A weekly summary of the more interesting technology trends to come across my desk...

• Abobe AIR, a technology that enables the execution of stand-alone applications on the desktop using web development languages, is now deployed on over 100 million PCs as reported by CNET. On the same topic, Emerging Technologies does a great job providing an overview of all the emerging Rich Internet Application (RIA) platforms.

• This scary post on InternetNews reports on the penetration of the DownAndUp worm. This "shock and Awe" worm attack has infected over 10 million PC's using methodologies that are almost diabolical.

• It looks like Microsoft's HD Photo technology is well on its way to becoming an international standard as "JPEG XR" as reported by CNET

• ars technica posts on M-Lab, an initiative to test the Internet on a grand scale, looking for behavior such as ISP bandwidth throttling and de-prioritization of certain traffic. Interesting stuff!

• This eWeek summary covers the ComScore Digital Year in Review, with some pretty amazing observations. How about Google accounting for 90% of the new search traffic on the Internet or if YouTube was ranked as a search engine it would be number 2, just behind it's parent Google.

• Mobile Industry Review reports on DeviceAnywhere, an innovative solution to testing the multitude of cell phones across numerous carriers. In just a few minutes I was able to fire up a trail version, select a virtual cell phone model and a carrier, load an application, and play with it. You pay $100 a month for access to a set of phones from a carrier such as Verizon, then pay a very modest hourly rate for using the devices (around $15/hour). Very impressive.

• Finally, a couple of unrelated items. eWeek reports on the Windows 7 beta release, which I am installing on Virtual PC as this is being written. I found an interesting web site that monitors the status of Cloud computing platform called CloudStatus and a great article on the basics of Virtualization on techsoup.org.

More next week...

Jim