I occasionally travel on business and have come to realize that booking a trip on most online services like Expedia is a pain. You have to sort through so many pages to find what you want and be sure that extras you don’t want aren’t being added on the sly to your total.

A new trip booking service aimed at business travelers called Tripware has been announced. The service is an Outlook 2007 plug-in that allows users to book trips directly from Outlook 2007. One of the coolest parts is that the plug-in remembers a user’s preferences like car rental info and hotel preferences.

We can thank Apple for the massive boom in awareness and availability of apps for smartphones. The Apple App Store has been a runaway sales success and has spawned a litany of competing offerings from other smartphone makers.

According to research firm ABI Research the future of smartphone and mobile applications lies in cloud computing. The research firm says that a new architecture for cloud-based apps will change the way the apps are developed, acquired, and used. ABI figures that the market for could-based apps will reach $20 million annually by 2014.

When it comes time to work I turn to Microsoft Office as do the majority of business people and users looking to do some word processing, check email or build spreadsheets. Microsoft Office is expensive for sure and several free products have turned up that offer Office-like capabilities.

Among the free offerings that are Office alternatives are Google Documents and OpenOffice. While both of these offerings are free, they still only have a tiny fraction of the users Microsoft has for Office. A new study from Clickstream Technologies polled Internet users to find out what productivity suite most people use.

Older computer geeks, circa mid-1990s, may well remember Central Point Software, developers of the original PC Tools collection of software utilities which gave Symantec a run for its money. Symantec acquired Central Point in 1994, putting an end to its major competitor at the time. The PC Tools name faded for awhile, before becoming the name of another software company in 2004. This company, in turn, was just picked up by Symantec today.

Symantec said it would be acquiring PC Tools for an undisclosed sum, keeping the company as a separate brand (for now). PC Tools, the modern company, is known for its variety of software products which handle privacy, anti-virus, computer maintenance and other tasks on Windows computers. This, again, is much like the original PC Tools. Did Symantec see the writing on the wall, again, and just decide to nip a potential …

A rather strange landmark of the Albany, New York skyline is The Egg, a local performing arts venue. This oddly designed building could well be an omen for Microsoft’s freshly announced “Albany” subscription service - a big, fat laid egg.

Albany, as discussed by Microsoft product manager Bryson Gordon, will be an all you can eat service for consumers which gives them all the Microsoft goodness they can handle under one desktop. You can, for x amount of dollars, gain access to Office Home and Student 2007, Windows Live OneCare and Windows Live Mail, Messenger and Photo Gallery. This is on top of security updates and the like.

Adobe announced on Thursday the beta launch of Adobe Phtotoshop Express, an free online tool for editing, storing and sharing images without the need for any installations or downloads. The Express version of Photoshop is of course a pared-down of the full-blown version of Photoshop, but Adobe hopes it will get more people interested in editing their photos and familiar with the tool, and in turn then sell more copies of Photoshop C3 for the normal $600-$900.

The new tool isn’t completely without any downloads or installations since it does require the Flash player 9 to run, but will then run on any browser with the plugin including Windows, Macs and Linux machines. Adobe is also offering 2GB of free storage with the free Photoshop Express account.

Let’s face it, Guitar Hero is not nearly enough for some would be Rock stars out there. To them, everything needs to have the ability to be plucked, strummed and otherwise abused musically. And the air guitar only gets you so far before people start avoiding you like the plague. This is for those people.

The PocketGuitar is a virtual guitar for the iPhone and iPod Touch. It was developed as a Google Code project by Shinya Kasatani. You can also use the songs on your iPod for those long guitar sessions. Apparently, it’s very easy to install. Now you’ll have a whole new way to annoy those around you, while getting your guitar action on.

RealPlayer. You remember that multimedia application, right? That’s the other program besides iTunes or Windows Media Player which lets you enjoy media files on your computer. RealNetworks, the company behind the program, is officially out today with the latest incarnation known as RealPlayer 11.

RealPlayer 11, depending upon if you are using the free or pay for version, lets you do a number of interesting features. You can, for example, transfer video content to iPods, which means RealNetworks is now encroaching upon Apple territory. The software will also let you now do “one-click” downloads of video you might otherwise normally stream so that you can watch it offline later.

Microsoft has taken more than one significant hit this week by losing its antitrust ruling appeal in Europe on Monday and then finding out that IBM now also provides competitive software to their Office suite of products. What makes this even more concerning for Microsoft is that IBM is offering their tools for free.

