Yahoo, HP and Intel have announced that they will jointly set up six virtual research centres designed to test emerging cloud computing technologies.

One of these centres will be right here in Singapore – hosted by the Infocomm Development Authority (IDA). Two other centres will be at the University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign), and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany. HP, Yahoo and Intel with also host one centre each.

Cloud computing essentially refers to the concept of using vast arrays of globally distributed computers as a platform for delivering services. Many industry watchers consider cloud computing to be the next big thing in IT. Research firm Gartner predicts that it will be as influential as e-business.

These new centres will allow researchers to test software, hardware and systems that would make the large-scale resources needed for cloud computing more reliable, manageable and secure.

Check out the IDA’s press release for more details on the Singapore cloud computing test bed.

Yahoo Mail users can now access their email even when they are offline. Yahoo has just released the Yahoo Zimbra Desktop as a free download for both Mac and Windows.

Zimbra Desktop is an application that you install locally on your PC. It functions like a traditional e-mail client such as Microsoft Outlook or Apple’s Mail App. In fact, the Zimbra interface has been designed to closely mirror Outlook’s general look and functionality.

Zimbra Desktop’s main benefit is that it gives you offline access to your Webmail accounts – it even works with Gmail accounts. It also throws in some productivity elements into the mix – specifically spreadsheet and word-processing applications; however, these are quite rudimentary even compared to Google Docs applications.

The Zimbra Desktop’s email features are certainly impressive – tagging, conversations threading, comprehensive search, etc. However, it does not seem able to synchronize with the Yahoo Address Book or Calendars just yet.

The Zimbra Desktop technology originates from Zimbra Inc – a company that Yahoo acquired in September 2007. Its primary product is the Zimbra Collaboration Suite – a full-featured collaboration platform that supports email, instant messaging, group calendars & contacts, and document sharing.

Reports are circulating that Microsoft has offered $44.6bn to purchase Yahoo.

The news follows Yahoo’s announcement on Tuesday that they would be lowering their revenue forecasts, that they intend to lay of 1000 employees, and that chairman Terry Semel would be leaving. The share price of yahoo stock has fallen 46% since October.

Microsoft is offering, what some analysts are calling an exorbitant, 62% more per share, than todays closing price of $19.18. The premarket trading price has already jumped to $29.

According to Microsoft’s Kevin Johnson, the move is targeted squarely at facing competition from Google. In recent years, the growth of SaaS, and enterprise web applications has put pressure on Microsoft’s position. At the same time, Yahoo, poster child of the early dot-com-revolution, has found it harder and harder to compete with Google’s growing dominance on the web.

It’s hard to predict how such a merger would affect Yahoo’s open source efforts, some of which compete directly with Microsoft products (the Zimbra groupware suite, for example).

Anyway you look at it, if the deal does go ahead, it’s likely to change the internet landscape significantly.

Following is the letter sent to Yahoo’s board.

In a move bound to excite the open source community, today, AOL (operator of both the popular AIM, and ICQ Instant Messenger networks), seems to have begun the process of moving their systems from their proprietary protocols, to open source solutions.

ICQ, developed in 1996 by Mirabilis and sold two years later to AOL for US$407M was one of the early stars of the Social Web. Developed at a time when instant messaging was a new concept, it’s creators were forced to develop their own language to allow their new application to communicate with their server. In the years since, dozens of other protocols and clients have been developed by competing companies. Internet giants Yahoo, Microsoft, and even AOL before their purchase of ICQ, developed their own IM networks.

Because each of these networks relied on their own protocol, clients were incompatible with each other and there was no interoperability. To communicate with each other many users were forced to join, and use multiple networks simultaneously.

In 2005, when Google launched it’s own IM network, gTalk, it took a different approach. Rather than developing their own proprietary protocol, google chose to use an open protocol called XMPP (developed by the Jabber Open Source Community). This allowed google to focus on providing network support, integration with their own software (in-browser messaging in gmail for example), and the general user experience. Users can choose can choose from the many XMPP compatible IM clients, and share contacts between gTalk, and other XMPP compatible networks.

In 2006, Yahoo and MSN seemd to be experementing with the idea of combining their networks. The latest versions of each of their client programs allow users to add friends from the other network. The move by AIM to XMPP will put pressure on Yahoo and MSN to go all the way, and adopt an open protocol too.

For information on connecting to AOL’s XMPP test server, read on here.