Corporate email and all it entails is still the number one headache for IT departments. No matter what size organization you work in, the availability of email is the primary concern of managers throughout the business. Even in these paranoid times where it seems every other dollar spent is on security, it’s still email, and exchange archiving, that dominates most IT meetings.

While Exchange isn’t the only email platform out there, it’s still the favorite for those who like their platforms predictable. Exchange archiving is a relatively new innovation, only really being introduced properly in Exchange 2010.

There was of course a cobbled together version using other software that businesses could put together, but we’re only just into an integrated archive system now. Email archiving is still in it’s infancy, and still being taken up by business, despite the high profile court actions of the past years where email has been pivotal as evidence.

There are two basic approaches that business can use to store and manage their email or Exchange archiving. One approach creates the function in-house while the other relies on an off-site service.

The first approach, keeping it all in-house is the preferred method for many. It involves a lot of expense, expertise and maintenance, but it offers the best security. It’s possible to ring-fence the system and restrict access to it, all within the confines of the business. This approach is generally only feasible for larger organizations.

The initial setup cost can be significant, as can the investment needed to maintain the system. Exchange alone can have significant hardware requirements, add to that, a secure network, firewalls, anti-virus and the exchange infrastructure, and you could be looking at a significant amount of money. Only those organizations of a certain size would see the benefit of such an investment.

The other option is to allow email to be handled off-site. This is generally referred to as the hosted model. This is where a third-party vendor hosts the hardware in their data centers and the organization pays a monthly fee to access it.

In the hosted model, the business only has to have an internet connection to the data centering order to have access to the system. Any email to and from the customer site is funneled through the service provider for storage and indexing. All of the investment needed in the traditional in-house setup is avoided.

One of the perceived downsides of a fully hosted model is the concern that businesses are placing their private communications in the hands of another company. While this is a legitimate concern, the provider is probably more concerned with your security than you are.

The hosted model for email archiving is a method that is gaining traction in the business community. As budgets are cut, or at least restricted, IT managers are looking for new ways to spend less and get more. The hosted model is in the perfect position to help achieve that.

At first glance, the science behind red light therapy seems a little thin. How can shining an LED onto the skin clean it up? How can it cure conditions like acne, eczema, or dermatitis when conventional medicine cannot?

The treatment actually uses red and blue light, depending on the situation. The blue light is an effective antibacterial that kills harmful bacteria on the surface of the skin. It works better than conventional creams because it permeates the top layer of skin and kills off the bacteria that causes acne.

Acne is caused by excess sebum on the surface of the skin. Bacteria interacts with the sebum which causes pustules or lesions. The sebum traps the bacteria, which causes the infection, and the resulting skin problems. By removing the bacteria, the condition is brought under control.

When used in conjunction with a proper skin-care regimen it can remove acne altogether. Best of all, you don’t need to take any drugs to do it.

Red light offers different advantages to blue. Red light therapy is more about healing that killing bacteria, so the two work well together. The primary function of red light therapy is that it is supposed to accelerate wound healing and stimulate collagen production.

In the case of acne, once the skin has been cleansed by the blue light, the red light stimulates that collagen production to speed up the natural healing process of the skin. Red light therapy can heal the lesions and the scarring that acne can cause, making the skin look healthy and new.

While the treatment is pretty straightforward, it need to be done properly to reap the benefits. Anyone wanting it to remove acne will need to have an effective daily cleaning routine, drink lots of water, and follow any instructions provided by the person offering the treatment.

Many tanning salons are offering red light therapy as part of their treatment range. If you have a good salon near you, ask them about it. The process is easy, similar to tanning in fact. It differs in that the treatment targets a specific area rather than the whole body.

It goes something like this. The attendant will wipe down the affected area to ensure it’s clean and free of bacteria. An LED plate will be applied to the affected area and the light will be switched on. The color of that light depends on the treatment being administered, but will be red or blue.

You may feel a little warm under the light, but it’s nothing to worry about. The light will be applied for a couple of minutes, then moved or switched off. That’s it. Depending on the severity, and type of condition, that session may be one of many.

Red light therapy is risk-free, drug-free, doesn’t hurt, doesn’t need surgery or recovery time. It’s the cure for all sorts of skin conditions. Don’t just take our word for it, find out yourself!

On Wednesday, December 15 2010, Microsoft held a ‘Bing Search Summit’ in San Francisco, where it showcased some of the latest addition to its search engine, as well as some new facilities for its mobile applications on iPhone and Android.

The dominant theme here was to highlight numerous minor enhancements the Bing team has been making to help boost its search experience. The goal: boil search down to the tasks that most users are typically conducting on Bing.

Microsoft says that the bulk of Bing queries fall under 155 query segments, which include things like Music (4.6% of searches), Consumer Electronics (1.6%), and Recipes (1.1%). Bing wants to take these segments and establish which verbs they actually involve: music has “download songs” and “read lyrics”, electronics has “read reviews”, and “see the ratings”.

To best tackle these, Bing has created 400 “unique visual experiences” depending on the search (this is to say that photos, images, and links are presented in distinct ways depending on what the user is searching for. Microsoft believes that with this, it does more than their chief competition (Google). Today, Bing is launching 50 new integrations.

