Business intelligence is getting a lot of attention amid the economic downturn as organisations try to use data they gather to become more efficient and compete more effectively with rivals. With this in mind, silicon.com has picked the brains of analysts specialising in BI to come up with some top tips about how you can make the most out of this growing area.

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Businesses have been slow to adopt unified communications, but Freeform Dynamics's Josie Sephton says its popularity could soon improve. The evangelists are calling for businesses to implement unified communications (UC), citing a whole raft of reasons - from cost savings to improved customer service and better productivity.

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Businesses can now build and run their external websites using technology from software-as-a-service company Salesforce.com. Launched today, Force.com Sites essentially uses the Force.com cloud platform to support customer websites and online applications.

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They're here - sort of. Twitter has launched the early beta phase of its "verified accounts" programme, a background-check for celebrities and other prominent users of the service to weed out impersonators and fake accounts. If they pass the test, they get a graphic "badge" much like a PayPal verified account's. "We're starting with well-known accounts that have had problems with impersonation or identity confusion," an explanation from Twitter read. "We may verify more accounts in the future but because of the cost and time required, we're only testing this feature with a small set of folks for the time being. As the test progresses we may be able to expand this test to more accounts over the next several months."

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Adobe is taking Acrobat.com out of beta in the US on Monday, and turning it into a business with paid user accounts. The service, which has more than five million registered users will retain its free version, however there are now usage limitations on certain features that can be unlocked by upgrading to one of the two new premium plans. These can be purchased on a monthly or yearly basis and cost $14.99 or $39 per month, or $149 or $390 per year respectively.

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Business intelligence is often touted as a way to boost profits. But how? Here Jesper Thorlund explains his innovative technique of turning lost trades into future deals. Let's begin with a real life example that I observed as a BI consultant a few years ago.

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The Ministry of Justice (MoJ) has cut £110m from its IT outsourcing spend by consolidating its suppliers. Over the past year the MoJ has reduced its number of suppliers from six to two, according to its annual departmental report for 2008/09.

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The Apple iPhone may have got a makeover last week but it's not enough to convince CIOs the device has a place in business. In the latest silicon.com CIO Jury, IT chiefs were asked whether they're planning to offer Apple's touchscreen device as part of their range of corporate mobile phones - and the vast majority of IT chiefs said they are not.

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Google is so firmly entrenched as most people's search engine of choice that it's entered common parlance as a verb. But it's not the only game in town: newcomers are pushing alternative models promising to tame the internet using crowd sourcing and "computational knowledge engines".

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Amid the difficulties the economic crisis inflicted on the computing industry, there's also been a silver lining: business intelligence software that's designed to help companies understand what's going on and make more informed decisions. BI software certainly hasn't been immune to the spending clampdown on corporate computing. And it's not technologically flawless but the technology is helping those who have taken the BI plunge to adjust to today's new business realities.

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Developers have released the Linux kernel version 2.6.30, adding support for new file systems as well as performance improvements and new hardware drivers. The Linux kernel is the core used by GNU/Linux operating system distributions from Red Hat, Novell Suse and others. The new release was finalised last week.

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IT security has been neglected due to the economic downturn, according to security experts. Bruce Schneier, BT's chief security technology officer, told a European Network and Information Security Agency (Enisa) event on Friday that organisations are struggling to keep on top of workloads that have increased due to layoffs.

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On Tuesday, Opera Software released Opera Unite, its application platform for turning your computer into a server from which you can share photos, files, notes, music and websites. Opera Unite's web server is a component of the latest experimental version of the Opera 10 browser - available for Windows, Mac and Linux. But viewers can access the content from any browser.

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Opera has released an early version of a browser-based sharing and collaboration service called Unite, which has been criticised by some security experts as having a level of protection that is too low. Opera Unite, an application platform that turns the user's PC into a web server, was unveiled in an alpha version by the Norwegian company on Tuesday. Components of the browser-based service include file sharing, photo sharing, a shared media player, a chat lounge and the ability to run websites hosted on the user's PC.

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Virtualisation software company Citrix is aiming to drive uptake of its technology by giving away several of its latest products for free. The company's server virtualisation software, XenServer, has been available for free for several months and Citrix is now offering Citrix Receiver, its application delivery client, and Dazzle, its self-service application management software, on the same basis from this week.

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Though Apple isn't saying whether it's working on a touchscreen tablet, the company may have shown its hand at its Worldwide Developers Conference last week. Of course, the Apple tablet has become the Apple press corps' version of a Bigfoot hunt. Some believe the evidence is overwhelming. Others are, well, underwhelmed. And Apple doesn't discuss products before it's ready to.

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More than three dozen security and privacy advocates and researchers are asking Google to offer better data protection for users of Gmail and other Google apps, and Google said on Tuesday it is considering doing that, if it doesn't slow down the apps too much. Users can set Gmail to encrypt session data by default to protect it from being sniffed over the network. However, Google doesn't offer the ability to encrypt potentially sensitive data created in other Google apps like Docs or Calendar by default, which means the communications could be stolen or snooped on by someone using a packet sniffer on public internet connections, such as open wireless networks, according to the letter addressed to Google chief executive Eric Schmidt and signed by a who's who of 38 experts in the security industry.

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IBM is ramping up its cloud computing activities with a push into services to help businesses develop and test their own clouds. In an announcement on Tuesday, IBM unveiled a set of cloud products and services as part of its Smart Business brand, with an initial focus on cloud development and virtual desktops.

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Many of the iPhone's long-awaited features will finally become a reality on Wednesday when Apple rolls out iPhone OS 3.0. Current iPhone owners can download the software from iTunes for free, and iPod Touch users can get it as well, but for a fee of $9.95, just like the last OS update. What time exactly, we don't know yet. Apple will only say iPhone OS 3.0 will come out at some point on Wednesday.

