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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tungsten Replicator is part of the overall Tungsten stack.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The trouble is, it also makes typing more difficult.

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

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

There are two lessons on software.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

7. Look around at what's available.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Based on the criteria above, here's why:

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

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

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

The price sealed my decision.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The U.S. District Court for the Central District of California ruled Thursday that Qualcomm must pay royalties to Broadcom for revenue earned from QChat version 3.0, one of the products Qualcomm was ordered to stop selling. The court also ordered Qualcomm to pay Broadcom gross profits from the service and support of QChat, which is push-to-talk software, since the ruling, Qualcomm said.

In addition, the court found that Qualcomm violated the injunction by continuing to service and support certain WCDMA (Wideband Code Division Multiple Access) products that were made and sold between the date of the trial verdict last May and the date of the injunction in December. Qualcomm maintains that it's a matter of interpreting the injunction and said it plans to appeal the decision.

The court has temporarily blocked public access to its order while it considers a request to keep portions of it confidential.

In a statement, Broadcom said Qualcomm's actions show a lack of respect for competitors' intellectual property and for the courts.

Qualcomm has been fighting a losing battle against Broadcom, and this isn't the first time it has been cited for trying to skirt the law. Earlier this year, a judge asked the State Bar of California to investigate Qualcomm lawyers for a possible ethics violation after the judge found that Qualcomm had intentionally withheld tens of thousands of important documents in a separate case involving Broadcom.

In a related case, the U.S. International Trade Commission ruled last year that Qualcomm could no longer import into the U.S. certain chips that infringed Broadcom patents.

IBM has claimed a major breakthrough in flash storage, with a research project that's delivering data transfer speeds of more than 1 million input/output operations per second, two and a half times faster than the industry's fastest disk storage. 

IBM's Project Quicksilver, announced Thursday, combines solid-state flash memory with IBM's storage virtualization technology. "Quicksilver improved performance by 250 percent at less than 1/20th the response time, took up 1/5th the floor space and required only 55 percent of the power and cooling," IBM says.

[ Stay ahead of advances in hardware technology with InfoWorld's Ahead of the Curve blog and newsletter. ]

IBM said Quicksilver is two and a half times faster than its own SAN Volume Controller coupled with IBM's DS4700 storage. It would also be two and a half times faster than technology from Texas Memory Systems, which says it has the world's fastest storage with an IOPS rate of 400,000.

Flash storage is starting to catch on with enterprise customers as such vendors as EMC promise faster speeds and more efficient use of storage with solid-state disks. Speeds are typically orders-of-magnitude lower than what IBM is claiming to have achieved. Sun, for example, says it plans to sell 32GB flash drives that deliver about 5,000 or more write-IOPS and at least 30,000 read-IOPS. 

IBM said it has been selling solid-state drives in some BladeCenter servers since June 2007, but didn't say when Project Quicksilver might result in a marketable product. ( Compare storage products.)

Quicksilver is a collaboration between engineers and researchers at the IBM Hursley development laboratory in England and IBM's Almaden Research Center in California.

"Performance improvements of this magnitude can have profound implications for business, allowing two to three times the work to [be completed] in a given time frame for ... time-sensitive applications like reservations systems, and financial program trading systems, and creating opportunity for entirely new insights in information-warehouses and analytics solutions," IBM states in a press release.

Despite its potential to improve data transfer speeds, IBM said Project Quicksilver's flash technology is not about to replace today's hard disk drives. Instead, it will be part of a "complete, end-to-end systems approach" to storage.

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Comcast, the largest provider of cable-based broadband service in the U.S., will limit residential customers to 250GB of bandwidth a month beginning Oct. 1, the company announced late Thursday.

Comcast will contact customers who go above the 250GB limit and ask them to curtail their use, Comcast said. If a customer goes over the monthly limit again during the following six months, Comcast will suspend service for a year.

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Currently, Comcast contacts high-bandwidth customers and will suspend their accounts if they don't curb their use, but it has not set a firm bandwidth limit until now. Most customers contacted about their bandwidth usage agree to limit their activity, according to Charlie Douglas, Comcast's director of communications.