Bing’s Derrick Connell then embarked on a whirlwind tour showcasing some of these new features. While most of these additions were subtle, that’s just about the point: they will save you a few seconds here and there. Here are a few of the examples he mentioned:

• For a travel search query like “flights from London to New York in November”, Bing will include a form in your search results, with fields pre-populated with airports in New York and the first weekend in November. A query for “Michael Moore healthcare movie” will display Sicko as your first result, with a grid of reviews from sides like IMDB following below.
• TV shows have a new overview page where you can click around TV listings, and play an episode in-line provided Bing has access to it
• You can now look at destination overview portals for major cities, which displays images, hotels, and other relevant information
• Product reviews are displayed inline along with search results about products

Bing also displayed some minor tweaks to its image results. Now when you view images while under the ‘small’ mode, whitespace will be eliminated and in it’s place will be big grid of images. Clicking on an image will display its full sized mode in a pane above the rest of the linked page as usual, and now you can quickly jump to other related images using a crisp mouse-over effect.

Social

The next big aspect in Bing’s strategy is its social component, which orients around the Facebook integration that it launched in October.

Bing has been incorporating Facebook ‘Likes’ into its results for some months now — if a friend has ‘Liked’ an article that’s relevant to your query, Bing will taking notice of that. But these ‘Likes’ have always been shown in a separate widget — soon, they’ll actually impact the search algorithm itself, so links will be reordered based on social signals.

For its Maps products, Bing has moved its focus from Silverlight to HTML5 and AJAX (this was announced last month). Bing Maps will start to show interior maps of shopping centers as part of its Maps, and it’s also partnering with EveryScape to showcase interior panoramas of venues.

To finish off the presentation, Bing showed a new version of its iPhone application. The app has integration with Grubhub and OpenTable, and as well as street-level views. Bing also gave a preview of a very cool Panorama creator that’s based on the Photosynth backend — it looks like it will compete with Occipital’s Panoramic 360 app.

It should be stressed that Bing isn’t trying to compete with Google in terms of speed. Instead, it’s taking advantage of its nonstarter position to try to figure out how to help users complete their tasks more quickly than they would using normal search. Of course, despite its long history of featuring a spartan interface, Google has also been making a lot of progress in this field — and you can be sure if it notices that Bing is doing something better, it’ll incorporate some of those changes itself

I own an iPhone. I live in San Francisco. As such, it’s basically a total crapshoot as to whether or not I’ll be able to make a phone call in the city. Skype had always been a pretty good back-up solution, but an even better one came a few months ago: Gmail Calling. And now Google has just extended the free period of the feature through 2011. Yes, through next year.

Gmail Calling is great because it exists fully in the browser in an app that I always have open anyway: Gmail. If you use gChat, it’s right below your status message marked with a phone icon and the words “Call phone”. Hitting this launches a dialpad window within Gmail (similar to a chat window) and you can call any number in the U.S. or Canada for free. In my experience, the call quality and reliability have been excellent.

All of this is done by way of a Google Voice plug-in. We were all excited for the desktop version of Google Voice — which we got to test out — but Google decided to go this route instead, and I do think it’s a better idea.

When the feature launched back in August, Google would only commit to keeping it free through the end of the year — so this 1 year extension is great. But a Google representative at the time also told us that they hoped they could keep calls free indefinitely if the margins on international calls could cover the U.S./Canada ones. No word on if that’s the case yet, but again, the 1 year extension is a good sign. It currently costs 2 cents a minute to make calls through the service with dozens of other countries.

Gmail’s Holiday Gift: Another Year Of Free Calling To The U.S. And Canada

It’s no secret that Zynga is making a big bet on mobile, recently acquiring mobile app developer Newtoy, and launching native Farmville apps for the iPad and iPhone. In fact, as of earlier this month, Farmville for the iPhone had seen 7 million downloads with 10 million people per month accesing Zynga on a mobile device. Today, Zynga is debuting the first game designed for the mobile web: Mafia Wars Atlantic City.

According to the company, the game was built in HTML5 and has been designed specifically to be used on a browser-based smart phone or device including the iPad, iPhone, Android, Blackberry and WebOS devices. Mafia Wars Atlantic City is available by pointing your mobile web browser to M.MafiaWars.com or at GetJar.

Zynga’s bet on HTML5 (versus Flash) is also worth noting as well, which allows the games to be played on iPads and iPhones. The gaming giant recently bought Dextrose AG, which developed an HTML5-based development engine.

Zynga, which brought on former Yahoo exec David Ko as its SVP of Mobile, also recently announced Zynga Poker and Mafia Wars are coming to Android phones. And Mafia Wars debuted a significant music partnership with rap artist Dr.Dre last week.

As Ko told TechCrunch’s MG Siegler at LeWeb a few weeks ago, Mobile is a huge opportunity for us. We have a huge user base to leverage, and they have some really exciting IP. Stay tuned.

Zynga Debuts First Mobile Web Browser Game Mafia Wars Atlantic City