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Looking to alleviate growing concerns from privacy advocates around the globe, Google has launched a new service that's designed to show its users how much the search giant knows about their individual online activities. Dubbed Dashboard, the service provides information about the several Google products the account-holder might use, from which YouTube videos have been viewed to details of their Gmail conversations.

The search history tab, for example, shows the last several queries performed from that Google account. Users can simply peruse the information, adjust their privacy settings or delete some of their stored data. Google hopes that by consolidating information relative to their services in a single place people will also rediscover accounts that they had forgotten about -- I for one just closed an Orkut account that was never used.

The new service should provide users with greater transparency and control over their data. However, while much of the concern about Google's data storage practices revolves around how and what exactly the company does to analyze and profit from user information, Dashboard offers little insight into that. More details on Google Dashboard can be found in a blog entry here.

Last month, Netflix announced that they'd be adding a new piece of hardware to the growing list of gadgets that support Netflix streaming. That device was none other than the PlayStation 3, a suitable choice for growth given that Netflix is already supported on the Xbox 360. The only really surprising aspect of the whole affair was the timeline Netflix put forth, and as of tomorrow many PS3 owners who are also Netflix subscribers will be receiving the installation disc to make this all possible.

If you're a Netflix subscriber and asked for a disc, Netflix has already mailed them out, and will get into most people's hands by tomorrow. The PS3 will then join the Xbox 360, the Roku, TiVo DVRs, some standalone Blu-ray players and of course the PC as devices which can access streaming video through Netflix.

Netflix claimed recently that nearly half of their subscribers have used the streaming service within the past three months. That's a substantial amount, which is good news for those that pay for the service -- it means that Netflix will no doubt have a keen interest in expanding it.

Though the online movie market is still arguably in its infancy, Netflix clearly has a huge advantage over existing and potential competitors, such as Amazon and Hulu.

October 2009's browser stats are in, and while Microsoft's Internet Explorer still lead the pack, IE6 has finally been surpassed by Firefox. Internet Explorer continued its descent, losing 1.07% browser share (from 65.71% to 64.64%), Firefox's share grew .32%, from 23.75% to 24.07%, Safari's share rose .18% to 4.42%, and Chrome furthered its lead on Opera, with the former gaining .41% (from 3.17% to 3.58%) and the latter declining .02% (from 2.19% to 2.17%).


IE6 is still accounted for some 23.3% of total Internet Explorer usage -- more than any other version. IE7 claimed 18.16%, IE8 18.12% and IE8 compatibility mode had 2.42%. Firefox 3.5 has taken off, accounting for 13.9% of all Firefox use, version 3.0 was attributed with 8.79%, and Firefox 2.0 only held a 1.14% sliver. Safari 4.0 (3.52%) and Chrome 3.0 (3.14%) are almost entirely responsible for their individual shares.

BitTorrent Inc. is preparing to launch a redesigned implementation of the BitTorrent protocol that could benefit both ISPs and users. Internet providers have long been interested in having a tighter grasp on bandwidth consumption, so heavy users of P2P networks are a natural enemy. Many providers throttle BitTorrent connections by arguing that they affect the speed of other traffic.

Recognizing this, BitTorrent Inc. has been working on a solution that should please both the throttlers and the throttlees. BitTorrent 2.0 -- or "uTP" -- supposedly senses congestion by calculating the time it takes for packets to reach their destination. If a major delay is detected, the protocol automatically adjusts upload or download speeds.

This new feature is present in uTorrent v2.0 beta, and according to BitTorrent VP of product management Simon Morris, a couple hundred thousand people are already using the client. Would you be ok with running a uTP-enabled torrent client, and do you think this will get service providers off the backs of heavy downloaders?

Facebook has been awarded $711 million in damages against spammer Sanford Wallace for bombarding the social networking with phony wall posts and messages. The so-called “Spam King” was sued in February along with Adam Arzoomanian and Scott Shaw for allegedly obtaining login credentials for other users' accounts, and sending out links to phishing sites and other websites that paid spammers for referrals.

While Facebook isn't expecting to receive the full amount of the massive award, the company says they'll work hard to get everything they can and hope this will serve as a deterrent to all spammers. In addition to the damages, Judge Jeremy Fogel of U.S. District Court in Northern California's San Jose division referred Wallace for prosecution of criminal contempt of court, which means he could face jail time.

