Jackson Rocco

Microsoft stepped up promotion of Bing in China with the launch of a Web services platform for mobile phones this week, a possible step toward challenging the dominance of Google and Baidu.com in the country. Bing has not caught on in China and Microsoft has done little to promote it in the country. The Microsoft portal, an effort to spur use of its services in a market crowded by local competitors, offers downloads of mobile clients for Bing and Windows Live Messenger, along with instructions on how to use Microsoft services, including Hotmail, from a mobile phone.

However, Bing, launched in June, has grown quickly in the U.S. and attracted about 9 percent of online searches there last month, according to Internet monitoring companies. Baidu and Google together account for as much as 95 percent of online searches done in China, leaving Yahoo, a range of local search engines, and any new players like Bing to compete for the remaining slice of the market. China's online search market is dominated by local player Baidu, with Google in a distant second place. The Bing mobile client lets users search for local information such as maps, restaurant locations and weather forecasts. Bing has strong potential but will face difficulty competing with Baidu and Google in the near term, said Ben Cavender, senior analyst at China Market Research Group in Shanghai. Microsoft "will continue to strengthen and expand the service scope of its mobile Internet products," the company said in a statement.

While Baidu and Google have well-established search services for free music downloads that keep Chinese users coming back, Microsoft so far has done little to localize Bing, Cavender said. Bing did not make a list of China's top 10 most-visited search engines in August, as posted on the Web site of local online traffic analyzer CR-Nielsen.

Oracle may have accumulated a vast array of products, but it has also added value and tightly integrated them, executives said during a keynote address Monday at the OpenWorld conference in San Francisco. One demo showed how Oracle has tied the Primavera project planning products it acquired last year back to its ERP (enterprise resource planning) software. Through a series of demonstrations, Oracle officials seemed intent on answering critics who say the vendor's acquisition spree has resulted in a Frankenstein monster-like mish-mash of components. Primavera business unit head Joel Koppelman showed how the integrations could be used to balance the availability of skilled workers against project timelines. "The minute you start to delay a project, they're all affected.

Another demonstration showcased a product aimed at helping fashion companies maximize their profits. What you really want to be able to do is model those changes," he said. The software uses Fusion middleware to tie together the ProfitLogic retail software Oracle acquired in 2005 with BI (business intelligence) tools and the WebCenter portal. "The pieces matter, but fitting it together is where all the value is," said Oracle president and CFO Safra Catz. The release includes 10 new "cross-industry" packs and six new packs aimed at specific verticals. Beyond the keynote and demonstrations, Oracle on Monday also announced Application Integration Architecture Release 2.5, the latest installment of its prebuilt packs for tying together processes and applications.

Not everyone at the show was buying into Oracle's middleware pitch. Representatives of ActiveVOS, which makes a product that competes with Oracle's SOA Suite, capered on street corners outside the Moscone Center wearing comical black-and-white prisoners' garb, begging passers-by to "free" them from the alleged higher cost and constraints of owning SOA Suite.

Augmented reality apps-mobile applications that can superimpose contextual digital information on top of the real environment-have carved out a very impressive niche on the iPhone 3GS. They demonstrate new and innovative uses for smartphones with a compass, a GPS, and a camera. Today, Layar has announced the release of version 2.0 for the iPhone 3GS. Unlike special purpose augmented-reality apps that tie themselves down to a particular location and a specific need, Layar lets users choose from a wide selection of 161 different augmented reality views. They've also made quite a splash on other smartphones: Google's Android platform, for example, has a beloved augmented-reality app called the Layar Reality Browser. These layers feature familiar Web services like Wikipedia, Yelp, Google local search, Qype, Brightkite, Yellowpages.com, and Twitter.

Layar was made to provide content worldwide, limited only by what each content provider is willing to offer for a given region. There are also several lesser known directory services available to find tourism hot spots in Japan, stations in the London Underground, or the closest Tim Hortons for a traditional Canadian coffee fix. You can search through layers, view content in your augmented views as a map or a list, take screenshots in the app itself and share layers with friends. For Layar 3.0, the developers also plan to add 3D capabilities for a full 3D augmented reality experience. The developers do appreciate feedback, so be sure to let them know what you think in their blog or within the swampy morass of App Store reviews.

