Celebrating the company's 50th anniversary, Plantronics on Wednesday unveiled the latest product in its line of wireless headsets for office scenarios, the Voyager Pro UC v2.

Utilizing capacitive touch sensors, the Voyager Pro UC and its new software suite can intelligently interact with softphones and mobile devices based simply upon the user's physical contact with the headset.

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In a move that signals the company's keenness to take full advantage of the increasing popularity of the Mac format, Microsoft has announced the availability of 30-day trial versions of Office for Mac 2011. The trial version of the office suite is for the Home & Business edition, which means that it includes Outlook and gives users the opportunity to try out all of the components of Office.

The release of a trial version of the office suite is likely to please PC users who have recently made the move to OS X, as it enables them to work with familiar software. It also enables Mac users who have previously avoided Microsoft software to take the suite for a test drive without having to part with any cash.

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What do application developers really care about? That's the question IDC seeks to answer with a new report released today based on a survey of 2,235 application developers conducted between January 10-12. "The survey reveals how new entrants to the tablet market are changing application development priorities and how businesses large and small are accelerating their efforts to build a mobile application strategy to deal with an explosion in apps, mobile devices, operating systems, and capabilities," according to the report.

The clincher: "Google has nearly caught up to Apple in smartphone popularity and is closing the gap in tablets." Read that sentence a second time and let the implications sink in and think about what it ultimately means for all the seemingly endless rah rahs for Apple's iOS.

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Tuesday, U.S. Senator Maria Cantwell (D-Wa.) introduced a bill called The Internet Freedom, Broadband Promotion, and Consumer Protection act of 2011 on behalf of herself and co-sponsor Senator Al Franken (D-Mn.)

Both Cantwell and Franken have expressed public concern about net neutrality in the wake of the FCC's passage of the Open Internet Order and approval of Comcast's joint content venture with NBC Universal, and this bill seeks to create stronger guidelines for net neutrality.

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The Document Foundation has released its first stable build of LibreOffice. Version 3.3 arrives ahead of schedule thanks largely to the growth in developers who have contributed to LibreOffice since its first appearance in September 2010. The number has mushroomed from under 20 to over 100, allowing LibreOffice to exceed the "aggressive" targets set by its founders when this offshoot from OpenOffice was first announced.

LibreOffice 3.3 introduces 10 new features to the program, many of which are exclusive to LibreOffice. Examples include the ability to import SVG graphics directly into the Draw application and edit them interactively. Title pages are now easier to create in Writer thanks to a new dialogue box, while a new Navigator view helps simplify the navigation of large documents. There are a number of new import filters too, including support for Microsoft Works and Lotus Word Pro, while the Corel WordPerfect filter has also been improved. There are also a number of extensions bundled across the suite, such as the Presenter View in Impress.

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The consumer video editing market is a competitive place, packed with impressive-looking apps, each vying for your attention. And yet, Roxio's new Video Lab HD, originally a component of Roxio Creator 2011, still manages to stand out from the crowd, thanks to a lengthy feature list.

The core 32-track video editor, for instance, can import your footage, then apply various corrections, and add professional video or transition effects. It works with standard, High Definition and even 3D footage, being able to import clips directly from many 3D cameras. You don't have one? No problem, the program can also convert your 2D movies or images into 3D.

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Amazon on Tuesday debuted a new bulk e-mail solution for businesses and developers as part of its web services offering. According to the company, Amazon SES is intended to take out the complexity of sending large amounts of e-mail for smaller businesses while ensuring delivery in a timely manner.

Users would receive their first gigabyte of data transfer at no charge, and would be free to those who use Amazon Web Service's EC2 cloud or Elastic Beanstalk application-management service as long as it falls within their bandwidth allocations. 2,000 e-mails per day would be covered under the free plan.

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In what could be considered a shot across the bow of AT&T, Verizon said late Monday that it would offer its $30 per month unlimited data plan that it offers for smart phones to iPhone users as well. Apple's iconic device is set to debut on the network on February 10.

