Roundup: FCC opens airwaves, Google slows hiring and more

Here’s the latest action (aside from a certain election):

FCC agrees to open up the airwaves — A section of the radio spectrum known as white space has been set aside for public use, a move pushed for by tech companies like Google and Microsoft.

Google slows hiring — CNBC reported that Google has implemented an unofficial hiring freeze, but the search giant denies the rumor, saying that it has merely slowed down.

Dell making more cutbacks — The computer maker has instituted a global hiring freeze, is offering “enhanced” severance packages and is encouraging employees to take unpaid leave. Meanwhile, chief executive Michael Dell is nurturing a budding film career, with a brief appearance in a film called “The Sno Cone Stand, Inc.”

Gaming platform Steam Cloud coming this week — The new offering from famed game maker Valve will allow gamers to store things like keyboard and mouse configurations in the Internet cloud, then access them from other computers.

Mr. Benioff, tear down that wall — Salesforce.com chief executive Marc Benioff says his company is all about love, but Zoho’s Sridhar Vembu disagrees, using Zoho’s attempt to get onto the Salesforce AppExchange as an example.

Voting machines are still causing problems — Virginia and Pennsylvania had the biggest issues yesterday, according to Wired.

What would Facebook look like with huge ads? — That’s what brand advertisers really want, argues blogger Andrew Chen. He put together an impressive mockup, featuring the new James Bond film Quantum of Solace.

Same-sex marriage ban wins in California — Proposition 8 was opposed by a number of Silicon Valley luminaries, including Sergey Brin of Google, eBay founder Pierre Omidyar and Jerry Yang of Yahoo, but it looks like a majority of California voters supported the initiative. On the other hand, Silicon Valley (by which I mean Santa Clara and San Mateo counties) voted overwhelmingly against it.

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