Nokia is extending its mobile navigation system to the Web via its Ovi.com site, where people will be able to save map locations and routes and then synchronize them with their phones.

Maps on Ovi, unveiled Monday at the Where 2.0 conference in Burlingame, California, builds on Nokia's next generation of mobile-phone navigation technology, Nokia Maps 2.0. It also signals Nokia's growing focus on software and services, even for use independent of its mobile phones.

Ovi is a Nokia Web portal for Internet services such as content sharing. Maps on Ovi will let people use and mark up maps on the Web and then upload their changes to a cell phone, said Michael Halbherr, vice president of context-based services at Nokia. For example, before traveling to another city, a user could pick out places to visit and the routes to those sites from his hotel. Once saved on Ovi, that information would be copied onto his phone automatically at the next synchronization, Halbherr said.

In addition, the user could walk or drive around the city and save his route on the phone, then upload that to his Ovi map. Sights along the way that he marked as interesting could be uploaded to the Web map, which eventually could provide a wealth of information about those places from a variety of sources. Nokia expects to deliver that information on the Web-based map through mashups with partners, which might include user-generated review sites such as TripAdvisor, Halbherr said.

Later, Nokia will let users of Ovi share their routes and tips with friends. For example, a company could put together a set of suggestions for employees visiting its headquarters city, Halbherr said.

Maps on Ovi will become available by the end of September, Nokia said. It may or may not be in beta at that time, but it will be fairly close to production quality in any case, he said.

Initially, Maps on Ovi will work only with Nokia phones, but the company intends to make it independent of its hardware. Nokia intends to succeed as a software and services company independent of its phones, Halbherr said. This is true even in the U.S., where Nokia's smartphones have had trouble gaining traction.

"We are running a software business," Halbherr said. "We'll do whatever we need to do to make (inroads) in the U.S. It may be a Nokia device, or it may not."

Maps 2.0 is a set of navigation capabilities, the fruit of Nokia's acquisition of Gate5, that was introduced in February and is now in beta for Nokia's Series 60 operating system. It includes features such as routes and directions designed for pedestrians instead of drivers. That software will emerge from beta by early next month for Series 60 phones, which include N-Series and E-Series smartphones as well as some less expensive devices, Nokia said. By the end of this year, a reduced version of Maps 2.0 will become available in beta for the company's lower-end Series 40 OS, Halbherr said.

Intel's test and assembly plant in Chengdu remained offline on Tuesday, as the region in southwestern China reeled from the effects of a devastating earthquake that struck on Monday afternoon.

Chinese officials put the death toll from the quake at nearly 10,000 on Tuesday morning, according to China's official Xinhua News Agency. The U.S. Geological Survey said the quake -- which shook buildings in far-off Beijing and Bangkok -- had a magnitude of 7.5, while China's State Seismological Center measured a magnitude of 7.8 on the Richter Scale.

As initial reports of damage and casualties emerged from areas hit by the quake, Chinese soldiers and rescue workers were being rushed to the region to search for survivors trapped under rubble and deliver relief supplies, Xinhua said.

The epicenter of the quake was close to Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province and one of the most important economic centers in southwestern China. Power and water supplies around the city were cut off by the quake. A lack of power and transmission problems rendered 2,300 base stations inoperable, taking down the city's mobile telephone network.

As buildings shook in Chengdu, people poured into the streets. Workers at plants operated by Intel and Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp. (SMIC), the country's largest chip maker, were evacuated and production came to a halt after the quake on Monday.

Intel employs around 1,600 workers at a test and assembly plant outside Chengdu, where the company assembles chipsets and microprocessors. None of the workers at Intel's plant were injured by the quake.

"The assembly test facility is running under backup power as local power and water have been disconnected pending a full seismic assessment. As a result employees have been sent home until Wednesday," said Nick Jacobs, an Intel spokesman in Singapore.

To assist with quake relief efforts, Intel donated $300,000 to the Chinese Red Cross.

Intel hopes to resume production once the assessment of the earthquake's impact is completed, but the situation "remains dynamic," Jacobs said.

To what extent the quake and plant shutdown will affect the availability of Intel products remains to be seen. "It is too early to say. However, bear in mind Intel has a number of assembly test facilities at other locations including Malaysia, the Philippines, Shanghai, and Costa Rica," he said.

Other companies, including Monolithic Power Systems, also kept their Chengdu manufacturing plants closed on Tuesday, pending a full assessment of the quake's impact. "The facility will be closed temporarily to check power, equipment and facilities, and to provide employees time with their families," the chip maker said, reporting that all of its employees were safe and accounted for.

Freescale Semiconductor shut down its design center in Chengdu. "Basically, there are no injuries, and only minor damage to the office. Employees have been advised to stay home until further notice to ensure safety," said Dawn Lam, a company spokeswoman.

Microsoft's reluctance to make its Office suite interoperable with competing products has prompted a British government agency to complain to the European Commission, which is already investigating the company's conduct in this area.

The British Educational Communications and Technology Agency (BECTA) filed a complaint with the U.K. Office of Fair Trading last October, and has now forwarded it to the Commission, it said late Monday. The complaint alleges that Microsoft's behavior impedes the exchange of files between Office 2007 and competitors' products, and that its licensing practices in the market for software for schools are anticompetitive.

