January 19 - 1:30pm EST   Belkin's Business Development Representative, Mark Bayard, has reportedly been paying Internet surfers to post fake positive reviews or poorly selling Belkin products on Amazon.com, according to a Friday report. Bayard has posted on Amazon's Mechanical Turk website, which pays users to perform tasks computers cannot, paying them on a per-task basis. At the time, Bayard offered 65 cents for every positive review posted, urging users need not own the product they are reviewing. The practice has both been challenged for its ethics and violates Amazon's Terms of Service. [full story]

June 9 - 8:30am EDT   HP this morning revealed ahead of a larger announcement in Berlin that it will bring its Blackbird 002 gaming system to retail. The previously online-only system will ship in a trim level targeted at the higher end of the performance spectrum with a liquid-cooled 2.66GHz Core 2 Quad, two of NVIDIA's as-yet unannounced GeForce 9800 GT video cards paired up in SLI mode, and a 500GB hard drive; the graphics are set to replace the 8800 GT and improve the clock speed of the earlier card without affecting heat output. [full story]

May 16 - 10:40am EDT   The top-ranking online electronics stores continue to be dominated by Apple and other specialized sites, according to a new study by ForeSee Results. Both Apple and hobbyist computer store Newegg have tied each other for the highest satisfiaction scores in an examination of the top 100 shops in the US, each reaching the 80-point threshold ForeSee says is necessary to be considered "superior." The company doesn't provide specifics as to why these two topped the charts but notes that its rankings are based on both the actual ease of use of the site as well as the ability to find stock and get it at the right price. [full story]