Apparently half a billion people across the world log on to the internet from a cybercafe everyday. Jooce – a Luxembourgh-based start up – aims to tap into this huge reservoir of “cybernomads” with its new virtual desktop.

This free, web-based desktop aims to give users all the functions of their very own PCs from any computer with an internet connection – “their very own private space online,” according to Jooce founder Stefan Surzyck. Jooce gives users easy access to emails, online storage, instant messaging and such.

However, much of the core functionalities that it currently aggregates appears quite old-hat – you can pretty much do the same thing with free services from Google, Yahoo! and the like. Jooce does stand out with a slick and quite intuitive user interface, though, and it is being aimed squarely at the developing digital world – Jooce is involved with a number of digital-divide bridging projects in places like the Philippines, India & China.

Jooce is just one among many companies pursuing the holy-grail of a web-based operating system. Its long-term business model seems a little hazy at the moment, but Jooce does have the backing of Mangrove – the VC firm that initially funded Skype.

The NYT is reporting that Google is ruffling feathers in the enterprise software industry by charging too little. Google bought enterprise email solution provider Postini for $625 million last year and has started offering the companies email filtering and monitoring technologies as part of it’s Google Apps suite – at upto a 90% discount.

LinkedIn has unveiled a mobile version of its social network. Point your mobile browser to http://m.linkedin.com/ to check it out.

Only basic functionality is currently available in the mobile version, but LinkedIn promises that more fully-featured, phone-specific features will be coming online soon. It is also accessible in six languages, including Mandarin.

A video introduction to the mobile LinkedIn app by Branden Duncan (LinkedIn’s director of engineering) is available on YouTube.

LinkedIn, with approximately 20 million members, is far smaller than MySpace or Facebook. However, its focus on the professional networking niche seems to have kept LinkedIn immune from the social networking fatigue that has beset its more popular rivals recently. LinkedIn has nearly tripled its unique visitor statistic over the past year, hitting a high of 3.6 million unique visitors in January 2008.

Firefox 3 is to be imbued with new and improved search capabilities according to Mitchell Baker, Chairman of the Mozilla Foundation – the browser’s developer. This latest version of the Firefox browser is currently undergoing beta testing.

One innovation will apparently be a tighter integration of the search function with the browser’s bookmarking tool to provide more relevant search results. The browser is also set to get more powerful offline features to buffer against patchy internet connectivity on the go.

These targeted improvements reflect the fact that search is the “number one activity” when people seek information online. The enhanced offline capability also mirrors the rise of Web Applications that can retain their functionality even if continuous internet connection is not possible.

You can find more details of the planned new features for Firefox 3 here.

Social web king, facebook.com, has seen it’s first ever drop in monthly users according to analytics firm Nielsen Online.

Almost half a million users who visited the site in January 2008 didn’t bother to return in February. Competing sites like Bebo.com and Newscorp’s MySpace have reported similar drops in traffic.

So far Facebook has been able to find investors, and justify their massive spending (In the coming year Facebook plans to spend US$ 200 million on servers alone) with their rapid growth. The end of the growth cycle will increase the pressure on facebook to find a way to turn their popularity into a viable revenue stream.  Facebook’s advertising platform, which allows advertisers to target extremely specific customers, has so far met with a tepid response.

At the peak of the excitement, Facebook was collecting almost 200 thousand new users a day, and Microsoft spent US$ 250 million buying 1.6% of the company – a deal that valued Facebook at $15 billion.

Todays news suggests that those frothy days may be over.

BusinessWeek has updated its “Blogs Will Change Your Business” article that was published in 2005 just as the blogging phenomenon was taking off.The social web has evolved quite a bit since 2005 – Wikis, Social Networks, Podcasts & Video Blogs have emerged and are being adopted as credible business tools; Twittering is no longer just for birds.You can read the full updated article here.It is a rather long and rambling article, but the bottom line is: the Social Web is here to stay; the role that social media will play in business is an evolving story, but there is no denying its already significant impact on how businesses communicate with their extended communities.

Nicholas Carr first gained notoriety within the corporate IT world in 2003 with his provocative Harvard Business Review article “IT Doesn’t Matter”. In the article, Carr argued that companies could no longer gain any strategic advantage from IT investments as its ubiquity had made IT simply another cost of doing business.Carr is now back with another book that is sure to raise the hackles of corporate IT types yet again.

In “The Big Switch“, Carr compares the trend toward grid or cloud computing with the development of the electric grid more than a century ago.Carr agues that much in the same way that stand-alone electric dynamos disappeared with the rise of national power grids, today’s islands of corporate IT resources will be made irrelevant with the shift to utility computing. And as the bulk of business computing shifts out of private data centres into the cloud, the traditional IT department is set to go the way of the Dodo.

The archives of Salon.com turns up this wonderfully prescient article about why underdog startup Google was going to win big.

http://archive.salon.com/21st/rose/1998/12/21straight.html

“There’s something ultimately dumb about these all-things-to-all-people sites in a medium whose greatest strength is the ability to be specific things to specific people. If the portals can’t even build a better search engine, I am not betting on their ability to control an industry as fast-moving, innovative and metamorphic as the Internet — next year or any year.”

Harvard University’s faculty of arts and sciences will start posting its professors’ academic papers online . This content can be crawled and indexed by search engines such as Google Scholar and can be freely accessed by anyone with an internet connection.The ostensible reasons for this move is to give academics more control over their intellectual property and to circumvent the spiraling costs of academic journals which traditionally disseminate such scholarly knowledge. One side-benefit, though, is that it will further enhance Harvard’s online presence as this vast knowledge repository will undoubtedly be a powerful search engine magnet.Your business need not be an Ivy League institution with a multi-billion dollar endowment fund to take a leaf out of the Harvard playbook.

The writing is on the wall – the global economy seems destined for a rough ride ahead. The US appears to be caught in an economic rut and Asia may not be quite as immune from the woes of the US economy as many are hoping.On the home front, a recent HSBC survey revealed that small businesses in Singapore are far less optimistic about the growth outlook than they were six months ago.

Not all that surprising, really, considering a recent Business Times report that Singapore appears to be loosing its competitive edge – mainly due to sharp increases in wages and other operating costs.In fact, Singapore is now ranked # 7 globally in a table of most expensive office rents compiled by real estate consultants Cushman & Wakefield with an average rental rate of SGD 185 per sq ft. Meanwhile, Singapore’s GDP shrank by 4.8% in Q4 of last year.So, how should a small business weather this “perfect storm”?