Technology Trends

Microsoft wants you on Xbox LIVE for the weekend with, of course, a view toward forever, and it's prepared to temporarily waive the cover fee to grab your attention.

Xbox LIVE Gold-tier membership usually costs $50 a year and provides access to features like online multiplayer, Facebook, Twitter, Last.FM, and Netflix for starters. Xbox LIVE Silver members who pay nothing save the time it takes to register a free account are by contrast left to nibble on skeletal features like online gamer profiles and friends lists, but otherwise have to stand at the window looking in.

That changes this weekend for US Xbox 360 gamers with a Silver membership (again, totally free) and the ability to bring their Xbox 360s online with an Ethernet cable or Wi-Fi adapter.

As noted this Tuesday by Microsoft's Larry "Major Nelson" Hryb, all Xbox LIVE regions except Europe will have free access to Gold services from November 20th at 12:00PM ET / 9:00AM PT until November 23rd at the same time. Europe's getting it too, of course, just a couple days later, and for a slightly longer time period–from November 25th to November 30th.

Visualize Master Chief (from Halo) with an olive-colored plasteel finger extended and a stern look on his…well, as stern-looking as a gold-tinged visor can be.

Microsoft runs these free weekends periodically, the last one occurring at the end of August and sponsored by T-Mobile. Paying members occasionally grumble about lack of reciprocity (compensation, other promotional items), and a few complain the free weekends briefly open the doors to younger, disruptive gamers, but on balance reactions tend to be positive.

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Watching Google's Chrome OS event made me realize: There is a lot in Google's OS that can benefit Microsoft–like giving it a completely new platform and one it needs. If Google is really true to its open source promises, Microsoft should join the fun.

(Take our visual tour of Chrome OS if you don't already know what the fuss is about).

Some will doubtless see such a move as "Microsoft tries to hijack Chrome OS" but that would not be the case. Chrome OS will be stronger and better if Microsoft participates, not necessarily as a leader, but by contributing when possible and making sure that Microsoft's cloud fits within the Chrome OS vision. And vice versa.

If Chrome OS is truly open source, then Google will not get incredible advantage from the mere existence of the operating system–no royalties, for example. It will not be a cash cow like Windows.

Yet, Chrome will move the world in a Google-friendly direction. That direction can be Microsoft-friendly, too.

If Microsoft decides to help with Chrome OS, it needs to be an honest effort, not sabotage. Of course, at the same time, Microsoft helps with Chrome OS, others at Microsoft will be trying to bash Chrome's brains in.

Perhaps, Microsoft will also do its own Chrome OS equivalent. Something that works better alongside the traditional applications we will continue to use.

During the Chrome OS presentation, I think I managed to be overwhelmed by how Chrome could change things and underwhelmed by what Google actually has to do to accomplish that task. There is not anything all that magic in what Google is doing.

Perhaps, Microsoft can make the case that Chrome is too limiting, and prove it with improvements to its own operating systems.

Microsoft can, at least, create links between the traditional applications and computers we will continue to use and the Chrome OS netbooks that Google promises for Christmas 2010.

Pundits want to make Chrome OS a Google vs. Microsoft thing, but it does not have to be that way.

Chrome OS may give Microsoft a way out of some of its problems–like how to move to a cloud-based computing model–at the same time it helps level the playing field between the two rivals.

Alternately, Microsoft can do everything possible to thwart the success of Chrome OS. That probably will not work and would be a waste of time and effort, besides. It is far better for Microsoft to embrace Chrome OS than to try to smother it.

If Chrome is not successful, it will be because the cloud model fails to win acceptance or because of some technical or marketing error by Google. My guess is Chrome will be at least a limited success, as well as one Microsoft can benefit from.

Chrome OS is clearly the next train out of the station and Microsoft needs to be aboard.

David Coursey tweets as

@techinciter

and can be

contacted

via his Web site.

A Seattle computer security consultant says he's developed a new way to exploit a recently disclosed bug in the SSL protocol, used to secure communications on the Internet. The attack, while difficult to execute, could give attackers a very powerful phishing attack.

Frank Heidt, CEO of Leviathan Security Group, says his "generic" proof-of-concept code could be used to attack a variety of Web sites. While the attack is extremely difficult to pull off — the hacker would first have to first pull off a man-in-the-middle attack, running code that compromises the victim's network — it could have devastating consequences.

The attack exploits the SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) Authentication Gap bug, first disclosed on Nov. 5. One of the SSL bug's discoverers, Marsh Ray at PhoneFactor, says he's seen a demonstration of Heidt's attack, and he's convinced it could work. "He did show it to me and it's the real deal," Ray said.

