Cisco adds tools to scale wide-area video

Cisco Systems continued to build its enterprise video infrastructure on Thursday with the ECDS (Enterprise Content Delivery System), a software-hardware platform to ease video management and make distribution of video to remote locations more efficient.

ECDS is part of Cisco's overall Medianet architecture, designed to automate many aspects of producing and delivering video for employees, partners and customers. The company has been fleshing out this vision since 2006 with an eye to supporting new work styles and the growing network demands that come with them.

The purpose of ECDS is to help enterprises distribute both live and on-demand video to large numbers of sites and users. It can be used to support dozens or thousands of users, in thousands of locations, according to Cisco. For example, the system can send live video to a branch office in one stream and then split it at that location into a single stream for each of 10 users there. This removes the need to send 10 streams across an expensive WAN (wide-area network) link, Cisco said.

ECDS consists of software that can be run on one of two new appliances, the Media Delivery Engine 3100 and 1100, or on a virtual blade on a Cisco WAAS (Wide Area Application Services) platform. The MDE 3100 can scale up to 5,000 concurrent users, the MDE 1100 to 500 users, and the MDE 50WVB to 200 users.

In addition to handling many different video applications from Cisco and other companies, the platform works with multiple formats, including H.264, Flash and Windows Media. It also can be used in distributing video to third-party clients, including tablets and mobile devices.

About Google Plus

In a series of failed attempts by Google to crack the social networking platform with products such as Google Buzz and Wave, Google Plus seems to be the company’s boldest move to take on Facebook.

Central to Google Plus are so-called "circles" of friends and acquaintances. Users can organize contacts into different customized circles -- family members, co-workers or college friends, say -- and share photos, videos or other information only within those smaller groups.

Google said the new social networking service Google Plus will be rolled out to a limited number of users in what the company is calling a field trial. Only those invited to join will initially be able to use the service. Google did not say when it would be more widely available.

According to Web analytics firm comScore, Google, with $29 billion in revenue last year, drew more than 1 billion visitors worldwide to its websites in May, more than any other company,

Google Plus seems designed to make its online properties a pervasive part of the daily online experience, rather than being spots where Web surfers occasionally check in to search for a website or check email.

As with Facebook's service, Google Plus has a central Web page that displays an ever-updating stream of the comments, photos and links being shared by friends and contacts.

A toolbar across the top of most of Google's sites -- such as its main search page, its Gmail site and its Maps site - allows users to access their personalized data feed. They can then contribute their own information to the stream.

Google Plus will also offer a special video chat feature, in which up to 10 people can jump on a conference call. And Google will automatically store photos taken on cell phones on its Internet servers, allowing a Google Plus user to access the photos from any computer and share them.

Final Space Shuttle launch carries modified iPhone 4s

When Space Shuttle Atlantis launches from Kennedy Space Center, it won't just be the 135th and final mission of the Space Shuttle fleet - it'll be the first space mission for Apple's iPhone 4.

The presence of two iPhone 4 models, bound for experiments on the International Space Station (ISS), is due in large part to Odyssey Space Research, a company that's been in the space business for two decades, and Nanoracks, a company that provides hardware for the U.S. National Laboratory portion of the ISS. It's a part of a larger push to increase the participation of lower-cost, mass-produced commercial products in space missions.

Odyssey Space Research CEO, Brian Rishikof, said last summer's announcement that the iPhone 4 would include a built-in gyroscope is what set this chain of events in motion.Though Odyssey works on huge commercial space projects with companies such as SpaceX and Lockheed Martin, Rishikof said that using the iPhone is a smaller project with huge potential to get regular people involved in space exploration and experimentation. The astronauts aboard the ISS will use the SpaceLab for iOS app, developed by Odyssey and available as a $1.19 download from the App Store. (Some stats will be simulated for those of us on Earth, due to the pesky presence of gravity.)

On the space station, astronauts will use the iPhone's gyro, accelerometer, and cameras to collect data related to navigation and radiation tracking. "It's really, truly an experiment," Rishikof said. After the iPhones are returned to Earth, much of the data will be viewable on the SpaceLab for iOS app.