Thanks to the, ahem, very efficient App Store approval process, no release date for the iPhone version of 3.0 has been announced, but it will be released for Android in November. Layar 2.0 can be downloaded now from the App Store for free; it requires an iPhone 3GS running iPhone OS 3.1 or later.

TLA Systems has an important new feature on its popular PCalc and PCalc Lite calculator apps for iPhone. Censorship. That feature?

And, frankly, it's about gosh-darned time. Those of us more experienced with the 8008's and heartbreaks know all too well why a calculator profanity filter is long overdue. Nothing has haunted the American people like the knowledge that parents may be sending their children to schools in which, with a press of few buttons and some crafty calculator flipping, youngsters could be exposed to numbers that vaguely resemble the word "BOOBIES." If you've never been exposed to the 5318008 flip trick, than count yourself as lucky. The new feature is simple: If an unsuspecting mathematician types in a number that might look like a tasteless word when the calculator is flipped upside-down, PCalc will "discreetly" censor that word, saving you from the horror of inflicting yourself-or others-with inadvertent smut. Discreet. See?

In a press release, TLA Systems's James Thompson emphasized the company's commitment to family-friendly calculators, stating, "We take our responsibility to protect innocent minds very seriously." Many "calculator words" have already been defined and the good people at TLA plan on increasing this ban-list over time through software updates. It has yet to be seen if TLA will eventually implement it on OS X, though flipping your iMac over might present a challenge. The profanity filter is available now on both PCalc and PCalc Lite for the iPhone. If you or someone you know is thinking about switching over to these extra-safe calculators, TLA Systems is currently offering a coupon code that's worth $9 off the price of PCalc for OS X. More information can be found on the company's website. Now if only they'd do something about that whole wretched hive of scum and villainy called "the Internet."

This new feature, if implemented into all calculators, could likely save billions of dollars in office-space productivity.

Criminals flooded several online ad networks with malicious advertisements over the weekend, causing popular Web sites such as the Drudge Report, Horoscope.com and Lyrics.com to inadvertently attack their readers, a security company said Wednesday. The attack comes just a week after the New York Times Web site was tricked into displaying a deceptive 'scareware' advertisement for fake antivirus software from scammers pretending to be ad buyers with Vonage, an Internet telephony company. The trouble started on Saturday, when the criminals somehow placed the malicious ads on networks managed by Google's DoubleClick, as well as two others: YieldManager and ValueClick's Fastclick network, according to Mary Landesman, a senior security researcher with ScanSafe. Instead of trying to trick Web surfers into buying bogus software, these ads attacked.

Sometimes, the ads would also try to exploit a previously patched flaw in Microsoft's DirectShow software, Landesman said. "The user would have seen a very brief opening of a blank pdf window and it would be at the bottom portion of their screen," she said. They would pop up a nearly invisible window in the victim's browser that contained a maliciously encoded pdf document, which included attack code that placed a variant of the Win32/Alureon Trojan horse program on the victim's computer. The Alureon Trojan is known to download additional malware and often hijack victims' search results, she said. Between Saturday and Monday, the ads accounted for 11 percent of all Web pages blocked by ScanSafe's Web filtering software, a sign that many people were being presented with the malicious ads. The pdf attacks apparently only affected victims with out-of-date versions of Adobe's Reader or Acrobat software, she added. And because the pdf pages were modified slightly every time they were displayed, most antivirus products didn't detect them.

Earlier this year criminals placed similar ads on the home page of technology trade magazine eWeek, whose ads were managed by DoubleClick. In tests, ScanSafe found that only 3 out of 41 antivirus vendors detected the malware. "To be honest, they were pretty clever in the way they carried this out," Landesman said. "They managed to infiltrate sites that enjoy very good traffic and they were able to use a mechanism for creating this pdf that caused it to be nearly completely undetected." This is not the first time Google's DoubleClick has been associated with this type of malicious advertising.

Solid-state storage earned a hot technology's badge of honor - a backlash - on Wednesday at the Diskcon conference in Santa Clara, California. Flash advocates claim they offer higher performance and greater reliability because there are no moving parts. Storage components based on NAND flash chips have recently been promoted as an alternative to spinning HDDs (hard disk drives) in netbooks, laptops, servers and enterprise storage platforms. But on Wednesday, even companies that are selling flash-based products cautioned that certain benefits may come only for certain applications or aren't here yet at all.

