Verizon walked away a big winner from the FCC spectrum auction, bidding $9.4 billion for the biggest chunk of the spectrum, giving them a decent advantage over other cell phone companies. Even though Google didn’t win any of its own bids, it will be able to enter the cell phone market with the gphone, because a large section of the wireless spectrum that was sold must be “open”, so that any cell phone manufacturer can use it. Google lobbied for that rule and got it – so we’re still on track to see gphones on the street before long.

Miro, the free video tool that lets you download movies from places like YouTube and then save them to your hard drive for viewing later, has just released a new update. You can now set channels to not automatically download, and it has an improved interface that now loads faster and runs better, and it no longer crashes all the time on Windows Vista.

OpenOffice, the free alternative to Microsoft Office, is giving us a sneak peak at the next version of their software. New in this version is a multi-page view of Writer, the free Microsoft Word replacement, and Office 2007 support. OpenOffice is a great competitor to Office, and includes many advantages, including one click PDF file creation and editing.

Last Friday, we saw the launch of the new cross platform gaming network, Mytopia. It launched simultaneously across MySpace, Facebook and Bebo. It currently has eight video games available for these three social networks, and they’ll release widgets for iGoogle Gadgets, Apple Dashboard Widgets, Yahoo Widgets and Windows Vista Toolbar Widgets later today.

And finally — last Thursday a web developer in San Francisco used Twitter to propose to his girlfriend. And believe it or not, this wasn’t the first marriage proposal on twitter – it was the second. She twittered back “I do” only a minute later.