If you're a user of Google's Buzz social networking service, creating posts from your Android smartphone just got a whole lot easier. Rather than accessing Buzz from the browser, Google has created a widget that lets users share directly from their home screen.

Many times when I am speaking with an IT Manager and I ask what their Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are with their users, I get an eye roll filled answer that generally equates to the revelation that the SLA is implied. There is a belief by many that SLAs are just are not worth the effort. The reality is that SLAs can make life easier and are well worth the effort.

"The business world has always been a cauldron of personal animosity, and those animosities have been particularly intense in Silicon Valley. Few do grudges quite as well as geeks," writes a columnist in the Economist. He then attempts to peel back the id-driven layers of the psychological onions animating Jobs, Gates, Ellison, and others. It's actually a lot more interesting than it sounds.

For a second time, Motorola Droid users were teased with the possibility that the Android 2.1 system update was on the way. And, for a second time, the update has apparently been put on hold, burning Droid users anxious to get the new software.

You may be able to deposit checks to your bank account soon just by snapping a picture of the check and sending it to your bank. In fact, if you bank at USAA, a bank primarily for military personnel, you can do it already. This will be one less reason to have to go to an ATM or local branch.

A panel was held Wednesday at Cloud Connect to talk about where cloud standards are going, with a set of experienced panelists at the front of the room. Whatever the script, all did not go as planned. It was if the audience came prepared to present its point of view, and the panel members were forced to listen.

Douglas Merrill dropped by InformationWeek's San Francisco office on Thursday to talk about his new book, "Getting Organized in the Google Era."

Apple has yet to share official numbers for iPad pre-orders, but the Wall Street Journal says that in one week "hundreds of thousands" of them have been pre-ordered. Additionally, Apple hasn't finalized all the content deals it was hoping to by launch.

Google recently provided a significant refresh of Maps for the Android platform. Maps for Mobile 4.1 now has an updated results page, a trick swipe-to-see-more feature, live wallpapers and a new latitude widget. Oh, and Google is now serving ads in Maps.

Today HTC made its first official response to the lawsuit Apple filed against it earlier this month. In the response, the company throws down its gauntlet with a long list of "firsts" that it has brought to the industry. That includes mobile computing products that reach as far back as 1998.

The Nasdaq's five biggest market caps belong to (listed alphabetically) Apple, Cisco, Google, Microsoft, and Oracle. The market caps for the top five are, in descending order, $259.9 billion, $203.2 billion, $179.8 billion, $150.4 billion, and $127.6 billion. Try to match the each of those top five companies with its market cap--and you might well be in for a surprise.

Yesterday I wrote about Microsoft's decision to leave clipboard functionality out of Windows Phone 7. That isn't the end of the story though. AT&T also announced a new green charger that uses no electricity when your phone is not plugged into it. Let's hit the news about Microsoft first.

eWeek's hallucination appears to go like this: IBM has become "a model company for killing good U.S. jobs," it has "ruined" an untold number of lives, and it has made "the United States a poorer part of the planet." My oh my--and just what terrible acts did mean old IBM perpetrate to deserve such condemnation from eWeek?

Today the Wall Street Journal reports that Sprint plans to launch its first WiMax smartphone next week at the CTIA trade show. The device will be made by HTC and is called the Supersonic.

The typical path to SSD is by either buying a SAN attached SSD specific storage system or leveraging SSD drives in an alternate drive type in a storage system. For a few years however another form factor has been establishing itself, the PCIe based SSD and there may be some areas where it has a few advantages.

Developers looking for a better -- or at least a faster -- way to deliver content to end users just got a big boost from Research In Motion. Starting today, RIM is making its Push Services free to all developers.

Users of older Android devices were given access today to Google's recently enabled Gesture Search Lab. Gesture Search lets users search the contents of their phone by drawing letters on the touch screen with their finger.

Owners of the Motorola Droid have been waiting for Verizon to update the device to Android version 2.1 since January. The update must be near, because Verizon has posted a full changelog for the system update. Reports suggest Droid users will see over-the-air updates arriving as soon as March 18. Updated with statement from Verizon.

