Apple telling the press that the state of its CEO's health is a 'private matter' was like waving a red cape in front of a bull. Within hours Fortune and the New York Times were reporting that the 53-year-old cancer survivor probably wasn't dying - as everyone had surmised by his emaciated appearance at the iPhone G3 introduction last month.

4D announced the release of 4D Web 2.0 Pack v11 Release 2. The new version, a combination of two products - 4D AJAX Framework and 4D for Flex - brings a powerful set of tools, plug-ins, and components that allow 4D developers to harness the power of Web 2.0 technologies, and deliver live web and rich internet applications to browsers, desktops, and portable devices such as the iPhone.

Apple is now the third-largest PC vendor in the US, according to IDC and Gartner's preliminary Q2 data, ousting Acer from the slot. Gartner thinks Mac shipments were up 38% year-over-year in Q2 to give Apple 8.5% of the sputtering US market, up from 6.4% this time last year. IDC figures the US PC market was up 3.6% in Q2, which Gartner, which had forecast only 2% growth, claims it was achieved on the back of a lot of price cuts, Apple included.

kannuu announced the availability of its iPhone SDK (Software Development Kit.) The kannuu iPhone SDK, provides developers with a rich set of tools to incorporate its indexing and lookup capabilities into high demand mobile OS X web-based and device native applications.

Sybase iAnywhere announced immediate support for the new iPhone 3G model to extend wireless email from Lotus Notes and Microsoft Exchange email systems. Sybase iAnywhere was early to market in offering iPhone users wireless email access to Lotus Domino with its product release in Q1 2008, and continues to innovate with support of the new iPhone 3G.

The iPhone is a fun little gadget and great for staying connected, but did you realize that it has incredible potential as a productivity tool? That's right, the iPhone has the power to supercharge everything from your e-mail to your parking space. Read on to see how it can be done.

Apple has introduced a number of extensions to the JavaScript programming language to assist iPhone Web developers. Including new fast lookup functions, native SVG graphics processing, CSS effects, database storage and full screen mode. These new functions will transform the way Web and AJAX developers look at the iPhone for application development. This session introduces the JavaScript extensions, and shows practical examples of their usage.

Build stunning animated applications that do amazing things that will knock your users socks off. Drawing on the content of his book on Core Animation, Dudney will take you through the concepts crucial to building beautiful native apps for the iPhone.

BillShrink launched a price comparison site dedicated to the new iPhone 3G , helping consumers decide whether the highly-anticipated device is the right purchase for their individual needs. BillShrink is a new, free online service that helps consumers save money by making continuously updated, personalized, usage-based money-saving recommendations, and its new comparison site allows consumers to navigate the complex iPhone 3G/AT&T combo pricing.

Oracle announced the first in a series of free Oracle business applications for the Apple iPhone. Oracle Business Indicators will be available on the Apple App Store beginning July 10th. These new Oracle business applications address how busy executives and managers work today -- requiring targeted, intelligent and task focused information to make informed decisions with ease and simplicity with today's increasingly mobile work style.

TechInsights will analyze the Apple 3G iPhone, to be released on July 11. TechInsights' divisions, TechOnline, Portelligent, EE Times and Semiconductor Insights, will collaborate to investigate the second-generation handset to provide technical detail about the new iPhone for readers, customers and the media.

After much soul-searching but finding no 'compelling reason,' Intel of all people is not going to upgrade its 80,000 PCs to Vista except in a few places; XP is just fine, thank you, according to a piece on a New York Times blog that actually started in the Inquirer. That started people to wondering whether Intel, when it finally does upgrade, will go to the Vista-beholden Windows 7 or to Linux or the Mac, its newest hero. It also got other people to remembering that Intel exhibited the same resistance to XP when it was new. It took four years for XP to get 50% of the market.

Azaleos announced that its OneStop Services support the soon to be released iPhone 3G and provide seamless integration with Microsoft Exchange servers. Azaleos remotely managed services enable organizations to synchronize and centrally control 3G and firmware-upgraded first generation iPhones using their Microsoft Exchange infrastructure. Azaleos has a heritage of managing Windows and non-Windows mobile devices, including the Blackberry, which is supported by its MobileXchange service.

I stood in line at an AT&T store last summer the day the iPhone first became publicly available. I thought the local Apple store would be mobbed. Four hours later the AT&T store was out of phones. With not much hope, I drove to the Apple store. Within 15 minutes I was inside buying two iPhones. So my relationship with the iPhone started out well, on balance. But I kept on using other phones on the side.

Sprint may drop out to do a 4G phone and China Mobile is having trouble translating Android into Chinese. And handset makers' efforts to customize the widgetry for carriers is taking longer than expected; there seems to be some difficulty integrating carrier-branded service into the thing alongside Google's apps. The Journal also says that Android isn't getting backing from the mobile ISV because the platform isn't stable - Google is constantly revising it - and Apple's iPhone is easier to develop for.

