software

Digby has partnered with well-known retailers like Barnes & Noble and Fossil to create a downloadable shopping app that lets you purchase goods from your (RIM 4.1 or above) BlackBerry smartphone.

Digby has done a good job minimizing typing and fast-tracking purchases with select retail partners. Simply scroll through the brand list, clicking deeper within the stripped-down interface to see items and special deals. You can set the alert function to nag you to buy a gift before an important occasion. You'll have to do much of that buying on faith, though--there's no built-in functionality to preview an item or research product ratings for items, at least none that I perused.

When the purchase is nigh, enter your locally-stored password and Digby will do the rest, passing the transaction along to the vendor to process. Credit card information is password protected and stored, encrypted, on the device.… Read more

Carbon counting, it seems, is a growth business.

Carbonetworks, from Victoria, British Columbia, has developed software that gives companies a way to make financial decisions around their carbon emissions. It's one of several organizations sprouting up and looking to build a business or derive revenue from regulatory limits on carbon.

Although North America does not yet have regulations that cap greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide, companies are already keeping track of their emissions, said CEO Michael Meehan, who started Carbonetworks in early 2006.

Even after doing an inventory, though, companies don't have a unified way of managing that … Read more

The Marble of Doom is a cute site created by some folks who clearly have a good sense of humor about waiting for their computer to finish processing. It's Mac-centric, and aimed to track all the time you've lost due to the Mac's version of the hourglass, also known as the "marble of doom" and "spinning beach ball of death." Whenever this happens, you just have to sit there and wait it out, leading to a somewhat inevitable destruction of any productivity.

The site tracks this time, and sorts it out by the … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--One area where Sun Microsystems' Java caught on was in mobile phones, but a leader of the project is working to eventually replace the mobile-specific version of the software.

Java Standard Edition (SE), geared for desktop computers, will gradually supplant Java Micro Edition (ME) as technology improvements let more computing power be packed into smaller devices, said James Gosling, the Sun vice president often called the father of Java.

"We're trying to converge everything to the Java SE specification. Cell phones and TV set-top boxes are growing up," Gosling said at a Java media event here … Read more

What do you get when you cross a Firefox with a chameleon?

An open-source Web browser whose user interface is adapted to the look of the operating system it's running on. One change planned for the upcoming Firefox version 3, code-named Gran Paradiso, is this more native appearance.

"The Web browser is an incredibly central piece of the user's operating system, and we don't want the user's initial reaction to be that they have modified their computer to add some type of strange, foreign application," said Mozilla interface designer Alex Faaborg in a blog posting last week. &… Read more

Open-source software start-up Cleversafe has a new twist on an ages-old warning not to put all your eggs in one basket.

If it were up to the Chicago-based company, you'd protect your data by putting slices of your eggs in multiple baskets scattered across the globe.

In the earlier version of the company's software, you could reconstruct your entire egg collection even if five of eleven baskets were destroyed in earthquakes, swamped by tsunamis, consumed in an overheated data center inferno or otherwise lost. A new version released Tuesday, though, lets users choose their own egg slice and … Read more

BadBuster gives a quick glimpse of "green" ratings of businesses you run across while reading searching, or shopping online.

BadBuster took a few quick minutes for me to download and set up, although it stalled on one of two Windows XP machines. Once installed, BadBuster underlines on Web pages the names of brands and goods it has ranked, with colors indicating the level or lack of "greenness." For example, green underscores the BP oil company, known for its "Beyond Petroleum" campaign, while glaring red marks notorious polluter Exxon. Yellow is the middle rating.

Roll … Read more

Editor's note: This story was updated at 9:59 a.m. PDT.

Steve Jobs made it official Wednesday morning: third-party applications are coming to the iPhone.

Apple's CEO posted another of his open letters to the world Wednesday on Apple's Hot News section of its Web site, confirming reports that a software development kit (SDK) for the iPhone will be released to developers next year. It's coming in February, rather than January as reported, but application developers and iPhone owners will probably be able to wait the extra month.

"We are excited about creating a … Read more

SAP announced on Wednesday that it is snapping up Yasu Technologies, which creates business rules management software.

The India-based company was founded in 1999 and has about 120 employees.

The deal is designed to boost SAP's business process management (BPM) offerings and will be tucked into SAP NetWeaver, which channels the ebb and flow of data to software applications via SAP's back-end middleware.

The Yasu announcement comes just a little over a week after SAP announced that it will acquire Business Objects in a deal valued at more than $6.8 billion, its largest acquisition ever.

SAP, however, … Read more