Report: Google deal to buy Twitter in the works
The rumor mill is in full gear over speculation that Google may acquire Twitter. The news comes from two separate and unnamed sources that claim talks between Google and Twitter are in the late stages, according to TechCrunch's Michael Arrington.
However, Arrington says he has spoken to a third source that says talks are just in the early stages. Arrington says his third source claims the talks may only result in the two companies collaborating on a real-time search engine for Google. There's no word on how much a Google-Twitter deal could be worth, but most estimates put it in the $1 billion range with Google paying a mix of cash and stock.
[ In other aquisition news, IBM's deal for Sun is reportedly close to complete. | Stay ahead of advances in technology with InfoWorld's Ahead of the Curve blog and newsletter. ] "
I thought Google wasn't buying?
This latest rumor comes only a few weeks after Google CEO Erich Schmidt called Twitter a "poor man's e-mail system" at the Morgan Stanley Technology Conference in San Francisco. During the conference, Schmidt said Google would wait for "prices to get better" before attempting any acquisitions. However, it was clear from his talk that Schmidt and Google had been putting a lot of thought into Twitter's future. Schmidt's Twitter musings included incorporating the service into traditional e-mail and for Twitter to evolve beyond what Schmidt called a "note phenomenon."
The reasons behind Twitter's Google-ification
Many believe a Google-Twitter deal makes sense since Twitter has the potential to take a bite out of Google's search business. Twitter Search does an excellent job of cataloguing real-time information from its users, and some have argued this ability threatens Google. However, at first glance that premise doesn't seem realistic to me. The idea that people would turn to Twitter as their primary source of information is preposterous. Yes, perhaps during real-time events Twitter might enjoy a surge of popularity. This scenario already played out earlier this year during the US Airways crash near Manhattan and last year's terror attacks in Bombay. Nevertheless, Twitter Search as it stands now is not the best way to find movie times, a stock price or even a Wikipedia page. But put Twitter in the hands of a Google rival like Microsoft or Yahoo and you have a potential game changer in the search business.
What Twoogle might look like
A Google-Twitter deal could be a win-win situation for both companies and the everyday user. Google's enormous computing power could put an end to the infamous "fail whale," and the search giant would be able to monetize Twitter with its advertising programs. For Google, as Computerworld's Seth Weintraub points out, Twitter could help create "a better pool of data from which to pool [Google News] stories and gauge their popularity. It could also help Google's lagging social networking site, Orkut, by establishing connections between Google users."
PC World is an InfoWorld affiliate.
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How bad off is tech? Depends on who you ask
Until this week, the major analyst houses have said the current recession is not as bad as what the tech sector suffered though in 2001 and 2002 after the dotcom bubble popped. Forrester, IDC, and Gartner still all agree that IT spending is down, but whether this recession is worse than the dotcom fallout is now a matter of debate.
The fact that analysts were maintaining that IT is not in as much trouble today as it was during the last recession has served as something of a beacon of hope for tech workers.
[ Learn more about how the financial crisis is affecting IT and the high-tech industry, plus what IT can do to help, in InfoWorld's special report. ]
But that changed earlier in the week when Gartner issued a report saying that 2009 will be worse than 2001. The analyst house projected global IT spending would decline by nearly 4 percent this year over last, citing a "general slowdown in demand for products and services across the board," to which IT is not immune.
While Forrester and IDC also see spending in a downward spiral, the firms do not exactly concur with Gartner.
Forrester this week circulated its "U.S. IT Market Outlook for Q1 2009," a rather bleak document that begins with the words, "The U.S. market keeps getting worse than we and many economists had expected."?
But Andrew Bartels, Forrester principal analyst and vice president, insists the tech sector is not in as bad a shape as it was after the dotcom bust. Bartels was careful to not comment specifically on Gartner's findings, but explained that in 2001 Forrester saw a 6 percent decline in spending, followed by 11 percent in 2002, whereas when Forrester published numbers for 2009 this week, it projected a 3.1 percent decrease in IT goods and services purchased by business and government, rather than its original estimation of a 1.6 percent increase.
[ Related: Forrester's Bartels first predicted we wouldn't see a repeat of the 2001-2002 bust in InfoWorld's Is tech in more trouble than we think? ]
"IT is down, just not to the same degree. We see 2009 as worse than we thought it would be in December, but we don't see it getting worse than we're predicting now," Bartels said. "The difference is that the decline today is for two or three quarters, not the two to three years we saw in 2001 and 2002."
