This is one of those weeks when it feels like we’ve been overrun by news. Nothing really major, but a lot of things to think about. To get caught up, here’s a sampling of what’s been going on in the Boston tech community today:

—E Ink, the technology maker behind many popular e-reader displays, said that Beijing-based Hanvon Technology will be the first company to sell a color display based on E Ink, starting in March. The New York Times and other media outlets reported the news. The color display, which E Ink told us about a few months ago, works by putting a color filter over E Ink’s standard black-and-white display. Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN), Sony (NYSE: SNE), and other big e-reader makers—not to mention Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL)—aren’t using the technology yet, but are watching closely.

—Akamai (NASDAQ: AKAM) is losing Netflix (NASDAQ: NFLX) as a video-streaming customer (to competitors Level 3 and Limelight), according to Dan Rayburn of StreamingMedia.com and Frost & Sullivan. Rayburn estimates that Netflix’s business is worth $10-15 million to Akamai, and that the change will occur over the coming months.

—Rob Go, the co-founder of NextView Ventures (formerly of Spark Capital), has posted a “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Boston Tech Community.” It’s a quick guide for new entrepreneurs in town. One highlight: Go gives his list of five “scaling companies to watch (i.e., probably hiring)”—Gemvara, CSN Stores, SCVNGR, HubSpot, and DataXu.

—Cambridge, MA-based Backupify, an online data management startup, has released a backup and archiving service for Facebook Fan Pages. The service is geared towards businesses and other organizations that need to keep records of all of their activity on Facebook and other social media sites.

—Boston-based Goby, an activity-based search engine startup, has hired Mike Bennett as its first chief revenue officer. Bennett is a social media entrepreneur and sales and marketing exec who has previously worked at Cheapflights.com, Healthetreatment.com, and Monster.com. (Revenue is a good thing, so hiring a chief revenue officer must be too.)

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For 15 years now, we’ve all thought of the World Wide Web as a near-literal web of connections between millions of servers in different locations, with each machine hosting just a tiny slice of the Web’s overall content. But that’s not the new shape of the Web, according to Arbor Networks of Chelmsford, MA. Today, a startling amount of Web content and traffic is controlled by just a handful of large Internet companies.

“As of 2009, 60 percent of all Internet content comes from, or terminates within, just 100 to 150 companies,” says Craig Labovitz, Arbor’s chief scientist. “That’s a very dramatic change in where the data is coming from.”

What that means in practical terms is that if you surf to the website for, say, the Pretty Good Car Company, more than likely the data is no longer stored on servers at Pretty Good itself, but on machines owned by a centralized infrastructure provider that Pretty Good has hired to handle its site, such as Akamai, Limelight, Rackspace, Amazon, Equinix, GoDaddy, or Verizon.

Arbor released data on this and other trends yesterday at the North American Network Operators Group conference in Dearborn, MI. The company makes software that helps companies detect and prevent denial-of-service attacks against their Internet servers.That software is installed on the Internet routers of 70 to 80 percent of the top content providers and Internet service providers in North America, which allows Arbor to collect vast amounts of information about Internet traffic.

Indeed, Arbor’s view of network traffic rivals and in some ways surpasses that of Cambridge, MA-based Akamai, whose “State of the Internet” reports we’ve covered frequently here. Only about 20 percent of global Internet traffic passes through Akamai’s content distribution network.

In a trend that Arbor calls the “rise of the hyper giants,” most Web content and traffic is moving to a small number of very large hosting providers and cloud services companies. The world’s Internet addresses are controlled by about 35,000 network operators, and as recently as 2007, the majority of Internet traffic was smoothly distributed across these operators. But today, 60 percent of all Internet traffic is generated by just 100 companies, according to Arbor, which conducted its study in collaboration with the University of Michigan and the non-profit Merit Network in Ann Arbor, MI.

There is concentration at the very top: 30 percent of all traffic comes from just 30 companies. And Google alone generates about 6 percent of all Internet traffic, Arbor found. Akamai, Microsoft, Limelight, Yahoo, and GigaNews (which hosts Usenet newsgroups) are also on the list of “hyper giants.”

