Ingram inducts first partner into Services Group

Ingram Micro has signed up services, cloud and hosting specialist, Ultra Serve, as its first partner in its newly formed Services Group.

Through Ultra Serve, it will offer a suite of hosted infrastructure services including virtual machines, dedicated machines, Cloud machines and managed services.

It will be hosted via Ultra Serve’s local datacentre facilities and resellers can white-label and configure the services through a Web portal.

Resellers can purchase the services in similar fashion to purchasing products via Ingram using their existing accounts and credit arrangements.

Ingram services group business manager, Darren Elsby, said this was the first of many partnerships to take place.

“We’re partnering with suppliers to offer services that are tailored to the market and supported by easy-to-use provisioning tools for resellers to deploy those services to end-users,” Elsby said.

Elsby said Ingram’s role was to ensure resellers are supplied with solid, well-priced and reliable services that meet stringent SLA requirements.

“That takes a lot of work in negotiating SLAs, pricing and so forth that otherwise would fall on the shoulders of our resellers,” he said. “They can be confident the services they provision through us will work as advertised. They don’t have to spend time finding a supplier and worrying about whether they’ll be reliable."

Resellers will also be supplied with access to technical expertise in deploying service-based solutions and with advice on how to build a profitable and sustainable services business, Elsby said.

Ultra Serve CEO, Samuel Yates, said partnering with Ingram provided an opportunity to reach out to a large pool of SMB-focused resellers, as well as expand its reach into government and education verticals.

Ultra Serve’s hosting platform supports both Linux and Windows operating systems.

Samsung unveils Android-based Galaxy Tab 7.0 Plus

Samsung has made the somewhat surprising decision to unveil yet another tablet to bolster its line.

Dubbed the Galaxy Tab 7.0 Plus, the Android 3.2 (Honeycomb)-based tablet comes with a 7-inch display and 1.2GHz dual-core processor. In addition to 802.11n wireless support, owners will also be able to connect to HSPA+ networks from the device. On the storage side, customers will be able to choose from 16GB and 32GB variants, and a microSD slot offers the ability to add up to 32GB of additional storage to the tablet.

Samsung's decision to announce a new 7-inch Galaxy Tab comes as a bit of a surprise, since the company already has a 7-inch tablet that it launched last year. Earlier this month, the company showed off a 7.7-inch tablet, alongside an 8.9-inch option. Samsung also sells a 10.1-inch tablet. Considering it had nearly all form factors covered, who'd have thought that Samsung would need a fourth option to offer customers?

Samsung's announcement comes just days after Amazon unveiled its own, and highly anticipated, entrant in the tablet market. That device, dubbed the Kindle Fire (complete coverage), lacks many of the bells and whistles found in the Galaxy Tab 7.0 Plus, including connectivity with mobile wireless networks and both front and rear cameras, but makes up for that with a price tag of just $199.

The Kindle Fire, which also runs Android, is slated to launch in November.

As for Samsung's 7.0 Plus, the company says that it will start rolling out the tablet to Indonesia and Austria at the end of October, followed by a gradual launch across Asia, the U.S., Europe, and elsewhere around the world. Pricing was not divulged, and Samsung did not immediately respond to CNET's request for comment on that detail.

When the 7.0 Plus is finally released, there's no telling if it will face the patent troubles Samsung's other tablets have run into. From Australia to Europe, Samsung and Apple are locked in a bitter patent battle that has seen the launch of the Galaxy Tab 10.1 held up in Australia and blocked from sale in Germany. Samsung's smartphones have also come under attack.

Firefox 8 beta now available with Twitter search

The beta release of Firefox 8 is now available for download, adding a number of user interface enhancements and tools to aid web development.

The Firefox 8 beta allows users to test the new features ahead of the full release, according to Mozilla, and is available to download now for Windows, Mac and Linux.

The new features fall roughly two categories: user interface improvements; and better support for new web standards, of which developers will be able to take advantage.

On the user side, Firefox has improved control over add-ons, making it easier to choose third-party add-ons with a notification to review and confirm the choices. The browser also now disables new add-ons by default until the user explicitly opts in to use them, Mozilla said.