Workman, who helped create IBM's storage business, believes good engineering will eventually overcome flash's limitations but complained that the market today is consumed by hyperbole. "One of the claims is that because the SSD's solid-state, it's more reliable. It's "stupid" to use SSDs in a network-attached storage device that overwrites a large amount of data over and over, because of the tendency of flash chips to wear out every time data is written to them, said Mike Workman, chairman and CEO of storage equipment maker Pillar Data Systems. Bullshit. Pillar already offers flash options on its storage platforms. It's not," Workman told attendees. "I'll tell you right now, the data that I have in the lab, it should make the solid-state guys be embarrassed," he said. "The solid-state guys'll win," Workman said. "But they're not there yet." Workman's company didn't come to the conference as a rival to flash vendors.

But Workman emphasized that the new technology is just one component of an overall enterprise storage strategy. Flash chips deliver spectacular performance while in a "virgin" state, when the first bits are being written to them, but their write speed falls off dramatically within hours, as new bits are written over on the same silicon, said Esther Spanjer, Smart's director of SSD technical marketing. An executive of another seller of SSDs, flash chip vendor Smart Modular Technologies, issued her own caveats about them. Likewise, SSDs may run much faster on sequential than on random tasks, so a user's results will vary based on what kinds of loads their applications present, she said. The Storage Networking Industry Association and other organizations are working on these standards, she said.

Today, makers of flash silicon may test their products with any combination of tasks and configurations, because there are no standard benchmarks, she said. "Things are pretty much all over the map, and it can be very confusing" for makers of storage platforms that want to use flash in them, Spanjer said. A deal that Smart announced on Tuesday marked a breakthrough for a new approach to flash storage. Its controllers manage MLC (multilevel cell) flash, the high-volume, relatively inexpensive type used in consumer products such as portable media players. The company agreed to buy flash controllers from SandForce, which claims it has the technology to make flash price-competitive for a wide range of enterprise uses. Thad Omura, SandForce's vice president of marketing, told the conference that only MLC flash can compete with HDDs on cost. SLC flash stores only one bit per cell, so it packs less capacity into a given space.

Most enterprise products today use SLC (single-level cell) flash, which will never fall to the needed price levels because it's a specialized product, Omura believes. But this type is used on enterprise products because it's better-suited to both reading and writing data, and less prone to flaws that can reduce a chip's capacity over time. Smart will use the SandForce controllers in enterprise SSDs built with its MLC flash chips. SandForce's controllers are designed to manage MLC chips so they last longer. Enterprises may eventually embrace MLC flash, especially in products such as midpriced x86 servers, where buyers concentrate on price, said TrendFocus analyst John Chen, who spoke at Diskcon.

SandForce isn't alone in trying to leverage low-cost MLC silicon, with bigger vendors such as Marvell developing such controllers too, he said. But the controller's ability to prevent chip degradation will be key to flash storage, he added. "I think it's all about the controller," Chen said. The next big step will be for more vendors to qualify their flash storage products for enterprise environments, a process that should bear fruit next year, Chen said. Most of the major enterprise storage vendors have put flash offerings on the market this year, and the partnership announced last year between Intel and Hitachi Global Storage Technologies is on track to deliver its first products in the first half of next year, said Dean Amini, director of enterprise product marketing at Hitachi GST. Intel already sells flash silicon for enterprise storage. Despite these technical concerns, next year should be a big one for enterprise flash.

The companies plan to make flash products, in HDD form factors, that match the performance of Fibre Channel HDDs under any type of workload, according to Amini. The enterprise flash business is in such an early stage that the dominant provider of chips, STEC, even welcomes competitors. "The industry and the market is growing rapidly ... and I think adding another credible vendor, somebody that can pass the qualifications, will just increase the market even more," said Scott Stetzer, STEC's director of marketing for enterprise SSD products. A slide of technical goals showed they plan to offer advanced power management and MTBF (mean time between failures) of 2 million hours. Diskcon concludes on Thursday.