Earlier this month, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission struck down Comcast's past network management practice of slowing BitTorrent peer-to-peer traffic in an effort to reduce congestion. The FCC ruled that Comcast was violating so-called net neutrality principles by targeting a certain kind of Internet traffic.

The new bandwidth cap will affect less than 1 percent of Comcast customers, Douglas said. Those customers "are using so much bandwidth that they are degrading the experience of other users," he added. "Two-hundred-and-fifty gigabytes is an extremely large amount of data."

Some high-bandwidth users have asked Comcast to identify a specific cap so they know where the line is, Douglas added. Some other broadband providers also warn customers about excessive bandwidth use.

An average Comcast customer uses two to three gigabytes of bandwidth a month, Comcast said. To reach the 250GB limit, a customer would have to do one of the following: send 50 million e-mails, download 62,500 songs, or download 125 standard-definition movies, the company said in its announcement .

Comcast has also looked at charging high-bandwidth users additional fees, and it still has not ruled out doing so in the future, Douglas said.

Comcast is also looking at "de-prioritizing" heavy users' traffic during times of network congestion. The plan Comcast is considering would slow heavy users' traffic for up to 20 minutes during times of the most congestion.

Comcast will notify customers of the new bandwidth limits using several methods, including banner ads at Comcast.net and notices sent with monthly bills, the company said. Some net neutrality advocates criticized Comcast for not telling customers of its previous network management plan to slow P-to-P traffic at times.

Some net neutrality advocates have said Comcast's new network management plans of targeting individual users is preferable to blocking Web applications. But others have suggested that those efforts may be equal to penalizing their best customers.

A recently discovered security flaw that would allow access to a locked iPhone will be fixed next month, Apple said on Thursday.

"The minor iPhone security issue which surfaced this week is fixed in a software update which will be released in September," Apple representative, Jennifer Bowcock, said in an email to Macworld.

[ Special reports: IT's guide to the iPhone |  Apple launches the iPhone 3G ]

The security flaw allows access to a locked iPhone by pressing the emergency call button at the unlock screen, followed by two taps on the home button. That will take you to the iPhone's private 'favorites' page without the need to enter the unlock code. If the owner of the phone has favorite entries in their address book containing URLs, e-mail addresses, or mobile phone numbers, then those entries can be used to launch the browser, mail application or SMS software and gain access to private Web favorites, e-mail messages and text messages stored in the phone, again without entering the unlock code.

Bowcock offered some advice to protect your phone until the software update is released. She said you can set the iPhone so that double-clicking the home button will take the user directly to the home screen, which if password protection is turned on, will be the unlock screen.

Fixing performance issues that have plagued previous versions of its Windows client OS and Internet Explorer (IE) browser are key development goals for the next versions of those products, Microsoft has revealed in company blogs.

IE 7 and Windows Vista have had serious performance problems early on that have alienated users and damaged the reputations of the products. Some IE users switched to Mozilla Firefox because of IE 7's frequent crashes and performance glitches, while Vista's bugs, incompatibility problems and other issues have been well-documented.

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

Microsoft is paying close attention to performance in Windows 7 and IE 8 as it develops both products, the company revealed in separate internal blogs about each product, "Engineering Windows 7" and "IEblog."

"We've re-dedicated ourselves to work in this area (performance) in Windows 7 (and IE 8)," according to the Engineering Windows 7 post. "This is a major initiative across each of our feature teams as well as the primary mission of one of our feature teams."

The company has an uphill battle to improving performance, particularly with Windows 7, said one analyst.

"I'm not surprised they're going to focus on performance," said Mike Cherry, an analyst with Directions on Microsoft. "I'm somewhat skeptical how much improvement they're going to make at this point."

He suggested Microsoft consider performance for Windows 7 the way it approached security when the company decided to make that a key priority for Vista. When Microsoft decided security was integral to the OS, the company engineered Vista so "every feature has a security attribute to it," Cherry said.

Similarly, the company should make performance such a priority that "anyone checking any code into Windows 7 not only has to make sure it's the most secure code and the most reliable code, but they'd better be addressing the performance of the code as well," he said.

While performance is made up of "many elements," the Windows 7 team is focusing on six areas of improvement in Windows 7, according to the post. They are memory usage, CPU utilization, disk I/O, the boot-shutdown-standby-resume feature, the base system, and disk footprint.