Last June, AT&T restructured its iPhone data plans. While the rates dropped, the company also made the decision to do away with unlimited data. While Verizon's move does look like it is a response to AT&T's decision, at the same time Verizon is doing away with its $15 monthly 150MB capped plan, meaning unlimited data is the only option.

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Google on Tuesday announced that existing Google Voice users can port their phone numbers over to the Google Voice service for a one-time fee of $20. Previously, users could only be assigned new numbers for the service, and not bring their existing number with them like they can between telephone companies.

"One of the most frequent requests we hear from people who use (or want to use) Google Voice is that they'd like to get all of Google Voice's features without having to give up their long-time phone numbers," said Google Software Engineer Robert Dong in the Google Voice blog today.

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Anyone who's performed the same mindless task more than a dozen times will know the benefits of finding some tool to do the job for you. After all, why take five minutes to perform a set of repetitive commands when you might be able to press a single button, sit back and watch the task whizz by? In this feature we've dug out 11 free tools that are designed to do the hard work for Windows users, so you don't have to.

The tools in question cover a variety of different repetitive tasks: convert and edit a group of images, add AutoText to any application, rename a large group of files quickly, or create powerful scripts that automate processes and tasks across multiple programs and even Windows itself. There's a tool here for everyone, so sit back, press a button, and let your computer take the strain -- after all, that was one of the reasons you bought it in the first place.

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It's the question asked by a Betanews reader last week. While there is no single answer, two reasons stand out: iPod and iPhone and the ecosystem supporting them. Apple launched its tablet with huge manufacturing, distribution and third-party support, something it didn't have with iPod and less of with iPhone. Purely from that perspective, and discounting design or technical merits, Research in Motion and Samsung are strategically in best competitive ecosystem positions to release viable iPad competitors.

Some Apple fans will disagree, arguing that iPad's size, design and user experience make it far superior to other tablets. I won't debate those points here but only observe they would be meaningless without the supporting ecosystem created by iPod and iPhone. Apple didn't launch iPad into a vacuum but with lush sales and distribution environment.

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Web metrics company comScore on Monday announced its Media Metrix Top 50 U.S. Web properties for the month of December, an important time to watch web traffic due to the holiday-related shopping that takes place. Once again, comScore ranked Yahoo and its related sites as the top Web property with 182 million unique viewers, beating out Google's 179.3 million and Microsoft's 177 million.

Amazon saw a spike in traffic in December that drove it up to the #7 position, and weather-related sites The Weather Channel and WeatherBug both enjoyed big spikes in unique visits due to holiday-related travel planning.

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Nitro PDF Software has released version 1.4 of their PDF Reader, a small but worthwhile update that contains a number of useful time-saving features. Top of the list is the new intelligent hyperlink recognition, a simple but welcome addition that should help you to bypass a common PDF annoyance.

You've seen it many times: your PDF document includes a URL, but it's in plain text, and therefore clicking it has precisely no effect at all, which is irritating. Nitro PDF Reader actually scans the document ahead of time and converts plain text web addresses into active links, though, so there's no need to manually open a browser window and paste the address -- you can simply click the URL to open a site, as the author intended.

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What do CIOs care most about? Cloud computing, says Gartner. They see the cloud as opportunity to freeing up resources that will be reinvested in future growth. Gartner released the findings of its 2011 CIO Agenda survey on Friday.

According to Gartner, the typical IT organization invests two-thirds of its budget to daily operations. Moving to the cloud will fee up between 35 percent to a whopping 50 percent of operational and infrastructure resources for reallocation elsewhere.

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VideoLan.org has released a minor update to its video playback tool,VLC Media Player. VLC 1.1.6 is a minor release that contains a few minor new features, plus consists mainly of bug fixes and security improvements.

VLC Media Player is both cross-platform and open-source, and is capable of playing a wide variety of video and audio formats without the need for additional codecs or downloads. It can also be used for playing back DVD movies -- a capability that first made it popular with Windows XP users (XP has no built-in capabilities for playing DVDs). Version 1.1.6 comes two months after version 1.1.5 was released last year -- over 58 million downloads of the last version have been recorded by VideoLan.org.

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