too.

Personally, I tried calling Apple support and here's what they told me: My 3.0 update probably installed fine, but the phone now needs to connect to iTunes to verify my account information. Right now, everybody with an iPhone is trying to connect to iTunes and "our servers can only take so much traffic."

Not sure if this is the same problem a few of you guys are having, but Apple's advice, basically, was: Wait for a while and try again later.

If you haven't tried to download and install the 3.0 software update, I'd say holding off for a while is probably a good idea.

In the meantime, I'm glad I still have a landline.

_ _ _ _ _

Well, that took long enough.

Apple had promised to release the latest major update to the iPhone's operating system today, but the company didn't specify what time users could expect to download OS 3.0. Last time around, Apple released its iPhone update in the morning, an event that turned into a minor fiasco for the company when its servers were slammed and many were left with a phone stuck in the almost entirely useless "emergency" mode.

I'm downloading and installing the update right now; hopefully things don't go south this time...

The new iPhone software introduces some features that likely should have been incorporated into the device when it was released a couple of years ago. Users can now "cut, copy and paste" text from one application to another, for example, and use a new search function to look up information parked in various application databases. One new feature allows users to incorporate a picture into their text message (though, whoops, AT&T, the only carrier with the iPhone, doesn't support this just yet. That's coming later this summer).

Users will now also be able to record voice memos and buy more stuff directly from the iTunes store. Apple is touting a new, enhanced stock checking application (as of this writing, AAPL is down two cents today).

The update is free for iPhone owners and $9.99 for owners of the iPod Touch.

If you're an owner of one of these devices and hit a glitch, please post away. Otherwise, see you on the other side.

Twitter appears to be turning green today, for some users anyway, as many regulars on the microblogging site are changing their user icons to a new hue to mark their support of defeated Iranian presidential candidate Mirhossein Mousavi and Iran's protesters

As Iran's election drama plays out this week, supporters organized in modern fashion: With Web sites and services such as Twitter, Flickr, YouTube Facebook and Google Maps. At the moment, the subject header "#IranElection" is one of the top discussion topics on the service.

"My friends are being held against their will in the university," wrote one Twitter user. "Rasoul Akram hospital has medics outside. Go there for help," wrote another. Others uploaded pictures and videos of alleged police violence against protesters.

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone blogged on Monday that some previously scheduled maintenance for the site was being delayed as a result of the situation in Iran. According to one report, the delay came after State Department officials asked Twitter to keep its service operational.

Twitter users blasted CNN over the weekend for not covering the election controversy enough. Others were alarmed to see that some media accounts of the Twitter communities' discussions of Iran were including the site's user names, and possibly putting some users in Iran in jeopardy.

Yesterday's transition to digital television went fairly smoothly with only a few minor glitches, federal officials said, although there is an unknown number of viewers who may still need help tuning into the new broadcast signals.

Throughout the day Friday, 971 full-power stations dropped their analog broadcasts, forcing consumers to install a converter box or upgrade to a digital TV set. Cable and satellite customers were largely unaffected by the switch. Federal Communications Commission staffers have been working around the clock to man the main DTV hotline: 1-888-CALL-FCC. The call centers received 317,450 calls yesterday, and has received nearly 700,000 calls since Monday. The call volume has tapered off today.

"Its looking more like Y2K than the Bay of Pigs," said FCC Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein on a conference call with reporters. But he added that efforts to identify and help consumers who had lost TV reception were still underway.

Nearly 30 percent of the calls to the FCC hotline concerned the operation of the digital converter boxes, most of which were resolved when consumers were instructed to "rescan" for channels. More than 20 percent of the calls dealt with reception issues, as a result of needing a new antenna, living too far away from the broadcast tower to receive a signal, or the station's digital coverage area changing slightly than its analog coverage area.

About 3 million households were considered to be unprepared for the transition, but the commissioners said it is impossible to know how many actually lost TV service.

Viewers in Chicago, Dallas-Ft. Worth, New York, Philadelphia and Baltimore were the most prevalent callers seeking help from the FCC. In Chicago, one station had trouble getting its digital signal to downtown residents living in high-rises. In Dallas, one broadcaster had trouble getting its digital signal to be picked up and rebroadcast by a satellite service provider. In other markets, a handful of stations had technical difficulties and were off the air for a short amount of time. In Memphis, a tornado prevented stations from making the switch. The FCC said it issued 23 extensions to stations around the country, mostly in smaller markets.

Acting FCC Chairman Michael Copps said it is too early to declare the transition a success. "A transition of this size inevitably causes disruption," he said. "Now job number one is to help restore service to consumers who are having problems."

