By all appearances the Mac is still selling pretty well, but new notebooks never hurt, especially heading into the holiday season. I’ve also heard a few rumblings about new iMacs–perhaps just a speed bump–around the same time, but Gruber’s report didn’t elaborate on the iMac.

John Gruber at Daring Fireball is reporting that Apple will roll out new MacBooks on October 14, which fits the usual Apple profile of launching new products on a Tuesday. We’ve expected that new Apple notebooks are coming for some time, with reports of a redesigned exterior for the MacBook to go along with Intel’s latest mobile chips.

With new iPods out of the way, the next priority for Apple is the
Mac.

(Credit:
Apple)

A mid-October MacBook launch misses the back-to-school rush, but has Apple in the right place for the holidays.

Adobe Systems is updating and expanding its LiveCycle software for building business-oriented Web applications.

LiveCycle ES Update 1 will be available next month, Adobe said.

The company on Tuesday is expected to announce LiveCycle Enterprise Suite Update 1, which adds new content management features along with tools to more quickly build financial services and government applications.

LiveCycle is one of the primary products in Adobe’s enterprise business. The product is designed for applications that involve document exchanges inside and outside of organizations, such as government Web sites that require people to fill out and process claims. It uses Adobe’s PDF and Flex software to create paperless, Web-based applications.

The new release also includes two new components: LiveCycle Content Services ES, and LiveCycle PDF Generator 3D ES.

The Content Services component, developed in conjunction with Alfresco Software, lets companies build a process or application linked to existing enterprise content. For instance, companies can use the tool to create a system for connecting manufacturers to parts suppliers, or for linking hospitals to insurers.

It’s one thing to lose a gadget and know where you lost it. It’s another thing to have the thing seemingly vanish.

Missing: One iPod Touch, last seen somewhere around here…

Newsweek’s Steven Levy recently had a similar experience with a MacBook Air he had on loan from Apple.

Such was the experience I had last December with the
iPod Touch I had shelled out $400 for just a couple months earlier. I had it one night and went to look for it the next day and it was gone. For weeks, I thought it might be somewhere in my house or the friend’s house I was at that night. But it never turned up either place.

Now, it’s not that losing tech products is anything new. I’m sure the value of cell phones, cameras and other gadgets left in taxis alone would be enough to build a lot of schools and libraries.

The only thing that I think Apple’s products have added to the mix is a thinness that makes it possible to lose the things without even knowing you have lost them.

It’s not the first time the thinness of Apple’s products has wreaked havoc in my household. There was an incident a couple years back where an iPod Nano was left in a back pocket of some jeans and went through the washing machine. It’s still a sore subject, so I won’t go into details. Suffice to say, it is the cleanest, whitest, nonfunctioning Nano you’ve ever seen.

Now, I’m not blaming Apple. And I freely (or expensively) admit that I am more forgetful than most. I just think that the next time you see the ad and lust that the MacBook Air is small enough to fit in a manila envelope, remember one thing: it is small enough to fit in a manila envelope.

Kumar listed the well-known reasons for AMD’s profit shortfalls: Lack of competitive offerings, blended ASPs (average selling prices) well below Intel’s, and the delayed ramp of the high-end quad-core Opteron.

Partnerships may also be helping AMD in the mobile market. “They’ve been partnering with some of the most aggressive OEMs out there. That plays to their favor,” said Jim McGregor, an analyst at In-Stat. “Companies like Acer and Toshiba have been extremely aggressive worldwide, especially in North America, at gaining market share,” he said.

AMD also said Monday that it expects to post first-quarter revenue of $1.5 billion, about 15 percent lower than the fourth quarter. This is well below seasonal declines. So upcoming earnings could be ugly in some respects. “Plus the pullback in consumer and business spending. Q2 tends to be a little bit low in terms of revenues,” McGregor warned, referring to factors that affect both Intel and AMD. “They’re facing a little bit of headwind in terms of economic and spending conditions.”