“Basically, 150 to 200 companies are now generating the majority of Internet content, at least as measured by traffic,” says Labovitz. It’s an inevitable and, in some ways, unsurprising trend, given the rising popularity of cloud-based hosting models for both content and software, and in view of the huge investment required to build data centers with the processing and communications capacity to handle today’s most popular forms of content, especially bandwidth-hogging video. But one implication, of course, is that outages and other snafus in a single location can affect many more Internet users all at once.

“Ensuring availability used to mean backing up your mail server or your laptop,” says Labovitz. “Nowadays, what does it mean if all your e-mail is on Google and Google is down for the day? If it wasn’t true before, it is very quickly becoming true: the network is the computer.”

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On Friday a judge in the U.S. District Court of Massachusetts overturned a February 2008 jury verdict that had ordered Tempe, AZ-based content distribution network Limelight Networks to pay Cambridge, MA-based Akamai Technologies $45 million in damages for patent infringement. Limelight successfully challenged the jury award based on new case law. Akamai immediately said it would appeal the decision.

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Does Amazon’s CloudFront announcement today mean a cold front is on the way for Cambridge, MA-based Akamai?

Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) said a couple of months ago that it was working on a way to let users of its Amazon Web Services  infrastructure speed delivery of Web graphics, software downloads, audio and video files, and other materials to Web users over its global network of servers. And today, in a direct assault on existing content distribution networks (CDNs) like Akamai, Limelight, and Voxel, it has unveiled the beta version of that service, called CloudFront.

It’s the latest step in the expansion of the Seattle e-retail giant’s cloud computing infrastructure, which allows other companies large and small to rent as much external processing power or storage as they need. As with its processing utility (the Elastic Compute Cloud, or EC2) and its storage utility (the Simple Storage Service, or S3), Amazon will sell access to CloudFront on a self-service, pay-as-you-go basis.

The service seems aimed at least in part at customers who currently have fixed, long-term contracts with the likes of Akamai (NASDAQ: AKAM) and Limelight, or who don’t generate enough traffic to qualify for discounted rates with the established CDNs.

“Traditionally, to secure scalable, reliable, low latency content delivery, businesses have been required to negotiate upfront or long-term commitments,” Amazon’s CloudFront announcement states. “Even then, only customers with significant scale have been able to negotiate inexpensive rates. With CloudFront, there are no upfront costs or commitments required—all developers are able to benefit from Amazon’s scale to enjoy low prices.”

Pundits have speculated that Amazon’s new service will put pressure on existing CDNs to introduce lower or more flexible prices. When I put that point to Jeff Young, Akamai’s director of corporate communications, he declined to comment.

Young did say, however, that he thought Akamai’s network—which was built specifically to support transfers of large or frequently requested files such as e-commerce Web pages and high-definition videos—will continue to be a better choice for most large online publishers. “Akamai provides comprehensive content and application acceleration services for powering the online businesses of today’s leading global enterprises, helping our customers to monetize their content,” Young said.

For existing Amazon Web Services customers, CloudFront makes it easy to copy original files already stored on S3 and replicate them across CloudFront “edge servers” around the Internet, where they’re closer to the users requesting them and can therefore be delivered faster. That’s the same idea behind all CDNs—the difference with CloudFront being that users pay only for actual data transfers, at rates that vary between $0.09 and $0.22 per gigabyte, depending on the geographic area. (Transfers from Amazon’s edge servers in Hong Kong and Japan are more expensive than those from servers in North America and Europe.)

Amazon identified two early users of CloudFront: Dallas, TX-based online retailer Woot, which highlights one product per day and is using the service to deliver product photos to shoppers, and London, UK-based casual games company PlayFish, which uses CloudFront to speed downloads of its games.

