The internet is worth £100bn a year to the UK economy, a study has concluded.
The research, which was commissioned by Google, found that the internet accounts for 7.2% of the UK's gross domestic product (GDP).
If the internet was an economic sector it would be the UK's fifth largest, said the report from the Boston Consulting Group (BCG).
This would make the sector larger than the construction, transport and utilities industries.
Central pillar
Some 60% of the £100bn a year figure is made up from internet consumption - the amount that users spend on online shopping and on the cost of their connections and devices to access the web.
The rest comes from investment in the UK's internet infrastructure, government IT spending and net exports.
The report, The Connected Kingdom: How the internet is transforming the UK, says that the internet's contribution to GDP is set to grow by about 10% annually, reaching 10% of GDP by 2015.
The UK, according to the report, is the world's leading nation for e-commerce. For every £1 spent online to import goods, £2.80 is exported.
In the realm of the service-centric ‘seamless OS’ we’re well on the path to having Windows Live serve as an optional yet natural services complement to the Windows and Office software. In the realm of ‘seamless productivity’, Office 365 and our 2010 Office, SharePoint and Live deliverables have shifted Office from being PC-centric toward now also robustly spanning the web and mobile. In ‘seamless entertainment’, Xbox Live has transformed Xbox into a real-time, social, media-rich TV experience.
Microsoft must think beyond the PC if it is to weather the changes due to hit in the next five years.
The warning was given by Microsoft's chief software architect Ray Ozzie in a memo penned soon after he announced he was leaving the company.
In it, Mr Ozzie said that the last five years had been "breathtaking" and expected the next five to be the same.
But, he said, the strengths that had helped Microsoft grow in the past now risked holding it back.
The memo, called "Dawn of a New Day" mirrors one Mr Ozzie wrote soon after taking over from Bill Gates as the man in charge of charting the development direction of Microsoft's portfolio of programs.
" Social-networking Web site Facebook.com is in serious talks to sell itself to Internet media company Yahoo Inc. (YHOO) for an amount that could approach $1 billion, The Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday.Facebook, which has been at the center of takeover rumors for months, also held separate discussions with Microsoft Corp. (MSFT), the world's largest software maker, and media conglomerate Viacom (VIA) over the past year, the Journal reported, citing people familiar with the matter.
In March, BusinessWeek reported that the company had turned down a $750 million offer and hoped to fetch as much as $2 billion in a sale. It has been separately reported that Viacom held talks to buy Facebook.
Social networking sites typically allow users to create and share blogs, pictures and videos with friends and the wider public."
Bill English, an MVP from Minnesota who is weathering the cold and snow, predicts that the uptake for SharePoint Server 2010 will be slow in 2010 due to deep investments in 2007 implementations that didn't occur until the 2008-2009 timeframe. "Many will "kick the 2010 tires" in 2010, but will put off adoption until 2011 or 2012. The economy will need to improve to help fund upgrade projects.
English goes on to point out that few firms have mature enough Knowledge Management requirements to see the benefit of 2010.
Some of the other interesting findings in the survey were related to Cloud Computing - one of the buzzwords in enterprises these days. Enterprises are still quite skeptic about the Cloud model as only 26 per cent are interested in moving their apps and services to the cloud; 70 per cent of the users will use Linux as their primary cloud platform. Also, as the adoption grows companies are looking to hire more professionals with a Linux background - more than 38 per cent replied in the affirmative.
Windows Mobile 6.5 was a little better and enjoyed a very brief period of praise before getting pulverised once again due to Android 2.2 and iPhone iOS4.
So what has changed?? Absolutely everything. Don't make the mistake of thinking Windows Phone 7 is an update of Windows Mobile 6.5. It's a completely new operating system
A survey conducted by the Forum of Private Business (FPB) found that 52pc of respondents who use social media sites such as LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter, regard them as ‘not useful’ or ‘useless’ to their businesses.Small firms: "Social media is useless" - Telegraph
Microsoft's Bing search engine has begun showing US users which sites and products their Facebook friends like.
The move is an attempt to make web search results more personal.
It is part of a four-year alliance between the two companies and marks another step in Microsoft's attempt to displace market leader Google.
The function is optional and only works when users are logged into Facebook or have "cookies" on their PC that store Facebook data.
