According to a study by IDC, instant messaging in the business world is going bonkers and looks set to continue its huge growth, but experts are warning of security risks.
Their research found that the worldwide enterprise instant messaging market (which includes instant messaging server products as well as enterprise instant messaging security, compliance, and management products) leapt 37% in terms of year-over-year revenue in 2004, and is expected to skyrocket from $315 million in 2005 to $736 million in 2009.
“With more than 28 million business users worldwide using enterprise instant messaging products to send nearly 1 billion messages each day in 2005, and many more crossover corporate consumers who use consumer instant messaging networks in the workplace, these products are clearly reaching more mainstream users,” said Robert P. Mahowald, program director for IDC’s Collaborative Computing research.
“Especially in compliance-driven sectors like Wall Street, financial services, and government, instant messaging is a critical differentiator. In the next few years, IDC expects instant messaging – once the plaything of teenagers – to continue to grow into its role as a substantial business collaboration application,” he added
The growth in the enterprise segment is being fuelled by domestic users of IM tools like MSN Messenger bringing their online chatting habits into the work place and using the service as a business collaboration tool.
The report identified financial services and the public sector as the keenest to take up enterprise IM, with business IM monitoring and archiving tools able to keep a watchful eye on yapping employees.
According to a recent Gartner poll, instant messaging is now used in 70% of all companies, but figures from the Yankee Group reveal that only 15-20% of those companies operate IM administration, leaving 50% of office IM use unmonitored.
This wouldn’t appear to be the brightest idea as a new IMLogic study reveals that an increasing number of virus authors are starting to focus on IM clients as virus spreading agents.
IMLogic says that the attacks on the IM clients have reached record values – up 14 times on last year – with the complexity of the attacks also increasing.
The company’s IM monitoring service showed that MSN Messenger suffered the highest attack rate at 62% of the reported cases, with AOL’s AIM client coming at second with 31% of the attacks and Yahoo third with 7% of the attacks targeting their client.
IMLogic’s research found that the majority of the attacks were worm-based (87%) with 12% of the attacks aimed at spreading a virus.
Dell have started shipping a Windows-less desktop PC for customers looking to install other operating systems on their PCs.
Dell’s new Dimension E510n PC comes with a blank hard drive untouched by all things Microsoft, with the company bunging in a copy of the obscure FreeDOS operating system for users to install, if they so desire.
The base machine’s reasonably specified (a Pentium 4 processor, 512Mbytes memory, 128MB ATI Radeon X300SE HyperMemory video card, Sound Blaster®Live! 24-bit Audio and 80GB hard drive), and knocks out for $774 (~e647~£439).
T-Mobile have launched ‘Web’n’walk’, their mass-market mobile Internet service, and are confidently predicting that it expects to lure hundreds of thousands of customers onto the service over the next couple of years.
Conceding that Internet services on mobile devices to date had so far been, well, rubbish, McBride bigged up T-Mobile’s approach for fast, simple and affordable services and products, saying that mobile networks will eventually carry more Internet traffic than fixed-line computers or phones.
Olympus have unveiled the SP-700, a new addition to their new SP series of cameras with a special guide function for beginners explaining what button does what.
We couldn’t find a preset for ‘pub’ or ‘all night rave in a dingy warehouse’, but there’s an underwater mode included too (just so long as punters remember that they’ve got to slap on the PT-013 underwater case before dunking their expensive camera into the sea).
Olympus is making a big hoo-hah about its ‘Compare and Shoot’ function which lets users check and compare results before re-shooting or adjusting settings if needed.
The camera is pitched directly in competition with the 
Google and Sun Microsystems have come up with a broad, but fuzzy, deal which will see the two companies developing and distributing each other’s technology in a move to challenge Microsoft’s Office suite dominance. 
It’s also expected that the deal will make it easier for freeloading punters to obtain OpenOffice, Sun’s well-regarded, freely distributed office productivity suite which directly competes with Microsoft Office.
Bundling the two products together seems a wise move, increasing the appeal of the Google Toolbar and making Java a more attractive proposition for software developers.
Fashion aficionados concerned that the hue of their laptop may clash awfully with their high fashion clobber will be delighted to learn that Sony is releasing their Sony F-type laptops in four stylish colours.
Carbon Fibre Laptops
The Vaio TX series offer a handy AV mode button which makes the machine available for watching movies or listening to music in just 12 seconds with no need to boot up Windows.
Search company Blinkx have launched a free service that lets amateurs and pro filmmakers upload and store their video files to a searchable online library.
Users of the Blinkx.tv service will also be able to create custom channels, based on a specific search term. 
This will be automatically populated in the background with videos that match a chosen search term, encouraging users to have the occasional rummage around in their smart folder to see what new videos have been added.
Listen to 
Politically, presenting in Tokyo was an important act – delivering this radical message in the home town of Sony’s head office. 
In the nine months that its been on the market, it’s sold 6m units worldwide, making it, they claim, the most successful portable games machine to date. 
Oh we like this! 
NYSee – a Web project by developers 
The locations of the cams can be viewed via the Google maps interface as a map, satellite view or hybrid. 
Finally, we took a shine to 
Japan’s largest annual IT show, Ceatec (Combined Exhibition of Advanced Technologies), opens today and will feature around 700 companies, according to the organisers. 
Toshiba has promised to display a super-slim 12.7 millimetre high drive designed for laptops which can read HD-DVD discs and read and write DVDs and CDs.