Adobe’s Flash technology has been taking a beating lately. Apple still won’t support it on its upcoming iPad or its iPhone. Steve Jobs calls it buggy and crash-prone and dismisses Adobe as being lazy. Adobe is trying to fight the negative vibes emanating from Cupertino and elsewhere. It has already pointed out that it will be easy to convert Flash apps into iPad apps, and now CTO Kevin Lynch is weighing in to defend Flash.

In a blog post today, Lynch addresses the two major threats to Flash: Apple’s refusal to support it on mobile touchscreen devices and the rise of HTML5 as a new, open standard which may one day replace Flash. On Apple, Lynch says Adobe is ready and able to put Flash on the iPhone, the iPad or anything else Apple can throw its way. But, as has been the case for more than a year, the ball is in Apple’s court:

Yesterday, Google published a long manifesto on the “meaning of open” in the form of an email to all employees republished as a blog post. In it, senior VP of product management Jonathan Rosenberg, makes an eloquent argument for why open systems always win and urges Google’s employees to always strive to be open when designing products. An open Internet spurs innovation and brings more consumers on board, which ultimately means more searches and increased use of Web applications.

The gist of his argument is that a bigger, better Internet is good for Google. He writes that Google employees should resist the impulse to create closed products and systems, and even makes a swipe at Apple for doing so (bold added for emphasis):

Google’s new realtime search wouldn’t be complete without Facebook updates. At the tail-end of today’s Google search event Marissa Mayer announced that Google will start to include realtime results from Facebook as well as MySpace. While Twitter and MySpace is making available everybody’s updates (or at least the public ones), Google right now will only show updates from public Facebook pages, which are generally fan pages.

“Facebook will be providing us with a feed of updates from public profile pages, also known as Facebook pages,” says Mayer. Facebook is still holding back publicly-designated updates from individuals (those visible to “everyone”). These individual updates make up the widest and most valuable part of Facebook’s stream.

Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz is starting a new startup called Asana to solve enterprise collaboration, and he just closed a $9 million series A round from Benchmark Capital and Andreessen-Horowitz. this follows $1.2 million angel round last spring from investors including Ron Conway, Peter Thiel, Mitch Kapor, MySpace CEO Owen van Natta, Sean Parker, and former Facebook Director of Mobile Jed Stremel.

Moskovitz, who was Facebook’s first CTO, founded Asana with another former Facebook (and before that, Google) engineer, Justin Rosenstein. Matt Cohler, also a former Facebook executive who is now a partner at Benchmark, will be taking a seat on Asana’s board. And two of its investors, Marc Andreesen and Peter Thiel, currently sit on Facebook’s board.

Microsoft announced the availability of Silverlight 4 in beta at its Professional Developers Conference (PDC) today. Some of the new features include more fluid animations, Webcam, microphone and printing support, 200 percent faster start times than Silverlight 3, deep zoom and multi-touch support and more. It now also supports Google Chrome, even though it’s just a rounding error of a browser.

One of the big capabilities of Silverlight 4 is its ability to take rich-media experiences outside the browser in client apps which will compete with Adobe AIR. The non-browser apps fully support HTML, allowing tight integration with content from the Web. It also supports notifications.

Site redesigns always take longer than expected. But in the case of manufacturing marketplace MFG.com, a major overhaul of its site ended up taking three years. “The whole team has felt as though we were hand-cuffed for the past three years and couldn’t execute on all the great ideas,” MFG.com founder and CEO Mitch Free tells me.

But now those cuffs are off. Last night, MFG.com opened up its brand new site, redesigned from the ground up. MFG.com is a surprisingly successful B2B marketplace for sourcing manufactured parts, with more than $600 million in outstanding requests for quotes on the site (which is up from $50 million less than two years ago). Jeff Bezos and the German Samwer brothers are investors, as is Fidelity Ventures.

When Free launched the site way back in 2000, he built it on ColdFusion because it was fast and cheap. It’s amazing the site lasted so long on such outmoded technology, given its growth.

Cisco is on a buying spree this month. This morning it announced a $2.9 billion acquisition of mobile networking infrastructure provider Starent Networks, which follows on the heels of another $3 billion acquisition announcement two weeks go for Two weeks ago it announced the $3 billion acquisition of video video-conferencing company Tandberg.

You add $3 billion here and $3 billion there, and pretty soon you are talking about real money.

Cisco has always been a large acquirer, and the fact that it is opening its purse strings again is a good sign for tech M&A overall. But these are relatively large bets for Cisco, which needs to keep at the forefront of networking technologies. The Starent acquisition gives it a strong play in mobile data networks as carriers migrate to 3G and 4G platforms. Broadband is moving to mobile, and Cisco needs to be there.

