Can a business be run solely in the cloud without a server anywhere in sight? Appirio says it can and is already doing it.

Starting out with four people two years ago and growing to nearly 100 employees, the company relies on cloud-based, on-demand software from Google and Salesforce.com, said Narinder Singh, founder and chief marketing officer at Appirio. The company provides products and services to accelerate adoption of on-demand services.

"Today, our company continues to run its entire business in the cloud. There's no servers inside Appirio," Singh said during a presentation at the Office 2.0 conference in San Francisco on Thursday afternoon.

The company uses Google Docs to collaborate on a day-to-day basis and Salesforce.com for such tasks as an employee recruitment system. Human resources, IT asset management, and financial systems also run in the cloud. Google Sites, providing secure Web sites, is used for collaborating with customers.

Annual IT costs per employee for hardware and software at Appirio are less than $1,000, as opposed to the $6,000 to $12,000 per employee that was spent at SAP when Singh worked there, he stressed. With cloud-based computing, large and small companies have access to the same infrastructure, Singh said. The core infrastructure will scale as Appirio grows, he said.

"We even manage the subscription process of how we actually look at licensing our customers inside of Salesforce," Singh said.

While acknowledging the risks that Google's applications and Salesforce.com are not immune to system failures, Singh nonetheless stressed the high uptime rates, estimating that Salesforce.com is has better than a 99.9 percent uptime rate. Appirio expects these uptimes to increase, he said. Appirio had pondered building redundant systems for some customers and process areas but has not acquired this capability, Singh said.

Appirio at the conference introduced Premium and Personal editions of its Sync tools intended to make individuals more productive. These tools provide synchronization for Google and Salesforce.com so users can more easily connect to their day-to-day productivity tools, the company said.

The company also now offers a package service to help prototype business models using on-demand platforms. The Business Model Prototyping service is based on a four-to-eight week engagement for executives at large and mid-sized businesses.

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Bob Rice is the author of Three Moves Ahead: What Chess Can Teach You About Business, and the former C.E.O. of a tech startup. He now runs merchant bank Tangent Capital, which he founded in 2005.

Love 'em to death, but here's the thing to remember about Google: Your business is its business.

Google doesn't sell software or hardware or content. It sells you -- or, slightly more precisely, its ability to understand your habits and deliver your attention to particular advertisers. And because of this, I am just a touch nervous about installing Chrome, its new browser software.

Of course, Google already collects mountains of information about you from your searches (you do realize they keep track of those, right?), and from the huge cookie collection delivered fresh daily by their ad bakery (the cookie gathers information from all Google products and affiliates -- and doesn't expire until 2038). Gmail users may also have long ago realized they were conceding privacy for convenience and bells and whistles.

Indeed, Google has far more and better data about your habits than the relatively modest amounts that set of privacy firestorms for AOL and DoubleClick (which Google now owns) back in the day. But so far, with Google, it's been like successfully boiling a frog: the temperature has gone up very slowly, so nobody's jumped out of the pot just yet.

Perhaps that's because Google offers so many wonderful services. Who wants to head out without checking the traffic with Google Maps (oops, more footprints)? Or plan an event without checking everybody's calendar (oy...)?

At first glance, Chrome seems just another browser -- and between us, who cares? IE, Safari, Firefox, Chrome -- one has more cup-holders, another has leather trim. So is the idea really just to take a piece of the "browser business," as many say? I doubt it, largely because there isn't one: Nobody's paid for browser software since about 1998. Firefox, remember, is the product of a nonprofit -- one that, interestingly, has been heavily funded by Google, for reasons previously unknown.

At first, Google's goal will be to change the software game and speed your transition from a desktop-driven environment to its "cloud computing" applications: word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation software. Google hopes that soon, you'll create these documents on one computer, leave them on their servers in the sky, and then continue working on them later from any other computer. Natch, you'll collaborate, share and deliver the docs this way, too. And Chrome will be the interface for it all, on top of serving more mundane web surfing functions.

And all the while, Google will be doing the usual, capturing your data, your documents, your habits.

And, how will they use all this information? To do what they do: deliver ever more precisely targeted ads, with concomitant higher response rates, and thus generate more dollars. Maybe we'll see "This cell sponsored by Fidelity" in our spreadsheets soon.