The SSL Authentication flaw gives the attacker a way to change data being sent to the SSL server, but there's still no way to read the information coming back. Heidt sends data that causes the SSL server to return a redirect message that then sends the Web browser to another page. He then uses that redirect message to move the victim to an insecure connection where the Web pages can be rewritten by Heidt's computer before they are sent to the victim.

"Frank has shown a way to leverage this blind plain text injection attack into a complete compromise of the connection between the browser and the secure site," Ray said.

A consortium of Internet companies has been working to fix the flaw since the PhoneFactor developers first uncovered it several months ago. Their work gained new urgency when the bug was inadvertently disclosed on a discussion list. Security experts have been debating the severity of this latest SSL flaw since it became public knowledge.

Last week, IBM researcher Anil Kurmus showed how the flaw could be used to trick browsers into sending Twitter messages that contained user passwords.

This latest attack shows that the flaw could be used to steal all sorts of sensitive information from secure Web sites, Heidt said.

To be vulnerable, sites need to do something called client renegotiation under SSL and also to have some element on their secure Web pages that could generate a particular 302 redirect message.

Many high-profile banking and e-commerce Web sites will not return this 302 redirect message in a way that can be exploited, but a "huge number" of sites could be attacked, Heidt said.

With so many Web sites at risk to the flaw, Heidt says he does not intend to release his code immediately.

From the victim's perspective, the only noticeable change during an attack is that the browser no longer looks as though it's connected to an SSL site. The attack is similar to the SSL Strip attack demonstrated by Moxie Marlinspike [cq] at a security conference earlier this year.

Leviathan Security Group has created a tool that webmasters can use to see if their sites are vulnerable to a SSL Authentication Gap attack.

Because SSL, and its replacement standard, TLS, are used in a wide range of Internet technologies the bug has far-reaching implications.

Thierry Zoller, a security consultant with G-Sec, says that theoretically, the flaw could be used to attack mail servers. "An attacker can potentially highjack mails send over secured SMTP [Simple Mail Transfer Protocol] connections, even if they are authenticated by a private certificate," he said in an instant message interview.

Zoller, who has not seen Leviathan's code, said that if the attack works as advertized, it will be just a matter of days before someone else figures out how to do it.

Sony is hoping to launch its planned online content service early next year and expects it will give the company an advantage in the increasingly competitive consumer electronics market, the executive heading up the project said Friday.

"I'd like it to get off the ground as quickly as possible," said Kaz Hirai, executive vice president of Sony and head of its Networked Products & Service Group, in an interview at the company's Tokyo headquarters. "Earlier in the year is more preferable."

The service, provisionally dubbed the "Sony Online Service," seeks to bring movies, music, books, games and other content to networked consumer electronics devices including Bravia TVs, Walkman music players, Vaio computers and Sony Ericsson cell phones.

It's an expansion of the successful PlayStation Network that has attracted 33 million users in its first 3 years of operation and provides a mixture of free and paid content. Sony is expecting sales of ¥50 billion (US$563 million) from the PlayStation Network this year and the new online service will run on the same infrastructure. The same user ID will work on both services.

The new service has a sales target of ¥300 billion in 2012 but it will also provide a range of free content to all users. Sony isn't "closing the door on all the good stuff that we provide for free," said Hirai.

In the U.S. the PlayStation Network carries content from all the major Hollywood studios and many major U.S. TV networks in addition to Sony's own content and Sony hopes to duplicate this on the new online service. Outside of the U.S. the PlayStation Network is being expanded — video downloads began on Thursday in France, Germany, Spain and the U.K. — and Sony hopes the new online service will follow a similar path.

Looking a little further ahead Hirai said the service could be expanded to products offered by other manufacturers, but that isn't initially being considered.

"The first priority is for us to make sure the Sony Online Service is a point of differentiation for all Sony devices," he said.

"Given what we bring to the table, the range of content and breadth of hardware in combination, if done right will be a successful formula," he said.

But getting it right isn't perhaps as easily said as done. Sony has tried to pool its resources before.

"We've had our fits and starts," said Hirai, citing the Connect service as one example. Connect was meant to bring audio content from Sony Music and other labels to Walkman music players but failed to make a dent in the dominance of Apple in that market.

Lessons have been learnt and, perhaps most importantly, the entire company reorganized to remove internal barriers to cooperation between business units, he said.

"I think there was always a vision of doing [this] but unfortunately the company was set up in a way that the vision was not put into execution."

