'Unlocking content to be remixed into new business value' is the driver of Web 2.0 in the enterprise, says Rod Smith, IBM VP of Emerging Internet Technologies, in this Exclusive Q&A with Jeremy Geelan on the occasion of IBM's release of a new technology created by IBM researchers, codenamed 'SMash' - short for Secure Mashup.

Outbid by Verizon Wireless in the great American airwaves auction last week, Google plunked a six-page letter on the Federal Communication Commission's desk asking the government to make the 'white spaces' - the airspace between TV channels - available for unlicensed wireless data use by mobile devices. The notion is backed by Microsoft, Intel, HP, Dell and the North American arm of Philips Electronics, a k a the White Space Coalition, and opposed by broadcasters on the theory that it's going to interfere with TV reception.

'We will have worldwide coverage but are concentrating on being number one in European blog search, both by controlling spam and working with all different languages,' said Martin Källström, CEO at Twingly, the European Internet start-up, as Twingly announced today that it is launching a spam-free blog search engine.

Douglas Merrill, Google VP of Engineering, is leaving Google to become EMI Music's new President of Digital. Merrill joined Google late in 2003 as Senior Director of Information Systems. In this capacity he led multiple strategic efforts including Google?s 2004 IPO and its related regulatory activities. He holds direct line accountability for all internal engineering and support worldwide.

Service providers that use Parallels Automation software can now easily deliver real-time spam and virus filtering, attack blocking, and e-mail traffic monitoring using a Google Apps security and compliance package. Parallels Automation is integrated with the Google Message Filtering e-mail offering, so service providers can streamline delivery of hosted services to their customers and provide automated billing and provisioning of the Google services through Parallels.

Here is a question that I have been pondering on and off for quite a while: Why do 'cool kids' choose Ruby or PHP to build websites instead of Java? I have to admit that I do not have an answer. Why do I even care? Because I am a Java developer. Like many Java developers, I get along with Java well. Not only the language itself, but the development environments (Eclipse for example), step-by-step debugging helper, wide availability of libraries and code snippets, and the readily accessible information on almost any technical question I may have on Java via Google. Last but not least, I go to JavaOne and see 10,000 people that talk and walk just like me.

Ya know, maybe it's not the economic slowdown. Google CEO Eric Schmidt said January 31 that the company was feeling no pain from any macroeconomic softening. Maybe the novelty of Google search is wearing thin because it doesn't return what people are looking for. Maybe Google should go work on its algorithms some more because comScore says US growth in Google?s click-through rate, up 25%-40% last year, which was only a few weeks ago, is now non-existent.

Yahoo has tied up with Tata subsidiary Computational Research Laboratories (CRL) to do cloud computing research. Financial terms were not disclosed. What CRL brings to the party is the fourth-fastest supercomputer in the world, a beast that Yahoo figures has 'substantially more processors than any other supercomputer currently available for cloud research' - 14,400 of them to be precise along with 28TB of memory, 140TB of disk space, a peak performance of 180 trillion calculations a second and sustained computation capacity of 120 teraflops.

This session will provide attendees with an overview of the iPhone SDK, including discussion of the App Store, Apple's planned distribution channel for SDK applications. Keep in mind that the contents of the SDK and experiences while using it are covered under NDA, so be prepared for me to talk in generics and leave out specific details that might be covered by the NDA. I am planning on providing a quick introduction to Objective-C for those attendees who may have never seen it and might be worried that it will be difficult to code in (it isn't!).

Yahoo's not the only company scrambling to avoid getting sucked up by Microsoft. Yahoo owns 39% of Alibaba Group, which in turn owns China's biggest B2B portal, and that interest would pass to Microsoft if Microsoft buys Yahoo. So now Alibaba, reportedly spooked by the specter of Microsoft's hands-on management and apparently convinced Microsoft will win the day, is in advanced talks with potential investors to buy back those shares, according to Reuters and the Wall Street Journal, both citing unnamed sources.

A reported tête-à-tête between Microsoft and Yahoo on March 10 at which Microsoft is supposed to have painted its picture of what a combined company would look like apparently hasn't advanced Microsoft's suit any - at least not at the price it's offering to pay. Yahoo Tuesday offered its rationale for rejecting Microsoft's $31-a-share bid as undervalued.

Webtide announced that it has developed a web and application server designed to operate on Google's Android mobile platform. Android is a freely downloadable open source software stack for mobile devices that includes an operating system, middleware and key applications based on Linux and Java. The port of Jetty on Android is named i-Jetty.

Google said Tuesday that it's going mobile with its Google Gears technology, the stuff that's supposed to let web-based apps run unconnected to the web, beginning with Windows Mobile 5 and 6 devices ahead of its own nascent Android platform. Same day, Microsoft came out and made a victory-over-Adobe-Flash statement saying that Nokia and its Symbian OS-based phones and Internet tablets are going to embed its Silverlight plug-in, Microsoft's Flash-competitive crossbrowser/ cross-platform approach to delivering rich media and web applications.

