'Google has amassed about 75 percent of paid search revenues worldwide and its share continues to grow. ...Microsoft and Yahoo! on the other hand have roughly 30 percent combined in the U.S. and approximately 10 percent combined in Europe.' That, in brief, was the reply Microsoft's General Counsel issued this afternoon to the statement by his opposite number at Google suggesting that Microsoft's hostile bid for Yahoo! raises 'troubling questions.' More info

New interaction paradigms and complex user interface controls of AJAX have raised concerns about access and usability for users of all backgrounds and abilities. Client-side JavaScript code may assume certain language or cultural conventions, alienating vast audiences. Graphical and mouse-based user interaction is often assumed, preventing use by keyboard or assistive technology users. This presentation will review the issues and provide best practices for building accessible and globalized AJAX applications today, including the new W3C Accessible Rich Internet Application (ARIA) specification. This and other strategies used to provide full accessibility and globalization in the Dojo Toolkit will be shown. More info

Open source web infrastructure management provider Hyperic's CEO, Javier Soltero, says the company is seeing rapid growth on a number of fronts. The firm, which says it is complementary to the big four systems management companies (IBM Tivoli, CA, Compuware, and BMC) because they don't focus enough on web infrastructure management, recently increased its European presence with new community managers in Germany and Spain. More info

Appcelerator, Inc. is an open source software company specializing in products and services for rapid rich Internet application (RIA) and SOA-based services development. The Appcelerator Platform SDKs enable developers to develop rich Ajax and DHTML applications using cross-browser widgets, a unique Web Expression Language and other open standards-based languages like HTML and CSS - without the use of Javascript. Appcelerator supports most languages, including Java, Ruby, PHP, .NET, Python and Perl. More info

'We chose Lightstreamer because with this technology our Trading Platform will enter a new era as a sophisticated solid system in both business functionality and Technology perspective,' said Tareq Saleh CEO & Vice President at EDATA, as it was announcd today that Lightstreamer, the streaming engine for AJAX applications, has signed a distribution partnership agreement with EDATA. More info

'We chose Lightstreamer because with this technology our Trading Platform will enter a new era as a sophisticated solid system in both business functionality and Technology perspective,' siad Tareq Saleh CEO & Vice President at EDATA, as it was announcd today that Lightstreamer, the streaming engine for AJAX applications, has signed a distribution partnership agreement with EDATA. More info

Core Security Technologies issued an advisory disclosing a vulnerability that could severely impact organizations relying on VMware's desktop virtualization software. This discovery demonstrates that thousands of companies with virtualized systems could unknowingly be exposing critical information assets that they otherwise sought to protect. Core Security today also released an exploit for this vulnerability, enabling customers to validate that it exists, prove that it can be exploited and safely assess the consequences of an actual network intrusion. More info

More than 30 million mobile phone users in the Philippines now have access to the latest in mobile communications with a new video SMS service offered by Smart Communications (SMART) and built on NMS Communications' proven Video SMS solution. SMART, the leading wireless services provider in the Philippines, launched a 'Video Avatar' service in December 2007 that allows users to send and receive video messages featuring either live video or a chosen avatar. More info

The movement to empowering business users via Enterprise Mashups, which began to gather momentum in 2006 and 2007, has now gathered speed to the extent that at the upcoming AJAXWorld Conference & Expo 2008 East in New York City, there is a dedicated track showcasing the industry's leaders in Enterprise Mashups and related Enterprise 2.0 and Enterprise Web 2.0 initiatives - all aimed at letting users join in data from outside the enterprise. More info

I was reading news feeds when I read a blog post that included some quotes from Bill Gates. Bill was quoted as saying that Windows 7 will make the keyboard and mouse far less important than in the past. We've all heard that crap before, it's typically what Bill used to say before attempting to pimp yet another failed Tablet PC project. I admit, I fell for the Tablet thing once... I had one, and I hated it. It was never powerful enough to be a real laptop and it was never portable enough to be a good enough tablet. In short, it was useless. More info