This isn't the first time Wallace has been targeted and fined. In May 2008, he was found guilty of violating the CAN-SPAM act and was ordered to pay $230 million for spamming and phishing on MySpace. Wallace was also hit with a nice $4 million fine from the FTC in 2006 and has faced numerous other suits in between.

Microsoft and Yahoo have postponed finalizing their search deal, according to an October 28 filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The companies intended to complete the deal by October 27, but have apparently run into some issues. "Given the complex nature of the transaction, there remain some details to be finalized," said the filing, adding that both parties are working as quickly as possible to reach agreements, and have made good progress to date.

The pending deal was first announced in July, and will see Microsoft's Bing as the exclusive search provider for Yahoo's sites. While a delay may seem like bad news, Yahoo and Microsoft have plenty of time to sort things out. An initial roll-out isn't slated until next year at some point, and it has been said that full implementation won't occur until at least 24 months after regulatory approval. The companies are now looking to close the deal by early 2010.

With the holiday shopping season almost underway, Amazon has launched a new payment system it hopes will make it simpler for customers to make online purchases on partner sites. The PayPhrase service works by keeping credit card information, shipping address and shipping preferences on record, and letting online shoppers invoke this information via a phrase and four-digit PIN of their own choosing.

While having to remember multiple customized phrases instead of just entering card numbers seems overly complicated, Amazon believes it will actually make your life easier and online shopping more flexible. For starters, it will allow users buy items without having to give critical information to third-party sites, while eliminating a few steps from the check out process -- you just need to click on the PayPhrase button, enter the phrase and four-digit PIN, and upon confirmation the purchase is automatically sent to the associated address.

PayPhrase also allows parents to set monthly allowances and preview and approve purchases for their credit card-less kids. It supports subscription payments and charity donations as well. For merchants, the obvious advantage is being able to incorporate Amazon’s proven checkout system into their own sites. The feature currently works for U.S. users with both Amazon and Amazon partner sites like Buy.com and J&R Electronics.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers -- ICANN for short -- is reportedly in the final stages of a plan that will allow the use of Web addresses with non-Latin characters. First approved last year, the plan will allow for domain names to be written in Asian, Arabic and other characters from various languages.

The group intends to finish the plans on Friday and said, "This is the biggest change technically to the Internet since it was invented 40 years ago." The new concept will roll out sometime in the middle of 2010, but applications for non-Latin domain names will be open next month. ICANN president Rod Beckstrom noted that of today's 1.6 billion Internet users, more than half use languages that have scripts which are not Latin-based.

Along with the multilingual web addresses, ICANN says that addresses ending in ".bank" will be reserved for authorized banks.

Google Voice is a free service that lets users combine work, home, mobile and any other phone under a single number for all of their incoming and outgoing communications. Among its highlights are free SMS messages and cheap long distance calls, as well as automated voicemail transcriptions, conference calling, and advanced call screening features.

The service has been getting plenty of buzz around the web, and rightly so. Its main drawback is that signing up for an account required you to pick a new phone number, and then pass that number around to everyone who’s likely to call you in order for it to be effective. That is no longer the case, however, as Google has now enabled users to keep their existing phone numbers and get some of the features Google Voice offers.

Going for this "lite" version will basically give you access to international calling and Google’s voicemail service -- including the ability to have them transcribed and placed online for later review or sharing with others. Meanwhile those using the Google-provided number will retain the full array of features that come with the service. The company has published a help page explaining the differences between the two options.

The service is still not widely available to the public. If you're not yet using Google Voice, you can request access here or ask a friend with a Google Voice account to send you an invitation.

A few months ago it was revealed that Yahoo had sealed the fate of GeoCities, one of the pioneers of the emerging Internet years ago. Fifteen years of service came to a halt when Yahoo told everyone still using the service that it would be shutting down, encouraging them to move on to something better. Now, true to their word, Yahoo has finally pulled the plug on the free web-hosting service. Where the Geocities homepage once stood, Yahoo has substitute a placeholder that confirms today as the final day for service.

The shutdown date has been available for some time, giving anyone who was still relying on the service a chance to fetch any data they wanted and make plans to move on. There's no mention of just how many people still used the service, though I imagine it wasn't very many. Numbers aside, there's still a feeling of nostalgia I get when thinking about GeoCities. For many of us, it was one of the most common first experiences on the Internet, and was one of the first services that ever tried to cater to neophyte web users who wanted to make a name for themselves.

Yahoo is offering to migrate any existing users over to their hosted services. Their disposal of GeoCities is part of their greater plan to improve company profits, which has been an important concern after a series of failed mergers and service cuts.

