Adobe Systems

Microsoft isn't going to let Apple have all the app-store fun. On Monday, the software giant announced more details about Windows Phone 7 Series applications in its online store as it moves to get third-party developers excited about the new platform.

Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the Internet Explorer browser waters, a new threat has emerged despite Microsoft's speedy out-of-band security patch. Symantec has confirmed a new exploit for the security hole used in the recent high-profile attacks against Google and other companies. The new exploit is in the wild and IT administrators who haven't applied Thursday's emergency patch are at risk.

The new threat is not the same Trojan.Hydraq malware that was used in the recent attacks against Google.

A bruising third quarter convinced German software vendor SAP that it needed to take swift action. After license sales dropped 31 percent, the fourth straight quarterly decline, SAP started selling new kinds of contracts that are easier on customers' wallets.

While IT administrators around the world had their hands full planning to implement the largest-ever set of patches from Microsoft on Tuesday, another software maker quietly rolled out a massive fix of its own.

On what will go down in IT admin history as a day of headaches, Adobe Systems rolled out updates for Acrobat and Reader on Tuesday. The updates address 29 critical security vulnerabilities for the PDF applications, which are used across business and consumer PCs around the world.

TVs that blend video, 3-D animation, graphics and interactivity. That vision of the future of television was described by Intel Thursday during its unveiling of the Atom CE4100 media processor. The announcement was made at the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco.

The CE4100, also known by the code name Sodaville, is the company's newest system on chip. Intel executive Eric Kim said the chip provides the processing power that is "the center of the TV evolution," featuring high performance and high-resolution graphics capabilities.

The e-publishing market may be following the same steps as its relatives in the music industry as Sony announced Wednesday that it will adopt the open ePub format for its Reader e-book readers. The move could signal the beginning of a new phase of e-publishing for consumers and businesses.

Facebook is about to get Flash-ier as the result of a joint effort announced Tuesday by Adobe Systems and the popular social-networking site. The companies said the newly available Flash ActionScript 3.0 Client Library for the Facebook Platform, a free and open-source programming library, will support all Facebook application programming interfaces, including APIs for the growing network of sites that back Facebook Connect.

'Simpler Access to Facebook Data'

One of the biggest complaints about Apple's groundbreaking iPhone has been that it doesn't support Adobe's Flash for interactive animation and video. But late last week Adobe Systems CEO Shantanu Narayen said his company is working with Apple to make it happen.

"It's a hard technical challenge, and that's part of the reason that Adobe and Apple are collaborating," he told the Bloomberg News Service in an interview from the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. "The onus is on us to deliver."

Good News, Bad News

While the nation's top three automobile giants are trying to convince the government that they need a bailout, other businesses are doing what they can to stay afloat even if it means slashing thousands of positions.

Today, Sony joined the growing list of companies who have had to cut a percentage of their workforce to stay competitive. Sony announced Tuesday that it will slash 8,000 positions between now and March 2010 in its electronics business, cut operation costs, and cut inventory.

AT&T, one of the largest phone companies in the world, has fallen victim to economic turbulence. AT&T announced Thursday it will cut four percent of its workforce, or 12,000 jobs.

With 303,530 employees worldwide and $120 billion in pro-forma revenue in 2007, AT&T said the cuts are the result of a poor economy and an effort to reorganize and focus on specific businesses within the company, including wireless, broadband and video.