Technology - InfoWorld

San Francisco - It's been a week of stark contrasts. A privately funded rocket made it into space, while stock market funds crashed to earth.

San Francisco - Mono 2.0, an open-source runtime enabling .Net-based applications to run on Linux, Mac OS X, and Unix, is being released Monday, featuring capabilities for a number of .Net technologies.

San Francisco - HP on Monday is updating its SOA governance software, HP Systinet 3.00, which assists with discovering and reusing services in composite applications and business processes.

San Francisco - Companies are finding themselves embroiled in a power crisis as they struggle to find ways to rein in soaring energy costs -- as well as do their part to address global climate change.

San Francisco - June 25, 1998, and June 30, 2008, marked two important milestones in Microsoft's evolution of the Windows OS -- the passing of the torch from Windows 95 to Windows 98, and the less seemly transition from XP to Vista.

San Francisco - A small business is not necessarily a simple business. That rather basic lesson has taken much of the computer industry far too many years to learn. Successful SaaS vendors have realized that small businesses need the same sort of functions and support that large enterprises get ??? just in smaller quantities. Clearly Microsoft has come to the same realization with the release of Small Business Server 2008.

San Francisco - Fearful tech workers tiptoeing along the shaky alleys of Wall Street -- and fretting about losing their jobs -- should take a deep breath. Of the more than 100,000 job losses expected as a direct result of the financial crisis, only a tiny slice will likely be from the tech ranks, figures Sean O'Dowd, an analyst at market researcher Financial Insights.

San Francisco - Ross Mayfield??, founder of Socialtext, unveiled this week version 3.0 of his company's enterprise wiki, which promises to make the corporate directory a social networking tool for the workplace.

San Francisco - Microsoft on Wednesday is revealing an updated platform strategy to support composite applications in Windows Server and the .Net Framework programming model.

San Francisco - SpringSource, maker of the popular Spring Framework for Java application development, this week began offering its SpringSource dm Server, an OSGi-based application server to run enterprise Java and Spring applications.

San Francisco - Facing uncertain economic times, enterprises may be more likely to turn to cloud computing services -- such as SaaS (software as a service), Amazon-style utility computing, and managed service providers -- for the lower up-front costs, the faster time to market, and the ability to add capabilities quickly without investing in new hardware.??

San Francisco - Officials from companies such as HP and Joyent debated the merits and even the definition of cloud computing Monday during an event at eBay headquarters, emphasizing efforts underway and noting limitations to cloud computing on the software side.