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News

• Japan user marks Twitter's 20 billionth 'tweet'

  Twitter, the social networking site that allows users to say something in 140 characters or less, passed another milestone on Saturday with the sending of tweet number 20 billion.

• Foursquare Makes it Harder to Unlock Badges

  Foursquare, the popular location-based social networking service where users "check-in" to earn points, unlock badges and become "Mayors" of their most frequented establishments has undergone some significant changes in recent days.

• Google reports brief search outage in China

  Google's search engine in China appeared to have been partially blocked overnight Thursday, but a Google spokeswoman said the service was up and running again by Friday morning local time.

• Google Apps intrigues IT pros, but security worries remain

  Google likes to boast that more than 2 million businesses run Google Apps, but IT pros harbor concerns about security in the cloud and the limited functionality presented by Google tools such as Gmail and Google Docs.

• Microsoft's 2010 software 'most complicated lock-in decision in years'

  Microsoft's 2010 software suites present "the most complicated lock-in decision in years," and many customers will be justified in sticking with the 2007 versions of Office, Exchange and SharePoint, Burton Group analysts said this week at the Catalyst conference.

• Microsoft to push harder for cloud

  Microsoft is shifting its strategy away from pitching itself as a company that can offer companies a choice of software or hosted services, toward pushing the cloud, an executive said on Thursday at the software giant's annual financial analyst meeting.

• 100M Facebook Profiles Now Available For Download

  One hundred million Facebook user profiles containing personal information such as e-mail addresses and phone numbers, are now available as a 2.8GB torrent download.

• CRM prominent on Google Apps marketplace

  CRM (customer relationship management) software has established a significant foothold on Google's Apps Marketplace since its launch in March, according to an official blog post this week.

• Canonical bundles Linux, IBM database for the cloud

  Canonical is offering enterprises a chance to try cloud computing via a virtual appliance that bundles Ubuntu Linux with the IBM DB2 Express-C database running on the Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) public cloud platform.

• Set Up a Virtualization Server

  If there's one technology that can greatly improve computing environments of any size, it's virtualization. By using a single physical server to run many virtual servers, you can decrease operational costs and get far more bang for your buck. Whether your company is a 2-server or 2000-server shop, you can <a href="http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/187391/how_a_virtualized_server_saved_one_small_business.html">benefit from server virtualization</a> in a variety of ways. The best part? You can do it cheaply and easily.

• Droid X is now hard to get, just like Droid Incredible and Evo before it

  Shortages of Android-based HTC Evo and HTC Droid Incredible smartphones were expected to spur sales of the Motorola Droid X, which first went on sale July 15.

• Twitter encounters more digital certificate problems

  Twitter is having trouble again with a digital certificate that secures communications to its Web site, which has been causing trouble for third-party applications that integrate with it, but the problem may have been fixed.

• Wikileaks' Afghan War Diary: An FAQ

  The world is still abuzz over the whistleblower site WikiLeaks, and its publication of more than 75,000 classified documents detailing the war in Afghanistan. WikiLeaks had previously sent the documents, along with 15,000 as yet unpublished files, to three newspapers worldwide that published separate reports about the documents.

• Microsoft cries foul over Google tie-up with Yahoo Japan

  Yahoo Japan's decision to replace Microsoft with Google as its main search partner has been met with protest from Microsoft, which called the deal "anticompetitive."

• Yahoo Japan spurns Bing in favor of Google search

  Google has secured a deal to provide search results and related advertising to Yahoo Japan, Japan's most popular Web site, the two companies said Tuesday.