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The ideal mobile ecosystem is still one that’s partly closed, such as the iPhone App Store, but the trend is toward greater openness, AT&T Chief Technology Officer John Donovan said Monday. Like other technologies, mobile is evolving from more closed environments, such as “walled gardens” restricted to carrier-supplied applications, to more open environments, Donovan said [...]

Microsoft said it will deliver four security updates next week to patch five vulnerabilities in Windows and Office, including the bug that a Google researcher took public a month ago. As expected, the slate for next Tuesday is relatively short: Microsoft has been shipping alternating large and small batches of fixes, with the larger updates [...]

Facebook has acquired a travel recommendation start-up called NextStop–but as has been the pattern with the massive social network’s history of small purchases, it will be shutting the NextStop product down. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. “We’ll be joining Facebook and…Facebook has bought most of our assets,” a message on NextStop’s home page [...]

EMC plans to acquire Greenplum for an undisclosed sum and form a new division around the privately held company’s data warehousing technology. Greenplum sells software for analyzing large amounts of structured data, breaking up the information into multiple databases and working on each separately for quick results, according to co-founder and President Scott Yara. Its [...]

Facebook announced Wednesday that it’s beginning to institute a new interface that will pop up when users connect their Facebook accounts to third-party services–one which the social-networking company says will bring more “transparency” (yes, that word again) to how much information its nearly 500 million users are sharing across the Web. Consequently, when a third-party [...]

Yahoo has tapped a six-year veteran of the company to fill its vacant chief technology officer spot. Raymie Stata, formerly Yahoo’s chief architect, is now senior vice president and chief technology officer, Yahoo announced Thursday. He’ll report to new chief products officer Blake Irving, as the two of them look to fill the void left [...]

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Wednesday that Director of Platform Bret Taylor has been promoted to chief technology officer–a position that the company had not previously counted among its ranks. Taylor joined Facebook last summer when the company acquired his start-up FriendFeed, a social-media aggregator that was rife with ex-Google engineering talent and Silicon Valley [...]

Half of the enterprise computers running the aged Windows XP operating system are still relying on the soon-to-be-retired Service Pack 2 (SP2), a researcher said today. According to security risk and compliance management provider Qualys, 50 percent of the several hundred thousand PCs it monitors for its clients are still running Windows XP SP2. [ [...]

Even as opposition mounts against Adobe Systems’ Flash technology, the company is showing Wednesday it’s working hard to ensure it’s not the only arrow in its Web programming quiver. At the Google I/O conference, Adobe Chief Technology Officer Kevin Lynch is expected to announce the release of an HTML5 update to Adobe’s Dreamweaver tool for [...]

In one of the clearest examples so far of just how much next-generation Web technologies threaten Flash, Scribd, a service for hosting and sharing documents online, is moving to a future that doesn’t require Adobe Systems’ plug-in. “After three years of building on Flash, Scribd is starting over and moving everything to HTML5,” said Scribd [...]