Shortly after the recent news that Apple is revamping its iPhone to make it safer for corporate use comes a story by the Wall Street Journal’s Ben Worthen that sheds some light on why Apple may feel that such a step is necessary.

“Designed with the consumer in mind, the iPhone is less secure than business-oriented smart phones such as those from Nokia Corp. or Research In Motion Ltd.’s BlackBerry, according to IT professionals,” the article states. “But that isn’t stopping people from using the device for work-related tasks such as checking email, managing sales contacts and getting information about prospective clients.”

Many IT groups have banned the iPhone from their workplaces, complaining that there is no way to force employees to protect their iPhones with passwords and that they can’t erase sensitive corporate data from remote locations if the device is stolen or lost. Additionally, they say the iPhone doesn’t support the software many businesses use and that it only works on one cellular carrier’s network.

However, the article makes it clear that, in the end, the preference of the workers is likely to win out over the preference of America’s corporate IT administrators:

Whereas software vendors and other tech suppliers traditionally pitched their products to high-ranking executives and IT managers, some are now paying closer attention to the technologies workers actually use. Some vendors say that if employees make clear that they are going to embrace a particular device — with or without their IT department’s approval — then they will develop compatible products for it. Otherwise, they risk losing business to rivals.

“It’s clear to us that power is shifting to the users” and away from IT departments, says Mike de la Cruz, a vice president at business-software maker SAP AG. “So we’ve changed our strategy to focus on the users.”

Still, Apple is certainly smart enough to know that it’s in its best interests to alleviate the concerns of IT professionals.

Apple and its iPhone partner, AT&T Inc., are trying to make the iPhone more business-friendly, too. In January, AT&T began to allow iPhone purchases by corporate-account holders. Previously, the telephone company would bill iPhone charges only to individuals, and they would have to seek reimbursement from their companies. “We saw business customers clamoring for the iPhone” and wanted to make it easier for them to use the device, says an AT&T spokesperson.

What do you think? Will the explosive popularity of the iPhone translate into the business world? Should it? Do you have one, and if so, do you find yourself using it for work-related tasks? Sound off in the comments and let us know your thoughts.

For months there has been a rising chorus of alarm about the surging growth in the amount of data flying across the Internet. The threat, according to some industry groups, analysts and researchers, stems mainly from the increasing visual richness of online communications and entertainment — video clips and movies, social networks and multiplayer games.

So begins a recent article in the New York Times about the growing concern amongst some industry observers that the Internet is reaching the limits of its capacity, thanks to the huge increase in streaming video and other media-heavy content we’ve seen in recent years.

Moving images, far more than words or sounds, are hefty rivers of digital bits as they traverse the Internet’s pipes and gateways, requiring, in industry parlance, more bandwidth. Last year, by one estimate, the video site YouTube, owned by Google, consumed as much bandwidth as the entire Internet did in 2000.

In a widely cited report published last November, a research firm projected that user demand for the Internet could outpace network capacity by 2011. The title of a debate scheduled next month at a technology conference in Boston sums up the angst: “The End of the Internet?”

Tempting as it is to dismiss such overly dramatic generalizations as “The End of the Internet,” and despite the questionable nature of making this kind of sweeping prediction in such an ever-changing form of media, the article does raise a very valid point: We’re using a lot more bandwidth and resources now than we ever did before, and that rate is increasing at a very alarming rate.

The article doesn’t claim that the “end” will be a total crash of web services, but rather, an “Internet clogging in the form of sluggish download speeds and frustration with data-heavy services that become much less useful or enjoyable.”

And perhaps most significant is how this issue will affect the heated debate in America about governmental policies on broadband structure — “a matter that is expected to attract political attention after a new administration takes over in Washington.”

While experts debate the immediacy of the challenge, they agree that it points to a larger issue. In the Internet era, they say, high-speed networks are increasingly the economic and scientific petri dishes of innovation, spawning new businesses, markets and jobs. If American investment lags behind, they warn, the nation risks losing competitiveness to countries that are making the move to higher-speed Internet access a priority.

… The Internet, though a global network, is in many ways surprisingly local. It is a vast amalgam of smaller networks, all linked together. The worries about digital traffic congestion are not really about the Internet’s main trunk lines, the equivalent of network superhighways. Instead, the problem is close to home — the capacity of neighborhood switches, routers and pipes into a house. The cost of stringing high-speed optical fiber to a home, analysts estimate, can be $1,000 or more.

