IBM opened up cloud computing centers in four countries on Wednesday to let enterprises, universities, and governments test Web-based services and applications.

The new cloud computing centers are in Bangalore, India; Hanoi, Vietnam; Sao Paulo, Brazil; and Seoul, South Korea. The company now has 13 cloud computing centers worldwide.

[ Learn more about what cloud computing really means and the new breed of utility computing and platform-as-a-service offerings. ]

Cloud computing is a relatively new technology, and issues such as usage models need to be studied, said Ponani Gopalakrishnan, vice president of IBM's India Software Lab.

The cloud computing model allows businesses and consumers to remotely access computers over the Internet to access services, IBM said. Using shared infrastructure like a cloud computing center allows businesses to manage and provision IT infrastructure dynamically depending on the requirements of business, Gopalakrishnan said.

The new center in India is positioned as an experimental platform for businesses and academic institutions to deploy and test applications, Gopalakrishnan said. While the platform would be offered free to academic institutions that IBM partners with, businesses will be charged, he added.

There are a number of production-scale applications using cloud computing available, Gopalakrishnan said. Academic institutions in India are expected to work on using cloud computing for e-government applications and researching deployment models for cloud computing, he added.

Cloud computing will help his organization provide IT services to its branches around the world without setting up additional infrastructure, said Deepak Bhosale, chief manager for IT at Asian Paints, an Indian vendor of paints.

The Society for the Promotion of Excellence in Brazilian Software (SOFTEX) and Vietnam Technology and Telecommunications (VNTT) are some of the early customers for the new cloud computing centers, IBM said.

Inadequate communications bandwidth in emerging economies like India will not be a bottleneck for the adoption of cloud computing, Gopalakrishnan said. There are a lot of mobile applications built around cloud computing, for example, that run on less than broadband-grade connectivity, he added.

Cisco this week rolled out a new collaboration product portfolio designed to help companies accelerate business processes and increase productivity, and further mine a $34 billion market for Cisco.

Additions to the Cisco collaboration portfolio include a new release of the company's Unified Communications software (compare unified communications products), a WebEx-enabled product for Web meetings with integrated presence and IM, and TelePresence customer service. The products are also intended to buttress Cisco's focus on the network as the nerve center for the collaboration experience.

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

Cisco contends that the network as a collaboration platform fosters integration between business applications, communications devices and Web-based tools, while allowing IT departments to maintain their mandates regarding security, policy and compliance. Microsoft comes at it from a software perspective (see a head-to-head comparison of Microsoft and Cisco UC products), while IBM touts systems, server, and software as the optimal collaboration platform.

"It's one of the first proof points Cisco's had around the concept of network-as-a-platform," says Yankee Group analyst Zeus Kerravala on this week's collaboration rollout.

Deeper integration with desktops in those IBM and Microsoft environments is one of the features of Cisco's Unified Communications Release 7.0 software. Another is mobility, with additions that help extend collaboration features across workspaces.

Still another is Cisco Mobile Communicator support for devices running on Windows Mobile as well as Symbian and BlackBerry operating systems. Unified Communications 7.0 also scales Cisco Unified Presence to 30,000 users and Cisco Unity to 15,000 users on a single server, Cisco says.

The new WebEx product is called WebEx Connect. It is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) application platform for collaborative business mashups that integrates presence, instant messaging, Web meetings, and team spaces with traditional and Web 2.0 business applications.

"It's the first time one of the major UC vendors decided to go to market with an online, SaaS-based offering," Kerravala says. "The whole idea behind WebEx Connect is to allow developers to be able to access a lot of the UC elements from the cloud. It's the cloud version of UC."

Cisco WebEx Connect includes a number of standard applications including enterprise instant messaging, team spaces, document management, calendaring, and discussions that can be combined with third-party widgets to enable companies to work from a single workspace. It allows administrators to control enterprise policy, security, and compliance for secure inter-company collaboration, Cisco says.

Cisco WebEx Connect also works with enterprise messaging systems to provide integrated communication capabilities within a collaborative mashup. But that's an area where the company can improve, according to one user.

"They need to have a way of having the [Unified Personal Communicator] client be able to talk to all IMs -- not just one -- all those different clients," says Mike DeDecker, voice network engineer at Activision. "So a user doesn't have to have four or five different clients working at his desktop just to communicate with the rest of the world."

DeDecker says Activision, though, can benefit from UC 7.0's standard local route groups feature, which he says reduces and the number and automates the establishment of dialing rules between two sites.

Kerravala expects WebEx Connect to compete with hosted versions of Microsoft's LiveMeeting and Avaya's OnDemand VoIP offering.

The TelePresence component is called Cisco TelePresence Expert on Demand. It integrates Cisco TelePresence into the contact center for in-branch customer service and the ability to summon expertise directly from a Cisco TelePresence meeting

It enables customers to connect with subject-matter experts for in-person customer and point-of-sale service. Users can summon expert assistance directly in a Cisco TelePresence meeting or use a dedicated Cisco TelePresence endpoint and get face-to-face assistance.

For example, a retail bank could provide in-person services to bank customers in every location via Cisco TelePresence, giving organizations the ability to scale resources or expertise, irrespective of geographic location.

Cisco Unified Communications System Release 7.0 and Cisco TelePresence Expert on Demand are available immediately. WebEx Connect is currently available as a desktop and Web-based client; support for mobile clients is scheduled to be available in early 2009.

Network World is an InfoWorld affiliate.

The U.S. Senate has approved an extension to an expired R&D (research and development) tax credit sought by many tech vendors.

The Senate, late Tuesday, passed the extension of the R&D tax credit after adding it to the Renewable Energy and Job Creation Act, which the U.S. House of Representatives passed in May. The House will have to approve the Senate version of the bill before it can go to U.S. President George Bush for his approval.

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The tax credit, expired since December, can cover up to 20 percent of qualified R&D spending. It has expired 13 times since 1981, despite calls by tech, pharmaceutical, and manufacturing groups to make the tax credit permanent.

Lawmakers have resisted making the tax break permanent largely because its price tag of about $7 billion a year. Some critics have called the tax credit a government subsidy for large businesses.

The Senate bill, which passed by a 93-2 vote, included clean energy tax incentives, a revamp of the alternative minimum tax paid by individual taxpayers, and other extensions of expiring tax cuts. The clean energy tax incentives earned praise from TechNet, a network of tech CEOs, which said that green energy represents a huge economic opportunity for the U.S.

"These tax measures represent real support for the American families, workers, and businesses that need a break now," Sen. Max Baucus, a Montana Democrat and chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, said in a statement. "Businesses need provisions like the R&D tax credit to innovate and grow."

In recent weeks, tech trade groups have renewed their push for the tax credit to be extended, with Congress in session for only a few more weeks this year.

The Information Technology Industry Council (ITI), a tech trade group, praised the Senate for passing the bill. "Given the historic economic uncertainty facing our nation, we should be doing all we can to encourage innovation and spark job growth in the U.S.," Ralph Hellmann, ITI's senior vice president for government relations, said in a statement. "It's time for the House to act and pass this legislation right away."

Earlier this month, R&D tax credit supporters sent a letter signed by more than 3,400 U.S. R&D workers from 123 companies to all members of Congress.

The lack of an R&D tax credit could mean that U.S. R&D jobs are sent overseas, the letter said. "Simply put, we are dismayed that Congress has allowed the R&D tax credit to expire," the letter said. "The signatures you see on this letter represent just some of the tens of thousands of real people who have benefited positively from the effects of the credit over the past 26 years. ... We are living proof that the vast majority of R&D credit dollars go directly to pay the wages of highly skilled American workers."

Without the tax credit, it's difficult for companies to plan their R&D budgets, said Sarah Barber, an engineer with Rockwell Collins, an aviation electronics vendor based in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

R&D is an "essential part" of the success for companies like Rockwell Collins, said Barber, one of the workers who signed the letter to Congress. "It's very important to be able to differentiate yourself from your competitors," Barber said.

Without the tax credit, many U.S. companies will have to make tough choices, with some sending R&D work overseas, Barber added.

In addition to extending the R&D tax credit until the end of 2009, the Senate bill would increase the percentage of R&D spending covered from 12 percent to 14 percent under one way of claiming the credit.

Nearly 18,000 U.S. companies used the R&D tax credit in 2005, ITI said. About 70 percent of the tax credit is used for R&D employee wages, it said.

A federal grand jury investigation into the compromise of vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin's Yahoo account has apparently concluded its first day of meetings without an indictment.

Local press has reported that University of Tennessee student David Kernell is being investigated as a suspect in the crime, which occurred last week. Late Tuesday, U.S. Department of Justice spokeswoman Laura Sweeney said that no charges had been filed in the case.

