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Have you got a new bundle of joy in your family? Are you proud parents of a cute little one and can’t wait to take him/her out to show them off to everyone? Hold on how do you plan to take them out? Are you planning to go for a stroll in the neighborhood with your baby put in a buggy?

Then make sure you choose a buggy that ensures your baby faces you while in it. This is so because a recently conducted research in Dundee University’s School of Psychology suggests that babies put in buggies in which they do not face their parents are prone to psychological damage.

Researchers say that lack of emotional connect due to facing away from parents is the reason why some babies interact less with their parents. This conclusive evidence comes after a research on 3000 parents and their babies.

When children face their parents while riding in a buggy, they establish a bond with the buggy-pusher. The laughs and talks of the person pushing the buggy lead to a good heart rate and lower stress levels in babies ensuring babies fall asleep while in their buggies.

Even though strolling with a kid in the buggy seems like a mundane job parents have to be careful of its after effects. They should utilize this opportunity for increasing their contact with their child by using a buggy in which their baby faces them.

The growing economic slump doesn’t appear to have fully struck Web advertising.

Internet advertising revenues for the third quarter were nearly $5.9 billion, representing an 11 percent increase over the same period last year, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau.

The bad news is online advertising appears to be slowing down. The third quarter in 2008 was up only two percent from the second quarter. For the first three quarters of the year, however, ad revenues totaled $17.3 billion, up from $15.2 billion for the first three quarters of 2007. The IAB said the $5.9 billion quarterly results were the second best ever.

Meanwhile, ComScore issued an ad-focus ranking for October. Platform A, AOL’s ad platform reached 173 million Americans or 91 percent of the 190.6 million American’s online. The Yahoo Network came in second by reaching 164 million people and was followed by Google’s Ad Network with 158 million.

With Jerry Yang quitting as Yahoo Inc.’s chief executive, the Internet company’s board will confront pivotal questions as it looks for a new leader.Should Yahoo swallow its pride and try to strike a buyout deal with Microsoft Corp. at a price far below Microsoft’s $47.5 billion offer from 6 1/2 months ago? Or should Yahoo still pursue a long-awaited turnaround that’s becoming more difficult to achieve as the economy tanks?

If Yahoo plays it safe and hires someone from within or someone friendly with Microsoft, it could signal the board merely wants an interim captain who can steer the ship until Microsoft, or possibly another buyer, comes to the rescue.

But should Yahoo recruit a CEO with a prestigious resume or pluck an up-and-coming technology star, it will be seen as a sign that the company is digging in to remain independent for the long haul.

Concentrating on rich Internet applications, Zend Technologies is backing Adobe’s Action Message Format (AMF) in Zend Framework 1.7.

Version 1.7 is the latest release of the company’s framework for building PHP Web applications; it is being announced at the Adobe Max 2008 conference in San Francisco on Wednesday. With AMF support, PHP developers can exchange data between PHP applications on a server and Flex and Flash applications on the client.

[ For more about Adobe Max, see "Adobe accommodates Visual Studio, Eclipse" ]

“It makes it much easier to develop [Adobe] Flex and AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime) applications in PHP,” said Wil Sinclair, development manager in the advanced technologies group at Zend.

Other features in Zend Framework 1.7 include performance enhancements to increase load times by 25 to 50 percent, the company said. Also featured is a native DB2 adapter to access DB2/400 data on the IBM i platform and an update to the Dojo AJAX toolkit, including a new dijit editor. Also, Zend will offer integration with the jQuery AJAX library, although Zend has chosen Dojo as its supported JavaScript library.

Version 1.7 supports Twitter, in which Twitter can be used within a Zend-based application instead of requiring the Twitter interface.

With the upcoming Zend Framework 1.8 release due in early 2009, Zend will focus on RAD (rapid application development) to build applications more easily. Tools such as a command line interface tool will be provided.

Zend Framework 1.7 is available for download here.

Yahoo Inc. shares shot up 11 percent Tuesday as investors took the resignation of CEO Jerry Yang to mean Microsoft Corp. is more likely to make another bid for the ailing Internet company.