Nine million PlayStation 3 owners in the United States will now have the option of streaming movies and TV shows from Netflix's online catalog as long as they are subscribers, of course. Just last week we reported that Netflix enjoyed of strong Q3 financials and that a non-US streaming service was being planned for 2010. The company claims it has over 11 million subscribers in the US.

Although the "Watch Instantly" streaming service got off to a slow start with a very limited library, most recently the company stated that 42% of its subscribers had used the streaming service in the last quarter. In addition to the PC, the PS3 joins the leagues of other consumer electronics devices that already supported Netflix's service including Microsoft's Xbox 360, Roku set-top boxes, TiVo DVRs, and a number of Blu-ray players.

The PS3 Netflix application is expected to become available next month.

During the recent OnScreen Media Summit, News Corp. exec Chase Carey made it known that users of Hulu can expect to pony up for some content by next year. "I think a free model is a very difficult way to capture the value of our content," Carey said.

He added, "I think what we need to do is deliver that content to consumers in a way where they will appreciate the value...Hulu concurs with that, it needs to evolve to have a meaningful subscription model as part of its business." Carey was later asked when Hulu would begin charging, to which he replied that there was no concrete timeframe, but that 2010 seemed likely.


While it seems inevitable that Hulu will adopt some form of subscription model, Carey and others suggest that not all content will be behind a pay wall -- which could indicate some form of tiered access. One thing is certain though, the majority of Hulu's appeal stems from the fact that it is ad-supported, and otherwise free.

Will you resort to some other method of obtaining content for free (such as torrents) if Hulu starts charging? Will another service rise in Hulu's place?

Mozilla has announced a new open-source, experimental communication platform called Raindrop. Built around the idea that "email isn’t fun anymore," the service is meant to act as a mini Web server to fetch your conversations from different sources (email, social networks, blogs and more) and then intelligently sort them so that personal messages "bubble up" while minor messages and notifications are pushed to the sidelines.

The idea is to separate emails from people you actually know or conversations in blogs and social networks you may want to participate in from, say, online promotions, countless newsletters and Facebook notifications.

It shares some similarities with Google Wave in its attempt to re-imagine web communications from the ground up and the ability to extend functionality through an open API -- thus many are already calling it a competitor. However, from what I can understand looking at this video, Raindrop is more about streamlining conversations and making sense of the huge influx of messages coming our way, whereas Google Wave seems to focus more on facilitating real-time collaboration within a (preferably modest-sized) group of people.

Both products are still at a very early stage so it will be interesting to see what parallels might emerge between the two besides using modern JavaScript libraries and CSS. For now Raindrop is only available to developers, but if you know your way around Python, you can download the code to start tinkering with it.

Update: In a blog post, Google also announced an agreement with Twitter that will also include real-time updates from the micro-blogging service in Google's search results. Google says it is looking to launch a tweet-filled search product in the coming months.

Original story: Microsoft has reportedly agreed to a deal that will include real-time updates from Twitter and Facebook in Bing's search results. The non-exclusive arrangement may pose a threat to Google, which dominates the search market. For the first time, data will be available through Bing that is not present in Google's search results -- that may change, however. Both Twitter and Facebook are supposedly talking with Google to arrange a similar deal.

According to AllThingsD the integration won't occur for a few weeks -- possibly months. In the meantime, Redmond launched a beta page today, which shows popular topics on Twitter, and Facebook update feeds are to be added at a later date. During a demonstration, the latest incarnation of the company's search engine was called "Bing Wave 2," and was said to be about real-time information.

When asked whether the real-time Twitter feed would influence actual Bing results, Microsoft's vice president of online services, Qi Lu, said "This is just the beginning. There's a lot of signal from Twitter, but the signal is still evolving. We can use them to augment today’s search experience, but it’s very early to say what we want to do with this." Lu also hinted at other possible deals with Twitter.

Google is reportedly on the verge of launching a new search product rumored to be called "OneBox" that will better organize results around music artists with background information, song previews, graphics, videos and more. The company will not become a music retailer or host any content itself, however, but rather stream songs from Lala.com, MySpace-owned iLike.com and other services.

Google’s music search service is expected to be officially announced next week and will include music from all four major labels. Further details remain sketchy at this point. As far as I can tell, Google will just be making it easier to find music that's legally available elsewhere on the web (and probably make some revenue-sharing deals) instead of directly competing with Apple’s iTunes and similar services -- sort of like Yahoo has been doing with RealNetworks’ Rhapsody.

