The first beta of Chrome, Google's long-in-development Internet browser, became available Tuesday afternoon for Windows Vista and XP users, with Mac and Linux editions soon to follow. There's ample reason to be excited about the release, and just as much reason to be wary. Check out these screen shots, weigh the pros and cons, and then decide for yourself.

For further PCWorld.com coverage of Chrome, see assistant editor Nick Mediati's product review ("Google Chrome Web Browser") and contributing editor Harry McCracken's analysis of how Google's entry into the browser market affects the other major players ("Chrome vs. the World").

[ Also check out Tom Yager's Ahead of the Curve blog: Developers should skip Google's Chrome, and jump straight to WebKit. ]

Seven Reasons Chrome Could Be Cool

1. It won't crash.Perhaps Chrome's biggest draw is its multiprocess architecture, which, in a nutshell, protects you from having a bad Web page or application take your browser down. Every tab, window, and plug-in runs in its own environment -- so one faulty site won't affect anything else that you have open. This approach also adds another layer of security by isolating each site and application within a limited environment.

2. It's really fast.Again because of the multiprocess foundation, one slow site won't drag down the rest of your browsing. Instead, you can effortlessly click to another tab or window. With plug-ins, the arrangement works similarly: If you open a site that has a slow-loading Java ad, for example, the Java itself will be isolated and the rest of the page won't be affected. The program itself opens within seconds of when you click the icon, too -- a distinct advantage over some slower-loading alternatives.

3. You barely notice it's there.Calling the design of Chrome's interface streamlined is an understatement. The program barely looks like a program, and the vast majority of your screen space is devoted to the site you're visiting -- with no buttons or logos hogging space. Chrome's designers say that they wanted people to forget they were even using a browser, and it comes pretty close to achieving that goal.

4. It makes searching simpler.One of Chrome's signature features is its Omnibox, an integrated all-purpose bar at the top of the browser. You can type in a URL or a search term -- or both -- and Chrome takes you to the right place without asking any questions. Omnibox can learn what you like, too -- a talent that goes beyond the obvious automatic completion function. Say that you want to use the PCWorld.com search function, for example. Once you've visited the site once, Chrome will remember that PCWorld.com has its own search box and will give you the option of using it right from Omnibox. The function thus automates keyword searches.

5. It gives you more control over tabs.Chrome gives the idea of tabbed browsing new power. You can grab a tab and drag it out into its own individual window. Or you can drag and drop tabs into existing windows to combine them. Chrome also gives you the option of starting up in any tab configuration you want -- whether a custom setup or the set of tabs you had open in your previous session. Other browsers require third-party add-ons to provide this capability.

6. It opens new doors on your home page.Chrome comes with a default dynamic home page. As you use it, the program remembers the sites that you visit most often. The top nine of those appear in snapshots on your home page, along with your most commonly used search engines and bookmarks. There's no force-feeding here, though: You can override the dynamic home page with any home page you want, just as you can set the default search engine to any service you prefer.

7. It lets you stay incognito.Like Internet Explorer 8's recent beta release, Chrome offers a private browsing option -- one it calls Incognito. You can open a special type of new window and rest easy knowing nothing you do in it will be logged or saved on your computer. And unlike Internet Explorer's, Chrome's Incognito window is isolated from the rest of your browsing experience, so you can have your private window open alongside your regular windows, and each will operate independently.

Seven Chrome-Related Concerns

1. It's only in its first beta.This is Chrome's first test release, so problems are bound to crop up over the coming months. If like most people you rely heavily on Web browsing, you run a risk by putting your online life into the hands of an unproven product. Visits to some plug-in-oriented sites such as logmein.com have generated errors ("This application has failed to start because xpcom.dll was not found..."). Do you want to deal with that kind of uncertainty daily?

2. You won't have any add-ons.Add-ons are a huge draw for Firefox fans, and none of these are available in Chrome yet. Google does intend to create an API for such extensions, but for now you'll have to make do without your AdBlocks, Better Gmails, and BugMeNots -- or you'll have to switch between browsers to use the add-ons you want when you want them.

3. You can't synchronize.One big plus of Firefox is its ability to synchronize across multiple computers using Mozilla's Weave option. This arrangement allows you to keep your home browser, your laptop browser, and your work browser looking identical at all times -- and once you get used to that level of synchronization, it's hard to give up. Chrome doesn't yet have that capability.

4. You may draw the short stick on standards.Standards get a little less standard as this new player enters the equation. It's based on WebKit, the same open-source system that drives Apple's Safari; but when you look at pages in Chrome compared to pages in Firefox or IE, you'll notice a difference in text formatting. And since most sites give coding priority to the market leader, you might be setting yourself up for disappointment with Chrome.

5. You're giving advertisers extra ammo.Have you seen all the hype about Google's privacy practices and how much of your data it shares with advertisers? Imagine the potential ammo you're giving it by using this browser. Google will now have total control over your experience from the time you open Chrome to the time you shut down. In some sense, you might just as well invite DoubleClick to watch over your shoulder while you surf.

6. The dropdown bar is dropped.The idea of the URL dropdown bar is dropped in Chrome. To compensate, the browser offers "intelligent" features in its Omnibox; but if you like being able to see your recent URLs at the click of a button, you'll miss the dropdown bar.

7. You lose some history power.Chrome's History functions are less versatile than the powerhouse ones built by Firefox. Chrome offers only a simple screen showing your day-by-day history. The ability to sort everything by date, site, or most visited appear to have joined the distaff and spindle on the ash heap.

So there you have it: the good, the bad, and the ambiguous of Google's first foray into browsing. You've heard the hype; now, the decision is yours. Whose campaign will you be joining?

PC World is an InfoWorld affiliate.

Sony Ericsson wants Windows Mobile developers to start working on applications for its Xperia X1 and on Wednesday it announced a tailor-made SDK (software development kit) for the upcoming smartphone.

A beta version of the Sony Ericsson SDK for Windows Mobile 6.1 is available for download from the company Web page. It has already been used in-house and by some partners to develop panels for the user interface, according to Merran Wrigley, spokeswoman at Sony Ericsson.

[ Discover the top-rated IT products as rated by the InfoWorld Test Center. ]

Sony Ericsson isn't trying to build a new developer community; instead it wants to take advantage of what's already there, according to Wrigley. The SDK is based on Visual Studio, with extensions for the Xperia panel interface. "It will feel very familiar to existing Windows Mobile developers," said Wrigley.

Using the SDK developers can adapt existing Windows Mobile applications, and start working on new ones. It currently supports HTML, CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), C and C++, according to Wrigley, who didn't want to announce when a finished version will become available.

The Xperia X1 was announced at Mobile World Congress in February. It is a slider phone, with a 3-inch display and touch navigation. For surfing the Web it supports Wi-Fi and HSPA (High-Speed Packet Access), for both downstream and upstream traffic. Just like most other high-end phones it also supports navigation using A-GPS (Assisted Global Positioning System).

Lately, there have been some reports stating that the phone has been delayed, but the official Sony Ericsson line is still that the phone will ship during the fourth quarter, according to Wrigley. As the fourth quarter starts it will announce more details about when and where the phone will ship, so far selected markets is all the company wants to divulge.

Google's famed co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin came out to support Chrome, saying that browser technology is fundamental to the company's success, so Google decided to get more involved in this area.

"Everything we do is running on the Web platform. It's very important to us that works well," Page said during a press conference Tuesday that was webcast from Google's headquarters.

"People are doing a lot more online, and the Web has evolved pretty dramatically & but the underlying browser architecture is still very similar to the original Netscape browser," said Sundar Pichai, vice president of product management.

Brin concurred, saying that the ultimate goal of Chrome isn't to be a Web operating system of sorts, but rather a better browser vehicle for the next generation of Web applications, a core business for Google.

"I wouldn't call Chrome the OS of Web apps. It's a very basic, fast engine to run Web apps. We'll see more and more Web apps of greater and greater sophistication, of the kinds of things that today are pretty challenging to do on the Web because of browser performance," Brin said.

Google is releasing Chrome as open source in the hopes that it will be improved by external developers, and simultaneously help improve other products, including the market-share leader, Microsoft's IE (Internet Explorer).