IDC, for its part, has re-forecast its spending projections down twice since July 2008, according to IDC Research Director Robert Mahowald, who also would not comment directly on Gartner's numbers or methodology.
Mahowald pointed out, however, that IDC re-examined 93 markets and found all those were headed downward in 2009 except three: managed telepresence, consumer broadband, and SaaS.
Which brings us to two things all the analyst firms agree on: First, as CFOs and CIOs look for ways to shift IT dollars from capital expenditures to operational efficiencies, enterprises will tap SaaS and cloud-based resources more. Even Gartner projects that cloud computing spending will soar in 2009.
Second, the current economic downturn -- regardless of whether it proves to be worse than the dotcom wake -- will not last forever. Gartner referred to the current economic turbulence as a "bleak outlook near-term."
Forrester's Bartels said demand for IT products and services is not cancelled, merely delayed, which actually creates pent-up demand. As such, he is already hoping that indications of recovery will emerge this year.
"In Q4 2009 we might see some early signs of recovery," Bartels said. "Certainly by 2010 we'll start to see some better numbers."
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Linux, Windows Server both hit by economy
An industry analyst forecast has Linux shipments slipping a bit more percentage-wise than Microsoft's Windows Server, but Microsoft is feeling the pain of the economy, too, said an analyst who worked on the report.
The IDC quarterly forecast of worldwide x86 server OS shipments for the year 2009, released last month, has Linux declining year over year by 16.1 percent, from 1.747 million shipments last year to nearly 1.47 million in 2009. Windows Server is slated to drop by 12.8 percent, from 5.75 million units in 2008 to about 5.016 million units this year, the syndicated report stated.
[ When it comes to server OSes, it's a tight two-horse race. Or is it? Check out the Windows-vs-Linux server face-off. ]
However, this news of Linux's greater slippage on a percentage basis is not much consolation for Microsoft, stressed analyst Matthew Eastwood, group vice president for enterprise platform research. "It's not exactly a great story for them, either," he said.
"We're projecting the market to decline for everybody," down double digits this year, Eastwood said.
The reason Linux might slip a bit more than Windows Server is that large datacenters running Linux have felt the effects of the market slowdown and are pulling back on installations, according to Eastwood. With Windows, many customers are on enterprise site licenses and deploying Windows does not cost any extra.
Overall, x86 server shipments are expected to drop 13.5 percent, including other shipments besides Linux and Windows Server. IDC's forecast, which was not vendor-sponsored, is compiled region by region, with IDC looking at economic data around gross domestic product growth.
The IDC findings do not conflict with a recent Novell-sponsored IDC report that said the down economy was driving an uptick in Linux evaluation, Eastwood said. "In the short term, Linux is down as is Windows. But over time, we believe Linux will continue to grow," as will Windows, he said.
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Report: IBM, Sun deal said to be close
IBM and Sun Microsystems are close to a deal under which IBM will acquire Sun Microsystems for about $9.50 per share, The New York Times reported in its online edition Thursday afternoon.
Citing unnamed sources familiar with discussions between the companies, the DealBook column of the Times' business section reported that the deal could be imminent and announced as soon as Friday.
[ Get the continuing coverage of IBM-Sun news with InfoWorld's special report "IBM in talks to buy Sun" ]
The Wall Street Journal earlier Thursday afternoon reported that IBM had dropped its takeover price from $10 to $11 a share to $9 to $10, also citing unnamed sources. Sun agreed to the lower price "in return for strong commitments from IBM that it will complete the deal even if it faces intense regulatory scrutiny," the Journal said, again citing anonymous sources.
Analysts have noted that overlap between the two companies could lead to regulatory issues and the Journal further reported that Sun is also concerned that such matters would keep the deal on hold for an extended period and lead to conditions being imposed for the acquisition to be finalized.
If the two companies join forces, they will have more than 40 percent of server market share.
A Sun spokeswoman and an IBM spokesman said separately that their companies do not comment on rumors -- the standard line in such instances.
Shares in both companies were trading higher late Thursday, with IBM up by 4.14 percent to $101.65 and Sun up 0.16 percent to $8.16.
(Agam Shah in San Francisco contributed to this report.)
