Stories by: Cathleen Moore

In celebration of its one-year anniversary, the Google Mini search appliance is getting a teensy bit bigger. Google is expected to announce today two new versions of the Mini that double and triple the capacity of the existing appliance.

Phishing is hooking more victims as the e-mail fraud attacks become more sophisticated and prevalent.

Google's entry last week into the IM space gave a high-profile shot in the arm to the open IM protocol XMPP (Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol). The decision to base Google Talk on the XML-based XMPP framework -- combined with Google's considerable market clout -- could shake up stalled IM interoperability efforts, or at the very least gives a big lift to a grassroots Internet standard.

Whether the content streams are eventually called RSS ,Web feeds or some other name, a key design goal of the forthcoming Internet Explorer 7 is to let users easily subscribe to blogs and websites via Really Simple Syndication (RSS).

Yahoo on Monday announced it has acquired Pixoria, a maker of mini applications, or widgets, that be customised to provide information such as Wi-Fi signal strength, stock prices, and traffic conditions.

Adobe Systems has rolled out patches for security vulnerabilities found in Adobe Reader 7.0 and 7.0.1, and in Adobe Acrobat 7.0 and 7.0.1.

Zeroing in on the specific needs of business users, Arts PDF and ScanSoft are introducing PDF creation and editing tools designed to offer more functionality at a lower price point than Adobe's Acrobat products.

Like airborne viruses, instant messaging worms are fledglings, but very much on the rise. These new worms are also proving that once inside a corporate network they can be just as destructive, if not more so, than traditional e-mail attacks.

Google on Wednesday announced new licensing terms for its search appliances that lowers the price point and ups the document capacity for both the Google Mini and the Google Search Appliance.

Microsoft Chairman and Chief Software Architect Bill Gates on Tuesday outlined Microsoft's vision for collaboration and communication within the Office System product lineup, introducing a new IM client and enhancements to the company's IM server and Web conferencing application.

One of the announcements from IBM's annual Lotusphere conference this week is a new version of IBM Workplace that bundles together multiple collaborative services into a single product.