Sure, our environment is full of the staph bacteria. But when the CDC recently reported the virulent MRSA form is killing more Americans annually than AIDS, the public noticed. Then cases began being reported from schools around the country. It seemed especially prevalent among high school football players. This week a twelve year old died, apparently from MRSA. He had been a student in a New York City public school. Some parents kept their children hme from that school today. And the general media cannot resist reporting any and every local MRSA case now. A private school in Savannah. In Ohio three school districts reported cases. Four students in Blair County, Pennsylvania. Four more cases on Long Island. North Kansas...

The common wisdom about the Mac is that the iPod's "halo" coat-tails has been pulling the Mac along behind it — it's the Mac puppy that follows Windows customers home with their iPods. This halo tag line is now a constant refrain by the press and analysts that can be found in almost every story about the Mac. The problem is that it's mostly nonsense. This week Apple reported that it shipped 2,164,000 Macs in its fiscal Q4. That's 34 percent year-to-year growth. This is the most Macs ever sold in a quarter by 400K units. And at the end of the week, Apple will release Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, which could spark a hardware upgrade cycle in the...

During his interview at the Web 2.0 Summit, AT&T Chairman and CEO Randall Stephenson explained why Apple went with the slower EDGE network in the U.S. instead of the faster 3G variety ("Steve Jobs wanted to be on the EDGE network. He wanted the broadest, most ubiquitous data network. It’s the only one that covers the entire country."), and said that AT&T would have a program for corporate that want to buy hundreds or thousands of iPhones (currently each employee must be buy a phone and have a separately billed account). Om Malik extracted some more data out of AT&T Chairman and CEO Randall Stephenson about the iPhone. Om chatted with Stephenson after his on stage interview at the Summit,...

Looks like "real soon now" turned into a few months. Regardless, Microsoft has now extended the beta of its Popfly mash-up tool to any and all interested parties. Popfly's competition includes Yahoo Pipes and Google Mashup Editor. Early testers of Popfly credited the Microsoft tool as usable by mere mortals (not just professional developers). Microsoft also rolled out this week a refreshed beta version of its Windows Live Photo Gallery service for Vista and XP users. The new beta allows users a choice of publishing their photos to Windows Live Spaces or Yahoo's Flickr.

The New York Times is running (hah!) a story about the much touted Nike+ site, one of the best examples out there of what a lot of us have started to call the branded application. The Nike+ site is done all in Flash and is a rich Internet application that brings users together and gives them a great experience around running. It tracks the users runs (distance, time, etc) and let them compare with other people on the site. It brings users back to the web and also encourages them to buy Nike shoes. As the paper notes the combination of lots of shoes out there and the coolness of the site helped generate buzz for Nike. In the process...

IBM and Google are each shelling out between $20 million and $25 million to start college programs focused on cloud computing. According to the Wall Street Journal both Big Blue and Google have a shared vision on cloud computing. The vision goes like this: Run multiple data centers in parallel and allow users to share resources. Microsoft, Sun Microsystems, Hewlett-Packard and others all have a similar vision of computing in the cloud. IBM and Google will at first offer 400 computers to teach cloud computing techniques. The duo plans to expand to 4,000. So far, six universities--University of Washington, Carnegie Mellon, MIT, Stanford, University of California at Berkeley and the University of Maryland--are participating.

Peter Zencke, a member of SAP’s Executive Board and head of R&D, spent the last fours years developing Business ByDesign, a new foundation for SAP's ERP software. I caught up with him during SAP TechEd ‘07 and asked about the origins of the product and what will differentiate it in the marketplace. (See earlier coverage of Zencke's TechEd '07 keynote and more SAP coverage here.) DF: What was the genesis behind Business ByDesign? PZ: "Four years ago, in 2003--exactly 10 years after R3 was introduced--we decided to go for new architecture, which we called "Ether" and then later "Enterprise SOA." The first year we were figuring out how to do enterprise SOA. We built a prototype but decided not to...

Microsoft is expected to announce on October 2 that it has released to manufacturing (RTM'd) that its Response Point small-business phone-system software, according to sources close to the company. Response Point, the product formerly codenamed "Edinburgh," will be brought to market by handset vendors. It is targeted at companies with one to 50 employees. When Microsoft initially announced Response Point, it said the first phone units would come from three OEMs, D-Link, Quanta and Uniden. According to sources, Uniden has decided against producing Response Point handsets. (I've contacted Microsoft for comment; so far no word back.) Response Point phone systems from Quanta and D-Link are expected to be priced at under $5,500, according to sources. Response Point is just one...