Minnesota is working with Vivisimo (vivisimo.com), a leader in enterprise search, in a multi-pronged effort to improve usability and findability in state web sites and to develop a new web hosting service for state agencies. (Logo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20080626/NEW046LOGO ) The Minnesota Office of Enterprise Technology's web site will be the first to utilize the integration of Vivisimo's Velocity Search Platform(TM: 65.66, 1.96,

We take a regular look through new job postings on our associated site Web Hosting Jobs (www.webhostingjobs.com) and post a summary here in the WHIR news section incorporating some of the newest openings. Lithium Technologies (Emeryville, California) Last week, Lithium Technologies (www.lithium.com), a company that develops solutions for building online communities, posted two openings - a demand generation manager (a marketing position), and a chief systems architect. Both jobs are located in Emeryville, California. The company posted a third listing for an online moderator, which would be handled remotely.

ASP.net hosting and SQL hosting provider, DiscountASP.NET, has expanded its Open Control Panel API with the addition of APIs for DNS management. The new DNS management API is part of DiscountASP.NET's Open Control Panel Initiative, whose goal is to provide customers with maximum control over their hosting presence management.

UK web hosting provider Webhosting.uk.com (www.webhosting.uk.com) announced on Monday that it has launched new shared and reseller web hosting products based on the Windows Server 2008 platform. The server 2008 platform first launched in early 2008 to much fanfare within the hosting community, as Microsoft built many features into the platform - and the Internet Information Server 7 module - with web hosting operations in mind.

Web hosting provider, Iguana Hosting, will offer R1Soft Continuous Data Protection (CDP) for Linux and Windows to more than 35,000 clients as a solid backup solution in order to provide maximum uptime and easy access to mission-critical data. "We are constantly putting ourselves in our clients' position and keep in mind that servers are only hardware. We must provide an added-value that sets us aside from the competition

Make the Zeus Extensible Traffic Manager application delivery platform more accessible to the application development community, Zeus has launched a new ZXTM Development License and a ZXTM Plugin for the Eclipse Integrated Development Environment (www.eclipse.org), which makes it easier for developers to develop, deploy, and debug Java applications on the Zeus platform.

Data center operator and managed hosting provider Peak 10 (www.peak10.com) announced on Tuesday it has signed an agreement where it will house retail reporting services provider dunnhumbyUSA within its Cincinnati facility.

Easyspace, one of the largest web hosting and domain name providers in the UK, is now offering the popular .TEL domain extension during its General Availability launch stage. Having just complete its Sunrise and Landrush launch periods, the .TEL has proven to be a highly sought after extension, generating several thousand sales despite the premium price attached to it during those phases.

http://www.webhosting.uk.com, a provider of Shared, Reseller, VPS and Dedicated Server hosting solutions, today announced that it is now providing Windows shared as well as reseller hosting on Windows 2008 server platform. Windows Server 2008 is the most recent release of Microsoft Windows' server line of operating systems. It delivers valuable new functionality and powerful improvements to the core Windows Server operating system in the form of new web tools, virtualization technologies, security enhancements, and management utilities that help save time, reduce costs, and provide a solid foundation for information technology (IT) infrastructure.

AYKsolutions, a provider of Shared, Reseller and Dedicated hosting solutions, announced today it has begun offering the benefits of its Partner Program to all customers - benefits normally reserved only for affiliates.

The Planet, the global leader in IT hosting, today announced the general availability of its new Storage Cloud service. The company offers globally dispersed locations to meet their customers' requirements, wherever they are located around the world. Customers can choose from an on-premise local node in The Planet's Dallas D2 data center, or from locations on the East or West Coasts, Europe or Asia, through its partnership with Nirvanix. The company also offers Storage Cloud options for organizations that do not require hosting solutions.

AT&T today slashed prices on its Easy World Wide Web Services, as well as offered users more flexible pricing plans, in a move to appeal to smaller businesses

Pacific Bell today officially announced its Internet dial-up access service for the San Francisco Bay Area, Sacramento, San Diego, and Los Angeles, regions that comprise about 75 percent of the telephone company's residential customer base. Service to Stockton and Fresno is scheduled for this summer and the company projects that it will offer service to about 90 percent of all California residential and small business users by early 1997.

AT&T's endorsement yesterday of Internet telephone service came as a surprise because it could put increasing pressure on the company's flagship telecommunications business as users begin to exploit the Net for low-cost, long distance phone calls. Internet telephones, such as Quarterdeck's WebTalk and VocalTec's Internet Phone, allow long distance calls over the Internet for the price of a call to a local Internet service provider.

With many of the best .COM domains already taken, .BZ offers fresh opportunities for niche marketing to today's social consumers. Add video, chat and RSS feeds and start your own internet buzz. Now HostDomainZone.com offers the new ccTLDs - .BZ, .COM.BZ and .NET.BZ.

"We Are Toast." So warns Gartner Blog Network member Neil MacDonald in a recent post about the current trend in malware. Rather than attacking operating systems, cybercrooks are increasingly going after vulnerabilities in Web applications.

Web hosting provider Webfusion (www.webfusion.com) announced on Friday that it has partnered with affiliate marketing solution provider Commission Junction (www.cj.com) to introduce a new affiliate marketing program

Web hosting and managed IT services provider MaximumASP has added disaster recovery to its suite of offerings, it was reported recently. According to the company, the new service "provides off-site real time data replication with automatic failover" for maximum safeguard of customer data.

Web host SiteGround, recognized as one of the leaders in blogging and Open Source script hosting, has launched its own company blog, it was reported recently. According to the company, the blog will "open new opportunities for a closer interaction" with its customers and "provide ideas for further improvement" to its customer services.

Kate Craig-Wood, MD of Web and IT hosting company, Memset and recent NatWest Everywoman of the Year winner is calling on technology companies to look at who costs the most before making redundancies.