HP's new portfolio spans 16 models and includes the HP 3500, 5400 and 8200 series switches. HP also announced expanded support for OpenFlow across all switches in its FlexNetwork architecture in 2012.

OpenFlow is a network virtualization technology that promises customers flexibility and control to configure their networking environments by giving a remote controller the power to modify the behavior of varied network devices through a "forwarding instruction set."

But analysts have varied takes on how valuable the OpenFlow standard is. HP touts benefits like reduced complexity of network devices and automated tasks via simplified management. HP also points to how IT staff can better respond to changing needs in real time. But, again, analysts have mixed views.

A Data-Driven Transformation

Jon Oltsik, senior principal analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group, is among those who see the value of OpenFlow. HP also has attracted partners like Indiana University, Stanford University and the Global Environment for Network Innovations Project, which is operated by Raytheon BBN Technologies and funded by the National Science Foundation.

"Enterprise data centers are in the midst of a massive transformation driven by data center consolidation, server virtualization, Web-based applications and new security requirements, which our research indicates has created numerous network challenges that can't be addressed with existing legacy networks and manual processes," Oltsik said.

"OpenFlow holds the promise of breaking the logjam in network flexibility as well as paving the way for network innovation in the data center -- and vendor support from companies like HP is crucial for advancing this technology in 2012."

Is OpenFlow Really Better?

But Zeus Kerravala, principal analyst at ZK Research, is still not sold on OpenFlow. As...

The cloud-based, mobile client service is intended for Windows Phone 7.5, iPad, iPhone, and Android or BlackBerry devices.

Dennis Michalis, general manager of Dynamics CRM, said that its customers, working in a "hyperconnected world," need to be able to "access their business-critical data on the device of their choice wherever they are."

Syncing, Administration

As an example of the value of management via mobile devices, Microsoft noted that the update allows sales and marketing personnel to capture and convert leads, develop marketing campaigns, or conduct case management on smartphones and tablets, on the road.

As a cloud-based service, information in Dynamics CRM is automatically synced between, say, a smartphone and a desktop. All configuration, security, management, and updates are accommodated in the cloud. Each registered mobile user can access the service from as many as three mobile devices, and there is an offline mode on most devices to enable some functionality even without Internet connectivity.

CRM administrators at a company can determine the record types, forms, views, offline synchronization rules and navigation structure for the service, which is published once. Multiple profiles can be established to determine data and functionality available for given roles, and administrators can remotely wipe CRM data off devices if they are lost, stolen or moved outside a company.

While mobile access is highlighted, the second-quarter service update is also enhancing social functionality for real-time communication and more effective collaboration, and adding multiple Web browser options, including Internet Explorer, Chrome, Firefox and Safari, on PCs, Macs or iPads.

Huge Acceptance of CRM

The Dynamics CRM service update last fall delivered micro-blogging and other social collaboration capabilities...

According to figures released Friday by industry research firm Canalys, there were more than 158 million smartphones shipped in the fourth quarter of last year, a whopping 57 percent increase over the same quarter in 2010. For the entire year, smartphones were up 63 percent, to 487.7 million units.

'Significant Milestone'

By contrast, the global client PC market grew 15 percent last year, to 414.6 million units. This includes a huge, 274 percent growth in tablets, which are now the fast-growing segment in the client PC category.

Chris Jones, Canalys vice president and principal analyst, said in a statement that this is a "significant milestone." Jones said that, within a few years, smartphones "have grown from being a niche product segment at the high end of the mobile phone market to becoming a truly mass-market proposition."

The milestone comes as a previous report from Canalys, released earlier this week, showed that tablets are now 22 percent of all PC shipments. Coupled with Friday's report on the growth of smartphones, it's clear that the center of mobile computing is now in smartphones and tablets.

The Canalys report said that, while decreasing price points have been a key driver of the smartphone growth, there also has been an "increasing consumer appetite" for using smartphones for Net browsing, content consumption and apps.

However, the era of smart phones being more popular than computers or tablets may be short-lived. Canalys said it expects smartphone growth to slow this year, as vendors begin to emphasize cost control and profitability.

As an example, the company noted that some vendors who have focused on the low end, such as Huawei, ZTE and LG, are now turning their attention to higher-level, pricier models that cost more,...

AMD calls its strategy "ambidextrous" and says it builds on the company's current strengths in x86 and graphics products while embracing other technology and intellectual property the company hopes will differentiate its products in a competitive market.

