Monthly round-up: July

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You may have heard about this one: Apple released a new handset this month. Not surprisingly, Apple hasn’t made a misstep on the iPhone, and the device garnered a solid review from IT PRO. But some analysts have warned that it’s not yet ready for the business world, despite several new features clearly targeting that market.

If you’ve got one of the new 3G models, check out our top tips for actually using the thing.

Google also had reasons to smile in July. While the web firm continues to succeed away from search – big names like the publisher of The Daily Telegraph are switching to its hosted apps – it’s been challenged by a new search tool in wanna-be usurpers Cuil.

The team behind that new-fangled search engine includes some ex-Googlers, but their claim to have indexed 120 billion pages just looked sad after their giant competitor conveniently released stats showing they’d looked at a trillion pages. The web might be big, but it doesn’t seem to have much room for new search engines…

With everything else going on in the world of web, Yahoo is still muddling through. It's highly anticipated board meeting is on 1 August, but it’s already successfully negotiated a peace deal with rogue shareholder Carl Ichan. Whether it can make other shareholders as happy remains to be seen.

VMware had a bit of shakeup. Not only did it replace Diane Green, but it announced it would be giving away its hypervisor for free, likely an attempt to hold onto its market share in the face of growing competition from the likes of Microsoft and Parallels.

Gary McKinnon won’t look back fondly on July. The UK’s highest court recently ruled against his extradition appeal, and it looks increasingly likely that he’s headed to the US sometime soon, to face hacking charges and possible life imprisonment.

And we’ll end this month’s review on a slightly depressing note… Despite the clear importance of IT in the UK economy, two computing museums are facing trouble. The Museum of Computing lost its home and was forced to pack its exhibits up in storage, while scientists have issued a rallying call for Bletchley Park, which needs cash for repairs.

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