CPU utilization in particular is a problem in Vista, and could use improvement in Windows 7. Cherry said he runs a 32-bit version of Vista on a PC with a 64-bit processor and 2GB of RAM. However, when he starts his Outlook e-mail client, it uses 100 percent of his CPU resources for more than a minute and a half. "It blows me away," he said of the problem.

Indeed, Microsoft said a key engineering goal for Windows 7 is to "keep the CPU utilization low as that improves multi-user scenarios as well as reduces power consumption," according to the Windows 7 blog post.

The focus of IE 8 improvements, according to the IEblog post, will be how to make pages and images load faster for "everyday" browsing. This will require improvements to scripting, the rendering engine and networking improvements, among others, the company said.

Microsoft has said it expects to release Windows 7 in early 2010; however, the company has not provided a time frame for the final release of IE8, though it is safe to say it likely will be a part of the Windows 7 release. Microsoft released IE8 beta 2 on Wednesday.

Google unveiled on Thursday its plans for a store where mobile users can find Android applications, a concept similar to the iPhone's App Store.

The first handsets running Android, expected to appear later this year, will include a beta version of the Android Market, Google's Eric Chu wrote in a blog post. Initially, users will at least be able to find free applications there. After that, Google expects to update the Market to allow users to buy and download paid content.

[ Special report: Google Android: Invader from beyond ]

The Market will feature a feedback and rating system similar to that used in YouTube, Chu said.

Developers can add their applications to the market by registering as a merchant, uploading the content, and publishing it. Google expects to add features for developers after the initial launch, including a dashboard where developers can find analytics information about their content. Developers will also be able to upload different versions of their applications that might work better on different devices.

Android followers have wondered how Google might support application distribution. Its Android Market is a similar concept to Apple's App Store, but differs in some ways. For instance, because all iPhones run on the same software, developers don't have to create different versions for different phones. Android is open, and handset makers may decide to include different hardware capabilities or opt not to support all Android features, which has an effect on the way applications work.

Historically, the mobile market has struggled with how to best sell and distribute mobile applications. Prior to the iPhone, the best way for an application to become widely used was for a developer to convince an operator to pre-load it onto a phone, a challenging accomplishment. Mobile phone users only very seldom download applications to their phones.

Due to the three outages that Gmail suffered earlier this month, Google will extend a credit to all paying customers of its hosted Apps suite and has vowed to improve its problem-notification methods.

In an apologetic e-mail sent Wednesday to Apps Premier administrators, Google said it will automatically extend annual subscriptions by 15 days at no extra charge. Apps Premier subscriptions cost $50 per user per year. This 15-day extension is the maximum credit of the 99.9 percent uptime service level agreement Google offers Premier customers for Gmail.

"We're committed to making Google Apps Premier Edition a service on which your organization can depend. During the first half of August, we didn't do this as well as we should have," reads the letter.

One outage, on Aug. 11, lasted about two hours but affected almost all Apps Premier users. The other two, on Aug. 6 and Aug. 15, hit a small number of Apps Premier users, but both outages were lengthy, lasting for some affected users more than 24 hours. In all of the incidents, users were unable to access their Gmail accounts, getting instead an error message when trying to log in.

In Wednesday's letter, Google said that system reliability is a top priority and that, although it can't promise zero downtime, it commits to solving outages quickly. "More importantly, we promise you focused discipline on preventing recurrence of the same problem," the letter reads.

In addition, Google plans to improve the way it informs Apps Premier administrators about system problems via a new dashboard that will become available in a few months.

That dashboard will provide descriptions of problems, especially of their impact on users; a regularly updated estimate of when the issues will be resolved; and, if necessary, a formal report within 48 hours of the resolution. The report will describe the incident, explain its cause, list corrective and preventive actions taken, and provide an outage timeline.

Google officials will also make themselves available to participate in live discussions about the incident with Apps Premier administrators and their companies' managers.

The plans for fuller disclosure of problem causes, fixes and prevention plans sound good to Gartner analyst Matt Cain, but he's confused as to why Google didn't start applying these principles with this letter, which he found slim on details.

"I'd like more transparency into what actually happened and why. They don't go into that [in this letter]. That's what they should have done in this note," Cain said. "Why start in the future and not now?"