BECTA's renewed complaint comes just days after Microsoft announced it would appeal an €899 million ($1.3 billion) fine the Commission imposed in February to punish Microsoft for failing to provide timely and adequate information about the interoperability of its workgroup server products, as the Commission had ordered in a March 2004 antitrust ruling.

The Commission opened two new antitrust investigations against Microsoft in January, one concerning the interoperability of Windows with other software, and the other concerning Microsoft's tactic of bundling software products with its Windows operating system.

As part of the first of those two investigations, the Commission said it will look at whether the Office Open XML document format used by Microsoft Office is sufficiently interoperable with competitors' products. BECTA has now sent its complaint and evidence to support that investigation, it said.

Impediments to interoperability can limit software buyers' choice, tying them to one vendors' applications. In the market for education software, this can result in higher prices, and have an impact on links between work in schools and work done at home, BECTA warned.

Advanced Micro Devices announced a series of executive changes Monday, including the creation of a Central Engineering Organization to oversee the company's product roadmap.

Leading the new executive appointments was the announcement that Randy Allen will replace Mario Rivas as head of the company's Computing Solutions Group. Rivas, who was an executive vice president, is leaving the company "to pursue new opportunities," the company said.

Prior to his latest appointment, Allen was responsible for AMD's server and workstation business. He will now report directly to Dirk Meyer, AMD's president and chief operating officer.

Another key appointment is the hiring of Chekib Akrout, formerly vice president of design technology at Freescale Semiconductor, to co-head the newly created Central Engineering Organization with Jeff VerHeul, AMD's corporate vice president of design engineering. This new group will report to Meyer and will oversee the development and direction of AMD's technology and product roadmaps.

Prior to Freescale, Akrout worked at IBM where "he was responsible for IBM's work on the development of the Cell processor, the Xbox 360 processor for Microsoft, and embedded PowerPC cores," AMD said.

Hewlett-Packard has confirmed it is in talks to acquire IT services company Electronic Data Systems in a deal that would give it more competitive muscle against worldwide services market leader IBM.

The price tag for EDS could be around $13 billion, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal published on Monday.

Both companies issued statements Monday confirming that they are in "advanced discussions" about a merger. They said they would not comment further until a deal is reached or the discussions end, and they each cautioned that there is no guarantee that they will come to an agreement.

The deal would strengthen HP's competitive position against IBM, whose Global Technology Services division has long been a strong profit generator for the company.

"I see it as an attempt by HP to really go head to head with IBM in a much more meaningful way, especially in technology services and IT outsourcing," said Dana Stiffler, research director with AMR Research.

Even after the merger, however, the combined companies' global services revenue would fall about $10 billion short of that of IBM, based on their figures reported for 2007, she said.

The market at stake was worth $748 billion in 2007, up 10.5 percent from 2006, according to figures from Gartner. IBM led the market last year with about $54 billion in revenue, compared to second-place EDS with $22 billion. IBM also grew faster than EDS last year, increasing its revenue by 12.2 percent year-over-year, compared with 3.4 percent for EDS. That was a reversal from 2006, when EDS had bigger growth than IBM.

HP took in $17 billion in services revenue last year, putting it in fifth place behind Accenture and Fujitsu. HP's business grew by 8.1 percent and accounted for 16 percent of its total revenue for 2007, most of which came from its printer and PC businesses.

The deal would strengthen HP's services capability in some areas but not others. EDS would give HP a boost in custom application and infrastructure management services, but less so in managing packaged applications from the likes or Oracle and SAP, Stiffler said.

"Another thing it wouldn't give HP is a strong business consulting presence, a go-to-market capability where you address operational executives and line of business people as much as the CIO," she said.

EDS may well be open to an acquisition though, according to Stiffler. "I think aligning themselves to HP makes them potentially a more future-focused and viable competitor than they are as a standalone company," she said.

There is a challenge for both companies. "Both HP and EDS grew up in a traditional world prior to India emerging as a global delivery center," Stiffler said, noting that Indian companies such as Wipro are focused on providing low-cost application development services.

It's a fairly bold move by HP, said Kathryn Hale, research vice president at Gartner. ""That is just amazing. It sounds more than just speculation."

Only HP, which earns $17 billion in revenue in 2007, has the wherewithal to acquire EDS, which is second in outsourcing revenue at $22 billion, Hale said. That would make it the second-largest services company in the world, bringing it closer to IBM, which earned $54 billion in services last year.

HP's services focus mainly on product support and the EDS acquisition could give HP the professional services revenue it would need to be considered a serious threat to IBM, Hale said. HP will also be able to use EDS' global network to expand its services presence, Hale said.

EDS has been struggling recently and HP acquisition would make a difference to both companies, Hale said. In its most recent earnings conference call, EDS talked about layoffs.

EDS may well be open to an acquisition though, according to Stiffler. "I think aligning themselves to HP makes them potentially a more future-focused and viable competitor than they are as a stand-alone company," she said.

There is a challenge for both companies. "Both HP and EDS grew up in a traditional world prior to India emerging as a global delivery center," Stiffler said, noting that Indian companies such as Wipro are focused on providing low-cost application development services.

