Microsoft Corp. has recently provided some insight into it next generation of Office. Code-named Office 12 the newest upgrade will emphasize collaboration, information discovery and content management. Since its March acquisition of Groove Networks
Microsoft has focused on on peer-to-peer aspects of Collaborative Business Intelligence.

Salesforce.com Announces Record Fiscal First Quarter Results

NEW YORK—Vowing to make RSS friendly to the everyday Web user, an MSN executive demonstrated upcoming services on Wednesday that build syndication feeds into the messaging alerts, a Windows screen saver and Web search.

During a keynote at the Syndicate Conference here, MSN Director Phil Holden said that Microsoft Corp's Internet division is taking RSS (Really Simple Syndication) seriously and will integrate the technology across even more of MSN's online services throughout the year. "Our goal is in making consumer adoption and consumption of RSS easier," Holden said during an interview. "We will literally put RSS and syndication in many, many places."

MSN already had begun taking steps into RSS in recent months, joining chief portal rival Yahoo Inc. in integrating syndication technology into online services. In January, My MSN began aggregating feeds on personalized home pages, and MSN in March began quietly testing a Web-based RSS aggregator.

But more syndication moves are on MSN's horizon, and even MSN's acquisition last week of MessageCast Inc. will play a role.

MSN is working to open its MSN Alerts service to a wider variety of sources through RSS. Today, the alerting service lets users receive notifications from specific sources such as MSNBC, MSN's sites and Weather.com as MSN Messenger instant messages, Hotmail e-mails and mobile text messages.

A feature expected to be available in about two months will allow users to also subscribe to RSS feeds, Holden said. MessageCast's technology will handle retrieving the feeds and making them compatible with MSN Alerts.

The feature also ties in to MSN's own blog-publishing service, called MSN Spaces. MSN Spaces publishes RSS feeds from blogs, so its users could use the alerts to track their blog with alerts delivered on multiple devices, Holden said.

MSN also is turning to the Windows desktop to aggregate RSS but not with a traditional client. It plans to release in midsummer a free software download for displaying RSS feeds in a Windows screen saver, Holden said.

Seagate Technology LLC will start shipping a new range of 2.5-in. hard disk drives for the notebook PC market next month. The range contains a number of industry firsts that promise a combination of better performance and storage capacity in comparison with the company's existing models, Seagate announced today.

The Momentus-branded hard-drive series includes a 120GB drive that spins at 5,400 rpm and a 100GB drive that spins at 7,200 rpm. This is the first time notebook drives with these combinations of rotational speeds and capacities have been announced by Seagate, according to Mark Walker, manager of product marketing at the Scotts Valley, Calif.-based company.

Electronic account records for some 500,000 banking customers at four different banks were allegedly stolen and sold to collection agencies in a data-theft case that has so far led to criminal charges against nine people, including seven former bank employees.
Police in Hackensack, N.J., are continuing their investigation into the theft by a crime ring that apparently accessed the data illegally through the former bank employees.

According to the U.S. Department of the Treasury, the crime is believed to be the largest breach of banking security in the U.S., local police said.

Hackensack police Det. Capt. Frank Lomia said the investigation into the crime ring is moving into a new phase.

"This thing's getting bigger and bigger," Lomia said. "It's still growing. The banks are uncovering more accounts than we knew about."

The police announced the arrests of the nine suspects on April 28 and charged them with illegally selling personal identification information stolen from bank and New Jersey state computer databases.

The police investigation alleges that a company called DRL Associates Inc. was set up to find individuals and as a collection agency, but was not properly licensed for those activities by the state.

A Hackensack man, Orazio Lembo, 35, has been charged with one count of racketeering and eight counts of disclosing data from a database for his role in the crime ring. Police allege that Lembo used his home as an office for DRL Associates and that he had hired several upper level bank employees to access data, including names, account numbers and balances, from the banks.

Now that it's mastered loading search results in fractions of a second, Google has opened up its massive computing power to the masses with one goal in mind: to speed up Web surfing. The company has released the Google Web Accelerator, which routes browser activity through Google machines to make Web pages load faster.

