Cisco Systems will take its TelePresence virtual meeting systems into home offices later this year, bringing telecommuters nearer to their corporate colleagues and society one step closer to science fiction.

TelePresence uses high-definition video, large flat-screen monitors, and advanced audio systems to make electronic meetings more lifelike, with a full-size view of participants at each site. It was introduced in late 2006 in configurations for six and for two meeting participants, but executives have said they are aiming eventually to expand the technology to the consumer market. The prospect of life-size interactive TVs in living rooms may someday foster closer relationships among widely dispersed families, but also conjures up images of the Telescreen two-way televisions in George Orwell's book "1984."

Unlike the Telescreen, the 37-inch Cisco TelePresence System 500 can be turned off by the home user. It's designed to let a telecommuter or an employee of a medium-sized business participate in TelePresence sessions with coworkers, partners, customers, and others without traveling. It's a step down from the three 65-inch displays used in the flagship TelePresence System 3000, but it includes speakers, camera, a lighting setup, and a built-in microphone array in the screen to deliver similar quality, according to Cisco. It can be mounted on a desk, pedestal, or office wall, with the screen doing double duty as a second PC monitor or a digital sign between meetings. Users can participate in one-on-one meetings and companywide TelePresence sessions with coworkers who have the larger systems.

The System 500 is not the consumer device Cisco envisions, which former Chief Development Officer Charlie Giancarlo last year predicted could be sold within two to three years for about $1,000. The System 500, coming in the third quarter, will have a list price of $33,900. But it does represent a less expensive entry price for medium-sized businesses. The six-seat System 3000 costs about $299,000 per room and the one-screen, two-seat System 1000 is priced at $79,000 per room.

A complete room analysis and system configuration service is included in the price of the existing products but will be optional for the System 500 because it generally won't be necessary, spokeswoman Jacqueline Pigliucci said.

Also in the third quarter, Cisco will expand the TelePresence line upward with the System 3200 for 12 or 18 participants. It will have a second row behind the existing six-person configuration, with similar specially designed desks with built-in microphones, which place a speaker's voice correctly for participants at the other site. The back row doesn't have to be raised above the front, Cisco said. While participants in the front watch a display below the main screens for data sharing, those in the back row can see that content on additional screens above. The System 3200 will have a list price of $340,000, and there will be a $90,000 upgrade kit for System 3000 customers.

Along with the System 3200 comes an update that will also be available in the other platforms: Data-sharing will run at 30 frames per second; until now it has been 5 frames per second.

TelePresence has been a high-end, high-profile hit for Cisco, which said last week that revenue for the platforms rose 1,000 percent in the quarter ended April 26 from a year earlier. More than 500 units had been ordered since the technology was introduced in October 2006, the company said.

A word to professional developers: Your job is being taken over by untrained neophytes, but you still will have plenty to do to keep yourself busy and employed.

This was the message for developers during a presentation by Sun engineer Todd Fast at the JavaOne conference last Friday in San Francisco. Fast argued that with applications having a shorter lifespan and non-professionals getting into the application development space, career software developers will increasingly become platform builders rather than application builders. He focused on the burgeoning Web development space.

During the presentation, entitled "Applications for the Masses by the Masses: Why Engineers Are an Endangered Species," Fast presented these three primary propositions:

* Software engineers will be an endangered species. * High-school and college students will take over the jobs of software engineers. * These engineers will not mind, because there still will be plenty of work.

The fact that students will take the reins of software development is "kind of scary," Fast said. But taking a lighthearted approach to his presentation, Fast said developers are not like other people and that has an impact. Developers have above average intelligence, do not dress well, and like weird things like Monty Python.

"We're at the edges of the population curve as software engineers," Fast said.

He cited the impact of social networking applications and Web 2.0 and how these trends are drawing more non-trained persons into software development. Social network applications are becoming the dominant way in which certain age groups interact.

Casual developers, those who do not identify themselves as engineers, can use templates in PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor) and play around in MySpace, blogs, and RSS feeds.

"This is just kind of normal thing for them," Fast said. But these casual developers now are entering the workforce and also are building out the next-generation Web.

Meanwhile, applications are being built out of existing applications, and the need for software developers cannot keep up with the increasing demand.

"There aren't enough of us to actually produce the cool stuff that people want," said Fast.

The traditional perspective of an application is a program that solves other people's use cases and is big, difficult to write, and takes time. Only highly skilled experts can create them. Java, for its part, is rich platform geared toward solving difficult problems, but it also is very complex, Fast said.