In other words, Chrome is meant to be a catalyst for faster innovation in browser technology. "Our business does well if people are using the Web a lot and are able to use it easily and quickly, so any improvement to any set of browsers as a consequence of Chrome is good for Google," Brin said.

Brin, Page and Pichai all went to great lengths to praise Mozilla's work with Firefox, crediting it with jump-starting innovation in browser development at a time when the only game in town was IE. "Without what [Mozilla] has done, this probably wouldn't be possible," Page said.

Chrome, in the works for about two years, highlights the importance for Google of its increasingly sophisticated Web applications, such as its ambitious Google Apps hosted collaboration and communication office-productivity suite. Apps, built around the Web-hosted "cloud computing" model for delivering applications via the Internet, is considered a major threat to Microsoft's Office/Exchange platform.

Thus, it's easy to understand why Google wouldn't want to look from the sidelines as Microsoft takes IE in the direction it so chooses. The browser is the key software for accessing Web applications, so it's no surprise to see Google finally jump feet-first into the development of browser technology.

Among the enhancements Google is promoting on Chrome are a more stable and secure environment in which a tab can crash without freezing the entire browser, as well as improved speed and performance with a new JavaScript engine called V8.

The Google cofounders' presence at the press conference underscores the importance of the Chrome initiative, said Gartner analyst Ray Valdes.

"This isn't one of those projects that started as a 20 percent time thing," Valdes said, referring to Google's policy of letting employees spend part of their time on projects they come up with. "This is definitely a strategic initiative that has been two years in the making and involves dozens of engineers."

Indeed, Google officials acknowledged at the press conference that the company has invested significant resources on Chrome.

But framing it as Google's attempt to win the browser wars is a mistake, Valdes said. "It's about the Web apps battle. It's about having a platform that will support the next generation of Web apps," he said.

Web applications in general, and Google's in particular, are pushing the limits of current browsers, including IE, Safari and Firefox. "Google is pushing the envelope and Chrome gives it a bigger envelope for Web apps," Valdes said.

"More importantly, Chrome is the platform Google will control," he added. "That makes it a strategic element in their technology portfolio."

Citigroup analyst Mark Mahaney agreed that investing in developing its own browser makes strategic sense for Google. "Given that search has become such a fundamental part of Internet usage, anything that impacts overall Internet usage is important for Google," he wrote in a research note Tuesday. "Also, while browser developments have to date had no material impact on Googles advertising base, a hedge against future browser developments makes sense."

However, he noted, it remains to be seen whether users will consider Chrome faster, simpler and safer enough than current browsers to justify switching to it.

Chrome is now available as a free download.

This story was updated on September 2, 2008

Novell Tuesday is launching its Compliance Management Platform, a combination of existing identity management and security-event management products with additional reporting and analysis tools.

The goal behind integrating the two existing server-based products is to make sure provisioning and access control is a monitored activity kept in conformance with business security policy. It will give IT managers a source for real-time monitoring of all identity repositories and allow for compliance report generation on the fly, according to Novell.

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"It can send an alert or even block an action," says Jim Ebzery, a Novell senior vice president and general manager. He says the platform will better enable customers to notice incongruent and suspicious events, such as if someone were logged in on an office LAN but at the same time that individual's electronic-badge credentials were being used to gain access to a corporate building in a different location.

Specifically, the Compliance Management Platform includes Identity Manager 3.6 (compare Identity Management products) integrated with Novell's SEM product, Sentinel 6.1 (compare Security Information Management products).

The Compliance Management Platform comes with several predefined policy templates to aid in setting it and includes Sentinel's software connectors for centralizing security-event information from hundreds of sources.

The offering costs $99 per user.

Oracle plans to buy ClearApp, maker of software for managing the performance of composite applications in SOA (service-oriented architecture) environments, the company announced Tuesday.

The deal is expected to close later this year. Terms were not disclosed.

SOA sees applications pulled together from multiple, sometimes shared components, theoretically giving IT departments flexibility and the opportunity for reuse.

But SOA environments also introduce a level of complexity that can make it hard to nail down the source of performance problems or pinpoint the effect of changes made to a given component, Oracle said.

ClearApp's software automatically discovers application components and their dependencies at runtime and monitors performance, according to Oracle. It will work alongside Oracle's Enterprise Manager platform.

ClearApp, based in Mountain View, California, also supports competing platforms such as IBM's WebSphere.

An Oracle FAQ on the pending sale did not specify how those relationships would continue, except to say that existing features in ClearApp's software would be supported.

ClearApp's technology provides "deep visibility into the components underlying SOA-based composite applications," but the acquisition also raises questions, as it follows related purchases of companies like Auptyma and Moniforce, said ZapThink analyst Jason Bloomberg in an e-mail Tuesday.

"Just how many management vendors does Oracle need to acquire before they have a coherent SOA management story that's not just more of their Frankenstein strategy? (That is, put together a lot of parts and hope for lightning)," Bloomberg wrote.

"Oracle does have quite a bit of experience in assimilating acquired technologies, and they're also known for taking care of the customers that come along as a result, but every such acquisition sets the bar of success higher for them," he added.

IT departments must establish a "green baseline" for their operations, according to new advice from Forrester Research.

Without a well-defined environmental baseline, IT leaders will not be able to respond effectively to demands to "go green" and will not be able to invest effectively.

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The fact that many IT departments still do not pay for their own energy should not deter technology leaders from taking the initiative on the carbon footprint of their organization.

"If you don't pay for the energy-related costs of IT, but believe green IT can positively impact the bottom line, talk to the business," advises Forrester analyst Doug Washburn, in a report, Is Green IT Your Emperor with No Clothes?

"Even if the financial benefits of your greening effort accrue to the facilities group, the company overall is profiting and aligning IT operations with the business."

Washburn also suggests IT leaders can use green as a way of developing staff skills.

"Inspire and develop staff by forming a green team," he urges. "Green IT is a complex topic requiring holistic thinking and creative solutions, exactly the skills the IT organization of the future needs to embrace.

Forming a green team will foster these skills within IT and help senior management identify staff members looking to go beyond their regular call of duty. Given that the second most popular driver (measured in an earlier Forrester analysis of IT departments) for pursuing green IT is to "do the right thing for the environment," the effort is likely to be well received by your staff.

The team should include facilities management staff and strategic allies such as VPs from your lines of business, marketing, and the corporate social responsibility (CSR) office -- who can drive buy-in, promotion, and even funding, Forrester suggests.

Get this right and IT can lead the business on environmental issues, claims Washburn.

"While the rampant growth in IT's energy use needs to be addressed, it pales in significance when compared with that consumed by office buildings and industrial facilities.

"As improved energy measurement and management technologies proliferate, IT can play a major role to reduce companywide energy consumption as the energy czar -- a term coined by the Uptime Institute and McKinsey & Company.

Since reduced energy use offers tangible environmental and financial savings -- unlike more discrete IT projects -- the energy czar is a role that IT ops executives will proactively begin to take ownership of."

Computerworld UK is an InfoWorld affiliate.

Nearly 100 domains related to Hurricane Gustav have been registered in the past 48 hours, security experts said Sunday, some of which may be used by bogus charity and relief scams after the storm strikes the U.S. Gulf Coast.

According to television station KTAL in Shreveport, La., the office of Louisiana's Attorney General Buddy Caldwell has warned residents of Gustav phishing attacks already in progress.

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On Saturday, Marcus Sachs, the director of the SANS Institute's Internet Storm Center (ISC), noted that numerous domains containing the word "gustav," "charity," "hurricane," and "relief" had been recently registered.

"On the day [Hurricane] Katrina hit New Orleans [in 2005] hundreds of donation sites appeared online, many if not most were scam sites," said Sachs in a post yesterday to the ISC research blog. "Well this time around it looks like the people who like to register domain names in anticipation of a storm's arrival have already started registering them for Gustav."

By Sunday, Sachs had listed almost 100 Gustav sites culled from the DomainTools' Web site. "Most of these sites are parked domains and many of them are for sale," he said. "They will be worth monitoring, particularly if'donate here' messages appear."

Several of the domains, in fact, do appear to be parked, or registered but not fleshed out with content. Others, including helpgustavictims.com and helpgustavvictions.net, were for sale on eBay as of mid-day Sunday.

A few, however, led to legitimate charities. The domain gustavcharity.com, for example, redirected users to the Web site of the evangelical Christian organization "Samaritan's Purse," while contributegustav.org took users to the Baton Rouge Area Foundation's site.