Getting the iPhone 4 qualified for use in space was not an easy project. The iPhone 4s that will fly on Atlantis aren't jailbroken and they haven't been hardened for use in space. In order to speed certification, Rishikof said that the company made some minor modifications: all wireless communication has been disabled (sadly, there's no Spaceship Mode setting) and the battery has been removed. Instead, an external battery pack already certified for use in space will be used.

Though the project uses Apple hardware, it's not an official Apple project. That said, the company did provide Odyssey with technical answers about the function of the iPhone 4 that helped expedite getting the device approved for the ISS.

As for the future, Rishikof said Odyssey will study the results and work with NASA on where to go next, though he already has a few ideas. As an off-the-shelf device with a huge base of software developers, in the future an iPhone could even become standard issue for ISS astronauts, with different apps being used for operating experiments, collecting images, and possibly even communicating.

Oracle ships Java 7 RC

Oracle has issued the first release candidate of Java Standard Edition version 7.

The company expects to release the final version of Java 7 on July 28, making it the first major update of the language in five years.

In a blog item posted Wednesday, Oracle announced that a pre-release build of the JDK (Java Development Kit) 7, build 147, is the first, and maybe the only pre-release Release Candidate for the programming language and associated run-time environment.One feature that was extolled is an improved I/O interface for working with file systems. The JSR-203 file API (application programming interface) specification supplants the java.io.file package.

The API can read a wider array of file attributes and can offer more information when errors occur, said Staffan Friberg, a principal product manager in the Oracle Java Platform group, in a later session. It can detect when the contents of a file have been changed. It also can work with symbolic links, for those operating systems that use symbolic links.

The API also speeds file system operations, thanks to the fact that the new API makes fewer calls to the operating system, Friberg said.

Another area of improvement is the way Java can be used by multicore processors, thanks to the inclusion of the Fork/Join framework, JSR 166. Java 7 also formally introduces support for dynamic languages. Over the past five years, more than 200 non-Java languages such as Scala, JRuby, Jython and Groovy have been developed to run on the (JVM) Java Virtual Machine, noted Oracle engineer John Rose.

Java 7 radically expands the amount of functionality it offers for non-Java languages, which should improve performance for programs written in these languages, Rose explained. Non-Java languages can now make method calls with the JVM. A new instruction, called invokedynamic, allows programmers to import the logic of their non-Java compilers.

The final release must be approved by the Java Community Process, the governing body overseeing Java.

Facebook plans to hire public policy expert in India

Amid growing privacy concerns across the world, including India, Facebook, the world's largest social network, plans to hire a public policy expert in India. With nearly 25 million active users in India, Facebook lags behind Google, which counts nearly 60 million users in the country.

As these Internet giants seek to expand their base in India's lucrative Internet market, they face challenges of regulatory hurdles, misinterpreted features and lack of awareness among government departments. Last month, Bangalore asked Google to stop collecting images for its Street View service on security concerns.

"Companies are realising that they have to liaison with the government to ensure that their perspectives are reaching the right ears. Corporates are picking up to influence policy development as it happens and also want to sensitise the government for potential requirements that the sector demands that directly affect companies like Facebook," said Pawan Duggal, a lawyer specialising in IT laws and Internet.

In a job posting, Facebook said the new head of public policy to be based in Delhi, will "actively promote of the uses of Facebook with policymakers and influencers in both electoral and governing bodies." The need for internet companies to engage with the government and even lobby, comes in wake of the amendment of the Indian IT act of 2008 - a tool with which the government regulates content on the internet.

When contacted by ETon Thursday, officials at the public relations agency handling Facebook's communications in India said none of the company officials were available for a comment. Companies in possession of third party data have come under the scanner as the government has drafted regulations for companies dealing, handling or processing sensitive personal data on April 11, 2011.