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Apple hints at launch of Nehalem-based Xserve
An Apple online store is set to take preorders of new Xserve servers carrying Intel's new Xeon chips, hinting at launch of the devices in the near future.
A notice on Apple's Hong Kong online store is offering to take preorders of the Xserve based on Intel's latest Xeon server chips. However, preorders cannot be placed as the link hasn't been activated yet, and customization capabilities for the old Xserve products have been disabled.
[ InfoWorld's Test Center found that Intel's new quad-core Xeon processor shows huge performance gains. | Discover the key Mac and Apple tech trends for business users. Read InfoWorld's Enterprise Mac blog and newsletter. ]
"Preorder the new Xserve with Intel Xeon (Nehalem)," the Web page states.
Apple does not comment on future products, an Apple spokesperson said. It is unclear when the servers would be released, though enthusiast sites including AppleInsider have predicted availability in a few weeks.
The upcoming servers could carry quad-core chips from the Xeon 5500 and 3500 family, which Apple has already included in its Mac Pro workstations launched last month. Intel has said the Xeon chips are its fastest server chips to date, which can be cranked up to run at speeds of 3.46GHz.
Intel's Nehalem microarchitecture improves system speed by cutting bottlenecks that plagued Intel's earlier chips. In certain circumstances, the chips could double server performance while consuming less power compared to its predecessors.
The chips' improved energy consumption relative to performance gives users a reason to upgrade, said Dean McCarron, principal analyst at Mercury Research
"The idea of saving power is more pervasive in Nehalem. You're seeing a much more fine-grained level of power control across [switches] on the chip," McCarron said. The current Xserve servers run chips belonging to Intel's earlier Penryn family.
One of the major improvements involves Intel integrating the memory controller on the CPU, which helps processors communicate faster with memory. It removes the memory latency affecting earlier Intel processors, which should translate to better server performance.
Data-intensive applications like video processing frequently require processors to fetch information from memory, and Intel's earlier chips had to go through a bus called the front-side bus (FSB). After years of criticism, Intel removed the FSB and integrated the memory controller into the CPU with Nehalem chips.
Nehalem also offers a faster pipe for a CPU to communicate with other processors and system components. That helps servers execute more tasks in parallel and tackle larger workloads. The faster communication improvements are bundled under a technology Intel calls QuickPath InterConnect, or QPI.
The chip advancements bode well for Apple's effort to push parallelism through its future Mac OS X server operating system, code-named Snow Leopard Server. The OS is built for a multicore system, and includes Grand Central technologies that will help server software better allocate tasks across multiple cores while saving power.
Details about the server operating system that will ship with these new servers are scarce, but it could possibly have hooks to crank down the clock speed as it executes tasks in parallel, McCarron said. Intel allows reduction in clock speed through the Turbo Mode feature that can crank down chip clock speed to save power.
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IBM sees Conficker hitting 4 percent of PCs
IBM is the second company in two days to suggest that the number of computers infected by the Conficker.C worm may be higher than previously thought.
After scanning 2 million computers over the past 24 hours, IBM's Internet Security Systems (ISS) division said Thursday that it had spotted the worm on 4 percent of the IP addresses it monitored.
[ Internet infrastructure provider OpenDNS was the first company to discover that Conficker.C infections it counted were much higher than expected. | Beware: Fake security software scammers have been jumping on Conficker. | Learn how to secure your systems with Roger Grimes' Security Adviser blog and newsletter, both from InfoWorld. ]
Although Conficker is clearly the worst worm outbreak in years, the results came as a surprise, according to Holly Stewart, a threat response manager with ISS. "It is higher than what we expected; I thought we'd see 1 to 2 percent," Stewart said.
Late last week, IBM researchers reverse-engineered Conficker and figured out a way to track infections by measuring peer-to-peer traffic on the network. They used that technique to reach their estimate.
The results are similar to numbers released Wednesday by OpenDNS, which said it had also spotted a much larger number of infections than expected. Both IBM and OpenDNS' numbers count Conficker.C, the latest variant of the worm, and one that is easier to spot communicating on the network.
Conficker began spreading in October 2008, using a handful of sneaky tricks to spread. Once it infects a machine, it can spread very quickly on a local area network by taking advantage of a now-patched flaw in Microsoft Windows.