Another security expert, Gary Warner, director of research in computer forensics at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, also posted a list of parked domains that may be used for scamming purposes. "Anytime we've seen a natural disaster, we've been on the lookup for domains which might be abused for fraud," said Warner Sunday on his blog. "It was only natural then that I retuned my settings at DomainTools yesterday to alert on Gustav domains."

Warner also pointed out a handful of domains that led to legitimate content.

Three years ago, before and after Hurricanes Katrina slammed into New Orleans, security researchers noted a similar run-up of domain registrations. Enough were used for phony relief scams, often by identity thieves hoping to trick consumers into divulging personal information, that the U.S. Department of Justice set up a Katrina anti-fraud task force.

More than a year later, two brothers were convicted on federal charges for running a fake Salvation Army site that solicited money, supposedly for Katrina relief efforts. The pair, Steven and Bartholomew Stephens, were sentenced to more than 100 months in prison for the scam last December.

Computerworld is an InfoWorld affiliate.

Google's surprise announcement of a new browser, Chrome, via a Web comic book could prove to be another game-changing development for the Internet in the coming years.

The browser presents a serious challenge to companies such as Microsoft and Apple, which hope their Web browsers will be the predominant ones used on the Internet and a gateway to more of their products.

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With Chrome, Google is promising people faster browsing, better security, and compatibility across multiple operating systems. Google ultimately sees Chrome as the doorway for broader use of its Web-based applications, which threaten the desktop-based software that has traditionally been Microsoft's domain.

Google published a 38-page comic book describing Chrome's features, a comprehensive view of what Google thinks people will want from a browser. Google's announcement of Chrome "reads almost like an operating system release, not a browser release," said David Mitchell, senior vice president for IT research at Ovum.

The company has also taken a new approach to dealing with JavaScript, the coding language used to create more interactive Web pages and Web services. Google has created its own virtual machine for processing JavaScript faster. It means Web services such as Gmail will, in theory, work faster.

But JavaScript can also be buggy on some Web pages and cause a browser to crash. Google says Chrome can manage that problem better, too. Tabs -- a common feature in browsers -- allow multiple Web pages to be opened. But if one of those tabs encounters bad JavaScript, the whole browser will crash. Google said that Chrome isolates those tabs so if one crashes, it doesn't crash the whole application.

Google has also incorporated its Gears toolkit into Chrome. Gears lets developers create applications that can be used offline, synching data with Web services when Internet access is available again. It's a key part of Google's strategy to embellish its Web-based applications with the convenience of desktop applications.

Chrome also takes a new approach to security. Pop-ups -- annoying boxes triggered by JavaScript -- will be isolated to an individual tab. Chrome can also block malicious programs on the Web from installing themselves on a PC's hard drive, using a technique known as sandboxing.

Google will make the code for Chrome open source. "It's in our interest to make the Internet better, and without competition, we have stagnation," said the comic book character representing Chris DiBona, Google's open source programs manager.

The introduction of Chrome raises concern that Google could use its browser -- much as Microsoft did with Internet Explorer -- to lock users in by offering features that are difficult for other browser makers to replicate.

However, it's not likely Google would risk incurring the backlash from people who advocate that Web-browser makers should conform to agreed-upon standards to make Web pages work for everyone, regardless of the browser they're using, Mitchell said.

Another question is how Chrome will impact Mozilla's open-source Firefox browser project and Opera Software's Opera browser. Google isn't unhappy with Firefox, as the two companies have a harmonious relationship, said Tristan Nitot, president of Mozilla Europe.

At the end of August, Microsoft's share of the browser market was 72.15 percent and falling, with Firefox holding 19.73 percent and Safari 6.37 percent, according to Hitslink, a service of Net Applications.

Google's Chrome project likely sprouted after worries over how Internet Explorer (IE) handles Google's applications since Explorer's development is controlled by one of its chief competitors, Nitot said. More than 70 percent of Internet surfers use IE, primarily because it ships with the all-dominant Windows operating system.

"Right now Google is delivering their services mostly through IE, which is an uncomfortable situation considering that IE is not very good in terms of performance," Nitot said.

Microsoft, which recently released the second beta version of IE 8, said people will pick its browser for its privacy and data control features. "The browser landscape is highly competitive, but people will choose IE 8 for the way it puts the services they want right at their fingertips," according to Dean Hachamovitch, Explorer's general manager.

But where does that leave Mozilla's Firefox? Mitchell said Chrome will likely just help fuel confidence open-source software development, where code is not kept secret as it is in companies such as Microsoft and is open to peer review.

"It's a huge mistake to view this as a head-to-head battle of Firefox versus Chrome," Mitchell said. "There's plenty of space for more consumer choice. If it [Chrome] gains market share, it will take it from all around."

CIOs will probably be open to letting users install Chrome as enterprise applications become less dependent on a specific browser to run, Mitchell said. "The category of applications that are only supporting IE are declining anyway," he said.

Opera spokesman Tor Odland said Google the introduction of Chrome is fine as long as it adheres to Web standards. Apple declined to comment.

(Mikael Ricknas in Stockholm and Peter Sayer in Paris contributed to this report.)

With an upgrade to its software development framework for PHP scheduled for release today, Zend Technologies is mixing in client-side AJAX capabilities with server-side PHP functionality.

Zend Framework 1.6, the company's open-source framework, integrates with the Dojo Toolkit for AJAX. Developers thus gain front-end rich Internet application capabilities via Dojo (version 1.1.1 of Dojo will ship with Zend's framework); integration between Zend and Dojo is accomplished via a piece of software called Zend_Dojo.

In this approach, developers would use Zend Framework to build JavaScript-enabled Web applications that Zend Framework renders, said Wil Sinclair, the Zend project lead for Zend Framework.

Although Zend worked with the Dojo Foundation on the Dojo integration, the Zend Framework still can be used with other AJAX technologies.

Also added in version 1.6 is full support for SOAP Web services. With that support, developers could build integration with an application based on Microsoft's .Net Framework. Jeffrey Hammond, a Forrester Research analyst, lauded the SOAP backing in version 1.6. "SOAP support is something many enterprise IT shops will find interesting. Many have made significant investments in SOAP-based SOA strategies but would still like to take advantage of lighter weight Web-based frameworks that use dynamic languages like PHP or Ruby. The updated version of Zend Framework should help them significantly," Hammond said.

Another capability highlighted in Model/View/Controller-enabled (MVC) Zend Framework 1.6 is unit testing for controllers on top of the existing object-level unit testing. This benefits agile and test-driven development, Zend's Sinclair said. Unit tests on controllers allow developers to test realistic user scenarios, such as log-ins or balance transfers, he said. The MVC support allows developers to separate applications into presentation and business logic, he added.

Version 1.6 features a preview implementation of the Zend_Tool project, for creating projects and project assets and managing them. This capability is important for rapid application development, Sinclair said. Zend Framework also features a "use at will" architecture, enabling developers to use separate components such as a forms creation component.

Intel has snapped up British Linux house Opened Hand in another sign of the growing interest in the use of the operating system on mobile devices.

Last month, research from ABI Research said that Linux was set to take the lion's share of the market for the so-called mobile internet devices, those bigger than a cell phone but smaller than a laptop.

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Intel had already invested in this area by setting up Linux project Moblin for the development of these devices.

In a statement posted on Opened Hand's Web site, the company said that it was looking forward to working with the chip giant. "The OpenedHand team will join the Intel Open Source Technology Centre and will focus on the development of the Moblin Software Platform, the optimised software stack for Intel Atom processors."

Rob Bamforth, principal analyst at Quocirca said that the move was a demonstration of the interest in Linux as a mobile platform. "We saw it earlier this year with Nokia buying Trolltech, it's a sign that the mobile space is not as clear cut as the something like the PC one. There you have a market dominated by PCs with Macs for some specialist users, but mobiles are not like that -- there's a diverse range of products, and, if anything, it's becoming more diverse," he said.

He said that he thought that Intel's purchase was a way for the chip giant to keep its own options open. "We don't know how this market is going to shape up and it's important to have that diverse range of platforms.

