Google soon to be watching you

Google is overhauling its desktop search software to go head-to-head with rivals Yahoo, Microsoft and AOL, reports BBC News.

According to the report, the new version of Google`s desktop search will function as a digital helper that keeps an eye on what users do and instantly displays relevant Web pages, blog entries, documents, messages and photos in a hovering, on-screen panel.

The panel can also monitor different e-mail accounts and show incoming messages as they appear. It also lets users generate a list of the most-used documents and files so they can launch them as soon as they are needed.

Desktop and toolbar search software have been heavily pushed by Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, AOL, Ask Jeeves and many others over the past year as these rivals look for an edge in the battle for users.

Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) has released a pair of mobile Turion 64-bit processors that are likely to appear in specialised notebooks from VoodooPC, according to an eWeek report.

The AMD MT-40 and MT-37 form the new high end of the Turion "MT" family of thin-and-light processors that use a 25-watt thermal design power envelope. A second family, the "ML" family, was designed for faster notebooks that consume up to 35 watts of power.

The Turion chips were specifically designed to fit inside thin-and-light notebooks, previously dominated by Intel`s Pentium M processor.

Oracle has released its long-promised collaboration suite update in a move believed to be aimed at challenging Microsoft`s Sharepoint software.

The Oracle collaboration suite has previously been compared to Microsoft Exchange Server and IBM e-mail offerings, but Information Week says Oracle`s new 10g suite includes enhanced content management capability aimed at challenging Microsoft Sharepoint.

The new version also includes instant-messaging/presence awareness capabilities, a universal user interface for all the collaboration services called Oracle Workspaces, and a consistent point of access and GUI to content management, threaded discussions, instant messaging, Web conferencing and contact/calendar management.

The Apache Software Foundation has launched an open source project to develop application-integration middleware.

Information Week reports that the move could lead to a viable alternative to vendor-supplied products used in service-oriented architectures.

The report states Apache Synapse will provide many of the capabilities of an enterprise service bus such as secure interoperability between business systems via extensible markup language, Web services interfaces and standardised rules-based routing.