SAN FRANCISCO

With the stakes high in Microsoft's bid to add its search engine to the iPhone, a few words of praise by the software giant's CEO have drawn a considerable amount of attention.

"Apple's done a very nice job that allows people to monetize and commercialize their intellectual property" in the App Store, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer told a University of Washington audience last week.

Playing Bing-o

Evidence from the recent Aurora hack attacks on major American corporations suggest that many may have tightly locked virtual front doors, but no cybersecurity inside their systems, a McAfee expert warned on Wednesday. In a Security Insights blog post, Paul Kurtz, McAfee's chief technology officer, discussed his study of the December-through-February attacks on Google, Intel, Adobe Systems, and other large firms.

Jeremy Lesniak owns a small Web design firm in Randolph, Vt. He has 10 employees and hundreds of clients. Sick isn't an option.

"I have two cell phones and a pager" he said. "I have taken partial sick days or just worked from home, but I haven't had a real one in over six years."

As Apple gets ready to ship its Pads with AT&T as the exclusive U.S. 3G carrier, the wireless giant's CEO seems to be downplaying expectations by saying the tablet computer will be "largely a Wi-Fi-driven product."

The basic iPad with Wi-Fi will sell for $499, and consumers who want 3G connections will have to shell out an extra $130 and pay AT&T $30 per month for unlimited data, or $15 a month for a 250MB plan. They'll also have to wait an extra month for 3G-capable tablets.

No Strain on Network

by Manisha Verma

Last December I went on a trip to Doha - the city I had spent many year

From mayangelou.com:

Google Inc., the Internet's most profitable company, is giving $2 million to support Wikipedia, a volunteer-driven reference tool that has emerged as one of the Web's most-read sites.

The donation announced Wednesday matches the largest grant made so far to Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit group that oversees the 7-year-old Wikipedia. Ebay founder Pierre Omidyar also donated $2 million to Wikimedia six months ago through one of his investment arms.

With the exploding popularity of smartphones, wireless laptops and, if Steve Jobs has his way, tablet computers, it's fast becoming a wireless world. But the breakneck growth of all things wireless is threatening to cause a traffic jam -- of the airwaves that deliver calls, Web searches and video to those data-hungry devices.

You have to wonder whether there were any women in the room when the marketing geniuses at Apple decided to call the company's new gadget the "iPad." The jokes about feminine hygiene products have been flying since last week's debut.

"Will women send their husbands to the Apple store to buy iPads?" went one joke on Twitter. And a "MadTV" comedy sketch from several years ago about an electronic sanitary napkin called the iPad went viral on YouTube.

So how did the company come up with the product name? And how could Apple have set itself up for such obvious punch lines?