Yang’s emotional attachment to the company he co-founded in 1995 is one of the reasons he balked at a $47.5 billion takeover offer from Microsoft six months ago. The same devotion finally led Yang to conclude he should step aside as chief executive, as the company seeks to bolster its depressed stock price and sagging earnings in an economic downturn that might prove even more wrenching than the dot-com bust of eight years ago.

Yang’s surrendering of the CEO reins, announced Monday, won’t occur until Yahoo finds a suitable replacement. The Silicon Valley company said it is interviewing candidates inside and outside Yahoo in a search led by its chairman, Roy Bostock, and the executive recruitment firm Heidrick & Struggles.

It didn’t take long for analysts to conclude Yang’s departure will clear the way for a major overhaul that could culminate in Yahoo’s sale to Microsoft — something Yang refused to do in May, to the great irritation of shareholders.

“We still believe Microsoft will eventually own Yahoo,” UBS analyst Benjamin Schachter wrote in a research note late Monday. “Jerry moving out of the CEO role may accelerate this.”

Microsoft declined to comment Monday.

Although Yang, 40, had publicly expressed his desire to remain at the helm, Yahoo’s board faced intensifying pressure to cast him aside as the company’s shares plunged to their lowest levels since early 2003.

The shares were trading Tuesday morning at $11.80, up $1.17 on the day, but still well below Microsoft’s last bid of $33 per share in early May.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer huffily withdrew the offer after Yang sought $37 per share. The negotiating breakdown triggered a shareholder revolt led by billionaire investor Carl Icahn, who called for Yang’s ouster in July.

Icahn reached a truce that put him and two allies on Yahoo’s 11-member board, but he still has been lobbying for Yahoo to pursue a deal with Microsoft that would either involve selling the company in its entirety or just its search engine, which ranks a distant second to Google Inc. An Icahn spokeswoman said the financier had no comment Monday.

Monday’s shake-up comes as no surprise, given the challenges facing Yahoo.

“The shareholders were ready to pick up pitchforks and torches,” said technology analyst Rob Enderle. “If Jerry wasn’t a founder, he already would have been gone” months ago.

Bostock made it sound as if the change in command had been in the works for some time. “Jerry and the board have had an ongoing dialogue about succession timing, and we all agree that now is the right time to make the transition to a new CEO who can take the company to the next level,” he said.

Yang, who started working on Yahoo with Stanford University classmate David Filo in 1994, will revert to “Chief Yahoo,” a titular role he filled before replacing former movie studio boss Terry Semel as CEO in June 2007. He will also remain on Yahoo’s board of directors.

“All of you know that I have always, and will always bleed purple,” Yang wrote Monday memo to employees, referring to the company’s official color.

Sue Decker, Yahoo’s president, is expected to be among the candidates to succeed Yang, although she has been an integral part of the management team that has exasperated shareholders.

Dan Rosensweig, who resigned as Yahoo’s chief operating officer, also could be lured back as CEO, or the board could turn to one of its own directors, such as former Viacom Inc. CEO Frank Biondi or former Nextel CEO John Chapple.

Yang had been pursuing a strategy that he thought would prove Yahoo was worth more than Microsoft was willing to pay, but the rapidly deteriorating economy made a comeback seem increasingly unlikely.

After squandering the opportunity to sell to Microsoft, Yang tried to boost Yahoo’s profit by forging an advertising partnership with Google.

But that backup plan fell through two weeks ago when Google walked away from the deal to avoid a court battle with the U.S. Justice Department, which had concluded the partnership would have throttled competition in the online advertising market.

Just a few hours after the Google partnership collapsed, Yang publicly said he thought Microsoft should hook up with Yahoo. But Ballmer threw cold water on the idea the next day by declaring he doubted a deal could be worked out.

Yang had also been exploring a possible acquisition of another fading Internet star, AOL, but most analysts panned the idea as a desperation move that threatened to hurt Yahoo more than it would help.

