TECH

Developers got their first look at MeeGo on Wednesday, with the release of key components of the as-yet unfinished operating system.

MeeGo is a mobile version of Linux that will merge Intel's Moblin OS with Nokia's Maemo OS. It's designed to be used in smartphones, handheld computers, and netbooks. The first devices based on the OS are expected later this year.

Adobe's new partnership with Google will keep Internet users safer because Chrome will automatically update Flash Player without asking users, an Adobe director of engineering said.

Jeet Kaul, Oracle's vice president for client software, thinks Java suffers from an image problem: It's attracting the wrong crowd. "I would like to see people with piercings doing Java programming," he said at last week's EclipseCon 2010 in Santa Clara, Calif.

After a grim 18 months of layoffs and cost-cutting, there are finally signs that the tech industry is beginning to recover. Companies are slowly starting to hire and restore employee benefits. Venture money is flowing, and severe price slashing -- always the hallmark of a recession -- has slowed.

While the hype around cloud computing is clearly full steam ahead, we are seeing signs that the amount of new information entering the cloud computing market has slowed down considerably in the last few months. This from a very unscientific polling of my cloud computing Twitter buddies.

The core idea behind HTML5, the latest proposed version of the Web's foundation markup language, is to make all resources, not just text and links, widely and uniformly usable across all platforms. Well, that was the theory. In practice, things aren't going to change that much from today's Web, with its reliance on proprietary media formats and methods.

Finally, there's something Google and Microsoft can agree on: Our electronic privacy protections are in serious need of an overhaul. They, along with Intel, AOL, AT&T, the ACLU, and a dozen other household names, have formed the Digital Due Process coalition, aimed at urging Congress to modernize the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) -- the only thing keeping Johnny Law from pawing through your digital life.

Lawson Software announced a partnership on Wednesday that will make its ERP (enterprise resource planning) and other applications available on Amazon Web Services' cloud-computing infrastructure service.

Starting in May, Lawson's S3 Enterprise Management System, M3 Enterprise Management System, and Talent Management application will hit Amazon's cloud.