An important contributor to the success of the service might be how Sony handles DRM (digital rights management), electronic and software restrictions on the use of content. Consumers won't want to be prevented from sharing downloaded content between their own devices or within their family, and Hirai said the issue remains one that is continually under discussion.

Hirai took his new position earlier this year when Howard Stringer, Sony's CEO and president, reorganized the company into three main business units. Hirai's previous PlayStation group was brought together with the Vaio PC group. A consumer products division was formed to include the television and camera business and a B2B group covered the broadcast and disc manufacturing businesses.

But in a key departure from previous restructuring efforts several functions common to each business unit were spun out to company-wide groups to drive cooperation. As a result Sony's software development, sales, marketing, procurement, manufacturing, logistics and customer service are all now handled by groups that span the electronics operations of Sony.

It seems the mobile world is full of silly little battles these days. You've got the AT&T-Verizon ad assault. There's that ever-popular Droid-iPhone rivalry. And then, of course, everyone's favorite Google Phone debate: Is there a Google Phone? If there were one, would it harm other Android phones? Or could it become — gasp — the elusive iPhone killer?

We won't be discussing the Google Phone any further here today (you can thank me later), but we will be keeping with the spirit of trivial competition. Personal preferences aside, I think we can all accept that the Android and iPhone platforms both have their strengths and weaknesses. So our new battle: Which mobile system has the more advanced users?

Android vs. iPhone: The Mobile Web

Ready? Our first measure of advanced functionality is the mobile Web. Both the iPhone and the Android platform are designed for easy Internet browsing — so which platform's users are most likely to take advantage of the InterWebbial SuperSpeedway?

Turns out it's Android's. According to new data collected by Nielsen and compiled by eMarketer, owners of Android phones are the most likely to use their device's Internet functionality. Ninety-two percent of Androiders say they take utilize their phone's Web connection, compared to 88 percent of iPhone owners. Both devices are well above the curve for smartphone owners in general, however, where the overall Net-using percentage is only 71.

Android vs. iPhone: Social Activity

If Android owners are slightly more Web-enabled, iPhone fans are slightly more social. As this chart of ComScore data demonstrates, iPhone users come out on top when it comes to most advanced social-oriented phone activities — everything from sharing photos to spending time on social networks and blogs.

Only in video-specific social activity does the Android clan pull ahead again, with significantly higher percentages of users capturing video and sharing it over the Net. (More Android users also watch video on their phones, according to Nielsen's numbers.)

Android vs. iPhone: Mobile Apps

How 'bout them apps? This one may be a bit surprising — after all, you'd expect to see iPhone owners apping it up more often, given the 100,000 options at their fingertips. Android owners, however, come out just barely ahead in the relative realm of application usage: Seventy-six percent of them say they utilize apps, according to Nielsen, while 74 percent of iPhone owners say they make use of their mobile programs.

Android vs. iPhone: The Big Picture

Here's the good news: Both iPhone and Android users can grab some bragging rights from these studies. The truth is the two platforms are neck-in-neck when it comes to using most of the so-called "advanced functions" — and practically every other mobile phone system is struggling to keep up.

See? We all have something to celebrate. Just don't tell AT&T and Verizon, or they're liable to start another ad war over it.

JR Raphael is co-founder of geek-humor site eSarcasm. You can keep up with him on Twitter: @jr_raphael.

An Indian eye hospital is piloting software that will push to doctors' iPhones retinal images collected from patients in remote locations.

Doctors can then quickly send their diagnosis and recommendations from their iPhones, said Anand Vinekar, project coordinator and pediatric retinal surgeon at the Narayana Nethralaya Postgraduate Institute of Ophthalmology in Bangalore.

Doctors are more likely to have access at all times to their mobile phones than their laptop computers, Vinekar said.

The hospital plans to use the technology to test infants for a potentially blinding condition called Retinopathy of Prematurity (ROP), besides other conditions such as ocular cancers.

ROP requires treatment after diagnosis within 48 to 72 hours to prevent blindness, Vinekar said. The problem in India is that the country has about 15 to 20 doctors trained to diagnose and treat patients with ROP, and they are located in the cities, Vinekar said.

As part of its village outreach program in rural areas, two years ago the hospital started sending qualified doctors to villages and equipped them with instruments used to examine the eye.

To improve its reach in rural and semi-urban areas, the hospital trained people to take eye images using a wide-angle retinal digital camera, with 130 degrees field of view. These people, who were not doctors or technicians, were also trained to make a preliminary diagnosis, Vinekar said.