It's a fairly bold move by HP, said Kathryn Hale, research vice president at Gartner. ""That is just amazing. It sounds like more than just speculation."

Only HP, which earns $17 billion in revenue in 2007, has the wherewithal to acquire EDS, which is second in outsourcing revenue at $22 billion, Hale said. That would make it the second-largest services company in the world, bringing it closer to IBM, which earned $54 billion in services last year.

HP's services focus mainly on product support, and the EDS acquisition could give HP the professional services revenue it would need to be considered a serious threat to IBM, Hale said. HP will also be able to use EDS' global network to expand its services presence, Hale said.

EDS has been struggling recently, and the HP acquisition would make a difference to both companies, Hale said. In its most recent earnings conference call, EDS talked about layoffs.

(James Niccolai in San Francisco contributed to this report.)

This story was updated on May 12, 2008

Matching up critical components in the SOA space, SOA Software, which provides SOA governance automation, said Monday it has acquired SOA repository and governance vendor LogicLibrary.

The combination creates an integrated SOA automation solution, SOA Software said. Enterprises can accelerate adoption of SOA with rapid delivery of services for distributed and mainframe environments, the company said.

The addition of LogicLibrary technology extends SOA Software integration capabilities across governed deployment platforms, such as IBM, JBoss, Microsoft, and SAP, SOA Software said.

"Basically, what LogicLibrary brings to us is SOA asset lifecycle management as well as SOA development governance and SOA repository," said Roberto Medrano, executive vice president at SOA Software. "Those are important to complete our integrated SOA governance [portfolio]."

"From our standpoint, this provides complementary technology so we can provide [an] end-to-end integrated governance solution," added Brent Carlson, who was founder and CTO of LogicLibrary and now has become senior vice president of technology for SOA Software. The merger provides a natural fit between the SOA Software Workbench for software policy governance and the LogicLibrary Logidex repository, Carlson said.

SOA Software did not release the monetary value of the transaction. The deal closed last week.

While Sun executives have said that JavaFX, the company's nascent RIA (rich Internet application) development product family and eventual competitor to Adobe's Flash and Microsoft's Silverlight, will be entirely open source, a FAQ page on Sun's site appears to contradict that.

"The JavaFX Script language, currently being developed with the community's help (see OpenJFX project), will have a grammar and syntax that are open source. Some parts of the language are already open source," it states, but adds, "the JavaFX compiler, runtime engine, player, and tools currently under development are not expected to be open source."

Simon Brocklehurst, CEO of software development company Psynixis, noted the FAQ's wording in a recent blog post.

"I'm pretty sure that potential JavaFX developers would be interested in getting some better understanding on this," Brocklehurst wrote. "Certainly, the lack of clarity has stopped me getting my hands dirty with JavaFX technology for the time being."

A Sun spokeswoman declined to provide a direct response to the FAQ statement but said Sun is looking into revising it and will reveal more information regarding JavaFX and open source later this year.

"Sun will be rolling out our open source strategy for JavaFX concurrent with the release of version 1 of JavaFX Desktop in the fall," she said in a statement.

She noted that a number of components are already open source, including the JavaFX Plugin for NetBeans. Sun has also started the OpenJFX Compiler project.

The company announced JavaFX in 2007. During last week's JavaOne conference, it presented some demonstrations of the technology and provided a road map.

Although Sun is coming to market with an RIA platform after some competitors, the company believes it has a built-in advantage due to the pervasive reach of Java.

Microsoft released Monday beta versions of separate service packs for the Visual Studio 2008 software development platform and the accompanying .Net Framework 3.5, a Microsoft official said in a blog.

General-release SP (Service Packs) 1 for Visual Studio 2008 and .Net Framework 3.5 are due this summer. SP1 for Visual Studio is the first release for Visual Studio that offers full support for the SQL Server 2008 database, said S. "Soma" Somasegar, senior vice president of the Microsoft Developer Division, in a blog entry.

But Microsoft stressed that the beta service pack for .Net Framework 3.5 does have compatibility issues with the Expression Blend tool as well as with the Silverlight 2 beta and Silverlight Tools Beta 1 for Visual Studio 2008.

"This beta release is for early testing and feedback. As a beta release, we recommend you only install the service pack on test computers," Microsoft said in its release notes.

SQL Server 2008 offers such features as the ability to store data from structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data. It is due to ship in the third quarter of this year.

Other capabilities cited in the SP 1 beta release for Visual Studio 2008 include improved functionality and performance for Windows Presentation Foundation designers and additional tools for Visual Basic and Visual C++. Office 2007 Ribbon functionality is highlighted as well. Also offered are richer JavaScript capabilities and improved Web development and site deployment.

This service pack also offers improvements for the Visual Studio Team System application lifecycle management platform, including support for work item-tracking via the Office 2007 ribbon and version control of unbound files.

SP1 for .Net Framework 3.5 introduces the ADO.Net Entity Framework. This framework raises the level of abstraction for data programmers to help eliminate the impedance mismatch between data models and languages.

The service pack for .Net Framework 3.5 also offers ADO.Net Data services to simplify data access code in applications, Somasegar said. .Net Framework presents Microsoft's managed code programming model for building Windows applications.