Tuesday IBM launched Lotus Symphony, a collection of three office-minded, internet-based programs that are freely available on the web after registering. The programs, bearing the same name as IBM’s top commercial software, consist of Lotus Symphony Documents which is a word editor, Lotus Symphony Presentations as a slide show creating tool, and Lotus Symphony Spreadsheets. All the programs work with Windows and Linux operating systems, and IBM says they have a future version planned for Mac OSX. The trio of programs can export documents to PDF’s and support a multitude of file types including Word, Excel and Powerpoint files from Microsoft.

Today Apple released Final Cut Studio 2, the latest upgrade to the companies video production suite of tools. Apple states that this new version was made specifically to allow editors using the software to “animate, mix, grade and deliver their work as a natural extension of the editorial process”.

For many users, the most significant of the many enhancements to the software package would have to be Final Cut Pro 6. This version introduces Apple’s new codec format for HD video compression called ProRes 422. The new compression will allow video files to be compressed to a much more manageable size than previously possible.

The Final Cut Studio 2 suite also includes Motion 3, Soundtrack Pro 2, Compressor 3 DVD Studio Pro 4.2 and Color. Color is a new addition to the Final Cut Studio suite of products, made to allow editors to further improve footage …

Google has released an enterprise version of its popular hosted productivity and communications suite, Google Apps. Google Apps Premier Edition will cost businesses $50 per user per year.

For $50 a user you get the entire Google Apps package plus access to APIs, conference room scheduling for Calendar, 10GB of storage for email, extended phone support for critical issues, and mobile GMail on your BlackBerry.

Google Apps includes GMail, Talk, Calendar, Start Page, Docs and Spreadsheets, and Page Creator. Google Apps currently comes in three editions: Standard, Education, and Premier. The Standard and Education editions will remain free.

Google has already signed on some larger companies such as Procter & Gamble, General Electric Corporation, and Prudential to use the new service.

Gmail For Your Domain was launched back in February 2006 as an invitation-only beta and allowed Gmail to be used with a …

Adobe has released its 1.0 version of the Photoshop Lightroom software which will bring the product out of its year-plus beta period and available for retail purchase. The Lightroom software is a digital photographers ‘toolbox’ used for managing, developing and presenting a digital photo library.

The product is available initially for $199, but will go up to $299 starting in May. If you are currently using the beta 4.1 or previous, it will expire at the end of February and you will have two months to take advantage of the $100 discount.

Lightroom 1.0 has some additional features which help filtering through large collections of photos by keywords and a new Key Metadata Browser for key information tags. It also has an improved ranking system with colored labels and a feature to pick or reject items. The Develop module has some new features for comparing versions of …

Editing images can get tricky very quickly for the novice photog. Not everyone needs the powerful features found in Adobe Photoshop, nor do they always have to money to purchase an expensive editor. Finding a quality and inexpensive image editor can be a difficult task.

Now may be the time to give Paint.NET a try, as Version 3.0 of the popular graphics editor has been released and is available for download.

Paint.NET is a free image and photo editor for Windows computers. It supports layers, unlimited undo, special effects, and a wide variety of image editing tools.

What’s new in Paint.NET v3.0?

A tab-based multi-document user interface.
Now available in 8 languages: English, Chinese (Simplified), French, German, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese (Brazil), and Spanish.
Interactive Gradient Tool for drawing and fine-tuning a gradient.
User-definable color palette.
New effects: Clouds, Median, Unfocus, Outline, and an improved Sharpen.
More intuitive and more powerful …

The Portable Document Format (PDF) is the ubiquitous document format used by both the public and private sector to securely exchange and preserve information. Adobe published the complete PDF specification in 1993 and has been committed to making the PDF an open standard within recent years.

In an effort to reinforce their “commitment to openness”, Adobe has announced that it intends to release the full PDF 1.7 specification to AIIM for ISO standardization. AIIM will be responsible for identifying issues and will develop a draft document that will then be presented to ISO for development and approval as an International Standard.

Going back to 1995, Adobe has a long history of working within the ISO process to deliver various specialized subsets of PDF as standards for specific industries and functions. PDF for Archive and PDF for Exchange are already ISO standards, …

Microsoft revealed three new mechanisms for customers looking to buy, upgrade, or otherwise license Windows Vista. The new options are designed to offer greater flexibility in obtaining the new operating system and to ensure users have the edition of Windows Vista that matches their needs. The announcement is made in the shadow of the worldwide availability of Windows Vista on January 30th.

The new purchase options are:

Windows Anytime Upgrade - Windows Anytime Upgrade allows customers to upgrade their current version of Windows Vista to a more advanced or feature-rich edition through an Internet transaction. This option will be available in the Start menu in Windows and allows users to select the desired upgrade version and purchase it online.

Windows Marketplace - Windows Marketplace makes Windows Vista and the 2007 Microsoft Office release available for direct …