But today, Web applications are being built to solve short-lived needs. There has been an explosive growth in non-traditional Web applications, such as widgets, social applications, mashups, and situational applications.

"The definition of applications is changing, the common perception of applications is changing," said Fast.

A sea change is occurring in how applications are being built. Facebook and social platforms are major drivers of application development, and these applications are not necessarily done using Enterprise JavaBeans, IDEs, and version control. Instead, developers can write PHP scripts in notepad, said Fast.

Professional developers, meanwhile, will build foundational platforms. "We'll be building the platforms that enable anyone to build applications on top, to increase the richness of the Web," said Fast. Engineers will work lower in the software development stacks.

In the new application development realm, situational, disposable applications are becoming prominent. The concept of Development 2.0 is emerging with higher levels of developer abstraction, such as Yahoo Pipes.

"As we see abstractions go up, we see more people able to participate, able to create applications," Fast said. Tools are being developed for casual developers.

Attendees at Fast's presentation tended to agree with Fast's premise that the role of the professional developer is shifting.

"It's a very interesting concept. I don't think it's coming as fast as he is pointing out, but it's probably coming," said Ceco Ivanov, software engineer at Genova Diagnostics, a medical lab. The shift will happen in the next 10 to 15 years, not two years, Ivanov said. But the trend is good in that it enables people to collaborate, he said.

Agility requires empowerment of end-users, another developer said.

"Essentially, writing code is very complex, and even in the corporate world, you need to empower the end-users to piece together their own applications because you need to be agile," said Tim Martel, a developer at Pegasystems, which develops Web-based business process management systems.

Fast also said the metric for applications is becoming how many people use an application as opposed to how time it took to build. The Zombies game application in Facebook, for example, was used by 250,000 people every day last October, said Fast. This application was written by one programmer who did it for fun, Fast said.

The Slide widget application, meanwhile, has 5 million users. "Nothing I built ever had 5 million users," Fast said.?

Scammers want your IRS refund checks and have devised at least one phishing scheme to get it, according to the FBI.

The e-mail, which purports to be from the IRS advises recipients that the best way to get their economic stimulus rebate money is by direct deposit. It then directs them to a Web site that asks them to enter bank account information and other personal data.

To encourage recipients to respond, the e-mail warns that not filling out the form will mean a delay in receiving the check.

The actual purpose is to steal personal information, the FBI says.

This is not the only news-related scam going around. Phony fund raisers for victims of the Myanmar cyclone may use similar tactics, according to the Federal Trade Commission.

"Various forms of online fraud continue to proliferate on the Internet and people should take the appropriate precautions to protect themselves," said Special Agent Richard J. Kolko, of the FBI national press office.

Text of a sample IRS phishing scam was released by the FBI:

"Over 130 million Americans will receive refunds as part of President Bush's program to jumpstart the economy. Our records indicate that you are qualified to receive the 2008 Economic Stimulus Refund. The fastest and easiest way to receive your refund is by direct deposit to your checking/savings account.

Please follow the link and fill out the form and submit before May 10th, 2008 to ensure that your refund will be processed as soon as possible.

Submitting your form on May 10, 2008 or later means that your refund will be delayed due to the volume of requests we anticipate for the Economic Stimulus Refund.

To access Economic Stimulus refund, please click here."

The iPhone is out of stock "company wide," Apple sales representatives said Sunday. The outage has fueled rumors that the next-generation 3G model will be released shortly.

Neither Apple's U.S. or U.K. online stores have iPhones available for sale, according to their Web sites. At both, the message "Currently Unavailable" appears beside "Ships," which last week was noting a delay of five to seven business days. The company's German and French e-stores, however, still show 8GB and 16GB iPhones available.

[ The heat is on Apple to produce a 3G iPhone; see related story: "RIM's BlackBerry Bold beats Apple to the 3G punch." ]

Sales representatives at four major Apple retail stores contacted by Computerworld today said that the iPhone is unavailable, not only at their own stores but across Apple. Most had no explanation why the smartphone is out of stock.

"The iPhone is sold out, company-wide," said a salesman who answered the phone at the Apple store in Braintree, Mass., just south of Boston.

"It's out of stock, Apple-wide," said a saleswoman from the Apple store in downtown Portland, Ore. "No, I don't know why," she said when asked why the iPhone was unavailable online and at retail. "All we've been told is that it's Apple-wide."

