social-networking sites

Apple showed a new version of its iLife package Tuesday at the Macworld Conference & Expo, now taking place in San Francisco. iLife is a suite of software programs included with a new Mac, and provides tools such as iPhoto, iMovie, GarageBand, iWeb and iDVD. The newest iLife requires Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard.

One of the 'Biggest Reasons' To Get a Mac

Where everyone else sees economic gloom and doom, Reid Hoffman sees opportunity. As the freshly minted CEO of LinkedIn (and its founder), he is shepherding a moneymaking tech company in battered Silicon Valley. And he anticipates more growth next year.

That is no small achievement. The social-networking site, which lets business professionals create online profiles to seek jobs and network, is adding members faster than ever despite its own recent layoffs and a management shake-up.

Are you building a business -- or thinking of starting one? Especially if you're a corporate army of one, it pays to be in the "you" business.

That means promoting yourself and telling people what you can do as a potential goods or services provider -- or an employee, for that matter.

And increasingly the online world is the place to hang your shingle with dedicated Web pages and social-networking sites like Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn.

One of the easiest and best ways to market yourself or your business is by creating a blog.

Business-networking site LinkedIn, facing more competition as other sites court business users, replaced its chief executive Wednesday with one of the company's cofounders. Reid Hoffman took over as CEO, a position that had been held by Dan Nye.

Jeff Weiner, a former Yahoo executive vice president, will become "interim president," handling day-to-day activities and overseeing all company executives.

Dr Pepper recently teamed with celebrity "doctors," such as NBA great Julius Erving (Dr. J) and Kelsey Grammer (Dr. Frasier Crane on TV's Frasier), to bolster its brand. But given its recent public relations imbroglio, what it needs now is a savvy spin doctor.

The company has been bashed online after a Nov. 25 letter from the attorney for rock band Guns N' Roses charging Dr Pepper failed to deliver a promised free soft drink for every American if the band finally released its Chinese Democracy album this year.

Do you know what your teens are doing with their tech tools? Some are having sex, according to a survey from the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy and CosmoGirl.com.

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.

Microsoft released eight security bulletins and one security advisory on Tuesday. It scored six of the bulletins critical and two important.

December's list of 28 vulnerabilities is the largest Microsoft has addressed since it first designated the second Tuesday of each month Patch Tuesday in late 2003. All the critical issues are client-side remote-code execution vulnerabilities, meaning any attacks would require user interaction -- as little as viewing a compromised Web page.

A new virus is spreading through Facebook. The Koobface -- a worm designed specifically to spread over social-networking sites -- is blasting spam messages out to Facebook members. The motive is to enable hijacking and click fraud.

Qik, the video-sharing site that clearly aspires to be the mobile YouTube, is jumping on the BlackBerry bandwagon. The company announced that it has created an alpha version of its video-sharing client for several BlackBerry models, including the Pearl 8120 and 8130, the Bold, and the Curve 8320 and 8330.