Experts had pegged Conficker infections in the 2 million to 4 million range, but IBM's numbers suggest that they may be much higher than that, perhaps in the tens of millions.
Still, Stewart cautioned against concluding that 4 percent of Internet users had been infected. "It's not a perfect number, nothing is. But it's the best that we can give with the data we have right now."
It's possible that Conficker infections are approaching 4 percent, said Danny McPherson, chief security officer with Arbor Networks. Because Conficker is more likely to infect certain types of users -- broadband consumers are generally more vulnerable than enterprise or government users, for example -- estimates like ISS' could come from a sample that does not represent the Internet as a whole, he said.
Still, by any measure, Conficker is a big problem. "Even if they're off by an order of magnitude -- which is possible -- the number of infected machines is immense."
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Hackers seize on 0-day flaw in Microsoft's PowerPoint
Microsoft warned Thursday that hackers are actively exploiting a software vulnerability in PowerPoint, the company's presentation application.
There's no patch yet for the bug, which could allow an attacker to completely control a computer. It affects Office 2000 Service Pack 3, Office XP SP3, Office 2003 SP3, and Office 2004 for Mac, Microsoft said in an advisory. Office 2007 is unaffected.
Microsoft said it has seen limited, targeted attacks. The Danish security company Secunia ranked the problem as "extremely critical," its most severe rating.
Secunia said the vulnerability "is caused due to an unspecified error that may result in access to an invalid object in memory when parsing a specially crafted PowerPoint file."
Microsoft advised users to not open or save Office files that come from untrusted sources. If the file is opened, users won't have much of an indication that it's a malicious file.
"Usually, these files look legit when opened, so it is quite easy to fall prey and not even notice that something malicious ran in the background," according to a post on the company's Malware Protection Center blog.
Hackers frequently hunt for vulnerabilities in commonly used software products, as it's another avenue other than the operating system to infect a computer with malicious software.
To be hacked, a user would either have to download a malicious file hosted on a Web site or open a file sent through e-mail, Microsoft said.
Microsoft has added a signature that will block access to PowerPoint exploit files in its Windows Live OneCare and Forefront Client security products. The signature is included in definition update 1.55.975.0 or higher.
The company noted that the exploit files have been recently submitted to VirusTotal, a Web site that aggregates antivirus engines.
Malware can be submitted to see which security products detect it. The site is often used by hackers to determine if their malware will be blocked by certain security software.
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You don't know tech: The InfoWorld news quiz
Any week in which April Fool's falls is deeply suspect in terms of news. But we're pretty sure we weren't hoodwinked in this week's quiz, which covers topics from the dark (worms, botnets, spammers) to the light (dating services, IPOs, and dishy redheads). Can you tell the real news from the fake? Give yourself 10 points for each correct answer. No foolin'. OK, let's go.
1. It was a Foolish week, all right. Which of the following "news" stories was NOT just an April Fool's joke?
a. Google introduces 3-D version of Chrome browser
b. Amazon launches Floating Amazon Cloud Environment
c. Twitter joins federal emergency response network
d. YouTube being redesigned to look more like Hulu
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Adobe, Nokia outline planned ventures at Web 2.0 show
Officials from Adobe Systems and Nokia emphasized endeavors in the application design and form factor spaces in presentations at the Web 2.0 Expo conference Thursday in San Francisco.
Touting a linkage between application developers and designers, Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch demonstrated the company's planned Flash Catalyst product at the Web 2.0 Expo conference in San Francisco. Nokia's Anssi Vanjoki, executive vice president at the company, cited planned form factors for mobile devices, which included a wearable wristband unit. He also hailed location-based services and the planned Ovi applications store, set to debut in June, that will bring applications to consumers.
[ In other mobile news, Blackberry launched an on-device apps store. ]
Flash Catalyst currently is in a beta release phase but is due soon, Lynch said. "We can enable people who do design to express not only what an application should look like but how it should feel to interact with," Lynch said. Users can import a design from a picture, such as from Adobe Illustrator, bring shapes into Catalyst, and turn them into the beginnings of an application. Lynch also noted Adobe this week combined APIs in the Flash platform with Facebook.
At Nokia, the company is eyeing location-based services that will require a mobile computer-like device that marries "virtuality with reality," Vanjoki said. "Nokia has a big lead in this development," he said.
Users, meanwhile, will see new form factors for wireless devices, such as an ear device or a wearable device similar to a bracelet, and some devices even will be self-cleaning.
