American workers may wish to invest in education while waiting for government help.

Written by Chris Smith

The employment figures for August will be released today by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and the figures are likely to be similar to those we got in July—several hundred thousand more jobs lost. The average monthly job loss from May through July was 331,000, and it's likely the figures for August will reflect another 300,000 or so jobs that have disappeared during the past month. Today, there are 14.5 million people out of work in the United States, which has an unemployment rate of 9.4 percent. If you are fortunately not one of the statistics, you probably are related to someone who is or certainly have friends who have lost their jobs—and more.

While advanced new processor technology is relatively easy to understand, new social networking software may take a shift in attitude.

Written by Chris Smith

We have several stories of interest this week: IBM's forthcoming Power7 chip and the company's upgrade path for Power 570 and 595 servers; Twitter's plans for a geolocation API; and a cloud-based microblogging enterprise collaboration suite that's both secure and free. We hope your interests take you to all these places.

A new self-managing appliance packages Lotus Sametime solutions to enhance collaboration and productivity.

By Chris Smith

IBM this week announced a self-managing appliance that combines multiple communications tools into a single solution.

The "office-in-a-box" solution provides all the communications and collaboration tools that a small or mid-sized business needs in order to implement an advanced unified communications (UC) solution. For those smaller businesses with limited IT resources, the idea is to reduce complexity and give employees immediate access to people and information.

Preconfigured widgets for TripIt online travel service and LinkedIn professional networking are the first offerings in an IBM initiative to give Notes users a plethora of useful desktop widgets.

Written by Chris Smith

IBM announced this week a new initiative to develop preconfigured business software widgets for Lotus Notes that interface with a variety of business services. The new widgets allow for single sign-on to Web services such as TripIt, LinkedIn, and eventually many other services and social networking sites.

Visitors to IBM's China Research Lab are "startled" by what they see.

Written by Chris Smith

I have tried many of the speech recognition products over the years, and I hear people like Dan Poynter, the dean of self-publishing, tell how he writes books in a matter of hours talking into a microphone while using speech recognition software. Could this really be possible? Whether or not it was in years past, apparently it finally is possible today, according to reports coming out of the IBM China Research Lab in Beijing.

Social networking services allow demonstrators to communicate with the outside world and each other.

Written by Chris Smith

When I was a boy, my father would send me postcards from Tehran, Iran, where he was on assignment from his Paris-based architectural firm. His company was under contract with an agency of the U.S. Government to design a new hospital for the citizens of Tehran. That was back in the 1950s under the rule of Reza Shah Pahlavi, the country's last U.S.-friendly leader.

One vendor is offering SD cards as a way to add removable storage to netbooks.

By Chris Smith

There is a little mesh box on my desktop now that contains a collection of flash drives, and it's a reminder of one more area of my life that needs organizing. Much the way Andy Rooney of CBS' 60 Minutes takes stock of his growing pile of aging memorabilia, I see the 13 drives I possess as a colorful set of treasures, all with different shapes, specifications, and case materials. They are a poignant reminder, however, of how easy it is to allow your technology to become antediluvian.

Concerns exist, however, over funding technology acquisitions and stock repurchases with borrowed money.

Written by Chris Smith

With several of the largest U.S. corporations, including GM, taking a nose dive recently, it's somewhat unsettling to look at the financial health of those companies on which we depend for our livelihood. Fortunately for those of us who depend on the health and wellbeing of IBM, Big Blue is doing remarkably well in weathering the recession, according to one of the nation's leading credit-rating services.