Technology - InfoWorld

San Francisco - Google put an extensions system for its Chrome browser into a beta channel on Tuesday and opened up a gallery featuring more than 300 extensions. Full Story »

San Francisco - JetBrains is shipping version 9 of its IntelliJ Idea IDE for Java, this time offering both commercial and open source versions. Full Story »

San Francisco - AmberPoint is announcing on Tuesday a governance system for distributed application environments, covering design, development, and staging of applications. Full Story »

San Francisco - Amazon's Relational Database Service (RDS) creates a MySQL database server in the cloud. The notion of "database as a service" is already a reality, thanks to products like FathomDB. Amazon itself provides EC2 instances running MySQL, and Amazon's SimpleDB service offers capabilities similar -- but not identical -- to Amazon RDS. Full Story »

San Francisco - Sun Microsystems, which has been pretty much silent in recent months while awaiting its merger with Oracle, will open up on Thursday about the latest developments in its Java technologies. Full Story »

San Francisco - "Got amazing or amusing IT tales, lessons learned the hard way, or war stories from the trenches?" Full Story »

San Francisco - The netbook promises convenience and capability in a small, lightweight, and generally inexpensive package, and the concept of a smartbook goes even further: a handy-dandy combination of smartphone and notebook. Alas, most netbook offerings come burdened with a full-blown Windows operating system, which runs slowly on performance-limited netbook hardware and saps battery life. And Windows is not exactly smartphone-oriented. Full Story »

San Francisco - It was a week full of hazards, bogeys, shanked shots, and bad lies -- and that's just Tiger Woods' love life. Full Story »

San Francisco - With an upgrade to its TeamCity distributed build management and continuous integration tool, JetBrains is highlighting integration with the Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) platform to accommodate variable loads depending on activity levels. Full Story »

San Francisco - Windows Azure, Microsoft's fledgling cloud computing platform, is piquing the interest of IT specialists who see it as a potential solution for dealing with variable compute loads. But an uptick in deployments for Azure, which becomes a fee-based service early next year, could take a while, with customers still just evaluating the technology. Full Story »