Regardless, the idea sounds like an important (if not late) step into music for Google that should help it harness more traffic from music fans looking for information on artists.

Google reported its third quarter earnings this week, marking the search giant's largest-ever profit. Google's quarterly net income rose 27% to $1.64 billion ($5.13 per share) from $1.29 billion ($4.06 a share) a year ago, beating analyst's expectations. Revenue climbed 7% to $5.94 billion -- 53% of which came from outside the US.

The company's sales rose 7% to $5.94 billion, hinting at a growth in demand for online advertising, which many see as a sign of economic recovery. Google's CEO, Eric Schmidt, offered his take on the economy saying, "While there is a lot of uncertainty about the pace of economic recovery, we believe the worst of the recession is behind us and now feel confident about investing heavily in our future."

Being at the heart of the Internet's largest advertising network (and the Web itself), Google's search engine is often considered a barometer for e-commerce. The company's number of paid clicks (including those on Google and partner sites), rose 4% on quarter, and 14% on year. The average amount paid per click increased by about 5% from the previous quarter, but was down 6% from last year.

Amazon has introduced a new same-day delivery service for customers in select cities and areas. The e-commerce company will offer their new "Local Express Delivery" option to customers in Baltimore, Boston, Las Vegas, New York, Philadelphia, Seattle and Washington, as well as some surrounding areas. It will expand to Chicago, Indianapolis, and Phoenix in the coming months.

Naturally, this comes at a cost. Amazon Prime members (those who pay $79 per year to receive unlimited two-day shipping), will have to pay $5.99 per item for the service. Regular old non-Prime customers can expect to pay $15 or more, and can view a full rate chart here. Along with the additional expense, all customers must place their orders by a defined cutoff time, which ranges from 10AM to 1PM depending on the city -- regardless of membership status.

Amazon has also expanded its Saturday Delivery options, which means that items ordered with two-day shipping before the cutoff time Thursday will be delivered on Saturday instead of Monday. This is an extension of the standard two-day option, making it free for Prime members, and the usual price for everyone else. Saturday Delivery is also available for orders placed before the cutoff on Fridays at a cost of $6.99 per item for Prime members, and other customers will have to pay $3 on top of standard overnight shipping rates.

It probably won't come as a surprise that Google is attributed with being the single greatest source of Internet traffic on Earth. The company reportedly accounts for a whopping 6% of all Internet traffic -- much of which comes from its popular video sharing site YouTube. What is surprising, however, is how consolidated the Web's traffic has become.

Looking back five years, Internet traffic was distributed among tens of thousands of networks, and two years ago, 15,000 networks accounted for about 50% of traffic. Today, only 150 networks control some 50% of all online traffic according to a recent report by Arbor Networks, and as few as 30 companies like Facebook, Microsoft and Google are responsible for 30% of traffic.

Another interesting -- and somewhat less scary -- statistic, is that P2P traffic has dropped to 18% from a high of 40%, which mostly due to media streaming sites like Hulu and YouTube. In fact, video accounts for as much as 20% of all Web traffic. Internet traffic in general is about 52% Web-based (up 10% from 2007), with the remaining traffic coming from email and private networks.

Where do you think our beloved dispenser of pornography and advertisements will be in another two to five years?

Gmail has introduced a new Labs feature that may spare you the embarrassment of sending a message to the wrong contact. Fittingly named "Got the wrong Bob?" the new Labs item tries to identify when you've accidentally included the wrong person in a group email, and notifies you prior to sending the message.

In a blog post, Google explained that if you normally email Bob Smith together with Tim and Angela, but happen to add Bob Jones instead, you'll be warned. While the feature only works if you're emailing more than two contacts at once, it can be paired with other embarrassment-saving Gmail Labs features like Undo Send to prevent email mishaps.


Enabling the new "Got the wrong Bob?" Labs item is a piece of cake. Log in to your Gmail account, click Settings at the top right of your screen, click on the Labs section, and toggle Enable next to the feature (which is located a little over 3/4 down the page). Be sure to check out the other Gmail Labs features while you're there, or take a look at our favorites here.

Google has slipped an updated feature into the ever-growing Google Docs platform, with the introduction of folder sharing today. Though folders were initially included in Google Docs as an afterthought, there has been at least some demand by users to share entire folders, rather than having to share each file individually. If you have an office that relies heavily on Google Docs, it's easy to see why that would be advantageous.