Sales representatives at the New York City store on Fifth Avenue and the San Francisco store on Stockton Street also confirmed that there were no iPhones to be had. "We're sold out," said the salesman at the New York store. "I heard that it was some kind of shipping issue."

Some of the Apple sales reps said that AT&T retail stores in the area might have iPhones in stock.

The iPhone's vanishing act has boosted talk that the 3G-enabled iPhone -- many analysts have predicted it would be announced and released next month -- is right around the corner.

Saturday, Apple-specific Web sites and blogs reported on the sold-out notices posted on Apple's U.S. and U.K. online stores. "With all the buzz surrounding the 3G model, the international rollout, and the SDK, this is just one more sign that the release of a new device is right around the corner," speculated the Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) in a post filed Saturday afternoon.

In a conference call with Wall Street analysts two weeks ago, Apple's chief operating officer, Tim Cook, acknowledged iPhone shortages, but blamed sales to buyers who planned to unlock the device. "Our U.S. stores have experienced more stock outs, or relatively more, and we believe the reason is that there are more phones being bought there with the intention of unlocking," he said at the time.

Apple officials were unavailable for comment.

Most analysts and pundits have pegged June 9, the opening day of Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) as the likely introduction of the 3G iPhone. Apple CEO Steve Jobs is expected to open the conference with his usual keynote address and could unveil a new iPhone then.

The iPhone's first sales anniversary, June 29, has been touted by others as a possible on-sale date for the 3G model.

Within the last week, several additional mobile service providers, including U.K.-based Vodafone, Telecomm Italia and Mexico-based Telefonica have announced that they had struck deals with Apple to sell the iPhone in a slew of new markets, including India, Italy, and Latin America.

Computerworld is an InfoWorld affiliate.

Google plans to release on Monday a preview version of Friend Connect, a service designed to let Web publishers add social networking features to their sites, the company said.

Friend Connect, which will be available on the Web at some point on Monday, lets publishers add social networking applications by inserting "a snippet of code" in their sites, Google said.

"We're seeing social capabilities get baked into the infrastructure of the Web. [They're] increasingly not tied to any one site, to any one source of friends, or any one type of application. We see the Web moving towards an end state where people can use any apps on any Web sites with any of their friends," said David Glazer, director of engineering at Google, during a press conference to discuss Friend Connect.

Thus, sites will be able to add features like user registration, friends invitation and message posting, as well as allow visitors to interact with existing friends in social networking sites like Facebook, Google's Orkut, Plaxo and Hi5, according to Google.

"Google Friend Connect is like giving Webmasters a saltshaker full of 'social' that they can sprinkle on their sites to add social capabilities," Glazer said.

Google's move is yet another in a recent string of data-portability efforts at tearing down the walls in social networking sites and letting users export the data and content they have stored in those sites. MySpace and Facebook took steps in that direction with announcements last week.

As the popularity of social networks keeps rising and people set up multiple profiles in such sites, they are demanding the ability to carry their data, content and connections from one site to another, so that they don't have to reenter all that information again.

At the same time, Web publishers of all sizes are eager to latch on to the craze by adding social networking features to their sites, now that a critical mass of Internet users have embraced the interaction and sharing that social applications provide.

Friend Connect makes use of open standards for authentication and authorization like OpenID and OAuth, and de facto makes any Web site a potential "container" of social applications built with Google's OpenSocial APIs, Glazer said.

"The entire Web has become a container for OpenSocial apps," he said.

Monday night, Web publishers will be able to sign up to a waiting list to get access to the Friend Connect service, but Google expects to make the service available to anyone within a matter of months, officials said.

The back-to-back unveiling of initiatives from Google, MySpace, and Facebook, with their differences and limitations, signal both progress and confusion for data portability, Gartner analyst Ray Valdes said.

"The underlying complexity is being revealed, and that's progress," Valdes said.

At this point, vendors aren't aiming for full data portability, primarily because key technical and operational issues need to be worked out, as evidenced by the painstaking but valuable work being done by the Data Portability Workgroup, Valdes said.

However, vendors are comfortable offering data availability, letting their users expose content and data to other sites but keeping the data stored in their servers, he noted. "For the moment, until other issues are solved, data availability is the most pragmatic approach," Valdes said.

As outlined by proponents, the ideal data portability scenario would be for users to have full control over their social profile data, independent of any sites.

This story was updated on May 12, 2008