OpenedHand employees will continue their existing projects. The statement said that Intel will continue supporting open source projects currently led by OpenedHand staff, such as the Clutter and Matchbox projects, and in most cases, will accelerate these projects as they become an integral part of Moblin.

Bamforth said that the problem with multiplicity of mobile devices was that it made it more awkward for IT directors looking to incorporate mobile products within a corporate comms network. "The IT manager will need to look for more powerful tools to manage these devices, otherwise it's like herding cats. The other option is outsourcing that management and I expect to see a few more companies adopt that approach."

Intel was approached for comment but had not responded by the time we'd gone to press.

Techworld is an InfoWorld affiliate.

Google has added a video sharing component to its Apps Premier suite of hosted communication and collaboration software, betting that companies will find it useful for a variety of workplace uses.

The Google Video service was due to debut in Apps Premier on Tuesday, allowing end-users to upload clips and share them with co-workers using an interface very similar to Google's YouTube, the most popular video sharing service in the consumer market.

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Apps Premier is the fee-based version of the suite, which also has free editions like Standard and Education. Google is adding the video application without raising the price of Apps Premier, which costs $50 per user per year.

As online video has gone mainstream among consumers, Google believes that organizations of all sizes will benefit from extending their communication with employees via clips for purposes like training, company announcements and broadcasting company events.

Matthew Glotzbach, product management director of Google Enterprise, said Apps Premier's video application will change how people collaborate at work. Like the rest of Apps Premier, it is designed to be simple enough for all employees to use it.

Each clip can be up to 300MB in size, and Apps Premier subscribers get 3GB of video storage per user account. Administrators will have a variety of controls over the service, such as being able to edit or remove clips, generate usage reports and create tag taxonomies.

The Apps Education edition will also gain video capabilities as a free trial between Sept. 8 and March 9 next year. Afterward, it will cost $10 per user per year.

Google is confident that the video application will give Apps Premier a significant differentiator in the market, since the cost of implementing and running a video-upload and -sharing system puts it beyond the means of most businesses.

The Apps Premier video service will run off the same infrastructure as YouTube and use that service's technology for flagging copyright and inappropriate content, Glotzbach said.

The Apps suite also includes Gmail; Talk; Calendar; Sites; the Docs word processing, spreadsheet, and presentations software; and other applications.

With Apps, Google is championing the popular SaaS (software as a service) model, in which vendors host applications in their datacenters and deliver them via the Internet. The SaaS approach is seen by its backers as the future of software, which has traditionally been installed by customers on their own facilities and hardware.

Delivering applications from the Internet "cloud" reduces the effort and cost customers have to invest in installing and maintaining software. In addition, these Web-hosted applications are designed to promote and simplify how co-workers share and collaborate, since documents reside on a central server and not on individual PCs.

However, concerns exist about the security of hosting software and data in a vendor datacenter and the loss of control over application performance and availability when vendor servers crash. Another issue with hosted applications is accessing them without an Internet connection, something Google is addressing with its Gears browser plug-in.

2nd Wind Exercise Equipment adopted Google Apps in February for its roughly 330 employees when it faced a Microsoft Exchange upgrade that also involved buying new hardware and would have cost around $225,000.

After researching Apps Premier, the Minneapolis retailer concluded that the Google suite met its requirements at a fraction of the cost of the Exchange upgrade, said Tom Kelly, 2nd Wind's chief financial officer and CIO. The company has also cut down significantly on its Microsoft Office licenses.

The company is pleased with Apps Premier, and more so now with the video service, which it had a chance to test in recent months. It is using it for training and corporate communications, and was also able to move its TV commercials from its former video storage provider to the Google suite, eliminating a $12,000-per-year expense, Kelly said.

The quality of the video streaming has been very good. "It's very quick, very smooth. We've had no buffering issues at all," he said.

Nucleus Research analyst Rebecca Wettemann said the video service is "a potentially very powerful business tool, particularly from the training perspective."

It will be in Google's best interest to evangelize among Apps Premier administrators the various scenarios and uses in which creating and uploading a video can be useful, Wettemann said.

"There are many cases in the business environment where, if I could shoot a quick little video to show people something, I could get my point across much more effectively than with e-mail or a phone conversation," she said.

Social-networking site provider Socialcast announced a "self-service" pricing model on Tuesday that allows smaller customers to get up and running without the need for a formal sales process.

"Our [sales] pipeline is filled with smaller organizations," said CEO Tim Young. "We thought you'd have to have at least 400, 500 employees to have the gravitational pull for [a social network] but we found there is benefit even for small teams."

[ Keep up with app dev issues and trends with InfoWorld's Fatal Exception and Strategic Developer blogs. ]

Smaller companies also face deployment challenges, given their general lack of on-site IT staff and money for outsourcing, Young added.

Beginning Monday, customers with fewer than 1,000 users can sign up for Socialcast's hosted service on a month-to-month basis for $5 per user per month, using a credit card.

Socialcast is making the announcement as part of its 3.0 release, which also features an improved user interface and additional commenting and search capabilities.

The company is one of many "white label" social-networking vendors, which in general, enable users to customize the site to their preferred needs. Socialcast backs up and archives material created by customer networks, and an array of data classification measures helps make the information more searchable. It can also integrate with e-mail and incorporate third-party feeds from services like Twitter, YouTube, and Google Talk.

While data is stored on the vendor's servers, Socialcast networks can be also connected with customers' LDAP and Active Directory systems for authentication.

Socialcast is built with the Web application framework Ruby on Rails, a platform that has seen its scalability questioned due to high-profile crashes of sites like Twitter.

"Ruby has done a lot in the last year to address scaling issues. It can be done, and very well -- it's how much experience your company has scaling Ruby," Young said.

The vendor's larger customers include the Hot Topic clothing chain and Guitar Center, Young said.

Use-case scenarios for social networks abound in retail, according to Young. For example, if a Guitar Center customer brings in a vintage guitar for repair but the local store workers don't know how to fix it, they could search network profiles for an employee who does, he said.

However, both companies like Socialcast and would-be social-networking users face a similar challenge -- dealing with the roughly 100 similar vendors in the market.

Those numbers show there is no real innovation left in the space, said Forrester Research analyst Jeremiah Owyang: "The technology is commodity."

Instead, customers should focus on factors besides features and functions, according to Owyang.

Social-networking vendors should meet the usual criteria for enterprises making software purchases, such as ongoing revenue streams, capital on hand and an ongoing list of large clients, he said.

But more importantly, a vendor must be able to deliver the needed services, from integration services to education and change management.

And before buying anything, companies should determine whether their employees are "joiners," the type of people who are interested in social networking to begin with.

"Do the research first," he said. "Just because you build it doesn't mean anyone is going to come."

The University of California-Irvine's Paul Merage School of Business appears to be taking this cautious approach. The school is about to begin a pilot program through which 20 to 30 students use Socialcast, said Jon Masciana, director of admissions recruiting.

While impressed by Socialcast's knowledge management and archiving functions, Masciana said the new pricing option would help the school determine who is the best target for the software as it moves forward.

"If we did a whole agreement with all of our students, it's unclear how many would be active contributors," he said.

Mobile phone OS developer Symbian's growth continues to slow down, the company reported on Wednesday.

The number of phones shipped with the OS inside in the second quarter increased by just 5 percent year on year. In the first quarter, the annual growth rate was 16.5 percent, and last year it grew even faster.

[ Get the latest on mobile developments with InfoWorld's Mobile Report newsletter. ]

Yet the smartphone market as a whole continued to grow at 16 percent year on year during the second quarter, according to Gartner.

A total of 19.6 million Symbian based phones shipped between April and June, compared to 18.7 million units during the second quarter last year and 18.5 million during the first three months of 2008, according to Symbian.

The marked slowdown is alarming, according to Geoff Blaber, an analyst at CCS Insight. He sees a couple of explanations for it. Since most Symbian devices are high-end phones, the company is dependent on more mature markets where phone sales have slowed. But the main reason is that Nokia has been quiet on the Symbian front, and Symbian sales are dominated by the Finnish phone giant, according to Blaber.

Sales of Symbian-based devices are expected to pick up in the second half, though, as Nokia launches phones like the N96. The platform will also get a boost from other devices, such as Samsung's Innov8, which has an 8-megapixel camera and HSDPA (High-Speed Downlink Packet Access) at 7.2M bps, according to Blaber.

