How big is this ecosystem? Try 70,000 apps for things like managing lists and searching for videos. Pretty remarkable considering you only need one or two. But that market is huge and growing and Twitter has announced a developer conference for next month. Datamation has more.

There are millions of Twitter users, but the number of application developers supporting the microblogging platform isn't too shabby, either....

CA on Wednesday added another piece to its growing cloud-computing portfolio when it announced the acquisition of 3Tera, an Aliso Viejo, Calif.-based developer of software applications used to build and deploy applications for public and private clouds.

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

3Tera's AppLogic software allows companies to use a browser to manage and scale on-demand, fully distributed applications for both in-house clouds and as a platform for cloud-computing services.

"3Tera technology is a powerful addition to the total solution CA provides for optimizing these high-value supply chains--from the mainframe to the cloud," Chris O'Malley, CA's executive vice president of cloud products, said in a statement."CIOs can use cloud computing to build and manage a new type of IT 'supply chain' across today's virtualized internal and external technology infrastructure." ...

The study surveyed 2,000 PHP developers in December and found that 85 percent reported that Linux was their primary operating system as a production environment for PHP.

Windows came in at a distant second at 11 percent while Mac OS X came in third at just 2 percent. However, when Zend drilled down into which platforms respondents prefer for their development, the rankings change dramatically. ...

Google is still rolling out the service to all Gmail users, but if you can't wait, we have a couple of ways that you can try out Buzz right now on your desktop or smartphone.

But before you get going, here are some early impressions from around the Web about Google Buzz.

Google Buzz is not that new

It may sound like sour grapes, but Microsoft and Yahoo released separate statements on Tuesday saying they have offered functionality that's similar to Google Buzz for years. Microsoft allows you to add what are called "Web Activities" to your Windows Live profile. There are about 75 services you can add to your Windows Live profile, including Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, Picasa, and others. Just like Google Buzz, Windows Live posts your activity to your public profile, and you can view the activities of others if they've added it to their Windows Live profiles as well. Yahoo profiles behave in a very similar manner....

The Visual Process Manager toolset allows non-programmers to create complex business process applications by drawing boxes with interconnects. It's reminiscent of the ability to sketch out application flow design in Microsoft Visio or modeling languages like UML. The Process Wizard then handles building the app, simulation testing, and generating UI screens.

"Customers want to solve the problem of business processes. Our conversations with CIOs are increasingly going in that area. It used to be line-of-business executives would say 'build me this app.' Now it's more of a collaborative discussion on how to automate these business processes," Ariel Kelman, vice president of Force.com marketing, told InternetNews.com. ...

Monty Widenius believes in open source and wants the popular free database he developed to remain viable long after Oracle's acquisition of Sun Microsystems fades from the headlines. Datamation chronicles his fight to keep MySQL alive and why he believes that its demise is probably inevitable.

"I will do everything that is possible to keep MySQL alive," says Michael (Monty) Widenius, the main developer of the well-known open source database. "I just hope it's enough."

Widenius is talking against the background of Oracle Corporation's acquisition of MySQL along with the other assets of Sun Microsystems. According to Widenius, if allowed to stand, the acquisition will mean the eventual loss of MySQL as a first-class database without any adequate open source replacement. ...

In classic form, Apple isn't saying much, but rumors have the company releasing some sort of aesthetically gorgeous, paper-sized tablet device that combines computing, Web browsing, e-reading and multimedia. The last time Apple released a product this shrouded and hyped--the iPhone---it pretty much singlehandedly elevated the entire mobile medium.

The excitement has some advertisers swooning over the possibilities of communicating via the tablet--envisioning a beautiful new canvas and maybe even a complete rethinking of what Web pages look like. "Advertising is, at its core, about storytelling. And since the advent of interactive media, we have had to make compromises in how we tell those stories: character limits, file sizes, small and odd dimensions," explained Eric Bader, managing partner, BrandinHand. "This tablet is the next step in vastly improving the experiences."