Well, it had to happen sometime.

An Arizona man's house was recently robbed, and he suspects that his Twitter and Facebook habits might be to blame for how his home's burglars found out that he would be away on a vacation. Check out the story here.

"It's not that these Web 2.0 things are creating new crimes," says an insurance agency worker quoted in the piece. "They are providing some new vectors or venues for the crimes that can happen anyway."

So, for anybody going out of town and leaving their homes vacant this summer, there's one more thing to keep in mind these days. If you've got a wide-reaching social network, you might want to watch what you Twiter!

Telecom analyst Blair Levin, a technology adviser for President Obama during his presidential campaign and transition, will be heading to the Federal Communications Commission to help coordinate the agency's national broadband plan.

The FCC made the announcement in a release today. Levin, a managing director at Stifel Nicolaus, is a telecom policy veteran who served as chief of staff for former FCC chairman Reed Hundt between 1993 and 1997, when the commission was charged with implementing the 1996 Telecom Act.

Levin worked closely with Julius Genachowski, Obama's pick to chair the FCC, on Obama's tech strategy during the campaign and transition, which led to the inclusion of broadband network projects in the economic stimulus plan. Levin returns to the FCC as Obama pledges to make broadband, or high-speed, Internet policy available to all Americans and use it to help spur economic growth.

As part of Obama's Recovery Act, or stimulus plan, the FCC was charged to come up with a strategy in one year to make broadband accessible to all households. The FCC is charged to also address questions of how to make broadband service available to those who can't afford it and to figure out ways to train people with computer use and Web access. In addition, Congress has allocated $7.2 billion in broadband deployment grants to companies to bring access to rural and underserved areas.

When Apple chief executive Steve Jobs went on medical leave in January, he promised that he'd be back in five months. According to a new report in the Wall Street Journal citing unnamed sources, Jobs is on track to soon return to the company he founded.

Whether Jobs returns in the next few days or not, you can expect to hear some news from the company early next week. The company's "Worldwide Developer Conference" kicks off next week and Apple is expected to introduce a new version of the iPhone at the event.

The ol' rumor mill isn't cranking out high expectations for the next iPhone: Mac fans seem to be expecting a modest hardware upgrade such as an auto-focusing lens and a built-in compass for the next iPod. Many fans are hoping that the next iPhone will be able to capture video, and not just snap photos.

In March, Apple gave a look at the next version of its iPhone operating system, and let software developers get their hands on the tools they'll need to build applications for the new OS.

Personally, I've been trying to get my wife to hold off on replacing her cell phone, a dying Treo, till the new iPhone comes out -- but the early Palm Pre reviews have all been raves too, for that matter.

In any case, we'll see what Apple has up its sleeve on Monday, when the WWDC kicks off.

The non-profit corporation responsible for overseeing the Web's domain-naming rules came to the Hill today, partly to push forward an agenda that it's time to expand the type of Web addresses beyond the familiar ".com" and ".org." But don't expect to be able to register "your.name" as a Web address anytime soon.

Paul Twomey, president and chief executive officer of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, in testimony before the House subcommittee on communications, technology and the Internet, said that raising the number of domain names would benefit Web users by allowing for more competition. Twomey listed possible domain names tied to geographic areas, like ".nyc," or topics, such as .sport."

Also, he said, allowing for more foreign language-based domain names would be fair to the "billions of non-English speakers who want domain names that look like their language."

Not everybody's an immediate fan of this idea, by any stretch. After all, the World Wide Web has already seen more than a few opportunistic, domain-name-buying cybersquatters. What's more, critics point out, consumers have a hard enough time feeling secure on the Web; an increase in the number of possible domain names will only increase confusion.

Consumers need to be confident, said Sarah Deutch, general counsel at Verizon Communications Inc., that if they visit some future "verizon.phone" Web address, for example, that they aren't ending up at an address belonging to a cyberscammer.

ICANN also took a number of jabs from congressfolk about the group's transparency and accountability -- or lack thereof.

Rep. Anna G. Eshoo (D-Calif.) pointed out that the strength of the Web is its open-ness and its democratizing powers, "yet it seems to me that the way ICANN operates does not match that."

Christine Jones, general counsel for The Go Daddy Group Inc., the Internet domain name seller and Web hosting company, echoed that sentiment as she asked for ICANN to operate less privately. "We ask a question and basically we get stonewalled," she complained.

One topic on the table was the future of U.S. government oversight of ICANN. At the end of September, an arrangement that gives the Department of Commerce oversight over ICANN expires. The House subcommittee, led by Rep. Rick Boucher (D-Va.), sounded inclined to extend that oversight period this morning.