Google Web Accelerator employs a number of different methods to speed up Web browsing, including caching frequently looked at pages to make them more accessible. Google will only refresh a Web page when it has been updated, saving the user from reloading content when unnecessary.

The application only benefits broadband users, Google says, because it utilizes techniques such as prefetching, which involves downloading a Web page that Web Accelerator assumes will be visited—such as the top search result—even if it is not. Google has implemented similar functionality on its Web site for Mozilla Firefox users.

Google admits there are some potential privacy concerns associated with the application. Although it does not handle requests for secure sites, cookies and passwords submitted via an unencrypted Web page, may be temporarily cached by Google. The company has setup a privacy page specific to the new application that outlines what information is collected.

Sober.p, the worm that stormed the Internet Monday, showed no signs of fading away as of Thursday morning, an anti-virus vendor said.
"It's had quite the impact," said Graham Cluley, a senior technology consultant with Sophos. "Although it's not on the level of a really major worm, like Sobig of last year, Sober is the biggest we've seen so far this year."

The worm broke Monday and quickly gained steam in Western Europe before hitting American PCs. Within hours it dominated the malware charts by making up 70 percent or more of the malicious code traffic spotted by anti-virus monitoring stations.

Contrary to some analysts' expectations, Sober hasn't yet slowed. It's been spotted in 40 countries so far, said Cluley, and currently accounts for 79.6 percent of all worms and viruses making the rounds.

"Sober is very much hanging in there," said Cluley. "Right now, it's accounting for 5.3 percent of all e-mail, legitimate or otherwise. Over 1 in 20 e-mails, in other words, is Sober. That's ferocious."

While the worm doesn't carry a malicious payload as such -- no backdoor Trojan, no keylogger, no ability to turn the infected PC into a spam-spewing proxy -- it's slowed down e-mail traffic and clogged users' inboxes around the world.

"At this point," said Cluley, "it's actually less of a virus problem and more of a spam problem. Copies of Sober are making up a significant portion of all e-mail, and an even greater percentage of spam."

Are open source communities a new source of free intellectual capital for commercial software companies?

Recently Jaspersoft announced their acquisition of all copyrights to the most popular open sourced reporting tool: Jasper Reports. Jasper Reports is consistently in the top 30 software products on SourceForge.net. The software product was licensed under the GNU LPL. Jasper Reports version 0.6.6 has been available since April 6, 2005.

Can an open-sourced project be taken private? Let’s take a look at a few of the issues related to the acquisition of the copyrights and the Jasper Reports open source license.

The market for big-ticket server software is going the way pork bellies and other commodities once did: Prices are going down.

The overall market for infrastructure software needed to run business applications grew in 2004 by nearly 6 percent compared with the previous year, to $6.7 billon, according to market research company Gartner, which released its results Tuesday

Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) mogul Bill Gates and the leader of Ford Motor Co. (F) outlined a future Friday in which software enables cars to fix themselves and avoid accidents.

Gates and Bill Ford Jr., Ford's chairman and chief executive, said high-definition screens, speech recognition technology, cameras, digital calendars and navigation equipment with directions and road conditions will set car companies apart from their competitors.

44% of US 18-34 year-olds get their news from web portals on a daily basis, while 37% use local TV newscasts, according to Carnegie Corporation of New York. Newspapers win just 19% of young readers on a daily basis, while newspaper web sites have 14%. The Internet is the top choice for financial news, while favorite sources for local, national, and international coverage are split between local news, national network news, and cable news programs, respectively.

• April 2009
• March 2009
• March 2008
• September 2006
• July 2006
• April 2006
• October 2005
• September 2005
• August 2005
• June 2005
• May 2005
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• March 2005

• E-Commerce up 23.8% to $141.4 bln in 2004
• Relational Database Sales Reached $7.8 bln in 2004, Oracle and IBM Tied for Top Spot
• Microsoft gets into the Groove
• Salesforce.com Releases Record Financial Results
• MSN Gets Ready for RSS Push
• Seagate to ship 120GB laptop hard drives in June
• Data Theft Involving Four Banks Could Affect 500,000 Customers
• Google Builds Web Surfing Accelerator
• Sober Worm Continues Attack
• Raiding the Bazaar