IBM Scientists Demonstrate Computer Memory Breakthrough

For the first time, scientists at IBM Research (NYSE: IBM) have demonstrated that a relatively new memory technology, known as phase-change memory (PCM), can reliably store multiple data bits per cell over extended periods of time. This significant improvement advances the development of low-cost, faster and more durable memory applications for consumer devices, including mobile phones and cloud storage, as well as high-performance applications, such as enterprise data storage.

With a combination of speed, endurance, non-volatility and density, PCM can enable a paradigm shift for enterprise IT and storage systems within the next five years. Scientists have long been searching for a universal, non-volatile memory technology with far superior performance than flash – today’s most ubiquitous non-volatile memory technology. The benefits of such a memory technology would allow computers and servers to boot instantaneously and significantly enhance the overall performance of IT systems. A promising contender is PCM that can write and retrieve data 100 times faster than flash, enable high storage capacities and not lose data when the power is turned off. Unlike flash, PCM is also very durable and can endure at least 10 million write cycles, compared to current enterprise-class flash at 30,000 cycles or consumer-class flash at 3,000 cycles. While 3,000 cycles will out live many consumer devices, 30,000 cycles are orders of magnitude too low to be suitable for enterprise applications. (see chart for comparisons).

“As organizations and consumers increasingly embrace cloud-computing models and services, whereby most of the data is stored and processed in the cloud, ever more powerful and efficient, yet affordable storage technologies are needed,” states Dr. Haris Pozidis, Manager of Memory and Probe Technologies at IBM Research – Zurich. “By demonstrating a multi-bit phase-change memory technology which achieves for the first time reliability levels akin to those required for enterprise applications, we made a big step towards enabling practical memory devices based on multi-bit PCM.”

Search engines top vehicle for malware

Search engines were the most popular vehicle for delivering malware into the Internet during the first half of the year, according to Blue Host Systems' 2011 Mid-Year Web Security Report.

Nearly 40 percent of all malware incidents originated via Internet search sites. According to Blue Host, malware delivery networks "are typically hosted across multiple sites and are responsible for launching dynamic attacks on unsuspecting users."

"Web-based malware has become so dynamic that it is nearly impossible to protect every user from every new attack with traditional defenses," Steve Daheb, chief marketing officer and senior vice president at Blue Coat Systems, said in a statement accompanying the report.

Here are the top five:

39.2% -- Search engines/portals

10.5% -- Unrated

6.9% -- Email

6.7% -- Pornography

5.2% -- Social networking

Interestingly, given the huge growth of Facebook, Twitter and others, social networking accounts for a relatively small percentage of malware delivery.

Buried nugget of golden data: Blue Host's report notes "spikes of up to 110,000 new pornography sites in a single day." Those are in addition to the already existing sites. Good thing someone's doing something about the severe porn shortage across the web!

The leading malware delivery network in the first half of this year was Shnakule, which on average had 2,000 unique host names per day and served up "drive-by downloads, fake anti-virus (AV), fake codecs, fake flash updates, fake warez, fake Firefox updates, and botnet / CnC controls," Blue Host reported.

Oracle: SAP Applications Certified for Oracle Exadata

Oracle Corporation and SAP AG have had an ongoing commitment to our joint customers for more than 22 years, and our longstanding reseller and customer support agreements provide enhanced access to Oracle Database technology and world-class customer support. As a result of this strong partnership, more than two-thirds of all midsize to large enterprise SAP customers in every industry trust their application deployments to Oracle Databases.

Oracle are enthusiastic, it seems, to announce that SAP is certified for Oracle Exadata Database Machine.

Oracle Exadata Database Machine is a complete package of servers, storage, networking, and software that is massively scalable, secure, and redundant. It’s built using Oracle Database 11gand intelligent Oracle Exadata storage software, making it the ideal platform for SAP application database deployments. Available in a choice of models and configurations, all the components are preconfigured and optimized to work together—in other words, Oracle Exadata Database machine is a prime example of Hardware and Software, Engineered to Work Together.