Although Yang’s tenure as CEO is unlikely to be remembered fondly by shareholders, his legacy as an Internet visionary remains secure.

Yahoo’s remarkable rise began in 1994 when Yang and Filo began compiling a directory of their favorite Web links while working on their engineering doctorates in a trailer at Stanford University. They initially called their site “Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web,” only to later decide to switch to an acronym for “Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle.”

Yang and Filo became two of the Internet’s first billionaires not long after Yahoo went public in 1996 with fewer than 50 employees on the payroll. At the height of the dot-com boom, Yahoo’s market value stood at $130 billion. It was around $16 billion Tuesday.

These days, the electrical power business has taken on a complexity akin to that of commodities trading. Deregulation, alternate energy sources, and customers seeking protection from rising prices have opened a world of opportunity to nimble electricity retailers such as BlueStar Energy Services, which — thanks to a strategic investment in SOA, much of it open source — has made the most of it.

Serving Illinois, Maryland, and the District of Columbia, BlueStar buys electricity on the broader market and resells it to residential and business customers, some of whom have complicated needs. The trick, as CTO Tom Keen explains, is to buy smart and schedule delivery in an optimal way. That requires managing the flow of information — and purchase and billing transactions — across multiple parties: power generators, transmission operators, local distribution companies, and last but not least, BlueStar customers.

[ See the full list of this year's InfoWorld 100 winners, as well as the other Top 10 finalists ]

“We basically help customers define contracts that maximize their energy dollar,” Keen says. “Some customers only want to use pure green energy. Some would like to run on brown energy and purchase what are called carbon offsets. We can do that as well. There’s just a tremendous blend of how you buy power, plus how much risk you want to take on. So we can do fixed options. It’s an extremely complex configuration.”

Here, the challenge isn’t just to design complex products, it’s to bill them. Not only does BlueStar have to track each customer’s hourly electricity usage, but it must also reconcile that usage with the cost of the power for each specific hour — a task made more difficult by the myriad methods (EDI, XML, FTP, Excel, CSV, and so on) local distributors employ to provide that information.

To automate customer provisioning and payments to trading partners, BlueStar brought together a heady mix of open source software, including an ESB, JMS message broker, a business rule management system, and BPM. A b-to-b gateway integrates all of BlueStar’s partners and translates all of the different feeds and data formats for BlueStar’s back-end systems. The loosely coupled approach insulates BlueStar’s accounting application and other systems against all the complexity of the outside world.

“The b-to-b gateway is a distributed implementation of an ESB,” says Guillermo Tantachuco, director of enterprise architecture at BlueStar. “We don’t have a huge monolithic server that handles all this. These are a bunch of services scattered across our network that are pretty resilient. If one instance dies, another one is ready to take over.”

Before BlueStar built the business infrastructure from scratch, it did look at off-the-shelf ERP and CRM packages. The utility industry has a number of standard applications that do forecasting, pricing, billing, accounting, and even e-commerce, but these apps weren’t flexible enough for BlueStar.

“We have to be able to respond to the market very, very quickly,” says CTO Keen. “When green energy becomes extremely important to customers, we have to be able to clear that and schedule that. These systems that exist out there, they just don’t do that.” Ultimately, Keen and Tantachuco didn’t believe the industry offerings could support the dynamics of the business.

The decision to build the business predominantly on open source was a practical one. First, open source offered a viable solution to nearly every technology requirement BlueStar had. Second, the functionality — and particularly the stability — of the open source solution typically beat the commercial options.

“Stability is twofold,” Keen notes. “It’s recognizing the problem and fixing it, but it’s also recognizing the problem and communicating it. I can design around a known problem. But I can’t do that with commercial, because they don’t tell us.”

In addition to open source, the other key investments BlueStar made were in enterprise architecture and an engineering discipline. Realizing they were building not only a business infrastructure but an entire organization, Keen and company committed early on to adopting certain engineering best practices — a software engineering lifecycle, domain-driven design, model-driven development, continuous integration, CMMI, ITIL, COBIT — and hiring developers who would buy into them. That entailed opening a development center in Lima, Peru, where the company has hired and trained more than 50 programmers. Between the adoption of open source and offshoring development, the company estimates it has saved $24 million over the past five years.