That is why Internet access speeds vary so much country by country. They depend on local patterns of corporate investment and government subsidy. Frederick J. Baker, a research fellow at Cisco, was attending a professional conference last month in Taiwan where Internet access is more than twice as fast and costs far less than his premium “high speed” service in California.

… In the United States, the investment required to cope with rising Internet traffic will need to be made at several levels, not just cable and telecommunications carriers. Tim Pozar, an engineer and a co-owner of the Internet services company UnitedLayer in San Francisco, said a number of forces were combining: the surge in bandwidth-hungry video applications on Web sites, the need to handle traffic from more Internet-enabled devices like cellphones, and shortages of electrical power for data centers in places like San Francisco.

“We’re running out of horsepower to accommodate the demand,” said Mr. Pozar, whose company’s data centers support Web sites for customers ranging from museums to social networks. “And upgrades needed in data centers are going to be a lot more expensive than in the past, now that all the excess capacity left over after the dot-com bubble burst has been gobbled up.” The pace of future demand is the big uncertainty surrounding the Internet traffic challenge, and how fast people will adopt emerging technologies is notoriously difficult to foresee.

Some observers think all this might be pointing to a fragmentation of the Internet, where several other webs are utilized to meet varying needs. At any rate, this is all probably connected with such recent news as TiVo’s announcement that they’re bringing YouTube to consumers’ TV sets.

We can confidently disagree with the report that the Internet will face some kind of crippling crisis in the year 2011. But it’s harder to state that no other problems will happen between now and then. As the Internet continues to evolve, it’ll no doubt take new directions that we can’t even predict yet. That’s one of the reasons why it continues to fascinate, and why it’s essential to get the best Internet partner you can find now, before things get even more chaotic.

If you’re in the eCommerce game, and you’ve never checked out this docstoc list of 68 great SEO tools, we’d like to encourage you to give it a look.

It’s a collection of basically everything you need to analyze and optimize your site’s SEO situation (not to mention, a great way to take a peak at how your competitors are stacking up against you). The list features a link to and brief description of a huge variety of tools. Everything from Firefox add-ons to almost two dozen resources from Google, from Web CEO to a Meta Tag Generator Tool, and much much more, can be found on this comprehensive list.

Even if you already take advantage of some of the more popular of these tools, it’s worth checking it out to discover some that you may not have heard of. And, even if you already know and love them all, the page is still a great place to find them all in one convenient location.

Thanks to the fine resources at docstoc.com for the list.

With the recent addition of Yahoo, the new lineup of the OpenSocial Initiative is now comprised of the three biggest names in Internet commerce — or what CNET calls “the Justice League of social media: Google, Yahoo, and News Corp.’s MySpace.com”.

“The OpenSocial Foundation is expected to be formed within 90 days, with more OpenSocial partners from across the Web on board in addition to the three responsible for the announcement,” stated the CNET article from earlier today.

So, just what is this new organization? According to Google’s official page, “OpenSocial defines a common API for social applications across multiple websites. With standard JavaScript and HTML, developers can create apps that access a social network’s friends and update feeds.”

A common API means you have less to learn to build for multiple websites. OpenSocial is currently being developed by a broad set of members of the web community. The ultimate goal is for any social website to be able to implement the API and host 3rd party social applications. There are many websites implementing OpenSocial, including Engage.com, Friendster, hi5, Hyves, imeem, LinkedIn, MySpace, Ning, Oracle, orkut, Plaxo, Salesforce.com, Six Apart, Tianji, Viadeo, and XING.

OpenSocial is built upon gadgets, so you can build a great, viral social app with little to no serving costs. With the Google Gadget Editor and a simple key/value API, you can build a complete social app with no server at all. Of course, you can also host your application on your own servers if you prefer. In all cases, Google’s gadget caching technology can ease your bandwidth demands should your app suddenly become a worldwide success.

The CNET article adds a bit more detail:

The specific purpose of the new nonprofit, according to a release, is “to ensure the neutrality and longevity of OpenSocial as an open, community-governed specification for building social applications across the Web.” It’s a particularly crucial move for Google, which has been eager to emphasize that OpenSocial is a community standard, not a Mountain View project.

