IBM will offer a version of Lotus Notes for the iPhone and iPod touch, ratcheting up its office battle with the software maker.

Big Blue officials the week of Jan. 21 will unveil an e-mail package for Lotus Notes that runs on Apple’s iPod Touch music player and the smash hit iPhone, which just surpassed 3 million units sold.

IBM will formally announce the software at its Lotusphere conference in Orlando, Fla., which starts Jan. 21, according to multiple news sources.

A computer tape containing personal data of 650,000 customers of about 230 retailers including J.C. Penney is missing, credit card issuer GE Money said on Friday.

Richard Jones, a spokesman for the General Electric unit, said a backup computer tape being stored at a facility operated by Iron Mountain, an information protection and storage company, had been lost. Jones added that Social Security numbers of about 150,000 people were also included on the tape.

Services and software companies IBM and SAP, longtime technology partners, will bring out their first joint software product in the fourth quarter of this year, the two companies said on Monday.

The product, code-named Atlantic, will allow users to access SAP’s Business Suite applications for work flows, reporting and analytics through IBM’s Lotus Notes desktop software. U.S.-based IBM and Germany’s SAP, which was founded by five former IBM employees, have collaborated for 35 years.

Even though our book is finally out, that doesn’t mean the story of White House email is over. Far from it. In fact, this week saw a number of new developments in Washington. In this article, David Gewirtz gives you an overview of the latest developments as well as my analysis.

Read this DominoPower article.

IT managers who have been worrying about how to support the iPhone for their executives may want to start some serious fretting. A report from Engadget and the Associated Press said that IBM’s Lotus Notes email is coming soon to the Apple’s iPhone and the iPod Touch. An announcement may occur Sunday at the start of Lotusphere. Apple and IBM officials could not be reached for comment on the report.

Mozilla should soon be experimenting with some novel user-interface technologies for its browser and other products, according to a UI developer that joined Mozilla this week from startup company Humanized.

Mozilla announced Wednesday that it had hired three of the principals from Humanized, which is known for its innovative work with the Enso project to create more intuitive user interfaces. Mozilla did not identify the people it hired, and Raskin was hesitant at first to say which of his colleagues had joined him at Mozilla. Eventually he acknowledged that Humanized’s Jono DiCarlo and Atul Varma also have joined the company known for its Firefox browser.

Secunia has found that the number of security bugs in the open source Red Hat Linux operating system and Firefox browsers far outstripped comparable products from Microsoft last year. In a report released this week, Secunia also criticized CA for the quality of the code in its anti-virus products, saying that "inherent" code problems are exposing CA products to ongoing security vulnerabilities.

DLI.tools announced DocLogic Document Manager has been renamed to Docova (doc-oh-va) as a core component of a rebranding initiative for DLI. Tools’ web platform for IBM Lotus Notes and Domino. Docova’s functionality makes Lotus Domino web applications feel like a traditional desktop environment, providing capabilities like drag-and-drop, in-place editing, IBM Lotus Notes mail integration, full-text search and right click action panels.

This article provides an overview of the default theme used in IBM Lotus Quickr services for IBM WebSphere Portal and gives the details you need to perform desired customizations of the theme. The main sections of the article focus on how to change the theme, how to customize the welcome page, how to put your own skin on all the Lotus Quickr pages, and how to make your deployment look like your place.

The Linux creator said copyright owners would have to agree to licensing changes, and those who didn’t would have to rewrite code. Linus Torvalds, creator of the Linux operating system, still has no plans to license the Linux kernel under version three of the GNU General Public License anytime soon.

Torvalds, a vocal critic of GPL v3 while it was being drafted, prefers GPL v2, he told Jim Zemlin, the executive director of the Linux Foundation, Jan. 8 in the first in a series of podcasts titled "Open Voices," which will feature the industry’s top open source and Linux leaders.