Broadband Advisor

Microsoft Thursday said it would issue a release candidate (RC) for Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) in the first three months of 2009, indicating it will ship its newest browser sometime in the first half of the year.

Marking the two-year anniversary of their controversial interoperability agreement, Microsoft and Novell this week are announcing upcoming availability of both the beta version of Moonlight, which puts Microsoft's Silverlight rich Internet application technology on Linux, and the general release of Advanced Management Pack for Suse Linux Enterprise for Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2.

Companies like Wal-Mart, Exxon Mobil and the makers of Motrin have all learned the hard way that online assaults from external users on Web 2.0 sites like Facebook and Twitter can damage their brands.

Mozilla Tuesday unveiled a Web application that speeds Firefox customization by offering users several sets of pre-selected add-ons.

JavaFX, Sun Microsystems' entrant in the rich Internet application (RIA) space, is nearly ready for prime time and, by the way, the company is making money off of Java, company officials said Monday afternoon at the Adobe Max 2008 conference in San Francisco.

This week saw the battle of the Web 2.0 conferences, with 70 entrepreneurs presenting their ideas at Demo Fall 2008 in San Diego and 50 more making their pitch at TechCrunch50 in San Francisco. Some of the ideas are little more than a glimmer in a coder's eye, but others are already doing business, are in private beta, or are soon to launch. Here's a selection of our favourites.

You know the old cliche, a picture is worth a thousand words? Turns out that pictures have been deeply undervalued: A single photo can cost you your reputation, your job, even your freedom -- if you post it online.

DEMO executive producer Chris Shipley isn't sure what to call the evolution of Web 2.0 software and applications, but she is sure of one thing: It shouldn't be called Web 3.0.

Google's just-released Chrome takes the same approach to browser design that Google takes to its home page -- stripped-down, fast and functional, with very few bells and whistles.

The US Air Force is using Web 2.0 technologies to better support its missions despite wariness about security, a civilian technology official of the service said last week.

Not long ago, the powers-that-be detected an impending crisis. To resolve it, they rushed into action crafting a proposal that represented an unprecedented upheaval of existing infrastructure. On the grounds that "something needed to be done" to avert the crisis, they brushed aside objections that the upheaval was too convulsive and might nonetheless fail to address the underlying issues that had created the crisis in the first place.

The question of why so many Google products are classified "beta" -- and classified thusly for so long -- has knocked around the tech press for some time. However, no one really seemed to know the answer, at least no one outside of Google.

At a conference that devoted much of its attention to celebrating the rise of collaborative platforms, media, and technologies, you had to wonder if the "Web 2.0" collaborative future would die before it really began. That was my takeaway from the Demo Fall 2008 conference in San Diego, which gave 72 startups six minutes each to show their stuff, usually in beta form.

There were many ways to search the Internet before Google came along, but none of them turned into a verb. These days, a big deal is being made of Google's turning 10 by a lot of the media. Most of the coverage has had a bit of an edge to it, as if people do not want to accept the success that Google has enjoyed.

Zoho has finally added a central document management page called Zoho Docs to tie together its many useful online apps. The clean-looking, functional page looks much like the Google Docs start page, with a folder view on the left and all files - spreadsheets, documents, presentations, etc. - listed on the right.

The quest to find a good price on a high-definition television can be a frustrating and confusing experience. For most people, the process concludes with the purchase of a brand-new TV set. For Mukesh Chatter, that was just the beginning.

Yahoo last week announced it is working on BrowserPlus, a development platform for creating Web applications that contain desktop capabilities.

Educators used to follow the auto industry because that's where all the lessons came from, says Bala Iyer. Then it was Microsoft. Now it's Google. In this month's Harvard Business Review, Iyer, an associate professor of technology operations and information management at Babson College, looked deep into Google's DNA to discern what makes it an innovation machine. Iyer talked with Kathleen Melymuka about what he and co-author Thomas H. Davenport discovered.

Jonathan Oxer is technical director of a Web application development company called Internet Vision Technologies and for the past couple of years has been president of the Linux Australia community group. At January's Linux.conf.au in Melbourne he presented a tutorial entitled Hardware / Software Hacking: Joining Second Life to the Real World. Computerworld recently spoke to Oxer about how he is knocking down the boundaries between the real and virtual world. Oxer also sheds light on his how his lifetime obsession with electronics has transformed his home-life into a software controlled environment.

When Richard Jalichandra became Technorati's CEO in October, the company, a blogging and Web 2.0 pioneer, had generated enough drama in recent years to rival a soap opera.

Flash animation gives websites pizzazz. It's used for video and other moving graphics, as well as non-static adverts. Flash is an excellent way of adding a little something extra to your site and making it stand out from the crowd.

These days, you can find a blog for just about anything. Looking for affordable art prints? Weheartprints.com has them. Interested in Craftsman, Mission, and Prairie furniture? Check out Hewn & Hammered.

Put your business on the map

While Microsoft's Internet Explorer remains the most popular browser, there's a reason many techies (and about half the visitors to PCWorld.com) use Mozilla's Firefox browser: Control. Firefox simply offers more ways to customize the browsing experience, letting you get more work done in less time. Here are our favorite productivity tweaks for Firefox 2.0.

The increasingly popular Firefox browser offers much more customisability than Internet Explorer does. Here are some tweaks you might not know about.

For the majority of those looking to upgrade to broadband Internet for the business or home, it's all about the extra speed.

Running a business and want to promote yourself online? You need a domain name.

Read this guide to understand how e-mail works and how it folds into the broader capabilities of today's messaging and collaboration platforms.