“OpenSocial has been a community-driven specification from the beginning,” Joe Kraus, Google’s director of product management, said in a joint statement from the three companies. “The formation of this foundation will ensure that it remains so in perpetuity. Developers and websites should feel secure that OpenSocial will be forever free and open.”

Indeed, the OpenSocial Foundation will be an independent entity with its own intellectual property and governance policies. Related assets are expected to be in place by the beginning of July.

Google first announced OpenSocial in October as a response to the plethora of announcements on behalf of social-networking sites that they would follow in Facebook’s footsteps and create developer platforms of their own. With so many disparate developer strategies, the social-media landscape could grow even more fragmented, and Google launched the OpenSocial API (and later the Social Graph API) as a means to provide some connectivity. Major players like MySpace, LinkedIn, Bebo, and Plaxo, along with a host of smaller social networks and many that are unknown in the U.S., all opted to participate in the new initiative.

Although the project was announced last year, it’s now picked up a huge amount of steam (helped in no small part by Yahoo’s entry into the collective) and is expected to go live within the next 90 days. “Some OpenSocial platforms, like foundation partner MySpace’s, are already live,” reports the CNET article. “Others are still in testing phases or have yet to make any kind of debut.”

Interestingly, Facebook, the site that first kicked off the recent social-networking craze, is sitting this one out.

“As the largest contributor to the memecached system, Facebook has long been a leader and supporter of open source initiatives but will not join the foundation,” a statement from the company read. “The company will continue to evaluate partnership opportunities that will benefit the 300,000 Facebook Platform developers while improving the Facebook user experience.”

Personal health records, or PHRs, are seen by many observers to be a key to solving the health care problems in the U.S.A. It’s not a new concept (Wikipedia reports that the term itself goes back to the 1970s); however, the association it now has with electronic records is somewhat new.

In short, a PHR represents a person’s complete health history and is made available to any health care official the patient approves of. It’s meant to greatly simplify the health care process by providing a safe way to give information to whomever may need it.

And, with the always-competitive Internet giants seeking to revolutionize each other at every turn, it should come as no surprise that Google and Microsoft have gotten themselves into the business of providing PHR technology.

This, according to the Washington Post’s Craig Stoltz, has the health care industry “energized, focused and at least a little bit frightened.”

In addition to Google and Microsoft, dozens of companies presented online products designed to make U.S. health care smarter, stronger and better looking. There was a plan to offer online doctor consults at $1.99 per minute, a provider search tool pitched as “the match.com of health care,” and an electronic medical record that made you want to bask in the sheer beauty of ear infection data.

Here’s a look at where Microsoft’s and Google’s personal health record programs are now and where they may be headed.

What Microsoft HealthVault and Google Health have in common:

Both companies claim the same ultimate goals: To create integrated online environments where you can create and store your personal records, get information, find doctors, make medical appointments, communicate online, manage medications, share information with providers and more. Oh, and with Microsoft and Google, there’s always that other goal: to dominate the world.

Both put users in control over what goes into the record and who has access to it. If there’s something you’d rather not share with your employer, insurance company or anyone else, leave it out.

Both are free Web-based services, meaning you can access the records without cost from any computer. The services are described as being as secure as online banking. Both companies pledge not to share your information without your explicit permission.

Both offer tailored searches that promise to filter out garbage and surface the gold.

Any private-company efforts to help overhaul the ailing U.S. health care system are admirable, particularly given the difficulty the government is having in getting any kind of reform-minded consensus. But, what’s in this for Google and Microsoft?

Microsoft plans to make money by placing ads next to HealthVault search results. As with any search, some are text ads generated by keywords. Some are interactive ads promoting HeathVault-compatible devices or services. Some offer related books and products from Amazon. Anyone can use the HealthVault search, but if you want to save your results privately (a nice feature), you’ll need to sign up for a free HealthVault account.

[For its part,] Google doesn’t rule out the possibility of selling ads alongside search results or other Google Health services but says it has no current plans to do so. … So why would Google take on such a big, difficult project — creating complex data exchange systems and storing all that personal information — if there’s no way to make money? Data show more than 70 percent of people seeking health-care information turn first to Google. A strong personal health dashboard linked to other Google services, including its cash-cow search business, can make sure those health-seekers stay with Google rather than with the competition. Like Microsoft, for instance.

So far, no launch dates have been set, but the health care industry is watching with great interest.

Read more about Google Health here. Read more about Microsoft HealthVault here. And click here to check out the original article in the Washington Post.