In addition to having just the folder sharing, there is also the added side benefit of better security. The folder sharing functionality supports individual file permissions for documents inside, making it trivial to change permissions on a batch of files. Other additions to Google Docs today include progress meters for files when uploading batches.

All of this goes back to Google attempting to offer a full cloud-computing environment, regardless of context. Not everyone needs servers in the cloud, but almost everyone could use office environments in the cloud -- or least Google hopes so.

With over 300 million users, Facebook isn't lacking in popularity, but there is one domain where it isn't loved or appreciated: the workplace. The site's very nature makes it easy to access from virtually anywhere -- and that includes your workstation. That has earned services like Facebook, MySpace and Twitter a bad reputation as a time waster, with upwards of 54% of companies reportedly banning them already.

The cited reasons vary, but all revolve around lost productivity. Of those that don't prohibit use of social networking sites, a substantial portion allow limited use, such as for business reasons only or "limited personal use." Altogether, only 10% of a relatively large pool of CIO's said they allow unrestricted access to social networking sites. How long will that 10% last?

There are issues that go beyond the impact on productivity though, as social networking sites are being identified as security risks. Network administrators worry that a user could infect a machine through careless browsing. That is certainly not limited to social networking sites, but the concern arises given their sheer size, thus making them a target. What's worse is that users typically trust sites like Facebook and that means they are more likely to become victims of malicious acts while browsing them.

We recently covered comScore's report, which said that Google's August 2009 views totaled over 10 billion, accounting for a fat 39.6% of the Internet videos watched that month -- or nearly 20 times the number served by its nearest competitor Microsoft, which only showed 547 million videos.

Unsurprisingly, YouTube made up about 99% of that 10 billion, but the video sharing site says it is much larger than detailed by comScore. YouTube has since disclosed more accurate -- and astronomical -- viewership figures. YouTube says that it serves well over 1 billion videos each day, or more than 30 billion per month.

That's over three times the size suggested by comScore, though, the research firm's figures were not exactly wrong. The view counts released by comScore were only for the US, whereas YouTube's posted figures are global. Note the loose wording, too: "well over 1 billion" -- I am afraid to know precisely what the numbers are.

If you're anything like me, drawing a few stick figures is about the extent of your artistic ability, but what if a few mouse clicks could transform those doodles into an image your mom would hang on the refrigerator? PhotoSketch, the project of a group of Chinese students, can do precisely that.

It's almost unbelievable, but PhotoSketch takes a loosely drawn sketch with text labels and scours the Internet for matching images. When it finds them, PhotoSketch uses an advanced blending algorithm to analyze each element and stitch everything together. The resulting pictures are not exactly perfect, but that takes nothing away from the cool-factor of PhotoSketch.

You can watch PhotoSketch in action after the jump, and a website with the source code and more information can be found here. According to that page, an online demo is in the works, which should be incredibly fun to tinker with.

In addition to the 10,000-plus Windows Live Hotmail account names and passwords posted online yesterday, another 20,000 email accounts have been exposed, including those from Gmail, Yahoo, AOL, Comcast, and Earthlink. According to the BBC, over 30,000 accounts have now been compromised across the mail services.

A Google spokesperson told CNET that it recently became aware of the industry-wide phishing scheme through which hackers gained user credentials for webmail accounts. Google responded immediately by forcing a password reset on the 500 or so affected users. The company is also prepared to reset the passwords of any other newly compromised accounts.

Some of the accounts exposed online are old or unused, but many are genuine. All of the companies involved are recommending that users promptly and routinely change their passwords and security questions, and to exercise extreme caution when opening unsolicited attachments and links.

Moving forward with a plan to crack down on blogger kickbacks, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission has officially issued an update to its guidelines regarding truth in advertising and in product endorsement that will require those reviewing products online to clearly disclose any freebies or payments they get from concerning companies. Penalties include up to $11,000 in fines per violation.

Although many question whether the FTC should have the authority to regulate what they consider to be individuals' free expression, the commission argues that this is just an extension of previously established rules to curb the use of deception in the marketplace. Ultimately they believe it will help consumers make well informed buying decisions when researching products online.

The FTC will obviously have a hard time enforcing these regulations -- after all, anyone with an Internet connection can set up a blog nowadays. Thus it's possible that their main focus will be on shady online marketers specializing in blogger ads rather than individual bloggers.

This marks the first time that the agency's "Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising" document has been updated since 1980, and extends to other areas as well such as celebrity endorsements "outside the context of traditional ads." The changes will come into effect on December 1.