IBM says it's found a way to make mashups secure enough for business. Because of inherent browser insecurity, mashups aren't really viable for widespread business adoption. But what's a little thing like viability compared to the pressure of keeping up with the Joneses - in this case the consumer mashup rage. So to keep the enterprise from hurting itself - and being held hostage by some cyber crook - IBM has come up with SMash, which basically lets information from different sources talk to each other - and create the one unified view mashups are famous for - but keeps them isolated so it's harder for malicious code to inject itself into the company system.

For the past ten years application developers have been stuck with only two desktop client choices. Traditionally, they can choose either a very thin Web-client technology implemented in HTML and CSS, or a very heavyweight thick client experience implemented using traditional client/server (C/S) technologies (e.g. Java Swing, MFC). It wasn't until the introduction of RIA technologies (e.g. AJAX, Adobe Flex, Curl, and Silverlight) and widget engines (e.g. Yahoo! Widgets and Google Gadgets) that we were given more options.

Acquia has yet to price its maintenance and support subscriptions - there should be a variety of SLAs - but they're supposed to include an electronic update notification system code named Spokes for updates that have been reviewed for security and compatibility and are supported by Acquia. Acquia is currently at 12 people, expecting to be 25 by the end of the year. Its Series A money comes from Northbridge Venture Partners, Sigma Partners and O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures. According to Dries' blog, Drupal 7 should offer the ability to create, share and mashup managed content, letting Drupal be a data repository accessed by tools and web sites across the network.

'While at Google, we learned to develop products that were simple to use, free for users, and clean of annoying advertising,' says Dan Daugherty, President and CEO of rentBits, a new nationwide search engine for rentals. 'rentBits has all of these qualities and this beta release is just the beginning. We will continue to innovate so we can provide the best rental search experience for our users,' Daugherty added.

Google closed on its $3.1 billion acquisition of DoubleClick this morning a couple of hours after the European Commission, as expected, waved the hackles-raising merger through. US authorities blessed the merger in December. The EC said the merger was 'unlikely' to harm consumers either in ad serving or the intermediation of online advertising markets and so wasn't anticompetitive.

The final hurdle in the completion of its deal to buy Doubleclick has now been overcome by Google: European regulators have today cleared its $3.1BN bid. Eric Schmidt, writing in the Official Google Blog, admitted 'As with most mergers, there may be reductions in headcount' - and Google's stock rose nearly 5% as a result, up from near its 52-week low of $413 per share on Monday.

In its desperate backstroke away from Microsoft's clutches - and in case Microsoft starts its threatened proxy fight for control of the company - Yahoo! has extended its deadline for board nominations to 10 days after it announces a date for its annual shareholders meeting. Whenever that might be. The original date was March 14, just around the corner.

Google has blown a new cloud over Redmond's way to rain on Microsoft's SharePoint collaboration server - even if it has a ways to go before being recognized as a thunderhead. The cloud is called Google Sites. It's a googlized version of the JotSpot start-up's wiki widgetry that Google bought 16 months ago on undisclosed terms.

Yahoo! continues to enable the global mobile ecosystem with the unveiling of Yahoo! onePlace - a mobile content management solution. Following the company's achievements in reinventing mobile search and mobile communications, Yahoo! onePlace is designed to be an essential tool to enable consumers to better manage the wide selection of content available across the Internet.

'Google and Opera have established a valuable relationship over the years and we look forward to continued collaboration on mobile products,' said Jon von Tetzchner, CEO of Opera, as Opera today made Google the default search engine in its mobile Web browsers. 'We're excited to extend this productive relationship and we hope that the nearly 100 million people using our mobile products will agree,' he added.

Google's stock dropped 7% this morning - down to the $450s - after comScore sprung the lever on the trapdoor under its feet and reported that US paid-click growth in January was flat year-over-year and down 7.5% sequentially. Google derives most of its revenue from paid-clicks. ComScore said Yahoo's paid-clicks were up 15% and cut 8 points off of Google's market share.

By producing a popular gadget you can distribute your code to millions of users practically overnight. Most gadgets are designed to gather data from the Web and then present that data to the user. In order to enable this functionality, Google Gadgets support a rich programming model based on based on JavaScript and the Gadgets' API. Unfortunately, rich platforms tend to lead to programming errors and security issues. The user of a poorly written gadget can have their online accounts breached, Web site passwords compromised, local computer data stolen and even lose control of their computer. This presentation, via code snippets, flow diagrams and other means, discusses how to write a gadget that avoids these pitfalls.

I am always being told off by i-technologists for quoting Picasso as having said that computers are useless. But I still love his reasoning: 'Because they can only give you answers.' Picasso, like AJAXWorld Magazine, liked questions. So we thought we would share with you what some of the world's leading rich Internet application pioneers are thinking may be the next questions that we need to see answered. From that, readers can themselves infer: where is AJAX headed next?

'When you start to have companies that control the operating system, control the browsers, they really tie up the top Web sites, and can be used to manipulate stuff in various ways. I think that's unnerving.' That, according to Google Co-Founder Sergey Brin, is what might face the Internet, which has evolved from open standards, having a diversity of companies, if Microsoft is allowed to acquire Yahoo!