SP1 for Net Framework 3.5 introduces more controls, a streamlined setup, improved AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML), and a new graphics features.

Also featured is .Net Framework Client Profile, a redistribution of .Net Framework optimized for clients.

"Some of the benefits of this profile are immediate responsiveness with a 200K bootstrapper to enable the fastest response to the application setup URL, an integrated custom UI allowing packaging of your application and the framework for a seamless install experience, and lastly incredible install speed at 26.5 MB (this translates to about six minutes on a typical connection)," Somasegar said.

The SP1 beta for Visual Studio 2008 can be downloaded here while the SP1 beta for .Net Framework 3.5 is accessible here.

Microsoft released Visual Studio 2008 and .Net Framework 3.5 in November 2007.

Cisco Systems will take its TelePresence virtual meeting systems into home offices later this year, bringing telecommuters nearer to their corporate colleagues and society one step closer to science fiction.

TelePresence uses high-definition video, large flat-screen monitors, and advanced audio systems to make electronic meetings more lifelike, with a full-size view of participants at each site. It was introduced in late 2006 in configurations for six and for two meeting participants, but executives have said they are aiming eventually to expand the technology to the consumer market. The prospect of life-size interactive TVs in living rooms may someday foster closer relationships among widely dispersed families, but also conjures up images of the Telescreen two-way televisions in George Orwell's book "1984."

Unlike the Telescreen, the 37-inch Cisco TelePresence System 500 can be turned off by the home user. It's designed to let a telecommuter or an employee of a medium-sized business participate in TelePresence sessions with coworkers, partners, customers, and others without traveling. It's a step down from the three 65-inch displays used in the flagship TelePresence System 3000, but it includes speakers, camera, a lighting setup, and a built-in microphone array in the screen to deliver similar quality, according to Cisco. It can be mounted on a desk, pedestal, or office wall, with the screen doing double duty as a second PC monitor or a digital sign between meetings. Users can participate in one-on-one meetings and companywide TelePresence sessions with coworkers who have the larger systems.

The System 500 is not the consumer device Cisco envisions, which former Chief Development Officer Charlie Giancarlo last year predicted could be sold within two to three years for about $1,000. The System 500, coming in the third quarter, will have a list price of $33,900. But it does represent a less expensive entry price for medium-sized businesses. The six-seat System 3000 costs about $299,000 per room and the one-screen, two-seat System 1000 is priced at $79,000 per room.

A complete room analysis and system configuration service is included in the price of the existing products but will be optional for the System 500 because it generally won't be necessary, spokeswoman Jacqueline Pigliucci said.

Also in the third quarter, Cisco will expand the TelePresence line upward with the System 3200 for 12 or 18 participants. It will have a second row behind the existing six-person configuration, with similar specially designed desks with built-in microphones, which place a speaker's voice correctly for participants at the other site. The back row doesn't have to be raised above the front, Cisco said. While participants in the front watch a display below the main screens for data sharing, those in the back row can see that content on additional screens above. The System 3200 will have a list price of $340,000, and there will be a $90,000 upgrade kit for System 3000 customers.

Along with the System 3200 comes an update that will also be available in the other platforms: Data-sharing will run at 30 frames per second; until now it has been 5 frames per second.

TelePresence has been a high-end, high-profile hit for Cisco, which said last week that revenue for the platforms rose 1,000 percent in the quarter ended April 26 from a year earlier. More than 500 units had been ordered since the technology was introduced in October 2006, the company said.

A word to professional developers: Your job is being taken over by untrained neophytes, but you still will have plenty to do to keep yourself busy and employed.

This was the message for developers during a presentation by Sun engineer Todd Fast at the JavaOne conference last Friday in San Francisco. Fast argued that with applications having a shorter lifespan and non-professionals getting into the application development space, career software developers will increasingly become platform builders rather than application builders. He focused on the burgeoning Web development space.

During the presentation, entitled "Applications for the Masses by the Masses: Why Engineers Are an Endangered Species," Fast presented these three primary propositions:

* Software engineers will be an endangered species.
* High-school and college students will take over the jobs of software engineers.
* These engineers will not mind, because there still will be plenty of work.

The fact that students will take the reins of software development is "kind of scary," Fast said. But taking a lighthearted approach to his presentation, Fast said developers are not like other people and that has an impact. Developers have above average intelligence, do not dress well, and like weird things like Monty Python.

"We're at the edges of the population curve as software engineers," Fast said.

He cited the impact of social networking applications and Web 2.0 and how these trends are drawing more non-trained persons into software development. Social network applications are becoming the dominant way in which certain age groups interact.

Casual developers, those who do not identify themselves as engineers, can use templates in PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor) and play around in MySpace, blogs, and RSS feeds.

"This is just kind of normal thing for them," Fast said. But these casual developers now are entering the workforce and also are building out the next-generation Web.

Meanwhile, applications are being built out of existing applications, and the need for software developers cannot keep up with the increasing demand.

"There aren't enough of us to actually produce the cool stuff that people want," said Fast.

The traditional perspective of an application is a program that solves other people's use cases and is big, difficult to write, and takes time. Only highly skilled experts can create them. Java, for its part, is rich platform geared toward solving difficult problems, but it also is very complex, Fast said.

