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Meebone is a bit of a strange piece of software, in that it is an AIR based desktop client for Meebo. Meebo itself is a great web application that allows you to easily log into all your favorite IM services from the web, so having a desktop client for it might seem like a rather odd choice at first. However, it actually turns out to be quite a useful tool. What Meebone basically does is display the Meebo web app in an AIR window, somewhat akin to what Fluid does on the Mac.

Google on Wednesday unveiled Gadgets for Spreadsheets in Google Docs, allowing people to create graphical representations of data in spreadsheets and publish them on Web sites. Google Docs lets you turn your data into a Motion Chart in a spreadsheet via a Google Gadget.(Credit: Google)For consumers, this means they have a dozen or so new ways to look at data in their spreadsheets. Google has put up a gallery of specialty gadgets to choose from. They include gadgets to display data on a pie chart, map, time chart, funnel chart, Gantt chart, pivot table, and on a heat map if it's geographical data. You can even create interactive charts like those used by ***

IBM on Thursday said it is donating code for securing mashups to the Open Ajax Alliance, a group of vendors and open-source Ajax projects. The software, called Smash (for secure mashups), is designed to make it easier to keep the sources of data separate in a mashup so that the application can't be hacked, according to IBM. Better security for Web applications built with Ajax is generally a good thing. For IBM, this is particularly important because the company is trying to build tools that let business users create their own mashup applications. Without better security, IT managers could block the use of these tools. ***

Microsoft is forging ahead with new development software that can link Web services to offline applications, among other things. The Microsoft Sync Framework, when integrated into applications, lets Web services be used offline and can synchronize music, videos, images, and other files between PCs and devices. Microsoft has released a new test build of its software as a community technology preview. The software has built-in support for synchronizing relational databases and file systems, including Microsoft's NTFS and FAT, between devices over any network. While Microsoft doesn't specify where the software might be used in its own product lineup, it could make for an interesting companion to an offline-compatible version of Silverlight that company execs say will eventually debut. ***

I fell in love with Zimbra's Ajax-style interface the first time I saw it. Slick, powerful, and much more extensible than Microsoft Outlook ever dreamed of being. There was just one thing I hated about the Zimbra experience: the browser artifacts around the application that made me feel like I was stuck in a Web site, rather than living in an application that just happened to leverage the power of the Web. No more. For the past few weeks I've been using Zimbra's new Prism-based Desktop. Verdict? It rocks. Take a look at the UI below: ***

It may not be quite as rapid as the company had hoped, but Livescribe is ready to show the world its Pulse. The digital pen company showed off a prototype of its technology at last year's D: All Things Digital conference, but missed its goal of shipping by year's end. And although Livescribe is unveiling more details on the product at the Demo trade show in Palm Springs on Monday, it won't actually be shipping the product until March. ***

On the heels of yesterday's Steve Jobs keynote at Macworld, Apple may be the tech company that's top of mind for many readers. However, from an enterprise computing perspective, Sun Microsystem's announcement that it is acquiring MySQL is far more pertinent. News.com's Martin LaMonica summarizes the announcement thusly: Sun Microsystems will pay $1 billion to buy MySQL, the provider of a popular open-source database. Sun said Wednesday that it will pay about $800 million in cash for MySQL's stock and take on about $200 million worth of options. MySQL CEO Marten Mickos will join Sun's senior executive team after the transaction closes. The acquisition is a bold move for Sun, which has embraced open-source software and development practices in an effort to garner more revenue from its software business. ***

Google integrates apps on iPhone and offers word suggestions when you type.(Credit: Google) Google has optimized its applications for the iPhone so they are integrated into a single interface and operate faster. Now, if you go to Google's home page on your iPhone you'll see the Web search box and links to Gmail, Calendar and Reader up at the top of the screen for quick access. Google also offers word suggestions as you type to make the query entry faster. And once you click on links, the pages download faster than before. "When you click it's instantaneous," says Gummi Hafsteinsson, a senior product manager at Google. "Just like on the desktop; there's no difference between the two." Google plans to optimize its applications for other phones eventually, he said. ***

Shortly after writing about SendThisFile, I had to transfer some large files to a client. It's one thing to read about a product and kick the tires, but quite another to battle-test it. Here was a battle. Since transferring large files can take hours, you need to be concerned with your computer going to sleep midstream. Many computers go into assorted suspended states when they haven't been used in a while. For example, the Power Options in the Windows XP Control Panel lets you set time limits after which the hard disk stops spinning, the entire computer goes into standby, or even turns itself off (hibernate). In the tests described below, I disabled all these "sleeping" options. Although ***

Yahoo and Adobe are bringing pay-per-click ads to Adobe's Portable Document Format so that publishers can serve up ads inside PDFs distributed on Web sites and over e-mail that are contextually relevant to the content. The text advertisements appear in a panel to the right of the content in the PDF and are subject matter matched using keywords and analysis of associated concepts. The ads are dynamic, meaning different ads can pop up at different times and clicking on an ad takes you to the advertiser Web site. Publishers upload their PDF content into Yahoo's ad serving system and then monitor the performance through Yahoo's system. Publishers take a cut of the revenue from each click on the ads and Yahoo will split its share of the revenue per click with Adobe. ***