Microsoft today attempted to exorcize the interoperability bogeymen that have haunted it since it was first discovered to be using secret APIs 20 years ago, bogeymen that now quote European antitrust law at it and carry writs from the Court of First Instance in Luxembourg. To avoid further confrontation with the European Commission, which opened a broad investigation of Microsoft's interoperability last month, the company said it would voluntarily open up all the APIs and communications protocols in its biggest revenue producers now and forever. To be clear, it said that these are the APIs and protocols 'used by other Microsoft products.'

Microsoft and Yahoo are not negotiating a deal behind the scenes, according to what Bill Gates told the AP yesterday morning, 18 days after Microsoft made its rejected $31-a-share offer for the company. And it appears that Microsoft, whose stock has been down 12.8% since publicizing the offer, isn't prepared to up the ante - at least not yet - not at the cost of $1.4 billion for every dollar of sweetener.

'We sent them a letter and said we think that's a fair offer,' Bill Gates has been telling an Associated Press reporter, referring of course to the February 1 proposal Microsoft made to the Yahoo! board of directors to acquire the company for $44.6BN. Gates made the comments during a conference call to announce free access to Microsoft developer tools for students.

Being held for the first time on March 18, 2008 at the historic Roosevelt Hotel in New York City, AJAXWorld Security Bootcamp is a compelling, intensive, one-day, hands-on training program that will teach Web developers, Web designers, and other Web professionals how to build secure AJAX applications and demonstrate what the best practices are to mitigate security problems in AJAX apps. It is led by one of the world's foremost AJAX security experts and popular teachers, Billy Hoffman.

HP CEO Mark Hurd has joined the board of directors at Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. media conglomerate, which should give him a nice view of any possible Microsoft-avoiding tie-up between News Corp. and Yahoo considering HP's printer chief Vyomesh Joshi sits on Yahoo's board. Reuters notes that Hurd will get to see a bit of Tom Perkins now.

Is Yahoo! too large a company to force into Microsoft's ways? That's the question asked this morning by The New York Times, whose correspondents John Markoff and Matt Richtel report a Silicon Valley executive as declaring that, when it comes to overall technology mindsets, Microsoft and Yahoo! 'are completely at odds with one another.'

Whistling past the graveyard, Yahoo! went ahead Tuesday with its thin, pre-Microsoft plans of canning a thousand non-core people worldwide in an attempt to get the firm growing in the right direction. The number actually turned out to be more like 1,100 but far from what it would take to puncture its 14,300-man bloat.

The media is all atwitter at the news that Yahoo! is now seeking a rabbit hole in Rupert Murdoch's patch rather than get bought by Microsoft - at least not for the ungodly sum of $44.6 billion currently on the table. What started on the Silicon Alley Insider and TechCrunch blogs has now been picked up by leak central, er, the Wall Street Journal, which, since it's now owned by News Corp, is fortuitously positioned. Anyway, Yahoo! and News Corp. are supposedly talking about a joint venture that would see Rupert fold MySpace and some other News Corp. Internet properties into Yahoo - as well as infuse cash - in exchange for a better-than-20% stake in Yahoo, an idea that's at least as old as last year.

On Monday Rupert Murdoch was reported as assuring the financial press that News Corporation would not be making a counter-bid for Yahoo! but yesterday came new reports that discussions are taking place about integrating Yahoo! with News Corp's Internet assets. The idea, according to TechCrunch, would be to fold Fox Interactive Media, which includes MySpace, into Yahoo! along with a cash investment by News Corp. and a private equity fund, to create an entity with nearly 150 billion monthly page views.

T-Mobile has announced that it is likely to make Yahoo! oneSearch the exclusive search engine in all eleven of its European markets. The company is the twenty-sixth mobile carrier to sign a major deal with Yahoo! and displaces arch-rival Google as T-Mobile's preferred search engine.

Google, which looks like it will be teaching rivals like Symantec to mutter words like 'predatory pricing,' has slashed prices on the widgetry it got from its $625 million Postini acquisition last July and is using the new price points like a billy club to force users on to the 'cloud.'

Some of the most scared people inside Yahoo right now have got to be the open source Zimbra crowd that Yahoo acquired last September for $350 million for its Microsoft-opposing enterprise-directed e-mail and calendaring, folks who just released their webby AJAX-based Collaboration Suite (ZCS) 5.0 this week - and intend to give it a browser-based document-creating and -sharing Zimbra Desktop, called the 'world's first offline-capable Web 2.0 collaborative experience.' Somehow we suspect Microsoft may not think e-mail is 'broken' like Zimbra, a partner of Red Hat, does, but if Microsoft does acquires Yahoo and you hear a crunch, you can imagine Zimbra's back breaking.

Officially Yahoo! won't even confirm the phone call but according to what has leaked to the press, the board is supposed to meet again face-to-face all day Wednesday, ironically - and perhaps prophetically - the day before Valentine's Day. Meanwhile, indulging perhaps in a bit of 'rabbi shopping,' Yahoo! is supposed to have whistled up some more financial advice. The Financial Times says it has hired Moelis & Company, which advised billionaire Yahoo! director Ron Burkle last year in his failed attempt to acquire the Tribune newspaper group.