Crediting all Apps Premier customers across the board and taking proactive steps to prevent future outages were the right actions for Google to take, said analyst Rebecca Wettemann from Nucleus Research.

"These are natural growing pains for an on-demand vendor," she said. "Google is doing what it needed to do [to respond to the outages], but in fairness to Google, it's held to a higher standard in terms of uptime and availability, as are many on-demand vendors, when you compare them to internally deployed applications."

Apps comes in various versions, including the free Basic and Education editions and the fee-based Premier edition. In addition to Gmail, it includes Google hosted services like Calendar, Sites, Talk, and the Docs word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation software.

Overall, more than 500,000 businesses with 10 million active users use Apps. Hundreds of thousands of those active users have Premier subscriptions, according to Google.

With Apps, a hosted suite of communications and collaboration applications, Google is a leading proponent of SaaS, an emerging model of software delivery that backers say represents the future.

Because vendors host applications in their own data centers, companies don't have to concern themselves with hardware provisioning and software maintenance. By living in the Internet "cloud," these hosted applications simplify sharing and collaboration among employees.

However, outages such as the one Gmail experienced are among the biggest question marks regarding SaaS applications, as IT and business managers ponder whether to ditch conventional software packages that are installed on their companies' servers.

 When applications hosted by vendors go down, there is little that IT and business managers can do to remedy the situation and respond to their angry end-users.

Google Apps critics question whether the suite can really provide enterprise-grade software availability and performance and thus be a real option in large companies to conventional, on-premise options like Microsoft's Office and Outlook/Exchange or IBM Lotus Notes/Domino.

Google acknowledges that most Apps subscribers are individuals or small and medium-size organizations. However, the company has high hopes that the Premier edition, with its IT management and enterprise software integration features, will push into the enterprise market of large companies.

Google has proved it can learn from mistakes and has improved as an enterprise IT provider, Cain said. However, Gartner's advice to enterprises is to hold off on adopting Gmail as an e-mail system, and this month's outages justify that position, Cain said.

"A 24-hour outage of e-mail for many companies would be catastrophic. That indicates that our cautious approach is warranted," he said.

Before giving the green light to its customers, Gartner wants to see at least a dozen enterprise deployments of Apps Premier with at least 10,000 Gmail seats, each running successfully for six to 12 months, Cain said.

This story was updated on August 28, 2008

Aptana, which has enabled Web 2.0 development via JavaScript, Ruby on Rails, and PHP with the Aptana Studio IDE, has added Python to the mix through its acquisition of Pydev, which was announced this week.

The company plans to combine the Pydev Eclipse-based development environment with Aptana Studio, which has supported AJAX and has been downloaded nearly 2.3 million times, Aptana said. Developers now can use Aptana Studio and Pydev side by side or plug them into Eclipse. Both are open source with commercially available extensions.

"Python kind of completes the portfolio of popular scripting languages that people use to build Web apps," said Kevin Hakman, Aptana director of evangelism.

Aptana currently has no timeframe for full integration between Aptana Studio and Pydev. The company also would not reveal how much it paid for Pydev.

With Pydev, developers get capabilities for code completion and analysis, a debug console and server, and refactoring. Aptana Studio, meanwhile, supports Web development by integrating AJAX tooling with PHP and Ruby on Rails. Ruby development is supported as well.

Aptana stressed the popularity of Python, particularly Google's selection of the language for use with its Google App Engine hosted application service. "When Google gets behind something, there tends to be a lot of attention [paid] to it. We've seen an increased utilization of the Python language," Hakman said.

Through the Pydev IDE, developers can deploy and manage applications to a computing cloud via linkup with the Aptana Cloud product for cloud-based deployments.

IT project management practices are stuck in the mud, and they're hindering IT departments' ability to deliver projects successfully. That's the conclusion of a recent Forrester report, "Stretching Your Project Management Muscles," which was published in July.

Mary Gerush, author of the report (and a former IT project manager herself), notes that the project management discipline has not kept up with the pace of change in business or in IT.