"This is just the beginning; there is going to be a whole lot more to come over time," Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg said at the launch.
Lists tool designers create all new form templates in Microsoft Office InfoPath, and then import these templates, saved in InfoPath as form template solution (.xsn) files, into the Lists tool.
To start a new form:
Although designers can start new form templates directly in InfoPath, we strongly recommend starting new form templates from the Lists tool designer. Form templates started from the Lists tool designer are initially set up with all features required for importing the Lists tool, plus additional features common to most custom Lists tools.
What new can be said about SharePoint? SharePoint has a large and expanding range of capabilities across portal, collaboration, content management, enterprise search, business process management and business intelligence disciplines.
SharePoint 2010 promises numerous improvements that better equip it as an enterprise portal framework and as an environment for creating and delivering composite applications.
Strengths
Built on a unified and consistent architecture, it has found its way into enterprises through a wide range of business and IT initiatives, not all of which are identified as portals.
It is the only large portal vendor with a multitenant, elastic cloud portal with a focus onoffice productivity and collaboration.
Cautions
Using SharePoint as a portal framework means a long-term commitment to Microsoft's (news, site) agenda, with organizations employing SharePoint forced to invest in the .NET platform and the skills needed to support it.
It has also grown in many enterprises outside the scope of the reasons for its original deployment so there are also often governance concerns.
Document libraries are collections of files that can be shared with other users. Document Libraries are key to SharePoint Document Management (DM) features. Think of the places you will need to share documents. Maybe HR, or a specific project, or a team. Document Libraries give you a place to share documents in a structured way.
Team Site
Finally the most popular SharePoint feature is the Team Site. A team site is a basic web page which contains lists and document libraries. Generally you create a team site in SharePoint any time you have a requirement to make a "small web page" for a specific purpose. Don't use Team Sites for resent you companies entire strategy. Think of them as small web pages with set purposes.
Once the IT guys have given you a Team Site define the Document Libraries, lists, columns and content types you will need to meet the business objectives. SharePoint builds on simply tools to give you the power to quickly implement the Information Architecture you want, without having to write code or go through long testing processes.
SharePoint Security Advisory Issued by Microsoft -- Visual Studio MagazineMicrosoft issued a security advisory on Thursday for a vulnerability in Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007.
The vulnerability affecting those applications has elevation-of-privilege implications for organizations. An attacker can use a cross-site scripting (XSS) technique to "run arbitrary script" that may lead to the attacker gaining access rights on a Web site running SharePoint, according to the advisory.
(Reuters) - Microsoft Corp named company veteran Kurt DelBene as head of its lucrative Office business on Friday, taking over from Stephen Elop, who left the world's largest software company to become chief executive officer of Nokia Corp last month.
Microsoft's Office suite of business applications -- including well-known programs such as Word, Outlook, SharePoint and Excel -- is a huge money-maker for the company and central to its move toward providing software online.
Office provided almost all of the $11.8 billion in profit reported by the Microsoft Business Division last fiscal year, just less than half of the company's total operating earnings.
Yahoo's stock price also has fallen by about 15 percent so far this year, leaving it even further below the $33 per share that Microsoft was prepared to pay to buy the entire company in May 2008. Yang balked at the offer, prompting Microsoft to withdraw the bid.
Yahoo shares fell 17 cents Thursday to close at $14.17.
Microsoft’s Secret Acquisition Spree | paidContentIt’s not clear why Microsoft bought Vivaty and McCurdy wouldn’t say. But Microsoft seems to have a specific interest in gaming companies. ZDNet’s Mary Jo Foley reported this week that Microsoft was making “overtures” to various social gaming companies, including possibly Second Life parent Linden Lab. (A commenter on her post mentioned that Microsoft had quietly purchased Vivaty, prompting me to check.)
New PCs could start in just seconds, thanks to an update to one of the oldest parts of desktop computers.
The upgrade will spell the end for the 25-year-old PC start-up software known as Bios that initialises a machine so its operating system can get going.
The code was not intended to live nearly this long, and adapting it to modern PCs is one reason they take as long as they do to warm up.
This week, there is a new rumor swirling that Microsoft might be sniffing around Linden Lab, the company behind the Second Life social-gaming platform that was the darling of many a tech company a couple of years back.