Once the hospital started using images for a diagnosis, the doctors did not have to go to the rural locations every time for diagnosis, he added.

Images were transferred from the camera to a computer, and then the images were e-mailed to the doctor in Bangalore for final diagnosis and recommendations. Some months ago, the hospital installed a system that allowed the images to be uploaded to a server using the Internet, and a doctor could access the images from a computer.

Under the new system, images from the computer are uploaded to a server using the Internet, and the software then pushes the images to the doctor's iPhone.

Doctors from other hospitals in other locations can also download the application to their iPhones, and collaborate in the diagnosis, said Sham Banerji, CEO of i2i TeleSolutions, the company that developed the software, and also hosts the application and the images.

Doctors can give their diagnosis, and send their reports from their mobile phones to the server, and from there on through the Internet to the persons at the patient's site.

The hospital selected the iPhone for its graphics capability and screen resolution, Vinekar said. The iPhone also offers features such as the ability to enlarge images, he added.

The ability to create PDF reports on the iPhone also helps doctors to create diagnostic reports and upload them on the Internet, Vinekar said.

The software has been submitted by i2i of Singapore for inclusion by Apple in its App Store, Banerji said. Having the software listed on the store will help the company market the software to more hospitals, he added.

The software can also be ported to other mobile phones, and the company may also look at phones using the Android mobile operating system, Banerji added.

Vinekar meanwhile hopes to down the line use a mobile phone and the mobile telephone network for collecting images at the patients' end, and transmit them in real-time to the back-end servers and the doctors' iPhones. But first the phones will have to support quality cameras with 130 degrees field of view, he added.

Microsoft has unleashed the public beta of Microsoft Office 2010. The Office 2010 beta includes updated versions of Word, excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, OneNote, Access, Publisher, InfoPath, SharePoint Workspace, and Communicator. You can download it right now from the Microsoft Office 2010 beta site.

Like Windows XP versus Windows Vista, a fair percentage of users never made the jump from Office 2003 to Office 2007. The Windows Vista backlash had a residual effect which led customers to adopt a 'my-current-version-works-fine-why-change-it' mentality.

Well, for those users (as well as those users who have adopted Office 2007), here are five reasons that you should download the beta and check out what Microsoft Office 2010 has to offer.

1. Ribbons. OK. I admit that the ribbon interface takes some getting used to. If you are still using Office 2003 and you are used to the standard menu options across the top of your Office application screens, prepare yourself for a little learning curve when you start using Office 2010.

That said, once you familiarize yourself with ribbons you will find it hard to go back. The ribbon interface is more intuitive and helps you operate more efficiently (after that requisite learning curve we were talking about). Ribbons existed in Office 2007, but only in certain applications. With Office 2010 Microsoft has built the ribbon interface into the entire suite.

2. Backstage View. This feature is more relevant for users of Office 2007. In Office 2007 a round Office button replaced many of the functions commonly accessed from the menu bar such as saving and printing. That button never really seemed to catch on.

In Office 2010, the button has been replaced with something that looks like one of the ribbon tabs at the top. Clicking on the tab at the far left brings up a separate screen called Backstage View. The Backstage interface displays a list of tasks in a panel on the left, but most of the screen is dedicated to displaying the options available for the selected task.

3. Paste Preview. Microsoft collected user feedback and found that very frequently users end up undoing a paste action once it is completed. Basically, the text or image pasted ends up not looking the way the user intended so they remove it and start over.

Paste Preview allows you to see what the paste will look like if you complete the action, enabling you to save some time and energy and get it right the first time. It also gives you the choice of maintaining the formatting from the source, merging the formatting, or pasting just the text with no formatting.

4. Excel Sparklines. Excel has always had a variety of charts and graphs available to visually depict data and trends. With Excel 2010, though, Microsoft has added a new feature called Sparklines, which allows you to place a mini-graph or trend line in a single cell.

The Sparklines are a cool way to quickly and simply add a visual element without having to go through the effort of inserting a graph or chart that overwhelms the worksheet.

5. Social Networking Integration. Microsoft recognizes the social networking trend by adding Outlook Social Connector to the Outlook 2010 application. Outlook Social Connector will let you see emails, status updates, shared files and photos, and more all in a single view. You will also be able to see who your mutual friends are and other information to help you maintain and extend your social network.

As of the release of the beta there are no social network add-ins, but Microsoft promises to release them over the coming months. With the position Facebook has in social networking, and the relationship Microsoft has with Facebook, it seems safe to assume a Facebook social network add-in might be one of the first available.