During a conference call that just ended to discuss Verizon’s new strategic partnership with Google to carry a line of Android phones and other devices, Verizon pitched itself as having seen the light and now embracing open platforms. Google CEO Eric Schmidt even commented that when Google started negotiation with Verizon 18 months ago, “We did not know that they would also take a leadership position on openness, which was surprising.”

Pressed on this issue during the Q&A, CEO Lowell McAdam was asked whether Verizon plans to support Google Voice (which Apple doesn’t). McAdam’s response: “Yeah, I guess we do. You either have an open device or you do not.”

Searching for growth and better margins, Dell is expanding its enterprise IT consulting business by acquiring Perot Systems for $3.9 billion in an all-cash deal. Perot Systems is the IT consulting and integration services company founded by Ross Perot in 1988 four years after selling Electronic Data Systems to General Motors. (EDS is now part of HP, which bought it last year for $13.9 billion).

The shift to consulting services will make Dell look more like IBM (and HP). Dell has an existing services division, which will be rolled into Perot Systems. Peter Altabef, the current CEO of Perot Systems, will run the combined IT Services business. Both Dell and Perot Systems are based in Texas, which should make the combination go smoother.

Many people still think of IBM as the company that sells Big Iron—mainframes and its enterprise server descendants. Of course, the engine of the company’s profits long ago shifted to consulting and software. In a financial slide presentation IBM released today to the SEC as an 8K document, however, you really get a sense of how much IBM has continued to shift its business towards software and services over the past eight years.

The result has been a very healthy expansion in its profit margins. As can be seen in the chart above, IBM’s pre-tax income margins have more than doubled from a low of 7.2 percent in 2002 to 16.1 percent in 2008. And the slide presentation suggests that IBM has further to go. It cites data showing that the top quartile of companies in the S&P 500, and 30 percent of tech companies, have pre-tax income margins of above 20 percent. IBM makes $90 billion in revenues per year, so each percentage gain in pre-tax profit margins adds up to nearly $1 billion.

Microsoft and Nokia announced a broad ranging alliance this morning which will bring Microsoft Office and other productivity software to a Nokia phones. The agreement marks “the first time Microsoft will make Office for non windows mobile phones,” says Microsoft Business Division President Stephen Elop. There are 200 million Nokia smart phones out there, and Microsoft wants its software on all of them eventually.

But initially, the alliance is targeting enterprise customers and will be integrated into Nokia’s E Series business phones. The Microsoft software and features that will be ported to Nokia phones include:

The ability to view, edit, create and share Office documents on more devices in more places with mobile-optimized versions of Microsoft Word, Microsoft PowerPoint, Microsoft Excel and Microsoft OneNote

Enterprise instant messaging and presence, and optimized conferencing and collaboration experience with Microsoft Office Communicator Mobile

Mobile access to intranet and extranet portals built on Microsoft SharePoint Server

Enterprise device management with Microsoft System Center

But the alliance aims to go “way beyond email and Office,” says Nokia’s Executive Vice President for Devices Kai Öistämö. Microsoft and Nokia are focusing on communication and productivity apps (Office, IM, Sharepoint, OneNote), but the alliance opens up those 200 million Nokia smart phones to future Mobile apps from Microsoft, perhaps including Mesh (which will sync all apps across all devices). Update: Unfortunately, the alliance is only for the Office business and does not include Mesh, according to Microsoft.

Advertisers and websites all too often rely on other companies for data about their own potential customers. A new advertising analytics startup called Demdex came out of stealth mode today to give companies a way to store and make sense of all the behavioral data which they collect or which is collected on their behalf.

As more and more applications move to the Web, computer security is increasingly threatened by security holes in Web applications, denial of service attacks on business Websites, and phishing expeditions that spread through social networks. If Twitter can be hacked, so can your company’s Website. A startup called Dasient is preparing to address the new class of security issues arising from Web applications with a suite of tools to track and close off such vulnerabilities. It will officially launch next week.

The company will target both Website owners and ISPs as potential customers. Attacks on Websites and Web applications can spread faster than traditional desktop viruses, but they can also be detected faster. A Web-scale approach will be the key to keeping one step ahead of the bad guys.

Dasient’s founders are Neil Daswani, formerly a Web security engineer and product manager at Google, Ameet Ranadive (ex-McKinsey), Googler Shariq Rizvi (another Google alum). They raised $2 million last fall in a seed round from investors Mike Maples, ex-Verisign CEO Stratton Sclavos, and ex-3Com/Palm chairman Eric Benhamou.