But today, Web applications are being built to solve short-lived needs. There has been an explosive growth in non-traditional Web applications, such as widgets, social applications, mashups, and situational applications.

"The definition of applications is changing, the common perception of applications is changing," said Fast.

A sea change is occurring in how applications are being built. Facebook and social platforms are major drivers of application development, and these applications are not necessarily done using Enterprise JavaBeans, IDEs, and version control. Instead, developers can write PHP scripts in notepad, said Fast.

Professional developers, meanwhile, will build foundational platforms. "We'll be building the platforms that enable anyone to build applications on top, to increase the richness of the Web," said Fast. Engineers will work lower in the software development stacks.

In the new application development realm, situational, disposable applications are becoming prominent. The concept of Development 2.0 is emerging with higher levels of developer abstraction, such as Yahoo Pipes.

"As we see abstractions go up, we see more people able to participate, able to create applications," Fast said. Tools are being developed for casual developers.

Attendees at Fast's presentation tended to agree with Fast's premise that the role of the professional developer is shifting.

"It's a very interesting concept. I don't think it's coming as fast as he is pointing out, but it's probably coming," said Ceco Ivanov, software engineer at Genova Diagnostics, a medical lab. The shift will happen in the next 10 to 15 years, not two years, Ivanov said. But the trend is good in that it enables people to collaborate, he said.

Agility requires empowerment of end-users, another developer said.

"Essentially, writing code is very complex, and even in the corporate world, you need to empower the end-users to piece together their own applications because you need to be agile," said Tim Martel, a developer at Pegasystems, which develops Web-based business process management systems.

Fast also said the metric for applications is becoming how many people use an application as opposed to how time it took to build. The Zombies game application in Facebook, for example, was used by 250,000 people every day last October, said Fast. This application was written by one programmer who did it for fun, Fast said.

The Slide widget application, meanwhile, has 5 million users. "Nothing I built ever had 5 million users," Fast said.?

Hewlett-Packard is close to acquiring IT services company Electronic Data Systems for around $13 billion, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal published on Monday.

The deal could be announced as early as Tuesday, according to the news report, which cited sources close to the matter.

The acquisition could boost HP's services business.

A spokeswoman from HP declined comment.

Scammers want your IRS refund checks and have devised at least one phishing scheme to get it, according to the FBI.

The e-mail, which purports to be from the IRS advises recipients that the best way to get their economic stimulus rebate money is by direct deposit. It then directs them to a Web site that asks them to enter bank account information and other personal data.

To encourage recipients to respond, the e-mail warns that not filling out the form will mean a delay in receiving the check.

The actual purpose is to steal personal information, the FBI says.

This is not the only news-related scam going around. Phony fund raisers for victims of the Myanmar cyclone may use similar tactics, according to the Federal Trade Commission.

"Various forms of online fraud continue to proliferate on the Internet and people should take the appropriate precautions to protect themselves," said Special Agent Richard J. Kolko, of the FBI national press office.

Text of a sample IRS phishing scam was released by the FBI:

"Over 130 million Americans will receive refunds as part of President Bush's program to jumpstart the economy. Our records indicate that you are qualified to receive the 2008 Economic Stimulus Refund. The fastest and easiest way to receive your refund is by direct deposit to your checking/savings account.

Please follow the link and fill out the form and submit before May 10th, 2008 to ensure that your refund will be processed as soon as possible.

Submitting your form on May 10, 2008 or later means that your refund will be delayed due to the volume of requests we anticipate for the Economic Stimulus Refund.

To access Economic Stimulus refund, please click here."

The iPhone is out of stock "company wide," Apple sales representatives said Sunday. The outage has fueled rumors that the next-generation 3G model will be released shortly.

Neither Apple's U.S. or U.K. online stores have iPhones available for sale, according to their Web sites. At both, the message "Currently Unavailable" appears beside "Ships," which last week was noting a delay of five to seven business days. The company's German and French e-stores, however, still show 8GB and 16GB iPhones available.

[ The heat is on Apple to produce a 3G iPhone; see related story: "RIM's BlackBerry Bold beats Apple to the 3G punch." ]

Sales representatives at four major Apple retail stores contacted by Computerworld today said that the iPhone is unavailable, not only at their own stores but across Apple. Most had no explanation why the smartphone is out of stock.

"The iPhone is sold out, company-wide," said a salesman who answered the phone at the Apple store in Braintree, Mass., just south of Boston.

"It's out of stock, Apple-wide," said a saleswoman from the Apple store in downtown Portland, Ore. "No, I don't know why," she said when asked why the iPhone was unavailable online and at retail. "All we've been told is that it's Apple-wide."

Sales representatives at the New York City store on Fifth Avenue and the San Francisco store on Stockton Street also confirmed that there were no iPhones to be had. "We're sold out," said the salesman at the New York store. "I heard that it was some kind of shipping issue."

Some of the Apple sales reps said that AT&T retail stores in the area might have iPhones in stock.

The iPhone's vanishing act has boosted talk that the 3G-enabled iPhone -- many analysts have predicted it would be announced and released next month -- is right around the corner.

