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Yahoo's Zimbra, the provider of a communications and collaboration suite that rivals Microsoft's Office and Outlook/Exchange, will make its cloud computing debut on Tuesday.Zimbra has so far relied entirely on third-party hosting partners to offer the SaaS (software-as-a-service) version of its suite.However, it is now taking advantage of Yahoo's data centers to become a hosting provider for customers in the education market that want to access the suite on demand.

New York City is touting a new weapon in its war on crime: cell phone cameras. Tipsters in New York City can now send photos and video from computers and Web-enabled cell phones and PDAs to the city's 911 and non-emergency hot lines to report crimes and quality-of-life issues such as potholes, officials announced Tuesday.

How does this relate to cloud computing? Well, there aren’t few enough standard interfaces… yet. We have at least 5 major operating systems, 4+ database types and 3 or so browsers. We have Flash, and JavaScript, and Silverlight. Incompatibilities between them reduce the working combinations slightly, but what about the different versions, and their incompatibilities? Taking just these simple, core technologies, that’s 5 x 4 x 3 x 3 = 180 different technology combinations! That’s a lot of complexity to mask over if you want to provide the same general kind of service to everyone. Look at the number of variables you have to cater for when all you’re supplying is electrons-per-second! But it is possible.

Thanks to the powerful technology that our Zimbra team built, and our involvement with the online calendaring community, we’ve been able to add some much-improved technical functionality to the new Yahoo! Calendar. Now you can better connect with your friends and family –- even those who aren’t using Yahoo! Calendar. Our new calendar is interoperable with the other popular services, including those from Apple, Microsoft, AOL, Mozilla, and Google, so you can share your upcoming plans and important dates with friends.

Subscribe to any iCalendar-based public calendar and add upcoming events and show times to your Yahoo! Calendar.

So if you’re looking to be even more connected with your friends and family and never miss an important appointment, sign up for the Yahoo! Calendar beta at http://switch.calendar.yahoo.com. We’ll be adding users from this list over the next few weeks. And check out this screencast of the new Yahoo! Calendar, narrated by our product manager Herbert Wang.

ZoooS LLC today previewed ZoooS Office, a web-based office suite that puts OpenOffice.org 3.0 in a browser, targeting enterprise, SMB, and individual users alike with a blend of software-as-a-service (SaaS) and desktop advantages.

Other key ZoooS Office implementations will include Mozilla XULRunner; Firefox, Opera, Safari as well as the new Google Chrome web browser; social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace, and Second Life; and Nintendo Wii and Sony PlayStation. Regardless of implementation, ZoooS applications run entirely on the client machine, performing all file operations locally to reduce network traffic, improve application performance, and support offline access.

Public availability of ZoooS Office is scheduled for the fourth quarter of 2008. Initially, ZoooS will deliver the Mozilla XULRunner version, a Firefox plug-in, an Opera widget, and an intranet server. ZoooS will follow up with a Vista gadget and Internet Explorer support in the first half of 2009. For more information on ZoooS, please visit www.zooos.com.

Wall Street has all but given up on Jonathan Schwartz.The chief executive of Sun Microsystems has been pushing one of the most drastic turnround strategies Silicon Valley has seen. Yet he now also has to contend with a severe economic downturn, the early stages of which have already exposed Sun's vulnerabilities: its reliance on expensive high-end equipment that does not sell well when times are hard, and its large exposure to the financial services industry.At barely $3 a share, Sun's $2.3bn stock market value is 40 per cent below its book value, and little more than 1 per cent of its value at the start of the decade. The announcement earlier this month of job cuts of up to 18 per cent of Sun's workforce has done little to change investors' minds.

I am thrilled to announce today the release of a new version of the W3C Markup Validation Service, also known as "HTML Validator". Use it online http://validator.w3.org/ .... or download it: it is Free and Open Source http://validator.w3.org/source/ The new version, 0.8.4 may sound like a very minor step from the version 0.8.3 released in August, but this new release of the W3C Markup Validator brings some very important change: in addition to checking documents against etablished standards such as HTML 4.01 and XHTML 1.0, the validator can now check documents for conformance to HTML5, thanks to the integration with the Validator.nu html5 engine.

HTML5 is still work in progress and support for this next generation of the publishing language of the World Wide Web will remain experimental. The integration of the html5 engine in the validator should provide experimentation grounds for those interested in trying on authoring in this new version of HTML, as well as a feedback channel for the group working on building a stable, open standard.

