The consensus is in on Windows Mobile 6.5: According to the likes of Engadget and Gizmodo, it’s a stop-gap solution by Microsoft meant to bring some slight user interface polish and touch-screen friendliness to their aging Windows Mobile platform. It doesn’t bring Windows Mobile anywhere near the level of accomplishment that we’re seeing with the iPhone, Palm Web OS, and Android phones today – for that we’ll have to wait for the release of version 7 sometime in late 2010. Simply put, 6.5 is the Windows Me to WinMo 7′s Windows XP.

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When small companies and startups look for development tools, they often look to the open source community to cut down costs. Given the choice to spend nothing on licensing for a LAMP configuration compared to thousands of dollars in Microsoft licensing fees, it doesn’t take an MBA to realize why Apache’s market share is 46.6% compared to 21.9% for Microsoft IIS. Those numbers might be about to change thanks to a new Microsoft seed program, WebsiteSpark.

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The rapidly changing nature of the Web makes it necessary for web developers to constantly be on the lookout for new, shiny tools. This post will hopefully show you some cool tools you didn’t already know about.

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When it comes to keeping up with blogs and other websites, a common complaint is information overload. Even if you subscribe to receive site updates through an RSS reader, it’s easy to wind up with more items in your reader than you have time to actually read. You may still want to read some of those posts, but if you don’t want to read all of them, searching through your reader for the important news items can be almost as much of a burden as going from site to site.

Because of the ongoing concern of information overload, many people who previously relied on RSS have drifted away from it. However, RSS readers are evolving to solve these issues and improve their usefulness.

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Not a week goes by without news about Twitter, the popular microblogging and social networking site. Things like how companies use Twitter for marketing, how consumers use it to flex their muscles, and how celebrities… well, use it to be celebrities.

While Twitter has a huge user base, it isn’t the only microblogging service on the Web. One of Twitter’s competitors that you should pay attention to is identi.ca. It combines the best, and occasionally the worst, of the microblogging and open source worlds.

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Last night, a routine maintenance of Sweden’s top-level domain .se went seriously wrong, introducing an error that made DNS lookups for all .se domain names start failing. The entire Swedish Internet effectively stopped working at this point. Swedish (.se) websites could not be reached, email to Swedish domain names stopped working, and for many these problems persist still.

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One short blog post can have a major impact on how a business can be seen. One little tweet can convince thousands of customers to buy a product or to walk away from a company forever. Whether or not an employee’s online activities are sanctioned by his employer, even a little involvement with social media can have some extreme results.

This article takes a look at social media policies in action and gives some tips to companies on what they can do.

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With the Internet growing rapidly over the years, the number of generic top-level domains (gTLDs) has increased from just a handful to about twenty, with many more proposed or in planning. Some, such as .com and .edu, have seen widespread adoption and are a useful contribution to the Internet. Others haven’t been quite as lucky. You could say they have flopped.

From domain extensions that never made it past the planning table, to those that make little sense at all, there are probably more flops than successes. Here are five of the worst TLD flops in Internet history (in no specific order).

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In a year in which tech companies have struggled to stay alive, Apple’s stock has doubled.

In January of 2009, Apple stock was priced at $78. Last week, it closed at $184. Also late last week, three major investment firms elevated their expectations for Apple. On Thursday, Oppenheimer analyst Yair Reiner increased his target price for Apple from $185 to $210, while Bank of America/Merrill Lynch analyst Scott Craig increased his target from $185 to $220. On Friday, UBS analyst Maynard Um jumped on the Apple bandwagon, and raised the bet, escalating Apple’s target price from $170 to $265.

A 236% jump in stock price from January to October would be remarkable for any company. But in the case of Apple, it happened under the most bizarre of circumstances.

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The combination of high bandwidth and low-cost hard drives has created a small revolution in online storage. Web-based storage like DropBox, Mozy, Data Deposit Box, and Amazon S3 offer individual computer users and firms of various sizes a fast, convenient, and flexible way to store their data.

But before you or your company jump in credit card first, you should consider the following five factors before you choose an online storage solution.

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