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Mozilla has announced a limited beta release of its new mobile browser, code-named Fennec. Testing will be limited to people using the Nokia N810 tablet, although emulators have been written to allow people to test the application on desktop computers running Windows, Mac OS, and Linux.

“I’m super-happy to announce the first beta release of Fennec for the Maemo platform,” wrote Stuart Parmenter, mobile architect for Mozilla, on his Pavlov.net blog. “We’ve done heavy optimizations to our front-end code and made a number of optimizations to the platform, resulting in greatly increasing zooming speed and making panning pretty smooth. We’ve also been able to improve start-up performance by reducing a good bit of unnecessary work.”

Other improvements, according to the Mozilla release notes, include tabbed browsing, integrated Web search (built into the address, or “awesome” bar), access to multiple search engines, and both bookmarks and tags.

JavaScript and Add-Ons

One of the more interesting features of Fennec is the inclusion of TraceMonkey, an engine for JavaScript support. Parmenter said the inclusion of TraceMonkey will enable Fennec to take advantage of the JavaScript speed improvements built into Firefox 3.1.

In addition, like the desktop version of Firefox, Fennec permits the installation of add-ons that can extend the capabilities of the mobile browser. Not surprisingly, only a limited number are available right now, but testers are already playing with add-ons to access Twitter, fix typos in URLs, and enhance security.

Reviewers have also praised the new browser’s intuitive handling of menus, bookmarks, auto-fill for URLs, and other features drawn directly from its desktop big brother.

Michael Gartenberg, a vice president at Interpret, said the release of Fennec is a notable development.

“It certainly is a milestone, but, as with all browsers, it will need to be widely available on the key mobile platforms to compete,” Gartenberg said. “Given the popularity…

The much-ballyhooed press event Tuesday on Apple’s Cupertino, Calif., campus for iPhone OS 3.0 has generally been hailed as uniformly good news for iPhone users. Although it will be months before the upgrade is released, iPhone users will be able to download it for free, and iPod touch users will be able to purchase the upgrade for just $9.95.

Bundled into the new OS are numerous features for which iPhone users have been clamoring, including Multimedia Messaging Service capabilities, stereo Bluetooth, cut and paste, and push notification for applications.

But for iPhone application developers, the unveiling of the iPhone OS 3.0 specs was a classic “good news, bad news” scenario.

Surge in Game Revenues?

First, the good news. The iPhone OS 3.0 software developers kit (SDK) contains more than one thousand new application programming interfaces (APIs), substantially expanding the potential of the iPhone as a software platform.

Two features have attracted particular attention: The ability of apps to use CoreData, a data-handling tool developed by Apple as part of its Mac OS X, and GameKit, tools which enable applications to connect to other phones in peer-to-peer mode and chat in real time.

Zippy Aima, an industry analyst for digital media for ABI Research, said the new features give the iPhone a significant edge over other mobile devices. “The new updates on the phone will position iPhone as a device that has music, video and an advanced gaming platform,” Aima said. “It’s good news not only for gamers, but also offers new revenue-generating models for the mobile industry.”

Perhaps the most exciting feature of GameKit is the ability of game developers (and other app sellers) to offer in-app upgrades for new levels, character features, and so on. Some reports suggest that in-app sales could generate as much as $1 billion in new revenue within the first 12 months….

San Jose, California and Zurit, Israel, March 17, 2009 — Real Intent Inc., the innovator in automating the intelligence of formal techniques for electronic design verification, announced today that it has signed Satris Corporation in Israel as its newest distribution partner.

Satris is providing sales and support for Real Intent’s prospects and customers in Israel, and is the newest addition to the company’s existing sales and support teams in North America, Europe and Asia.

“Automating design verification has become increasingly important to companies around the world in the face of the current economic challenges,” commented Carol Hallett, VP of Worldwide Sales and Marketing at Real Intent. “We are pleased to partner with Satris as our representative in Israel. With their in-depth knowledge and background in design verification, they are highly qualified to support our customers in that region.”

Coby Hanoch, President & CEO at Satris Corporation, added, “Real Intent’s strong portfolio of automatic verification software is facilitating designers to increase productivity and achieve high quality by using verification tools early in the design cycle. We are eager to bring Real Intent’s automatic verification solutions to our customers in Israel.”

About Real Intent’s Verification Software

Real Intent’s automatic software products include Ascent™, for automatic functional verification without testbench; Conquest, for static, formal Assertion-Based Verification (ABV); Meridian CDC and Meridian FPGA for Clock Domain Crossing (CDC) verification; and PureTime for Synopsys Design Constraint (SDC) timing exceptions verification, such as false and multi-cycle paths.

About Real Intent

Real Intent is extending breakthrough formal technology to critical problems encountered by design and verification teams worldwide. Real Intent’s products dramatically improve the functional verification efficiency of leading-edge application specific integrated circuit (ASIC), system-on-chip (SoC) and Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) devices. Over 40 major electronics design houses worldwide use Real Intent software.