AMD quad-core Opteron finally on its way to computer makers

But these negatives–so the upbeat narrative on AMD goes–are the chipmaker’s past, not its future. After a very long delay (about one year), AMD’s quad-core Barcelona for servers is just about set to ship to the largest computer companies in the world: IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Sun Microsystems, and Dell, among others. “Barcelona ASPs are 300 (dollars) plus. That historically has been the profit pool of the company,” Kumar said. Once AMD ramps Barcelona and the desktop quad-core Phenom, things should “dramatically improve,” he said.

Kumar sees one scenario in which AMD bifurcates into a manufacturing concern and a design company. If earnings don’t trend up by the second half, this is a real possibility according to Kumar. “They don’t have too many options with the debt overhang (from the ATI acquisition),” he said. The soft economy may not help matters either.

(Credit:
AMD)

And AMD’s mobile offerings are getting better too. “They were probably at their weakest point in 2007,” said Dean McCarron, founder and principal of Mercury Research. “The next design cycle for notebooks is happening right now. You can safely say that they are more competitive than they were last year” vis-a-vis Nvidia, he said.

And all of the positives cited above may happen slowly for AMD. “Things don’t swing overnight. They take time,” McGregor said.

The desktop is looking better too, with the triple-core and quad-core Phenom processors just beginning to ship in volume.

Along these lines, AMD is slated to bring out the “Puma” mobile platform this quarter. Puma is based on the RS780M chipset and AMD’s dual-core Griffin processor–now called the Turion Ultra. The new Turion is all about power consumption (to reduce power, each core can run at different frequencies) while the RS780M, AMD claims, is up to five times faster than Intel’s current X3100 integrated graphics silicon.

AMD’s processor business has been in the dumps for well over a year. But a resumption of quad-core shipments and a reduction in its workforce, though painful, may signal a turnaround.

All this optimism is cautious, of course. “The competitive environment that they’re in now is a little bit different than the one that they were in before. Intel is much stronger,” said McCarron. “We have Nehalem (the next-generation Intel microarchitecture) coming at the tail end of the year and the Penryn products are very competitive,” he added.

According to TechCrunch, the Marketplace replaces a simpler Enterprise Solutions Gallery.

Google and Salesforce are also rumored to announce a partnership on Monday that will let Salesforce resell Google Apps.

It also parallels what Salesforce.com has done with its AppExchange for its hosted applications.

Google Solutions Marketplace, a catalog of third-party business applications.

On the Solutions Marketplace, Google won’t be hosting other companies’ applications, as Salesforce does with AppExchange. But companies can create their own listings, and customers can review them.

Not content to offer just applications and search appliances to businesses, Google has launched its Solutions Marketplace, a listing site for third-party add-on products to Google Apps.

(Credit:
Google) The marketplace allows software developers to post their applications in a catalog for business customers to browse. For example, listings on the site now show an offshore development service for customizing Google Apps and consulting services for small businesses.

“The Marketplace’s initial focus is connecting customers of our communications and collaboration products like Google Apps and Enterprise search with 3rd parties that sell complementary products and services. But that’s just a start. We expect to grow to fit the needs of an expanding set of Google customers and developers,” he wrote.

The move is a bid to find more customers for Google Apps by encouraging third-party product development and sales, much the way that Microsoft has built an ecosystem of third-party add-ons around Office.

All gold rushes must come to an end, and according to one new report, Facebook’s developer platform is no exception.

“Networks like Zynga and Social Gaming Network have cropped up in the last few months and have made it their business to consolidate the game space on Facebook, probably the only real vertical that has found success on the platform,” Farmer wrote. “Bigger companies like Slide and RockYou have been actively recruiting from the Facebook developer pool all along, too.”

Or perhaps, he suggests, small-time developers might be disillusioned. Facebook, in an effort to curb spam, has instituted new regulations that some developers find controversial. Then there’s the presence of big application companies like Slide and RockYou, which dominate the rankings of the most popular Facebook applications and have valuations in the hundreds of millions. Not only do they dwarf smaller developers, but they also snap up programmer talent that might otherwise be independent.

