Google’s Apps Marketplace opened the online doors for business on Tuesday with 50 companies joining in the offerings.    The most popular offerings were related to Google cloud apps that are Software-as-a-Service focused.   Lesser known companies joined in with CRM, fax and ERP apps, but there were well known companies such as Intuit with its payroll software and content management from Box.net.   Creative offerings from companies such as Manymoon, with its free "social productivity, project management, and task management" app, were part of the mix. Atlassian Software known for its hosted software development suit will bring its customer to Google Apps, but will benefit from the Google Apps that enable word processing, calendar, and chat within the Atlassian suite.

Avaya’s new offering for small business reduces the price point for unified communication by 40 percent, which features a new combination card that provides support for IP, digital and analog phones.  The collaborative tools include video, instant messaging and presence.   The lasted offering utilizes an SD card, which replaces the flash card and license that was required previously.   It is offered as part of the 6.0 version of IP office which is browser based.  The 6.0 version features improved instant messaging, more presence features and the ability to archive voice messaging.

RightNow, known for its Web customer experience management software, believes that the cloud provides a new opportunity for cloud software vendors to provide fair pricing that reflects a new level of economies of scale.   RightNow CEO Greg Gianforte stated  The “Cloud Challenge” is directed at other major players in this space including Oracle, SAP, Salesforce.com, and other vendors.   "We are challenging the industry to finally deliver on the full promise of the cloud. I challenge our peers to step up and engage with clients like true cloud vendors, not on-premise vendors in cloud clothing," stated RightNow's chief marketing officer, Jason Mittelstaedt. 

After a major cloud computing partnership with Microsoft with in December, NetApp has now announced a comprehensive set of management tools to enable service providers to build private and public clouds for both storage and virtualization customers.   The latest products from NetApp not only enhance functionality in providing services and apps for enterprise clients, it bolsters functionality and security for IT service provider cloud deployments for their customers.  "NetApp has a proven track record of successfully teaming with leading service providers to power their cloud service offerings," Patrick Rogers, NetApp's (NASDAQ: NTAP) vice president of solutions and alliances, wrote in a statement. "Our strategy in this space is to enable the success of our solution partners, not compete with them, and through them provide a broad and open set of industry cloud services for enterprise IT customers."

According to Brendan Barnicle, senior research analyst with Pacific Crest Securities, Microsoft has plans to spend $1 billion on its Windows Phone business during this coming year.   Bill Koefoed, general manager of Microsoft’s investor relations, revealed the plans make the hefty investment in research and development in this year alone.   Even for Microsoft, this represents a significant commitment of approximately 10 percent of the company’s R&D budget.  "In our minds, [Koefoed] ruled out them buying somebody like Palm or RIM. He didn't say it directly ... it's our conclusion.”  Barnicle stated to InternetNews.com.

Year over year numbers for January 2010 show that smartphone users are moving toward connecting to social networks via their smartphones in growing numbers.   Users are not just using their PC’s to connect with social networks as the number of smartphone users that are jump on social networks doubled from 5% to 10% when compared to January 2009.   The number of users accessing Facebook via a mobile browser grew by 112%, and Twitter grew by an amazing 347% from the previous year.  "Social networking remains one of the most popular and fastest-growing behaviors on both the PC-based Internet and the mobile Web," Mark Donovan, senior VP of mobile at ComScore, wrote in a statement. "Social media is a natural sweet spot for mobile since mobile devices are at the center of how people communicate with their circle of friends, whether by phone, text, email, or, increasingly, accessing social networking sites via a mobile browser."

Symantec CEO Enrique Salem spoke at the 2010 RSA Conference and called for the need to provide a new level of security as data in the cloud is made available to a host of mobile devices.   Salem said that enterprise data has a 60% annual growth rate which needs robust security to be protected from cybercriminals.  "IDC says there will be one billion cell phones accessing the Internet by the end of this year. Right now, there are 1.3 billion PCs connected to the Internet. We need to think about how we secure that device," he said as he spoke to an audience at this week’s RSA conference. Salem said that cybercriminals know the value of intellectual property and there is a shift away from broad based attacks to precision attacks on specific targets.

Google has added the Picnik photo-editing to its string of recent acquisitions.   The price paid for the small company was not disclosed.    Google already owns Picasa which it bought back in 2004, which offers some similar photo organizing and enhancing features.    Picnik further enhances Google’s abilities with the service which supports the ability to import photos from Flickr, owned by Yahoo, as well as from Facebook.   "Picnik [is] one of the first sites to bring photo editing to the cloud," Brian Axe, product management director at Google, blogged. "Using Picnik, you can crop, do touch-ups and add cool effects to your photos, all without leaving your Web browser.  The first step will be integration of the product with Google.

HP and the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) have identified the top cloud computing security threats in a new document which features research on the subject.   The CSA has provided a warning to organizations to be aware of technology that accumulates sensitive personal information such as credit card numbers, social security numbers and employee information.     Prevention is less expensive that cleaning up after a data loss or regulatory compliance violation, which require notification and system modification.   Chris Whitener, HP's chief security strategist, noted that although cloud computing can reduce capital expenditures, managing risks is often overlooked.  "The No. 1 thing you shouldn't do is approach this with complete ignorance," Whitener stated. "And unfortunately, this is something that a lot of people do. Understand and limit your risk profile. If you approach this with complete abandon, you're asking for it." 

A Federal U.S. judge has granted Microsoft’s request for a court order against one of the most infamous sources of internet spam the Waledac botnet, while will allow it to cut of 277 associated domains.   The action is expected to wipe out the command and control servers utilized by cybercriminals to control hundreds of thousands of infected PCs.  It is most commonly believed that Waledec botnet is the work of Eastern European spammers which is capable of generated 1.5 billion spam messages per day.