Rodney Gedda

Artwork: Chip TaylorWith virtualization now a mainstream technology for most large businesses, the big players like EMC (VMWare), IBM and Microsoft are investing heavily in proprietary options for running multiple guest operating systems on a single machine.

In addition to the commercial products, there is a vibrant open source virtualization ecosystem that CIOs can consider for public and private cloud infrastructure.

Open source software has a long history in lower-level network software so it's not surprising there is a healthy range of free tools available for network and systems management.

Often with commercial support available, open source network management tools offer an easy way to gain more visibility into the workings of disparate systems and software.

Sony has unveiled a new range of high definition pan tilt zoom (PTZ) security cameras designed for surveillance and applications such as identification and motion detection.

The SNC-RH series are internet protocol (IP) network security cameras that offer HD surveillance and the ability to pan 360 degrees.

The first major release of the 3.0 series of open source office suite OpenOffice.org, version 3.1, is now available with big improvements in usability and the user interface.

OpenOffice.org now has anti-aliasing making graphics look "smoother" on screen and dragging objects now displays a "shadow" of the object, rather of a dotted outline.

The social media phenomenon that is Twitter continues to attract third-party developers with the London-based WorkDigital developing TwitterJobSearch, a job search engine for the microblogging service now available online (in beta, of course).

TwitterJobSearch.com claims to be the "social media job search engine" and allows people to search for jobs in twitter feeds simply by entering keywords in the search engine.

Chinese telecommunications company Huawei has announced its first Android-powered smartphone at the GSMA Mobile World Congress in Barcelona to be commercially available in the third quarter of 2009.

Huawei joins HTC in the Android operating system camp with a real production phone, along with Motorola and Kogan who have announced plans to ship devices running Google's operating system.

The proliferation of standards-based video sharing and collaboration is set to take off with a $US100,000 grant from the Mozilla Foundation to fund the development of the Ogg Theora video codec and server-side streaming software.

Wikimedia developer Michael Dale announced the sponsorship during a presentation on Wikipedia's video content initiatives at this year's Linux.conf.au conference in Hobart.