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Dell said hospitals can integrate the service into their own information systems and offer it to affiliated doctors for their local practices. Dell’s EMR system is modular, so hospitals can tailor it to their specific needs.

The Congressional Budget Office forecasts that about 90 percent of doctors and 70 percent of hospitals will be using EMR within the next decade as a result of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.

Different surveys have found a variety of results on the rate of adoption of EMR systems in the U.S. Dell cited a survey from the July 2008 New England Journal of Medicine, which reported that less than 10 percent of physicians at the time had a fully-functional EMR system. That survey was compiled in late 2007 and early 2008.

Dell said its EMR system will also connect doctors and their sponsoring hospitals so they can share patient information, helping coordinate care, and slash administrative costs.

Already in use by certain hospitals, the new EMR service–a combination of hardware, software, and support–is designed to make the transition from paper to digital records more affordable and practical for the average physician or medical staff.

As part of its EMR package, Dell will go on site to a hospital to determine its needs and readiness. The company will install all hardware and software, offer training to the hospital staff, and provide 24-7 hardware and software support. The EMR application can be hosted either by the hospital or with a Dell EMR partner in a secure data center.

One key component of U.S. health care reform is the move toward digital medical records. Dell is hoping to play a role in that move.

A December 2008 survey by the Center for Disease Control found that only 4 percent of doctors said they used a full EMR or Electronic Health Record (EHR) system, but 20 percent reported using a minimally-functional electronic record system.

Dell announced Thursday a new service to help doctors and hospitals more easily switch to electronic medical records (EMR).

A more recent March 2009 survey by the New England Journal of Medicine discovered that 17 percent of U.S. doctors and 8 percent to 10 percent of U.S. hospitals have even a basic EMR.

Electronic record keeping is seen as one measure to reduce health care costs across the board for consumers, companies, and the government. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act passed early this year offers financial incentives in the form of reimbursements to doctors and hospitals that can demonstrate a meaningful use of EMR systems in their practices by 2011.

The devices targeted are not those that are part of the computing network infrastructure, like desktops, servers, and routers.

Under the ICSA Labs Network Attached Peripheral Security Certification and Assessment program, experts will evaluate devices used in corporations and work with vendors to help them understand the inherent security risks to Internet-connected devices, said George Japak, managing director of ICSA Labs, which is an independent division of Verizon Business.

ICSA Labs, which sets standards for commercial security products, plans to announce on Monday a new program for helping corporations protect themselves from attacks and snooping via Internet-connected devices such as printers, copiers, ATMs, and security cameras.

Remote attackers can exploit weaknesses in software to remotely steal data that sits on the devices, such as sensitive documents that someone has printed or copied. But the devices can also be used to propagate malware across the network, he said.

“There is a lot of functionality on those devices being centrally managed and controlled via an Internet connection, and those Internet connections can be compromised,” he said. “These unsecured devices are as much of a risk as an unsecured server sitting out on your network.”

That rough patch sorted, FeedDemon remains one of the best desktop RSS and Atom feed catchers. This version contains a lengthy list of changes, including greatly enhanced Twitter connectivity, a tweaked interface that’s a bit easier to use, and better tagging and sharing.

Tagging, tag clouds, and item sharing get a massive overhaul in FeedDemon 3, with all three features added to the item view and a tag cloud added to the Subscriptions Home view. The interface will look similar to FeedDemon 2.8, but there are many little tweaks to improve its usability.

FeedDemon has dumped its proprietary synchronization site, Newsgator.com, in favor of syncing with Google Reader. New users won’t notice, but older users are likely to lose many unread feeds, since Google can’t import feeds with more than 10 unread items. Once synced with Google Reader, unread feeds can again include more than 10 items.

Twitter feed reading has been baked in because FeedDemon supports authenticated feeds. Hyperlinking and short-URL expansion are automatic, and if you use Twitter as a live news stream, FeedDemon’s Twitter link sharing should appeal to you. To set that up, you need to subscribe in FeedDemon to your Twitter feed here.