The smartphone market is about to go through some major changes. Competition is heating up, with Apple's iPhone going global and the first Google Android phones also on the way.

While other players enter the market, or expand their position, those counting on Symbian are concentrating their efforts and pulling together. At the end of June, Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Motorola and NTT DoCoMo announced their intent to unite Symbian OS and other software that build on it, including S60, UIQ and MOAP(S), to create one open mobile software platform.

The first version of the unified platform will become available during the first half of 2010, but that is not fast enough for Roberta Cozza, principal analyst at Gartner. To keep up with the competition she thinks it has be brought forward to some time next year.

Microsoft is preparing to launch in the next few months a Web site called Skymarket to sell Windows Mobile OS applications, a job advertisement suggests.

The clue to the launch is a job advertisement spotted by blogger Long Zheng. Microsoft is looking for a senior product manager who would oversee the marketing and development for the service, intended to complement the eventual release of the next mobile OS, Windows Mobile 7.

Third-party developers have built more than 15,000 applications for Windows Mobile, but the applications are sold through a multitude of vendors on different Web sites.

The advertisement would suggest that Microsoft is aiming for something closer to Apple's one-stop shop approach with its iTunes Store, which also sells applications for the iPhone. Those applications, which now number more than 1,000, are vetted by Apple and are not sold elsewhere.

One of the goals listed in Microsoft's ad for the position is making "the Windows Mobile marketplace 'the place to be' for developers wishing to distribute and monetize their Windows Mobile applications."

Microsoft has already taken a shot at loosely roping its applications under one online roof with its Windows Mobile Catalog.

But the site is a facade, with links leading to vendors such as Pocketland, Handango, and MobiHand that handle the transaction and downloads. By contrast, Apple's applications can be purchased and downloaded on its iPhone wirelessly.

Google is launching a beta version of its own Web browser on Tuesday in more than 100 countries, the company announced Monday in a blog posting.

The open-source browser, called Chrome, first appeared on an unofficial Google blog in the form of a comic book. "As you may have read in the blogosphere, we hit 'send' a bit early on a comic book introducing our new open source browser, Google Chrome," the company said in the official announcement that appeared late Monday afternoon after the Internet began buzzing about the comic-book site. The blog posting was by Sundar Pichai, vice president of product management, and Linus Upson, engineering director.

[ Discover the top-rated IT products as rated by the InfoWorld Test Center. ]

The browser window is "streamlined and simple," they said, describing in words what can be seen visually at the unofficial blog, Google Blogoscoped. "To most people, it isn't the browser that matters. It's only a tool to run the important stuff -- the pages, sites and applications that make up the Web. Like the classic Google homepage, Google Chrome is clean and fast. It gets out of your way and gets you where you want to go," the blog posting said.

Chrome will run Web applications "much better," they wrote, with tabs kept in an isolated "sandbox," which will prevent "one tab from crashing into another and provide improved protection from rogue sites." Better speed and responsiveness are also part of Chrome, which features "a more powerful JavaScript engine, V8, to power the next generation of Web applications that aren't even possible in today's browsers."

Components from Apple's WebKit and Mozilla's Firefox are part of the open-source Chrome, they said.

Updated information about the browser and its availability Tuesday will be provided at the company blog, they said.

Microsoft's latest version of Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) requires more than double the system memory of its main rival, Mozilla's Firefox, and spawns nearly six times the number of processor threads, a performance researcher said today.

Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) Beta 2 also consumes 52 percent more memory than its predecessor, IE7, and uses almost three times as many threads, said Craig Barth, chief technology officer at Devil Mountain Software, a Florida-based maker of PC performance testing software.

[ Discover the top-rated IT products as rated by the InfoWorld Test Center. ]

"IE8 is epically porcine," said Barth. "Microsoft has gone to epic levels of bloat."

Barth tested IE8 Beta 2, IE7, and Firefox 3.0.1 in a 10-site scenario that involved media-rich domains such as boston.com, channel9.com, cnet.com, infoworld.com, nytimes.com, and others. Each site was opened by each browser in a separate tab, then links on those sites were opened in new tabs. Both Flash and Microsoft's Silverlight were installed as plug-ins for each browser.

By test end, IE8 Beta 2 had grabbed 380MB of memory on the 2GB-equipped system running Windows Vista, while IE7 accounted for 250GB and Firefox 3.0.1, the most-recent version of the open source browser, had taken 159MB. When the same tests were run under Windows XP, each browser consumed slightly less memory than in Vista; IE8 Beta 2, however, continued to lead the competition by wide margins.

"When Windows XP starts, the entire OS takes 130 to 150MB," said Barth. "Suddenly you're looking at a memory footprint for IE that's bigger than Microsoft's earlier operating system. IE8 is fatter than XP."

When Barth tallied up the separate processor threads each browser spawned during the tests, he also found that IE8 Beta 2's count was dramatically higher than either IE7's or Firefox's. The latter, for instance, never used more than 29 concurrent processor threads during the 10-site test, while IE7 spawned a maximum of 65. IE8 Beta 2, however, used a whopping 171 threads.

Piling on the threads, said Barth, "becomes overwhelming after a while" and can have a direct impact on the speed of the browser. The more concurrent threads, the more operating system overhead managing those threads, and the more the processor is stressed. Web browsers typically uses multiple processor threads, but when the thread count climbs, performance can suffer unless the application is running on a multiple-core processor.

That may be Microsoft's plan, Barth speculated. "If a multithreaded application is designed well, and runs on a heavily parallel system, like a multicore machine with four or eight [processor] cores, you can get additional performance. My guess is that Microsoft is targeting IE8 at the next generation of hardware."

While that may be good news for users with multicore machines, what about people running older hardware? "On legacy systems with just one core, IE8's going to struggle," Barth answered.

He likened IE8's penchant for spawning a large number of threads with Windows Vista's similar habit. Vista, said Barth, uses over 90 at startup, while the older Windows XP spawns less than 60. "No matter how much you strip out [Vista], you still have more threads than in XP," he said. "My theory is that's why Vista is 40 percent slower than XP, no matter how much you take out of Vista."

Last year, Barth used Devil Mountain's DMS Clarity Studio performance-analyzing software to make several performance claims about Windows XP and Windows Vista, including that Vista Service Pack 1 (SP1) was no faster than the stock version.

The one bright spot for IE8 in the Devil Mountain tests was its CPU utilization. On average, Firefox consumed 33 percent of the CPU's time under XP, and 48 percent under Vista. Meanwhile, IE8 Beta 2 took 22 percent of the CPU in XP, 33 percent under Vista. IE7 was the least aggressive at utilizing the processor: its averages were 13 percent and 24 percent under XP and Vista, respectively.

Barth attributed Firefox's heftier CPU time consumption to a "more efficient rendering engine" that employs fewer threads but aggressively pushes the processor to gain faster performance.

"Microsoft has taken the attitude that hardware is cheap, like it did when Vista first came out," Barth said. That may play out better for users down the road, he added, but he wondered if it is the right move for the present.

He also defended testing IE8, even though it is only in beta form. "Absolutely, it's fair to test now," he said. "I'm sure they'll do some performance optimization, but I don't see that much debug code here. And unless they do something drastic to the architecture, I think this is the kind of performance we'll see in the final."

Microsoft has said that IE8 Beta 2 is "feature complete," which means it doesn't plan on adding any additional features to the browser. It has, however, refused to set a timetable to shipping the major upgrade, and officially has only been willing to say it will launch before the next version of Windows.

For its part, Microsoft has touched on some performance improvements it's made in IE8. In a blog entry posted last Tuesday, for example, Christian Stockwell, a program manager on the IE team, said company developers fixed more than 400 memory leaks in the browser that reduced, not increased, the amount of memory used by the beta.

He also echoed concepts raised the day before by another Microsoft manager, James Pratt, during an interview with Computerworld prior to Beta 2's release. Both men dismissed the focus by rivals, including Mozilla, on major speed gains in JavaScript execution, as missing the big picture. "Performance is also about how quickly I can get things done," said Pratt. "We've made improvements in the [IE] JavaScript engine, but we're really focusing on both areas, performance and productivity."

Stockwell, for instance, cited WebSlices, IE8's new data feed feature, as a major productivity boon, and thus a performance win for Microsoft's browser. "In some cases the fastest browser is the one that does not need to load a page at all," he argued.