Saturday, Apple-specific Web sites and blogs reported on the sold-out notices posted on Apple's U.S. and U.K. online stores. "With all the buzz surrounding the 3G model, the international rollout, and the SDK, this is just one more sign that the release of a new device is right around the corner," speculated the Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) in a post filed Saturday afternoon.

In a conference call with Wall Street analysts two weeks ago, Apple's chief operating officer, Tim Cook, acknowledged iPhone shortages, but blamed sales to buyers who planned to unlock the device. "Our U.S. stores have experienced more stock outs, or relatively more, and we believe the reason is that there are more phones being bought there with the intention of unlocking," he said at the time.

Apple officials were unavailable for comment.

Most analysts and pundits have pegged June 9, the opening day of Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) as the likely introduction of the 3G iPhone. Apple CEO Steve Jobs is expected to open the conference with his usual keynote address and could unveil a new iPhone then.

The iPhone's first sales anniversary, June 29, has been touted by others as a possible on-sale date for the 3G model.

Within the last week, several additional mobile service providers, including U.K.-based Vodafone, Telecomm Italia and Mexico-based Telefonica have announced that they had struck deals with Apple to sell the iPhone in a slew of new markets, including India, Italy, and Latin America.

Computerworld is an InfoWorld affiliate.

Google plans to release on Monday a preview version of Friend Connect, a service designed to let Web publishers add social networking features to their sites, the company said.

Friend Connect, which will be available on the Web at some point on Monday, lets publishers add social networking applications by inserting "a snippet of code" in their sites, Google said.

"We're seeing social capabilities get baked into the infrastructure of the Web. [They're] increasingly not tied to any one site, to any one source of friends, or any one type of application. We see the Web moving towards an end state where people can use any apps on any Web sites with any of their friends," said David Glazer, director of engineering at Google, during a press conference to discuss Friend Connect.

Thus, sites will be able to add features like user registration, friends invitation and message posting, as well as allow visitors to interact with existing friends in social networking sites like Facebook, Google's Orkut, Plaxo and Hi5, according to Google.

"Google Friend Connect is like giving Webmasters a saltshaker full of 'social' that they can sprinkle on their sites to add social capabilities," Glazer said.

Google's move is yet another in a recent string of data-portability efforts at tearing down the walls in social networking sites and letting users export the data and content they have stored in those sites. MySpace and Facebook took steps in that direction with announcements last week.

As the popularity of social networks keeps rising and people set up multiple profiles in such sites, they are demanding the ability to carry their data, content and connections from one site to another, so that they don't have to reenter all that information again.

At the same time, Web publishers of all sizes are eager to latch on to the craze by adding social networking features to their sites, now that a critical mass of Internet users have embraced the interaction and sharing that social applications provide.

Friend Connect makes use of open standards for authentication and authorization like OpenID and OAuth, and de facto makes any Web site a potential "container" of social applications built with Google's OpenSocial APIs, Glazer said.

"The entire Web has become a container for OpenSocial apps," he said.

Monday night, Web publishers will be able to sign up to a waiting list to get access to the Friend Connect service, but Google expects to make the service available to anyone within a matter of months, officials said.

The back-to-back unveiling of initiatives from Google, MySpace, and Facebook, with their differences and limitations, signal both progress and confusion for data portability, Gartner analyst Ray Valdes said.

"The underlying complexity is being revealed, and that's progress," Valdes said.

At this point, vendors aren't aiming for full data portability, primarily because key technical and operational issues need to be worked out, as evidenced by the painstaking but valuable work being done by the Data Portability Workgroup, Valdes said.

However, vendors are comfortable offering data availability, letting their users expose content and data to other sites but keeping the data stored in their servers, he noted. "For the moment, until other issues are solved, data availability is the most pragmatic approach," Valdes said.

As outlined by proponents, the ideal data portability scenario would be for users to have full control over their social profile data, independent of any sites.

This story was updated on May 12, 2008

Microsoft blames computer makers for some of the problems users have encountered after updating to Windows XP Service Pack 3 (SP3), according to a company support document.

The document also showed that the "endless reboot" problem some users have reported after installing XP SP3 was neither unanticipated or new; Microsoft updated the document the same day it released the service pack, and indicated that the same thing happened nearly four years ago when it rolled out Windows XP SP2.

Knowledge Base document 888372, last updated May 6, spelled out an error message that stops a PC's boot process -- and, depending on the machine's settings, may make it repeatedly reboot -- after installing SP3. The fault, said the Microsoft document, is in the Windows XP image originally installed on the PC by the computer manufacturer, or OEM.

"The problem may occur if the original Windows XP Service Pack 1 (SP1) Sysprep image is created on an Intel-processor-based computer and if the Sysprep image is then deployed on a non-Intel-processor-based computer," said Microsoft.

"Under this configuration, after the computer is upgraded to Windows XP SP2 or SP3, the Intel processor driver (Intelppm.sys) may try to load because an orphaned registry key remains from the original Sysprep image," the document continued. "This issue may also occur if the original Windows XP SP2 or Windows XP SP3 Sysprep image is created on an Intel-processor-based computer and if it is then deployed onto a non-Intel-processor-based computer. Again, the Intel processor driver (Intelppm.sys) may try to load because an orphaned registry key remains from the original Sysprep image."