My Twitter stream in FeedDemon 3.

Flags have been renamed Stars for Google Reader consistency, for example, while the Home page features videos, pictures, and content from your feeds. One smart improvement over Google Reader is that you can view your starred feeds in the folders they came from, instead of in a single “starred items” folder.

FeedDemon 3 is ready for public use, after months spent in a beta version that saw a confusing migration from proprietary online syncing to Google Reader.

There’s also a new, persistent ad placed in the lower-left corner of the interface, and FeedDemon’s performance could be a lot better–RAM usage was hefty, and 3GB of RAM didn’t prevent occasional program hang-ups.

(Credit:
Screenshot by Seth Rosenblatt/CNET)

We’d like to see performance addressed in future versions, but overall, FeedDemon remains a favorite option for desktop feed management. Let us know your thoughts on the new FeedDemon in the comments below.

There’s a catch, of course: users will only be able to download as many songs as Free All Music can sell sponsorships for. At launch, the company is aiming for what Nailling calls “typical iTunes behavior,” which is 15 songs per month, spread over three sessions. If the site takes off and advertisers buy more space, the song allowance will increase.

Free All Media, an Atlanta-based start-up, is the latest company to propose an ad-supported music downloading service. The company, which just announced its first seed round of funding Wednesday and expects to begin public beta testing by December, hopes to differentiate itself from flameouts like SpiralFrog with a unique advertising model that asks users to participate more directly in choosing the ads they’ll see.

The company’s CEO, Richard Nailling, explained how the company’s Web site, Free All Music, will work. Users will select an MP3 they want to download and a sponsor they’d like to “buy” that MP3 for them. They will then watch a video advertisement, between 15 and 18 seconds in length, from that advertiser. Once the ad is completed, they’ll be free to download the file, a 256kbps MP3 with no copy restrictions. No further advertisements will be served for that download.

But here’s the unique part–Free All Music will then use the downloader’s handle in other banner ads for that sponsor, which Free All Music will place around the Web using an (as yet undisclosed) third-party ad network, as well as through its own ad network, which will focus on music-oriented sites. In other words, you might be visiting CNET and see “MattR just downloaded ‘Angry Chair’ by Alice in Chains…sponsored by Converse.” In this way, Free All Music will be able to sell multiple ads per download and perhaps earn enough money to cover the license fee for each song.

Correction at 7:13 a.m. PDT October 1: This post incorrectly stated the number of free songs that Free All Music aims to offer at launch. The site plans to offer 15 free downloads per month, spread over three sessions.

Would you be willing to sit through an 18-second video ad in exchange for a perfectly legal and guaranteed legitimate MP3? Or will you stick with file-trading networks?

The key to success will be whether the company can get all four major labels and enough indies on board to make for a competitive selection of music. So far, the company claims it’s signed up one major label (unnamed), and is aiming for the “full digital catalog” from each label, giving it full parity with iTunes and sites like Amazon MP3.

The auction giant’s solution, according to a Bloomberg report on Thursday: Build a new one.

eBay purchased Skype in 2005 for $2.6 billion, but it hasn’t proven to be the best fit for the company. Rumors circulated that it was looking to sell Skype, possibly to Google, but then opted to take the company public instead.

Here’s what has happened: Skype’s founders have established a company called Joltid Ltd., which still owns the rights to some of Skype’s technology. Joltid has made the accusation that eBay doesn’t have the right to do everything it wants with all of Skype’s code as a result; eBay is suing Joltid to get that technology back (is this like the Silicon Valley equivalent of body-snatching?) But the catch is that the trial isn’t scheduled until next June, which could put a big roadblock in the way of eBay’s plans for a Skype IPO.

So that’s why eBay is working on a total rebuild of Skype’s software.

eBay wants to spin off telephony service Skype into a separate publicly traded company, but something’s standing in the way: Skype’s founders are threatening to take back some of the technology in the midst of a licensing dispute.