In 2006, the European Commission has started the revision of the European Interoperability Framework (EIF) and the Architecture Guidelines (AG).

The European Commission has started drafting the EIF v2.0 in close cooperation with the concerned Commission services and with the Members States as well as with the Candidate Countries and EEA Countries as observers.

A draft document from which the final EIF V2.0 will be elaborated was available for external comments till the 22nd September. The proposal for the new EIF v2.0 that has been subject to consultation, is available: [3508 Kb]

Some things are clearer with hindsight of several years. It is necessary to evolve HTML incrementally. The attempt to get the world to switch to XML, including quotes around attribute values and slashes in empty tags and namespaces all at once didn't work. The large HTML-generating public did not move, largely because the browsers didn't complain. Some large communities did shift and are enjoying the fruits of well-formed systems, but not all. It is important to maintain HTML incrementally, as well as continuing a transition to well-formed world, and developing more power in that world.

The plan is, informed by Webforms, to extend HTML forms. At the same time, there is a work item to look at how HTML forms (existing and extended) can be thought of as XForm equivalents, to allow an easy escalation path. A goal would be to have an HTML forms language which is a superset of the existing HTML language, and a subset of a XForms language wit added HTML compatibility.

Adobe Systems Google Inc.* IBM Intel Corporation Microsoft Corporation Novell* Sun Microsystems

WebKit’s core JavaScript engine just got a new interpreter, code-named SquirrelFish. SquirrelFish is fast—much faster than WebKit’s previous interpreter. Check out the numbers. On the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark, SquirrelFish is 1.6 times faster than WebKit’s previous interpreter.

Google, the industry’s newest giant, is also coming under closer scrutiny. On April 29th it emerged that America’s Justice Department is examining whether Google’s settlement with authors and publishers over its book-search service violates antitrust laws; and on May 5th the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) launched a probe to see whether Google’s sharing of two board members with Apple reduces competition between the two firms.

Similarly, antitrust lobbying is part of a broader “platform war” for IBM, which hopes thereby to keep Microsoft at bay. Among other things, IBM is a sponsor of the European Committee for Interoperable Systems (ECIS), which has many of Microsoft’s other competitors as its members and is one of the prime movers behind the new browser case. It started in late 2007 with a complaint by Opera, a Norwegian browser-maker and ECIS member. Not to be outdone, Microsoft has entered the antitrust game, too. It recently made an investment in T3, a small vendor of mainframe-like computers, which in January lodged a complaint with the European Commission, alleging that IBM kept it from competing by refusing to license mainframe software to T3’s customers. Microsoft has also lobbied American antitrust regulators to tackle Google, encouraging them to look into an online-advertising deal between the search giant and its rival, Yahoo!, which was eventually abandoned.

IBM, for its part, would appear to have little to fear. It is hard to argue, with so many different computer systems around, that mainframes still constitute a separate market—a necessary condition if IBM’s behaviour is to be judged anticompetitive.

The Open Government Data Initiative (OGDI) is an initiative led by Microsoft Public Sector Developer Evangelism team. OGDI uses the Azure Services Platform to make it easier to publish and use a wide variety of public data from government agencies. OGDI is also a free, open source ‘starter kit’ (coming soon) with code that can be used to publish data on the Internet in a Web-friendly format with easy-to-use, open API's. OGDI-based web API’s can be accessed from a variety of client technologies such as Silverlight, Flash, JavaScript, PHP, Python, Ruby, mapping web sites, etc. Whether you are a business wishing to use government data, a government developer, or a ‘citizen developer’, these open API's will enable you to build innovative applications, visualizations and mash-ups that empower people through access to government information. This site is built using the OGDI starter kit software assets and provides interactive access to some publicly-available data sets along with sample code and resources for writing applications using the OGDI API's.

  Google has given its Web search engine an injection of semantic technology, as the search leader pushes into what many consider the future of search on the Internet. Oracle White Paper - Nucleus Report: Who's ready for SMB? - read this white paper. getRelatedBoxOne("/article/09/03/24/Google_rolls_out_semantic_search_capabilities_1.html","spBoxOne") The new technology will allow Google's search engine to identify associations and concepts related to a query, improving the list of related search terms Google displays along with its results, the company announced in an official blog on Tuesday.

Google has given its Web search engine an injection of semantic technology, as the search leader pushes into what many consider the future of search on the Internet.

The new technology will allow Google's search engine to identify associations and concepts related to a query, improving the list of related search terms Google displays along with its results, the company announced in an official blog on Tuesday.