software

Google's bombshell announcement that it might pull up stakes in China because of cyberattacks and censorship points up a concern long overdue for higher scrutiny, security experts say.

For more than a decade, China and other nations have been ramping up state-sponsored cyberintrusions of commercial and military targets. Public outrage has been muted mainly because victimized organizations have disclosed as little as possible.

Given the craze surrounding the iPhone, Motorola Droid, Palm Pre and Nexus One, it may seem that nearly everyone has a smartphone.

But most consumers in the United States use simpler, much lower-cost phones.

According to data from the Nielsen Co., about 82 percent of cell phones in use in the United States are limited-function phones, the kind that typically sell for less than $50 or are given away with two-year service contracts.

Given the craze surrounding the iPhone, Motorola Droid, Palm Pre and Nexus One, it may seem that nearly everyone has a smartphone.

But most consumers in the United States use simpler, much lower-cost phones.

According to data from the Nielsen Co., about 82 percent of cell phones in use in the United States are limited-function phones, the kind that typically sell for less than $50 or are given away with two-year service contracts.

Just a month after launching a beta micro-blogging web site in the Chinese market, Microsoft has temporarily suspended the Twitter-like blog amid accusations that it copied code from a similar service. Plurk, a startup in China, says the software giant copied 80 percent of its code to create the Juku micro-blog.

What could be cooler than surfing the Web and watching your big-screen TV at the same time? Getting rid of your cable box, perhaps. The folks who brought you the free Boxee software that transfers streaming video, music and other media from a computer to a TV announced upgraded features this week and debuted the first piece of hardware: A little black box (of course).

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison told a Silicon Valley audience Monday that Sun Microsystems is losing about $100 million a month because of delays in Oracle's acquisition of the company. "The longer this takes, the more money Sun is going to lose, and that's not good for anybody," Ellison said, according to the Financial Times.

Microsoft is putting its weight behind a new endeavor to which the software giant has agreed to contribute $1 million. Called the CodePlex Foundation, the nonprofit organization describes its mission as enabling the exchange of code and understanding among software companies and open-source communities.

No amount of ingenuity seems able to squeeze textbooks into a credit-card-size space.

In our digital age, miniaturization rules.

This is a welcome thing -- in most cases. Squeezing two billion transistors onto a small chip? All good. Squeezing an enormous printed textbook down to iPhone-size? Not so good.

Yes, the textbook can be digitized and displayed on gadgets that students can carry everywhere. But the iPhone version is painfully limited in its usefulness.

A year ago, Roy Thompson had no use for software salespeople.

"We make money fixing your car," says the owner of Thompson's S&S Collision Repair in Sacramento. "I'm not one of these tech junkie guys."

Yet, last March Thompson accepted a 30-day free trial offer from ClaimTools Solutions. The Nanaimo, British Columbia-based software firm sent him five rugged digital cameras configured to send photos over the Internet to ClaimTools' computer servers for archiving and processing.

I am lecturing a group of 20 entrepreneurial students, and one of the segments is supposed to be on "integrated warehousing." Where can I get easy-to-understand information on this topic and how it relates to entrepreneurs?

-- B.L., Johannesburg, South Africa

"Integrated warehousing" refers to everything that goes into a warehouse operation, including inventory control, order forecasting, and order management. The two components of integrated warehousing are supply chain planning and supply chain execution.