Monday morning, Zoho, the online productivity suite, announced full offline functionality for its Zoho Writer product. Zoho had previously released partial offline functionality for Writer earlier this year, but you could only read the documents and not edit them. What good is that? Luckily, as a little post-Thanksgiving gift, we now have full offline editing, utilizing Google Gears (download Google Gears for Windows or ***

Internet visionary Vint Cerf predicted on Wednesday that in the coming decades, scientists will have developed an interplanetary Web, or a common set of communications protocols that will allow sensors on spacecraft, satellites and planets to transmit information to each other and back to Earth. Google, of course, would be the search engine to organize all that data. "I think were going to end up with an interplanetary backbone over the next 20, 30, 40 years..." Cerf said during a talk at Google's analyst day in Mountain View, Calif. We'll have "data coming back from space, which we'll help to organize just like we organize (everything else). ***

Well, It doesn't appear that Microsoft will be taking direct aim at the iPhone on Tuesday. Rather, the software maker is playing to its strengths, announcing a new piece of server software to help businesses manage a company's worth of smartphones. That doesn't mean Microsoft isn't interested in say, adding a full Web browser into Windows Mobile, according to Scott Horn, a general manager in Microsoft's mobile device unit. "Do I see a path where we are going to have a phenomenal browsing experience," Horn said. "Yes, I do." But the bulk of Microsoft's announcements for Tuesday focus on the company's enterprise strengths. ***

From left to right: Chris DeWolfe, Rupert Murdoch, John Battelle(Credit: Rafe Needleman/CNET Networks) Recently, rumors have been flying over whether or not MySpace would use this week's Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco as a venue for announcing a developer platform akin to Facebook's. Well, now we have a final answer: sort of. MySpace CEO Chris DeWolfe and News Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch took the stage at Web 2.0 and confirmed that the company is working on a platform that will launch "within a couple of months. ***

Zoho this morning launched yet another office productivity app in its online suite: Zoho DB, a full online database. It's an impressive application, full of the features that users of databases like Access are accustomed to. You can create complex relational databases made up of several tables of information, and then query the data using visual query builders. The tool also supports SQL queries. If you've been using a spreadsheet (like Excel) as a database, as most of the world does, the learning curve for a real database like Zoho DB will be painful. Zoho DB lets you start out with a single spreadsheet-like table and add in database features from there, which is a help, but a tutorial and more help text would be welcome. ***

As I said last week in my post about Apple's iPod announcements, I ordered a new 160GB iPod classic as soon as the Apple Store was back online. It arrived today (Monday)--five days later, from Shanghai--with my custom engraving. I think that's pretty darn excellent. The iPod packaging has gotten a lot smaller. A box the size of those that contained my first two iPods (a third-generation model, then a fourth-generation iPod when the third-gen model died) could probably hold about six of the new iPod classic packages. I saw the new iPod nano packaging at a local Apple Store this evening, and it's much smaller--and very cool, since it presents the iPod itself under clear plastic. Anyway, when my iPod arrived, I turned it on and selected English as my preferred language. ***

Skype users got a proverbial dead line when trying to dial out, or receive, a call on Thursday because of a software glitch with the VoIP service, according to a notice on Skype's Web site. The notice begins: "Some of you may be having problems logging into Skype." So it's not yet entirely clear how many users are being denied service. The engineering staff at the Internet phone company expects to have the problem resolved within the next 12 to 24 hours, which would put a fix in place sometime Thursday or as late as Friday morning. Affected Skype users are presently prevented from logging into the service, and prospective users are prevented from downloading Skype onto their systems. ***

Are you the kind of person who posts a ton of photos and videos online but uses very little e-mail storage? Well, Google is now offering consumers the ability to buy additional, or overflow, storage when they reach the free limit in Gmail or in Picasa Web Albums (2.8GB and 1GB, respectively), instead of having to pay for more storage in each program separately. Eventually, other applications like Google Docs & Spreadsheets will be included. Prices range from $20 per year for 6GB of overflow storage to $500 a year for 250GB. The news was released by Google after Google Blogoscoped readers started noticing that their Gmail storage was mysteriously growing on Thursday. ***

Xcellery, a service that lets users collaborate on Microsoft Excel files in near-real-time, is for sale now on eBay. I covered the service in March. I heard about the sale from the creator of the service, Reto Laemmler. He wrote to me, "There are no plans to shut down Xcellery, and in case of an acquisition [co-founder] Heng-yi and I will try to stay on board." However, the eBay listing says, "Xcellery is for sale because the founder team is focusing on other projects and cannot spend enough time on it anymore." As of this writing, the bidding is at $202. ***

Google has just announced its acquisition of Zenter, a small company that makes software for creating online slideshows--a much rumored, and fully confirmed product Google's CEO Eric Schmidt officially announced a few months ago at the Web 2.0 Expo. Zenter joins Tonic Systems, another presentation-creation service Google picked up back in April. ***