The number of software developers in emerging markets, including China, India, Russia and Brazil, is rising faster than ever, and companies in these countries will play a more important role in the global software industry. "The number of software developers and engineers in emerging markets is now starting to exceed the number in the U.S. and Western Europe," said Buell Duncan, IBM’s general manager of independent software vendor and developer relations, in a telephone interview. He estimated that there are a total of 15 million software developers worldwide.

With 41 new attacks carried out during the month of December alone, 2006 proved to be a significant growth year for threats distributed over instant messaging systems. According to a new research report produced by security software maker Akonix Systems, in San Diego, experts at the company unearthed some 406 new IM-borne threats over the last 12 months, compared with 347 attacks tracked by the company in 2005.

An email worm disguised as a New Year’s greeting is making the rounds on the Internet. Worm-laden messages are titled "Happy New Year" and contain an attachment called either postcard.exe or postcard.zip, according to experts at VeriSign’s iDefense Labs, which provides information on security flaws and exploits. If the attachment is opened, malicious software is downloaded from the Internet and can infect computers running Windows operating systems.

Retired microbiologist Diana Westmoreland is no stranger to technology–except when it comes to computers. The problem, says consultant David Platt, lies not with the user but with the programmers, who just don’t think like the people who use their products. Platt is a computer science instructor at the Harvard University Extension School and the author of a new book called "Why Software Sucks… And What You Can Do About It."

In the security year that was 2006, zero-day attacks and exploits dominated the headlines. However, the year will be best remembered for the work of members of the hacking–er, security research–community who discovered and disclosed serious vulnerabilities in the technologies we take for granted, forced software vendors to react faster to flaw warnings and pushed the vulnerability research boat into new, uncharted waters. In no particular order, here’s eWeek’s list of five hackers who left a significant mark on 2006 and set the stage for more important discoveries in 2007.

McAfee announced amendments to its stock option granting process on Jan. 2 in an effort to clear up internal finances after firing its president and chief executive in late 2006 over a share price backdating scandal. The security software maker reported that it has recalculated stock options awarded to former president Kevin Weiss, who was dismissed in mid-October 2006 for allegedly backdating some of his options to inflate their value.

It has been a decade since IBM showed up at the Consumer Electronics Show. That 10-year absence will come to an end in a few weeks, after Big Blue opens its booth on the showroom floor at the 2007 CES show in Las Vegas.

IBM enjoyed 30 years of dominance. Microsoft 14 years. That suggests that the half-life of the value of market dominance is falling by more than 50 percent in each "age" of computing. Extrapolating from that trend, if we can call it that based on only two ages of computing, Google in 2007 has a year or two of dominance left.

VoiceRite’s plug-in for Lotus Sametime offers office workers and road warrior’s management of voice communications using Lotus Sametime. With the VoiceRite Client plug-in, users can interact with their incoming calls and decide how to handle them right from their desktop. This new Sametime plug-in lets users see caller details, intercept incoming calls, forward calls to another telephone number, and listen to voice mail from their Lotus Sametime 7.5 client.

CertFX announced a 40% discount on all available CertFX Practice Tests. CertFX has added two Volume Packages for direct purchase from the Web.