The Intel rival sees its future in HSA, or heterogeneous system architecture. AMD outlined its strategy at its Financial Analyst Day this week.

"AMD's strategy capitalizes on the convergence of technologies and devices that will define the next era of the industry," said Rory Read, president and CEO of AMD. "The trends around consumerization, the cloud and convergence will only grow stronger in the coming years."

Repositioning AMD

As Read sees it, AMD has a unique opportunity to take advantage of a key industry inflection point as executives continue the work they started last year to reposition the company. Read says the new strategy will "help AMD embrace the shifts occurring in the industry, marrying market needs with innovative technologies, and become a consistent growth engine."

A major part of the plan includes HSA, which promises software developers a way to program APUs by combining scalar processing on the CPU with parallel processing on the graphics processing unit -- all while offering high-bandwidth access to memory at low power. AMD is working to make HSA an open industry standard for the developer community.

"The battle plan that Read is articulating isn't to go head-to-head with Intel. He's suggesting going around Intel," said Rob Enderle, principal analyst at Enderle Group, who attended AMD's Financial Analyst Day. "Read was talking about going where the market was going, using whatever technologies they have access to in order to get there, including both x86 and ARM. You had to read between...

The online reports began appearing this week. They build on a leaked video of a Microsoft phone executive, Joe Belfiore, which reportedly had been intended only for the eyes of Nokia executives, as well as various postings and hints by Microsoft.

Web Browsing, NFC, BitLocker

According to the reports, the Apollo OS will provide support for multi-core processors, four different screen resolutions, removable microSD cards, wireless e-commerce, and near-field communication, which allows tap-to-share functionality that will work with other phones, computers and tablets.

From the perspective of user interface and application development, the interfaces between Windows 8 and Apollo are expected to be similar, and Phone 8 is expected to reuse the kernel, network stacks, security and multimedia coding of Windows 8. As a result, applications developed for Windows 8 could potentially run, with relatively little modification, on Apollo phones.

To speed up Web browsing, Apollo will also reportedly use proxy servers that compress and deliver pages to the Internet Explorer 10 browser on the phone, a la the Opera browser. The reports also indicate that a revised Skype, now owned by Microsoft, will be integrated with Apollo, there will be automatic Wi-Fi connectivity, and Microsoft's 128-bit BitLocker will be used for full disk encryption, which is expected to appeal to businesses. Support for SkyDrive will allow data to be shared among Windows 8/Phone 8 devices.

Apollo's release schedule has not yet been announced, but it is expected to occur sometime after the coming...

The service analyzes new applications in the Android Market as well as those already posted, and even developer accounts, looking for known malware, spyware and trojans.

Google's Bouncer also looks for "behaviors that indicate an application might be misbehaving," according to a post on Google's mobile blog Thursday announcing the service.

The service develops a baseline of previously analyzed apps and compares it with new ones for signs of trouble.

"We actually run every application on Google's cloud infrastructure and simulate how it will run on an Android device to look for hidden, malicious behavior," writes Hiroshi Lockheimer, vice president of engineering for Google's Android division.

And Stay Out!

Bouncer will also scrutinize new developer accounts to make sure those who are tossed as repeat offenders do not come back.

Bouncer works in addition to existing Android tools such as sandboxing, which builds virtual walls between applications and other software on the device so malware can't access data; permissions, which scrutinizes the capabilities of apps to help users make decisions; and malware removal tools that can remotely scrub intruders from a phone or tablet.

Still, the Android Market's growth -- it topped 11 billion downloads -- has made it a top source of malware. Juniper Networks in November announced that its Global Threat Center believes the easy process for posting apps led to a 472 percent increase in malware samples since the previous July.

"These days, it seems all you need is a developer account, that is relatively easy to anonymize, pay $25 and you can post your applications," wrote Juniper on its threat center blog. Lack of sufficient screening means poorly defined, unscreened apps will only be removed if malware is reported or detected by...

Zynga Inc. was getting the best ride on Facebook's coattails Thursday. Its stock jumped nearly 17 percent to close at $12.39 -- a new high. There's good reason for that. Almost all of Zynga's revenue comes from addictive games like CityVille and Mafia Wars that are played on Facebook. The social network's initial public offering documents revealed, for the first time, that 12 percent of its $3.7 billion in revenue last year came from Zynga.