[ To learn more about the Palin incident, read "Lessons of the Sarah Palin e-mail hack." And find out how to secure your systems with Roger Grimes' Security Adviser blog and newsletter, both from InfoWorld. ]

The Chattanooga Times Free Press reported that federal agents and three students had reported Tuesday morning to the courthouse, where a federal grand jury was investigating the case. The grand jury stopped for the day around lunch time without handing down an indictment, the newspaper said.

Sweeney declined to comment on the grand jury or on whether Kernell was a suspect in the matter. Grand jury proceedings are secret until an indictment is delivered to the court.

Although Kernell has not been officially named as a suspect, he was fingered by bloggers who linked him to the online name "rubico," used by the hacker who claimed to have accessed Palin's Yahoo account last week. Information from that hack, including personal messages to and from Palin, were published on the Wikileaks Web site.

Rubico claimed to have accessed the account by using Yahoo's password reset feature and answering security questions with publicly available information. He guessed correctly that Palin had met her husband at Wasilla High.

Kernell, 20, is the son of Mike Kernell, a Democratic state representative from Memphis. David Kernell's Knoxville, Tenn., apartment was searched over the weekend by U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation agents, according to a local report.

Sweeney confirmed that there had been "investigatory activity late Saturday and early Sunday morning in Knoxville related to the government's inquiry."

Last week, the McCain-Palin campaign called the hack "a shocking invasion of the Governor's privacy and a violation of law." Palin is the governor of Alaska.

Microsoft has been busy this year, rolling out Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008 in a push to expand its presence in the corporate data center. To be successful, the company must overcome an economic environment that appears increasingly difficult as well as tough competition from rivals Oracle and VMware, among others

Rob Kelly, Microsoft's corporate vice president of infrastructure server marketing, sat down with IDG News Service to discuss the adoption rate of Windows Server 2008, Microsoft's plans for cloud-based services, and the recent declaration by Paul Maritz, an ex-Microsoft executive and current president and CEO of VMware, that the traditional server operating system "has all but disappeared."

[ Learn more about what cloud computing really means and the new breed of utility computing and platform-as-a-service offerings. ]

What follows is an edited transcript of that interview:

IDGNS: We haven't heard much from Microsoft about user adoption of Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008, can you give us an update on how things are going? For example, are you finding many customers switching from Oracle?

Rob Kelly: At the end of the day, our job is to build software that customers choose to run their businesses on. My job is not out there to beat Oracle, to take Oracle's business. I just want to do a better job of satisfying the customer and, ultimately, they'll choose me for that reason.

The products have been exceedingly well received. We've never had faster adoption of the OS as we've seen with Windows Server 2008, for lots of reasons: the quality of it, the workload focus that we have, some of the efficiencies that are built into it around things like power management, that sort of thing.

IDGNS: When you say this is the fastest adoption you've ever seen, can you quantify that for me?

Kelly: We're taking more share than we've ever taken of the x86 server world, whether you look at IDC or Gartner. We will probably make it to that magical million licenses per quarter run rate very quickly, and that's a phenomenal rate of adoption.

The other thing that's happening on Windows Server 2008 is our mix of premium SKUs (stock keeping unit), driven almost exclusively by virtualization and the rights around virtualization that we've put in those SKUs. Just think of it this way: We have three main SKUs for Windows Server 2008. If you want to run one virtual machine, you choose Standard. If you want to run four virtual machines or fewer, you run Enterprise Edition. If you want unlimited virtual machines you run Datacenter Edition.

Our premium SKU mix, on a global basis, has more than doubled over the last two years since we made the licensing change, and over the last six months it's been unbelievably fast.

IDGNS: Last week we saw Paul Maritz, the CEO of VMware and a guy who knows Microsoft pretty well, proclaim that the server operating system is obsolete and his company will build a virtual datacenter OS to manage applications. How should we interpret his comments? Is there substance to his claim?

Kelly: The death of Windows has been foretold many times. It's in their best interests to position it that way.

Secondly, as I told some internal folks the other day, I know Paul and he's a great guy. I don't envy him where he is right now, because he just entered into a hornet's nest. Not so much because of Microsoft; we treat virtualization as an enabler. It's a feature of the operating system, as it's always been in mainframes and as it is in Linux distributions. What he's just done is enter a space that's crowded by his partners, and I'll give you the one that's canonically challenging for him: Hewlett-Packard.

HP has spent, literally, billions of dollars buying companies that would allow them to be the governor of the data center. They bought Opsware, they bought EDS, they bought Neoware. They bought a whole bunch of interesting assets for themselves. VMware came out and said, "We want to displace them." That's a very tough spot to be in.

As they try to move out of what's quickly becoming a commoditized world, where all these very high margins go away, VMware has stomped into a space where all of their partners are scratching their heads. The buzz on the show floor last week was, "Oh, that's our stuff. That's what we do. Now they want to do this?" It's a fascinating thing, actually. I don't envy Paul.

IDGNS: The news coming out of Wall Street has been pretty grim lately. How does Microsoft view the economic situation? Do you see foresee a point where a worsening economy hurts user adoption of Windows Server 2008?

Kelly: At the core of what we're trying to do is help customers deliver a whole new set of experiences at the lowest cost possible. The first job is help them strip out cost, because that's what they live with every day. We also have to help them deliver new capabilities, because that's what drives their business. Everything is about helping customers move from a high cost, maintenance-focused IT environment to a much more dynamic, business-responsive IT architecture.

When times get tough, customers are constantly on the path to do more with less. Software really delivers the best bang for the buck. Customers tell us when their IT department is strapped, they start asking whether this next machine, this next application or maintenance check is the right way to spend their IT dollars. Or should they move to the economic platform, the one that's actually driven the innovation over the last 10 or 15 years and get on that wave now?

IDGNS: But is the investment required for companies to replace their existing systems with new ones going to be less than the marginal cost of maintaining those existing systems until the economic environment improves?

Kelly: It depends on the customer. A great advantage of Windows Server 2008 is our virtualization technology. It used to cost you $3,000 to buy the Enterprise Edition license and then you had to pay another $3,000 for each virtual server running on top of that, up to four. Now, because of the licensing rights change we allow you to run four virtual machines on top of that for no additional cost. Now, for $3,000, you can run five machines, the base plus four virtual machines.

If you're a Windows customer, for a very marginal outlay of price you can consolidate your physical environment into a virtual environment, which reduces your total footprint of servers. You get a huge power savings and your management costs go down.

IDGNS: Oracle and Amazon announced a deal that makes Oracle 11g and other products available as part of Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud service. Is Microsoft headed down the same path?

Kelly: We're telling everybody to hold their horses, wait until the PDC. At the Professional Developers Conference in late October we will be more concrete about what our plans are, what our offers are in the cloud. But you could probably guess to a large degree. We are a platform company and we are going to offer platform elements in the cloud.

From a developer's standpoint, it will be coherent across the on-premises experience and the cloud-based experience, so you can leverage the learning you already have. If you're a customer, it's a consumption model. I want to consume an application, but do I want to consume it on the premises or in the cloud? We'll make it coherent.

Without giving away a whole bunch of interesting secrets and all that stuff we're holding for PDC, there is nothing that is frightening to us about the cloud. It's just a different delivery vehicle. There's nothing frightening to us about other vendors getting into the space. We believe in the platform and we believe that because we have a platform that customers have chosen with their feet, and their dollars, in the on-premises world, we will be able to deliver that same value proposition in a cloud-based world.

To a lot of people, Ubuntu represents the most end-user-friendly non-geek-compatible Linux distribution. But there are other commercial distributions that work even harder to create a desktop experience that is, frankly, Windows-like. The two best-known of these are Xandros and Linspire (formerly Lindows). Since Xandros recently acquired Linspire, that leaves it pretty much in sole possession of that segment of the marketplace.

Xandros tries to set itself apart from the majority of popular distributions in two ways: first, by making the installation and administration procedure as simple as -- or simpler than -- the best free distributions; second, by integrating commercial software offerings into its package management system.

[ Track the latest trends in open source with InfoWorld's Open Sources blog. ]

A no-choice installWhile distributions such as Ubuntu try to make the installation process easy for nontechnical users by offering reasonable defaults for the various setup options, Xandros takes it a step further -- by essentially offering no choices. The first thing that the installer asks is whether you want an express installation or a custom one.

If you select express, you have made your last decision -- the installer will take over the entire disk, install a standard set of packages, set your network port up for DHCP, and so on. About all you'll be asked for is the required security information for the system login. (As you'd expect, the custom install gives you a bit more control.)