Barth remained skeptical. "Firefox is rendering pages faster, by most measurements, and doing it with half the memory. It has way less code bloat. But IE8, this is fat."

Devil Mountain also operates Exo.performance.net (Xpnet), a community-based collection network that gathers performance and other metric data from more than 3,000 PCs. Users can join the network by downloading and installing a small utility, DMS Clarity Tracker Agent, from Devil Mountain's site.

Computerworld is an InfoWorld affiliate.

VeriSign is in many ways synonymous with managing the Web, thanks to its handling of key DNS root servers and of name resolution for .com, .net, and other domains. In recent years, it's had both strong ups and strong downs.

On the up side, VeriSign has aggressively pushed PKI, SSL/TLS, EV, and digital certificates, making these authenticated security approaches commonplace. And VeriSign has spent millions of dollars building out and protecting the Internet's massive DNS infrastructure, even though its contract with the DNS's governing body required that VeriSign spend just a fraction of that amount. Although VeriSign's extra investment was a business decision meant to keep its lead as DNS infrastructure manager, the result for Internet users is still a better DNS infrastructure than was required.

On the downside, in the 2005-2007 period, the company angered many users by adding new services to the Internet, such as domain waitlisting, and by raising registration fees. It garnered significant ill will when its Network Solutions domain registration unit (later sold) began redirecting misspelled URLs to ads, causing an uproar among users. When VeriSign met resistance over such actions from ICANN, the global steward of Web domains, it sued the organization. Although that suit was resolved after VeriSign agreed to new ICANN procedures, users and elected officials remained nervous about VeriSign's potential actions. In 2007, the company ran afoul of federal regulators, resulting in its CFO's resignation and a restatement of earnings.

During this same period of ups and downs, VeriSign entered several new lines of business, such as Wi-Fi roaming services, RFID contract resolution (to translate an RFID tag's electronic number to a product's common name), andone-time-use security credentials. More recently, VeriSign has been part of a consortium promoting the OpenID federated certificate standard.

Today, VeriSign is refocused on its Internet roots, after having dropped some of its new ventures, to focus on DNS management. The company processes about 48 billion name resolution requests per day across 60 different locations, peaking at 700,000 queries a second. It is a major provider of PKI technologies and services, including digital certificate products, managed security services, and IT consulting services.

InfoWorld interviewed CTO Ken Silva on the company's current and past challenges. Silva manages VeriSign's technical operations, which handle much of the world's DNS traffic and cryptographically protect millions of Web sites. Before joining VeriSign, Silva spent 10 years with the National Security Agency (NSA). Roger asked about VeriSign's current status and future plans. Here are some excerpts from that interview:

Q: In the first part of this decade, the global DNS infrastructure came under a few big denial-of-service attacks that caused service disruptions, but in the last few years, we haven't seen any significant service outages. How well have we done in making DNS resistant to DoS attacks?

A: VeriSign services have never completely been taken out from a DoS attack because of our distributed nature. We do get DDoS [distributed DoS] attacks, and they are getting bigger, and bigger, and bigger, but they haven't affected us that greatly. In February 2006, we launched our Project Titan initiative, in response to our growing legitimate services and to handle DDoS attacks in the multiple tens of gigabytes. Our goal was to fortify the infrastructure to over 10 times the predicted infrastructure needed. Project Titan will increase bandwidth 10,000 times the 2000 levels by 2010. It's already at 1,000 times the size today [as compared to the 2000 levels], and will be another 10 times today's level in the next two years. It will be able to handle 4 trillion queries a day.

Q: Why are DNSSec and any of the other "advanced" DNS security proposals slow to gain more widespread acceptance?

A: These are complicated technologies, and you have to agree to get the entire world to agree on the standard, what makes up the standard, and do it at the same time. That alone makes it difficult.

Q: Users have a tendency to ignore or bypass digital certificate errors, undermining the whole system of trust. What can be done to improve the user's security experience in light of that fact? What are browser vendors missing?

A: VeriSign has been working closely with browser vendors to improve the user experiences, but there isn't enough real estate in the browser to do it perfectly. But many vendors, especially Microsoft, are doing innovative things like Extended Validation (EV) certificates. When a user browses to an EV-protected Web site, an EV-enabled browser [such as Microsoft Internet Explorer 7, Mozilla Firefox 2, and Opera 9.5] will turn the address bar green, identifying that the site as trusted using the strongest assurance we can offer today. Users can trust EV certificates. It is proven that sites that use EV certificates have much lower abandonment rates than sites without EV. For example, Overstock.com found users were abandoning their shopping cart at the point at which they were supposed to put in their credit card information ? at the moment they really needed to trust the vendor. Overstock.com start using EV certificates and saw a 16,000 times return on investment.

Q: Critics say that Extended Validation is really asking consumers to pay more for the trust assurance that they were originally promised in normal Class 3 Web site certificates. How do you respond?

A: EV gives the certification authority vendor more time to do the proper validation. With EV, we do a complete background investigation, including a financial check, articles of incorporation, and verifying their identity.

Q: But that's included with the normal Class 3 certs. What's different?

A: We ensure the subject is who they say they are and that they own the domain.

Q: Again, VeriSign does this with Class 3 certificates, so what's different?

A: VeriSign has always done a high-quality assurance job, but more time to conduct the background investigation means improved security for everyone. Plus, prior to EV, each CA [certification authority] could determine what processes were performed to provide assurance. A user could not be assured about whether a CA vendor did the same high-quality checks without reading the assurance statements. EV defines what assurance processes must be accomplished prior to the issuance of an EV certificate. An EV certificate means consistent, standard assurances across CA vendors.

Q: How will Web services, SaaS (software as a service), and cloud computing affect VeriSign and DNS over the next 10 years?

A: Any new Web functions, like Web 2.0, will impact us. Today, it's normal for a single Web site page to generate 20 DNS queries. [Our challenge is] not only scaling, but making sure that services are always reliable, especially with services such as TV and telephony coming over the Internet. With some new services, we have created a game-changer. Our VeriSign Identity Protection Services generate a single token or one-time password on any device the customer or vendor desires (such as a cell phone or credit card). It can be used across multiple sites and vendors. You can use that one token to do a lot more in your life than you previously could using older technologies.

In the future, you might be able to say something similar to the LifeLock CEO on TV [who promotes his identity protection service by reading out his Social Security number] and say, "My real password is ?" and not minimize your security. The authentication, identity, and protection will be in the cloud. Ask yourself: Would we use bank cards as much as we do today if they only worked at your bank? No, banks created the ATM network to allow users to shop and spend nationwide and globally. We've essentially done the same thing in the online world. We allow one token or password to be used in multiple places. It's like an ATM network for the online world. Visit our new Personal Identity Portal to see the beta. It's very cool.

Q: A few years ago, VeriSign dropped Network Solutions to pick up the RFID contract resolution work. It was predicted that the RFID resolution traffic would be orders of magnitude bigger than DNS. How has that project scaled over the last few years? Is it bigger than DNS yet?

A: No, RFID is still fairly new and hasn't surpassed DNS traffic levels yet. We've seen a recent uptick in the garment industry. They use it to track inventories and to help keep inventories low. We expect the RFID work to grow, but we want to focus on our core services of DNS, SSL certificates, and identity and authentication services.

This is typically one of the slowest weeks of the year for IT news, but the approach of Hurricane Gustav has Gulf Coast IT departments in full-out preparedness mode and the rest of the country anxiously watching with sharp memories of Hurricane Katrina, which hit that coast and devastated New Orleans on Aug. 29 three years ago. Also in the news were woes with an Oracle forum upgrade and Google offering credit to paying customers of its online Apps suite, to compensate for three Gmail outages earlier this month.

1. New Orleans IT departments brace for Gustav and Cellular operators say they're ready for Gustav: IT departments that learned valuable lessons for coping with disaster in the wake of Hurricane Katrina are preparing for the possibility that Hurricane Gustav will hit the U.S. Gulf Coast. Cellular operators say that they are prepared for the storm as well.

2. Oracle technical forum upgrade plagued with problems: Oracle "upgraded" its technical forums last weekend, but the changes have left some users unable to access the forums, prompted error messages and caused a general slowdown in performance. By week's end, Oracle apologized for the downtime users were experiencing and said it was working to restore performance levels.