But the biggest effort, Keen and Tantachuco say, was establishing their enterprise architecture at the very beginning. That involved sitting down with the business executives and understanding their goals, then making sure they understood that — in BlueStar’s case — an SOA was the way IT could meet them.

“There was a shift in thinking on the business side that enabled this,” Keen says. “We think in the area of process, we think in the area of automation, we think in the area of business rules. Without that shift in thinking, you’re going to get an IT person’s version of what a service-oriented business would look like implemented in technology, and that’s just not successful. Without [our CEO's and COO's] leadership it probably would not have succeeded.”

Need help setting up that home computer or Internet connection? Frustrated by that new cell phone? You’re not alone. A survey released on Sunday found that nearly half of Americans need help from others booting up their new devices, and an even larger percentage need outside assistance when they encounter technical problems.

“A new gadget or service can become popular well before the technology itself is understood by the average user,” said Sydney Jones, co-author of the report by the Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project.

“Naturally, some users catch on to new technology more quickly than others, and those who have more trouble grasping the technology are left confused, discouraged, and reliant on help from others when their technology fails.”

Forty-eight percent of the 2,054 adults surveyed by the Pew Center said they usually need help from others to set up new devices or services such as home computers, cell phones or Internet connections and to show them how they work.

When encountering technical problems, 28 percent said that they fixed the problems themselves, with men (39 percent) more likely than women (22 percent) to go it alone.

But most people need assistance.

Thirty-eight percent said they contacted user support for help, 15 percent said they fixed the problem with help from friends or family and two percent said they found help online.

Fifteen percent just gave up, unable to fix their devices at all.

As to the frequency of the problems, 44 percent of those with home Internet access said their connection failed to work properly at some time in the past year.

Thirty-nine percent of those with desktop or laptop computers said their machines did not work properly at some time in the previous 12 months.

Twenty-nine percent of cell phone users said their device failed at some time in the past year and 15 percent of those with an iPod or MP3 player said their devices did not work properly at some time in the past 12 months.

As for the most recent failure, 46 percent said it was their home Internet connection, 28 percent said it was their computer, 21 percent said it was their cell phone and three percent said it was their iPod or other MP3 player.

Cell phones were the device least likely to be fixed, the survey found, with 23 percent of those with broken cell phones saying they were unable to get them working again.

Nineteen percent of those with broken computers reported not being able to fix them, while just seven percent of those with Internet connection problems said they were unable to reconnect to the Web.

Forty-eight percent of those surveyed said they felt discouraged with the amount of effort needed to fix the problem and 40 percent felt confused by the information that they were getting.

“Struggles with modern gadgetry mean less engagement with the services they enable,” said John Horrigan, associate director at the Pew Internet Project and co-author of the report.

“Time spent dealing with set-up or outages means less time using modern communication services to connect with friends or find information that might help people be more productive.”

The survey was conducted between October 24 and November 2 with a margin of error of plus or minus 2.4 percent.

MySpace, the popular online social network owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, could develop a digital music player in the future, pitting it against Apple Inc’s hot-selling iPod.

But there are no immediate plans to make or sell such a device, MySpace co-founder and Chief Executive Chris DeWolfe said at a conference in San Francisco on Thursday.

“It’s possible” that MySpace, which recently launched a music joint venture with major music labels, could eventually build a device for listening to music, DeWolfe said in response to a question from conference host John Battelle.

“Right now, we’re just focusing on the service,” DeWolfe said at the Web 2.0 summit.

MySpace, the largest online social networking site, launched MySpace Music in September, aiming to become the ultimate one-stop for music fans.

The joint venture between MySpace and major music labels such as Sony BMG Music, Universal Music Group and Warner Music Group lets people access a range of new music services, including streaming, music and ringtone downloads, videos, ticketing and merchandising.

