Microsoft plans to launch an application on Thursday for quickly ramping up websites and lightweight Web applications, called WebMatrix.

The days of e-mailing the whole office to ask if anyone has a mobile-phone charger that fits your phone are numbered, as European standardization bodies on Wednesday released harmonized standards for a common charger.

Like at least half the nerds in America, I applied to be part of Chrome OS beta testing program as soon as it was announced last week. On the surface, at least, I figured myself to be an ideal Chrome user?to a sometimes-scary extent, my life is already lived in Google?s cloud. Even on a Mac I default to the Chrome browser, where I write in Google Docs, check my feeds in Google Reader, and even sync Google Calendar and Contacts to my iPhone and iPad instead of paying for MobileMe. The company?s cloud-based operating system seemed the next logical step.

An increasing number of contributions to the open-source Linux kernel are coming from mobile and embedded equipment vendors, according to an annual report about to be released by the Linux Foundation.

Microsoft has started letting developers build and release applications for Windows Phone 7 using Visual Basic, potentially opening the door to more applications on the new smartphone platform.

SAP has admitted to the "massive and prolonged" infringement of Oracle's copyrights and should pay at least US$1.7 billion in damages, an Oracle attorney said Monday as the companies' corporate theft lawsuit entered its final stages.

Intel has been working with several industry experts to improve the safety of football helmets, including an idea to put its tiny Atom microprocessors inside football helmets to measure and feed real-time impact data to medical personnel on the sidelines of a game.

Negotiators working on a controversial international copyright-enforcement agreement have finalized the language in the proposed pact, the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative said Monday.

Some people speculated that Mark Hurd joined Oracle to get back at his former employer, Hewlett-Packard, but on Thursday he described other reasons for taking the job.

Former Oracle President Charles Phillips testified in court Thursday that he would have been "terrified" to learn SAP had gained access to Oracle's software and that SAP would have had to pay "at least 3 or 4 billion dollars" to license it.

The next major version of OS X took center stage at an Apple press event Wednesday, but it wasn?t the only Mac-centric news to come out of Cupertino. In addition to previewing Mac OS X 10.7?which Apple calls ?Lion??the company also released an updated version of iLife, rolled out a desktop version of its FaceTime video-conferencing application, and revamped its MacBook Air lineup. Apple CEO Steve Jobs called Mac OS X Lion the ?entrée? of Wednesday?s press event, though the company didn?t offer extensive information about its next major OS X update. Lion is slated to arrive in summer 2011.

Google reported strong increases in profit and revenue in the third quarter, during which the company had good results in both its core and emerging businesses.

Intel reported an increase in quarterly profits on Tuesday, brushing off weakness in the consumer market and predicting "healthy worldwide demand for computing products" moving forward.

Google is continuing to back green energy projects, this time investing in the construction of a backbone that will carry energy produced by wind turbines off the East Coast back to shore.

Microsoft has made another case for upgrading to Windows 7: The company has released the latest version of its free downloadable collection of software and enhancements for the consumer editions of Windows

Intel and South Korea's KT Corporation plan to work together to expand WiBro (Wireless Broadband) Internet service to several new areas of South Korea and and have worked to make the network compatible with mobile WiMax.

The newly released version of the Fedora Linux-based operating system will be the first to incorporate desktop virtualization capabilities, the Fedora Foundation announced on Tuesday.

Hewlett-Packard has released new software to help customers move off of their aging HP 9000 servers and onto its newer Integrity systems.

The first release of Oracle's long-awaited, next-generation Fusion Applications will be generally available in the first quarter of 2011, CEO Larry Ellison said during a keynote address at the OpenWorld conference in San Francisco on Sunday.

Microsoft has released a nearly completed preview version of its next-generation communications server and associated software, which the company has collectively renamed as Lync.