Sure, other companies are in position to track your data, too. The difference is that, for the most part, their business models don't require them to exploit that knowledge. And certainly nobody has the reach that Google has and will have -- especially after they eliminate your last ability to hide with the G-phone this fall.

Now we know Big Brother's real name, do we care? Free software and services are great, and I'd rather see relevant ads than irrelevant ones. But make no mistake: this lunch, too, has a real cost. It's called privacy.

So that's the question consumers have to answer: Is it worth it? If they genuinely don't care about one company controlling a complete catalog of their surfing and working, talking and texting, and meetings and greetings, fine. For me, I think I'd rather pay cash and avoid a virtual peeping Tom who only makes money if he predicts my private behavior well. But, then, I admit it: I'm so 2005.

So, shine up your computer with Chrome if you like; but at least consider getting that "Do No Evil" promise in writing first.

Dell's new netbook, the Inspiron Mini 9, will be sold with built-in mobile broadband by Vodafone, the companies announced on Thursday. The deal is part of a growing trend, as operators try to find new growth opportunities.

Dell's entry in the growing netbook space weighs in at just over 1 kilogram, and has an 8.9-inch LED display. Like some of its competitors it has an SSD (solid-state disk) for storage, holding up to 16GB.

[ For more on products in the hot mini-notebook category, check out our hands-on looks at Asus' Eee PC 901 and 1000, the Cloudbook Max netbook, Elitegroup's G10IL mini-laptop, MSI's Wind low-cost laptop, Giga-byte's M912X mini-laptop, HP's Mini-Note netbook, and Acer's Aspire one. ]

The Vodafone version of the netbook supports download speeds up to 7.2Mbps and upload speeds up to 2Mbps, using HSDPA (High-Speed Downlink Packet Access) and HSUPA (High-Speed Uplink Packet Access), according to company spokesman Ben Taylor. The Mini 9 also comes equipped with support for Wi-Fi.

Vodafone will start selling the Mini 9 later this month, but has not yet said in which countries it will offer the netbook. For now its "in key European markets," the operator said.

Vodafone will announce pricing later, but if you just want the netbook, it sells elsewhere for from £299 ($526) in the United Kingdom. A version with Ubuntu's version of the Linux operating system, with a user interface customized by Dell, will also go on sale with a starting price of £269. Vodafone isn't announcing which operating system it has picked, or if both will be available, according to Taylor.

Vodafone is far from alone in its interest in the laptop market. In just the last couple of weeks Orange, Telenor, and TeliaSonera have also announced similar plans.

As growth has flattened in areas including voice, SMS (Short Message Service), and roaming, operators have been forced to look elsewhere, and the addition of laptops to their offerings is a no-brainer, according to Shaun Collins, managing director at CCS Insight. "For the operator it's all additional business, there are for example no interconnect costs it has to share with others," said Collins, who thinks that next year laptops will grow to be as important to operators as mobile phones.

But it's not just the operators who have learned to value laptops. Laptop manufacturers have also realized that the mobile broadband market is a growth opportunity for them as well, and are more open to making deals, according to Collins.

The market is still in its infancy, and for the next couple of years there will be a land-grab, as operators fight over the customer base, according to Collins. "Then we'll start to see some differentiation," said Collins, as operators start to take advantage of the open nature of PCs, and add software to guide users to their own offerings.

A team of researchers have built a malicious Facebook program an experiment to demonstrate the possible dangers of social networking applications.

The experiment shows the ease with which attackers could dupe large number of users into downloading a seemingly harmless application that actually performs a clandestine attack that can cripple a Web site.

[ Learn how to secure your systems with Roger Grimes' Security Adviser blog and newsletter, both from InfoWorld. ]

Facebook and other Web sites such as MySpace, Bebo, and Google are creating technology platforms that let third-party developers build applications to run on those sites. The concept has opened the door to innovation, but also prompted worries over how those applications could be used for spam or steal personal data.

The researchers developed an application called "Photo of the Day," which serves up a new National Geographic photo daily. But in the background, every time the application is clicked, it sends a 600K HTTP request for images to a victim's Web site.

Those requests, as well as those images, are not seen by someone using Photo of the Day, which the researchers have termed a "Facebot" application. The effect is a flood of traffic to the victim's Web site, known as a DoS attack.