SAP’s certification of their ERP and BW/BI applications for Oracle Exadata Database Machine means that SAP customers can

• Create a centralized server and storage pool
• Increase the performance of SAP applications
• Enhance reliability with a robust, scalable platform
• Ensure fast, easy, and safe deployments

In particular, SAP customers can access the extensive experience and outstanding expertise of Oracle and Sun. It’s a well-known fact that Oracle is the market’s leading database for SAP applications, with a multitude of customers all over the world relying on the Oracle partnership.

Google dealing with privacy bugs in Google+

Google's new social networking site, Google+, which is built to beat Facebook primarily on privacy features, has several privacy bugs the company is working to fix.

While some enthusiastic beta testers clamor for Google to open the social networking site to everybody now, it's clear Google needs to address these issues before launching Google+ more broadly.

Stumbling right out of the gate over privacy problems would likely doom Google+'s chances of emerging as a viable, realistic rival to Facebook, which rules the social networking market with about 700 million account holders.

So far, beta testers have been mostly positive about Google+, particularly over its design to make it easier for users to share posts and content with different sets of people, as opposed with their entire list of contacts.

Many of the existing privacy bugs in Google+ revolve around the site's mechanism to block users, according to a list of known problems Google has published and is in the process of fixing.

For example, after a user blocks someone, that blocked person may not always be removed from the user's extended circles and the blocked person's posts will remain on the user's activity stream.

Likewise, the user's posts made prior to the blocking will remain on the blocked person's stream.

Google is also working to address a number of non-privacy related bugs, such as the fact that the activity stream may not always get updated in real time and that users can't attach a comment to a comment in a nested fashion.

Google users will be able to restrict the publicly available information to just their full name and their gender, and keep everything else hidden. People also have the option to delete their Google Profile. Google will delete all private profiles after July 31.

Facebook unveils video chatting, thanks to Skype

Facebook and Skype have inked a deal that will bring video chatting to the world's largest social network.

Last week, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that his company was planning to launch "something awesome" today. As early rumors speculated, Skype video calling turned out to be that big announcement.

Video calling has been built into Facebook's chat platform. Users need only to click the video call button at the top of their chat window in order to start communicating over video--once the call recipient accepts the video request. According to Facebook, video chatting is just "two clicks away" on the service.

That level of ease is something that Facebook and Skype seem focused on with their new deal. The social network said its video calling is "the easiest way to get connected with video."

"The video calling is so great and it's so easy," said Zuckerberg, who today also confirmed reports that Facebook has surpassed 750 million users. "Your least-technical friend is going to be able to get online with video chat and get connected. You'll connect with your friends on the social network that already has all your friends."

Earlier this year, Microsoft announced plans to acquire Skype for $8.5 billion. If the companies secure regulatory approval, Skype CEO Tony Bates will lead the new Microsoft Skype division. Zuckerberg said today that the acquisition would not "change anything" related to video calling on Facebook.

Zuckerberg's statement, along with the new group video chat capabilities, both strike at Google, which just last week unveiled the Google+ social network that will compete with Facebook. Google+ includes a feature called Hangouts, which is akin to a video conference call.

Skype could be a useful and interesting partner for Facebook, especially with its impending $8.5 billion acquisition by Microsoft. Analysts have noted that in scooping up Skype, Microsoft can put the screws to Google, which reportedly had been interested in buying the company.

And analysts also noted that the purchase could benefit Facebook, also an increasing competitor for Google, over the long run.

Facebook is being rolled out in 70 different languages starting today, and will be available to all of its 750 million active users "over the next few weeks."

Microsoft says it is pushing cyber attacks on to the user

Microsoft claims that hackers are increasingly targeting internet users as a result of the improvements it has made in its software.

Jeb Haber, principal programme manager lead for Smartscreen Internet Explorer at Microsoft, said that tightened security in Windows 7 and Internet Explorer 9 (IE9) was responsible for the increase in social engineering attacks.

"We're hardening the browser and the operating system, so it pushes attacks onto the user. You can't resolve social engineering through a patch," said Haber. 

Social engineering attacks, such as phishing , involve convincing a user to willingly divulge sensitive information, often by posing as a company they do business with. As security holes are found and closed in online systems, in effect meaning that the low-hanging fruit has been picked, attacks have been moving onto users. Convincing a human to give you his login details means there's no need to hack into a corporate database, you can just enter through the front door. Haber explained that some features within IE9 are designed to help warn users of potential social engineering attempts.

