Facebook’s coziness with Washington and the astronomical tax bill its founder could face by exercising a huge cache of stock options are some of the latest details to emerge about the social network following its IPO announcement.

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The Watson supercomputer is about to begin evaluating cancer treatment options that can be delivered to physicians in a matter of seconds.

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Here are some recent stories on TechCrunch Gadgets:

The Zen Table Practices Mindfulness So You Don’t Have To

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“Hacktivist” group Anonymous is having a laugh at law enforcement’s expense after secretly recording a conference call between the FBI, U.K. authorities, and other foreign police agencies, and then posting the recorded conversation online.

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Riverbed Technology plans to make enterprise data centers look like local storage at branch offices with Granite, a new accelerator technology the company is announcing on Wednesday.

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Brandon Watson, a major player in the resurrection of Microsoft's Windows Phone OS, specifically in his work with developers, has taken a job with Amazon. Watson confirmed his departure Friday on Twitter, and ZDNet's Mary Jo Foley tracked down that he'll be director of the Kindle Cross-Platform Team. Foley says that makes him responsible for for all of the first- and third-party Kindle apps, which would include Android's own Amazon Kindle application.

Said Watson:

The rumors are true. The team is in great hands. I'll miss working on #wpdev. I will [miss] the community, but won't be a stranger.

With a high-profile name like Watson, who was one of Microsoft's biggest cheerleaders for the revived Windows Phone platform (and a hell of a nice dude — I've met him a couple times), you can't help but wonder what else Amazon has up its sleeve. Amazon's running what is believe to be the most successful forked version of Android with its Kindle Fire e-reader/tablet, along with its wildly successful Amazon Appstore. And now Amazon's picked up some serious Microsoft talent. 

No doubt that if anyone has the traditional manufacturers looking over their shoulders a little bit, especially in the tablet space, it's Amazon. On the other hand, while the Kindle family (and Kindle Fire in particular) may be moving a bunch of units — up 177 percent over last year — maybe they looked at Amazon's profit and shrugged. Either way, things are getting interesting.

Source: @brandonwatson, ZDNet; via WPCentral

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Fueled by a firestorm of outrage on Twitter and Facebook, the people behind the Susan G. Komen For the Cure Friday backed off their decision to cut funding of Planned Parenthood programs.

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Research in Motion said its “Be Bold” cartoon superheroes unveiled in a recent blog infographic were “intended to be a bit of fun” and are not a new ad campaign.

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You may remember the Peek, a device that showed up back in 2008 (so long ago, now!) offering nothing but email. That’s right, nothing but email in an age when smartphones were already becoming popular, and the iPhone was changing the way people thought about interacting with their data.

In a way, it was genius: limiting the service and the device made it easy to explain and simple to use. It does email, period. An interesting tack, and one that kept them rolling for a few years, but alas, Peek is finally going to take the big sleep.

Despite revising the hardware and switching up the pricing, the Peek couldn’t maintain relevance in the face of smartphones and tablets. There was always the question of whether it was a legitimate market at all, but I object to that objection. I think it’s a brilliant proposition, and one many people found useful. But you just can’t fight progress, and while phones and tablets got more capable, they also got easier to use.

Ironically, it might have been trying to compete that made the Peek at last irrelevant. The people who liked it didn’t think of it as a less-capable smartphone, but as a single-purpose device, like a fork or a measuring tape. That value proposition, focus, is something we’re seeing in practice in single-purpose sites like Imgur and so on. But the philosophy of the mobile phone as Swiss army knife has taken over in the hardware field, so devices like the Peek got left behind.

The Verge talked to the CEO, and he said that there are a few thousand devices lying around in warehouses, and he’d like to put them into the hands of interested hackers. The Peek 9 was a perfectly workable piece of hardware, though not particularly powerful, but perhaps it could be made into something interesting or useful by a little creative coding. Head over there for more info.

Update: It should be noted that this isn’t the end for Peek the company, only Peek the service and line of devices. Peek Inc actually just closed a big funding round to fuel its work bringing smartphone-type software to low-cost mobile devices. We’ll report more on that as the story develops.

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