The researchers uploaded their application to Facebook in January and told a few colleagues about it. Even without advertising or other promotion, close to 1,000 people installed it in their profiles, much to the researchers' surprise.

They then monitored traffic on a Web site they set up for Photo of the Day to attack. If those traffic figures were applied to Facebook applications that have a million or more users, they estimated a victim's Web site could be bombarded by as much as 23Mbps of traffic, or 248GB of unwanted data per day.

"Facebook applications have a highly-distributed platform with significant attack firepower under their control," wrote the researchers.

The malicious Facebot could also be rigged for other nefarious duties. An attacker could create an application that uses JavaScript and HTTP requests to figure out if a particular host has certain ports open, they wrote. Another possibility is to construct an application that delivers a malicious link in order to infect a Web site with malware.

Since Facebook applications can get access to users' personal details, it would also be possible for the application to grab all of those details and post them to a remote server, they wrote.

However, social networking sites can take measures to prevent bad applications, the researchers said. One remedy is ensuring that applications can't interact with hosts that aren't part of the social network. New applications should also be vigorously verified by the social networking site. APIs should be crafted so as not to allow too much interaction with the rest of the Internet.

Photo of the Day is still listed on Facebook, with its authorship attributed to Andreas Makridakis, one of the researchers. The application has 543 users now, with several comments praising it.

The study was published by the Foundation for Research and Technology in Heraklion, Greece, and the Institute for Infocomm Research in Singapore.

Sun Microsystems will introduce a storage appliance based on its FISHworks software package by the end of this year and later extend the technology to other types of products through partnerships.

FISHworks is a set of software components for building specialized appliances on industry-standard x86 hardware. Though it runs best on Sun equipment and the company's OpenSolaris open-source operating system, the software theoretically could work on other platforms, according to Sun.

[ Get the latest on storage developments with InfoWorld's Storage Adviser blog and Storage Report newsletter. ]

The idea behind FISHworks is to offer the all-in-one simplicity of an appliance, fully tested and configured, with open-source software and commodity hardware. FISHworks stands for Fully Integrated Software and Hardware, but will get a new name when it is commercially released, said Mike Shapiro, a distinguished engineer in Sun's FISHworks group.

The platform was announced in February 2007 and had been expected earlier this year, but Sun said it has been fine-tuning it so it's a fully baked product when it hits the market. The company joins a growing list of big vendors working on virtual appliance platforms, including IBM, VMware, Red Hat, and Novell, according to IDC analyst Brett Waldman. Unlike conventional appliances, virtual ones aren't tied to a particular hardware system.

Sun is using FISHworks in a reinvention of its storage products around its own intellectual property, after selling storage products it brought on through acquisitions for several years, Shapiro said. The high-performance NAS (network-attached storage) appliances coming later this year will be designed for large enterprises. FISHworks will use Sun's ZFS (Zettabyte File System) storage software, which has distinctive Sun features including an analytics tool that uses the company's DTrace (Dynamic Tracing) technology.

The DTrace-based tool is more powerful than any other such tool in the industry for telling IT managers what is working or not, according to Sun. For example, it can drill down to tell an administrator which protocol is consuming the most resources on a storage network, which clients are using that protocol the most and which files they are working with, and more, Shapiro said. This would help IT managers troubleshoot problems such as boot-up times for virtual servers that get longer over time, he said.

Some time after rolling out the NAS appliances, Sun will offer the software components as an "appliance kit" for OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) to build their own products. As an example, Sun pointed to Dell, which today licenses Windows 2003 for some of its storage gear. Using OpenSolaris would save that licensing cost, according to Sun. In addition, enterprises could use software components to build their own systems if they chose.

In storage, Sun is going after a fast-growing industry that is fairly new territory for the company. Enterprises are looking for a simple finished solution, so coming out with storage appliances based on this platform is probably a good move, said Andrew Reichman, an analyst with Forrester Research. So far, Sun's storage lineup has been a mishmash, he said.

"While Sun does have interesting and valuable pieces ... they have not put it together to be a very compelling offer," Reichman said.

Even with the appliances, it will be hard for the company to catch up to big names such as EMC and NetApp, he added.

"Storage is a (market) where you've got to have experience and expertise and develop a relationship over time," Reichman said. "People buy storage for reputation and solidity ... much more than they do for a low-cost solution."

