IBM has a habit of being a beacon during economic calamity. Of course, its earnings yesterday helped everyone feel for at least a moment that the world wasn’t coming to an end. But that pales in comparison to IBM’s feat during the Great Depression. Hopefully, we’ll see more of the same from the company.

I know about this because I wrote a book about the guy who built IBM, Thomas Watson Sr., titled “The Maverick and His Machine.” (Earlier this week, blogger Ed Cone picked up on the connection between IBM then and now.)

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Sam Gustin says: The commercialization of Twitter continues, for companies other than Twitter, at least.

Twittertise (get it? Twitter + advertise) allows users to schedule their updates for a certain time.

This is a new twist for Twitter, which is supposed to be all about what you’re doing “right now.”

Now companies can set specific times for sending out commercial messages like special offers, instead of having some unlucky employee manually send out the updates.

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Kevin Maney smacks his head: While you’re lusting over a new iPhone, think about this: Why can’t you watch free, regular, over-the-air TV on your phone? Isn’t that what you really want–not these bastardized TV offerings that you have to pay for, like AT&T’s Mobile TV and Sprint’s MobiTV?

I just got off the phone with Reed Hundt, former chairman of the FCC and now an investor and consultant. He’s involved in a number of companies, but he said the one that’s most exciting right now is Telegent. It has been working for three years to figure out how to make chips that would go in cell phones and allow them to pick up regular local TV signals. “It’s very hard to do,” Hundt says.

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Blaise Zerega misses $4/gallon gasoline: The Segway is a huge success–as a technology product. But even as high gas prices have increased sales, as reported by WSJ today, it’s hard to term it a business success. And for that reason, greentech start-ups and their backers ought to examine what’s gone wrong.

Launched amid enormous hype in 2001, Dean Kamen’s splendid invention has become a textbook example of how hard it is to challenge the energy and transportation industries. Relying on an electrical charge and with a 25-mile range, the Segway seemed a perfect solution for short commutes and errands around town. Not so fast.

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In Microsoft’s never-ending search to bloat its software with bells and whistles of questionable use, the company now wants to add touch-screen capabilities to Windows. Raise your hand if you’ve been dying to navigate on your laptop by touching the screen? Anybody? Anyone at all?

This is the company that has been sure the tablet PC would be a success since 1999. It’s never been more than a computing niche. Yeah, touch-screen makes sense on something you hold in your hand, like an iPhone or Treo. But not-so-much with something that sits on your desk.

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Reports, rumors and innuendos are bouncing around the Web that Google may not want to cut an advertising deal with Yahoo after all. This before there is actually substantiation that Google and Yahoo are crafting an advertising deal, which was something of a rumor and innuendo in the first place, allegedly planted to let Microsoft know that Yahoo had options.

Google is allegedly worried about ticking off Washington officials who might think that if Google is playing ball with Yahoo, Google has become an antitrust violator that must be terminated. As if Google isn’t already close to monopoly power in search. It gets 67% of all searches, and that share keeps growing. Google worrying that a Yahoo deal will push it over the brink in antitrust is like Kim Jong-il worrying that if he puts on a party hat he’ll be considered crazy.

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Lots of interesting debate about this week’s Pulitzer Prizes and what they say about the newspaper industry. On Gawker, Nick Denton very smartly says that “the newspapers’ Pulitzer-chasing is most damaging because it distracts newspapers from their real challenge. Rather than impress colleagues with the seriousness of their reporting, U.S. newspapers need to engage a readership that is drifting off to television and the Internet.”

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Starbucks is turning to social networking and hoping its customers will help it out of its current slump.

But maybe Starbucks has a problem it can’t solve with technology or anything else. I had lunch the other day with iconoclastic economist and author Tyler Cowen. We got talking about Starbucks, which Cowen suggested has been so successful in large part because of an aura it created–not because it ever had better coffee. Starbucks was a cool new thing, he said, and it grew rapidly to take advantage of that image. But the rapid growth now becomes Starbucks very undoing–because by definition, if you’re huge and omnipresent, you can no longer be the cool new thing.

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The Japanese have one view of robotics–researchers there constantly work at making robots that are like humans (Honda’s Asimo) and humans that are more like robots.

Colin Angle, CEO of the most successful consumer robot company, iRobot, operates on a different vision. He believes that trying to build a humanoid bot is a waste of time. Instead, we’ll have teams of special-purpose robots that work together.

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