Apple has a history of carriage trade pricing, and, although such practices cost it the PC market - while imbuing it with a certain cachet - the policy was enshrined in the original iPhone. For the first time Monday Apple sorta kinda changed its tune, so to speak, and started chasing the mass market with an entry-level $199 iPhone 3G with 8GB of memory and $299 for a model with 16GB of memory, in either case a $200 price cut compared to iPhone 1.0, $300 cheaper than a year ago.

John Gage, Sun employee number 5 and its chief researcher, head of its science office - the guy who coined the Sun tag line 'The Network is the Computer' - a seemingly nonsense slogan Sun used to wish it could shake - has finally left the building after 25 years. He's going to Kleiner Perkins to be a VC focused on green technology investments. Sun co-founder Bill Joy has a berth at Kleiner, one of Sun's original backers. A few days ago Sun, which is cutting maybe another 2,500 jobs, lost his chief salesman Don Grantham to HP.

Fundamentally, the '3G iPhone' is little different from its forebear it offers nothing that many other devices can not offer, but, boy, is it better at selling itself! However, now that it is to be available at lower cost in so many more countries, the iPhone is playing on a far more level playing field than it has to date. Therefore, users, operators and rival vendors will really start to see what it is capable of delivering from a performance, user experience and revenue generating perspective.

Keynotes are often boring, but watching today's keynote from WWDC conference was just great. I do not want to repeat the facts about iPhone 3G. Needless to say that I'll buy a couple of them this summer. I do not want to bore you with the facts about the countless possibilities that open iPhone SDK brings to the table. Just watch the keynote.

So how does this relate to MobileMe? MobileMe is, according to Phil Schiller's keynote, 'Exchange for the rest of us'. What this means is that using MobileMe, you will receive push contacts, push e-mail, and push calendar notifications. This will work with any MobileMe-aware application, including Outlook on the PC and iCal, Mail, and Address Book on the Mac and iPhone. This also includes the old iDisk functionality which allows you to share files among all of your devices using file synchronization technologies. iDisk works, but don't ever try to code directly on an iDisk folder with Xcode unless you have a back-up. Hopefully this peculiarity has been fixed in MobileMe.

Up to this point, the iPhone has been a device for gadget fanatics and big spenders, while shortcomings like the price and lack of 3G have limited the addressable market considerably. By adding 3G, GPS and enterprise support and lowering the starting price, Apple has just dramatically expanded the addressable market for the iPhone, such that it now has at least some claim to be a mainstream device. The big increase in available countries will further add to the potential market size, and Apple should now have no problems reaching its near-term goals for iPhone sales. The bigger question now is whether it will be able to keep up with demand.

From Application Virtualization to Xen, a round-up of the virtualization themes & topics being discussed in NYC June 23-24, 2008 by the world-class speaker faculty at the 3rd International Virtualization Conference & Expo being held by SYS-CON Events in The Roosevelt Hotel, in midtown Manhattan.

Apple is supposed to unveil its next-generation 3G iPhone Monday, June 9 at its Worldwide Developers Conference. An iPhone Apps Store, peddling Apple-approved third-party applications for a 30% cut of the proceeds, is also expected to debut. The new iPhone reportedly has GPS support.

By 2011 over 16% of worldwide active e-mail mailboxes will be accessed with a wireless push e-mail solution. That, according to recent report by The Radicati Group on the future of the technology made famous by BlackBerry. Right now, mind you, the percentage of worldwide active e-mail mailboxes accessed by wireless push e-mail is just 1%.

Friday morning the local Fox television station in New York City broke the news - Apple was suing New York City. Six out of 100 of their viewers thought Apple had the right to sue the City, but 94 out of 100 viewers are now calling for New Yorkers to drop Apple and its products, including the iPhone and Macs. New Yorkers are pissed off! New York City, universally known as The Big Apple, is facing a lawsuit from Steve Jobs' Apple Computer Inc. for, of all things, copyright infringement.

Red Hat CTO Brian Stevens, Citrix CTO Simon Crosby, Egenera CTO Pete Manca, Allen Stewart, Group Manager, Windows Virtualization at Microsoft, and Brian Duckering, Sr. Director of Products and Alliances at Symantec were the top industry executives who joined Jeremy Geelan in the 4th Floor Reuters Studio overlooking Times Square for a special SYS-CON.TV 'Virtualization Power Panel' recorded on June 22, 2008, the day before the opening of SYS-CON's 3rd International Virtualization Conference & Expo - which was held 23-24 June 2008 in New York City.

Peer networks are really just logical graphs of computers, or, in many cases, logical graphs of connected applications. The physical topology of the peer network, means of communication, and weighting of the edges are all implementation-specific details that differ from P2P network to P2P network, but all of them can be reduced down at some point to a drawing containing nodes and edges.