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Drinks giant Diageo has signed two outsourcing contracts worth $35m with services company CSC. The first contract, worth $7m, will see CSC design and install a new supply chain management system for the company, based on SAP.

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BAA's tech team have had a busy past year with offshoring a large part of its IT, the opening of Heathrow T5 and the sale of Gatwick Airport. Service delivery manager, Kevin Mercer, told the Gartner Outsourcing Summit this week how the team were helping steer the UK's largest airport operator through a challenging period.

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Google thinks it has made a breakthrough in "computer vision". Imagine stumbling upon a picture of a beautiful landscape filled with ancient ruins, one you didn't recognise at first glance while searching for holiday destinations online. Google has developed a way to let a person provide Google with the URL for that image and search a database of more than 40 million geotagged photos to match that image to verified landmarks, giving you a destination for that next trip.

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Researchers at security firm Finjan said on Wednesday that they have uncovered an underground botnet-leasing network where cyber criminals can pay $5 to $100 to install malware on 1,000 PCs for things like stealing data and sending spam. The Golden Cash network, dubbed "Your money-making machine" on its homepage, sells access to botnets comprised of thousands of compromised PCs to cyber criminals for custom malware spreading jobs, according to issue two of the Cybercrime Intelligence Report for 2009.

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Users of Firefox 3.5 beta can now get to upgrade to the release candidate for Firefox 3.5. Available for Windows, Mac, and Linux, the noticeable changes to the release candidate from beta 4 and the b99 pre-release version are not readily apparent. Generally, users can expect the release candidate to be more stable than its beta predecessors.

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CIOs spend countless hours listening to suppliers pitch their technology, so silicon.com decided to make the process a lot more entertaining by putting the vendors on the spot. Welcome to the 60-Second Pitch. Suppliers have just one minute to pitch their product or service to a panel of current and former heads of IT, who then have the opportunity to quiz the vendor before giving the technology a green or red light - just for fun, of course.

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Intel, Oracle, BT and a number of other high-profile IT companies have backed the launch on Wednesday of the Kantara Initiative, which aims to bring greater harmony to identity management. The project, which has been in the making for a year, is dedicated to examining ways of improving interoperability between different identity technologies and standards. It also intends to address topics such as privacy, which can be sidelined by purely technical discussions, according to Kantara.

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Microsoft will launch a public beta of its anti-malware service, Microsoft Security Essentials, on Tuesday as it phases out its Live OneCare suite in favour of a simpler free consumer security offering. Microsoft Security Essentials, which will run on Windows XP, Vista, and Windows 7, will be available in the US, Brazil and Israel in English and Brazilian Portuguese. A public beta version for Simplified Chinese will be available later in the year.

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Apple has patched nearly four dozen security holes in the iPhone and iPod Touch with its iPhone OS 3.0 release, made available on Wednesday. The 46 flaws could allow an attacker to bypass security restrictions, shut down an application, disclose sensitive information, conduct cross-site scripting and cross-site request forgery attacks, or take over the device, Apple said in an advisory.

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BT is about to formally launch a virtualised infrastructure service called BT Virtual Data Centre, which will form the basis of its cloud-computing strategy. VDC involves the virtualisation of servers, storage, networks and security delivered to customers via an online portal as cloud-based services. On Thursday, BT's Global Services division announced the customer rollout of VDC, which will initially target multinational corporate customers and the public sector.

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The UK has dropped sharply in the Economist Intelligence Unit's (EIU) annual 'e-readiness' league table, as the recession harmed many countries' ability to use ICT for social and economic development. The E-readiness rankings 2009: The usage imperative report, published last week, is the ninth in an annual series analysing and ranking countries according to the standard of their ICT infrastructure and the ability of their citizens, businesses and governments to use ICT for their good.

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Cutbacks in technology spending are the wrong remedy for the NHS in an economic downturn, according to a junior minister at the Department of Health. Instead, the NHS should embrace the efficiencies IT can bring, professor Lord Darzi, parliamentary under-secretary of state at the department, told an audience at the NHS Healthcare Innovation Expo in London on Thursday.

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Competition in the smartphone market is heating up this summer as one new hot smartphone after another hits the street. The latest is T-Mobile's next Google Android device, called the myTouch. T-Mobile is set to announce the new smartphone today. It is the second smartphone the carrier has introduced that uses Google's open-source mobile operating system, Android. T-Mobile introduced the world's first Google Android phone, called the G1, last autumn. And so far the company claims it has sold more than one million devices.

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Few would disagree that faster is better when it comes to the web, and Google wants to get web publishers hooked on speed. Webmasters looking for ways to speed up page loading times now have a host of tips and tricks to peruse as Google has launched a new website designed to emphasise the importance of speed on the web, said Richard Rabbat, a product manager at Google.

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Police data systems should be based on open-source software, according to a senior member of the Association of Chief Police Officers. Ian Readhead, director of information for Acpo, said on Tuesday at a Unisys security event that emergency service data transferral systems should be open source, to help ensure interoperability between them.

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Intel and Nokia have announced a long-term relationship that will see the development of Intel-powered, Linux-based, handheld mobile computing devices. The deal between the chipmaker and handset manufacturer was announced on Tuesday. Intel and Nokia will collaborate on several open source mobile Linux software projects and Intel will license HSPA/3G modem intellectual property from Nokia, the companies said.

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Kevin Mitnick, one of the most famous computer hackers, talks to CNET News about his days on the dark side and why he's now one of the good guys. One of the first computer hackers ever prosecuted, Kevin Mitnick was labelled a "computer terrorist" after leading the FBI on a three-year manhunt for breaking into computer networks and stealing software at Sun, Novell and Motorola.

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