Linux

Google on Monday announced its latest social-web acquisition: Picnik. A complement to Google's Picasa and a partner with services like Yahoo's Flickr and Photobucket, Picnik lets users edit photos in the browser. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Brian Axe, a product management director at Google, noted the rise in people sharing and storing photos online. In addition to photo-sharing sites, Facebook and MySpace are also driving traffic to online photos within their social-networking communities. In fact, Facebook leads the photo-sharing market in the United States and worldwide.

Mobile-phone sales worldwide headed up at the end of last year, according to a new report from industry research firm Gartner. Sales in the fourth quarter posted a 8.3 percent increase compared to a year ago, although overall 2009 sales dropped 0.9 percent.

Gartner said the drivers pushing up sales are smartphones and low-end devices. Smartphone sales, said Gartner Research Director Carolina Milanesi, "continued their strong growth in the fourth quarter of 2009," up 41.1 percent over 2008 to 53.8 million units. For all of 2009, smartphone sales were up 23.8 percent.

Intel and Nokia are combining their Moblin and Maemo operating systems to create a unified Linux-based platform that will run on a wide range of mobile computing devices, including advanced cellular handsets, netbooks, tablet computers, TV sets, and in-vehicle infotainment systems. Called MeeGo, the new open-source platform is expected to launch on next-generation devices from Nokia and perhaps other vendors in the second half of this year.

Mozilla released an update Thursday to its popular Firefox browser. According to the Mozilla Foundation, the new version 3.6 -- the latest of what it unabashedly calls "The World's Best Browser" -- offers better performance, better security, and HTML5 support.

This is the first update to the free browser since early summer. Other new features include "browser skins" called Personas, and support for full-screen video and the open-source Web Open Font Format (WOFF).

Windows, Mac, Linux

At a time when everything -- even Bluetooth headsets -- is becoming a platform for third-party applications, Amazon.com has decided to make its Kindle e-reader part of the crowd. On Thursday, the online retail giant said it's encouraging developers to build and upload content to the Kindle Store and promised a Kindle software development kit (SDK) soon.

Dear Action Line: How do I keep track of all the computer software vulnerabilities floating around the Internet? I can't really trust the sellers to keep me informed of their latest glitches and don't see it in the newspaper or on TV. -- H.E., Tulsa.

Two sources of "cyber security news" are US-CERT and Help Net Security.

If a new product unveiled this week by Freescale Semiconductor is any indication, 2010 could be "the year of the tablet computer." Just in time for the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) opening Thursday in Las Vegas, the company has launched a seven-inch touchscreen tablet computer that it described as "the future of the smartbook category."

Fifteen months ago, Google introduced its Chrome browser promising speed, stability and security. Google also amped up the browser wars with established players like Microsoft's Internet Explorer, Mozilla's Firefox, and Apple's Safari. The latest monthly numbers show Google is making progress in its quest to become the browser of choice.

Ubuntu strikes many people in the western world as an odd name for an operating system. They may not know that in the African languages of Zulu and Xhosa the word means roughly "humanity towards others."

It's a name that sums up the concept behind the Linux distribution known as Ubuntu -- especially since it was South African entrepreneur Mark Shuttleworth, one of the key financial backers of its development, who selected it.

Mozilla is pushing back deadlines for new versions of Firefox, calculating that taking a little more time to deliver new software will be worth the risk.

Unlike in years past, when Firefox was the only serious, free alternative to Microsoft's Internet Explorer, the browser landscape is especially crowded these days, and browsers that fall too far behind the upgrade race risk losing substantial market share.