Facebook developer Jesse Farmer, creator of developer analytics service Adonomics, did an extensive amount of number-crunching after coming to an odd observation earlier this year: “Something is wrong in the Facebook developer community,” Farmer wrote in a blog post Tuesday. “Starting in March I began noticing that the level of activity in the Facebook developers forum was dropping sharply.”

Is the Facebook platform doomed? Hardly. But if Farmer’s research is accurate, it’s a sign that the initial frenzy is finally quieting–it’s been a year, after all.

One possible reason, Farmer wrote, is the fact that Facebook isn’t the only hub for social-network application developers anymore. Google kickstarted the OpenSocial standard last year, and Bebo, newly acquired by AOL, is currently the only social network that supports both Facebook and OpenSocial applications.

Farmer’s research confirmed his speculation: activity in the Facebook developer forum, from posts per day to highly active users, had fallen notably from January to April. In other words, that likely means there’s less activity on the part of independent developers hoping to tap into Facebook’s massive audience.

Windows Mobile 6.1 will be the first major update to ship since version 6.0 made its debut last year. Screenshots that leaked out earlier this year hinted that 6.1 would use a sleeker interface, cutting down on some of the clutter in the 6.0 version.

The sixth version came with some incremental improvements to Windows Mobile 5.0, according to CNET’s review of WinMo 6. But next year, Microsoft is expected to take a nod from Apple’s OS X and release a touch-screen-oriented user interface as part of Windows Mobile 7.

(Credit:
Microsoft)

Microsoft could be getting ready to release an updated version of Windows Mobile 6, shown here.

I’ll be at
CTIA next week for Bach’s keynote address along with several colleagues, as we check out the latest from Microsoft’s smartphone group. At the moment, Windows Mobile phones are quite popular with the CNET News.com crowd, but there’s not a single company in this industry that isn’t re-examining its future road map after watching the debut of the iPhone.

Microsoft is getting ready to take the wraps off the latest version of Windows Mobile, according to a report out Tuesday.

Twhirl lets you monitor multiple Twitter accounts and cross post your Tweets to Jaiku and Pownce too.

(Credit:
CNET Networks)

As an app, Twhirl feels very similar to Snitter, although I found the selection of skins to be a little more robust. There are a dozen to choose from, and none of them are tied to the size and style of text, or the shape of the window. It’s also got several handy features that the Web front end for Twitter doesn’t have, like a built-in tool to shorten URLs from two different services (Snurl and is.gd), and message notifications that can be tweaked right down to how much speaker volume you want to give them.

The one crucial thing that’s missing (and such a tease) is the inability to pull in feeds from the other two services. While it’s nice to send out your message to three places at the same time, it’s a one-way street. It’s also worth noting that Pownce and Jaiku differ distinctively from Twitter in making replies from other users more of a public experience, which might get a little hairy when all three are getting the same message from you.

Message notifications pop up on top of your task bar (or below on Macs) and let you know which account the message is tied to.

Related:
The many flavors of Twitter

The latest build of Twirl is nice enough to let you plug in your log-ins from Jaiku and Pownce (two popular competitors) in order to cross-post whatever you’re Tweeting about. Yes, there were ways to do this before, but this involves no such RSS hackery, and lets you tweak either of those two external accounts in one place. And for those of you who have more than one Twitter account, you can add in as many as you’d like (I successfully added six).

Twhirl lets you add in your Pownce and Jaiku accounts to cross-post your Twitter messages to each service on the fly.

To help sort through some of that chaos is Twirl, an Adobe Air-based communications application for Twitter that sits on your desktop and monitors the traffic flow of your friends. Sure, there are similar apps that do this, like Snitter, Spaz and Tweetr, but none of those let you post to services besides Twitter.

(Credit:
CNET Networks)

(Credit:
CNET Networks)

I’m a big fan of microblogging services like Twitter, Pownce, and Jaiku, but a number of solutions that have popped up to help you make the influx of information more bearable can also be overwhelming.