This was revealed in a 10-Q regulatory filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission; eBay is not commenting beyond the filing. You can decide whether “Frankenskype” or “Skypenstein” is a better name for the hypothetical creation.

There is, however, this little issue. “The new software will be expensive and might not work,” Bloomberg’s article summarized. “The company said it might have to shut down Skype if the dispute with the founders isn’t resolved.”

Google on Tuesday launched a gallery of 29 themes for Google Chrome (requires Google Chrome 3.0 beta for Windows). But Mozilla, while refraining from sniggering, boasted it’s now up to 20,000.

(Credit:
Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)

The collection of themes includes Legal Pad, Star Gazing, Transparent (it’s not, on my Windows XP machine), Dots, and Pencil Sketch. One monochromatic theme called Minimal downloads nearly instantly, but Grass, at 1.3MB, takes more time.

(Credit:
Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)

Google now offers a gallery of themes for its Chrome browser.

Cosmetic changes are, well, cosmetic, but a lot of people like them as a way to add some flair to their machines. Many had been pestering Google to add themes support even though Chrome employs a Spartan user interface without much acreage for artistry. Last week’s developer version of Chrome added a “Get themes” button in the Options dialog box, and now Google has flipped the switch to activate the Web page that button points to.

Why so large? Themes can come with a background image that shows on Chrome’s new-tab page that offers a much greater chance for expressiveness, especially since that page is the default when Chrome launches. That could help Google with its attempt to recruit artists to supply their own themes, as some have done with the iGoogle customizable home page.

Mozilla Labs announced Monday that Firefox now has 20,000 Personas, with 10,000 of them arriving in the last 10 weeks.

Mozilla has its own skinning technology in the works, a plug-in called Personas that launched on Mozilla Labs in March. That head start, coupled with its vastly larger and more engaged external audience, gives it a big lead over Chrome when it comes to getting gussied up.

This theme is called Grass.

The network giant’s initial bid received a thumbs down from most of Tandberg’s shareholders, who felt the initial $3 billion offer undervalued the company.

The new bid expires December 1. Cisco said that if the bid isn’t accepted by that deadline, it will withdraw the bid and look at other ways to expand its reach in the video conferencing market.

Cisco announced on October 1 that it was pursuing a $3 billion cash takeover of Tandberg, a major global supplier of video conferencing equipment with dual headquarters in Oslo, Norway, and New York City.

Cisco has been on a tear lately buying smaller niche companies, taking over a few firms earlier in the year and recently announcing plans to gobble up security software firm ScanSafe and wireless equipment maker Starent Networks.

So far, more than 40 percent of Tandberg’s stockholders, which includes investment firm OppenheimerFunds and Norwegian government pension fund Folketrygdfondet, have pre-accepted the new offer.

Increasingly important to companies looking to cut travel costs, teleconferencing is considered a growth industry. Cisco wants a bigger piece of that pie, and analysts didn’t expect it to give up on Tandberg too easily.

Cisco Systems has bumped up its buyout offer to $3.41 billion for video conferencing company Tandberg.

As the virtual operating systems (VMware, MS Hyper-V, etc.) progress, we will see an increased tendency to offer administrators the option of doing both storage and data management at the server rather than the storage level. Backups and data migrations can be done by a VMware administrator for example. Storage capacity can be managed from the virtualized OS management console.

For the last few years, enterprise IT operational departments have been segregated by technological boundaries–separate server, networking, and storage groups managing IT infrastructure, each focused on their own areas of expertise. While the groups communicated with one another, the relationships could sometimes get testy to say the least. Some years ago I attended a Network World show and observed people wearing buttons proclaiming “The Problem Is Not The Network!” Later that year I heard a CIO from a large university lament that his operations groups had turned into armed camps.