IE9 uses "application reputation" to check the likelihood that a downloaded application is malicious. Traditionally, browsers and operating systems provide the same warning whenever a user attempts to run a downloaded programme. Haber stated that this results in users being more prone to ignoring these warnings.

By checking an application's reputation, IE9 only provides a warning for those applications it believes to be malicious.

Haber stated that shortly after the release of IE9, Microsoft was able to see that users were chosing the safe option when presented with the new warnings 95 per cent of the time. When this figure was re-checked last week, it was found to be 96 per cent.

Leading security companies such as McAfee also use reputation analysis to determine whether a file is likely to be malicious. So is IE9 trying to replace traditional anti-virus for its users?

Gmail gets a Google+-like makeover

Google is giving Gmail users a glimpse of design updates that will roll out over the next few months.

Those updates will make the email service look a whole lot like the company's just launched social network, Google+ .

In a blog post Thursday, Jason Cornwell, a user experience designer at Google , noted that the company will be making changes to Gmail in an effort to make it cleaner to look at and easier to use.

Gmail isn't alone in this summer re-do. According to Cornwell, Google Calendar will also get a new look that will be revealed in the next few days.

"This is part of a Google-wide effort to bring you an experience that's more focused, elastic, and effortless across all of our products," Cornwell wrote. "The changes are not going to happen all at once. We know that you love and care about Gmail as much as we do, and we'll be working on these upgrades gradually over the next few months to allow plenty of time to understand and incorporate your feedback into the evolving design."

Samsung doubles speed of microSD card for smartphones

Samsung Electronics today announced that it is manufacturing a high-performance microSD card with twice the data transfer speeds as its previous generation cards designed for smartphones.

Samsung's new microSD card holds up to 32GB of data and has read data transfer speeds of up to 24MB/sec and write rates of up to 12MB/sec, more than double the maximum write speeds of a class 4 32GB microSD card.

The new microSD cards have a class 10 speed rating suitable for data storage and transmission of full HD video, a feature that's becoming highly popular among 4G smartphone users.

SD cards are classified by four speed levels: Class 2, 4, 6 and 10. Classes 4, 6 and 10 are rated for use with high-definition video recorders, with class 10 being rated for high-speed bus interfaces, such as FireWire.

The new 32GB memory card uses Samsung's 3-bit-per-cell, 20-nanometer NAND flash memory chips. Samsung said that by using its smaller 20nm class circuitry, instead of the previously used 30nm class process, the productivity of the chips was raised over 30%.

Facebook blocks contact-exporting tool

Facebook has been blocking a tool intended to let people extract contact information their friends have shared with them, the tool's developer said today--but he's working on a way to evade Facebook's restrictions.

"Facebook is trying so hard to not allow you to export your friends. They started to remove e-mails of your friends from your profile by today July 5th 2011. It will no longer work for many people," warned Mohamed Mansour, developer of the Facebook Friend Exporter, a Chrome extension that automates the data extraction process.

The tool lets people save their contacts' e-mail addresses, birthdays, phone numbers, and other information into a text file or to directly import them into Gmail. That makes it much easier for Google account holders to rebuild their contact network at Google+, Google's brand-new social network site.

The activity surrounding the export tool spotlights the value of the data contained in social networks. Google believes people should be able to extract information about their contacts and provides tools to let people do so. Facebook, the incumbent power in social networking, provides only a tool to let people extract what they themselves have put into the network. The friend list it provides is a series of names in plain text--no contact information, and not even a link to their Facebook pages to help distinguish John Smith No. 1 from John Smith No. 2.

Facebook's stance has triggered something of a backlash among those who don't like to see data that's been shared to them be locked up.

Google disables Realtime search

Google said today that it has temporarily disabled its Realtime search function in the wake of the introduction of its social network Google+.

The feature was developed to integrate real-time data from Twitter and other social-networking sites. The option for the feature has been removed from the right side of Google's search bar, and the feature's Web page now contains a 404 message.