More info came out of Mix10 today and while some is good - a lot of it actually - some is bad, and at least one thing is downright awful. Microsoft confirmed today in a Q&A session that Windows Phone 7 has no support for a clipboard. That's right, that means that Cut, Copy and Paste are missing in action in Microsoft's new platform. Huh?

In a move no one expected, today Google made the Nexus One available with support for AT&T's 3G network. The phone, which has been available directly from Google since January, is now available for AT&T and T-Mobile. Verizon will offer it soon.

Vivek Kundra was on the West Coast last week, where his schedule included meetings with Amazon, Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Mozilla, and other tech innovators. The federal CIO says that U.S. government employees are at a disadvantage when it comes to the technology they use, and he's looking for better ways of working.

Microsoft's MIX conference was a goldmine of data regarding its new Windows Phone 7 platform. Some of the news was exciting, such as the story for developers. But there's a lot of bad news, too. In fact, Windows Phone 7 is so much like the iPhone, Microsoft is now the new Apple.

Appistry is expanding its Cloud IQ platform, a basis for building a private cloud inside the enterprise, to include a file storage system. Cloud IQ Storage is aimed at extremely large storage loads-- up to a petabyte -- that would enable next generation, high scalable applications dealing with masses of data.

It was strongly rumored near the end of 2009 that the HTC HD2 would get an upgrade to Windows Phone 7 since it seemed to have all of the hardware required by the OS. Microsoft has now confirmed that the HD2 won't be getting the upgrade. Is Microsoft being too rigid just to say that all Windows Phone 7 Series phones have a single hardware spec?

A poll released today by Harris Interactive found that a good portion of workers admit that they knowingly violate IT policies so that they can get their work done. My take: those workers that didn't admit that they violate corporate compliance and security policies are liars.

Today during its MIX developer conference, Microsoft shared more details about Windows Phone 7 and the tools developers can use to write applications for it. In a shocking revelation, Microsoft admitted to a decidedly Apple-like approach to how it will distribute Windows Phone 7 apps. All apps must be approved by Microsoft, and can only be distributed via the Windows Marketplace for Mobile.

Over the last six months, there's been an across-the-board uptick in all IT jobs posted on Dice.com, and the demand for health IT positions is growing even faster than most, says a company executive.

If there is confusion over when you use solid state disk (SSD) in the enterprise then there seems to be utter chaos when it comes to the laptop market. The typical hope is that the use of SSDs will improve performance and improve battery life of these devices that for many people are their primary computing platform. In addition to performance and battery life there are other laptop challenges that SSD may be able to help with.

Today the Federal Communications Commission unveiled its broadband plan for the U.S. Some of its goals include reclaiming 500MHz of wireless spectrum for broadband use and making sure every American has access to 100Mbps downloads

Even as data centers are placed in increasingly exotic locations and tied to peripheral issues ranging from tourist attractions to economic-growth strategies, this one's a real doozy: a new Helsinki data center built in a former bomb shelter under a historic cathedral will heat several hundred Helsinki homes while being cooled by frigid Baltic seawater.

Early estimates say that the number of people who ordered the iPad starting on Friday may have topped 120,000. The pace dropped off sharply over the weekend, though.

Most written content accessed on the web is free. You can read almost any newspaper in the US for no cost right from your screen. You only need to put up with a few ads to do it. Will online media companies use the popularity of mobile phones to try the paid content model again?

Twenty-five years ago, Apple Computer established a home in the K-12 educational market and introduced an entire generation to the Apple brand. Today you'll find both PCs and Macs in schools at every level, but there's a new battle going on to offer a wide variety of technology services to students. This time the two major competitors are Google and Microsoft.

At the SXSW expo hall I caught up with the creators of a new content-streaming Internet device named Mojito.

By focusing on threats, rather than vulnerabilities, those who rely on anti-virus software to stop rapidly evolving attacks are simply asking for their systems to be owned.

VKernel is offering a free, lightweight tool for evaluating the capacity management of your VMware virtual machines. It's an example of what you can do to get started in intelligent virtual machine management without committing to a big management framework and thousands of dollars of expense.

As the Game Developers Conference winds down in San Francisco, I'm struck by the apparent vitality of the gaming industry. There was real excitement, enthusiasm, and hope for the future among the developers there. Between the mobile revolution and the surge in social gaming, there's a sense of opportunity and ambition that's just not evident in other industry sectors.

