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I've just posted a short video about SAP's deal with Jive Software, which lets you embed dynamic analytics widgets inside your blog posts. I mean "dynamic" not in the sense of multicolor whiz-bang (which usually aren't) charts. I'm talking serious Crystal Reports graphics, so you can showcase Business Intelligence (BI) with multiple data slices before your entire company, right there on the corporate Clearspace wiki.

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I'm encouraged that the dirty little secret of Web 2.0 and social media technologies is finally being openly addressed by early adopters and vendors alike. At the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston, there's been frank discussion this week of the question average users have been whispering (so that their bosses don't hear them): Namely, what can this stuff do for me that's actually useful?

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The infinite, self-referential loop which is the modern Web came into relief Monday, on the occasion of Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference. Fanboys gathered in San Francisco at WWDC's keynote for the introduction of the iPhone 3GS. So many people were tweeting, though, that I felt more plugged in online than I would've if I'd been there live. The tweets gyrated wildly between tweeters bored with the phone and those who were fanboyishly enthusiastic.

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I hate to be a whiny blogger -- I know; are there any other kind? -- but with news swirling that Apple is set to call its third-generation funky mobile device the iPhone Video, what can I say except I told you so? Back in February, I was first to uncover hints about video, in a patent document, and posted the news in Apple Planning Video-Call iPhone.

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On the face of it, Intel's announcement that it's going to buy embedded-software vendor Wind River Systems for $884 million is just another ho-hum corporate acquisition. But the back story is much more interesting: This Intel's umpteenth attempt to diversify beyond PC processors. This time they hope they've got it right, by acquiring a company with expertise in the software which powers emerging mobile devices like handheld Web browsers.

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Two just-in reports suggest AMD has a success on its hands with its new 6-core Istanbul. Early tests are showing that the processor, which is a drop-in replacement on mobos supporting quad-core 'Shanghai' Opterons, delivers great performance while being very power-efficient.

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AMD will take Opteron to the next level on June 1, when it formally unveils its 6-core Istanbul processor. The exciting angle for users of high-powered servers (and also viewed from a data-center consolidation perspective) is that Istanbul in 4-socket servers will deliver 24 physical cores. (And you can add virtualization on top of that.) When you add the AMD launch to Intel news last week about its 8-core Nehalem-EX, I'd say we have a have a processing-power revolution on our hands comparable to that which occurred when RISC displaced CISC.

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I'm not a big fan of David Pogue (this video is one reason, though mainly it's because he has a larger audience than I), but I took notice when he reviewed the latest Kindle alternative. What does it all mean? Ebooks are real, and they'll eventually replace print, but for now I'm ticked there are no good portable PDF readers for smartphones.

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Forget four cores -- even though it's the sweet spot of the market. I write that only half in jest, because with announcements from Intel (an 8-core Nehalem) and AMD (6-core Istanbul), the lid has been ripped off the supposed upper limit on cores and threads. Consider that a Nehalem-EX with 8 physical cores and 2 threads per core for 16 total logical threads. In a four-socket server configuration, this can deliver 64 logical cores. [Update: This number has been corrected to 64 logical cores; when I originally posted, in my haste I calculated incorrectly.] Click on to see slides from Intel and AMD.

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OK, so I only actually have four photos so far. But they're fresh from the morning keynotes, where HP announced its unified communications alliance with Microsoft, and VMware discussed how virtualization has become a serious enabling technology for cloud computer. I'll be tweeting (@awolfe58) and posting more photos throughout Interop. Click ahead to see the first batch.

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We're in the midst of a mobile enterprise tornado, Terry Stepien, president of Sybase iAnywhere, told me when we did our podcast the other day. (Actually, it's a perfect storm.) Used to be, companies would dole out smartphones to anointed employees. Now, workers are storming the IT gates, demanding corporate e-mail connectivity for their iPhones. And software vendors are partnering up with mobility shops to roll out smartphone clients for their apps. Click on to hear our podcast.

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Sick of reading about MP3 and movie piracy, and how it's killed the music business and is destroying Hollywood, too? Then let's take a break and talk about e-book piracy. The usual suspect -- Cory Doctorow -- posits that the author's real enemy is obscurity, not piracy. Wrong. It's a different "p" word: Poverty.

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Here I've been on a kick the past year saying that the Smartphone Is Your Next Computer. Turns out, while that's true -- more people are leaving lapbricks at home in favor of Blackberrys and iPhones -- there's another trend brewing. Namely, your mobile device is about to become an unwired wallet.

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If an engineering education teaches one anything, it's that proper process begets beneficial results. The reverse case is scarily evident in the transcripts of the Colgan Air disaster, where a discombobulated crew was a disaster, waiting to happen, which did.

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When I sat down with Bill McDermott, president of SAP's Global Field Operations, all I wanted to talk about was whether software-as-a-service is upending traditional self-hosted software. So it almost went by me when he mentioned that SAP would soon have some Business Intelligence news. We also discussed mobile apps, plus Bill had some tough words for competitor Oracle. Click on to access the video and podcast.