Some of that revenue came from the 30 percent "toll" that Facebook takes on in-game purchases, the rest came from ads that Zynga bought on the site.

"It shows (Zynga's) an important partner, they're going to participate in Facebook's growth," said Wedbush analyst Michael Pachter.

Baird analyst Colin Sebastian said the filing suggests there could be upside to his forecast for Zynga's fourth-quarter earnings, which will be announced in two weeks.

He added that other Internet companies were justifiably trading higher partly because Facebook reported ad revenue growth of 69 percent in 2011.

"It shines a spotlight on the Internet sector," Sebastian said. "There's a lot to be excited about still among Internet stocks."

Daily deals site Groupon Inc.'s stock rose 7.4 percent to close at $23.08, while jobs networking site LinkedIn Corp. shares rose 6.4 percent to close at $76.98, even though their revenues aren't tied to Facebook.

Online radio service Pandora Media Inc.'s stock rose 3.3 percent to $13.32 and American depositary shares of Chinese social networking company Renren Inc. jumped 8.2 percent to $5.42.

All five companies made their stock market debuts last year. Only LinkedIn's stock has...

It's one of the company's major challenges because the total is paltry compared with competing Internet companies. Google makes more than $30 a year from each registered user. Even struggling Yahoo and AOL make $7 and $10, respectively.

Once Facebook goes public, Wall Street will surely demand more. That means the social network will almost certainly have to attract a lot more users or be more aggressive with its advertising, perhaps by mining personal data even more than it does now.

But can Facebook do all that without spoiling the user experience?

The company may have a tough time increasing the number of ads on a site that has become primarily a home for online conversations.

"It's a communications tool. Can you imagine what a turn-off it would be if we were talking on the phone and AT&T tried to play an ad in the middle of our conversation?" said University of Notre Dame finance professor Tim Loughran, who studies IPOs.

Facebook stock probably won't begin trading until at least May, but analysts already believe the company will try to sell shares at a price that will give it a market value of at least $100 billion -- more than Yahoo, AOL and Hewlett Packard Co. combined.

To justify a valuation like that, Facebook will need to maximize its revenue to get closer to Google, one of its biggest rivals. Google's revenue of nearly $38 billion last year translated into about $35 per registered user.

Facebook recorded $3.7 billion in revenue last year.

The question is whether it can bring in more money without alienating the 845 million users who have become accustomed to hanging out with friends and family on the social network...

The group released a roughly 15-minute-long recording of what appears to be a Jan. 17 conference call devoted to tracking and prosecuting members of the loose-knit hacking group.

The recording's authenticity could not immediately be verified, and it's not clear how the hackers got their hands on it. It appears to have been edited to bleep out the names of some of the suspects being discussed.

Anonymous also published an email purportedly sent by an FBI agent which gave details and a password for accessing the call.

"The FBI might be curious how we're able to continuously read their internal comms for some time now," the group gloated in a message posted to Twitter.

Calls to law enforcement officials on both sides of the Atlantic were not immediately returned.

Amid the material published by Anonymous was a message purportedly sent by an FBI agent to international law enforcement agencies. It invites his foreign counterparts to join the call to "discuss the on-going investigations related to Anonymous ... and other associated splinter groups." The email contained a phone number and password for accessing the call.

The email is addressed to officials in the U.K., Ireland, the Netherlands, Sweden and France, but only American and British officials can be heard on the recording.

Emails to the FBI agent and others coded in on the call were not immediately returned, but the discussion itself appears sensitive. Those on the call talk about what legal strategy to pursue in the cases of Ryan Cleary and Jake Davis -- two British suspects linked to Anonymous -- and discuss details of the evidence gathered against other suspects.

Karen Todner, a lawyer for Cleary, said that the...

Google publicized its new privacy rules -- which regulate how the Web giant uses the enormous amounts of personal data its collects through its search engine, email and other services -- with much fanfare last week.

Since then, it has launched a huge publicity campaign informing its users around the globe of the new policy, which is set to come into force on March 1.

But that launch date may now be under threat.

In a letter to Google Chief Executive Larry Page, Jacob Kohnstamm, the chairman of the group of 27 national privacy regulators in the EU, said the French data protection agency has launched an investigation into the new rules and how they will affect Google users in the EU.

"We call for a pause (in the rollout of the new rules) in the interests of ensuring that there can be no misunderstanding about Google's commitments to information rights of their users and EU citizens, until we have completed our analysis," Kohnstamm wrote in the letter, which was sent Thursday and published on Friday.