It is also now possible to restore only selected tabs following a restart of Firefox, and the new version adds Twitter as an option in the search box and tab animations when users tear off and reorder open tab windows.

Under the hood, Firefox 8 beta adds support for cross-origin resource sharing, a W3C recommended method for sharing cross-site content in a more secure manner, especially WebGL graphics content, which has been the focus of warnings about potential vulnerabilities.

For developers, Firefox now supports HTML5 media elements for audio and video content, plus the ability to add items to Firefox's right-click menu using HTML5 markup.

Mozilla also announced new features in Firefox Beta for Android, including Twitter search, a master password to protect usernames and passwords stored on the handset, and the option to add a shortcut for a bookmarked site directly to the phone home screen.

Intel to acquire location-based services company Telmap

Intel has signed an agreement to acquire Telmap, a company focused on mobile navigation and location-based services, search and content, for an undisclosed amount, the company said in a blog post.

The announcement was made this week during a keynote at the Intel AppUp Elements 2011 in Seattle, an annual gathering of developers, Peter Biddle, general manager of AppUp, said on Wednesday.

Telmap provides white-label, hosted and managed location-based services to mobile operators globally, the Israeli company said earlier this month. Its customers include Orange FT Group, Vodafone, Vodacom, SFR, O2, Telefonica, SingTel, Optus, Cellcom, and Pelephone. Telmap said in a Twitter message late Thursday that it has been acquired by Intel, and was joining the family.

The proposed acquisition is a step for Intel to expand its mobile software services capabilities as it continues to grow in the area of software and services.

Telmap, which provides an integrated, uniform experience across consumer devices, will become a wholly-owned subsidiary of Intel. It has expertise around end-to-end mobile local search, mapping and navigation services, delivering multi-platform consumer experiences, Biddle said.

With Telmap, Intel said it can directly provide developers with location-based services spanning devices, operating systems and CPU architectures.

Telmap will allow Intel to provide AppUp developers with differentiated location capabilities in the form of a standard set of location-based APIs (application programming interfaces) and software that developers can easily integrate into their AppUp apps, Biddle said.

Intel said at the conference that 807,000 applications have been downloaded and 350,000 consumers have registered to use its AppUp store. The store, which launched in 2010, was designed to spur application development for netbooks, but also includes apps for PCs.

Percona curbs MySQL memory hunger

Percona has updated its version of MySQL so that the software's storage engine consumes less working memory, potentially increasing its suitability for tasks requiring an in-memory database, the company announced Friday.

The in-memory storage engine of Percona Server 5.5.15 now can hold all MySQL data types, including the previously unsupported BLOB and TEXT data types, which could also broaden its appeal to large-scale Web services companies.

If a deployment "has very small memory tables, [this version] may save a few megabytes of memory. It's no big deal. But if you are using tens or hundreds of gigabytes of data in memory, that is where you will find that our changes have an advantage," said Percona founder and CEO Peter Zaitsev. 

Founded in 2006, Percona bills itself as the largest and oldest independent MySQL services vendor outside of Oracle. Internet-facing companies such as GroupOn, RightNow, Answer.Com, 37Signals and the British Broadcasting Corporation have availed themselves of Percona's services. Percona Server is an open source version of MySQL with a number of enhancements for production use. Percona sells support for the server.

For this release, the company modified the MySQL MEMORY storage engine, which was designed to store database tables in a server's working memory, eliminating the need to write each change to a disk, which can slow transaction speeds. For jobs such as hosting a website, MySQL Memory can significantly speed response times.

A number of limitations have hobbled the basic version of MySQL MEMORY, Zaitsev said. Most notably, MEMORY (formerly known as HEAP) can work only with a subset of data types allowable in MySQL, notably only those with fixed lengths.

With fixed-length data types, each entry to the database will be stored in an identically sized storage block. Because most entries won't use all the space in their storage blocks, this approach is inherently inefficient, due to all empty space it creates. "For many problems, you have to store strings of different lengths," Zaitsev said.

On disk drives, where space is relatively cheap, this waste is not a huge deal. On the more expensive RAM, however, such waste is costly.