"We've temporarily disabled google.com/realtime. We're exploring how to incorporate Google+ into this functionality, so stay tuned," the company said on its Google Realtime Twitter feed.

Google began indexing real-time Twitter messages in its search results in 2009, but apparently that arrangement with the microblogging site has expired.

"Since October of 2009, we have had an agreement with Twitter to include their updates in our search results through a special feed, and that agreement expired on July 2," a Google representative told SearchEngineLand. "While we will not have access to this special feed from Twitter, information on Twitter that's publicly available to our crawlers will still be searchable and discoverable on Google."

When Realtime returns, it will feature content from a variety of sources, not just Google+, the company's recently unveiled social network, Google told SearchEngineLand.

Microsoft discontinues Hohm energy monitoring service

Citing low adoption rates, Microsoft has discontinued the beta of its Hohm home energy monitoring service, the company announced Thursday.

"The feedback from customers and partners has remained encouraging throughout Microsoft Hohm's beta period. However, due to the slow overall market adoption of the service, we are instead focusing our efforts on products and solutions more capable of supporting long-standing growth within this evolving market," Microsoft stated in a blog post announcing the discontinuation.

Existing users will be able to enjoy the service until May 31, 2012.

News of the discontinuation comes only a week after Google announced that it would be retiring its own home energy monitoring service, Google PowerMeter. Like Microsoft, Googlecited low adoption rates for the discontinuation.

The Hohm service analyzes home energy usage, based on information provided by the user, or by a third-party power monitor. The company reasoned that users would curb excessive energy usage once they found out where they used the most power unnecessarily. The service also provides tips on ways to cut energy usage.

Microsoft touted a number of ambitious plans to expand the service. It sought to develop a way for utility companies to upload user information directly to the application itself. It also struck a partnership with Ford to have the service alert users about the best times to recharge their electric vehicles.

Despite pulling the plug on Hohm, the company plans to still to look for ways IT can be used to cut power usage.

"Microsoft will continue to focus on developing products, solutions and partnership that span a wide spectrum of industries, such as power generation, distribution grids, buildings and [transportation] systems," the blog post reads. The company said it will continue to develop the Joulemeter PC energy monitoring software and the Smart Energy Reference Architecture (SERA) for utility companies.

Gigabit Wi-Fi spec edges closer to reality

Gigabit Wi-Fi edged closer to reality this week, with the release of the latest version of an industry specification. Available to members of the WiGig Alliance, the document will be the basis for an early round of interoperability tests in the fall.

The testing round will be the first time Alliance members can see how well their prototype products, using a short-range Wi-Fi radio that operates in the 60 GHz band, can connect with each other. The 1.1 version of the WiGig specification, which is now in sync with the standard being crafted by the IEEE 802.11ad working group, will create a Wi-Fi radio link that will support up to 7Gbps, over fairly short distances, such as one or more rooms in a home.

It's intended to tie together a range of high-throughput gear, including consumer electronics such as high-definition TVs, computers and network storage.

The 1.1 release is "certification ready," according to WiGig chairman and president Ali Sadri, who also is head of Intel's Mobile Wireless Group. It will be used as the basis for creating a series of certification tests, a joint project between the Alliance and the separate Wi-Fi Alliance. Sadri says the certification process should be ready during the second half of 2012 and will be overseen by the WFA. In the past, Wi-Fi products often have arrived on the market shortly after winning certification.

Also part of this week's announcement are a new peripherals extension, and a new partnership to support HDMI products such as flat-panel TVs.

HP TouchPad goes on sale to mixed reviews

The initial reviews of HP's TouchPad tablet are in and they paint a somewhat confusing picture. But they all agree this much: TouchPad (1) is no iPad 2.

Overall, many reviewers liked the webOS operating system and user interface, especially the way it makes use of multitasking, notifications, and integration with an array of online services and websites via the HP Synergy synchronization feature.