A day after Microsoft added XP SP3 to Windows Update, users began reporting that their machines processors from Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) were rebooting endlessly. Many of them said that the crippled systems were from Hewlett-Packard.

"I too have an HP Pavilion with an AMD Athelon [sic] processor," said a user identified as "jrednasnh" in a message posted Saturday to a Microsoft support forum. "I find it discouraging that HP may be partially at fault and did not attempt to notify us AMD customers, nor attempt to fix the issue."

Jesper Johansson, a former program manager for security policy at Microsoft and currently an MVP (Microsoft Most Valuable Professional), worked with others to identify some of the reboot issues as involving PCs running AMD CPUs. Johansson, who said one of his HP PCs repeatedly rebooted after installing XP SP3, traded accounts with several other users on the newsgroup and summarized the results on his blog.

"The problem is that HP, and possibly other OEMs, deploy the same image to Intel-based desktops that they do to AMD-based desktops," Johansson said. "Microsoft points out in a Knowledge Base article that installing both drivers on the same computer is an unsupported configuration, putting the blame on the OEM that deploys the image. The article in question was written when the same problem occurred after installing Service Pack 2 for Windows XP." Microsoft unveiled XP SP2 in August 2004.

According to Johansson, only HP desktop models are affected. "It also appears that this is unique to their desktop image, and any HP AMD-based laptops are unaffected by the problem," he said.

As Johansson mentioned, Microsoft has dubbed the practice "unsupported" in KB888372. "We do not support using Sysprep to install an operating system from an image if the image was created by using a computer that has a different processor," said Microsoft. "For example, you cannot create a Sysprep image on a computer that has an Intel processor and deploy the image to a computer that has an AMD processor."

KB888372 instructed users how to modify the Windows registry to disable the errant Intel driver, assuming users could regain control of their PCs long enough to boot into Safe mode.

The company has also listed several other scenarios that OEMs should avoid in another support document.

Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard did not immediately respond to questions Sunday.

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Hackers now have their own social network, backed by GnuCitizen, a high-profile "ethical hacking" group.

The network, called House of Hackers, has signed up more than 1,000 members since its launch earlier this week, according to the site.

GnuCitizen set up the network in order to promote collaboration among security researchers. The site's founders said they use "hacker" in the complementary sense.

The term "should all express admiration for the work of the most skilled, creative, clever, unique, provocative, intelligent, intense, intriguing and interesting people among the human society," said GnuCitizen in a message on the House of Hackers website.

"From our perspective, a hacker is a person people express admiration for his/her work, skills, creative edge, cleverness, uniqueness, intelligence, etc," said GnuCitizen founder Petko D. Petkov in a blog post.

"We do not promote criminal activities. The network is designed to enable its members to exchange ideas with each other, communicate, form groups, elite circles and tiger/red teams, conglomerate around projects and participate in a hacker recruitment market."

Petkov said the ability to create groups on the network could be useful for setting up ad-hoc penetration testing teams. He suggested organizers could use the site's events features to test the water for planned events.

GnuCitizen is encouraging businesses to use the site to seek out security researchers for jobs or particular projects.

The network is built on Ning, a site allowing the creation of ad-hoc social networks, and programmers can create customized add-ons using the Google-backed Open Social API, meaning the add-ons are reusable on other sites.

GnuCitizen was founded in 2005 and has been credited with some high-profile security research of late, including vulnerabilities involving SNMP and BT Home Hub Wi-Fi routers.

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Sanjiv Ahuja left his role as CEO of Orange, the mobile phone and Internet access subsidiary of France Télécom, last year in order to seek a new challenge. With his new company Augere, he is now focused on rolling out broadband Internet access in parts of the world where penetration today is almost nonexistent -- and sees a need for desktop, not laptop, computers in developing countries.

"Our objective is very simple. I think there is a significant part of the world's population that is still not getting connected to the Internet. More than 90 percent of the world's countries have a broadband penetration of less than 2 percent," said Ahuja, who on Monday visited Cairo to speak at the ITU Telecom Africa 2008 conference.

In Egypt itself, only 1.5 percent of the population have broadband connections, while the figure is less than 2 percent in Russia, and only 0.3 percent in India, all countries that have moved up the development scale, according to Ahuja.

"As we go around world the penetration on a household level is still very, very low, so somebody needs to step up, and solve this on a global scale," said Ahuja.

He still doesn't want to talk in detail about what his new company Augere plans to do to change this, but believes that broadband access is directly linked to improving national prosperity, education, health and stability.

Going from a large operator to a small startup has its advantages.

"Not having a legacy of the business in your hands give you an extreme sense of freedom, agility, and focus in a small organization," he said.

Wireless is Ahuja's technology of choice for rolling out broadband.

"The advantages are speed and cost of rolling out your service. Rolling out using fixed technology is cost-prohibitive, or it would have already been done, and it hasn't," he said.

Broadband also has to be affordable for the masses.

"Ideally, you should be able to offer a basic desktop for under $300 that connects you to the Internet at a monthly rate of $10," said Ahuja.