There you have it–five reasons to download the Office 2010 beta and check it out. There are a number of other reasons as well, but there is only so much you can fit in one article. The integration with Microsoft Office Web Apps, as well as with other recent and upcoming release like Exchange 2010 and Office Communications Server 2010.

This is not a good year to be anti-Microsoft–Microsoft is on a roll. Bing, Internet Explorer 8, Windows 7, and now Office 2010 have all received a fair amount of praise as they have been unleashed. While other platforms like Windows Vista and Windows Mobile 6.5 have not succeeded in generating much excitement, these other software titles demonstrate that Microsoft still has the ability to develop innovative software that works.

Tony Bradley tweets as @PCSecurityNews, and can be contacted at his Facebook page
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Nokia says its Linux-based Maemo operating system is the future of its high-end smartphones, ending hope for Symbian OS to reign supreme. The change emphasizes how far behind the world's largest handset maker has become.

Nokia told a group of Maemo developers that by 2012 its legacy Symbian operating system would be gone from the high-end N-family devices, The Really Mobile Project blog reports.

Symbian is today the world's most successful smartphone OS, accounting for 50 percent of global sales. Most of these handsets do not, however, compare favorably to Android-based or iPhone devices.

Gartner recently estimated that Symbian will remain the world's best-selling smartphone OS in 2012, with Android, BlackBerry, and iPhone following, in that order.

The blog reports there is no current plan to roust Symbian from Nokia's video-focused X-series or enterprise-focused E-series handsets. In fact, the company plans development tools capable of supporting both operating systems.

For more than a decade, Symbian has been Nokia's operating system of choice. Yet, it took computer companies–Apple, Google, and to a limited extent Microsoft–to create the high-end smartphones customers want to purchase.

That is an incredible put-down for Nokia, which has been investing in operating systems and tools for many years, yet never seemed to figure out what customers want (that isn't a lowest-price handset).

Nokia still does not know, and its decision to focus on Maemo is proof. Rather than do the sensible thing, which would be accept reality and go with Android as its high-end OS, Nokia will be heading out alone again, naturally. (Pun noted).

The primary advantage of Maemo, from what I can tell, is Nokia's hope to still develop a complex ecosystem around an operating system it controls. While a noble ambition, at least from shareholders' perspective, there is no reason at all to believe Nokia can pull it off.

After all, the company has been a leader, perhaps the leader, in handsets over the last decade, but has never been able to create high-end products that people want to purchase.

The new Maemo-powered N900 seems to be a fine handset, but as customers become more interested in a rich applications catalog and downloadable media, Nokia is left behind.

Do not think this Maemo announcement means the end of Symbian, for apparently it is not. Reports are that the legacy operating system will continue to power Nokia's mass-market phones for the foreseeable future.

However, as smartphones increase their market presence (and become less expensive) it is hard not to see Nokia's announcement as the beginning of the end of the Symbian era.

Good riddance.

P.S. Watch John C. Dvorak, Rob Enderle, and me on CrankyGeeks today at 1 p.m. U.S. Pacific Time.

David Coursey tweets as

@techinciter

and can be

contacted

via his Web site.

South Korean regulators gave Apple a business license on Wednesday that would allow it to launch the iPhone in the country at any time.

The license allows Apple to operate location-based services in the country itself and clears the last regulatory hurdle for the handset, said Oh Sang-jin, director of the privacy protection and ethics section of the Korea Communications Commission.

Earlier this year the regulator moved to allow Apple to apply for the license itself rather than obliging it to seek a local operator to run the location services and manage privacy issues concerning user data.

The regulator has said that the move was partly aimed to avoid limiting choices for users in a country where LG Electronics and Samsung, both local vendors, dominate the handset market.

South Korean carrier KT has said it is in talks with Apple about offering the iPhone. SK Telecom, another local carrier, is also reportedly in talks with Apple.

An Apple spokeswoman declined to comment on plans to launch the iPhone in South Korea.

The 3G network of the world's largest mobile phone network operator will cover 70 percent of China's cities by the end of this year, the company's chairman said Wednesday.

China Mobile uses the nation's home-grown 3G mobile standard, TD-SCDMA (Time-Division Synchronous Code Division Multiple Access), in its network and is the only company in the world rolling it out in a big way. China Potevio, a network equipment maker, signed an agreement in July to operate a test TD-SCDMA network in Italy.

The TD-SCDMA network is progressing smoothly. By the end of this year, China Mobile will roll out 88,000 TD-SCDMA base stations in 238 cities, said Wang Jianzhou, chairman and CEO of China Mobile at the GSM Association's Mobile Asia Congress in Hong Kong on Wednesday. The number of base stations will nearly double to 160,000 by 2011.