Google's search engine has a market share of more than 90 percent in the EU, with rival services like Microsoft's Bing gaining little traction. The EU's competition authorities are already examining whether Google uses this dominance to stop other search engines from entering the market.

Google said in a statement that it had briefed data protection agencies before making its new policy announcement and that none of them had had substantial concerns at the time.

"Delaying the policy would cause significant confusion," it said in the e-mailed note.

In its descriptions of the new privacy policy, Google says its main aim is...

Small but growing numbers of Japanese entrepreneurs are jumping into the startup scene in northern California, particularly since the earthquake and tsunami last March. They include Naoki Shibata, who took the plunge by giving up the sort of life many Japanese in past decades spent their lives trying to attain.

Only 30, Shibata had an executive-level position at online retailing giant Rakuten Inc. and an assistant professorship at the prestigious University of Tokyo, where he earned a Ph.D. Last June he launched AppGrooves, an iPhone application discovery tool.

"I wanted a global company from the first moment," he said. "If you want to reach a global market, then you have to start from Silicon Valley."

Shibata and others say they are seeing a major uptick in Japanese entrepreneurs migrating to Silicon Valley or seriously contemplating a move, as their country struggles with two decades of economic stagnation and a rapidly shrinking and aging population.

Some venture capitalists believe the earthquake, tsunami and the nuclear disaster that followed compelled many Japanese to take an increasingly uncertain future into their own hands.

"Whenever there's a natural disaster, people are pushed and pressed against the wall," said Annis Uzzaman, one of the founders of San Jose, Calif.-based Fenox Venture Capital. "And they want to come out as number one."

Attorney Yoichiro Taku, a partner at Silicon Valley firm Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, has taken on AppGrooves as a client, as well as Japanese-founded social network startups Wondershake and Mieple. Taku, who has among the most active startup practices in the U.S., said it's the most Japanese startup traffic he has ever seen in his Silicon Valley career.

More than...

A new study out Friday found that the average user of the world's biggest online social network gets more than they give. That means more messages, more "likes" and more comments. Yes, even more "pokes."

Behind all that is Facebook's relatively small group of "power users," who do more than their share of tagging, liking and uploading. The report from the Pew Research Center's Internet and American Life Project comes two days after Facebook filed for a $5 billion initial public offering of stock that could eventually value the company at $100 billion.

Key to that mammoth valuation will be Facebook's ability to convince advertisers they can make money from the billons of connections and interactions that people partake in on its Web site and beyond. Though Pew's findings don't address the commercial side of people's activities, they shed important light on how people use the site and what they get out of it.

The study is the product of Pew's analysis of Facebook users' activities in November 2010. It consisted of data that Facebook provided to Pew after 269 users gave their permission. Those users were identified through a random telephone survey about broader Internet issues.

The researchers found that about 20 percent to 30 percent of Facebook users fell into the "power user" category, though they tended to specialize in different types of activities on Facebook. Some of them sent a lot of friend requests, while others tagged more photos than the average user. Only 5 percent were power users in every activity that Pew logged.

The way this plays out is that the average user is more "liked" than they click "like" on other's posts. They receive more friend requests than they...

In the scheme, account holders are tricked by an offer of training in a new "upgraded security system" after being logged into the bank's real site, after which money is moved out of their account but evidence of the theft is invisible to the user, the BBC reported Thursday.

The scam involves what has been dubbed the Man in the Browser attack, or MitB, where the malware the user has been tricked into downloading lives in their Web browser and can get between the user and the bank Web site, altering what is seen and changing details of what is being entered.

Some versions of the MitB will change payment details and amounts and can also change on-screen balances to hide its activities, experts said.

"The man in the browser attack is a very focused, very specific, advanced threat, specifically focused against banking," said Daniel Brett of malware testing lab S21sec.

Every time a new update to the malware is released, it takes security companies a number of weeks to learn how to spot it, he said.

Online banking fraud losses totaled $27 million in the first six months of 2011, a Financial Fraud Action U.K. spokesman said.

But banks are taking action against such scams, FFA's Mark Bowerman said.

"We've got intelligent fraud detection software, and it's used to seeing how you operate your online bank account.

"Any deviations from the norm and the software is going to pick it up -- that may be the type of transaction you've made or the amount," he said.