Percona Server 5.5.15, which is based on MySQL 5.5.15, comes with an enhanced version of MySQL MEMORY that can work with any MySQL data type, including variable-length data types such as BLOB and TEXT.

Heroku, Engine Yard bolster language support on clouds

 Platform-as-a-service cloud vendors Heroku and Engine Yard have been branching out to accommodate more developers by backing more programming languages.

Heroku, the cloud application deployment platform owned by Salesforce.comsince early this year, added Python support this week and Java support late last month. Engine Yard as of this week is accommodating JRuby, a version of the Ruby language for the Java Virtual Machine.

Both Python and Java are in a beta stage on Heroku, although developers can use them now.  In addition to these languages, Heroku supports development via Ruby, Node.js, and Clojure. Developers also can use PHP when developing applications for Facebook. Applications deployed on Heroku include consumer-facing Web applications as well as some enterprise business applications  for the Web.

"We basically believe that moving forward, all software is Web software," said James Lindenbaum, Heroku co-founder. Heroku was acquired by Salesforce.com in January for $250 million.

Engine Yard, in adding JRuby support, bills itself as the first platform to make available all stable, production-ready implementations of Ruby. JRuby project leaders Charles Nutter and Thomas Enebo both work at Engine Yard, after having previously worked for Java founder Sun Microsystems.

Engine Yard, which has been running primarily Ruby on Rails Web applications, wants its customers to shift over to the JRuby variant of the language.

"[JRuby] is the only Ruby that is fully concurrent, which we believe is a bare minimum for running cloud applications," said Nic Williams, Engine Yard vice president of technology. Ruby is very resource-intensive and memory-hungry, he said. "With JRuby, it's much more efficient, much more performant, uses far less memory."

Engine Yard also supports development via PHP.

Facebook faces more complaints over data retention

Facebook's data retention practices are under investigation by Ireland's Data Protection Commissioner following a series of complaints filed by a European group critical of the social networking site.

A total of 22 complaints have been filed with the Data Protection Commissioner by Europe v. Facebook, a group that claims the company is at odds with European privacy laws governing how companies manage personal data.

Facebook has sought to deflect criticism over its data handling practices, maintaining that it complies with data protection laws around the world.

The complaints concern a range of issues, such ashow Facebook deals with deleted posts and contacts, or Facebook's privacy policy, which the group claims is unclear. The group said it filed the complaints in Ireland because Facebook's user agreement says that users outsde the U.S. and Canada are entering into an agreement with Facebook Ireland, which is also the company's European headquarters.

Many of the issues brought up by Europe v. Facebook came about after members of the group asked Facebook for personal data stored on them by the site. Facebook is required under European law to respond to such requests. The group published redacted data obtained by some of its supporters to show what kind information Facebook stores. The group's website contains instructions for how people can request the data Facebook stores about them.

The Data Protection Commissioner's office was already planning to audit Facebook before the complaints were filed, but the process has now been accelerated, said Ciara O'Sullivan, spokeswoman for the office.

The Data Protection Commissioner will undertake an investigation of the complaints and also an audit of Facebook, which will involve visiting the company's facilities in Dublin and "looking more generally at how they process personal data," O'Sullivan said. The audit will begin next month.

The commissioner is not obligated to make the findings public, but due to the size of the investigation and scrutiny of Facebook, O'Sullivan said she expects some findings to be publicly released by the end of the year.

Facebook said in a statement on Friday that it has regular contact with the Data Protection Commissioner, and "we look forward to demonstrating our commitment to the appropriate handling of user data as part of this routine audit."

The company did briefly address in its statement some of the issues in the complaints. People who requested their Facebook data found that information they thought they had deleted was still present in the file.

Facebook said that "this is mostly likely due to the user removing a post from a specific place on Facebook rather than deleting it, or because we needed to retain information for a limited period for an investigation. We're continuing to work on ways to make this process as seamless as possible."

Nokia readies Linux OS for low-end smartphones

Nokia has underlined the importance of low-cost smartphones and now it appears that the company is developing a Linux-based OS for smartphones that will cost less than $100 without subsidies.