He expects 3 million subscribers for TD-SCDMA by the end of this year.

The base station figure marks a strong improvement from earlier this year. In July, China Mobile reported having TD-SCDMA in only 38 cities as of July. But the subscriber projection means China Mobile will have to work hard to meet a government target for it to reach between 50 million and 80 million 3G subscribers by the end of 2010.

Wang blamed high prices for TD-SCDMA handsets for the lack of uptake in the national 3G standard.

"More low-priced TD handsets are needed," he said.

The quality of TD-SCDMA technology has improved and there are a range of handsets, high-end, mid-end and soon there will be some low-end handsets priced at around 1000 Chinese yuan (US$147), he said.

China Mobile plans to build a mobile broadband TD-LTE (Time Division-Long Term Evolution) trial system for the World Expo 2010 in Shanghai next year, with 20MHz bandwidth, Wang said.

China Mobile boasted over 508 million mobile phone subscribers as of the end of September. It has set up nearly 500,000 base stations to cover 98 percent of China's population with mobile phone service. The government has aggressively promoted 3G over past few years and offered economic stimulus money to help network operators expand.

China Mobile is also working to lower electricity costs by using more efficient base stations. China Mobile aims to reduce its electricity use by 20 percent by 2012 despite expanding its network, said Wang. A 20 percent savings equals 11.8 billion kilowatt hours of electricity, he said.

The company currently has 2,000 solar or wind-powered base stations installed, he said, and the future roll out of such devices depends largely on price. The base stations are 50 percent more expensive than normal base stations, he said, so a lower price will allow the company to use more of them.

China Mobile will also soon start using the energy-conserving base stations at its Pakistan subsidiary, he said.

The company has also rolled out 20,000 base stations that are about 40 percent to 50 percent more power efficient than regular base stations. The devices were made by Huawei Technologies' terminal division and have been sold in countries such as Bangladesh, China, Indonesia and elsewhere.

Kevin Tao, CEO of Huawei Terminal Division, said his company has sold 1,500 solar or wind-powered base stations, which are integrated with electric networks and do not sustain themselves fully on natural power.

IBM announced Tuesday that its free Lotus Symphony office productivity suite is now available on Keepods — thin USB devices made by the Italian company NSEC.

Big Blue's Symphony suite is based on OpenOffice.org and includes word processing, spreadsheets and presentation creation. The new Keepod version, available through the Keepod store, employs VMware's ThinApp virtualization software, which wraps applications into an executable file that is isolated from a computer's operating system, mitigating compatibility and security concerns.

Keepods are roughly the size of a credit card and hold up to 16GB of data. Prices start at €19.90 (US$29.78) for a 2GB "Base" version. A 2GB Secure edition, which includes 256-bit AES hardware encryption, is priced at €69.

Although a USB deployment option could make Symphony attractive to more users, Microsoft retains an iron grip on the office productivity market. Eighty percent of respondents polled for a Forrester Research report earlier this year said their companies were using some form of Office, and 78.4 percent had no plans to deploy any alternatives.

IBM does not formally track Symphony installs but estimates about 10 million people are using the software, said product manager Jeanette Barlow.

Many companies are still in the tire-kicking stage, running pilot programs or deploying the software on a departmental level, she said.

The Keepod announcement comes in response to "a huge push from enterprise customers for supporting mobile workers," she said.

IBM expects interest in Symphony to jump significantly next year, when a new version based on the OpenOffice 3 codebase is released, according to Barlow.

A startup is now offering to take the hard work out of creating mobile applications and even of porting them to the iPhone, BlackBerry and Windows Mobile platforms, all through an online service that gives novice developers simple templates for various types of businesses and organizations.

With an eye to software novices, Mobile On Services' BuildAnApp service tackles a problem that has plagued professional mobile developers for years: Unlike on the Web and in the world of PCs, there are many different platforms to write for if you want to reach many mobile users. Once a customer has gone through the steps on the BuildAnApp site to create a new application, Mobile On uses its proprietary software to package the app for three of the major smartphone platforms and also develop a mobile-optimized Web site, said company co-founder Scott Pearson.

Users get 30 days free to design the application and populate it with content such as news, restaurant menus and click-to-dial phone numbers. After that, they pay to bring new content into the application. Mobile On will submit it to Apple's App Store for US$19.99, including resubmissions if it is rejected.

