ServicePower -- a mobile workforce management software provider -- is seeing more and more companies turning to a workforce model that relies on a mix of full-time employees, third-party contractors, and independent technicians being brought together and managed seamlessly in one place using the power of the cloud.

I chatted with Mark Duffin, CEO and president of ServicePower, about the changes he’s seen recently, the data his firm collects, and why cloud deployment has become so important to his company and its clients.

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We all know that search engine results can sometimes serve up malware, but if you’re using Bing you’re five times more likely to get malicious links than if you’re using Google.

In an 18-month study, independent German lab AV-Test  discovered that all search engines sometimes serve up Trojans and other malware amongst their results despite the search providers' best efforts to prevent it.

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If something really matters on Twitter then it's on Trends. The little card displayed to the left of the tweets feed in the browser (or inside a tab in the mobile app) shows ten topics that have managed to come out on top as most relevant to worldwide users.

In order to get even more spooky, Twitter even offers something called "tailored Trends" which delivers a more personal list "based on who you follow and your location". But if you don't want to use the feature, you can get trends only for a specific location, an option which Twitter has expanded to include 160 more places worldwide.

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If you’re working on some important PC task and want to avoid distractions, then maximizing your program window is usually a good place to start. But if you need to monitor several programs -- or the window just can’t be maximized -- then Le Dimmer may offer a more interesting approach.

The program is tiny, portable, and has just a single task: after launching, it dims everything on your desktop apart from the current window.

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When you get a new mobile phone and set up a new contract, you’re tied into it for a set period of time. If you want to upgrade to a new phone partway through your contract you’ll need to pay off at least some -- if not all -- of the remaining fees, which can prove very costly.

O2 has come up with a new mobile phone price plan designed to appeal to people who like to always have the latest smartphone.

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Twentieth in a series. "Market research firms tend to serve the same function for the PC industry that a lamppost does for a drunk", writes Robert X. Cringely in this installment of 1991 classic Accidental Empires. Context is universal forecast that OS/2 would overtake MS-DOS. Analysts were wrong then, much as they are today making predictions about smartphones, tablets and PCs. The insightful chapter also explains vaporware and product leak tactics IBM pioneered, Microsoft refined and Apple later adopted.

In Prudhoe Bay, in the oilfields of Alaska’s North Slope, the sun goes down sometime in late November and doesn’t appear again until January, and even then the days are so short that you can celebrate sunrise, high noon, and sunset all with the same cup of coffee. The whole day looks like that sliver of white at the base of your thumbnail.

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The furor over Google Reader's eminent demise, while quieter, is by no means over. Today, Digg pours gasoline on the fire, by publishing results from a survey about subscription habits. Late last month, the social news site announced intentions to build its own RSS solution. The company made the task the number one priority and immediately began asking for feedback. Among the 17,000 people who signed up to help shape the product, 8,000 returned surveys.

Keep in mind this is a self-selected group of people most likely to use RSS and doesn't really represent the habits of most Internet users. Results show that "80 percent of respondents check Google Reader many times a day, and 40 percent follow more than 100 feeds". In addition, more than 75 percent of the respondents say they use Google Reader for both work and play and the the most popular response to question "If there’s one thing you could remove from Google Reader what would it be"? is "nothing".

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Checking Facebook on the move is a great way to keep in touch with friends and keep up to date with what is going on. But when you are moving about you will invariably hit an area where there is poor signal, and you find that the official Facebook app can be a little on the slow side even at the best of times. oStream offers a possible solution by synchronizing your contents so it is available for offline reading.

Even for those who will own up to being addicted to Facebook, the official Facebook app is far from being without problems. It can be slow and cumbersome to use, awkward to navigate -- generally a bit of a pain. In addition to making your newsfeed available offline, oStream also has the added benefit of running much more quickly that the Facebook app -- or many popular alternatives for that matter.

