RIMM and its ubiquitous Blackberry is back in the financial news this week, after Goldman Sachs raised its target price on the Research in Motion to $163 from $148.

Why not? Cell phones, especially multi-functional ones like the Blackberry, are the bumper crop of this year’s tech toy marketplace. And they’re growing even more multi-functional. Says Strategy Analytics, in a new report out last week, cell phone heavyweights like Blackberry and Apple are pioneering fresh revenue streams for the mobile handset industry with their emerging push into value-added services such as navigation, email and music. Current revenues for all three vendors are modest, but growing.

Adds Tom Kang, senior analyst at Strategy Analytics, “Nokia, Blackberry and Apple are among the first to realize that global handset revenues are approaching a peak; therefore fresh growth streams must be found in mobile services. A cocktail of promising applications for wireless consumers is already emerging, such as GPS navigation from Nokia, push-email from Blackberry and iTunes music from Apple.”

One potential trouble spot is the iPhone, which has experienced a decline in market share, especially relative to Research in Motion in the first quarter of 2008. According to the technology consulting and analytical firm International Data Corp (IDC), “Rim’s share of the U.S. market for advanced phones with computer-like features such as e-mail rose to 44.5 percent in the first quarter from 35.1 percent in the fourth quarter, while iPhone’s share fell to 19.2 percent from 26.7 percent in the fourth quarter.”

Of course, Apple won’t take that sitting down. Work is already underway on version 3G of the iPhone, which analysts are already buzzing about. But RIMM is also on the move, with the new Blackberry Bold and the new Blackberry Thunder touch-screen handheld device coming out in 2008.

Call it the Celtics vs. Lakers of the handheld marketplace. Apple is the stylish newcomer that has the prevalent buzz factor (like the Lakers) but RIMM (like the Celts) has history on its side and a competitive mean streak that Apple’s going to have to match.

Should be fun to watch.

Bill Gates opened Tech-Ed 2008 Developers, its annual developers conference in Orlando, Fla., today by saying good-bye to a group the Microsoft founder said has been the company’s most important. “The success of Microsoft really is due to our relationship with developers,” he said in his keynote this morning to a room filled with about 6,000 developers.

It will likely be Gates’ last speech as a full time Microsoft employee; on July 1 he’ll focus most of his efforts on the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which gives away huge sums of the couple’s fortunes to help improve global healthcare and development.

In typical Gates fashion, he spoke of the future direction of application development, which includes continued focus on application modeling. Part of that strategy is project Oslo, the company’s architecture for visually modeling SOA applications and composites. Developers wanting a peek at the platform will have to wait until the Professional Developers Conference in October.

Gates also spoke of services, namely the types of hosted services it needs to play catch-up with against Amazon and archrival Google. “We’re taking everything we do at the server level and saying we have a service that mirrors that exactly. It’s getting us to think about data centers at a scale that we haven’t thought of before…[to create a mega-data center that Microsoft and only a few others will have.”

He also announced that Silverlight 2, beta 2—Microsoft’s media player browser plug-in—was available now, ahead of its “second half of 2008” schedule. He also mentioned that a second beta of Internet Explorer 8 will be available in August.

In what must have been a very light-hearted moment, Gates introduced a Windows-powered robot with Steve Ballmer’s face showing on a monitor where its head should have been. On cue, the robot reportedly threw an egg across the stage and then shouted “developers, developers, developers, developers,” parroting one of Ballmer’s infamous stage rants.

The MessageLabs Intelligence Report for May 2008 has revealed that spam levels have risen across all industry sectors, but manufacturing remains the leading vertical as far as spam activity is concerned at 83.7 percent. The biggest rise, however, can be found in the non-profit sector with spam levels up by 7 percent to 81.3 percent. The retail sector sits at 80 percent, the public sector 75.7 percent and finance 71.7 percent. The finance sector also saw 1 in every 248.2 emails containing some kind of virus activity, although that is way behind the 1 in 43.8 infected emails that can be found in the accommodation and catering sector.

Perhaps the most disturbing revelation in the report is that spam levels are back on the up, with overall levels hitting 76.8 percent of all emails in May which is a level not seen since early in 2007 according to MessageLabs.

“The savvy, intelligent and accurate cybercriminals of today seem to have abandoned the attachments tactic that was so innovative in late 2007 and are now focused on exploiting free hosted applications which have become mainstream in 2008,” said Mark Sunner, Chief Security Analyst, MessageLabs. “The spammers are taking advantage of the fact that these services are free, provide ample bandwidth and are rarely blacklisted; this is one more addition to the growing list of ways the spammers have succeeded in outsmarting traditional detection devices.”