Payless Car Rental has launched an iPhone and iPod Touch optimized website. Payless Car Rental is a car rental agency that built a customized version of its website for the iPhone and iPod Touch. The homepage of Payless' iPhone interface also features a 'Call to Book' button that, when pressed, will connect the customer to Payless' call center, where the customer can book over the phone, instead of through the interface.

According to Sean Walsh, President and CEO of Skyway Software, 'Our Skyway Community is thriving and our members are very talented. We truly look forward to their RIAs submittals and Skyway Builder extensions and are excited that all of the contributions will benefit the entire Skyway Community.' With Skyway Builder CE, Java developers get an open source Eclipse-based plugin that offers a seamless blend of coding and modeling for delivering RIAs and Web Services in Spring. Unlike any other modeling tool, Skyway Builder CE provides comprehensive modeling capabilities at four distinct application layers:

Apple has finally bought PA Semi, the fab-less low-power PowerPC start-up that supposedly swooned when Apple switched from the PowerPC Intel. What Apple's going to do with it now become fodder for the speculators. The iPhone uses an 32-bit ARM-derived chip that Intel would love to displace with its newfangled Atom processor.

Apple's taken some heat lately for their decision to push Safari to anybody who runs their Apple Software Update utility. I didn't want Safari, but unless I opt out of it I'll get it. Now Sun and Google are doing the same thing with the Google Toolbar. It isn't enough that they allow you to opt-out.

You remember back in the early days of video games when there wasn't enough capacity on the carts themselves to support 30 hours of gameplay? What was the solution to keep you playing? They made the games unbelievably freaking difficult. Try playing Kid Icarus now after having played a modern game and you'll see that the game introduces artificial barriers and creates needless blocks simply to increase the amount of time spent in the game. If you're an MMO maker and you charge a monthly fee, the more time people spend in your game the more money you make.

Silverlight 2.0 kicks ass and I can't wait to start dropping more hardcore blog posts regarding it. Scott Guthrie's tutorials are a fantastic place to start. The issue I have, however, is that all of the tutorials assume you have installed Silverlight 2.0 tools for VS 2008. There is a small issue with that and I'm not sure everyone's aware of it.

The mouse was the original idea of Doug Engelbart who was the head of the Augmentation Research Center (ARC) at Stanford Research Institute. Engelbart's philosophy is best embodied, in my opinion, in the design of another device that he invented, the five-finger keyboard - with keys like a piano, used by one hand. The problem was, Engelbart's five-finger keyboard and mouse combination was very difficult to learn.

Told ya Adobe was gonna reorganize and put its mobile/devices operation in with its platform operation in the name of moving to a single technology platform and runtime for PCs, handsets and consumer devices. Adobe's new CTO Kevin Lynch, the creator of AIR, is basically in charge of the whole magilla now. Gary Kovacs, VP of product management and marketing for the mobile and devices business, will be general manager of the unit, reporting to Lynch, replacing Al Ramadan, who is leaving.

Rumor has it that in the next few weeks Adobe is going to 'reorganize' its Mobile and Device business unit where its Jobs-criticized Flash Lite lives and send the engineers to go work with the larger platform effort and Flash proper, which Jobs has also criticized. Presumably, Adobe is going to do what it takes to appease Jobs. It does want to be on the iPhone and needs Apple's help.

The NY Times had a story yesterday, much-written-about in the blogosphere, that said that bloggers were working themselves to death. This was one article about blogging I was glad to be left out of, even so, it could have been about me, a number of years ago, when my lifestyle almost did kill me.

This was the first time I've included into the list of the RIA players a little known product called Curl. Even though this language was created in MIT, it's mainly used in Japan. I had a chance to spend an hour with Curl folks today, and it seems that this language may be a good fit for RIA that require solid processing power on the client. I need to spend more time studying this language to form an opinion about this language Curl.

Zimbra announced the availability of its ZimbraME (Java Mobile Edition) client and source code for businesses. Users of any Java-enabled mobile phone will have access to the industry's most complete collaboration solution. The ZimbraME client provides Zimbra Collaboration Suite (ZCS) Open Source and Network Edition users worldwide with free access to the Zimbra experience with e-mail and calendar on mass-market Java-enabled mobile phones. This extends Zimbra's reach of services to the broadest range of devices available in the market and builds on Yahoo!'s e-mail and mobile Web services and as a key starting point for consumers.

If you're like me, you've probably been spending every waking moment you have eating, living, and breathing the iPhone SDK. Since March 6th, that's pretty much all I can think about once I get home. So, what do you do if you want to learn how to write iPhone apps, but you want to become a pro at iPhone SDK programming? Its one thing to read the SDK, page-by-page until your eyes bleed (what I do for fun), but most people like to hang out with other developers, get hands on, do labs, see demos, and generally get their hands dirty.