Buyers also foresee the tablet as a channel for better targeting data. But its personal, portable nature may also make it tougher to make an impact. "How do I insert my brand in an era where it's increasingly impossible to disrupt somebody?" asked Greg March, digital group director at Wieden+Kennedy. "That doesn't change with a tablet."

Most expect Apple's tablet, like Amazon's Kindle, to sell magazine and newspaper subscriptions. But publishing experts cautioned against viewing the device as a lifesaver. Sean Reily, Los Angeles Times director of editorial business and planning, said that Apple's brand should lift the profile of e-reading overall and provide an attractive distribution outlet.
"But the business of publishing is a whole other ballgame," he said.

At Ziptechnologies, our hearts & prayers go out to the victims of the earthquake and their families, as such we too have contributed cash and kind to help our haitian neighbours. We know you are also anxious to help out, which is why we've put together this quick list of ways you can lend your support to Haiti during its time of crisis.

You can help haitian children and families to start rebuilding communities and restoring hope, right now, here's how:- ...

"Mozilla released a fifth version of Firefox 3.6 to its more than 600,000 beta users as part of its continuing program to gather feedback and get fixes into the hands of the people evaluating the preview," said Mike Beltzner, director of Firefox, to ComputerWorld. "We expect to be able to issue a release candidate before the end of this year, but we'll likely hold off on the official release until early in the new year."...

In this moribund economy, more and more enterprise customers are embracing the cloud model to shave costs, reduce the time and complexity of bringing new services online and improve their ability to react to business changes on the fly without installing expensive applications and hardware in their datacenters....

On the heels of last week's vote to ratify the new Java specification, Sun Microsystems, the leader of the Java community, today formally announced the release of Java EE 6.

Along with the news, Sun today also released Glassfish version 3--the first Java EE 6-compliant Java server--as well as NetBeans 6.8 IDE, which also includes full Java EE 6 support.

With the releases, Sun (NASDAQ: JAVA) is providing the first major update to the Java EE platform in over three years. This month also marks another significant milestone with the tenth anniversary of the first J2EE release (the former name of Java EE) in 1999.

"Java EE 6 is important for many reasons, not the least of which is that it continued the development, maturation and innovation of the standard for enterprise Java development," Kevin Schmidt, director of product management and marketing for Sun's Application Platform organization, said during a conference call with press this morning. "Java EE 6 adds new services like RESTful Web Services, dependency injection and annotation additions for servlets, further reducing the amount of code that a developer must write." ...

The conference focuses on all things related to high performance computing, something GPU vendors have increasingly wanted a part of. ATI and nVidia were both on hand at SC09 to show off their products tuned for HPC, as was Intel. Only instead of just discussing the Nehalem generation of CPUs, Intel CTO Justin Rattner also showed significant progress in Larrabee's development. (See YouTube video clip here).

Intel has been coy about the exact specs of Larrabee. It has not said how many cores it will have, the clock speed or power draw. What is known is that it's a many-core design that uses older Pentium cores, updated with 64-bit extensions and SIMD (define) extensions plus a 1,024-bit high-speed ring bus to link all of the cores.

The IDF showing was, to be charitable, underwhelming, with an old 3D graphics game sitting idle on stage and barely any action taking place on screen. But during his keynote, Rattner showed a much better demonstration. He held up the Larrabee card, which is about as large as modern day cards, and then ran an HPC demo....

The 11 APIs will enable third parties to incorporate features from LinkedIn on their sites, enabling visitors to access their profiles and send messages to their contacts, as well as a LinkedIn search feature that developers will be able to embed on external sites.

LinkedIn is also offering a menu of embeddable widgets, which allow site operators to build some of the social network's most popular features into their own Web properties with a minimal amount of coding.

The developer platform builds on several partnerships LinkedIn has struck with major enterprise IT players to integrate its service into the flow of the workplace. LinkedIn has teamed with IBM for a Lotus collaboration, RIM for a version of the site designed for the BlackBerry, and with Microsoft for an Outlook tie-in.

In the social arena, LinkedIn also recently collaborated with Twitter to integrate the content of those two sites....