The new OS is code-named "Meltemi," and the project is being led by Mary McDowell, Nokia's executive vice president in charge of mobile phones, according to sources familiar with the matter, the Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday.

The company has been hinting at plans for a reboot of its low-end smartphone portfolio. At its Connection event in Singapore, Nokia said that Qt, a Linux-compatible cross-platform application and user interface framework, would be a good fit for lower-end devices, and before that McDowell said that Nokia needs to find a replacement for Series 40, according to Carolina Milanesi, research vice president at Gartner.

Series 40 is the OS Nokia today uses on its feature phones, a product segment that is going away as users want smartphones. On the record, Nokia is keeping mum about its plans.

Nokia choosing Windows Phone over Android has put the company in a tight spot when it comes to low-end smartphones. There is no question that Android is pushing the price of smartphones to levels that are considerably lower than that of smartphones based on Windows Phone in the near-term, which means that Nokia has a gap in its portfolio, according to Ben Wood, director of research at CCS Insight.

Nokia can't afford to bet its entire future on Windows Phone and if it wants to remain the volume leader it needs to step up its efforts in the low-end smartphone segment. The low-end smartphone market is increasingly important and will become the largest smartphone market segment.Sales of less expensive smartphones are already growing faster that high-end models in Western Europe and the availability of low-end smartphones will be crucial to increase sales in emerging markets.

The opportunity is so big that no one can afford to ignore it, not even Apple, Jeronimo said, adding that he won't be surprised if the company releases a cheaper version of the iPhone next week.

For Nokia, a logical venue for the public launch of Meltemi would be at Nokia World in London at the end of October. The drawback is that Meltemi risks being drowned by the expected launch of Nokia's first Windows Phone, according to Wood.

Microsoft kills Google Chrome with bad malware signature

Microsoft scrambled earlier today to revise an antivirus definition file that deleted Google's Chrome browser from users' PCs.

"Wow, that's certainly one way to win the browser war," said Andrew Storms, director of security operations at nCircle Security.

Google told Chrome users that Microsoft incorrectly marked the browser as malware.

Storms was referring to the battle between Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE) and rivals, including Chrome, for usage share. According to data from one Web metrics firm, Chrome will pass Mozilla's Firefox as the second-most-popular browser by the end of this year, pitting Google and Microsoft for the top spot.

Chrome users began reporting the specious detection of the browser early Friday in a quickly-growing thread on a Google support forum.

"This morning, after I started up the PC, a Windows Security box popped up and said I had a Security Problem that needed to be removed," said someone identified as "chasd harris" in the first message of the thread. "I clicked the Details button and saw that it was 'PWS:Win32/Zbot.' I clicked the Remove button and restarted my PC. Now I do not have Chrome. It has been removed or uninstalled."

Scores of others reported the same behavior on their Windows PCs running Microsoft's Security Essentials -- its free, consumer-grade antivirus software -- as well as Forefront, the antivirus product designed for enterprises.

Microsoft issued a corrected definition file around 10 a.m. PT Friday, about three hours after users began reporting the false positive on Google's support forum.

Several bloggers, including ZDNet's Ryan Naraine and Ed Bott, reported the problem earlier today.

Microsoft has acknowledged the gaffe, and said approximately 3,000 users were affected.

"An incorrect detection for PWS:Win32/Zbot was identified and as a result, Google Chrome was inadvertently blocked and in some cases removed from customers PCs," Microsoft said in a statement posted to the Facebook pageof its malware research center. "We have already fixed the issue..., but approximately 3,000 customers were impacted."

Microsoft told users to update Security Essentials with the new definition file, then reinstall Chrome.

For its part, Google slapped a red warning banner at the top of its Google support pages that read, "Alert: Google Chrome has been incorrectly marked as malware by Microsoft security software."

Chrome was fingered as Zbot, better known as Zeus, a widespread botnet Trojan that focuses on stealing online banking credentials, which criminals then use to vacuum money from accounts.

