Virtual Whistler

Scientists positively identified the presence of ethane, according to a statement from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, which manages the Cassini mission exploring Saturn, its rings and moons.

Liquid ethane is a component of crude oil.

Cassini has made more than 40 close flybys of Titan, a giant planet-sized satellite of the ringed world.

Scientists had theorized that Titan might have oceans of methane, ethane and other hydrocarbons, but Cassini found hundreds of dark, lake-like features instead, and it wasn't known at first whether they were liquid or dark, solid material, JPL's statement said.

The instrument was used during a December flyby to observe a feature dubbed Ontario Lacus, in the south polar region, that is about 7,800 square miles, slightly larger than North America's Lake Ontario.

Cassini reached Saturn in mid-2004 and at the end of that year launched a probe named Huygens that parachuted to the surface of Titan the following January.

The mission is a project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency.

Coveo Solutions Inc. announced the limited availability of Coveo G2B for CRM. Coveo G2B for CRM provides designated users with a single view of all relevant customer data instantly from a wide variety of CRM applications and other data sources including salesforce.com, Siebel, corporate intranet, tech support emails, customer support databases, and ERP systems.

Coveo G2B for CRM also provides users with advanced content analytics, allowing management and workers to quickly develop a visual analysis of customer data and present it graphically, such as in a spreadsheet or pie chart.

In doing so, G2B for CRM allows businesses to make better decisions for planning, forecasting and resource management. Coveo G2B for CRM is part of the Coveo G2B Information Access Suite, which provides knowledge workers with an unrivaled ability to obtain a total view of the information they need to drive business.

Built on the Coveo Enterprise Search-platform technology, Coveo's search-powered business applications deliver competence and consumer-style ease of use, an implementation that takes "less than 24-hours, and black-belt" level customer support.

http://www.coveo.com

IBM announced enhancements to their social networking tools for business. Lotus Connections 2.0 and IBM Atlas for Lotus Connections feature a mix of new capabilities that blend IBM's expertise in business software with the Web 2.0 capabilities popular in consumer social networking Web sites.

The new home page streams feeds from various components of Lotus Connections and shows people what is happening within their network. Widgets let people customize the main page and add links to external communities such as Facebook or custom business applications used within the organization.

IBM is expanding the tagging abilities of Lotus Connections to include people tagging. With the latest version, people can tag themselves or others based on a key topic or area of expertise. This allows individuals to instantly identify and retrieve live intellect on any given topic and tap into the collective wisdom of a larger group or pinpoint rare, niche expertise from the general population.

Tag clouds are displayed on a person's profile and throughout communities, making it easy to associate people with areas of expertise. Additional new features in Lotus Connections include the ability to send or receive notifications to others about interesting social bookmarks, discussion forums and integration with wiki providers Atlassian and Social Text.

http://www.ibm.com/lotus/connections

Micro blogging site Twitter is the latest target of cyber criminals who are increasingly finding fertile ground on social networks.

A fake Twitter profile with a malicious payload has been spotted by security firm Kaspersky.

It purports to link to a pornographic video but downloads a fake version of Adobe Flash which installs programs capable of stealing data.

The attack is believed to be the first to target Twitter.

Social net

The attack is believed to have originated in Brazil because of the language it uses, the servers it calls on to download trojans and the e-mail address used to collect stolen data.

The fake profile has a name that means "pretty rabbit" in Portuguese. It tries to convince users to download the fake Flash video viewer in order to watch the associated video.

It comes as Kaspersky also releases details about two worms that target social networking sites MySpace and Facebook. More variants of these worms are also starting to turn up.

The worms transformed victims' machines into zombie computers, used by criminals to send spam, launch phishing attacks and harvest data.

They were disguised as a link to YouTube which also installed a fake version of Flash Player.

"Unfortunately users are very trusting of messages left by friends on social networking sites so the likelihood of a user clicking on a link like this is very high," said Alexander Gostev, a senior virus analyst at Kaspersky Lab.

FRANKFURT (Reuters) - Apple Inc's iPhone outsold all smartphones in the United States in July, its first full month on sale, accounting for 1.8 percent of all U.S. mobile handset sales, research group iSuppli said on Tuesday.

ISuppli reiterated its forecast that Apple would sell 4.5 million iPhones this year, rising to more than 30 million in 2011.

The two models of the iPhone on the market sold more than Research in Motion's Blackberry series, the entire Palm portfolio and any individual smartphone model from Motorola, Nokia or Samsung.

Sales equaled those of LG Electronics' Chocolate, the most popular feature phone on the U.S. market, iSuppli said.

ISuppli classifies the iPhone as a crossover phone that competes with both smartphones, which have personal computer-like functions such as e-mail, and feature phones, which have extras such as cameras and music players.

"While iSuppli has not collected historical information on this topic, it's likely that the speed of the iPhone's rise to competitive dominance in its segment is unprecedented in the history of the mobile-handset market," iSuppli said.

"Apple achieved this in the face of numerous, well-entrenched competitors."

Most buyers of iPhones in the United States in July were male, under 35 and had a college degree, iSuppli said.

A quarter of those who bought an iPhone switched to operator AT&T, which has an exclusive service agreement for the iPhone in the United States.

The iPhone will go on sale in Europe later this year.

ISuppli gathered its data through a consumer survey of 2 million participants in the United States that it carries out online once a month.

Samsung Electronics has informed downstream customers it will start reducing its supply of NAND flash chips to them from July as its key customer Apple has placed a large batch of orders, according to sources at the company's customers.

The sources indicated that Samsung recently informed them it has secured orders for 50 million 8Gb-equivalent NAND flash chips mainly for use in Apple's iPhone. Amid the new orders, Samsung said it would sharply cut supply to other customers in July, they added.

In addition to the Apple orders, supply will also be reduced because of a capacity adjustment Samsung made in May. The chip maker allotted less capacity for NAND flash production during April and May in attempts to reduce oversupply, which should be reflected in actual output in July, the sources said.

Despite an apparent sharp drop in NAND flash, the sources said industry players are still doubtful about the impact from the Apple orders. They noted that Apple already landed a batch of 25 million 8Gb-equivalent NAND flash chips from Samsung in June and commented that ongoing procurement will depend largely on iPhone sales.