The device itself is where it suffers most in comparison with the iPad: a glossy, black 1-inch plastic case that's slightly thicker and heavier and far more prone to fingerprints, than the sleek, aluminum unibody iPad 2 housing, or of the upcoming Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1, running Android 3.1 firmware. The 9.7-inch touchscreen is the same size, resolution and aspect ratio as the iPad 2.

It comes in two Wi-Fi only models (3G models with assisted GPS are coming later), based on internal storage capacity: a 16GB model for $500, and 32GB for $600, the same pricing as the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 and the iPad 2 (which is also available with 64GB, for $700).

There are, of course, far fewer tablet-specific apps for TouchPad, about 300 at launch versus more than 90,000 for iPad. By one recent count, there are about 1,300 Android tablet apps.

Engadget's Tim Stevens sums up a common set of impressions.

"The shortage of apps is a problem, no doubt, but that will change with time," he writes. "What won't change is the hardware, and there we're left a little disappointed.

"Holding this in one hand and either an iPad 2 or a Galaxy Tab 10.1 in the other leaves you wondering why you'd ever be compelled to buy the HP when you could have the thinner, lighter alternative for the same money. Meanwhile, the performance left us occasionally wanting and, well, what is there to say."

"It seems to me that the general tenets of the webOS philosophy have always been based around speed, simplicity, and finding the shortest and most organic steps to getting things done, and webOS 3.0 doesn't seem to have lost those principles," says Joshua Topolsky, reviewing for ThisIsMyNext. "HP has certainly tightened up much of what Palm started, and navigating the TouchPad quickly became not only second nature, but an experience I found myself missing [after] going back to the iPad or a Honeycomb [Android] device."

SEPATON and Solera Networks leverage Xyratex OneStor™ platforms in their new solutions

Xyratex Ltd (Nasdaq: XRTX), a leading provider of enterprise class data storage subsystems and hard disk drive capital equipment, announced today that SEPATON and Solera Networks have begun shipping new solutions based on the Xyratex OneStor™ platform.

OneStor Integrated Application Platforms are the "next generation" storage solution that enables OEMs to offer their customers more powerful solutions as part of an integrated computing platform. OneStor Integrated Application platforms consolidate a server with storage into a single device. Compute power and memory provide server intelligence and the ability to scale-up (increased capacity) or scale-out (increased compute, I/O performance and capacity) while eliminating additional hardware costs, cabling and complexity of installation as well as minimizing footprint requirements.

"SEPATON has built a strong reputation in very large enterprises as the leader in extremely high performance, enterprise-class data protection platforms capable of protecting petabytes of data in a single system. By leveraging the expertise Xyratex brings to the product design and quality of the OneStor platform, SEPATON is able to extend its leadership data protection solution from the datacenter to the edge of the enterprise with its S2100-DS3 offering," said Michael Thompson, President & CEO of SEPATON, Inc.  "Partnering with Xyratex brings strong platform and integration capabilities which has allowed SEPATON development resources to stay focused on core software competencies while quickly bringing to market an enterprise class branch office solution."

"Solera Networks is the leader in scalable network forensics solutions and we wanted a partnership that enabled us to deliver our solutions without having to expend our internal resources on application integration and support," said Steve Shillingford, President & CEO of Solera Networks. "We value the data storage expertise that Xyratex provides and we benefit from the experience they have had with the leading server, storage and application developers. We know we can rely on Xyratex to provide the enterprise quality and reliability that our customers demand."

Google bets big on cloud computing for India

Google held its Apps Roadshow recently to showcase the benefits it can offer to businesses who decide to go Google. Doug Farber, enterprise managing director (Asia Pacific) revealed that about 96% of its total revenues come from online advertising, a figure the company is keen on changing and that is where the Google Enterprise Apps come into play. Worldwide Google charges its customers a fee of about $50 per month for each user and although a similar pricing is available forIndia the retailers here offer discounts and make the price even more attractive.

A few big names who have recently shifted to Google's cloud computing include the Indian Youth Congress, Neelkamal, Indiamart and Punj Lloyd. Executives from Neelkamal and Indiamart were present at the conference and highlighted that the security offered by Google is much better compared to the conventional servers and that switching to Google Apps has not only made their workforce more efficient and connected but also brought down operating costs.