Microsoft isn't the only security software maker to have screwed up in this way: All three of the world's largest antivirus companies -- Symantec, McAfee and Trend Micro -- have issued defective definitions in the past. In some cases, those mistakes have wreaked much more havoc.

In April 2010, for example, a McAfee antivirus update crippled an unknown number of corporate PCs worldwide when it quarantined a crucial Windows XP system file.

Some users who had seen Chrome vanish when they accepted Security Essentials' advice and let the software delete "chrome.exe," said that their bookmarks had also been eliminated, and that they were not restored after reinstalling Chrome.

Others, however, said that their bookmarks had not been affected.

Sony Announces Mini-Upgrade To Playstation Home Prior to Re-Launch

Sony has already announced that they will be upgrading the Playstation 3’s streaming video interface with “Video Unlimited,” now they are also expecting some upgrades to the Playstation Home service. If you are not actually familiar with Playstation Home, then you are not alone. 

While Sony hopes that the Playstation Home can eventually compete with Facebook as far as social gaming goes, it isn’t quite in the realm of competition just yet. That is why the company is planning such a big upgrade in the first place.

While there will eventually be a total re-launch, with the aim to be something people will actually want to use, Sony is doing it the right way by fixing a few things now. If the company were to wait until the re-launch was ready, Sony would run the risk of no one being around when they felt ready to hit the big stage. 

The Playstation Blog has announced that this particular upgrade will make the Playstation Home’s environment slightly different. Among the changes that are going to occur with the 1.55 version upgrade will be a better startup flow than what is currently offered.

Apparently, the update will also include several new furnishings that players can use to decorate their virtual home that serves as the jumping off point. Players will also be able to clear their Playstation Home Cache, a feature that users have been clamoring for since the original launch. 

One of the coolest new features of this particular upgrade is a changing in the way the “active camera” works on the site. Users will have a little more control over what they record and what they can edit when they are shooting video of their Playstation Home visits. The active camera will almost certainly get the most buzz of the new features, as this is the most truly social aspect of the upgrade. 

For those who are waiting out the re-launch before they decide whether they are sold on the service, the wait will be just a bit longer. The company has not announced exactly when the re-launch will occur but it is expected relatively soon.

Amazon wants to buy Palm: report

Amazon is in advanced negotiations to purchase Palm from Hewlett-Packard, reports Venture Beat.According to a “well-placed source” who spoke with the publication, HP wants to shed the struggling smartphone brand quickly.

HP purchased Palm in July of last year for about $1.2 billion. Palm makes the respected webOS operating system. Unfortunately, it’s respected by a select few, and Palm has not found a way to sell its platform to the masses in any meaningful sense.

It would seem HP has been courting Amazon as a possible new parent company for Palm for a while. Palm CEO Jon Rubinstein joined Amazon’s board of directors last year, after the HP acquisition of Palm. And this July, he told This is my next that Palm was looking for new partners for webOS, and that “Amazon would certainly make a great partner because they have a lot of characteristics that would help them expand the webOS ecosystem.”

News of a possible Palm acquisition by Amazon comes at a time when HP itself is struggling to maintain its grip. The company recently fired its failed chief executive, Leo Apotheker, and replaced him with former eBay CEO Meg Whitman.

Amazon, on the other hand, just announced this week the release of four new Kindles, the Kindle Fire tablet, Kindle Touch e-reader, Kindle Touch 3G and a new $79 Kindle. In other words, Amazon is delving deeper into the world of hardware production, and making millions in the process.

From a distance, at least, this deal seems like a good idea for everyone involved. HP desperately needs to get its house in order, and that means cutting off the fat that’s keeping it from a nimble pivot to whatever business focus will help it regain composure and begin to thrive again. Amazon could surely get Palm at a discount, and would do well with its own mobile platform. The new Kindle Fire runs on Google’s Android OS – but it’s so heavily modified, you’d barely know Android is under there. Why not just go all the way with an OS of its own? And for that webOS may be the answer.

Cloupia Offers Open Automation for Clouds

Cloud automation and management software provider Cloupia announced Open Automation for Clouds, allowing its customers and partners to extend, add or enhance data center management and operations automation in addition to its Cloupia Unified Infrastructure Controller (CUIC) cloud and data center automation capabilities.