The Xandros installation CD performed well during testing, installing nearly flawlessly on both VMware running on a Windows Vista quad Core 2 workstation and a trusty three-year-old Toshiba laptop. It correctly identified and configured the 802.11g wireless system in the laptop, something that not every distribution I've tested can boast. It did not, however, manage to configure the laptop's sound correctly -- it did not recognize the device, leaving me without audio.

One thing you won't find with Xandros is a LiveCD version. This means that your opportunities to "try before you buy" are limited to physically installing the trial version, and installing something else later if it turns out you don't like it.

After installation, you'll be asked a few more questions when you first log in, dealing with internationalization, time zones, and selecting a desktop look and feel. The default Xandros look is (probably intentionally) very reminiscent of Windows XP, with a Launch button in place of the Start button and little icons representing running programs on the bottom right. If you want, you can choose from several other themes, including a generic KDE interface.

The standard install doesn't include some things you might have expected, such as the OpenOffice suite or the Gimp image manipulation app (although both are available for install via the Xandros Network). You also won't find the Gnome desktop. Unlike many distributions, Gnome isn't available in the standard Xandros installation as a choice -- in fact, it isn't available at all, even through the package manager. Xandros has clearly decided that KDE is the app of choice, and the company is sticking with it.

Interestingly, the install does include some of the usual suspects, such as Firefox and Evolution, the integrated mail, address book, and calendaring app. You also get a copy of CrossOver Linux, an app that allows you to install Windows software on a Linux system, which makes one wonder if they expect most of their potential users would rather install Microsoft Office than use the open source alternatives.

Incidentally, Xandros does a good job of making a number of tasks friendlier than usual for Linux. For example, it has a printer driver installation wizard that walks you through the process, and seems to know about most common printers, such as the pair of networked Brother laser printers I used it with.

The Xandros NetworkThe Xandros Network is a very interesting component of the distribution. It combines a number of functions that most distributions keep separate: package management, updates, and news from Xandros. The package management component, where you install new applications, looks pretty much like that for any other distribution. However, the update section is another place where Xandros has gone for a Windows look and feel, with highly readable descriptions of the updates, divided up into security updates, normal updates, driver updates, and service packs (yes, Xandros has even borrowed the Service Pack nomenclature from Microsoft).

One thing that Xandros offers that most distributions don't is a store, integrated into the Network, that lets you purchase, download, and install commercial Linux software.

Unfortunately, there really aren't that many packages available -- the store mainly offers the pro version of CrossOver and the StarOffice productivity suite, along with Xandros' ant-ivirus software. For an additional $40, you can purchase a Xandros Network Pro membership, which lets you download a number of interesting games and tools.

The current Network may become irrelevant, however, due to the Linspire purchase. One of the major reasons that Xandros gave for acquiring Linspire was to integrate Linspire's Click and Run (CNR) technology into Xandros. CNR offers a much wider variety of commercial software as well as the usual open source fare, and is available on multiple distributions, including Fedora and Ubuntu. As of this writing, CNR is still not available for Xandros, despite an announced July 2008 date, but I would expect it to become available soon.

No free lunchXandros is an unabashedly commercial distribution. Unlike Linspire, which has a parallel Freespire project, Xandros has no free version. The trial version is just that -- it starts shutting down after a half-hour once you've reached the end of the 30-day trial.

If you decide to buy, you currently have only one option: You can purchase the Professional version for $99, which includes the distribution, the Xandros Network package and 90 days of support. (If you're a nonprofit, incidentally, the company allows unlimited installations for nonprofit use.)

And if you're looking for a single desktop edition? At the moment, you're out of luck; Xandros has discontinued its $40 Desktop Home Edition. However, according to a company rep, Xandros will release Freespire 5 in late October and a new Business Desktop version in November.

Xandros will no doubt offend Linux purists, both by the tight integration of commercial software into its business model and by the lack of features such as Gnome. On the other hand, for a Linux newbie who wants a Windows-like experience, it may make a reasonable choice.

James Turner is a freelance journalist specializing in technology. Computerworld is an InfoWorld affiliate.

Chuck Rozwat, Oracle's head of product development, largely deflected questions about hotly anticipated technologies such as Fusion Applications during a Q&A session with reporters at the OpenWorld conference in San Francisco on Tuesday, but did reveal more details of the vendor's plans around cloud computing.

Intel and Oracle announced Tuesday that they are collaborating to "accelerate enterprise readiness of cloud computing." The partnership will focus on three areas: software performance and power efficiency; improved virtual machine security; and the promotion of standards for porting virtual machine images and provisioning cloud services.

[ For more news from Oracle OpenWorld 2008, check out InfoWorld's special report. ]

Oracle will likely seek a similar collaboration with Intel's rival, Advanced Micro Devices, Rozwat said.

"When we do announcements with one particular vendor, unless there's some big exclusive tag associated with it, it typically is something we might do with other vendors as well," Rozwat said.

That announcement followed Monday's news that Oracle will make its 11g database, Fusion Middleware and Enterprise Manager products available on Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).

The Amazon deal is also by no means exclusive, Rozwat indicated: "We will be making subsequent announcements for other cloud computing environments."

But Rozwat was less forthcoming regarding other topics, particularly Fusion Applications, which have been dogged by questions of delays.

Oracle has unveiled a handful of Fusion Applications so far, centering on CRM (customer relationship management). Rozwat also classified a recently released enterprise performance management product as a Fusion application.

On Sunday, another company executive said during a panel discussion that Oracle hopes to get the initial Fusion Applications product suite into the hands of early adopters starting in 2009.

But Rozwat refused to reveal any other concrete information about Fusion Applications, and characterized his reticence as standard company practice.

"Across all our products, we talk about general directions but we try to avoid giving very specific features or specific dates," he said. "If you look at all our presentations this week, you really won't see anything too far into the future that starts giving feature lists or product names. ... We're treating Fusion applications no different than any other product in that regard."

Neither would the executive pull the curtain back on Oracle 11g R2, for which Oracle is recruiting beta testers this week. Oracle did deliver a patch set for 11g Release 1 this week, but is not "quite ready to talk about 11g R2 and exactly when that will be available," Rozwat said.

When it does ship, 11g R2 will make it easier to employ and manage grid computing and Oracle's Real Application Clusters (RAC) database-clustering technology, and will include better diagnostic and monitoring tools, Rozwat said.

T-Mobile, Google, and High Tech Computer (HTC) unveiled the highly anticipated Android phone in New York on Tuesday, and I got a chance to try out the new handset at HTC's office in Taipei.

The applications on board are by far the coolest feature of the handset, especially Google Maps Street View, which on the handset, allows a person to view a snapshot of an entire street scene at any of several U.S. cities.

[ See  related story "Android to debut in T-Mobile's G1 smartphone." ]

I chose 42nd Street in New York City at the Avenue of the Americas from Google Maps, and once the information downloaded from Chunghwa Telecom's mobile network, I was able to view the street on the handset's screen. It's cool.

There are three ways to navigate a street scene with T-Mobile's G1, or the "Dream" as HTC calls it.

The funnest was to hit the "compass" function on the handset and move it around by hand. You pan the G1 up and view the screen as if it's the LCD viewfinder on a digital camera, and you're looking at building tops or into trees. Pan down and you can see if anyone dropped some coins on the street. Pan around for an entire 360-degree view of the street from where you are, including taxis, buildings, or a guy walking down the street eating a sandwich.

I can't think of any useful reasons to use Street View -- Google Maps is enough to get you where you want to go -- but it sure is fun.

The other two ways to navigate on Street View are by using the touchscreen to look around or the trackball at the bottom of the phone.

Google is still expanding the Street View database to include more cities.

The applications aspect of the G1 may make it one of the most expandable handsets around. You can already find fun and useful programs from Android, many of them free. And applications are easy to find and download.

An icon on the desktop of the handset sends you right to an Android apps page, where applications roll across a panel at the top of the screen. You can use your thumb on the touchscreen to make the panel move left or right for more choices and then tap an app's icon to choose it.

I picked ShopSavvy because the demonstration of it looked fun and I wanted to see it in actual use.

Bargain hunters will love this program.

ShopSavvy turns the G1's on-board 3-megapixel camera into a price tag scanner. It starts to scan immediately when ShopSavvy is on, no need to snap a photo or anything. Just run a red line in the middle of the viewfinder over a barcode and it scans the information.

It took me a few tries to scan the barcode of the book, "Execution" by Larry Bossidy, which was one of the few things at HTC's office with a barcode. But once I got it, it only took several seconds to navigate to a site with a book review and other information, as well as suggestions on where to buy. It costs $21 new at eCampus.com, or $2.50 used at Half.com, while the retail price listed inside the cover of the book itself was $27.50.

The ShopSavvy application only took about 40 seconds to download. I also downloaded Pac-Man, which took about 33 seconds.