For many people, Sony’s oft-maligned PlayStation 3 video game console had one no-doubt-about-it selling point: when it launched, it was by far the cheapest Blu-ray player on the market.

If you’re Sony, do you care? Not if you can get people to buy the machine–which, unlike the Wii and the Xbox is available everywhere with no delays at all and has been throughout the past many months–to take advantage of the newest Blu-ray features.

“With this update, the PlayStation 3 becomes the first Blu-ray player on the market with BD-Live functionality,” Sony bragged.

The PS3 will once again offer users the most advanced Blu-Ray features, despite the console’s tepid appeal to video gamers.

But with its announcement of a forthcoming PS3 firmware upgrade, Sony has once again given consumers a reason to buy the console for little more than its Blu-ray capabilities.

After all, they say, when faced with lemons, make lemonade.

As Sony said, the new firmware will allow users to take advantage of something called BD-Live, and to dynamically download “additional content and special features” associated with movies on Blu-ray.

Therefore, once again, consumers who want to be on the cutting edge of Blu-ray technology have one distinct place to go for it: the PS3.

That means, Sony argued, that BD-Live “will keep your (Blu-ray) discs fresh with new content and in some cases exclusive content only accessible to owners of BD-Live enabled discs.”

That’s no longer true, what with plenty of low-cost players flooding the market now that Blu-ray has effectively vanquished HD DVD as the next-generation playback standard.

Update: This story now reflects NPD data showing improved
PlayStation 3 performance in the first two months of the year.

As an example, the company pointed to the planned April 8 Blu-ray release of two Sony films, The 6th Day and Walk Hard, both of which will have features accessible under BD-Live.

Never mind that not once in the blog entry about the firmware upgrade on the official PlayStation blog does Sony use the words “video game.” Never mind that in the mind of some in the video game community, the PS3 is the bastard child that has been outclassed most of the way since its launch–at least in sales–by Nintendo’s
Wii and Microsoft’s
Xbox 360. New data from the NPD Group does show that the PS3 outsold the Xbox in the first two months of 2008, though Microsoft attributes that to shortages of its console in that time frame.

A big culprit is JavaScript, a language that’s widely used to control Web browsers and enable more sophisticated operations. JavaScript has been around for more than a decade, but new risks are emerging since it’s a major component of Ajax, a Web 2.0 technology used to build richly interactive sites.

Jacob West, manager of the security research group at Fortify

“We’re talking about fixes that are going to come in the 10-year time frame,” he said.

(Credit:
Stephen Shankland/CNET Networks)

He did describe one particular Ajax-specific problem called JavaScript hijacking. With it, a Web browser that picks up malicious JavaScript code from a Web site can be instructed, in effect, to send confidential information with an attacker.

Other toolkit makers were not so responsive, though, he said: “Microsoft and Yahoo wrote back and said, ‘Nope, we’re not going to fix that.’”

West was pessimistic that fundamental progress would help reduce vulnerabilities. Companies with browsers and Web sites are reluctant to embrace change that would break compatibility with older technology, for example.

“Security was a challenge to begin with, but if anything it’s getting harder in the Web 2.0 world,” said Jacob West, manager of the security research group at Fortify, a company that helps companies make sure their software is secure. He made his comments during a talk at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco here.

“JavaScript hijacking is Ajax-specific,” West said. It relies on the transmission of personal information packaged as JavaScript code, and “transmitting information with JavaScript I unique to Ajax code.”

But some are working to at least close up the holes. For example, programmers working on Direct Web Remoting (DWR) and the Google Web Toolkit (GWT) updated their Ajax programming toolkits to head JavaScript hijacking attacks off at the pass.

“The number of unique problems from Ajax will remain pretty small,” West said in an interview after his speech. But Ajax means that JavaScript is being used much more widely and in much more complicated ways, so existing vulnerabilities are more widespread, and “attack techniques are improving quickly.”

SAN FRANCISCO–The glitzy, interactive abilities of Web 2.0 have led to a profusion of new applications, but the technology also is bringing a new era of security vulnerabilities, a security researcher warned Wednesday.