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The big branding news from Intel is not its upcoming megabucks "Sponsors of Tomorrow" ad campaign -- another sure-to-fail attempt to paint geeks as cool. (I'm referring to the "TV spot portraying the Intel scientist who helped invent the USB drive as a rock star." David Byrne, maybe?) What is welcome news, though, is the quieter "rebadging" effort, which seeks to clarify those hapless stickers identifying the processor inside your PC or laptop.

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In an unusual coincidence, one day before Amazon.com is scheduled to unveil a new, widescreen Kindle aimed at newspaper readers, the e-commerce giant has been awarded what appears to be its first United States patent related to the device. The new patent, D591,741, is a design patent which protects the look and feel of the Kindle shell, not for fundamental technologies.

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Here's a story that'll warm the hearts of aging audiophiles (me) and anyone nostalgic for the heyday of electromechanical storage: Best Buy is considering dedicating space to selling vinyl records, after a sales test proved there's life in the old platters yet. Can vacuum tubes be far behind?

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If you're known by the enemies you keep, then Software as a Service received a boost the other day when it was bashed by Richard Stallman, the free-software GNUru. Stallman is such a control freak about his particular vision of software "freedom" that he says the following about SaaS: "You must not use it!"

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I was going to weigh in with yet another opinion about whether microposts reminiscent of that 1970s ad -- "if u cn rd ths msg, u cn gt a gd jb" -- presage the post-literate future or are instead our decade's pet-rock moment. However, what's more interesting is the brewing battle over whether Twitter backlash is for real or just a made-up story attempting to throw cold water on the popular Web 2.0 time-suck.

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AMD's persistent economic challenges -- it just reported a first quarter loss -- have obscured its very real technology story. The scrappy chipmaker remains on track with an aggressive Opteron server-chip roadmap, which will see its six-core Istanbul processor fielded in the next several months, and its 8- and 12-core designs coming in 2010. I talked about Operton recently with Vlad Rozanovich, who heads up AMD's enterprise sales efforts in the United States. Read on to access the podcast.

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The most interesting omission I've seen in all the nattering about Oracle's planned acquisition of Sun Microsystems is discussion of whether the technical talent at Sun will mesh better with their new masters than they would have had the acquiring party been IBM. My counterintuitive answer is, yes.

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My latest video takes you behind the scenes at Intel's announcement of its $250-million healthcare alliance with GE. But what interested me even more than the launch product (a monitoring system for seniors) was the bold language by Intel CEO Paul Otellini and GE chairman Jeff Immelt, neither of whom minced words in saying the U.S. healthcare system is broken.

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Cash for clunkers. I couldn't help thinking about that possibly upcoming government car-purchase incentive program, as I walked the floor the other day at the press preview of the 2009 New York Auto Show. Because free money would be the only thing that could get me excited about what I saw on display at New York City's Javits Center. I can only hope that the state of the auto industry is a lagging indicator, because if it's not, well. . .

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The Blackberry's progression into a mobile platform which puts the iPhone to shame continues apace with RIM's new Blackberry App World. So now Blackberry has added the one ecosystem component it was lacking in its competition with Apple. And I have to tell you, App World rocks.

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Here's another crop of pictures from my New York Auto Show Fizzles post.

Click here to go back and see the previous set of pictures.

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Here's another crop of pictures from my New York Auto Show Fizzles post.

Click here to go back and see the previous set of pictures.

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Here's another crop of pictures from my New York Auto Show Fizzles post.

Click here to go back and see the previous set of pictures.

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Here's another crop of pictures from my New York Auto Show Fizzles post.

Click here to go back and see the previous set of pictures.

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Here's another crop of pictures from my New York Auto Show Fizzles post.

Click here to go back and see the previous set of pictures.

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After I wrote my column on the battle between AP and Google (see Web No Longer Wants To Be So Free), Google CEO Eric Schmidt has weighed in with a speech attempting to defuse the tension.

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Here's another crop of pictures from my New York Auto Show Fizzles post.

Click here to go back and see the previous set of pictures.

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Here's another crop of pictures from my New York Auto Show Fizzles post.

Click here to go back and see the previous set of pictures.

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Here's another crop of pictures from my New York Auto Show Fizzles post.

Click here to go back and see the previous set of pictures.

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Here's another crop of pictures from my New York Auto Show Fizzles post.

Click here to go back and see the previous set of pictures.

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Here's the final crop of pictures from my New York Auto Show Fizzles post.

Click here to go back and see the previous set of pictures.

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In the wake of last week's Nehalem server chip launch, I sat down with Intel chief sales and marketing officer Sean Maloney for a wide-ranging discussion. Maloney gave me -- and you -- some food for thought. A recession, he says, isn't the time to halt technology spending. OK, so there's a self-serving (server?) aspect to this observation -- Intel sells processors. But that doesn't mean Maloney's incorrect in pointing out that businesses need to position themselves for the recovery.