McDonald’s, Sony Pictures, Toyota and State Farm are advertising sponsors of the site.

“We wanted to come up with a program that meets the needs of music companies and artists, by definition, and users,” DeWolfe said.

People streamed music more than 1 billion times in the first few days and have created 80 million playlists since the launch, DeWolfe said. Five million bands upload their music to the site.

Music companies have been keen on another major player to boost sales by driving competition to iTunes — Apple’s digital music store and the top U.S. music retailer — even as CD sales have fallen in recent years.

MYSPACE VS ITUNES

Warner Music Group Chief Executive Edgar Bronfman said MySpace was different from iTunes in its focus on “community and sharing.” People can share playlists, peruse their friends’ music choices and discover new songs that way, Bronfman said at the conference.

Apple too has recently started “Genuis,” which builds playlists and offers recommendations based on songs in a person’s iTunes library.

But DeWolfe said the “Genius” feature doesn’t make iTunes a competitor to MySpace Music because Apple continues to focus on selling their music devices.

“If anything, we’ll be accretive to iPod sales” as people use MySpace Music to download more music and videos for their iPods, DeWolfe said. “Unless we develop a device,” he added.

While remote at this point, it would be an audacious move for MySpace, which practically defined the burgeoning social network concept as a business.

MySpace, which News Corp bought for $580 million in 2005, has proven a particular bright spot for Murdoch’s international media conglomerate, even as the company faces a tough 2009 because of falling advertising revenue in other parts of its business.

The site faces increasing competition from networks such as the privately-held Facebook, as they all struggle to find new ways to make money from the millions of people who interact with each other through their online profiles.

A new report from security services provider ScanSafe finds that companies are at increasing risk of having employees inadvertently download backdoors and password stealers onto corporate computers from Web sites that have malicious software hidden on them.

A company in ScanSafe’s focus group faced a nearly 500 percent greater risk of exposure to those threats in September than was faced in January of this year, according to ScanSafe’s Global Threat Report released on Tuesday.

Companies in the energy sector are at greater risk from Web-based malware than other industries, the report concludes. The energy sector, worldwide, faces a 189 percent higher risk of exposure from workers visiting sites with malware on them than other industries, followed by the pharmaceutical and chemicals industry, construction and engineering, and media and publishing.

“On a more positive note, government agencies were at 0 percent, which indicates they were at neither higher nor lower rates of exposure compared to other verticals,” Mary Landesman, senior security researcher at ScanSafe, writes in a blog post.

The industry with the lowest rate of exposure was aviation and automotive. Landesman says she can’t say exactly why one sector is more at risk than another but expects to release more findings soon that could help answer that question.

Overall, there was a flattening in the volume of threats in August and September, although ScanSafe is seeing a spike in October. Landesman says things could get ugly from a malware perspective throughout the rest of this year.

The holidays tend to be busy for socially engineered-types of malware, Landesman said. Plus, “the economy is hurting people’s finances and this could encourage criminals to up their efforts to gain more money through illicit means,” she said.

Also on Tuesday, security firm MessageLabs released statistics on the numbers of phishing attacks related to the banking crisis.

MessageLabs intercepted 7,000 phishing attacks exploiting Bank of America on October 16 and 15,000 on October 17, reaching 125,000 total e-mails over that weekend. American Express was the focus of a phishing attack that started on October 20 and reached 35,000 e-mails for the day.

The Cutwail botnet, which controls more than 1 million active unsuspecting zombie computers on the Internet and is believed to be the largest botnet, is responsible for those phishing attempts, MessageLabs said.

Lyle Andrews has released MetaView, a new Mac OS X application that lets you view stock market data in 3D. It costs $49.59, and also requires a subscription to a special MetaView data feed, priced at $15 per month.

MetaView lets you group stocks to view in 3D. If you are grouping stocks you hold, you can enter the number of shares you have; MetaView will calculate the total value and display it in the main view. Yu can use a menu to view more information about individual stocks; save headlines and URLs of new stories for each stock; access Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filings and graph them by date; and enter historical events and assign them to groups.