Americans who feel bored and underpaid do work hard–at surfing the Internet and catching up on gossip, according to a survey that found U.S. workers waste about 20 percent of their working day.

An online survey of 2,057 employees by online compensation company Salary.com found about six in every 10 workers admit to wasting time at work with the average employee wasting 1.7 hours of a typical 8.5 hour working day.

Personal Internet use topped the list as the leading time-wasting activity according to 34 percent of respondents, with 20.3 percent then listing socializing with co-workers and 17 percent conducting personal business as taking up time.

CommonTime, leading wireless push Lotus Notes email and enterprise mobility solutions provider, announced that it has strengthened its partner program to provide partners with enhanced opportunities to identify and win new business. The new program offers access to market-leading wireless mobility solutions, high gross profit margins, technical training and joint marketing programs.

The improved and streamlined program features emphasis on CommonTime’s ongoing commitment to its partners selling and supporting its complete line of mobility solutions worldwide.

Spammers are once again taking advantage of an upcoming potential blockbuster film, Simpsons. Spam mails are being sent to email users trying to coerce them to take a survey, giving over their email address to spammers. SPAMfighter filters these types of mails from the 3.6 million SPAMfighter user’s, making them aware that this is a scam, and filtering the emails away from their inbox so they never have to see it.

The spam mail contains a picture of Homer Simpson in his underwear and asks the recipient if they plan on seeing the movie and to help fill out a survey by clicking on a link. Once the recipient does this, their email address is recognized as being active, opening them up for many more spam mails. In order to entice email users to enter this survey, they offer a prize for taking and completing the survey. As with many offers made by spam, this offer is fake, and there no chance of receiving the prize. The only reason for the mail is to get the email addresses of active email accounts so they can be slammed with spam mail later.

Voxonic’s technology converts any voice, speech, or song into 1,400 different languages. Unlike standard voice conversion companies that create a finished product which simulates a robotic tone, Arie Deutsch, President of Voxonic has developed a technology that retains the voice of the original speaker. A 10-minute sample of the original speaker’s voice is taken and broken into "phonemes," the basic sound that forms words. Afterwards, an actor who is fluent in the desired language is hired to record a lyric or speech and the two voice patterns are aligned, resulting in a 99% level of accuracy in the original speaker’s voice.

Experience a fast way to create and deploy components for IBM portal applications. During this tutorial, you will learn how to build a blog component in an easy-to-use, intuitive visual environment. You will then deploy your component and create a portal application. When finished with this tutorial, you will have the practical skills needed for using Lotus

Learn how to use the IBM Lotus Expeditor micro broker to support the MQ Telemetry Transport publish/subscribe messaging protocol. Create a sample publisher, publish to a topic, and verify the receipt of the message.

Do you know who is reading your email? Has the fact that there is a good chance that your place of work is reading your outbound email, even those that you send from your personal Web mail accounts, changed your behavior? Did you know that more than one-quarter of U.S. companies have fired an employee in the last year for violating email policies?

If your answer to all three of the above questions was "no," you might breathe a sigh of relief to learn that your answers put you squarely in the majority of U.S. employees. But the relief will last only until the implications of these answers set in. The odds are, someone else in your company knows you’re reading this article right now.

IBM is looking to ride its leadership position in the enterprise portal space into a similar position in the Enterprise 2.0 arena, where Web 2.0 technologies intersect with the enterprise.

IBM announced that research firm IDC had named IBM the leader in the enterprise portal space market for the fifth consecutive year. IBM, based in Armonk, N.Y., is moving to parlay that leadership into new areas with additional features in its WebSphere Portal offering. According to IDC, IBM had a 31.5 percent market share in 2006, followed by BEA Systems with 19.6 percent and Oracle with 10.5 percent.

Sherpa Software announced a series of product enhancements to Mail Attender for Lotus Notes that includes a customizable, proficiency level installation to improve usability for the administrators and an expansion of the exporting and reporting capabilities while still offering a non-invasive, platform independent architecture to companies addressing archiving, compliance and storage management requirements.

Mail Attender Version 6.4 takes specific aim at easing the administrator experience to quickly set up archiving and retention policies. The interface of Mail Attender includes a new, industry-first, proprietary proficiency-driven menu system. This menu allows administrators to specify his/her proficiency level within the product to maximize the efficiency in setting up their email management policies. Based on the selected proficiency (novice, moderate, expert), the menu options will change to reflect higher level administrative options or scaled down step-by-step oriented instructions. In addition, self-guided tutorials that cover the major functionality within the product have been created. And, in an effort to improve error resolution, the administrators can now predetermine what actions will be taken should an error occur. This includes having the errors emailed directly to Sherpa’s Technical Support Team for quicker customer response times.

Hewlett-Packard announced plans to acquire Linux thin client specialist Neoware, in a deal valued at $214 million. HP said the deal will boost its thin client Linux software, and help the company compete in the emergent market for virtualized client computing systems.

Neoware is the third-largest thin client vendor, after Wyse and HP. Of the three, it alone is "committed to the Linux operating system," it said in February of this year, when it last revised its NeoLinux OS.