real time

AOL purchased Bebo, a social-media Web site, for $850 million in March. Now Bebo is looking to gain market share against rivals Facebook and MySpace by making it easier to manage communications.

AOL on Wednesday said Bebo is now giving users a one-stop "social inbox" that combines e-mail, social networking, and media recommendations in a single interface.

With video and other rich media growing by leaps and bounds on the Internet and in corporate networks, Cisco has decided it's time to optimize. On Monday, the San Jose, Calif.-based company introduced new technologies and solutions it said will better enable "medianets" in home networks, businesses and through Internet service providers.

The company said "data-based communications are being replaced by video and rich media," and this is straining networks originally designed primarily for data.

'Immersive New Experiences'

Netflix on Monday made announcements that favored both Microsoft and Apple and opened up a new audience for its streaming video service.

First, Netflix has started deploying Microsoft Silverlight to enhance the instant-watching component of its service. Second, that move opens the door for subscribers to begin watching movies and TV episodes instantly on Intel-based Apple Macintosh computers.

IBM is getting in the cloud. After a string of announcements over the past few weeks from Citrix, Red Hat, VMware, Cisco and Hewlett-Packard, Big Blue is launching an initiative to extend its traditional software delivery model toward a mix of on-premise and cloud-computing applications with new software, services and technical resources for clients and independent software vendors (ISVs).

Rugged, small and ultra-mobile. That could be the description of a unit of miniature commandos, or Panasonic's new Toughbook CF-U1.

The CF-U1 is the first ultra-mobile PC (UMPC) with the new low-power Intel Atom processor in this line of handheld computers that prides itself on being more rugged than the other guys.

Panasonic's Firsts

A new company has launched an alpha version of a platform that can show the location-based trends of consumers in real time. New York City-based Sense Networks publicly announced itself as a company Monday -- along with its patent-pending software platform, Macrosense, and the platform's first application: a real-time social-navigation and "nightlife-discovery application" called Citysense.

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