One of the next frontiers of search is taking all of the unstructured data spread helter-skelter across the Web and treat it like it is sitting in a nice, structured database. It is easier to get answers out of a database where everything is neatly labeled, stamped, and categorized. As the sheer volume of stuff on the Web keeps growing, keyword search keeps getting closer to its breaking point. Adding structure to the Web is one way to make sense of all that data, and Google is starting the tackle the problem with a Google Labs project called Google Squared, which Marissa Mayer mentioned earlier today at the company’s Searchology briefing.

Google Squared extracts data from Web pages and presents them in search results as squares in an online spreadsheet. Michael was at the event and got a personal demo (see video after the jump).

TellMe, which Microsoft bought two years ago, is rolling out an upgrade to its call center automation software which should improve its speech recognition rates. It is also adding Global Crossing as partner for reselling its VoiP carrier service, along with AT&T and Verizon. TellMe handles 2.5 billion calls a year for customers such as American Airlines and ETrade, all on-demand. Even a one percent improvement in automated call completion rates translates into millions of dollars a year for large call centers.

TellMe will be deploying a new text-to-speech engine with an almost-sexy female voice called Zira. She only sounds slightly robotic. Another set of technologies can break up sentences into their constituent parts so that if the software doesn’t understand something it can ask for only the piece of missing information instead of repeating the entire question. or instance, if you say you want to fly from New york to San Francisco on Wednesday, and it got everything but the day, it would only ask you what day you want to fly instead of making you repeat your entire itinerary.

Regular search engines such as Google and Yahoo use statistics to make sense of the Web. They count links, keywords, and other items on a page to determine its rank in search results. Semantic search engines try to actually understand the meaning of the words found on the Web and other documents to bring back the most relevant results to a query. Microsoft bought Powerset for $100 million to gain semantic search expertise, but so far all it can search is Wikipedia.. Hakia, Textwise, and other startups are also working on semantic search. Now comes NetBase, which brings a slightly different approach that its says can scale to the entire Web.

NetBase has been around for a while. Originally called Accelovation, it has raised $9 million in two rounds of venture funding over the past four years, has 30 employees, and counts among its current customers P&G, Caterpillar, 3M, BP, Kraft, BASF, and Goodyear. It is now changing its name and offering its core semantic indexing technology as a platform for other companies to build their own products. Already, scientific publisher Elsevier uses NetBase to power its Illumin8 research tool for searching scientific articles, patents, and Websites.

Larry Ellison has always wanted to be the Steve Jobs of the enterprise. With this morning’s announcement that Oracle will buy Sun Microsystems for $7.4 billion, he took a big step towards making Oracle more of a soup-to-nuts provider of enterprise technology. With Sun, he will now be able to build and package together everything from chips and servers to operating systems, Java middleware, databases, and enterprise applications.

Like Apple, Oracle wants to take away complexity for its customers and bundle the entire IT stack neatly together so that it works without hassles and is optimized for Oracle’s software. With this deal, Ellison has come full circle from his early-1990s mantra of “best-of-breed” systems, which he abandoned long ago. Rather than look like Apple with its dedication to making the perfect product, Oracle just became IBM. It will use Sun’s existing server market share to push Oracle databases and software, and bundle it all with IT services. Sure, it will continue to support Dell and HP and even rival enterprise software, but the sales pitch will be around the bundled product. If that turns out to be a superior product at a lower price, then both Oracle and customers will win out. But to the extent that it takes away choice from IT buyers, it could be an even tougher sell than convincing them to give up their beloved Blackberries for an iPhone.

Continuing its quest to bridge the world’s of broadcast television and the Web, Syndicaster is adding several online distribution options for local TV stations, including the ability to publish video clips to YouTube, AOL (via Brightcove), Yahoo and other sites. Syndicaster is an online editing and video-clip management service that allows TV stations to any broadcast news clip and repurpose it for the Web by publishing it to their own Websites or through its sister service ClipSyndicate (both Syndicaster and ClipSyndicate are divisions of Critical Media).

Now Syndicaster is adding one-click distribution options to the major video sites so that local TV affiliates or station groups can post their videos to AOL Money & Finance or their YouTube channel, and manage it all from one place. One feature that TV customers will appreciate is the ability to set embargo windows for each service, allowing a TV station to publish hot news immediately to its own site, then 24 or 36 hours later to video partner sites where it makes the most money, and then maybe finally to YouTube.