That Ahuja favors desktop computers may come as a surprise: talk of computers for the developing world has been dominated by discussion of the One Laptop Per Child Project and its goal of building a $100 laptop. But Ahuja is convinced that users in the developing world aren't as mobile as many think, and don't want to carry an expensive product like a laptop with them all the time.

Reaching the goal needed for mass adoption may not be possible today, but he is confident for the future.

"I am very optimistic individual. The needs are very clear, and there is a latent demand," said Ahuja.

Database maker Vertica Systems is moving its technology to Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud infrastructure (EC2), hoping to score customers who want a hosted, pay-as-you-go model for data warehousing and BI (business intelligence), the company announced Monday.

Vertica's database organizes data by columns, as opposed to rows. The company and others that make columnar databases, such as Sybase and ParAccel, contend the approach is faster and better for BI-related queries because only the desired columns -- such as a customer's name or location -- can be read without having to parse through an entire table, saving bandwidth.

The company also sells the database for on-premises use and in appliance form.

It sees a market for the on-demand offering due to a number of scenarios. For example, a company might want to conduct a BI project that will only last a fixed period of time, such as revising its pricing based on competitive and market data, said Andy Ellicott, senior director of marketing.

Hedge funds, which test their trading algorithms against large sets of historical stock market data, are another potential use case, because while such entities manage vast amounts of money, they seek to maintain the lowest possible overhead, which a cloud-based approach can provide, he said.

It is also hoping to sell to SaaS (software as a service) companies that focus on analytics.

One such vendor, Sonian, has been beta-testing the on-demand version.

"Everything is working out really well," said Sonian's chief technology officer, Greg Arnette. "We don't want to be in the plumbing business any more, managing pipes and [storage area networks]. We don't have to become experts on the Vertica database," he added.

The Dedham, Mass., company started out as a hosted e-mail archiving provider, but is working on a service that will provide analysis of a company's stored content.

Sonian is still handling the task of loading data into Vertica, "but they're providing the expertise on configuring the database, optimizing it, that kind of stuff," he said.

Vertica's move is "very interesting" and positions it "as one of the front-runners in the race to bring data warehousing into the cloud," said Forrester analyst James Kobielus in an e-mail message on Friday.

Amazon's architecture also sets up Vertica "both for the midmarket (which generally doesn't use the most scalable premises-based [data warehousing] platforms) and for the surge requirements of the most demanding, high-end enterprise DW, predictive analytics and data mining jobs," Kobielus added.

Cloud-hosted database management systems (DMBS) hold "little value" to "the end-user type IT and department-level

organizations," Gartner analyst Donald Feinberg said via e-mail.

However, there is potential in the model for small third-party software companies, which could cheaply use the service to run proof-of-concept exercises, he noted.

"Another, although related to the software vendor, is when a BI app vendor puts their app on top of Vertica and sells to their clients as a package," Feinberg wrote. "They could now sell just to the end-user (bypassing IT and red tape) and install it fast with the correct resources for the end-users on EC2, assist the end-user loading data and the users are off and running."

"So it appears that Vertica may be on to something for the short term, until cloud DBMS (DaaS -- DBMS as a Service) catches on more broadly (maybe or at least two to five years out)," he added.

The on-demand offering is priced on a usage basis, beginning at $2,000 per month for managing 500 gigabytes of data. This compares to about $150,000 for a typical on-premises installation, according to the company.

Taiwanese hardware maker Micro-Star International's upcoming Wind laptop can be preordered starting from $560.

The Wind, which is expected to use Intel's upcoming 1.6GHz Atom N270 processor, is just one of an expected flood of low-cost systems based on the new chip that will be on show at the Computex exhibition in Taipei during June.

While the Atom processor  has yet to be released by Intel, online retailer Expansys has begun accepting orders for the U.K. version of the Wind running either Windows XP Home for $604 or Linux for $560. The laptops are available in three colors: white, black and pink.

The same laptops are priced at £350 ($684) and £320, respectively, on Expansys' U.K. Web site.

The Wind systems available for preorder on Expansys have a 10-inch screen with a resolution of 1,024 pixels by 768 pixels and an LED (light-emitting diode) backlight, which helps lower power consumption. The system, which weighs roughly 1 kilogram (2.2 pounds), also ships with 1GB of memory, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, a 1.3-megapixel camera, and an 80GB hard drive.

Expansys did not list pricing for a planned version of the Wind that has an 8.9-inch screen.

We started the week with Microsoft calling off the Yahoo deal (or maybe not). Then Grand Theft Auto stole the spotlight with its record-breaking sales. Along the way, we have the Webby Awards, big settlements for movie piracy, and candidates seeking to save us from the evils of Second Life. We cover it all in this week's quiz. Give yourself 10 points for each correct answer. Ready to test your news know-how? Then begin.

1. Microsoft decided it would rather switch than fight Yahoo for control of, well, Yahoo. Which of the following is NOT one of the reasons it gave for dropping its bid?

a. Yahoo's decision to outsource search ads to Google
b. Yahoo's take-it-or-leave-it price of $37 a share
c. The engineering brain drain that would follow a hostile takeover
d. Absorbing Yahoo would cause bureaucratic and logistical nightmares

Take the InfoWorld news quiz