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An anonymous reader writes “The Australian Communications and Media Authority has commenced legal proceedings in the Federal Court against several local and international companies over allegedly unsolicited SMS spam. It’s the first time the regulator has used its powers under the Spam Act to pursue an alleged SMS spammer through the Courts. Other companies have been fined or committed to an ‘enforceable undertaking’ to avoid this type of action (although these are not without issue). Another firm accused of SMS spam accused the regulator of being overzealous after it received a formal warning. The regulator appears to have instituted a crackdown on the premium mobile content industry in recent months, culminating in this latest action.”

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theodp writes “PC Magazine’s John C. Dvorak offers his curmudgeonly take on the 30th anniversary of the spreadsheet, which Dvorak blames for elevating once lowly bean counters to the executive suite and enabling them to make some truly horrible decisions. But even if you believe that VisiCalc was the root-of-all-evil, as Dvorak claims, your geek side still has to admire it for the programming tour-de-force that it was, implemented in 32KB memory using the look-Ma-no-multiply-or-divide instruction set of the 1MHz 8-bit 6502 processor that powered the Apple II.” On the brighter side, one of my favorite things about Visicalc is the widely repeated story that it was snuck into businesses on Apple machines bought under the guise of word processors, but covertly used for accounting instead.

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The latest AJAX-based mapping system from NavDog is a consumer-facing map search that incorporates system intelligence into the user experience. This intelligence is based on NavDog’s new Geographic Business Intelligence Engine (GBIE), which is designed to process user actions in order to derive their intent. This derived intent is matched with relevant map content, which is then displayed to the user in real time through NavDog’s refined AJAX technology. The system builds upon each subsequent user action in order to further refine the content it returns to the user. The end result is a map that displays the object of the user’s map search, along with related supporting content through relationships between map items and their relevance to the users’ immediate interests. The site literally creates a unique mashup of map content every time a user interacts with it.

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On Elpeleg writes “The Perl Foundation is giving out grants for Perl development ranging from $500 to $3,000 in February 2009. You neither need to have a large, complex, or lengthy project nor be a Perl master or guru. You are encouraged to submit a proposal if you have a good idea and the means and ability to accomplish your Perl project. The deadline for proposal submissions is January 31, 2009.”

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Nokia announced it will bring a US optimized version of the Nokia E63 to the North American market. The Nokia E63 will be available in the coming weeks. The Nokia E63 combines a QWERTY keypad, 3G network speeds and the open source operating system Symbian S60 3rd Edition, allowing consumers the ability to download third party applications to customize their device. The Nokia E63 also comes with the ability to switch modes with the press of a button - allowing consumers to customize two separate home screens, e.g., one for work and one for play. Each home screen can be personalized with applications such as a digital music player, video player, camera functionality, games, and corporate

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Gearworx has launched private label Virtual Private Servers, enabling small businesses, developers and hosting resellers to more directly manage and control their reseller hosting environment. Private label VPS accounts are powered by dedicated VPS containers, hosted on CentOS 5.2 and Microsoft Windows Server 2003 servers. Customers can utilize both Windows and Linux platforms simultaneously and manage both through a central interface. Individual hosting accounts are controlled through Parallels Plesk 8.6.x, which offers usability. Additionally, Gearworx provides customers with a full suite of features through the Plesk Application

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chromatic writes to tell us that O’Reilly has an interview with Guido van Rossum on the evolutionary process that gave us Python 3.0 and what is in store for the future. “I’d like to reiterate that at this point, it’s a very personal choice to decide whether to use 3.0 or 2.6. You don’t run the risk of being left behind by taking a conservative stance at this point. 2.6 will be just as well supported by the same group of core Python developers as 3.0. At the same time, we’re also not sort of deemphasizing the importance and quality of 3.0. So if you are not held back by external requirements like dependencies on packages or third party software that hasn’t been ported to 3.0 yet or working in an environment where everyone else is using another version. If you’re learning Python for the first time, 3.0 is a great way to learn the language. There’s a couple of things that trip over beginners have been removed.”

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Kaavo has announced the public launch of Infrastructure and Middleware on Demand. IMOD is a solution with an application-focused approach to IT infrastructure management through public and private clouds. Companies traditionally manage their servers individually which is complex and costly and impedes business growth across an enterprise. By tapping the capabilities of cloud computing, however, IMOD enables users to manage infrastructure as a unified system and provides the following benefits:
Application and service centric n-tier configuration: With one click, IMOD automatically brings online one or multi-server systems for running applications.
Business continuity: A simple interface to schedule automatic data backups ensures business continuity.

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