Conference attendees on Thursday also heard from Ellen Miller, executive director of the Sunligtht Foundation. "Our goal has been really to use the Internet to catalyze greater openness and transparency in government," she said. Within government, officials claim to be in favor of transparency, but there are not a lot who really understand technology, Miller said.
Government spending on information projects was questioned by Miller, who cited a new government Web site called recovery.gov that reportedly will cost $86 million to create. "I suspect there's a way to do it a lot cheaper," she said. "That figure is dumbfounding to me."
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Central Desktop delivers Outlook plug-in
Central Desktop has enhanced its eponymous Web-hosted collaboration suite with a plug-in for Outlook that the company believes increases its viability as a SharePoint alternative.
Microsoft Outlook is the desktop e-mail program of about 70 percent of Central Desktop's 270,000 end-users. Because Central Desktop has designed its suite as a less-expensive and easier-to-manage option to Microsoft SharePoint, developing this Outlook plug-in was a must, said CEO Isaac Garcia.
[ Discover the top-rated IT products as rated by the InfoWorld Test Center. ]
"Outlook is the focal point of how people interact with SharePoint," he said. "SharePoint alternatives need synchronization with Outlook. Now, we've bridged that gap with this deep and wide Outlook integration."
The new plug-in will let users bidirectionally synchronize their task lists and calendars between Central Desktop and Outlook.
In addition, the plug-in lets users automate through pre-established rules the delivery of e-mail messages from Outlook to Central Desktop folders. This can also be done on an ad-hoc basis.
All existing Central Desktop customers can download the plug-in for free now from the company's Web site.
A potential area of further integration with Outlook would be the contacts list, but demand for that wasn't as big as for e-mail messages, tasks and calendar items, he said.
Central Desktop's product is built around the concept of shared "workspaces," which members of a group can set up to collaboratively manage projects, track tasks, engage in discussions and manage documents and files.
Integrating Central Desktop with Outlook is an obvious choice, according to Mark Levitt, an IDC analyst. "Their customers want to have ways of interacting with and using Outlook as a launching point for Central Desktop, in order to be able to send information in and out of [Central Desktop] workspaces via e-mails, share calendars and so on," Levitt said, adding that integration with Lotus Notes would be worthwhile for Central Desktop as well.
The plug-in also should help the company increase its adoption among new customers that on first glance may not be aware of how its suite works and how it's different from others in the market. "By providing integration with Outlook, you can automatically be participating in an ecosystem of users who are looking for ways to add value to and connect additional functionality into Outlook," Levitt said.
Competitively, Central Desktop's main edge in the collaboration market is that it combines asynchronous team collaboration with discussions and live meetings, he said. "Most other solutions have those two pieces separate," Levitt said. An exception is Novell, thanks to its acquisition last year of SiteScape.
Central Desktop is part of a group of SaaS (software-as-a-service) vendors that are disrupting the collaboration software market, historically dominated by expensive and complex suites from vendors like IBM and Microsoft.
Designed from the ground up to work on the Web, this new wave of collaboration platforms is often more friendly for both end-users and IT staffers, as well as less expensive to acquire and maintain. IBM and Microsoft have reacted to this trend by coming out with SaaS alternatives to their venerable, on-premise platforms, efforts that for both of those vendors are ongoing.
Central Desktop targets midsize companies or departments within larger companies, usually with between 100 and 1,000 end-users, a segment of the market that has been historically underserved by large collaboration vendors.
Some marquee-name Central Desktop customers include Oracle, Adobe Systems, Duke University, Amtrak, J.D. Power & Associates, Siemens and Lenovo, according to the privately held company, which was founded in 2005 and is based in Pasadena, California.
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IBM continues push for Sun, but will the deal kill Solaris?
The high-stakes, but still under-the covers battle by IBM to take over Sun Microsystems is still in play, but IBM may be rethinking what it is willing to pay for the enterprise vendor.
The Wall Street Journal, citing unnamed sources, reported today that IBM has dropped its offer to $9 to $10 a share, below its previously discussed price of $10 to $11.
[ Special report: IBM in talks to buy Sun. ]
What may be affecting IBM's offer is the potential delay due to regulatory oversight that the deal may bring.