[ Get sage advice on IT careers and management from Bob Lewis in InfoWorld's Advice Line blog and newsletter. ]

Gerush writes that while IT departments have adopted service oriented architecture (SOA) and Agile software development practices to become more responsive to business needs, the project management discipline has remained largely focused on methodology. And traditional project management methodologies are proving to be too rigid, cumbersome and bureaucratic for today's mercurial and competitive business environment. In fact, Gerush notes, these methodologies can work against IT departments.

"Traditional project management practices, which are designed to improve the likelihood of project success, often have the opposite effect in a dynamic, rapidly changing environment," writes Gerush in her report.

The reason traditional project management methodologies can backfire on IT departments is because they require so much rigor. For example, says Gerush, project managers have to follow scores of pre-defined processes and steps, and they have to deliver reams of documentation at each phase of the project-all of which dramatically and often unnecessarily protracts projects.

"There's so much rigor and normally so much documentation and so many processes you have to go through to follow a methodology that it weighs you down and that you can't move as quickly as the business needs you to move or as quickly as technology enables you to move," she says.

The Remedy: Flexible Project Management

To keep pace with the business and with the rest of IT, project management offices need to make their project management practices more flexible. Gerush offers five measures project management teams can employ to improve their responsiveness.

1. Adopt a framework. A framework is a collection of various pieces of project management "functionality," says Gerush. When projects come in, the project management office can choose which pieces of the framework to use to provide just the right amount of oversight necessary for the project, as opposed to following every step of a methodology.

2. Figure out which deliverables you really need."For projects of short duration, an informal e-mail status report may be more appropriate than a formal document, and formally documented use cases and design specifications may be overkill for some projects," writes Gerush. That's why she advises project managers to customize project deliverables according to each project's needs.

3. Incent project managers differently. Project managers are usually rewarded for delivering projects on time and on budget, and of course, they rely on their methodologies to accomplish those goals. But if you want project managers to become more flexible, you have to encourage that behavior, writes Gerush. So reward them when they adapt easily and quickly to changing business needs, even if their maneuvers impact timelines and budgets ever so slightly.

4. Train project managers to be leaders rather than control freaks. Left-brained project managers can over-rely on their analytical skills to complete projects on time and on budget. "But flexible project management is not a left-brain, black-and-white endeavor," writes Gerush. "It requires the full brain and touches on all shades of gray, requiring understanding and exercise of adaptive leadership versus command and control."

5. Keep improving your project management practices. Your approach to project management should evolve alongside the business and IT. Solicit project stakeholders and business partners for their ideas on how you can make your project management practices more responsive.

CIO.com is an InfoWorld affiliate.

Microsoft yesterday warned users of Windows XP Service Pack 3 (SP3) that they won't be able to uninstall either the service pack or Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) under some circumstances.

The warning was reminiscent of one Microsoft made in May, when Windows XP SP3 had just been made available for downloading. At the time, the company told users they wouldn't be able to downgrade from IE7 to the older IE6 browser without uninstalling the service pack.

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

In a post to the IE blog today, Jane Maliouta, a Microsoft program manager, spelled out the newest situation, which affects users who downloaded and installed IE8 Beta 1 prior to updating Windows XP to SP3. If those users then upgrade IE8 to Beta 2 , which Microsoft unveiled today, they will be stuck with both IE8 and Windows XP SP3.

A warning dialog will appear to alert users. "If you chose to continue, Windows XP SP3 and IE8 Beta2 will become permanent," Maliouta said. "You will still be able to upgrade to later IE8 builds as they become available, but you won't be able to uninstall them."

She recommended that users instead first uninstall Windows XP SP3, then uninstall IE8 Beta 1; they should then reinstall XP SP3 and follow that by installing IE8 Beta 2.

It's unclear how many users the warning is aimed at. Although users running Windows XP and IE8 Beta 1 could manually download and install Service Pack 3 from Microsoft's site, the company set its Windows Update service so that it didn't offer SP3 to systems with IE8 Beta 1.

Windows XP users who do have the first beta already on their machines will be offered the update to Beta 2 via Windows Update if they have Automatic Updates enabled, Maliouta continued. "A prompt in your Windows task bar will alert you when IE8 Beta 2 is ready for installation," she said.

Windows Vista users, however, will not see IE8 Beta 2 in Windows Update because update apparently cannot sniff out instances of IE8 Beta 1 and uninstall them automatically. Instead, users must remove Beta 1 manually, said Maliouta.

