Today Google shared some information about its upcoming Chrome OS. First, it said there are no betas, no devices, and the operating system is a full year away from actual launch. The good news is that Google open-sourced the code for Chrome OS today. Updated! Video included.

National health IT coordinator Dr. David Blumenthal dropped a big hint about upcoming criteria for giving out e-health records grants. He advised healthcare IT managers to focus on "goals of care" rather than technology.

The stats are in. During the third quarter of 2009, the Apple iPhone 3GS was the top-selling smartphone in the U.S. Research In Motion, however, owned nearly every other spot in the top ten. Who's the real winner here?

DataSF.org is San Francisco's major foray into open and transparent government; it is the city giving its vital data back to its citizens. We talked with the city's mayor, Gavin Newsom, several members of his technology team, led by CTO Blair Adams, and some of the early developers who have already built applications around the data. We've captured all of this in a new video documentary.

The Palm Pre has been on sale at Sprint for about six months now. Its little brother, the Pixi, just hit store shelves this past weekend. Both can (already) be had for a song and a dance.

Apple spends a lot of time emphasizing what you can do with the phone, and most of that is related to the apps, not the platform or any of its built in functions. With over 100,000 apps available, whatever you want to do, "There's an app for that." Are the apps more important than the platform? Microsoft's Ray Ozzie doesn't think so.

For most modern businesses, Microsoft Office is the standard for productivity applications. So the arrival of Microsoft 2010 -- now going into beta for release next year -- is big news. But after a couple weeks of working with the new release it seems that Microsoft has done a great job -- of winning the last war.

Though the current feud between AT&T and Verizon Wireless borders on the ridiculous, it isn't stopping either company from continuing the schoolyard brawl. AT&T was dealt a blow in court today and came out swinging in response. Its own "attack ad" -- if you can call it that -- misses the mark.

Some of the best advice on being an IT executive that I ever got was from an ex-boss. Jonathan, he said, there are two types of CIOs. The first type looks into the data center, and the second looks out of the data center to interact with customers. The first type, he said, isn't nearly as useful and doesn't last nearly as long.

While OS X is targeted by a far fewer number of viruses than other operating systems, that's not stopping fraudsters from trying to hit Mac users with fraud.

From increased collaboration to business intelligence to better integration with applications, enterprise content management is evolving. Take our reader survey and let us know where you think ECM is heading.

Apple and Google have been planning to leverage the popularity of mobile devices to serve up ads to enhance their bottom lines. Now that devices are powerful enough to browse the normal web and bandwidth concerns are minimal, this looks like the perfect time to jump in in a big way.

Look up in the sky and you might see cirrus, stratus, or cumulus clouds. Similarly, cloud computing comes in multiple flavors. The one you should choose depends on, among other things, how much vendor lock-in you’re prepared to accept in exchange for banishing complexity from your IT organization.

Right smack in the middle of today's announcement of Microsoft Office 2010 was a teeny little paragraph noting that Office Mobile 2010 is already available to Windows Mobile 6.5 phones in beta form.

Atari and Cryptic Studios are going to launch a MMORPG based on the Star Trek universe in early February, and reading about it has made me rather teary-eyed for the old days of Empire.

"Who would have imagined the explosion of interest in the cloud?" asked Ray Ozzie, Microsoft chief software architect, at the opening of Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference this week in Los Angeles. Well, Ozzie foresaw it and he listened to developers on how to best position his company.

There are countless ways to manage data available to the storage manager today but most of these solutions look at data as a problem. Few take an asset view of data, understanding that it is something to be cultivated and leveraged for future use. Storage managers should do more than just manage their data, they should know it.

I've been using Movable Type as my blogging system of choice for several years now -- not just because it's open source but because it's a good program with great features. And yet the newest revision, version 5, feels like it falls far short of what could -- and needs -- to be done.

Members of the media were invited to Google's headquarters for the official unveiling of Chrome OS, the new operating system from Google. Details were few and far between, but don't expect Chrome OS to become widely available until 2010.

YouTube on Tuesday introduced YouTube Direct, a Web platform designed to help media organizations solicit, screen and rebroadcast video clips submitted by citizen journalists.

More than 15,000 people are attending the Dreamforce conference in San Francisco starting Tuesday night—good proof that Salesforce.com is fulfilling its destiny as a cloud computing platform provider. (This many people wouldn't show up for a CRM conference.) Meanwhile, down in L.A., Microsoft execs are talking to developers about building apps to run on Windows Azure. Is that the crash-boom-bang of competitive thunderclouds I hear on the horizon?