Google released a shiny new version of its hosted enterprise search product today that includes new custom indexing and a synonym dictionary. While they were at it, Google changed the name of the product to Google Site Search, which replaces the old (rather awkward) moniker Custom Search Business Edition.

If you are like me, you may be wondering how Site Search is different from the free Google search widget many use on their website. For one, the widget is free and Site Search starts at $100 per month for 5000 pages (reasonable I think by anyone’s pricing benchmark). When you look at results on my blog, you see Google ads, while Site Search results are ad-free. What’s more, using the Google XML API, you can completely customize Site Search results including the order of the results and pages that might not show up in the generic Google results. You can’t do that with the search widget. Finally, you also have control over the look and feel of search results (or you can leave it with Google branding if you prefer to have the power of the Google search brand on your site).

Although it may new to us, some customers have been using it since last summer when Google began rolling out the enhancements to select customers. Jennifer Dyni, Manager of Emerging Technologies at TechSmith, a software vendor that makes SnagIt and Camtasia, says her company has been using the new features since last August. She says that she likes the ability to target the search results in a way that isn’t possible using the generic search index alone.

“The new features that Google is making available speak directly to our number one reason for choosing Google Site Search – they are all focused on helping our visitors get relevant search results when using our web site. For example, being able to include a site map or index for Google to crawl — in addition to what [Google's] web crawler is already indexing – will ensure that the content we want visitors to reach using Site Search will definitely be available.”

What’s more Dyni reports that it didn’t take her team long to incorporate the new features into the interface. “It took our team about 3 hours to get a pilot of the search interface running on our staging site for techsmith.com. We spent about 3 days after the pilot customizing the search experience, and that was mostly incorporating the search box into our site template.” She adds, they deliberately didn’t do any customization because they wanted customers to have the familiar Google look and feel. (You can test Techsmith’s implementation by entering a search term in the Search box on the Techsmith site.)

One interesting side note is that the Washington Post/TechCrunch reported that in the days leading up to this announcement, there was a rumor that Google was replacing its Mini Search appliance with a hosted solution for indexing content. Well, the rumor was partly right. Google added custom indexing capability to its hosted product, but the Mini is still alive and well, which just goes to show how seriously we should take rumors. There is an element of truth, but what’s real is hard to know, a lesson those of us waiting for the iPhone announcement next week should take to heart.

Channel Insider has announced that Red Hat Enterprise Linux has beaten off the competition in the 2008 Product of the Year awards to scoop the server operating system award. This is important for two reasons: firstly the fact that awards are given to products which “exemplify attributes of high importance to the channel including value, support and profit potential” which gives it a very real world impact, but also because Microsoft could not muster a top three place at all. In fact, Sun came in second with Novell in third.

OK, Microsoft did pick up some gongs elsewhere, such as winning the client operating system category as well as the system and network management one. But this cannot dilute the fact that as far as the core group of Value Added Resellers that were surveyed by Channel Insider was concerned Microsoft simply is not as profitable, simply does not provide the value nor the support, in the server operating system arena. The point being that while it is all too easy to lay the blame for the Microsoft snub at the usual suspects, the Bill baiters and haters, the fact that Microsoft won other categories suggests this is not the case.

Server operating systems were ranked based upon familiarity with the product, opportunity for after-market sales, product profit potential, impact of the product on the technology market as a whole and the product vendor’s service and support. “We are very honored to receive the award for best server operating system given the depth of expertise Channel Insider provides professionals in the channel community,” said Mark Enzweiler, vice president, North America channels at Red Hat. “We continue to focus on becoming a channel-centric company and are seeing increased sales across the channel for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and JBoss Enterprise Middleware solutions.”

Recently, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 was recognized by SearchEnterpriseLinux.com as Product of the Year in the Linux Server Distributions category for leadership in virtualization. The operating system was also recognized as a 2008 Product of the Year by Datamation in the Enterprise Linux category, and was named Best Open Source Solution in the 2008 SIIA Codie Awards.

All the Channel Insider Product of the Year award winners can be found here.

The Malicious software (malware): a security threat to the Internet economy report published by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development over the weekend suggests that the PC malware infection rate in the US has hit 25 percent. These OECD cybercrime infection findings are highly disturbing, admits Geoff Sweeney, CTO with behavioural analysis IT security specialists Tier-3 (whose customers spread across major corporations and governments the world over) but nonetheless are accurate. In fact, the figures confirm the companies own findings with regards to infections. OECD says in the report that while the economic and social impacts of malware may indeed be somewhat hard to quantify, there is no doubting that when used directly or indirectly can harm critical information infrastructures resulting in financial loss. Malware, the OECD warns, therefore plays a pivotal role in the erosion of trust issues that the Internet economy is currently facing.