Today’s enterprise IT storage professional (storage administrator, storage architect, etc.) should now be broadening his or her technical horizons. I recently asked one how server virtualization was changing his life. His (ironic) answer: I’m learning more about networks. But don’t stop at the network. Know what characteristics of a storage system enhance the performance and manageability of virtual server environments, how to architect a storage infrastructure in a world where everything is a virtual machine, and under what circumstances is it better to manage data and storage from within the storage layer. In short, become a converged storage pro.

Now virtualization and the convergence of Fibre Channel and Ethernet within the data center come along and change the nature of the relationships between enterprise IT operational groups as well as the traditional roles of server, networking, and storage groups. For storage professionals, the change may well be career threatening as observed earlier.

Recently I heard the chief information officer of a large technology company observe that the consolidation and convergence of IT infrastructure is forcing a consolidation and convergence within his own department. He observed that because platforms are converging around server virtualization projects and a future rollout of virtual desktops, narrowly focused IT administrative groups must also converge. In the future, IT competency will be in systems and services delivery rather than in stove-piped areas of expertise like servers, networks, and storage. Furthermore he believes that the IT jobs market will value “converged’ administrators.

As a final point, he observed that the role of the storage administrator within IT operations was disappearing–this from the CIO of a large storage vendor.

This is not the municipal collection giant’s first foray into trash-to-energy tech. Waste Management has been distributing solar-powered trash compactors and investing in various projects geared at converting waste in usable energy in several different forms.

Contrary to what might be inferred from Adams’ enthusiastic sound bite, the project is not the utopistic dream of incinerating any old trash in a DeLorean for fuel, nor has either company claimed this. What the project does show is an idea that reduces pollution in two ways. The renewable source for fuel is also a naturally occurring gas that would have otherwise released itself into the atmosphere.

A tanker carrying liquefied natural gas that was made from harvesting the naturally occurring gas produced from the decomposition of organic trash.

Waste Management collects the gas that is produced from the naturally occurring decomposition of organic trash in its Livermore landfill. The Linde plant then purifies and processes that gas into LNG. The LNG is then used to fuel some of Waste Management’s fleet for collecting trash and recycling. Those vehicles, of course, having been slightly modified so that they can run on LNG.

Linde designed and operates the plant which is located close to Waste Management’s Altamont Landfill near Livermore, Calif.

“The opening of the world’s largest landfill-gas-to-LNG plant right here in California is a milestone and a testament to our commitment to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Now that the technology has been proven, we look forward to seeing its adoption spread so more vehicles can run on garbage,” Linda Adams, secretary of the California Environmental Protection Agency, said in a statement.

While the plant has only produced about 200,000 gallons since it started operating in September, it has the capacity to eventually produce 13,000 gallons a day or 4 million gallons a year. That would be enough to cover the fuel needs of 300 Waste Management vehicles used for garbage and recycling collection, and save about 30,000 tons of emissions per year, according to company statistics.

(Credit:
The Linde Group)

Trash collection giant Waste Management and the Linde Group petroleum engineering firm have partnered to create a plant that makes liquefied natural gas (LNG) from landfill gas, both companies announced this week.

Yahoo is bringing Facebook into just about all of its Web sites, allowing users to update their Facebook status and share news items with friends right from the Yahoo page.

Yahoo already offers a few hooks into Facebook, but this partnership strengthens the relationship between the two sites. The integration will take awhile, however; Yahoo said not to expect the process to begin until the first half of next year.

The company announced the integration of Facebook Connect across several key Yahoo Web sites including Mail, News, Sports, and Finance. The idea is to drive even more readers to Yahoo’s network of sites–the second largest in the U.S.–by making it easier for them to share things they like with their Facebook friends, some of whom may not have seen the Yahoo item otherwise.

It foreshadowed the Facebook Connect integration at an event in August, when Yahoo announced social-networking features within properties such as Mail and Messenger. Those updates were restricted to friends within the Yahoo network, however. Facebook and Twitter are where the social-networking junkies congregate.