The company’s Open Automation for Clouds capability provides customers with a way to automatically add multiple infrastructure and cloud vendors as an extension of their data centers and allows users to take control of systems and applications. The platform is designed to allow IT administrators to customize and automate infrastructure administrative and operational tasks while allowing IT teams to build and execute repeatable physical and virtual infrastructure provisioning workflows.

“Typical data centers are heterogeneous in nature, and automation technology cannot be limited to a small set of protocols and systems,” said Raju Penmetsa, CTO at Cloupia. “Open Automation for Clouds provides technology and service delivery partners, as well as customer administrators, with access to reports, analytics, workflows, triggers, chargeback and data acquisition information to properly service business users and operators. These tools are vital in helping an organization properly implement a dynamic IT infrastructure to reduce costs, simplify administration and better align IT departments with their business needs.”

Cloupia also helps small to medium-size businesses (SMBs) evolve from static data center or virtual environments to private and public cloud environments. Its flagship product, CUIC, provides infrastructure control, provisioning, management and monitoring across physical, virtual and cloud environments using a single pane of glass. The company is providing evaluation software, a software development kit, documentation and training for partners and customers adopting Open Automation for Clouds.

In August, 3i Infotech, a provider of IT solutions, announced that it selected Cloupia to offer and deliver cloud and data center automation services worldwide. "Together with Cloupia, we are uniquely addressing enterprise challenges by looking at the data center from the business perspective and driving innovation down to and across all components," said Babji VS, senior vice president of global head infrastructure management services for 3i Infotech. "Cloupia's unified infrastructure controller will give customers an automated, virtualized, cloud-ready and sustainable data center infrastructure and provide the unique advantage of a flexible foundation for long-term growth and sustainability."

Microsoft fails to credit Kelihos takedown partner

Microsoft grabbed headlines Wednesday with its report about the successful takedown of the Kelihos botnet, but while the company detailed the achievements of its Digital Crimes Unit, it failed to mention the major role security firm Kaspersky Lab played in the operation.

Microsoft's Kelihos takedown announcement centered on the fact that its specialized team of lawyers succeeded in naming defendants in a botnet-related federal court complaint for the first time -- such cases usually involve unknown parties.

The named defendants were Alexander Piatti and his Czech-based company dotFREE Group SRO, which operated a second-level domain (SLD) registration service in the .cz.cc name space. This service was abused by the botnet's operators to set up hosts for their control infrastructure. A temporary restraining order was obtained by the Digital Crimes Unit in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, forcing VeriSign to suspend the cz.cc domain.

Microsoft did not disclose any technical details about how Kelihos was hijacked from its original operators because Kaspersky Lab handled that part of the operation. The security company's experts explained Thursday in a lengthy blog post how they took control of the botnet, but they probably didn't appreciate being left out of the story in the first place.

"Kaspersky Lab played a critical role in this botnet takedown initiative, leading the way to reverse-engineer the bot malware, crack the communication protocol and develop tools to attack the peer-to-peer infrastructure," said Tillmann Werner, a senior virus analyst with Kaspersky in Germany. "We worked closely with Microsoft's Digital Crimes Unit (DCU), sharing the relevant information and providing them with access to our live botnet tracking system," he added.

Even the antivirus vendor's co-founder and CEO, Eugene Kaspersky, linked to his company's blog post with the message: "The flipside of the Microsoft's takedown of Kelihos (Hlux) botnet."

Kaspersky Lab currently operates the only server where computers infected with this malware connect to, which effectively puts it in control of the botnet. The company has the resources to keep this so-called sinkhole operational for a long time, but the end goal is to reduce Kelihos' size as much as possible.

Sending commands to clean the infected systems remotely would be illegal in most countries, so this won't be an easy task. Microsoft has added detection for the Kelihos malware family to its Malicious Software Removal Tool (MSRT), which is distributed to computers worldwide via Windows Update, but the effects have yet to show.

The software giant claims that not crediting Kaspersky Lab in its original announcement was the result of poor communication between the two companies.