“PC infections are a lot more prevalent than many corporates realise, mainly because many go unnoticed for long periods of time, until IT security software vendors get around to updating their applications to counter the specific malware involved” Sweeney told me, adding “The Internet has become the modern equivalent of the Wild West. For most companies it’s become as essential as the telephone, but it is far, far more dangerous.” There is little doubt in Sweeney’s mind that the assertion within the report that such a simple act as connecting a computer to the Internet can effectively mobilise an army of organised criminals aiming to subvert ‘the system’ is correct. Cybercrime is, indeed, a potential threat to the Internet economy.

“Companies need to ask themselves whether their existing single or multiple layers of IT security is sufficient to protect their IT resource. The answer to this question is almost certainly no for most enterprises, as they now need to extend their protection from variations on rule based technology to include behavioural analysis technology.”

The report perhaps unsurprisingly concludes that there is no magic bullet, no simple solution to the complex problems presented by malware. Just as unsurprisingly, Sweeney does not think that it is time to place your head between your knees and start praying. The answer, he insists, lies with behavioural analysis technology which has the ability to spot both known and unknown types of malware and take appropriate action. “That is its great strength which is needed to counter the fact that at least one in four of PCs are now infected with some form of malware.”

A year ago last week, Facebook released the Facebook Platform, enabling users of the social network to create their own applications. Today, 400,000 developers and 24,000 applications later, the company introduced the Facebook Open Platform, which releases much of the Facebook Platform source code to the development community.

The so-called fbOpen is now among several Facebook open source projects. In essence, fbOpen delivers a “snapshot of the infrastructure that runs Facebook Platform,” according to a project Web page. By downloading this snapshot, developers can launch an instance of the platform and test their applications locally, rather than uploading them to a server or sandbox for better performance, stability and control. fbOpen also includes Facebook’s API infrastructure, the FQL parser, the FBML parser, and FBJS, and implementations of the most common methods and tags.

“The goal of this release is to help you as developers better understand Facebook Platform as a whole and more easily build applications, whether it’s by running your own test servers, building tools, or optimizing your applications on this technology’ wrote Facebook’s Ami Vora in a blog post today. Also built into the release, she wrote, are extensibility points that permit developers to add functionality to the platform such as custom tags and API methods. “We’re also hoping you use Facebook Open Platform in ways we’ve never thought of. [J]ust as you showed off your creativity with Facebook Platform, we hope this lets you be creative with the foundation of the platform itself.” All the code is being released under the Common Public Attribution License with the exception of the FBML Parser, which is controlled by the Mozilla Public License.

Hi Everyone,

Finally, our forums have been released and are functional. We are still adding new forums for the use of everyone to use, please remember, KEEP THEM CLEAN! =)

You can reach the forums, going up to the top under ‘Guy’s Favourite Websites’ or to the right in the sidebar to ‘Links’.

In these forums, you can ask for help, read topic’s on general IT - or you can just have a pit-stop to have a chat!

Enjoy everyone!

Guy

The highly-anticipated release of Fedora 9 is here! It has the new KDE4 desktop which makes some big improvements in user experience and speed. It also includes the hot new FireFox 3 web browser with some new security features that are sure to impress even the most jaded surfer. Fedora 9 also gives you the options of the new ext4 filesystem, encrypted filesystems, partition resizing, and Xen virtualization enhancements.

The ext4 filesystem is a higher-performance, high capacity filesystem based on the ext3 filesystem. Anaconda, the Fedora installer program, allows you to resize ext2/ext3, and NT filesystems. You can also create and install to encrypted filesystems.

Fedora 9, and all things Fedora-related are found at fedoraproject.org. You can now download via direct http or ftp, bittorrent, or jigdo. There are several download options awaiting you at the Fedora Project page–you can download Live Fedora CD images with either the Gnome or KDE Desktop interface, Installation DVD images for x86, x86_64, and ppc platforms, and your choice of download options in case you have a slow or limited Internet connection.

I don’t recommend Fedora 9, or any other Fedora release, for production-level use. They aren’t beta but they are also somewhat leading edge and therefore less stable than other versions of Linux. But, if you want to test out some coolness, grab Fedora 9 and let me know what you think of it. I’ll give you my report when I’ve had a chance to play a bit more.

Windows Server 2008 incorporates the completely rewritten TCP/IP stack we shipped in Windows Vista and since this is the first server release with the stack we’d like to ask our readers to load up Windows Server RC1 and see if your applications are ready.

The new features (compared to Windows Server 2003) that may pose potential compatibility issues include: removed filter hooks, receive window auto tuning, dual IP layer architecture for IPv6, compound TCP, ECN support, default strong host model, easier kernel mode programming, extensive protocol offload.

Windows Server 2008 is also the very first Microsoft server product to have the firewall ON by default. Third party applications that are not aware of this behavior may break.