A vendor such as Dell, which lacks a strong enterprise-class NAS product, might find FISHworks a worthwhile option, said Taneja Group analyst Arun Taneja. It will all come down to dollars and cents, he said -- information that's not yet available.

If there is any doubt that vendors want to poke desktop virtualization into the psyche of corporate IT, then last week's rash of vendor announcements should put all that to rest.

Microsoft, Red Hat, HP, and Sun all moved to improve their standing in terms of enterprise desktop virtualization software.

[ Stay up to date on the latest virtualization developments with InfoWorld's Virtualization Report blog and newsletter. ]

Microsoft, in a move to shore up its ongoing virtualized desktop story, announced that App-V 4.5 has been completed and that it will be included in the Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack (MDOP) 2008 R2, which is set for release in a few weeks.

App-V (formerly Softgrid) lets users package applications up into "containers," store them on a server where they can be centrally managed, and then stream those containers to desktops, devices, or shared PCs.

Microsoft has been pushing what it calls the Optimized Desktop, which addresses centralized management and deployment of physical and virtual resources.

With App-V 4.5, which is the first version developed under the company's Trustworthy Computing and Secure by Default guidelines, Microsoft introduced integration with System Center management tools, including the System Center Operations Manager 2007 Management Pack for App-V 4.5 servers. The software also features Dynamic Suite Composition (DSC), which lets virtualized applications share middleware resources; support for 11 languages; and a service-provider license option called Microsoft Application Virtualization 4.5 Hosting for Desktops.

Microsoft also announced that Citrix is releasing a version of Citrix XenDesktop that will integrate with System Center Virtual Machine Manager when that software ships later this month. 

Red Hat rounds upMeanwhile, Red Hat extended its virtualization wares to the desktop by acquiring vendor Qumranet, which develops a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) platform called SolidICE.

The technology is based on a Linux kernel technology called Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM), which Qumranet wrote and then took open source.

SolidICE provides IT with centralized desktop and image management, high availability, and provisioning for any desktop operating system.

Red Hat said the privately held Qumranet's development, test and support staff, including those that lead the KVM project, will join Red Hat.

The company said in a statement its long-term goal is to infuse servers and desktops with virtualization technology that is built into the operating system.

In a statement, Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst said, "Put simply, Qumranet's KVM and VDI technologies are at the forefront of the next generation of virtualization."

Meanwhile, HP announced that it was upgrading its HP Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) platform with the HP VDI Citrix XenDesktop. HP said the Citrix version could be used for entry-level implementations up to enterprisewide desktop delivery.

XenDesktop uses virtual machine technology to deliver the Windows desktop from a central server to network clients. XenDesktop gives the IT staff the ability to centrally managed desktops. HP also said its will offer "Citrix Ready" blade PCs and thin clients.

Sun tooSun introduced Version 2.0 of xVM VirtualBox, which lets users load virtual machines onto a desktop and install the operating system of their choice. VirtualBox 2.0 adds support for 64-bit Windows Vista and Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and features new platform support options and performance enhancements.

The Macintosh and Sun Solaris versions were upgraded with network performance enhancements. Sun also has improved performance on AMD-based PCs.

Sun also introduced xVM VirtualBox Software Enterprise Subscription, around-the-clock premium support that starts at $30 per user per year.

The IDG News Service contributed to this report. Network World is an InfoWorld affiliate.

When asked if and how they plan to match Microsoft Office's unparalleled feature set, most online office suite vendors simply switch the subject, touting the superiority of their Web-based collaboration, and low or free price.

ZoooS is one of the few vendors that won't dodge the question.

[ Discover the top-rated open source software that received InfoWorld's Bossie awards, and read the Test Center review "Office killers pack some heat." ]

At the Office 2.0 conference in San Francisco this week, the California-European startup will preview a Web office suite that is based on the free, open source OpenOffice.org, Microsoft Office's main desktop competitor.

ZoooS offers Google Docs-like collaboration, such as letting users simultaneously edit the same document. And despite OpenOffice's size -- version 2 for Windows requires 440MB of disk space when installed -- ZoooS offers speedy access to 95 percent of the features and look-and-feel of OpenOffice.org, said ZoooS' CEO and co-founder, Hisham El-Emam.