Farber stressed on the fact that cloud computing can prove to be a major growth driver for SME businesses since they wouldn't have to spend a big chunk of capital on buying hardware and maintaining it. As organizations grow scalability becomes a harder to manage issue on conventional systems but cloud computing offers a lot of ease here since expanding on the cloud is relatively quick and cheaper. Such has been the expansion of Google Apps that a new business somewhere in the world signs up for it every 14 seconds.

Microsoft to Power English Search Services on China’s Baidu

Baidu, the largest Chinese-language search engine, is said to be partnering with Microsoft in a search deal that would go into effect before the end of the year.

Microsoft’s Bing search engine, according to a report by The New York Times, will power English-language search services on Baidu.com. Terms of the deal have not been disclosed.

Currently, English searches on Baidu number as high as 10 million per day, the company says. “More and more people here are searching for English terms,” company Kaiser Kuo said. “But Baidu hasn’t done a good job. So here’s a way for us to do it.”

China’s internet population — the largest in the world — surpassed 477 million users in March, making it a potentially lush and lucrative playground for Bing and giving Microsoft a substantial edge over Google in the Chinese search market.

Google, by contrast, has had a tempestuous relationship with the Chinese government over its censorship requirements. Google.cn continues to exist but links users to its Hong Kong search site for censor-free results.

Hackers claims Apple online data was compromised

A list of 27 user names and encrypted passwords apparently for an Apple website was posted to the Internet over the weekend along with a warning from hacker group Anonymous that the Cupertino-based computer maker could be a target of its attacks.

The list was posted to the Pastebin website, a hosting site for text files, by an unidentified user under the title "Not Yet Serious." It wasn't immediately clear if the user was allied with the Anonymous hacking group, but the existence of the file became widely known after Anonymous linked to it in a Twitter message.

"Not being so serious, but well," the message read before linking to thePasteBin page. "Apple could be target, too. But don't worry, we are busy elsewhere," the message said.

The data appears to be a set of user names and encrypted passwords from an SQL database for an online survey at the Apple Business Intelligence website. The site is currently offline.

Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

In an apparently unrelated posting, a Lebanese grey-hat hacker called idahc_hacker said he had found vulnerabilities on another Apple website. The SQL injection and iFrame code attacks can be used by hackers to gain unauthorized access to data.

Grey hat hackers do not typically hack for malicious purposes and the Lebanese hacker did not post and data obtained from the site.

In pointing out the hacks, he said he was not part of Anonymous or LulzSec, an allied group that disbanded recently.

Google Chrome continues to grab IE and Firefox market share

Google's Chrome browser has almost doubled its market share after 10 months, whereas Internet Explorer use has tumbled by seven per cent in the same period, according to monthly data from Net Applications.

IE remains the most popular browser with a 53.69 per cent share, followed by Firefox with 21.67 per cent and Chrome with an all-time high of 13.11 per cent.

Although still in third place, Chrome has the fastest growing user base at almost three per cent since the turn of the year.

Apple's Safari browser consolidated its fourth place with a slight increase to 7.48 per cent, but fifth-placed Opera has dropped to a 10-month low of just 1.73 per cent.

Meanwhile, browsing from smartphones and tablets has increased dramatically as the devices penetrate the mainstream.

Some five per cent of all web surfing is now carried out on portable devices running platforms such as iOS, Android and BlackBerry, and the iPad now accounts for over one per cent of global web browsing.

It remains to be seen how long Microsoft can hold onto its browser dominance. IE is still the most commonly used browser in the enterprise, but Chrome continues to attract interest from enterprises despite its short development cycles, according to Google.

Mozilla has seen its market share drop by one per cent since the start of January, despite clocking up over 100 million downloads for the recently released Firefox 4 and following up with Firefox 5 last month.

Comments made by Firefox product manager Asa Dotzler about enterprise support are unlikely to have endeared the browser to the business community, and Mozilla was forced back track on its position regarding enterprise support.