The handset itself feels good, solidly built and with beautiful screen quality. Even when you flip up the screen to reveal the QWERTY keyboard below, it's quick and smooth in a way you can tell it won't break easily.

Flipping up the screen, by the way, is the only way to turn the view on the handset screen sideways. Unlike other handsets that turn the screen view sideways when the handset is held sideways, the G1 only turns the screen view sideways when the QWERTY keyboard is showing.

I can't say I was wild about the handset's overall design. It's a bit thick and industrial, especially compared to HTC's last major release, the Touch Diamond, which is beautifully crafted.

But unlike the Touch Diamond, which is made of a clear plastic that's a bit slippery, the G1 has more of a rubberized feel for easier handling.

The face of the G1, when the QWERTY keypad isn't showing, is mainly the touchscreen, which looks like it's about 3-inches, with five navigation controls at the bottom, including the trackball in the middle.

Navigation on the touchscreen was smooth and the software responded quickly to tap commands. The trackball, also worked well, but took a bit of getting used to.

The keypad was easy to use, even with my big thumbs, but I didn't have a chance to actually type out a message. I did make a phone call, which was easy to do and the voice quality was clear.

One warning to sound out to anyone interested in the G1 (Dream) handset is to take care on your choice of mobile phone service providers.

The only service provider today is T-Mobile and some fine print on their Web site betrays a stingy allowance on data services: "If your total data usage in any billing cycle is more than 1GB, your data throughput for the remainder of that cycle may be reduced to 50Kbps or less."

For a handset designed for the Internet, with so much downloadable software applications from Android's Web site that are heavy on data usage, as well as music downloads from Amazon and online videos from YouTube, it seems likely users will need more than the 1GB allotment.

More likely than not, other service providers will launch a version of HTC's Dream as well. They may offer better terms.

T-Mobile's G1 will first be available in the U.S. on Oct. 22 for $179 with a two-year contract and subscription to a limited data plan for $25 a month or $35 for unlimited data access.

T-Mobile will release the G1 in the U.K. in early November and other European markets in the first quarter next year.

The G1 is currently only available in English, but translation into other languages is already underway, an HTC representative said. It will take six months for the handset to be made available in nearly all languages.

In the coming weeks, the feds and the surviving financial services institutions will have the daunting task of unraveling all the securitized loans and other instruments that are hiding the toxic investments. But does the technology exist to do that? And if so, could it have been used to prevent the bad debt from hitting the fan in the first place?

The fact is that despite government regulations like Sarbanes-Oxley, there is little visibility mandated by current regulations into the origination of loans and how they are broken up, resold, and resold again.

[ After-the-fact BI doesn't help identify problems early. Read how operational analytics could help flag issues so that you can act before they blow up. ]

To cite the classic example of how we got into this mess, consumers were given 100-percent-plus variable mortgages without any security. Not only could those mortgages be sold to other banks, but they could be divided into 5, 10, or 20 tranches -- financialese for slices -- and resold to between 5 and 10 different organizations, making it difficult to track who was involved and who ended up taking the risk.

Theoretically, the financial service providers were clear on the risks of each type of loan and had a way to gauge whether they had enough liquidity -- cash and other easily sold assets -- available if the riskier loans went south. But a New York Times report indicates that in fact many financial institutions gamed their analytics to favor positive scenarios over negative ones in order to justify keeping less money in reserves should the risky loan blow up. "A large number of buyers of these kinds of instruments really didn't care about the value. They just wanted to flip it. A lot of people just didn't want to know," says Josh Greenbaum, principal at Enterprise Applications Consulting.

Analytics and CEP tools could have helped Had these financial services companies and banks established business intelligence metrics as to the ratios of what kind of debt they were holding versus the cash reserves they held, their analytics systems might have driven alerts earlier in the process, says Michael Corcoran, a product manager at the BI provider Information Builders. But as anyone in business already knows, consolidating that kind of data to get those answers more often than not is a slow process that typically ends up being done manually in an Excel spreadsheet well after the fact.

Jeff Wooton, vice president of product strategy at Aleri, a CEP (complex event processing) company, agrees that most data consolidation takes far too long to give a complete picture. "It relies on overnight data consolidation runs, overnight reports, and manual processes like spreadsheets."

That's where technologies such as CEP and operational BI come into play. They analyze huge volumes of transactions -- 100,000 messages per second with millisecond response time, triggering remedial actions by other systems. But they can also be slowed down and used by analysts as a decision support tool. Tools such as Aleri's Liquidity Management System already exist to help treasurers in global banks gauge their liquidity position in real time. Wooton says that over the last two weeks there has been considerably more interest in such products than in the past.

Wooton cautions that the various kinds of analytics tools available, such as business activity monitoring, decision support software, data integration, and alerts, could have offered a warning but not fixed the underlying problem of financial services firms misjudging -- and in some cases, misrepresenting -- the risks of their loans and securities.

But taking analytics, CEP, and data integration to the next level to give regulators a sense of what all the financial institutions were doing and what the liquidity risks actually were could have helped, and it could prevent a recurrence, Corcoran says. He says that the use of middleware could bring the data together and create a "common front end" that is shared by regulators and the services companies alike.

But that front end needs a common back end, especially around the data that should exist, says consultant Greenbaum. "The data model for doing the analysis doesn't exist," he says, so a company selling securities and packaged mortgages doesn't include the packaging history. "You can't do the classic drill-down," Greenbaum says, because no one knows what the relationships are because the metadata hasn't been preserved -- or at least not preserved in a way that is easy to find.

Integration is a double-edged sword While integration of data and the analytics around financial investments could help prevent future financial meltdowns, it's also true that the integration of business activities on a global scale helped get us into this crisis in the first place, says Suzanne Duncan, financial markets industry leader for the Institute for Business Value at IBM.

"Firm-to-firm and country-to-country integration is increasing. This improves efficiency because it lets capital flow to where it is needed, but at the same time these linkages cause larger shocks at a greater frequency," Duncan says.

The reason comes back to the lack of visibility into financial risks and liquidity both at the individual financial institution and globally. Because the information is too scattered throughout the firm and held in silos of information systems, many financial institutions did not even have a grasp on the loans they held, he says.

"Many of these bigger firms don't know what their counterparty exposures are. They don't know how much Lehman Brothers owes them," Wooton adds. (A counterparty is any organization with which your company has some kind of relationship with, be it as partner or as a client.) Duncan agrees: "No matter which part of the ecosystem you are talking about, companies don't know what their counterparty exposures are." IBM is in the midst of working with its Asian clients to root through what their exposures are.?

Retail algorithms may be reused for financial services Although much of the technology already exists that could have tracked and helped to at least warn companies of the dangers ahead, IBM is also looking at retooling some current technology that uses sophisticated algorithms to map processes to help increase the visibility into risks of financial instruments that are dispersed globally.

Up until now, technology in the financial services industry has been focused on capacity -- whether an application can handle high volume and volatility -- rather than on process. There is no process flow map that tells organizations who owns what pieces of what risk.

But in the retail industry, there are such flow-mapping technologies to track, for example, that consumer A buys a car and two years later sells that car to consumer B, who in turn sells his car to consumer C, while consumer A buys a new car; the software maps all of those processes for the sake of tracking buyer behavior. By scanning through the Web and physical public documents, a retailer puts together a point of view on a customer's buying behavior. "That kind of process mapping hasn't been unleashed to track the whole world of institutional behavior," Duncan says. But perhaps it could.

Of course, even with the right technology in place, Greenbaum cautions, it will do no good unless meaningful government oversight is put in place, so the financial services companies can't again -- through ignorance or deceit -- so wildly create and distribute toxic assets.

Linux is enjoying growth, with a contingent of devotees too large to be called a cult following at this point. Solaris, meanwhile, has thrived as a longstanding, primary Unix platform geared to enterprises. But with Linux the object of all the buzz in the industry, can Sun's rival Solaris Unix OS hang on, or is it destined to be displaced by Linux altogether?

The case for Solaris's demise Sun officials believe the 16-year-old Solaris platform remains a pivotal, innovative platform. But at the Linux Foundation, there is a no-conciliatory stance; the attitude there is to tell Solaris and Sun to move out of the way. "The future is Linux and Microsoft Windows," says foundation Executive Director Jim Zemlin. "It is not Unix or Solaris."

[ Sun is moving into the virtualization space, riding on x86 Solaris. Read the InfoWorld's Test Center review of Sun's xVM VirtualBox. ]

Solaris, he said, has almost no new deployments and is a legacy operating environment offered by a company with financial difficulties. Original equipment manufacturers also do not see a bright future for Solaris, he claims.