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They say nothing is certain but death and taxes. Google has experience avoiding the latter and wants you to plan for the former. While I can only assume that Google would prefer you stick around and use its services and click on the ads for as long as possible, the company has a Plan B. Despite the incredible attempts being made by both medical science and Ray Kurzweil, the search giant goes in another direction. Instead of memorializing you online as some sites allow you to plan for, Google prefers you simply plan what happens to your account when the Grim Reaper comes calling.

The company has released a new settings page so you choose what happens when your account becomes inactive. While Google will not actually come out and use the word "death", it certainly does an excellent job implying that this is what is meant -- perhaps the company did not consult with Mr. Kurzweil, its director of engineering and author of the book The Singularity Is Near: A True Story About the Future.

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Last week I asked if you would buy Samsung's newest smartphone, which goes on sale later this month. With a large enough sample size -- 1,700 responses so far -- time is come to share the results. Seventy percent say they will buy Galaxy S4, although not all immediately. Just 20 percent answer flat-out "No".

I should qualify the headline: "You likely will buy Samsung Galaxy S4, if you're not American". Over here, more people are bugaboo about iPhone. Apple had 38.9 percent smartphone subscriber share in February compared to 21.3 percent for its South Korean rival, according to comScore. Elsewhere, Samsung rules, selling more general handsets and smartphones than any other manufacturer, according to Gartner. (Woe to damn provincial Americans!)

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Moonchild Productions has released Pale Moon 20.0.1 and Pale Moon x64 20.0.1 for Windows. Also available in portable 32-bit and portable 64-bit forms, the Firefox variant had only just been updated to version 20.

Version 20.0.1 includes all the best bits of Firefox 20, including the new panel-based download manager, per-window private browsing support and ability to close individual non-responsive plug-ins to protect the current browser session.

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Microsoft announced GeoFlow at the SharePoint conference in November 2012 and today rolled out a public preview of the 3-D mashup that combines the Office spreadsheet app Excel with Bing maps to allow you to plot geographic and temporal data visually.

Microsoft Research claims that GeoFlow "enables information workers to discover and share new insights from data through rich, 3-D data on a globe and fluid, cinematic guided tours—virtual cinematography moving through data". The app evolved out of the WorldWide Telescope project. "We built a gigantic virtual telescope, but to do so, we had to build an engine that could visualize the universe. If we can visualize the universe, we can visualize almost anything else", Microsoft Research principal researcher Curtis Wong explains.

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Keyboard task switching under Windows normally means repeatedly pressing Alt+Tab or Win+Tab, cycling through your running applications until you find what you need. But this is a more direct way. If you see you required program is, say, the 7th button on the taskbar, then pressing Win+7 will launch it directly.

When your taskbar is cluttered then of course it may take a moment to figure out exactly which number any particular button might be. But that’s where the free 7+ Taskbar Numberer comes in. The program can add number overlays to each of your taskbar buttons, helping you identify them at a glance.

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Ever since viruses started to hit the headlines back in the 1980s, security for PCs has been big business. Products like Norton and McAfee have grown to household name status, and made their original developers very rich men on the back of it.

This is mainly because Windows wasn’t built with security in mind and was adopted in such huge numbers that it made a tempting target. Until recently that is. With Security Essentials built into Windows 8 and active by default, and available free for users of older systems, the boys at Redmond have suddenly started to take security seriously.

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Well, well, perhaps Windows 8 isn't cause for all the PC market's woes, as IDC strongly stated yesterday. Gartner's first-quarter assessment is grim but no reaper. The analyst firm lays blame partly on consumers unwillingness to pay more for touchscreen models and asserts that the business market actually grows. Also, the firms released contradictory data, with Apple showing glaring and shocking differences.

Mikako Kitagawa, Gartner principal analyst, doesn't blame Windows 8: "Consumers are migrating content consumption from PCs to other connected devices, such as tablets and smartphones". The first factor pulling down PC shipments, which by Gartner estimates fell 11.2 percent globally during Q1, is tablet competition, then. Not Windows 8.

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