3. Google extends Apps Premier credit for Gmail outages: Google is giving Apps Premier customers of its hosted Apps suite extensions of annual subscriptions for 15 days at no charge to compensate them for three Gmail outages earlier this month. Were committed to making Google Apps Premier Edition a service on which your organization can depend. During the first half of August, we didnt do this as well as we should have, reads an apologetic letter Google sent to those customers.

4. Atom demand still stymied by testing bottleneck: A testing bottleneck continues to keep Intel from meeting the strong demand for its Atom processor, designed for small laptops called netbooks. Intel underestimated end-user demand for the chips, and its testing process gives priority to more expensive chips that have a higher average selling price than does Atom. Thus, the ongoing bottleneck.

5. Performance improvement integral to Windows 7, IE8: Fixing performance issues with past versions of the Windows client OS and Internet Explorer are key goals of the development teams at Microsoft, according to company blogs. "We've re-dedicated ourselves to work in this area (performance) in Windows 7 (and IE 8)," according to an Engineering Windows 7 blog post. "This is a major initiative across each of our feature teams as well as the primary mission of one of our feature teams."

6. Comcast sets monthly bandwidth limit for customers and Critics question Comcast broadband caps: Comcast will limit residential customers to 250G bytes of bandwidth monthly as of Oct. 1. Those who exceed the limit will be contacted and told to curb their broadband use and, if in the six months after that warning the customer again goes over the limit, their service will be suspended for a year. Critics challenged aspects of the move, raising questions they said have not been answered, including "what's the point?" given that few users will likely be affected, at least for now.

7. Judge finds Qualcomm in contempt of injunction: Qualcomm is in contempt of an injunction that prevents it from selling some products that use patented Broadcom technology, a U.S. federal judge ruled. Qualcomm was ordered to pay royalties to Broadcom for revenue derived from QChat version 3.0, push-to-talk software that Qualcomm was ordered by the court to stop selling. The company also has to pay Broadcom gross profits from QChat service and support.

8. Steve Jobs' death greatly exaggerated; Bloomberg obit a mistake: The whoops entry for the week is courtesy of the Bloomberg financial news service, which inadvertently posted the obituary of Apple CEO Steve Jobs. Bloomberg quickly retracted the obituary. News organizations often have such stories written in advance so that they can be quickly rolled out when someone actually does die. From time to time, such stories are updated and then stored away for future use. Apparently, in the updating process the Bloomberg story wound up going briefly public.

9. Hacker faces plane ride to US court: The European Court of Human Rights will not hear U.K. hacker Gary McKinnon's appeal that he not be extradited to the U.S. McKinnon's attorney plans one more appeal, this one to the U.K. Home Secretary, on medical grounds because McKinnon was recently diagnosed with Asperger syndrome, a neurological disorder. He is accused of hacking into computers belonging to NASA and the U.S. military in 2001 and was indicted in 2002. U.K. police arrested him in 2005, and his extradition was first approved by the government there in 2006, but he has been fighting that move since.

10. Open source: What you should learn from the French: When it comes to adopting and promoting open-source software, the French government has been a leader for years. It has been promoting open source in government and education for years, and it is now weighing providing tax incentives to further stimulate open-source development. The big lesson from all this? Everyone prospers when working together under a single, shared technology vision.

Oracle's technical forums have been racked with performance issues all week since the vendor upgraded the system.

Forums.oracle.com underwent a "long, long overdue" upgrade last weekend to Jive Forums 5.5, according to a blog post by Justin Kestelyn, editor in chief of Oracle Technology Network.

But apparently, some Oracle users have had to wait a long, long time to access the system, receiving error messages and experiencing slow performance overall.

The situation has users who did manage to get into the forums sounding off in colorful fashion.

"I do not care whether or not this forum has loads of funky new features -- if no one can get to the site and/or post anything, what's the point?," wrote one poster, "ATD," on Thursday.

"I would also like to register my disgust at what's been happening for several days and my sheer disappointment that Oracle, of all companies, would allow an application to go live without thorough testing or, if it was thoroughly tested in UAT, without rolling back immediately when it was obvious that there were problems in the production environment," ATD added.

Oracle teams have been scrambling to resolve the issues all week, according to Kestelyn, and uptime reached 80 percent by Wednesday, compared to 7 percent on Monday.

"Uptime is still not where it should be of course; forums.oracle.com is business-critical for a lot of folks (as well as for Oracle), and I'm glad they consider it so," he wrote.

"We made a conscious decision early in this process to stick with the upgrade; to fight through the problems instead of run from them," he added. "Regardless, I do want to apologize for the downtime you've suffered through thus far."

It is possible the company will change course platform-wise, he said. "Stability is our top priority - much more so than features. If we have to trade the latter for the former, we will."

Open-source middleware maker Continuent has launched a database scale-out stack called Tungsten, which supports open-source databases like MySQL as well as proprietary ones from the likes of Oracle.

On Thursday, the company published code for Tungsten Replicator, a master-slave replication tool for MySQL, wrote Continuent CTO Robert Hodges in a blog post. Master-slave replication sees a "master" database sync up with a number of "slaves," allowing a workload to be scaled out.

"We started with master/slave replication on MySQL for a very simple reason: We know it well. And we know that while MySQL replication has many wonderful features like simple set-up, it also has many deficiencies that have persisted for a long time," Hodges wrote. Support for Oracle, PostgreSQL, and "many other databases" will follow, he added.

"The code is in the early stages but will mature very rapidly," he added. "We are looking forward to creating something that brings powerful replication within the reach of every database user."

Tungsten Replicator is part of the overall Tungsten stack.

The stack's capabilities include a failure protection function that keeps extra database replicas in the event the master fails and can automatically promote a slave to master status when needed. It also enables users to maintain and replicate database copies at a number of locations to aid disaster recovery, according to a statement.

The Tungsten project's site is located at community.continuent.com.

Continuent isn't trying to supplant high-end products like Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC), 451 Group analyst Matthew Aslett said.

It instead hopes to provide "a potential incremental scale-out offering for customers using low-end databases and hardware that either can't afford or don't want to buy into the whole Oracle RAC architecture," he said.

"This is an interesting long-term opportunity, but in the near-term the most significant opportunities for Tungsten probably lie in improving the replication and high availability features for MySQL," Aslett added.

Mini-laptops are among the hottest new products this year and with the back-to-school sales season upon us, I created a list of items to help you choose the right one.

The devices, which are becoming popularly known as netbooks, or my favorite term, "laptots," have caught on because they offer people a mobile, easy way to wirelessly access the Web.

[ 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. ]

They come with 7-inch to 10-inch LCD screens and are about half to two-thirds the size of a mainstream laptop. They weigh around 1 kilogram (2.2 lbs) each, carry batteries that last up to 8 hours and generally cost between $199 and $699.

I've written several netbook reviews and after some consideration, offer these tips for your first netbook.

1. Know what you want to use it for and how much you're willing to spend.

This is a cliche in reviews and doesn't tell you much but it's actually very important. What do you want this for? Do you want a lightweight device for easy Internet access? Or are you really looking for a full-featured laptop computer? Don't buy a netbook if you're really looking for a laptop, it would be a mistake.

To ensure longer battery life, some key components on a netbook, such as the microprocessor, are far less powerful than common laptops. That's why they're good for surfing the Internet, doing homework on a word processing program, working on spreadsheets or for presentations and other Office-like work.

Anyone looking for a gaming laptop or one for video-editing or other multimedia work should shop for true laptops, not netbooks.

2. Buy a netbook with an 8.9-inch screen or larger.

I tried out an Eee PC with a 7-inch screen and the annoying part is not being able to see an entire Web page because the screen is too small.

That's less of a problem on the slightly larger-sized screens and in the 8.9-inch screen size, the weight and size of the netbook is nearly the same as devices with 7-inch screens.

3. Make sure you get a 6-cell battery for your netbook, although you may have to pay $50 more and the device will weigh more.

Most companies are offering netbooks with 3-cell batteries as the standard, but that doesn't offer a whole lot of run time, just 2 to 3 hours. A 6-cell battery doubles that, and in some devices designed around a 6-cell battery, such as Asustek Computer's Eee PC 1000 and Eee PC 901, you can get up to 8 hours.