By contrast, Linux is the overwhelming choice for new deployments on x86 systems, Zemlin says.? Sun has had its strength in applications such as ERP systems with a seven- to 20-year life cycle, he adds. "What's starting to happen is those life cycles are starting to be completed," and those customers are moving to Linux.

That move to Linux is accelerated by Linux's strength in Web applications, where developers today are focused, Zemlin adds. "You can't really talk to any Web-based application company these days that's not using Linux," he says.?

Linux also is less costly to run, Zemlin claims. Sun, he declared, should just move over to Linux. Zemlin also held out little hope for other IBM's AIX and Hewlett-Packard's HP-UX Unix platforms. "It's certainly true that Unix is on the decline," he says.

"Customers are pretty aware that Unix is a more expensive legacy architecture. They continue to support it because they don't want to change their legacy apps over to a new platform because of the costs," Zemlin said. "But they know now they eventually need to do it because Unix just doesn't have the combined might of all the different organizations and individuals that are developing [for] Linux."

Thanks to its strong support of the x86 hardware architecture, "in terms of overall volume, Linux is just a much higher volume product than Solaris ever was," says Al Gillen, an IDC analyst. IDC data show that worldwide Linux shipments in 2006 were about 2.4 million in 2006 and nearly 2.7 million in 2007. By contrast, Solaris shipments totaled 376,000 in 2006 and 371,000 last year.

Solaris, Zemlin says, is losing market share because it does not have a good price performance or value proposition.

Zemlin also disputes Sun's notion that Solaris technology gives it an edge over Linux. "The only people I hear talk about DTrace [Solaris's technology for assessing program and OS behaviours] and ZFS [the Zettabyte File System] as competitive features [are] Sun Microsystems sales representatives. It's not something I believe is impacting the market in any way," he says.

With capabilities such as ZFS and DTrace, Sun is trying to compete based on minor features, Zemlin says. "That's literally like noticing the view from a third-story building as it burns to the ground." And the Linux community is working on rival technology, Zemlin adds.

Given Sun's own Linux support on its Sparc and x86 servers, Zemlin suggests that it should make ZFS and DTrace available under a Linux-compatible license. Sun instead uses its Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL), which is not compatible with the Linux GNU General Public License. (Sun says CDDL provides licensing support for a greater universe of systems than GPL does.)

One company that is moving from Solaris ?to Linux is Sesame Workshop, famous for TV shows such as Sesame Street. A key reason is that more people are available to support Linux than Solaris, says Noah Broadwater, vice president of information services at Sesame Workshop. "I honestly have one person who is certified on Solaris. I have four people who are certified on Linux," Broadwater said.

The other key issue with Solaris boils down to one word: cost. Sesame is saving about $20,000 a year in support costs by moving to Linux, Broadwater says.

One fear that Broadwater had in moving to Linux was degradation in performance, but he has been pleasantly surprised such degradation has not occurred. For example, the company's IBM Cognos BI application runs faster on x86 Linux boxes than it did on Sparc Solaris, he says.

The case for Solaris's existence Sun stands behind Solaris. "For customers who'd chosen Linux in the past, we're seeing some of those same customers come back to Solaris," says Charlie Boyle, director of Solaris product marketing at Sun.

Solaris boasts features such as ZFS for simplified storage management and Solaris containers for virtualization, Boyle says. He cites a recent partnership in which Dell will make Solaris available on its computers; Dell would not do this if there was not customer demand. Sun is seeing brand new customers for Solaris; "I think we've got a great future," Boyle says.

"I think Solaris is absolutely a great OS," says Neil Wilson, a former Sun employee who later left the OpenDS project. Solaris is "absolutely far superior to Linux for the cases where the hardware support is there," he adds.

Gracenote, which provides a media recognition and metadata service for MP3 users (the CDDB database familiar to iTunes users), agrees. "We found the threading model in Linux was problematic. You get to a certain number of concurrent threads and the OS just slows way down," says Matthew Leeds, vice president of operations at Gracenote.? Solaris "just works for us."

The debate over Solaris's open source future As part of its plans to give Solaris a longer life, Sun has developed an open source effort based on Solaris, called OpenSolaris, featuring a binary release of Solaris through Project Indiana.

The Linux Foundation's Zemlin, though, dismisses Sun's open-source Solaris as "too little, too late." His foundation has also charged that there is no real open source community around OpenSolaris, arguing that Sun still controls development. To back up its point, the foundation points to blogs detailing disputes over control of OpenSolaris and the Sun-driven OpenDS directory projects, from February 2008 and November 2007. Sun declined to comment on the specifics of these issues and noted they both happened several months ago. Zemlin claims Open Solaris is no more than an attempt to expand the Solaris user base to drive customers to commercial Sun technology.

Sun's Boyle acknowledges that Sun employees participate in OpenSolaris development, but says they do so along with individual and corporate contributors such as Intel. Community registrations in the OpenSolaris community exceed 160,000, far in excess of Sun's total employee account of 34,000 people, he notes.

"I'd say we've got a great community around OpenSolaris." Boyle said. "People are free to come and go as they want, and the community's been growing every month," he says. "To say that Sun is controlling all this, I don't think is a fair and accurate statement."

Oracle introduced a new application grid that employs technology acquired through its purchase of BEA Systems.

Application grids eschew the traditional approach that dedicates a piece of hardware to serving a particular application. Instead, the grid format creates a pool of resources that can be provisioned dynamically at runtime.

[ For more news from Oracle OpenWorld 2008, check out InfoWorld's special report. ]

This can help IT shops respond to spikes in demand for a given application. For example, a bank may have certain hours of the day when its online banking application is heavily hit, and therefore needs more resources, whereas an account reconciliation program might need additional power at a different time of day, said Rick Schultz, vice president of product marketing, at the OpenWorld conference in San Francisco on Tuesday.

Oracle is talking about application grids now because of the recent BEA purchase, but also because many customers who have applied grid technology to their database tiers are thinking about implementing a similar model at the middleware level, according to Schultz.

Oracle WebLogic Application Grid components include Oracle Coherence, an in-memory data grid; JRockit Real-Time and JRockit Mission Control, the Java virtual machine and accompanying toolset Oracle gained from BEA; and Oracle WebLogic Operations Control, another BEA-developed product, for managing the service-level agreements of grid-enabled applications.

The stack is "application-server-agnostic," able to work with competing products such as WebSphere and JBoss as well as Oracle's own WebLogic Server, according to a FAQ sheet.

Speciality vendors like Gigaspaces and Appistry also sell application grid technology.

When Google announced the Open Handset Alliance (a group of wireless industry players looking to get their names associated with Google's Android open mobile platform project), true open-source smartphones were a great idea that seemed far from commercial realization. This will change on October 22, when the T-Mobile G1 ? the product of an exclusive partnership among T-Mobile, Google, and Asian handset manufacturer HTC -- becomes the first shipping mobile device based on the Android platform.

The Android platform is open source -- Google has committed to publishing the source code for the entire platform, not just an application-level SDK. In the words of one developer interviewed for the T-Mobile launch event, "There's nobody telling you 'you can't do that'."

In truth, T-Mobile is placing limits on T-Mobile G1 users and developers. While the device is open to international roaming within T-Mobile networks, and its baseband radio is compatible with standards used by other GSM and UMTS networks worldwide, the G1 will be locked to T-Mobile networks. T-Mobile has also decided to prohibit the device's use as a so-called "Internet modem," a service that the industry refers to as tethering. Some other handsets, including Windows Mobile, BlackBerry, and Nokia models, will tether to laptops and other Bluetooth and USB-equipped computers to a cellular data network. If Android is a truly open platform, a rookie programmer could work around the tethering restriction. To put teeth in the tethering ban, provisions in T-Mobile's data plans subject subscribers who transfer more than 1GB of data per month to dial-up speed limitations as well as possible suspension of their coverage. Some users will bristle at being subjected to any limit, but 1GB is extremely generous for a mobile device, and at least T-Mobile's limit is explicitly stated unlike some competitors'. With its built-in Wi-Fi connectivity, home and office networks, as well as airport and restaurant hot spots, will satisfy T-Mobile G1 users' appetite for downloadable media without eating into their monthly bit budget.

Carrier locking, T-Mobile's temporary Android exclusive, and prohibition of tethered use will generate controversy among open-source fans who will likely dominate the T-Mobile G1's initial market. Even so, these protections are needed. Without them, Android has grim commercial prospects because T-Mobile and Google, neither of which is a non-profit operation, have underwritten this effort for three years, and they need assured payback on their R & D. If gray market T-Mobile G1 (a.k.a. HTC Dream) handsets become available that are unlocked to operate on competing networks, T-Mobile and Google, along with all of the third parties that hope to charge for Android software and services offered through Google's Android Market, will end up in the red, and Android will flop. It behooves Android developers who want the device to succeed to further, not thwart, T-Mobile's and Google's efforts to make money with this and future devices.

