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Google has filed at least four patent applications for technology it is building into its Chrome browser to try to make the web a more powerful foundation for applications.

Three patent applications concern Google’s Native Client, a technology for letting downloaded software modules run directly on a processor rather than more slowly through on-the-fly decoding as with the commonly used JavaScript. The fourth patent application involves O3D, a technology to let browser applications take advantage of 3D acceleration of graphics hardware.

Ultimately, Google hopes to standardize the technology so all browsers can use it, though it is not waiting for a standard. “Native Client so far is outside any standards process. We’re in discussions with other browser vendors on how to move that forward. We’d like to see all these things standardized,” said Linus Upson, engineering director for the Chrome browser and Chrome OS, in an interview in December.

Reports: Gmail to Become Hub for Social Networking? Categories:   Google Tags:   Gmail, Google

Both The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal report Monday that Google will be adding hooks to popular social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter via Gmail. While interesting, a Facebook and Twitter plugin wouldn’t exactly be game-changing. In fact, my early suspicion was that this might be a Gmail Labs plugin. In fact, this sounds very very similar to Google’s recent real-time search efforts, where Google Social Search provides real-time updates from people that you know. It’s not that far from an active search for those updates to having them pushed, now that Google has a real-time framework for those updates. It seems reasonable to assume that Google is stealing a page from startups like Threadsy, which tries to take feeds, streams, tweets, and other elements of your social networking life into one easy, manageable stream. If so, more power to Google. And that’s exactly what you’ll be giving the company if you sign on, unfortunately: the ability for Google to sniff a collection of inbound communications and updates, rather than just the Gmail and Google Reader feeds it previously only had access to.

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• Google Opens Social Search to All; Cuts Facebook Off at the Pass (readwriteweb.com)

It took a little longer than expected, but Intel officials have finally released the long-awaited “Tukwila,” the next-generation Itanium processor that offers significant advances in performance and scalability and a host of features that improve everything from virtualization capabilities to reliability.

A week after announcing that they had begun shipping Tukwila—now called the Itanium 9300 series—Intel officials on Feb. 8 officially released the processor, which had been delayed several times over the past couple of years.

However, in the end what businesses will be getting when systems powered by the new Itaniums roll out within the next three months are chips with 2 billion transistors, double the number of cores—from two to four over the current “Montecito” chips—that can run eight instruction threads each, an 800 percent improvement in interconnect bandwidth, 500 percent more memory bandwidth, and up to 700 percent more memory capacity.

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• After delays, Intel rolls out Tukwila chip (computerworld.com)

Police in the central Hubei province arrested three people suspected of running the Black Hawk Safety Net, state news agency Xinhua reported on Monday.

The Black Hawk Safety Net disseminated hacking tools and Trojans to its members, said Xinhua. The group had collected seven million yuan ($1,000,000) in membership fees from 12,000 subscribers by the time it was shut down. The group had an additional 170,000 members who had joined for free, said Xinhua.

As well as the arrests, the police also seized nine servers, five computers, a Honda Accord and 1.7 million yuan in assets.

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• China breaks up Black Hawk hacking ring (news.cnet.com)

Energized by the debut of the Apple iPad, the global tablet market is poised to move some 50 million units in 2014, according to a new report from In-Stat.

Released Monday, the research firm said the boost to the niche tablet segment also spells significant opportunities to component manufacturers.

Pointing to the iPad as an example, In-Stat said the success of Apple’s device would help inject an additional US$4.1 billion into the semiconductor industry in 2014.

In an earlier report, IDC analyst Richard Shim estimated that Apple would sell 4 million to 5 million iPad devices this year, compared to a forecasted 1.3 million tablet PCs running Microsoft Windows. Of these tablet PCs, 170,000 will be slates; the majority are expected to be convertible laptops that have touchscreens and keyboards.

IBM is rolling out the first systems based on its new Power7 processors, setting the stage for a new round of competition in the rapidly changing high-end server space.

IBM will officially unveil the four new Power7 systems at an event Feb. 8 in New York. At about the same time, at a press conference in San Francisco that also will be Webcast, officials with Intel and Hewlett-Packard are expected to officially release “Tukwila,” the much-delayed next-generation version of the Itanium processor.

All that comes as Oracle works to incorporate Sun Microsystems’ SPARC/Solaris hardware line into its business, and Intel and Advanced Micro Devices look to grab more high-end workloads with their x86 processors.

“We’re seeing three very big vendors … sharpening their elbows a bit,” Charles King, an analyst with Pund-IT Research, said in an interview.

IBM officials are looking to press their advantage, having gained 12 points of market share in the $14 billion Unix space since 2005 and more than 2,200 HP and Sun server and storage customers over the same time span.

“We view the Unix market as very, very robust and mission-critical, and with [the Power7] platform, we have a perfect spot in the market,” Scott Handy, vice president of worldwide marketing and strategy for IBM’s Power systems platform, said in an interview.

SAP CEO Leo Apotheker has resigned after he and the SAP Supervisory Board “reached a mutual agreement” not to extend Apotheker’s contract as a member of the SAP executive board, the Germany-based software and services company announced on Feb. 7.

With his resignation, the SAP Executive Board appointed two co-CEOs, Bill McDermott, head of SAP’s field organization and Jim Hagermann Snabe, head of product development, the company announced. Both men were already members of the SAP Executive board. Apotheker resigned immediately from the Executive Board as well as CEO. Apotheker has worked at SAP for more than 20 years.