In a mobile device, battery life is vital. You don't want to always be looking around for plugs, nor fighting over the last one.

Most vendors are now following Asustek's lead with 6-cell batteries. Micro-Star International recently announced a line of Wind netbooks with six-cell batteries, and Acer recently put out a formal version of its Aspire one with a six-cell battery, and larger HDD to boot.

Vendors generally offer six-cell batteries for all models. But most devices come standard with a three-cell or four-cell battery, so if you want a six-cell then you have to ask for it, and expect to pay a bit more.

Another benefit of the larger battery is that it props up the back of the device, putting it on a slight angle that makes typing easier. Keypads on netbooks are smaller than normal keypads, and comfortable typing was one area I was not willing to compromise on.

4. Try out the keypad and make sure it's right for you.

None of the devices I tested had a better typing pad on a cheaper netbook than Intel's ClassMate PC, which has a keypad far smaller than the Eee PC 1000. Keys on the ClassMate PC's keyboard are raised and there is a lot of space between them, making them easy to find by touch.

By contrast, the Eee PCs, Wind and Elitegroup Computer Systems' G10IL designed their keypads with flat keys and little or no space between keys because, I was told by Elitegroup staff, it makes them look nice.

The trouble is, it also makes typing more difficult.

I really liked the keypads on Acer's Aspire one and Everex's CloudBook Max , but the best keypad was on Hewlett-Packard's Mini-Note.

5. Software: see what it comes with and consider trying the Linux OS.

There are two lessons on software.

First, some vendors have skimped on including software in their netbooks on the pretense that users can download a lot of free software on the Internet. That's true, but it's a bogus excuse. Who wants to spend time downloading when many netbook makers have added lots of software so users can play with their new netbook right away?

Asustek included a lot of useful software on its Eee PCs 1000, 1000H and 901, as has Acer, which also added a nice opening screen that boots up in just 12 seconds.

Second, it may be time to the give the Linux OS a try.

The Acer opening screen I just referred to is based on Linux, and the Aspire one comes with the Linpus Linux Lite OS, which is very user friendly. I've used Windows for most of my life but switching to Linux to try out the Aspire one was smooth and easy.

Most of the netbooks I tested with Linux OSs booted up far faster than Windows XP or Windows Vista (I would not buy a netbook with Vista, it's just too slow).

There are also free Linux-based word processing programs, spreadsheets etc. available on the Internet such as Open Office , Google Pack, which includes Sun's StarOffice or Web-based software such as Google Apps.

Of course, it would be nice to see a Web site devoted to netbooks, with software specifically designed for low-power devices and smaller screens. Netbookdownload.com, anyone?

6. Price: if it costs more than $500, start looking at a regular notebook computer.

Companies have started promoting a wide range of netbooks at ever higher prices, but once you pass $500, netbooks start to compete with laptops, and a laptop will almost always give you more value for your money in that case.

Laptop computers have far more powerful microprocessors and other components than netbooks, and sport DVD drives. There are no DVD drives on netbooks.

If size and weight are your main concerns, there are plenty of small, full-featured laptops, including the Sony Vaio VGN-TZ340, Lenovo Ideapad U110-23042BU, and of course, Apple's lightweight MacBook Air.

7. Look around at what's available.

There were a lot of devices that impressed me and that are worth considering.

Giga-byte's M912, is the netbook that has by far the coolest technology on board with its touchscreen. The screen can also swivel around so you can show someone else what you're working on or looking at on the Net.

But I was quoted a price of NT$19,900 (US$632) for the device, and since I'm not really sure how much I'd use the touchscreen, I figured it wasn't right for me.

I almost decided on one of the netbooks with the bigger, 10-inch screens. My top choices were Asustek's Eee PC 1000 with the Xandros Linux OS and a 40GB solid state drive (SSD) for storage and six-cell battery, or Micro-Star International's Wind with a six-cell battery.

Both devices are very nice to use but were a little bigger and more expensive than what I was looking for. Size is important to consider in terms of weight. Ten inch screens, hard disk drives (HDDs) and 6-cell batteries add a lot of extra weight to a netbook.

All of the netbooks I tried out include wireless Internet access through Wi-Fi 802.11b/g, but only Asustek's Eee PCs 1000, 1000H and 901 offered speedier 802.11b/g/n as of this writing.

The CloudBook Max will be sold with subscriptions for WiMax wireless networking, and some netbooks will also be sold with built-in 3G modules so mobile phone service providers can offer them with 3G (third generation telecommunications) contracts, so people can access the Internet from anywhere on their mobile phone network.

People can also buy add-on 3G (third generation telephony) or WiMax cards for any netbook.

8. And finally, the best netbook available is....

I tested several different netbooks and published reviews on them all, and after trying out some pretty cool devices, I decided to buy the one that's right for me: Acer's Aspire one.

Based on the criteria above, here's why:

I already have a laptop PC, so I don't need a powerful netbook. I just wanted a smaller, lighter device easier to carry around that I can use to surf the Web and write outside my office.

The Aspire one comes with an 8.9-inch screen and a three-cell battery, standard, but I will pay a little more for a six-cell battery. I get stranded in airports sometimes, often take trains, and simply like to sip my coffee very slowly. I need a long lasting battery.

The keypad on the device is quite comfortable, and the software it comes with is easy to use, especially the Linpus Linux Lite OS.

The price sealed my decision.

Last Friday, Acer slashed prices on three Aspire one models in the U.S., to $399 for an Aspire one with Windows XP, a 160GB HDD (hard disk drive) and six-cell battery. An Aspire one with Windows XP, a 120GB HDD and three-cell battery costs just $349, and a similar device running on Linpus Linux Lite is just $329.

I plan to buy the $329 Linux-based Aspire one, which has an 8.9-inch screen, a 1.6GHz Intel Atom microprocessor, 512MB of DRAM and 8GB of flash memory storage and a three-cell battery. I'll add more DRAM and buy an additional flash card, as well as trade up to a six-cell battery, which will likely raise the price to around $420, in all.

Demand for Intel's Atom processor is strong, with computer makers clamoring for more chips to plug into the small, portable laptops called netbooks, but the chips remain in short supply. The problem isn't that Intel can't make enough of the silicon chips -- the company can, and it is -- but availability remains stymied by a testing bottleneck that prevents the chip maker from meeting demand.

This bottleneck, first highlighted in a July conference call by Intel CFO Stacy Smith, exists because Intel underestimated the level of end-user demand for the chips found in netbooks. The shortage of Atom chips is so severe that Asustek Computer decided to use a much older Intel chip, the 900MHz Celeron M 353, in two models of its popular Eee PC.

[ Find out more about Asustek's plans for Eee PC netbooks. ]

There's no quick fix. Intel can't easily take away capacity from other processors to handle the higher Atom demand. Atom processors are cheaper than other Intel chips and priority in the testing process goes to more expensive models that command higher average selling prices (ASPs).

"It would not be fiscally prudent to take capacity away from Core processors, with a US$100-ish ASP, to service Atom, which have a $25-ish ASP," wrote Dean McCarron, president of Mercury Research, in an e-mail.

Underscoring the fast-rising pace of demand for Atom, McCarron repeatedly revised his own shipment forecasts for the chip upwards, doubling them every six weeks since January.

One of Atom's advantages is its small size. Intel can cram 2,500 of them on the 300-millimeter silicon wafers it uses to make chips, helping to keep unit production costs low. But testing and assembling raw silicon into finished chips is a labor-intensive process. That's one reason Intel can't easily increase testing capacity.

"Capacity needed to be added, and that can only be done so fast as one has to buy equipment, install it and set up the appropriate factory lines, etc.," McCarron wrote.

Responding to a request for comment about the testing bottleneck, an Intel spokesman confirmed the testing constraint that has limited Atom availability remains, but did not say when the bottleneck would be eased.

Depending on end-user demand for various Intel chips, it's possible the bottleneck may not completely disappear until next year, when Intel completes construction on a $1 billion test and assembly facility in Vietnam. That plant, which will be Intel's largest testing facility when completed, is expected to begin production next year.

 A U.S. federal judge found Qualcomm in contempt of an injunction issued last year preventing the chip maker from selling certain products that rely on patented Broadcom technology.

The U.S. District Court for the Central District of California ruled Thursday that Qualcomm must pay royaltie