Update: Microsoft has confirmed Neowin's initial report, saying, "several thousand Windows Live Hotmail customer's credentials were exposed on a third-party site due to a likely phishing scheme." Redmond has determined that its internal data has not been breached, and it is working to help users regain control of their accounts.

Original: Neowin is reporting that thousands of Windows Live Hotmail passwords may have been compromised in a "hack" or phishing scheme. The site caught word of an anonymous post on pastebin.com, a service that allows users to upload and publicly display snippets of text like source code.

The post contained the names and passwords of over 10,000 accounts from A through B, most of which seemed to be based in Europe. The Microsoft Windows Live Hotmail accounts include those that end in @hotmail.com, @live.com, and @msn.com. Neowin reported this information to Microsoft's Security Response Center as well as PR folks in both the US and UK.

Microsoft has stated that it is "investigating the situation and will take appropriate steps as rapidly as possible." In the mean time, it would probably be a smart move to change the password and security question to your Windows Live account, no what it begins with alphabetically.

Twitter's future varies greatly depending on what pair of eyes you're looking through. Many expect it to be purchased by a third party or integrated with other services, and some foresee its failure. All seem plausible, though a purchase may be Twitter's best option. Financial issues aside, where does the company see itself going? Some interesting information along those lines and more was unearthed in an interview with Evan Williams, co-founder of Twitter. Speaking about Twitter's technical challenges, Williams tersely revealed plans the company has to stay afloat.

One of the biggest issues he mentioned was credibility. Tweets can be very anonymous, and their real-time nature leaves any information from them up in the air in terms of reliability. He mentioned that there are systems being developed right now to help offer more credibility, such as the ability to identify the physical location of where a Tweet was sent from. Another option being considered is a reputation system, given the people who read said Tweets an opportunity to rate their trustworthiness.

He didn't play the anonymous aspect of Twitter down. He said both anonymity and reliability are important, so finding a balance is their immediate goal. This is just speculation, but it could be that Twitter may delve into several different classes of Tweets -- some for people who prefer to remain anonymous, and some for those who want to be trusted at the expense of revealing more information about themselves. It's a short interview, but if you are interested in Twitter at all it's worth a read.

Yahoo acquired Xoopit for $20 million in July and immediately began declining new Gmail users, but said it would continue support for open accounts. The company has since rescinded that support, announcing Friday that it would entirely drop the Gmail integration of Xoopit.

Users have until November 13 to backup any media stored on Yahoo's servers -- though the company will keep data until next February in accordance with its 90-day retention policy. Yahoo claims its decision to end Xoopit support for Gmail users is to focus on developing the tool for its own products. It simply does not want to continue investing resources in Xoopit for Gmail users -- yet, it doesn't want them to end up with a lousy experience.


If you're uninterested in switching to Yahoo Mail to use Xoopit beyond November 13, Yahoo suggests you check out a few Gmail Labs features which may ease the migration away from the photo sharing tool. We also recommended many of the Labs items in a recent tech tip, which include previews of YouTube, Picasa and Flickr media.

IBM is preparing to launch a Web-based version of its Lotus Notes business email system on Monday. Called LotusLive iNotes, the service will compete with Google Apps, providing access to Webmail, 1GB of storage per user, mobile device support, integrated spam and antimalware protection, and administration tools.

LotusLive iNotes starts at $3 per month, per user on a yearly basis ($36), and runs $3.75 for those taking things month-to-month. The Premier Edition of Google Apps costs a bit more than that, at $50 yearly per user -- but there are some obvious extras, including 25GB of email storage for each employee. IBM is providing a free 30-day trial as well, so you'll be able to give LotusLive iNotes a shot before committing to a contract.

Am I the only one who wishes they could have been at the table when IBM came up with the name LotusLive iNotes?

The not-for-profit organization which oversees the administration of the Internet, ICANN, has signed a momentous agreement with the U.S. Department of Commerce that will reduce some of the country's say over how the network is run. This effectively pushes the California-based entity towards a new status as an international body, with greater representation from companies and governments around the globe.

Under the agreement, which enters into force today, expert panels will be created to conduct regular reviews of ICANN's work in several areas, including network security and stability; the evolution of generic domains such as .com and .net as well as domains based on non-Western characters; and the continuance of a public database of web site owners.

Although no immediate changes are expected the news has been well received by major players on the Internet. You can read more about the scope of this agreement here.