T-Mobile and Google went out of their way to drain the potentially intimidating geek factor out of the G1. They want this to be a mainstream, slightly upscale consumer phone befitting its subsidized price of $179. T-Mobile was careful to demonstrate the handset's consumer-friendly driving experience using a video laden with jump-cuts, and in which a finger prominently obscured the display. T-Mobile hastened to qualify the video as a "just a teaser." It ushered attendees of the launch event to rooms downstairs where devices were available to touch and drive. I will find my own way to drive the G1 between now and the launch date. YouTube renderings of the experience will abound in the meantime. If they're not shot with T-Mobile's press conference table in the background, suspect it as a fake.

If you've already decided that you want a T-Mobile G1, as I said at the top of this story, the magic begins on October 22. I like that T-Mobile's existing customers, which ranks include myself (through T-Mobile's goodwill), will be able to pre-order the G1 on-line. Everybody else can queue up at T-Mobile stores and authorized retailers when the phone goes on sale. Don't expect any shortages, real or otherwise; T-Mobile G1 won't be a million-seller in its first weekend. Expect G1 to pick up steam as apps come on-line and early consumers start addressing usability. If Google keeps to its promise to open Android to all, the platform will evolve at a pace that thrills customers and shows T-Mobile and Google that their bets were well placed.

Even though three companies hosted the launch event and the software is backed by a consortium, the introduction of the first Android phone made it very clear that Android is about one company: Google.

Android is Google's attempt to dominate the mobile advertising market, just as it has dominated the online PC advertising market, said Craig Wigginton, industry leader for Deloitte's telecommunications practice. "Their number-one driver for pushing this is the advertising model," he said.

[ Special report: All about Google's Android mobile OS ]

But in order to grab a major share of the mobile advertising market, Google will have to convince a large number of people -- including business users -- to buy Android phones. That's a significant challenge in the increasingly crowded mobile phone market.

The G1, the first Android phone introduced by T-Mobile, Google, and HTC on Tuesday, comes loaded with Google applications, including Gmail, Gtalk, Maps, and YouTube. The home screen includes just one item: a Google search bar. Each of those applications is an opportunity for Google to deliver advertisements to users.

"Google is moving into the mobile devices market not to become yet another mobile phone manufacturer, but to enable a large addressable market for its services and applications," agreed Carolina Milanesi, an analyst at Gartner.

Around the world, there are 3.5 billion mobile-phone users. Just a fraction as many have computers. "Google has been very successful in the PC marketplace from an advertising perspective, so I think this can be a phenomenal source of revenue for them," Wigginton said.

Mobile advertising so far is a small market, but some analysts have high hopes for growth in the future. M:Metrics found that mobile display advertising was an approximately $200 million industry last year, a figure analysts there expect to at least double this year. Analysts at Heavy Reading predict that the mobile advertising industry will exceed $10 billion in annual revenue in 2013.

But Google faces a major challenge in trying to get the phones into hands of users as it is up against some strong competitors, including the iPhone. Researchers at Strategy Analytics predict that 400,000 people will buy the G1 by the end of the year. That compares to 1 million people who recently bought the 3G iPhone on its opening weekend.

Google and T-Mobile appear to be mainly hoping that mass-market consumers will buy the phone, even though smartphones have traditionally appealed most to business users. The G1 lacks some features that business users might want. For example, it doesn't support Exchange mail, although it could if a developer builds the application.

J. Gold Associates recently conducted a study of large and small businesses regarding their expectations for which mobile platform they expect to use within the next three years. The study of North American companies found that Android comes in last place, with 4.8 percent of businesses in the study saying that the platform will be important to them within the next three years.

Microsoft doesn't see Android as a competitor to Windows Mobile. "It's not even supporting Exchange, so I really doubt this is going to be going after the market that we do," said Scott Rockfeld, group product manager at Microsoft's Windows Mobile group. Microsoft has recently tweaked its marketing message from pitching Windows Mobile as exclusively a business tool to portraying the device as a single phone that appeals to people while they're working and playing.

Still, because Android is an open platform, developers can build applications that might interest enterprise users. "With the open sourcing, we should see as many enterprise apps as we would see consumer apps," said Wigginton.

Google's success in the market could benefit all mobile users, be they consumers or business users, in the form of lower prices. Onlookers have speculated that Google could help subsidize Android phones using revenue earned from advertising to the devices. "I don't know if Google is subsidizing it or not, but it's not out of the realm of possibilities," said Wigginton. The G1 will cost $179 when it becomes available in late October in the U.S.

Some analysts say they don't expect Android to be an overnight success, but given time it could challenge its competitors. "The G1 represents a promising start, and Google has pockets deep enough to outspend and compete with its competitors," said Geoff Blaber, an analyst at CCS Insight.

Once other Android phones start appearing, the platform could gain momentum. "There will be more to come in 2009 when manufacturers such as Samsung and LG will deliver their devices. Android has the potential to become the de facto operating system for Linux, and we expect sales to reach around 10 percent of the smartphone market in 2011," said Gartner analyst Roberta Cozza.

It's unclear yet which operator will launch the next Android phone. T-Mobile appears to have gotten a head start on its competitors. During the launch event on Tuesday, Cole Brodman, chief technology and innovation officer for T-Mobile USA, mentioned that the operator had been working with Google and HTC as far back as three years ago. Their partnership then predates the introduction of Android and the alliance of companies that back it in November 2007. Sprint, NTT DoCoMo, Telefonica, and other operators around the globe are also members of the consortium.

Oracle is mapping out two upgrades to the enterprise portal software package acquired when the company bought BEA Systems.

Highlighted at the Oracle OpenWorld 2008 conference in San Francisco on Monday evening, plans call for new releases of Oracle WebCenter Interaction, formerly BEA AquaLogic User Interaction, later this year and in 2009.

[ For more news from Oracle OpenWorld 2008, check out InfoWorld's special report. ]

The product offers many uses, said Ajay Gandhi, senior director of product management for Enterprise 2.0 and portal products at Oracle. Among these uses are social networking and serving as a front end to a composite application in an SOA stack. Gandhi came over to Oracle from BEA, which Oracle acquired earlier this year.

WebCenter Interaction has become part of Oracle's WebCenter Suite. The upcoming fall release, WebCenter Interaction 10g R3, serves as the first Oracle-branded version of the product, Gandhi said.

"The big thing is it's designed to work with Oracle's Web 2.0-based WebCenter Services and Oracle's Universal Content Management [platform]," Gandhi said during a follow-up interview. WebCenter Services features Web 2.0 services like wikis and blogs;

Also featured in the 10g R3 product are improvements to adaptive layouts and the UI. "It's really a release designed to come out with Oracle branding, [the] Oracle look and feel," Gandhi said.

The fall release also supports Java Development Kit 1.6, enabling developers writing portlets to use the current Java standard, said Gandhi.

The second half of 2009 will see the Neo release of WebCenter Interaction, featuring support for deployment on Windows Server 2008. The official name of the release is Oracle WebCenter Interaction 11g.

Another key capability is microblogging, which leverages small messages tracked on a user's profile page. Activity streams, for tracking activities relevant to work, are leveraged as part of the overarching WebCenter Services suite.

A "People Connections" capability in 11g is a Web 2.0 service offering such functionality as content recommendations. Version 11g also bridges with Microsoft SharePoint Web Part portlets.

Also featured in 11g is WebCenter Collaboration, a renaming of the AquaLogic Collaboration module that is used to create community- and project-based workspaces. The UI will be more dynamic, featuring tagging capabilities and RSS subscriptions. It also will be integrated with Microsoft Office 2007.

The Neo release will boost standards support around content integration and portlets consumption; the company still is ironing out which specific standards will be backed, Gandhi said.

A user of the portal software, who first deployed it when it was a Plumtree product, said he has been satisfied with Oracle's acquisition. But the change has meant another round of transition, said the user, Geoff Garcia, producer for enterprise portal at March of Dimes.

"Going from Plumtree to BEA, we were still going through that transition," Garcia said. "Now, we've got a whole [new] transition with another name change."

March of Dimes has been scheduled to redo its support contract but that has been put on hold indefinitely since the merger, said Garcia.

BEA acquired Plumtree in 2005.

Mobile navigation and software vendor TeleNav took a page from Research In Motion's book with a server that can mediate between TeleNav's software and existing enterprise applications.

The company's TeleNav Track platform includes tools for managing employees who work out of the office as well as for sending information from the field. It's based on TeleNav's navigation software for mobile phones, which can keep supervisors apprised of workers' locations via GPS as well as provide maps and turn-by-turn directions. TeleNav is available for a variety of Windows Mobile, Palm, and BlackBerry devices as well as on other types of phones through Brew and J2ME (Java 2, Micro Edition).