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For anyone with an historical perspective about our industry, the demise of Silicon Graphics Inc. is a scary example of the truism that great technology is no insulation from the changing vagaries of the marketplace. (Also, that iffy business decisions don't help.) Still, remembering the heyday of this one-time maker of the absolute coolest workstations on the planet, it's sad to see it acquired for a paltry $25 million.

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Here's a lesson I learned, painfully: Be careful which Web 2.0 providers you get in bed with, because the software underpinning you're relying on today to help you do the next big thing could be turned off tomorrow when the company realizes it's got to focus its efforts elsewhere, like maybe to snare some of that elusive stuff called revenue.

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Question: When is a commodity server no longer a commodity server? Answer: When the system is so darn powerful it can run your data center. That's the deal with the latest crop of server CPUs, including Intel's Xeon 5500 unveiled on Monday, and AMD's upcoming six-core Istanbul. It's all of a piece with my theory that processing power has become ubiquitous, and figuratively free.

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Something is happening and you don't know what it is, goes the song. Strangely, it's turning out that the Web operating system we all thought would one day challenge Windows and serve as a portal to a universe of online-hosted apps turns out to be cloud computing. I breathed the buzz of cloud's success the other day as I caught up with the New York City edition of Salesforce.com's tenth anniversary, cross-country victory tour, and I shot a video.

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Bear with me here on my latest short video, because while it's not tech news per se, it's about tech news. As in, what's the business model for online sites in an age where ad revenues are declining but demand for killer content is higher than ever? That’s the discussion I had with Jeff Jarvis, author of "What Would Google Do?," journalism professor, and Buzzmachine blogger. Click on to see the video.

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I've been tardy in posting this five-minute podcast, where Sybase chief marketing officer Raj Nathan and SAP vice president Vinay Iyer delve into their joint deal to improve access to SAP's smartphone apps. (Sybase is providing the middleware.) But you should listen, because the "smartphone is the computer" is a meme that's rapidly gaining traction from deals like this.

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Even fanboys admit that, when Steve Jobs gifted his iPhone with wonderful attributes, he skimped in the battery life department. Fortunately, what the creator omitted, a cool add-on gadget called Mophie delivers. Read on to see a short demo video of this useful "juice pack" for Apple's iPhone.

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I'm more worried about losing my cell phone than I am about getting my wallet lifted. Probably I shouldn't fret over a physical loss -- with password protection, you can set your misplaced iPhone or BlackBerry to wipe its data after 10 unauthorized access attempts (unless your password is "password"). What troubles me more, though, is that we haven't begun to seriously grapple with mobile security, mostly because hackers aren't flooding the space. But they will be.

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If you think iPhones have set the template for the gadgets of the next 25 years, then get ready to think different. Intel is quietly engaged in some of the coolest research this side of Star Trek. At Intel's Pittsburgh lab, in collaboration with Carnegie Mellon University, senior researcher Jason Campbell says: "We're working on materials that can change their shapes." Think of a smartphone that resizes itself into a netbook when you're ready to surf the Web.

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I've been hunting around to see if we can flesh out the picture of our new federal CIO, Vivek Kundra. On Thursday, our own K.C. Jones wrote about his priorities, and Rob Preston and Bob Evans have blogged about what he needs to do and the top 10 questions he should answer. So now let's hear from Kundra in his own words, in three YouTube videos. The most interesting is where Kundra talks about championing Google Apps in his previous position as CIO of the District of Columbia.

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You've got to hand it to Intel for never taking no for an answer. The marketplace has long told the semiconductor behemoth that it loves its desktop and laptop processors, likes its NAND flash chips (no profit there, though), and is amenable to its graphics strategy. But as for its forays into the communications and embedded spaces, well, not so much. Nevertheless, Intel CEO Paul Otellini is taking yet another crack at those last two areas. Read on to find out why.

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Get ready for a new battle in the multicore wars. AMD is planning to ramp up production of its next-gen 32-nm processor in mid-2010. This follows on the heels of Intel's revelation that it'll be first to ship 32-nm parts with its Westmere chips late this year. What jumps out at me most here isn't that this is great news for consumers -- it is -- but that there's a big element of saber-rattling going on. That's because the 45-nm chips shipping from both vendors are still new themselves and far from obsolete. Read on for my interview with Intel's Stephen Smith, where he discusses new chip-making technology, server processors, and netbooks.

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A confluence of events -- faster processors, 32-nm fab technology, and the ubiquity of computing power -- make this an incredibly exciting time in the chip industry. So I made a video about it. Click through to see my eight minute vlog, where I opine on these trends and also show Intel's new Core i7 processor, the X-25 solid-state drive (SSD) that's taking the PC storage market by storm, and one surprisingly large heat sink.

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