"It's almost all JavaScript, so it runs really fast, you don't even need Google Chrome," El-Emam said.

ZoooS already has a "few thousand" paying users at several medium-sized companies and its major client, the German Ministry of Education, making the 20-employee startup already profitable, El-Emam said. The basic cost is $999 for a perpetual server license for 10 users, which includes installation support and a few basic support incidents after that. The price per user decreases as the number of users increases, he said.

This isn't El-Eman's first attempt at a Web office suite. The German-trained lawyer co-founded Ajax13, an early online office vendor.

Trying to match Microsoft Office breadth-wise, however, hurt Ajax13's depth, said a Computerworld review last year.

El-Eman split with Ajax13's co-founder, MP3.com founder Michael Robertson, last year, though Robertson retains a small stake in ZoooS.

El-Eman's new approach delivers OpenOffice.org's deep feature set, multilingual capabilities (36 languages), and user interface, which is close but not identical to Microsoft Office.

ZoooS's framework translates the OpenOffice.org code, making it browser-friendly. By the end of this year, the company hopes to have plug-ins and widgets for Firefox, Opera and several other browsers for both on- and offline access. An Internet Explorer version is targeted for the first half of 2009.

El-Eman said a main goal with ZoooS was to target existing users of Microsoft Office. ZoooS can be more attractive on price against Microsoft, he said, and, at the same time, will be appealing to users who are resistant to switch to something free (such as Google Docs) or very low-cost (such as Zoho) because they may be lacking in features.

ZoooS is also developing "skins" for Office 2003 and Office 2007. Thus, users would get the Office user interface of their choice, even though the functional back end remains OpenOffice.org, he said. The only catch: files are natively saved in OpenOffice.org's OpenDocument Format (ODF), rather than native Office or Office Open XML. ZoooS is working on making opening and converting of Office files as fast and true as possible, said El-Eman.

He concedes that ZoooS competes with the desktop version of OpenOffice.org. As a result, attempts to forge an alliance with the open source group "weren't really successful," he said, despite promises to release ZoooS' code as open source via the GPL (General Public License) within the next six months.

El-Eman also admits that ZoooS isn't even the first to take OpenOffice.org online. That would be Ulteo. El-Eman says Ulteo has no offline version today, unlike ZoooS, and differs in other technical ways.

What if making a dent into Microsoft Office's dominance proves too difficult? El-Eman has a Plan B: to use the ZoooS framework to help desktop app vendors take their products online.

ZoooS has already reverse-engineered a prototype of Apple's personal database, FileMaker Pro, which can open FileMaker files and mimic some of its features and user interface. However, it cannot use FileMaker's proprietary code as its functional back end.

Computerworld is an InfoWorld affiliate.

Samsung is eyeing a possible acquisition of memory chip-maker SanDisk. The company, which is the world's largest computer memory maker in the world, said it was "considering various opportunities" with regard to SanDisk "but nothing has been decided yet."

The comment came after Korean online news service Edaily reported that Samsung had engaged JPMorgan Chase to advise on the acquisition of SanDisk.

[ Keep up on the latest tech news headlines at InfoWorld News, or subscribe to the Today's Headlines newsletter. ]

In response, SanDisk issued a brief statement that, as is standard in such cases, didn't directly address the report in question.

"SanDisk periodically has conversations with multiple parties, including Samsung, regarding a variety of potential business opportunities. We evaluate all of these opportunities, but maintain a policy of not commenting on market rumors or speculation," it said.

SanDisk has seen its share price sink from just under $80 at the beginning of 2006 to $14 on Thursday. So far this year its share price and thus the value of the company has more than halved.

The acquisition buzz comes as the two companies are currently battling each other in court over the April 2006 termination of a patent licensing agreement. Samsung disputed the termination of the agreement and the two entered arbitration, which ended in May this year with a panel deciding the contract had been properly terminated. On July 24 Samsung petitioned the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York to vacate the panel's final award. SanDisk said it intends to fight the Samsung petition.

SanDisk has close ties to Toshiba, a rival to Samsung, and the two jointly operate flash memory production factories through their Flash Alliance joint venture. They also closely cooperate on design and development of new memory chips so an acquisition by Samsung could mean big competitive changes in the memory chip market.