A new study from JiWire unearths some interesting bits of information regarding Wi-Fi use at airports. More than half of users tend to make more than $100,000 per year, and 75% plan to make a big-ticket purchase in the next 12 months. Does that describe you?

EMC's Avamar 5.0 and HP's DPNE bring backup with dedupe to laptops and desktops, but they each take a very different approach to backing up PCs.

Trained journalists are under increasing pressure from average citizens who are often first to take pictures, shoot video, and report on events as they unfold. Rather than pit them against one another for eyeballs, Google is unrolling YouTube Direct, a way for journalists to reach out to citizen contributors and re-broadcast their videos to regional or national audiences.

The classic Internet search model, where users type in a query and are confronted with page upon page of links ranked by someone else’s idea of relevance, is giving way to a more efficient paradigm in which results are informed by who the searcher is, who his or her friends are, where they live, and other user-centric data.

Laugh (or cry) if you want. But with each successive release of Android, and with each new iteration of Chrome -- soon to be ChromeOS -- it's looking more and more like Linux's future as any kind of mainstream product is in Google's hands. There's a lesson here.

The U.S. government's cloud computing portal, Apps.gov, may be a breakthrough in fast, efficient, and transparent IT acquisition, but that doesn't mean it's cheap. Witness the multimillion-dollar software modules available to government agencies on the site.

On Monday, Verizon Wireless officially responded to lawsuits filed against it by AT&T. Verizon calls AT&T's lawsuits "meritless," points out that the ads are factually accurate and that "the truth hurts."

As indicated previously, Microsoft has released a client for Windows Mobile 6.0 and 6.1 users giving them access to app store that WinMo 6.5 users have had access to for just over a month. Deciding on whether or not to install this is a no brainer - do it. You won't regret it.

It seems the hot Twitter news these days is that the service might be slowing in U.S. traffic growth. More importantly, is Twitter continuing to creep closer to FriendFeed's feature set?

Have you been longing for access to applications on your Windows Mobile 6.0 or 6.1 smartphone? Jealous that Windows Mobile 6.5 can and you can't? Be jealous no more, as users of WinMo 6.0 and 6.1 can download and install Microsoft Marketplace for Windows starting today.

I'm beginning to think that fears about cloud security are overblown. The reason: an intellectual framework is already in place for protecting data, applications, and connections. It's called encryption. What's evolving now, and isn't anywhere near fully baked, is a set of agreed-upon implementations and best practices. Today's post talks about some relevant and interesting work from Trend Micro and from IBM.

The Health Information Trust Alliance (HITRUST) has unveiled a new program that helps streamline how healthcare organizations report to their business associates their status of compliance to security regulations such as HIPAA and others.

The U.S.'s top e-health official urged healthcare organizations to tear down the barriers to effective exchange of e-health records in a message to healthcare providers.

As we dive deeper into the storage as a virtual machine concept we went back and re-interviewed some of the players in the storage as a virtual machine market, focusing specifically on what they provide. The first two conversations were with DataCore and HP. We will cover more suppliers as the series unfolds.

Palm CEO Jon Rubinstein recently said that Android is for "techies" and webOS (its own smartphone platform) is for "people." He also said that he thinks webOS doesn't need 80 gazillion applications to become appealing to the masses. Really?

Last week brought news about Microsoft inadvertently using open source code in one of their binary-only tools -- code that had to be redistributed with the tool itself. When this does happen, what's the best way to bring such a mistake to an offending company's attention? Is shouting about it far and wide always wise?

The onslaught of Android devices is fully under way. The latest salvo comes from Samsung, which announced the Galaxy Spica i5700 Android device. The Galaxy totes an 800MHz processor and a couple of multimedia surprises under the hood.

Oh the dangers on blogging on rumors and speculation. Every once in a while, you get it completely wrong. Contrary to what I talked about last week, it seems Samsung is not bailing on Windows Mobile. Quite the contrary - they anticipate increased volume of device powered by Microsoft's mobile platform.

Although Microsoft has been known to dabble in Open Source projects when it suits their business goals, the majority of the company's software is still proprietary and closed to public view. This includes the source to Windows and Office, of course, but it also includes most of the utilities and other support software that Microsoft makes.