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

Easy-to-use forms for cell phone screens are a key attribute of TeleNav Track. They can be adapted to particular types of reports required for individual enterprises, said Keith Halasy, TeleNav's senior marketing manager for business-to-business products. Data from TeleNav can be adapted to go into existing data-entry and database systems, including the homegrown applications commonly used in small businesses, he said. But so far, that has required ad-hoc development for each enterprise system, and it's been hard to handle more than one, according to Halasy.

The TeleNav Enterprise Server (TES), available starting Tuesday with the newly introduced TeleNav Track 4.1, is designed to consolidate all types of data conversions in one platform and make it easier to write software for each of those processes. With relative ease, enterprises can set up conversions to multiple formats, Halasy said. TeleNav can also do this work as an added service.

New York's Street Conditions Observation Unit (SCOUT) program uses TeleNav Track for reporting potholes, sinkholes and other conditions to various city agencies for repair. About 15 employees ride scooters around the city, covering roughly every street within a month, and send in a report via a BlackBerry handset for each problem they find. The program was launched last year on short notice, and the city scrambled to put together software that could adapt TeleNav Track data to each agency's preferred format, said Girish Chhugani, executive director of citywide technology initiatives.

Setting up the system for entering street-condition reports was relatively easy and only took about two months, Chhugani said.

"We didn't even really have to develop anything. All we had to do was create forms," Chhugani said. "If we sat down and did all that ... it would have been another ten months."

However, there was some back-end work required to send the data from those forms into all the systems that needed it, including a Siebel system for the city's 311 information service and a mainframe at the Department of Transportation, he said. The city used Visual Basic and .Net to create applications for those needs.

With the TES, Chhugani hopes to further automate that process, allowing the back-end databases to be automatically populated. Like RIM's BlackBerry Enterprise Server, the TES sits behind an enterprise firewall and acts as a broker between the mobile infrastructure and enterprise back-end systems. A single server, rather than an array of different scripts, will be easier to maintain in the long run, Chhugani said.

In addition to field reporting, TeleNav allows the SCOUT program to track employees to see whether they are covering their territories and lets employees clock in and out from the field. The city is working with TeleNav to give them GPS-controlled automated directions around their routes. The biggest problem the city has encountered has been the sometimes poor GPS coverage in areas with many tall buildings, Chhugani said.

Other new features in TeleNav Track 4.1 include Team Timecard, which lets supervisors clock entire crews in and out from a mobile device; controls to prevent users from clocking excessive overtime; and a Hot Key Alert, which lets a worker send an alert message to a supervisor quickly and discreetly with just a few keystrokes.

The TES is priced starting at $3,000 for between 25 and 50 users, with a $500 annual maintenance fee. It is also available as a managed server. TeleNav Track 4.1 starts at $12.95 per user per month and is sold through mobile operators.

The new T-Mobile G1 wireless phone, announced Tuesday by T-Mobile, Google, and HTC, generated attention for its use of the open Android platform, but it will be locked to the T-Mobile USA network and it doesn't appear to be heavily focused on business users.

"It appears they have provided an Android phone that is only half open," said Jack Gold , an analyst at J. Gold Associates in Northboro, Mass.

[ Special report: Google Android: Invader from beyond ]

Moreover, the absence of support for Microsoft Exchange e-mail or another robust business-focused e-mail system will limit the G1's usefulness to all but the smallest businesses, Gold added. "You can't use Gmail in the enterprise."

Even T-Mobile conceded the device will be more focused on consumers. "This device will have mass appeal and something for everybody," said Cole Brodman, chief technology and innovation officer at T-Mobile USA in a webcast announcement of the $179 device. Still he quickly added: "We expect it to be more [for the] consumer, not necessarily enterprise, but a lot of enterprise workers will come ... and use it as well."

Brodman defended the locking of the device to T-Mobile's GSM and 3G HSPA networks, noting that a faster 3G network will give G1 applications the "best experience." The phone will function on 2G networks, he said, adding there will be a "good experience on 2G, but the best on Wi-Fi and 3G."

About 16 cities have HSPA service from T-Mobile Tuesday, and 22 cities will be on that 3G network by the time of the U.S. launch of the G1 on Oct. 22. About 27 markets will have HSPA service in mid-November, representing 80 percent of T-Mobile USA's 31 million customers, Brodman said.

The bigger market advantage will be in Europe, where 100 million T-Mobile International customers will have the phone in the first quarter of next year, starting with users in the U.K. in early November, said Christopher Schlaffer, innovation officer at Deutsche Telekom, which owns T-Mobile.

Inevitably, users will compare the G1 to Apple's iPhone 3G , which garnered more credibility among business users than its predecessor thanks to new features such as a robust e-mail connection with Microsoft Exchange. But Google's senior director of mobile platforms, Andy Rubin, said that while the G1 will allow users to read Microsoft Word documents and PDFs, it won't support for Exchange.

"It's a good opportunity for third parties" to provide an Exchange application, he noted, adding that the G1 supports Gmail from Google. "Gmail is pretty robust, and you can search e-mail pretty fast with it."

Brodman also said that the G1 does not yet support Skype and will not support iTunes, although it supports the iTunes code and could support it if Apple unlocked the digital rights.

Gold's research includes a recent survey of 290 businesses in North America, which showed that T-Mobile has been a small player with business users, with about 8 percent those surveyed reporting that they use the carrier. AT&T leads that group, followed by Verizon Wireless and Sprint Nextel, Gold said.

Having the phone locked to T-Mobile "is a problem, absolutely," especially for potential business users, Gold added. Even as iPhone 3G has received criticism for being locked to AT&T in the U.S., Apple has reached out to a larger business community with its latest release.

A major factor for many businesses that might hear from users who want to use the G1 is whether it will have basic security, such as native encryption or robust user log-on passwords, Gold said. Security was not a focus of the announcement and "remains an unanswered question," he said.

Even if the G1 should most interest consumers, some analysts gave the new device a tepid review. Charles Golvin, an analyst at Forrester Research Inc. in Cambridge, Mass., said the G1 will appeal to a "somewhat advanced user" who already uses a phone to access the Internet. Still, he said the G1 is not a compelling offer for voice-centric mobile users. "Those will come later."

Even the LiMo Foundation questioned the G1's commitment to openness, noting that it has provided an open Linux platform already used by 23 handsets.

In a statement, Morgan Gillis, executive director of the LiMo Foundation asked, "Which services will be made available to mobile consumers on Google Android handsets but not on other open mobile handsets; will G1 users have an open and free choice about whether or not they subscribe to Google's services; why has Google elected to build its own handset platform rather than working collaboratively with the mobile industry on the available alternatives?"

Kevin Burden, an analyst at ABI Research in Oyster Bay, N.Y., said T-Mobile and Google have made it "pretty clear" that the G1 is "not really for the business user." But Burden said future Android phones could easily be provided to carriers other than T-Mobile and with capabilities such as Exchange support.

"Google's goal with Android has been to loosen the grip of the carriers and handset makers on the cell phone market, and I think they've partially succeeded with reaching that goal today," Burden said.

Users curious, but don't see Android in the enterpriseBrant Castellow, regional sales executive at Correlagen Diagnostics Inc. in Waltham, Mass., said his initial impression of the G1 is that "it looks a little quirky from the photos I've seen and not that sophisticated." He said that with Google's involvement, he expects it will work well, but he questioned with so many Google applications integrated into the device, "won't they have a tough time capturing the business user like me?"

Castellow uses an iPhone 3G for a variety of business functions, but said he hopes to check out the G1 when it becomes available.

Jorge Mata, the CIO at the Los Angeles Community College District, said the G1 will give Google a "strong first salvo" in the "Clash of the Titans" scenario that is building between Apple, Google, and others. "The openness is a great thing," Mata said.

Mata said Apple's approach, especially tying the iPhone to AT&T, could eventually backfire for Apple. Exchange support and enterprise deployment tools are needed before there will be corporate adoption of G1 or Android phones, he added.

Still, Mata said the college district plans to support the G1 as soon as it is available, and said the Qwerty keyboard and access to Google Apps will make it a useful device for online discussions that are popular with students. "Think unified communications on this phone with productivity in the cloud," he said.

"This [G1] phone is not as sexy as the iPhone, and it does have a certain geek charm, but you should expect this to change in the near term," Mata said. He predicted the G1 will erode sales of Windows Mobile devices and BlackBerries before it starts to erode iPhone sales.

This story was updated on September 23, 2008

Mobile telephone service providers are trying to block a plan to create a free, nationwide wireless broadband network by insisting on protections from interference that would make it impossible to deliver wireless broadband, according to the company proposing the network.