If IBM takes control of Sun, it also gains much of the Unix server market. IBM has more than a 37 percent share of Unix servers, and Sun, at No. 2, has just over 28 percent of the market, according to IDC.
Unix servers are heavily used in the high end of the market, where IBM is already strong, thanks to its mainframe business, and that is just one area that could prompt antitrust regulators to examine this deal.
The decision will also have major implication for users. Both companies have been in a lock-down about what a merger might mean and what technologies might live and die, but a merger could mean bad news for Sun's Solaris operating system, according to Paul Otellini, the president and CEO of Intel.
At a recent company question-and-answer session, a transcript of which was filed with the SEC, Otellini warned that Solaris and Sparc are "likely to see EOLs over time through the IBM acquisition," he said. EOLs stands for end of life.
Otellini said he saw no strategic reason for IBM to maintain Solaris and its Sparc processors "except to attempt to convert the very large Sun Sparc Solaris base to power" IBM. "I think that would be their most likely strategy as part of this," he said.
Intel has reason to be concerned about Solaris -- the company has a lot invested in the operating systems, said Herb Hinstroff, Sun's director of datacenter software business management.
Intel has "very large teams" that "are spending a whole lot of energy on Solaris," Hinstroff said in an interview this week. Intel is the No. 2 contributor -- after Sun itself -- to the Solaris code base, he said.
Hinstroff noted that during the same session, Otellini also indicated that he wanted to see Sun remain independent. Otellini's transcribed words on that point: "I'd rather have Sun be independent I guess."
Computerworld is an InfoWorld affiliate
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iTKO touts Web 2.0, virtualization in test product
iTKO on Thursday is offering an upgrade to its Lisa product for services testing, validation and governance, touting capabilities for Web 2.0 applications and virtualization.
Geared to architectures like SOA as well as to business process management, Lisa version 4.6 includes service virtualization for simulating a testing environment and enhanced UI testing support for rich Internet application and Web 2.0 application delivery models. Increased governance and policy validation is offered for composite applications in SOA, BPM, and cloud environments.
[ Related: iTKO was noted in InfoWorld's "How to handle SOA vendor consolidation" report in 2008. ]
The product integrates with registry/repositories such as Systinet. "We become the policy validation engine," said John Michelsen, founder and chief architect at iTKO.
Version 4.6 enables automated modeling and simulation of inaccessible or unavailable IT resources into IT virtual test environments for development and testing purposes. This provides realistic behaviors and stateful transactions like a production environment, the company said.
Enhanced UI testing includes requirements validation for Java Swing, Flash, AJAX, Flex, and ActiveX systems. Browser-native testing controls enable testers to verify that applications function as expected in browsers like Internet Explorer and Firefox. "In the UI testing side, we greatly enhanced our Web 2.0 or rich Internet application types," Michelsen said.
Lisa also supports enforcement of verification of policies and SLA by validating business outcomes and results using event-based triggers, such as services publishing.
Lisa 4.6 integrates with the Software AG's CentraSite product for governance. Also, expanded platform and standards support is offered for Eclipse, CORBA, SAML 2.0, and REST-based validation.
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Dell frees latest Vostro laptops of bloatware
Dell on Thursday introduced small-business laptops that will be free of bloatware, which could help improve system performance and protect storage space.
The Vostro laptops will be preloaded only with software that is requested by buyers, Dell said. "Bloatware" refers to trial software that laptop makers often load onto new machines. Software publishers often pay PC manufacturers to include trial versions on computers. Common types of trial software include office productivity and accounting applications. Bloatware can be a headache for users, as it takes away system resources like storage space and could potentially introduce unwanted security vulnerabilities.
[ Will Vostro be enough to head off the netbook challenge? InfoWorld's Eric Knorr looks into the mini laptops' appeal in "Notes from the netbook revolution." | The InfoWorld Test Center rates netbooks for business. See who came out on top. ]
The laptops are aimed at buyers on tight budgets and include some of the latest storage, security, and videoconferencing technologies. The laptops also support solid-state drive (SSD) storage, which is faster and more power-efficient than hard-drive storage.
Screen sizes on the laptops are 13.3 inches for the Vostro 1320, 15.4 inches for the Vostro 1520, and 17 inches for the Vostro 1720. The laptops include enhanced security capabilities to protect data, with fingerprint readers that can authenticate users to log on to the system and software from Wave Systems that encrypts hard drives.