Real Intent is headquartered at 505 North Mathilda Avenue, Suite 210,…

The Federal Trade Commission is being asked to investigate Internet search giant Google for a lack of security in its cloud-computing services, a framework of software and services in which applications and data reside on third-party servers that provide remote access through Web-based devices.

The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), a Washington, D.C.-based public-interest group, filed the complaint and is asking for an injunction by the FTC to stop Google from offering any of its cloud services until the FTC has investigated Google’s safeguarding of consumers’ information.

The complaint comes just 10 days after Google announced that it had unintentionally disclosed user-generated documents stored on its cloud-computing service.

Privacy Glitches Cited

In its 15-page complaint, EPIC said Google is not providing adequate protection of consumers’ information in its group of cloud-computing services, which includes Gmail, Google Docs, Google Desktop, Picasa Web Albums and Google Calendar.

“We understand the FTC is very interested and have received an acknowledgment from the FTC,” Marc Rotenberg, president at EPIC, told us. “Now they will make a determination on whether to begin an investigation.”

Rotenberg said EPIC always reserves the right to supplement the filing and may add to it because of Google’s health-records service that “will clearly raise privacy and security concerns.”

In September and November alone, 30.4 million consumers used Google’s Docs and Gmail cloud-computing services, according to ComScore Media Metrix.

EPIC points out several flaws in Google’s cloud-computing services. In January 2005, researchers found that usernames and passwords for Google accounts allowed others to steal log-in information, allowing outsiders to snoop on users’ e-mail. Another flaw exposed Google users’ personal data to malicious Internet sites, EPIC says.

“Of course what we did was we looked carefully at Google’s statements and they sound very favorable, then you read their terms of service,” Rotenberg said. “On one hand they are telling everyone cloud…

Six months ago, while gaming-console manufacturers Nintendo and Microsoft were busy trying to lure consumers with holiday discounts for their systems, Sony stubbornly refused to drop its prices. Kazuo Hirai, chairman and group CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment, told reporters at the time that he thought the company’s equipment was “a very good value proposition.”

Six months of economic downturn — and increasingly cautious consumers — appears to have changed Sony’s outlook. “A major UK retailer” told the industry journal CVG (ComputerAndVideoGames.com) that retailers were told by Sony that a price drop was planned for both the PS3 and the PSP.

Details Pending

As is commonly the case, the precise timing and amount of the price cuts are still unknown, although the mystery retailer told CVG that Sony had been contemplating the reductions for some time. A logical time for announcing the price change would be the end of next week, when the Game Developers Conference is scheduled to open in San Francisco.

Numerous outlets suggested that Sony would drop the price of an 80GB PS3 from its current $399 price point to around $300. The price drop for the PSP would be less, but proportional to its lower cost.

CVG also published a photo of a new product that will go on sale March 29 at Target: a Sony PS3 with two bundled games, MotorStorm and Resistance: Fall of Man. That package, however, will not be discounted, and will sell for the current price of $399.

Sony Under Pressure

The possibility, even the necessity, of a price drop by Sony has been widely discussed in the trade press recently, with a number of analysts suggesting that such a move is inevitable.

Sony has been trailing badly in the console wars for some time, and the fourth quarter of 2008 was no exception. According to figures provided by…

TORONTO, Canada, March 18, 2009 –- Platform Computing, the global leader in High Performance Computing (HPC) management software, announces the release of the Platform HPC for ICE-Linux, a solution developed with HP, which combines the power of Platform Computing with the multi-systems management of HP Insight Control suite for Linux (ICE-Linux). The solution will allow customers to easily deploy HPC cluster environments using an out-of-the-box software solution that supports superior performance, growth and scalability while reducing cost and complexity.

Platform HPC for ICE-Linux offers HP ProLiant and HP BladeSystem customers and resellers a simple path for incorporating HPC into IT infrastructures. The solution integrates a combination of Platform, HP and open source technologies, and builds on the established HP ProLiant system management technology, HP Systems Insight Manager (SIM) for monitoring and provisioning capabilities. HP SIM allows unified infrastructure management across HP platforms and provides HP ICE-Linux with the basis for deep insight, precise control and ongoing optimization for expanding physical and virtual Linux environments. Platform HPC for ICE-Linux provides customers with powerful tools to manage the software stack, including a comprehensive toolkit for high performance computing, a workload manager, resource management tools and the remote control and advanced power management functions of ICE-Linux.

As IT budgets come under increasing pressure, Platform HPC for ICE-Linux allows customers to leverage existing HP investments and open source tools within Platform Open Cluster Stack (OCS) 5 to reduce the complexity and costs within IT infrastructures. Platform OCS 5 is based on the open source Project Kusu. Project Kusu is designed from the ground up to deliver the next generation of cluster management software. Customers and resellers will minimize the disruption of implementing additional new technologies and services, cut costs associated with HPC cluster projects, and reduce the impact that monitoring and management tools have on…