Slowly but surely, Amazon keeps adding capabilities to its cloud computing services. What started out as pay-by-the-drink storage (S3) and computational processing (EC2), now includes a simple database (SimpleDB), a content delivery network (CloudFront), and computer-to-computer messaging (SQS). And today Amazon added a web-scale file system data processing engine with Amazon Elastic MapReduce. (It is a framework for accessing data stored in file systems and databases).

This is actually a big deal because it allows developers to better take advantage of the massive computing power Amazon has to offer and create applications which process huge reservoirs of data (conveniently stored in Amazon S3) in parallel. MapReduce is the name of the data processing framework Google created to index and search the Web. It literally breaks up huge computational tasks and spreads them to different servers. This is called mapping the data. Once each processor is done with its portion of the math problem, it sends the result back so that all the different partial answers can be combined and then “reduced” into one final answer.

Amazon is using Hadoop, which is the open-source version of MapReduce. Yahoo also started using Hadoop last year. While Google and Yahoo use this technique for searching the Web, it can be used for any data-intensive computational problem

Earlier today, I sat in on a keynote presentation at Salesforce.com’s analyst event in New York City. CEO Marc Benioff and other Salesforce execs went over the earlier news that companies can now track Twitter conversations inside Salesforce. Naturally, I Twittered my notes (reproduced below). Salesforce is basically implementing Track (the ability to search and monitor conversations by keyword and topic) inside Salesforce.com in a way that hopefully Twitter will make possible for all of its users.

But the data point I found most interesting had nothing to do with Twitter. Salesforce talked about its own back-end infrastructure and revealed that all of Salesforce.com runs on only 1bout 1,000 servers. And that is mirrored, so it is really only 500. Think about that for a minute. Salesforce has more than 55,000 enterprise customers, 1.5 million individual subscribers, 30 million lines of third-party code, and hundreds of terabytes of data all running on 1,000 machines. Amazon’s Web Services, in comparison, runs on about 100,000 machines I am told by someone with knowledge of Amazon’s server infrastructure.

Barcelona-based 3Scale Networks is launching its API management service today at the Plugg conference (which is run by TechCrunch editor Robin Wauters). With every Web startup releasing their own APIs as a matter of course these days, 3Scale offers a startups who don’t want to deal with all the hassles of managing their own APIs their own enterprise Web service that does it for them.

3Scale manages signups, tracks usage, offers user forums, stores online documentation, and handles online billing. The service runs on Amazon’s EC2, S3 ,and cloud computing Web services. 3Scale starts charging only once the billing for an API kicks in, which is usually above a certain threshold of free usage. 3Scale was previously in beta. Now companies can host their API management portal on their own sub-domain.

We’re all getting used to the idea that our personal information information is now public to the extent that we share it on social networks and elsewhere on the Web. Corporate data about people’s roles and functions within different organizations is similarly becoming increasingly public. All you need to do is search on LinkedIn to get a person’s entire work history or Jigsaw to find their direct contact information. Now you can add TheOfficialBoard, a contact database which goes one step further. It shows the organization charts for 20,000 of the largest companies, so you can not only look up an executive like Mark Zuckerberg but also see who reports to him or her.

Org charts are not always the most reliable indicator of power within a company, but they do serve as a handy way to visualize the power relationships within specific corporate networks. At launch, TheOfficialBoard is hit or miss in terms of its comprehensiveness and accuracy. (See Google. Where is Marissa Mayer? Does Joshua Schachter really report directly to Eric Schmidt? Update: he doesn’t). But it will get better over time. Like Jigsaw, it relies on its members to fill out the data about each company. And most of the detailed information is obscured unless you either add three contacts, or you can pay $100 a year for premium access. Both contact data or cash can be traded in for virtual currency, which then can be used to access the data. This data exchange model is also similar to Jigsaw’s, over which Michael once had a hissy fit.

In yet another sign that this will be the year of the activity stream, Socialtext is adding a Twitter-like message stream to its enterprise wiki/workspace service, The new feature is called Socialtext Signals, and it appears both as a widget in the Socialtext dashboard and as a standalone desktop app built on Adobe AIR.

Socialtext Signals is essentially an enterprise version of Twitter, much like Yammer. Employees within a company can micro-message each other without competitors or the rest of the world snooping. They will see only the messages of the co-workers they are following. In addition to the 140-character messaging between co-workers (the “signals”), there is also an “activity” tab. This generates a micro-message every time a person you are following takes an action inside Socialtext, such as creating a wiki page, writing a blog post, or making a comment.