LG Electronics will launch in October a netbook-class laptop PC based on Intel's Atom processor that also includes 3G wireless, it said Wednesday at the IFA show in Berlin.

The X110 will include an HSPA (High-Speed Packet Access) cellular data modem that should be compatible with the newer 3G networks now being rolled out by most major carriers around the world. HSPA is typically capable of download speeds of several megabits per second, and the latest versions of the evolving technology also offer megabit-per-second uploads.

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In addition to 3G, the machine supports 802.11b/g wireless LAN and has a wired Ethernet connector.

The X110 is based on the same 1.6GHz Atom processor that many of its competing devices use and has a 10-inch WSVGA resolution (1,024 by 600 pixels) screen that, if it wasn't for the 3G, would place it very close to competing netbook PCs.

LG has decided to go for a conventional hard-disk drive in the X110 and will offer models with either 80GB or 120GB of capacity. Some netbooks use faster solid-state disks based on flash memory chips, but they typically offer much lower capacity.

It runs the Windows XP Home operating system.

The machine will be available in several colors, including white, pink, or silver. LG didn't announce the price.

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Cisco is buying PostPath, a maker of e-mail and calendaring software, for $215 million and plans to add those capabilities to its on-demand Web Ex Connect collaboration platform.

PostPath makes PostPath Server, an e-mail and collaboration server the company touts as a replacement or supplement to Microsoft Exchange.  An archiving edition of the software is available to store e-mails in a less cumbersome fashion than Exchange does with its journaling of old e-mails. The company also offers a version of PostPath Server for VMware.

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Cisco plans to put the server in the cloud and sell an e-mail and calendaring service to its customers. "Our 'cloud-based' delivery model offers our customers rapid deployment and compelling economics," says Doug Dennerline, senior vice president of Cisco's Collaboration Software Group (CSG).

PostPath is all about requiring no middleware to interoperate with Microsoft Outlook, Exchange, Active Directory, ActiveSynch and BlackBerry Enterprise Server, among other applications. But it also promotes itself as a Linux-based replacement for Exchange that gets around some of the Microsoft platform's shortcomings, including larger data stores and higher performance in terms of how many hits per minute the platforms can handle.

Cisco bought WebEx last year to deliver software-as-a-service (SaaS) offerings, including instant messaging, team spaces for collaboration, wikis and document sharing.

Privately held PostPath was founded in 2003.

Cisco says it expects to close the deal by the end of October and add PostPath's 67 employees to its Collaboration Software Group. CSG is part of Cisco's recently established Software Group that oversees the IOS network operating system, network and service management, unified communications, policy management and SaaS offerings.

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Microsoft loyalists could be forgiven for feeling a little smug after all of the publicity over outages and lost e-mails at online services run by archrivals Apple's MobileMe and Google's Gmail.

Microsoft, it turns out, isn't invulnerable. Some users of Microsoft's Office Live Small Business have also reported intermittent e-mail outages, according to interviews and postings at discussion forums for the Web service, which is used by more than a million small companies.

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Through a spokeswoman, Microsoft acknowledged Tuesday that a "brief isolated" e-mail outage occurred last Friday.

But at least one user says he was told by Microsoft technicians that some of his e-mails were permanently lost.

"Outages you can understand, but the outright loss of data? They should be ashamed of themselves, being the biggest computer company in the world," said Joe Reilly, owner of Marine Wireless Internet in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.

Reilly said he is a paying customer of Office Live Small Business, which he uses to host his tech firm's Web site and provide his e-mail, through which he gets important messages, such as customer payment confirmations.

Reilly said he "became suspicious" when he did not receive "my usual 20-30 e-mails" on Monday morning. Confirming through his self-testing that e-mails were not being delivered, Reilly said he talked to Office Live's technical support, who told him that the service was "experiencing some issues."

First launched in 2006, Office Live Small Business is a service that allows small firms to design and host their Web sites, run their e-mail, an e-commerce store, Web advertising campaigns and more from a single service. Some of the services are free and some are provided for a fee.