The Minneapolis company designed BuildAnApp for small businesses, retail stores, nonprofit organizations and professionals such as doctors. To build an application, users simply pick the template for their type of organization, choose from among typical types of pages to put within the app, and populate the app with information. Then they can select people they want to alert to the application, and Mobile On will send e-mail messages to those people with a link to a download page. Users with a supported phone can then download the application directly. The applications can be kept private with access passwords.

Mobile applications are getting a lot of attention, but much of the capability a small business needs to offer customers can be delivered via a mobile Web site, which can be updated with new information for no additional charge, industry analysts said Tuesday. However, Mobile On's Pearson pointed out a few advantages to having an app instead of relying solely on a Web page to reach customers. Apps let consumers access and use information even when they are out of range of the cellular data network, they tend to look better than mobile Web sites because they are optimized for the hardware platform, and they usually move faster than the mobile Web because they operate locally, Pearson said.

For most small businesses, a mobile application will be primarily a tool for keeping existing customers loyal rather than attracting new ones, Pearson acknowledged. Apart from sending out the notification e-mails to current contacts, Mobile On Services won't handle marketing of the apps against the growing tide of mobile software, such as the more than 100,000 applications now on Apple's App Store.

Analysts liken the emergence of a service such as BuildAnApp to the evolution of Web development from pure HTML coding to easy-to-use design services such as GeoCities and Blogger.

"It's certainly a signal that mobile applications have arrived," said Avi Greengart of Current Analysis. However, a mobile app still isn't as critical to a small business as a Web site, he said.

Unlike a Web site, a mobile app sits on the home screen (or extended home screen) of the consumer's phone, In-Stat's Allen Nogee pointed out. An application can create more presence and recognition than a mobile Web site to which a user has to navigate in a browser, he said.

A pizza restaurant and a small clothing store created applications during BuildAnApp's closed beta test, which just concluded, Pearson said. The pizza place's application includes, among other things, the menu and a button for clicking to call the shop and place an order, he said. The clothing store shows pictures of new items in the shop.

BuildAnApp's 16 templates include ones for a real estate agent, a school, a sports league and a religious organization. There is also a template for "other" that includes a wide range of page types selected from the other templates. The company is also developing a "pro" version of the service for skilled developers creating more sophisticated applications, Pearson said.

However, Mobile On doesn't plan to support the kind of sophisticated development provided by companies such as Rhomobile and Appcelerator, he said. Those companies offer online app development for developers working in languages such as Ruby, JavaScript and HTML.

"Our intent is to provide mobility to the masses," Pearson said. "It gives these small organizations a way to have a mobile presence without spending a lot of money."

By the end of the year, Mobile On plans to add Google's Android platform. Other plans include adding support for Nokia, Symbian and Palm; adding APIs (application programming interfaces) to bring existing Web and database content into the applications; and letting customers integrate their applications with online services such as Facebook, Twitter and the OpenTable restaurant reservation system.

Though BuildAnApp has just entered its open beta test, which is likely to continue into the first quarter of next year, Mobile On is now charging after a customer's 30-day free trial. Users can pay $7.99 for a one-time content or application update or pay $14.99 per month to make as many updates as they wish. Unlimited updates for six months are available for $59.99.

Fraudsters may have a hot deal waiting for them in the form of an obscure Chinese domain name that's for sale on the Internet.

The wpad.cn domain is for sale, according to a note posted on the Web site. That fact probably doesn't mean much to most people, but to Duane Wessels it's a big deal. He says that if it fell into criminal hands it could be misused for phishing or other types of fraud.

Wessels, the president of Measurement Factory, owns five wpad domains — wpad.com, wpad.net, wpad.org, wpad.biz and wpad.us. Between them, he gets 5 million hits per day. Most of them come from Windows computers erroneously looking for network configuration information, thanks to a decade-old Windows bug that Microsoft first fixed in 1999.

Nobody knows why sites like Wessels' continue to get so much traffic long after Microsoft patched the flaw. He thinks it may come from old versions of Windows, obscure programs with built-in Web components, or perhaps even misconfigured servers on the network. Microsoft did not respond to a query about the issue on Tuesday.

According to Wessels, if criminals were to take control of the wpad.cn domain they could set themselves up as a proxy Web server for their victims, redirecting them to a phishing site or sneaking unwanted ads onto their computers.

The flaw that sends so much traffic to Wessels' sites lies in the way some PCs search for a Web Proxy Auto-Discovery (WPAD) server on the network. These servers are trusted machines, set up by administrators to send the PC a Web configuration file called wpad.dat.