Several additional updates are required before installing IE8 Beta 2 on Vista, including one that, if omitted, blocks its installation entirely. That fix, a revised version of a Vista Service Pack 1 (SP1) prerequisite that earlier this year sent machines into an endless series of reboots, is also necessary for IE8 Beta 2; users with SP1 will, of course, already have it in place, but those running pre-SP1 versions of Vista must still install it.

Microsoft also spelled out a long list of IE8 Beta 2 known issues and compatibility problems in release notes it posted on its support site Wednesday.

Ironically, of the nine applications called out as incompatible with the new IE8, the only two that will lock up and crash are Microsoft's.

Visual Studio.NET version 7, said Microsoft, will crash on a PC that also contains IE8 Beta 2. "No workaround is currently available," Microsoft said in the release notes.

The other Microsoft incompatible application is Windows Live Mail, formerly called Windows Live Desktop, and the desktop mail client meant to replace Outlook Express and Windows Mail. "If you install Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2, Windows Live Mail will crash when you create or reply to an e-mail message," Microsoft warned.

Computerworld is an InfoWorld affiliate.

Sprint Nextel will put location-based services front and center on its Xohm WiMax service, offering a portal with widgets for local weather, traffic, events, reviews, and other information.

The carrier was set to announce on Thursday a partnership with uLocate Communications, along with Google, AccuWeather, Navteq, reviews site Yelp, and other content providers.

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Sprint will discover subscribers' locations using information from its WiMax base stations. With uLocate's Where platform, it will present local content and services from the other partners, said Art Spivy, director of content and community services for Xohm. By the end of the year, Sprint also hopes to integrate uLocate's Buddy Beacon friend-finding service in the service.

Xohm will be a data-oriented service that users will access on devices sold by manufacturers at retail rather than by the carrier, as is common for cell phones. In addition, those devices won't have a standard "deck" or lineup of services constantly presented by Sprint. Client devices are expected to start with laptop cards and eventually include MIDs (mobile Internet devices), personal entertainment devices and other platforms. The service is set to launch in September in Baltimore, with more markets added in the coming months.

The location-based content will be presented on a Xohm Web portal and will change as a subscriber moves from one place to another. Subscribers will also be able to personalize the portal to offer information on the kinds of things they want. But they won't be forced to use that portal as a home page.

"We're not trying to replace AOL's or Yahoo's portal," Spivy said. "We're really trying to be a great start experience for your mobile session."

The content partners' information will be presented through widgets on the portal page. Other initial partners are set to include events and tickets company Eventful and localized news provider Topix. Sprint later plans to open up the portal to many more partners through a developer program. Policies for the privacy of user data will be included in that partner program, he said.

Sprint's move is part of an overall trend away from tight service-provider control of mobile content, according to analyst Greg Sterling of Sterling Market Research. Using the location data it gathers will help to draw subscriber's to Xohm's own portal on devices that could easily be used simply for Web access, but in the wake of the iPhone's personalized home screen, Sprint is not alone, he said.

"Everything, generally speaking, is moving toward greater openness and customization," Sterling said.

The European Court of Human Rights has refused U.K. hacker Gary McKinnon's appeal against demands for his extradition to the U.S.

McKinnon stands accused of breaking into computers belonging to NASA and the U.S. military, and had appealed against his extradition under Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights. He had claimed that the conditions of detention he would face if convicted in the U.S. would breach a European prohibition on inhumane or degrading treatment.

[ Read the related story about the U.K.'s hacker's fight against extradition to the U.S.  ]

The court said Thursday it had refused his appeal, and will not prevent his extradition. The court had previously ordered that his extradition be delayed until midnight Friday while it considered his request.

It was in 2002 that a U.S. court first indicted McKinnon for the offenses, committed in 2001, although he was not arrested by U.K. police until 2005. The U.K. government first approved his extradition in 2006.

McKinnon has never visited the U.S., and the offenses of which McKinnon is accused were committed in the U.K., his lawyers Kaim Todner LLP said.

"We maintain that any prosecution of our client ought therefore to be carried out by the appropriate British authorities," the London law firm said. "U.K. citizens are at the