E-mail for Office Live Small Business users is provided through Windows Live Hotmail.

The spokeswoman confirmed that Office Live Small Business and Hotmail customers were hit by a two-hour outage early last Friday afternoon.

"We are sorry to hear about this customer experience and are doing everything we can to help the customer restore his emails," she wrote in an e-mail. "This incident only affected a handful of customers and to our knowledge all customers' emails are being restored."

Not according to Reilly, who said he was reassured on Monday that mail would "trickle through in the next few hours." When that didn't happen, Reilly called back, and was told there was an "extended server outage" and that some customer e-mails had been permanently lost. After demanding a written confirmation, Reilly said he was referred to Microsoft's legal department.

Another Office Live user, Russ Bellew, said he has also experienced recent "intermittent outages," though he hasn't permanently lost any e-mails as far as he knows.

Microsoft had a much larger outage that affected multiple Windows Live services, including Windows Live Mail, back in February.

For now, the recent outage appear less severe than that incident or the problems affecting MobileMe and Gmail.

Relaunched this February, Office Live Small Business competes with services from Yahoo and others.

It is different from Office Live Workspace, an online document storage and collaboration service that competes with Google Apps.

Reilly says that while he's disappointed with Office Live Small Business, he doesn't plan to switch. "I'm kind of stuck with them," he said.

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Hackers are claiming they have kidnapped children in a bid to infect PCs with a Trojan Horse virus, says Sophos.

The security firm is warning users that e-mails entitled "We have hijacked your baby" are being sent to Web users around the globe. As well as asking for a $50,000 ransom for the "release" of the child, the messages also contain an attachment supposed to be a photograph of the child. Instead the file actually contains a Trojan horse that will steal personal information.

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"Receiving or reading these widespread emails themselves does not mean you are infected, but if users open the attachment they will be infecting their Windows computer, they will give hackers an open door to take control and steal information," said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant for Sophos.

"There's no other way of putting it -- this attack is sick. Hackers have no qualms about exploiting a family's natural instinct to defend its most vulnerable members," added Cluley.

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U.S. companies are pulling back hard on IT spending as the economic downturn continues, a new study by ChangeWave Research has found.

ChangeWave surveyed 1,947 people involved with IT spending in their organizations. The survey was conducted Aug. 11-21. Eighty percent of those surveyed were located in the U.S., along with small percentages in Canada and other countries.

Thirty percent overall reported that third-quarter IT spending was lower than previously planned, an increase of three percentage points since ChangeWave's May spending survey. Meanwhile, only 12 percent spent more than planned.

In addition, 29 percent said spending will drop or even cease in the fourth quarter, a 5 percent increase over the last study. Thirteen percent plan to spend more.

"Thus, the brief period of stabilizing we picked up in May has given way to another major leg downward," ChangeWave director of research Paul Carton wrote in a blog post Wednesday. "In fact, you have to go way back to the middle of the last recession (August 2001) to find a ChangeWave survey projecting this big of an IT spending downturn."

Higher energy costs stood as a top factor for the spending slowdown, cited by 35 percent of respondents.

ChangeWave's findings show a turnaround is not imminent; 39 percent of respondents predicted IT spending in their companies would not rise until the second quarter of 2009 or beyond.

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Will bloodmobiles soon be a thing of the past, like vacuum-tube televisions and glass milk bottles delivered daily?

More important: Will the use of embryonic stem cells, which became a heated issue during the 2004 presidential election, finally produce a breakout product? One that will squelch the controversy for all but a few die-hards who still prefer their milk in glass bottles?

Researchers at Advanced Cell Technology in Worcester, Massachusetts, announced the breakthrough a few days ago. Working with scientists from the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, and the University of Chicago, A.C.T.'s team says it has developed a method for making potentially unlimited and scalable supplies of synthetic blood from embryonic stem cells.

The findings are published in Blood, a scientific journal. A.C.T.'s chief scientific officer Robert Lanza led the team.

If the claim holds up to scrutiny, it would be a huge boon for humankind, which until now has had to collectively open its veins to provide tons of this basic stuff of life for people who need extra blood because of injuries, surgeries or disease.