Today Apple began accepting pre-orders for its iPad tablet device. Based on analyst estimates, approximately 50,000 were pre-ordered during the first two hours of availability. At that rate, Apple will sell one million by tomorrow. Also, plenty of new details about the device have surfaced.

Comments made by a Verizon Wireless executive indicate that the company plans to debut its first Long Term Evolution handset by the middle of 2011. The bad news is that Verizon is pretty sure LTE will usher in the era of tiered data pricing.

Seventeen tech-industry executives made the new Forbes list of billionaires, led by Bill Gates in the #2 spot and Larry Ellison in the #6 spot. Can it be true that Facebook parvenu Mark Zuckerberg outranks Apple icon Steve Jobs? Here's a list of those 17 along with their ranks and estimated net worths.

Mix10 starts Monday in Las Vegas. It is the end-all be-all event for Microsoft to tout its tools for Web developers. It is also when the veil of secrecy is lifted on the Windows Phone 7 Series so developers will finally know what has to be done to get apps running on the platform.

This week Twitter unveiled a new tool that allows users to share their location information when they send tweets. The new feature is accessible from mobile browsers and desktop browsers, though some smartphone apps already offer location sharing.

Virtualization does more than just consolidate servers in the data center, although that's been its primary role. Virtualization opens up the opportunity to manage servers in new ways. By watching traffic between virtual machines and from virtual machines over the network, Xangati has produced a new management tool.

The Apple iPad will be available to pre-order starting Friday, March 12. If you're in the market for Apple's "magical" device, here are five reasons why you should sign up early and buy on the very first day.

Sometimes in storage you don't have the budget to go out and get the latest, greatest storage system that is going to make your life simpler. Sometimes you have to make due with what you have. That does not mean that you have to live without all the new capabilities that are becoming available in storage like improved provisioning and multiple protocols.

One of the chief complaints of iPhone users since the debut of iPhone OS 2.0 and the apps store is the iPhone's inability to multitask (run two or more programs simultaneously). New information suggests that iPhone OS 4.0's biggest upgrade will be multitasking. Also, purported images of iPhone 4G have been spotted.

Today Opera Software made its Opera Mini 5 browser available to the Android platform for the first time. As with its performance on the iPhone, Opera Mini 5 is much faster on Android handsets than the native Android browser.

Palm caught a second wind last year when they released the long awaited successor to Palm OS 5. WebOS got an immediate fan base before the first device shipped and investors cheered the handset maker. A year later though, things aren't looking quite as bright.

Late Tuesday, Apple made a new version of the software developers kit available for iPhone OS 3.2 for the iPad. As per usual, developers have made some interesting discoveries buried in the code, including some support for new finger gestures.

The year has started out with significant M&A activity from vendors looking to deliver the necessary components for cloud computing. They all come to market with their own technologies and solutions, but there's one offering that's a must-have.

ComScore issued its latest report on smartphone usage in the United States for the three months ending January 2010. Google moved up significantly, while Palm dropped a few (more) percentage points. RIM, however, remains champion.

Anyone who has been using social networks for the past couple of years has anecdotally witnessed an increase in malicious activity and phishing attacks. Today, a security firm released its analysis of 19 million Twitter accounts and has quantified just how rapidly malicious activity on Twitter has grown. Hint: it's been significant recently.

The 30-year-old CIO of a Chicago-area public school district has a salary of $96,000 and until recently earned an additional $24,000 by serving as school-board treasurer. When the district's teachers accepted pay cuts due to budget limitations, they carped about the $24,000 stipend—so the CIO gave it up, but requested the board consider increasing his salary. Here are 5 reasons why he deserves a big raise.

Listen up, employers of mobile workers. The results of a new CareerBuilder survey should scare you. More than half of all mobile workers admitted to using their smartphones to check emails and perform other tasks while driving for business.

In our last entry we discussed what to look for in a new storage system. But what if you don't have the budget for a new storage system or your current system is not old enough that you dare bring up the subject of replacing it? The alternative is to look for solutions that can extend the usefulness of what you currently have.