MicroStrategy, a business intelligence software maker, has deployed 1,100 Apple iPads to executives and sales personnel to conduct critical job-related tasks. The company said it expects to 700 more iPads to be deployed soon.

Adobe on Thursday said it would resurrect a tool that lets developers port Flash applications to the iPhone after Apple did an about-face earlier in the day.

Microsoft apologized to customers of its hosted software services for businesses after at least three outages over the past few weeks.

Security experts warned Thursday of a fast-spreading email worm, the first large outbreak of this type in nearly a decade.

The worm appears in email messages with the subject "Here you have," and contains what seems to be a link to an Adobe PDF file. In fact the link takes the victim to a Web page hosted on the members.multimania.co.uk domain that then tries to download a screensaver (.scr) file. If the user agrees to installing that file, he is then infected by the worm, which mails itself to his email contacts.

Google made searching a smidge faster this week, while proving yet again they really are smarter than the rest of us combined. What else happened? Craigslist responded to complaints from 17 state attorneys general, Mark Hurd got a new gig, Apple opened its App Store kimono, and the planet got a brief reprieve from two boulder-size asteroids. Have you got what it takes to ace our quiz before we're all blown to kingdom come? Give yourself 10 points for each correct answer. Now strap on your tinfoil helmets and begin.

Nokia has named Stephen Elop, former president of Microsoft's business software group, to become its new CEO effective from later this month.

Elop will replace Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo in the top job on Sept. 21. Kallasvuo loses his board seat with immediate effect and will step down from the CEO position on Sept. 20, Nokia said. Elop will leave Microsoft immediately, that company said.

Codesion, which offers hosted source code management, has added the Git distributed version control system to its services, the company said this week.

The company enables users to host code repositories, including Subversion and CVS. Developers can use "best of breed" development tools with Codesion, said company CEO Guy Marion. These repositories are deployed to cloud platforms such as Amazon Elastic Compute Service (EC2).

Microsoft today said it will issue nine security updates to patch 13 bugs in Windows, Office, and its Web server software next week.

The number of Sept. 14 updates will be more than double the maximum the company has delivered in any other of this year's odd-numbered months. Microsoft traditionally delivers relatively few patches in those months.

Microsoft will launch Windows Phone 7 on Oct. 11 at an event in New York, according to a report on the Pocket-lint website.

Pocket-lint, which publishes gadget news and reviews, cited multiple Microsoft sources that it did not name.

Apple today reversed its decision earlier in the year that barred developers from using rival programming tools, including one that has since been discontinued by Adobe, to build applications for the iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch.

Mark your calendars! Sept. 9 is hereby declared Debugging Day. It's been associated with removing bugs for more than 50 years now but is rarely formally celebrated. So let's start the tradition this year.

It all began with a log entry from 1947 by Harvard University's Mark II technical team. The now-classic entry features a moth taped to the page, time-stamped 15:45, with the caption "Relay #70 Panel F (moth) in relay" and the proud boast, "First actual case of bug being found."

With a new range of hardware announced Thursday, Dell's is targeting high-performance and cloud computing environments that share similar hyperscale characteristics.

Software vendor MobileIron announced the release of version 3.0 of its Virtual Smartphone Platform today, giving IT shops the ability to integrate mobile management with other enterprise-based systems.

The new version costs the same as version 2.0, which is $4 per user per month, MobileIron CEO Bob Tinker said.

WASHINGTON -- Among the proposals President Barack Obama made this week to boost the U.S. economy is one that will allow businesses to write off all of the investment they do in 2011. But there's a lot of uncertainty ahead for IT managers interested in this tax break.

In a speech Wednesday, Obama was specific about when he wants the tax break to apply -- "in 2011," he said. There was initial expectation that the White House would ask Congress to approve a tax break that applied through 2011, with a retroactive start date to this month.

Arm Holdings has taken the wraps off its next major chip design, promising a five-fold increase in performance that the company hopes will take it beyond smartphones and into new types of equipment such as high-performance routers and servers.

Arm's top executives launched the Cortex-A15 MPCore at a press conference in San Francisco Wednesday evening. The name is supposed to reflect how much of an advance the chip represents -- Arm's current designs are the Cortex-A8 and the Cortex-A9.

While Apple has been unequivocal in banning Java and Adobe's Flash from the iPhone and related devices, third-party iOS application development tools have been allowed to flourish. Uncertainty over Apple's stance toward third-party toolmakers, however, has left at least one such vendor -- Novell -- anxious about the future of its iOS development platform.

Oracle detailed on Wednesday upgrades to the Solaris Unix OS it inherited from Sun Microsystems, offering improvements in such areas as virtualization.

The company announced Oracle Solaris 10 9/10, Oracle Solaris Cluster 3.3, and Oracle Solaris Studio 12.2. Oracle emphasized that Solaris is designed to leverage large memory and multi-core processor/thread systems as well as offer high performance, security, and scalability.

HP expanded its IP phone and wireless LAN offerings for small and medium-size businesses on Wednesday as part of a broad set of product introductions for those customers.

Oracle's board of directors has weighed in against a shareholder proposal calling for the creation of a board-level committee on sustainability, according to the proxy statement for the vendor's upcoming annual meeting.

Google raised the stakes in the search space on Wednesday with the introduction of Google Instant, which will provide faster, more intelligent searching and results on the company's site.

The intelligence built into the Google Instant service responds to predicted queries based on just a few keystrokes. Google Instant will become part of the core Google search service, with initial rollouts today in the United States.