The discovery also would remove the danger of blood being tainted by pathogens that cause hepatitis, H.I.V. and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, among other viruses and bacteria.

But will this promise become reality?

Advanced Cell Technology has made incredible claims before. Under recently departed C.E.O. Michael West—whom some critics compared with the circus promoter P.T. Barnum—the company routinely asserted that stem-cell therapies were likely to reverse the aging process and grow replacement body parts, while most scientists were talking a more cautious line.

The company was the first to clone an endangered species, an Asian bovine called a gaur, which died soon after—possibly from causes unrelated to the cloning. A.C.T. also claimed it had cloned the first human embryo, attracting worldwide attention, though the embryos grew to only a few cells in size.

Some blame the company's over-enthusiasm for playing into the hands of stem-cell opponents in the Bush administration and elsewhere who were bent on squelching this new therapy. President Bush severely restricted federal funding for stem-cell research in 2001—restrictions that remain today, and are likely to until the next administration takes office.

Under Lanza, the company may not have fulfilled all of the promises made by West, but it has produced a string of solid discoveries and observations—though none have proved to be commercially viable. Most recently, Lanza's team has also induced stem cells to grow into retinal cells in eyes.

Creating synthetic blood has proved difficult; decades of efforts have so far been in vain. Several potential products are being tested in human clinical trials, most of them focusing on the critical function that blood plays in transporting oxygen. Other products, however, have been abandoned when they either didn't work, or proved to have dangerous or deadly side effects.

Blood created by stem cells is very similar to the real thing, and may avoid the pitfalls with other, more artificial techniques. If further tests confirm A.C.T.'s discovery—and, critically, show that the process is scalable and affordable—stem-cell blood may make the company more attractive to investors as it desperately seeks cash to carry on.

In July, a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission revealed that A.C.T. had $17 million in current liabilities, but only $1 million in cash and other current assets, the Boston Globe reported. A.C.T.'s stock has been trading at 6 cents per share, down from $8 per share three years ago.

It's hard to know what the new techniques will cost once scaled up, or what revenues the discovery will bring in; Lanza says that he expects the company to know within two years if the processes will work.

Independent scientists are hopeful that the discovery will pan out. "The problem with relying on donated blood is that there are always shortages," Professor Alex Medvinsky, a blood stem-cell expert at the University of Edinburgh,

Oracle has developed prebuilt integration software for its CRM On Demand product and the on-premise Siebel CRM, providing customers with a single view of their CRM data, the company announced Wednesday.

Companies can benefit from a hybrid approach to customer relationship management, because the on-demand model allows companies to more easily add new users, while enabling data from both systems to be analyzed at once, Oracle said. The integration software employs Oracle's Application Integration Architecture framework and Fusion middleware. Pricing was not disclosed.

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Oracle's news release on the product stressed its benefits for customers. But the vendor's real goal is to fend off competition from Salesforce, which has based its entire strategy on pushing the benefits of on-demand software, analysts said.

"This is how you sell against Salesforce," said analyst Bruce Richardson of AMR Research. "You talk about that as a dead-end silo while selling end-to-end business processes."

"I don't think it will lead to an increase in demand for Siebel," he added.

Denis Pombriant of Beagle Research largely echoed Richardson, while noting that Salesforce offers Salesforce to Salesforce, a means of integrating with fellow Salesforce customers, and also has strong capabilities for tying into systems such as Siebel.

" I expect this is a strategy by Oracle to keep its Siebel customers from looking outside of the barn," he said.

On the whole, Oracle has taken a cautious approach to on-demand software. During an earnings conference call in May, CEO Larry Ellison told analysts that while the company has been selling on-demand products for nearly 10 years, it only recently began making money at it.

"The entire industry has to get better at making money selling on-demand ... That's what we're focused on before we scale the business," Ellison said at the time.

Salesforce's stock dropped sharply following its recent quarterly earnings report, which saw the company beat analyst expectations for revenue but also indications that business is slowing down.