The WPAD server's name will start with wpad (as in wpad.corp.idg.com) so, using a technique known as DNS devolution, Windows systems will search far and wide for a machine starting with those four letters. Unfortunately, this sometimes sends them out of the network — to Wessels' wpad.com Web site, for example. Computers in China that were similarly misconfigured would likely look to the wpad.cn domain.

Wessels and other DNS experts think that someone could probably misuse the wpad.cn domain by sending malicious wpad.dat files to those computers. "It could be used to mine information like account names and account numbers," said Cricket Liu, vice president of architecture with Infoblox. "You could potentially modify any content that they might see."

Contacted by IDG News Service, brokers representing the wpad.cn domain owners offered to sell it cheap. In an instant-message interview, an agent with Aomei New Investment Consulting said the domain could be had for ¥12,000 (US$1,760).

For criminals, that would be a pretty good deal, said Tomasz Koperski, the vice-CEO with FutureMind.com, which has acquired more than 40 wpad-related domains. He owns the wpad.com.tw domain, for example, which has received more than 5 million hits so far this month from computers looking for wpad.dat files, he said via instant message.

The wpad.cn owners probably don't know about the WPAD issue, Wessels said. "My guess is that they are not noticing that they get a lot of requests for this proxy autoconfig file," he said. "If they knew what they had there they would probably charge more."

Tech culture has come a long way from its widely-lambasted formative years of LAN parties, red Doritos and Mountain Dew to today, when the New Oxford Dictionary ekes our vocab and ratifies it. "Unfriend," a term used to describe deleting a social networking buddy (like your mom on Facebook) was chosen as 2009's Word of the Year. (Funny, I always thought it was defriend.)

Five of the other Word of the Year finalists also came from the tech world — two of which could have soiled tech culture's image. For instance, "sexting" — the sending of sexually explicit text messages — would have made us appear like sex-crazed smartphone junkies; and "intexticated" — driving distracted while texting — paints us to be irresponsible maniacs behind the wheel. So it's a good thing the relatively benign depiction of removing somebody from Facebook made it into Oxford Dictionary.

It's interesting to consider how far tech jargon has oozed its way into popular culture. How many of your (younger) friends, for instance, say "OMG" instead of "Oh my God"? And what happened to renting a movie? People don't rent movies anymore — they "Netflix" them. Also Facebooking: we don't find people anymore; we Facebook them. "Saw this crazy dude at the club with a mohawk and a kilt — I totally Facebooked him!"

For those turning sour sneers at the desecration of the "un-" prefix, you can be thankful that the tentacles of Leetspeak (also spelled L33t) didn't infiltrate Oxford. While a younger audience may pwn teh N00bs, the suits on the WOTY committee haven't yet replaced "titillating adult entertainment" with pr0n.

Still scarfing down pages of your dictionary to save them from despoiling? At least Oxford didn't choose "teabagger," "tramp stamp," or, worse yet — and not even a finalist — the alternative definition of "cougar."

Why can't Apple's App Store overlords exercise more discretion when it counts? A $2 Britney Spears app has just approved is available for the iPhone. I thought the app called "It's Britney!" may have been some clever lip-syncing or karaoke app, but it's not. According to Britney's Web site "There really is an app for everything."

Should we have expected any less from Britney? After all, an iPhone app is the perfect byproduct of our celebrity (and iPhone) obsessed culture. But wait, it gets better: There are plenty more self-obsessed celebrities with an iPhone app available at theiPhone's App Store. Heck, a star stalking iPhone user could waste hours with apps that revolve around musicians, athletes and movie stars. Here's a rundown of iPhone apps brought to you by your favorite celebs:

It's Britney!

pop icon's app, out Monday, is a blend of news, photos, messages from Spears and a "Be Britney's Dancer" feature that lets you superimpose images of yourself onto one of her backup singers, all for just $1.99. No word on whether it'll shave off the top of the iPhone's outer casing when it wants attention.

Push: Shaq

need for instant push notification whenever Shaquille O'Neal updates his Twitter account. The man is that interesting, as evidenced by his legion of over 2.5 million Twitter followers.

Hammer Time

The app costs $0.99, which is also what you'd expect to pay for one of Hammer's albums nowadays.

Spinal Tap

Spinal Tap app warns of sexual content, nudity, drug references, profanity and mature/suggestive themes.

Chad Ochocinco Experience

Chad Ochocinco Experience gives you whereabouts, stats, photos and soundbytes from one of the NFL's loudest and most entertaining players. You can also ask Ochocinco for advice through a "What Would Ocho Do?" feature.

Celebrity Pets News Reader

an app for that. And it costs 99 cents.