Mobile carriers, led by T-Mobile, are insisting on interference protections for their existing spectrum that goes beyond any current protections and would disqualify several widely used products that currently emit low levels of energy in the radio spectrum, including microwave ovens and Wi-Fi equipment, said officials with M2Z Networks, a startup that proposed building a free wireless network on unused spectrum.

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The two sides are now arguing about the interference questions before the U.S. Federal Communications Commission, which has released its own proposal to auction spectrum for a free, nationwide network. Mobile carriers don't want a free broadband network that would compete with their own services, John Muleta, M2Z's CEO, said at a Monday press briefing previewing an M2Z filing to the FCC.

Some of the devices that would essentially be prohibited under the interference rules that T-Mobile and other mobile carriers want are devices the carriers themselves sell, Muleta said. If a T-Mobile handset operates at -105 dBm (the ratio of power in decibels to one milliwatt) signal strength, then Wi-Fi equipment and Bluetooth headsets sold by the carriers themselves would interfere, Muleta said. But that's the level of protection T-Mobile wants.

"If you do -105 [dBm], then all these devices are going to start interfering," said Muleta, a former chief of the FCC's wireless telecommunications bureau. "How does that make sense? It doesn't."

The interference protections T-Mobile and other carriers have proposed go beyond the operating capabilities of T-Mobile's mobile phones, added Paul Kolodzy, senior tech advisor to M2Z and a former senior spectrum policy advisor at the FCC. At a -100 dBm signal strength, a T-Mobile handset would drop calls, he said.

A representative of T-Mobile, which provides mobile service in the nearby spectrum, called M2Z's conclusions inaccurate. Microwave ovens and Bluetooth receivers operate on spectrum 100MHz to 200MHz away from T-Mobile's spectrum, while the proposed broadband network would operate in adjacent spectrum, said Patrick Welsh, senior corporate counsel for regulatory affairs at T-Mobile.

"It's complete apples to oranges," he said. "It demonstrates a complete lack of technical knowledge and expertise in this."

In addition, more than five percent of T-Mobile's traffic operates at or below a -105 dBm signal strength, Welsh said. And a T-Mobile proposal to the FCC that would pair the so-called AWS-3 spectrum in the FCC's proposal with another block of spectrum would allow the winning bidder to offer broadband service, he said.

Test results in Seattle earlier this month "clearly showed that there would be significant harmful interference ... under the FCC's proposed rules," Welsh added. "M2Z's wildly inaccurate conclusions can only reflect that either they do not understand the test results or they are being disingenuous."

M2Z's reading of the Seattle tests is that they showed no technical or interference problems, said Kolodzy, who observed the tests. T-Mobile's service and the proposed free network "can coexist ... using the technical rules similar to those that M2Z has been advocating for over two years," he said.

The wrangling over interference goes back to May 2006, when M2Z proposed building a nationwide wireless network, with service available for free, on 20MHz of unused wireless spectrum referred to as AWS-3 spectrum. The FCC sat on the proposal until a year ago, when it proposed to auction about 20MHz of spectrum in the 2155MHz band, with the winner required to use part of it for a free nationwide network.

T-Mobile operates a network that uses nearby AWS-1 spectrum, for which it paid about $4 billion in a 2006 auction.

In June, the FCC asked for comments on a specific proposal that would require the auction winner to use 25 percent of the spectrum's capacity to provide a free broadband network with downstream speeds of at least 768Kbps The FCC also proposed that the operator of the free network filter out pornography and other material that might harm children.

The network filtering proposal has drawn criticism from some civil rights and tech trade groups, who say the filtering mandate is "extraordinarily" broad and would amount to government censorship.

In addition to the other criticisms of T-Mobile, Kolodzy and Muleta noted that T-Mobile handsets are dual-mode, meaning they are able to receive both AWS-1 and PCS (Personal Communications Service). If there was interference with AWS-1 spectrum, a handset would switch to PCS, they said.

Welsh said dual-mode phones can receive both signals, but it's difficult to make the switch in the middle of a call. A phone experiencing interference from a AWS-3 device would likely drop the call instead of switching on the fly from an AWS-1 to PCS signal, he said.

"M2Z wants us to have a network that works sometimes in some places," Welsh said. "T-Mobile wants to design a network that works all the time in all places."

IBM is threatening to leave organizations that set standards for software interoperability because of concerns that their processes are not always fair.

IBM published a new set of guidelines it plans to follow, which include encouraging standards bodies to have rules to protect their decisions from "undue influence," a clear reference to competitor Microsoft.

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IBM would like to see loopholes that allow dominant companies to abuse standards processes closed, said Bob Sutor, vice president of open source and standards. Leaving a standards organization for a lack of reforms would be a "last resort," he said.

"We see this very much as a positive, constructive policy for how we hope to engage," Sutor said.

IBM was one of the most vocal opponents of a file format created by Microsoft and approved by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) as an international standard earlier this year.

Part of the specification, called Office Open XML, is used in Microsoft's latest Office 2007 productivity suite but has yet to be fully implemented by either Microsoft or other software vendors. OOXML is a rival to OpenDocument Format (ODF), also an international standard used in office suites such as OpenOffice.org and StarOffice.

Microsoft submitted OOXML to the ISO under a so-called Fast Track process, which some opponents believed was too rushed and resulted in a poor-quality standard. Many countries and technical experts questioned the need for another standard document format.

A draft standard OOXML was approved by ISO/IEC Joint Technical Committee 1 (JTC 1) in a vote that closed March 29. Brazil, India, South Africa and Venezuela filed appeals over its approval, but the appeals were dismissed in July. The appeals centered in part on alleged irregularities in the ISO's voting process.

In August, the ISO and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) approved the publication of ISO/IEC DIS 29500, the official name for the OOXML specification.

IBM's new guidelines for how it will participate in standards organizations was born out of the company's frustration with OOXML, said Andrew Updegrove, an attorney with Gesmer Updegrove in Boston who studies standards and intellectual-property issues.

IBM's guidelines were formulated from recommendations from a six-week, Web-based consultation held in May and June. It involved more than 70 experts who discussed how the creation of standards could be improved. Updegrove also participated.

IBM's guidelines are based on its belief that open standards increase the range of software products that are interchangeable. Standards prevent one software vendor from capturing a large part of a market by locking users into a proprietary format and limiting their ability to easily switch to another product.

Microsoft has long been accused of dominating the market for office productivity programs due to its use of closed file formats. Microsoft changed course, however, and submitted its OOXML format to become an international standard, which means other vendors could implement OOXML in their products.

But OOXML was criticized for being unnecessarily complex. Also, Microsoft was accused of pressuring countries to support the standard, which left companies such as IBM fuming. IBM is a longtime backer of ODF.

IBM's new guidelines are intended to pressure organizations such as the ISO and ECMA, an industry-led standards organization, into rethinking their procedures.

That change is not likely to come soon, since IT standards are just a small part of what ISO does, Updegrove said. It sets standards ranging from specifications for fertilizers to clothing sizes to pharmaceuticals.

But IBM is a big player and participates in more national standards bodies and organizations that perhaps any other tech company, Updegrove said.

Even if IBM made good on its threat, withdrawing from a standards body wouldn't cause one to fall apart, Updegrove said. IBM would also suffer, he said.

"If they decided to drop out of ECMA, that kicks away from them that ability to push its favored standard through the system," Updegrove said.

Representatives from the ISO and ECMA could not immediately be reached for comment.

This may seem like a weird time to go to Wall Street to announce a new operating system, but that's what Microsoft did Monday. At a technology conference in New York, the software vendor formally detailed its Windows HPC Server 2008 software, a high-performance computing version of Windows offering some features that may appeal to bailout-seeking financial services firms.

First, the new release -- the successor to Microsoft's Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003 technology -- will do far less damage to corporate bottom lines than bad subprime mortgages have inflicted. HPC Server 2008, which can scale from two to 2,000 or more server nodes, costs $475 per node, with each consisting of between one and four processor sockets.

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Second, HPC Server 2008 includes new management and diagnostics functionality designed to improve the ability of systems administrators to identify performance issues, such as system latency and its root causes. The software also is integrated with desktop applications; for instance, a user working in Excel can send a processing job to an HPC cluster with just one mouse click, similar to what it takes to launch a printing task.

And third, Microsoft said that HPC Server 2008 will enable users to run complex algorithms, such as those used to determine the amount of risk in investment portfolios, in a parallel environment on multiple server cores without having to rewrite their application code.

Financial services firms are increasingly adopting HPC technologies, something Microsoft pointed out in its announcement that HPC Server 2008 has been released to manufacturing.