But CloudFront isn’t the first pay-as-you-go CDN: that title may belong to New York-based Voxel, which introduced technology back in April that allows customers to pull content into its network from Amazon S3. Tech blogs such as ReadWriteWeb have described CloudFront as a preemptive move by Amazon to keep services like Voxel from overtaking the market for cloud-based content distribution.

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A federal jury in Boston ruled today that Limelight Networks of Tempe, AZ, infringed on a key MIT patent licensed to Akamai Technologies (NASDAQ: AKAM) of Cambridge, MA. Akamai also won a damage award totaling more than $45 million. But the verdict was not the huge win Akamai hoped it would be, as much of the company’s case against Limelight had been thrown out weeks earlier, and Akamai acknowledges it felt that the evidence called for an award of at least $100 million.

Nevertheless, Jeff Young, Akamai’s director of corporate communications told Xconomy this afternoon, “We’re extremely pleased with the jury’s verdict. We have an obligation to our shareholders to protect the unique assets of our technology. Today’s ruling recognizes the strength of our patent portfolio and is a tangible reflection of our resolve to vigorously defend the company’s intellectual property.”

Akamai and Limelight both operate global content distribution networks used by media companies and other Web publishers to speed delivery of video, music, software, games, and other rich media to end users. Both companies’ networks do this in part by caching copies of the most-requested content on networks of servers that, in effect, bring the content closer to end users and dilute traffic.

Akamai sued Limelight in the U.S. District Court of Massachusetts in Boston in June 2006, alleging that Limelight was infringing on two key patents covering various aspects of its content distribution network. The patents, U.S. patents 6,108,703, and 6,553,413, are owned by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and licensed exclusively to Akamai. In a summary judgment in early February, the court ruled that Limelight was not infringing on patent 6,554,413. That narrowed the case to patent 6,108,703, which was issued in August 2000.

The patent describes a “global hosting system” that includes a method of copying content from a web server to a network of caching servers around the world and directing browsers to the cached content by “prepending” a modified URL for the caching server to the URL for the original file. The jury ruled that Limelight is infringing on this “prepend” method and another so-called “CNAME” method claimed in the patent.

The essence of the jury’s thinking is captured in a seven-page form signed and presumably also filled out by foreperson James Ranieri. On the form, “X” marks indicate that the jury decided that Limelight infringed on four claims involving the prepend and CNAME methods and rejected all of Limelight’s claims that the patent was invalid. The form also includes hand-written notes detailing damages to be awarded to Akamai. These include $40,102,000 to compensate for profits lost as a result of Limelight’s infringement, to which the jury affixed a royalty of $1,424,946, and a further $4 million in price erosion damages suffered by Akamai—accounting for the total award of $45,526,946. You can see the Akamai verdict form here.

Akamai had hoped for a much larger damage award, according to Young. “I can’t really comment on the specific amount, but we believe the evidence showed at least a nine-figure damage number,” he said. The company said it will return to court to seek a permanent injunction prohibiting Limelight from selling services that infringe on the ’703 patent. “We anticipate that there will be a series of post-trial motions before the court,” Young said.

For its part, Limelight issued the following statement from Phil Maynard, the company’s chief legal counsel: “We are disappointed with the jury’s verdict in this matter. We strongly believe that, like other companies that follow long-established Internet standards, we do not infringe the patent in this case. We will continue to remain a competitive choice in the marketplace as we pursue all appropriate legal avenues.”

Akamai has pursued perceived patent infringers aggressively in the courts. In fact, this is the second (by some counts the third) time the company has successfully asserted the ’703 patent against a competitor. The first suit came shortly after the patent was issued and was brought against Digital Island, a content distribution company later bought by Cable & Wireless. In 2002 Akamai won a permanent injunction forcing Exodus, the Cable & Wireless business unit to which Digital Island belonged, to stop using its Footprint content distribution service.

Also in 2002, Akamai sued Speedera Networks of Santa Clara, CA, again alleging infringement of the ’703 patent. A drawn-out legal battle finally ended in 2005 when Akamai bought Speedera.

(Here’s another link to the Akamai-Limelight case’s filled-in jury verdict form.)

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