Furthermore SAP appointed Vishal Sikka, chief technology officer, to the Executive Board and said that Hasso Plattner, SAP co-founder and chairman of the SAP supervisory board will “continue to play a strong role in advising” the new co-CEOs on technology and product development.

Apotheker’s resignation comes as SAP remains locked in a fierce global market share battle with Oracle over the enterprise business applications that both companies develop and sell. These applications include accounting, financial management, general ledger, human resources and others that are the operational bedrock of all large enterprises.

It also comes little more than a week after SAP announced a 12 percent non-GAAP decrease in operating income for the full year 2009. Total non-GAAP revenue for the period declined 9 percent to 10.68 Euros from 11.73 billion Euros in 2008. GAAP software revenue declined 28 percent in 2009 to 2.61 billion Euros from 3.61 billion Euros in 2008.

His departure is the latest in a series of rapid changes in the company’s senior management over the past three years. Apotheker has been SAP’s sole CEO since May 2009 when the contract of Henning Kagermann expired. He had been co-CEO with Kagermann since April 2008.

Apotheker’s appointment came in the wake of the controversial March 2007 departure of Shai Agassi, former president of SAP’s product and technology group. Agassi had been seen as a front runner to replace Kagermann. But SAP decided to extend Kagermann’s contract through April 2009 meaning that Agassi would have to wait at least another two years before he would have a shot at a co-CEO position alongside Apotheker.

At the time of Agassi’s departure, Plattner told the media that after SAP decided to extend Kagermann’s contract “It became apparent to Shai that he was not comfortable committing a long-term, 10- or 15-year period to SAP and [he] responded that I should not consider him for the co-CEO or CEO position.”

Agassi has since become founder and CEO of Better Place of Palo Alto, Calif., a startup company that provides electric vehicle networks and services.

SAP is also locked in a bruising lawsuit with Oracle over claims that a now-defunct online customer support subsidiary, TomorrowNow, illegally downloaded copyrighted Oracle product support documentation and code. TomorrowNow was founded to provide online third-party application maintenance and support for the PeopleSoft enterprise business applications that Oracle acquired in late 2004.

After several unsuccessful settlement conferences in 2009, the lawsuit is currently scheduled to go to trial in U.S. District Court in San Francisco on Nov. 1, 2010.

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• SAP CEO Resigns, Replaced 2 Co-Chief Executives (abcnews.go.com)
• Apotheker is out as SAP CEO (computerworld.com)

I know that so many of you have been a little undecided on this important subject, so this seriously significant information may be enough to sway you as to your own deeply conflicted feelings.

The majority of your fellow humans are not interested in owning an iPad.

No, I haven’t been pounding the streets and screens of this world in order to ask everyone still living and breathing after the iPad launch announcement. Instead, I have lucked upon a an article in Computerworld, which tells me of some survey work performed by online retailer Retrevo.

Retrevo, being a retailer of electronic things, possibly performed this research in order to know how many iPads it should have in stock. However, having spoken to more than 1,000 Americans, yes, perhaps even 1,001, its conclusion seems to be “not so many.”

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• Survey: Majority of people don’t want an iPad (news.cnet.com)
• iPad interest waning? So says one survey (macworld.com)

Microsoft experienced a cloud-centric week with Windows Azure, which is now generally available in 21 countries and no longer available for free. Microsoft hopes that the cloud-based platform and its application-building tools for developers will allow it to gain market share in the cloud computing arena, where it faces strong competition from the likes of Google and Amazon. In addition to Azure, Microsoft received some good news on the Windows 7 front, with a new report from Net Applications showing a rising rate of adoption for the new operating system. However, Microsoft continues to face some difficulties in mobile, with the rumor mill suggesting that the company may try to introduce a branded smartphone later this month.

Although Microsoft has traditionally earned the substantial bulk of its revenues from desktop-centric products such as its Windows operating system and Office, the company has also been constructing new cloud-based software as a way of creating a viable future. To that end, Microsoft announced on Feb. 1 that its Windows Azure platform, a competitor in the cloud computing space increasingly crowded by the likes of Amazon and Google, will be made generally available in 21 countries.

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• Microsoft, Azure and 2010 (robbiz1978.blogspot.com)

Google Enterprise President Dave Girouard said the company will release a version of Google Voice for businesses, roll out Google Wave to all users who want it, and deliver as many as 200 small features to Google Apps in 2010.  

Google Apps is a suite of Web-based collaboration applications Google hosts on its servers and provisions to users for free and in a premier edition for $50 per user, per year. More than than 2 million business customers use the suite of hosted Gmail, Google Docs, Google Sites and other apps.

Google expects to redouble its efforts to combat Microsoft and IBM, whose on-premise collaboration software sit on the servers of hundreds of millions of enterprise customers. Microsoft and IBM moved aggressively against Google Apps in 2009 by rolling out their own collaboration apps that leverage the Web-based cloud computing model.

Girouard told eWEEK that his team added 100 discrete features to the Google Apps suite in 2009, and he expects this number to double in 2010, noting “there will be a steady stream of new capabilities brought to the cloud.”

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• Google bringing on third parties to boost apps (ecombizcenter.blogspot.com)