The systems will come with Intel Core 2 Duo or Celeron processors and run on Windows Vista OS, with the option to downgrade to Windows XP.
Users have the option of integrated graphics or a separate Nvidia GeForce graphics card. The systems support up to 8GB of DDR2 memory with up to 320GB in hard-drive storage or 128GB in SSD storage.
A Dell spokeswoman couldn't estimate battery life on the laptops, as it depends on how customers configure the systems.
Starting at $569, the 1320 laptop weighs 4.1 pounds (1.86 kg) with a four-cell battery and no optical drive. The 1520 starts at $629 and weighs 5.38 pounds. The 1720 starts at $649 and weighs 6.8 pounds.
The products are available in North America and a few South American countries starting Thursday. They will be available in EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa) April 7, and in some countries in Asia in May.
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IBM, Mayo form open source health IT consortium
Biomedical informatics researchers at IBM and the Mayo Clinic have launched a new open source consortium focused on natural language processing (NLP), in an effort to help doctors share diagnosis and treatment information.
The Open Health Natural Language Processing Consortium, announced Thursday, will focus on technology to allow for large-scale data aggregation, allowing doctors to mine medical records in their specialties to find similar cases to study before making difficult diagnoses or before determining treatment.
[ InfoWorld's Ephraim Schwartz asks: Can IT solve the electronic health records challenge? | Keep up on the latest tech news headlines at InfoWorld News, or subscribe to the Today's Headlines newsletter. ]
Doctors will be able to review any physician notes on similar cases, but no personally identifiable patient information will be available in the database, IBM and Mayo said.
With the launch of the consortium, the two organizations have released two projects under open source licenses, one focused on clinical notes and one on pathology reports. The consortium is using the Apache license, version 2.0.
The organizations are inviting others to help develop NLP tools. "By making it an open source initiative, we hope to enable wide use of these NLP tools so medical advancements can happen faster and more efficiently," Dr. Christopher Chute, a Mayo Clinic bioinformatics expert and senior consultant on the project, said in a statement.
Two other health care organizations, Seattle Group Health and the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs Boston Healthcare System, plan to participate in the consortium, and other participants are welcome, IBM and Mayo said.
As more health care providers adopt electronic health records, it will become increasingly important to be able to search those records, the organizations said. Mayo and IBM have developed a system for extracting information from more than 25 million text-based clinical notes based on IBM's open source Unstructured Information Management Architecture, or UIMA, they said.
The two organizations have also developed a system to extract cancer diseases characteristics from pathology reports, allowing for the computation of cancer stage.
"Large-scale information extraction from the clinical narrative is a vital component in advancing translational research and patient care," Guergana Savova, a medical informatics specialist and Mayo's lead on the project, said in a statement. "It 'unlocks' the clinical textual data that resides in huge repositories. Such technology would allow for large-scale data aggregation, analyses and usage -- just imagine the power of data from millions of patients."
The organizations have not yet determined what NLP projects to work on next, an IBM spokeswoman said. "The goal is to first get feedback from participating institutions on the initial project, and then expand," she said.
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Longjump puts SaaS inside IT shops
Platform-as-a-service provider Longjump announced this week that its on-demand Business Applications Platform can now be licensed and used within a customer's four walls.
"Now we are shifting gears. We've found that some large companies are not ready to push all their information into the cloud," said Pankaj Malviya, founder and CEO of Longjump. "We are trying to solve this problem."
[ InfoWorld interviews author Nick Carr about the many ways cloud computing will disrupt IT. | Contributing editor whurley asks if cloud computing inherently evil ]
So customers and ISVs can now opt to license the software and install it in-house to create so-called private clouds. Malviya explained that the Business Applications Platform lets IT and business collaborate to create applications that business users, in turn, can easily customize. Longjump also provides a unified interface to integrate business data and create transactional applications, according to the company.
By installing the software in-house, IT shops can take control of otherwise hosted functions, such as multi-tenancy, application delivery, and portability, Malviya added. Likewise, ISVs and SaaS providers can use Longjump's Business Applications Platform to add more features and capabilities to existing services, he said.
This has been a busy week for cloud computing. Hewlett-Packard on Tuesday unwrapped Cloud Assure products and services to improve the availability, performance, and security of cloud-based resources. And on Monday, a number of vendors, including Longjump, published the Open Cloud Manifesto.
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