Web search leader Google is hiring scores of radio sales people and is spending heavily in a bid to expand its position in the $20 billion radio industry. Google spokesman Michael Mayzel said this week that the company will begin a public test of Google Audio Ads by the end of the year. Advertisers will be able to go online and sign up for targeted radio ads using the same AdWords system they use to buy Web search ads. Google is generally testing its ability to move into offline media, this week saying it would help customers buy advertisements in 50 U.S. newspapers.

With the release of Constructor, the first product in the Grammar Games series from Leading Step, students can have fun while learning all about nouns, verbs, objects, clauses and phrases while improving their ability to identify the parts of a sentence. With Constructor installed on a Palm OS handheld device, they will learn to recognize and identify various parts of speech in standard English.

BoxWave has released three new products for the Motorola Q, the premium Designio Leather Case, ActiveCase hard case, and Standard Capacity battery.

Wal-Mart is whacking prices on PCs and TVs in a bid to expand its electronics business. The retailing giant has started selling a Compaq laptop for $398 a few weeks ahead of Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving and one of the biggest shopping days of the year. Wal-Mart is also touting a 42-inch Panasonic plasma TV for $1,294 (down from $1,794) and a 37-inch HDTV LCD from Panasonic for $997 (down from $1,297).

Palm has issued a statement in response to a patent-infringement lawsuit filed against it by patent-holding company NTP. The NTP lawsuit claims that certain Palm products infringe seven NTP patents. All seven of the patents asserted are being re-examined by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and have been rejected by the re-examiners as invalid. Palm also noted that the NTP patents disclose a pager-based email service that has nothing in common with the mobile-computing devices invented by Palm.

Belkin announced new accessories for the Zune digital media player, including an FM transmitter, backup battery pack, and a host of various cases. With the Zune player’s landscape mode, these new accessories–such as the TunePower, TuneBase FM Transmitter, and acrylic case–allow you to watch your video while keeping your Zune protected and playing.

Today is Election Day here in the United States. As a registered voter, I did my duty and went down to my local polling place, and cast my vote. It was, without a doubt, the most disturbing voting experience I’ve ever had. In particular, we had issues of both inappropriate electioneering and a complete lack of privacy. Our interest here at Computing Unplugged was initially the touchscreen machines, since this is a computing technology that touches on our coverage areas. However, we’re also interested in the optical-scan systems, since they, too, are managed by computers and computing technology.

Read this Computing Unplugged article.

Voters are urged to cast their ballots carefully as scattered reports of election machine glitches have been reported around South Florida during early voting. CBS4’s Dave Malkoff spoke to early voter, John Mabe who claims when he cast his vote at the Lemon City library early voting facility for Jim Davis, the machine registered Charlie Crist as the correct vote. CBS4 found out that this was the not the first voting machine glitch at the Lemon City facility. Apparently there was another case where a woman’s vote was recorded improperly and it was allegedly written up as an “operator error.” Several other South Florida voters say the choices they touched on the electronic screens were not the ones that appeared on the review screen which is the final voting step. In Miami-Dade County incidents like these are logged and reported daily and recorded in a central database and according to election officials, the problem machines are shut down.

The three companies that supply most of the nation’s election equipment and ballots will deploy thousands of technicians Tuesday to head off problems that disrupted some primary elections earlier this year. Missing equipment, programming errors and too few voting machines delayed election results in some states. In others, confused poll workers and voters hesitated to use new touch-screen machines. Three companies–Election Systems & Software, of Omaha, Sequoia Voting Systems of California, and Diebold Election Systems of Ohio–say everyone involved has learned from the mistakes.

Diebold’s voting systems, once touted as a way to avoid a repeat of the 2000 Florida election debacle, have come under fire from critics who question their vulnerability to tampering, and are again in the spotlight ahead of Tuesday’s closely watched U.S. mid-term elections. The 2004 elections wreaked havoc on Diebold’s reputation, when then-Chief Executive Walden O’Dell openly raised money for President Bush and said in a fund-raising letter that he was “committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president.” O’Dell resigned in 2005, but critics have continued to slam the machines’ security against tampering. In September, computer scientists at Princeton University published a paper explaining how the computers could be modified to steal vote data or change votes, and a recent HBO documentary raised questions about the Canton, Ohio-based company’s systems. Diebold said the HBO report was riddled with factual errors, and generally says its voting systems are safe, accurate and secure when properly administered.