We all know by now that games built on top of social networks' platforms are a big deal, but the results of a study commissioned by games manufacturer PopCap give some idea of just what the numbers are like.

The survey estimates that there are about 100 million people in the United States and United Kingdom who play social games regularly, based on the 24 percent of survey respondents who identified themselves as such. More women than men--55 percent to 45 percent--identify themselves as social gamers, and the average age of a social gamer is 43. That's consistent with anecdotal reports that, in spite of social stigmas still attached to women and gaming, many of the most avid players of social games like Farmville, Pet Society, and Bejeweled are suburban moms.

Here's how the survey worked: Out of 5,000 survey respondents in the U.S. and U.K., 24 percent identified themselves as playing social games at least once per week for at least 15 minutes. Those users were identified as "social gamers," and it's their results that populate the rest of the survey. A PopCap representative said that while the study did include people under the age of 18, that "very few" in that demographic participated in the survey.

(Also note the fact that the survey was commissioned by a game publisher. It likely doesn't make the results suspect, but should be taken into consideration regardless.)

The rest of the survey has quite a bit to say about where people are playing social games, who they're playing with, and whether they're actually spending money.

Women who play social games are more likely than men to play with people whom they know in real life--68 percent versus 56 percent. And Facebook, unsurprisingly, has a huge lock on the market: 83 percent of social gamers say they play games on Facebook versus 24 percent on MySpace, 7 percent on Bebo, and 5 percent on Friendster. Keep in mind that this is U.S. and U.K. only: Friendster has more traction in Asia, and another social site, Hi5, is big in Latin American countries.

Companies hoping to cash in big on micropayments and virtual goods in games may be interested in this item, though: while just over half of social gamers (53 percent) say they have earned or spent virtual goods in a game, only 28 percent say they have spent real-world money on virtual goods and 32 percent have bought a virtual gift.

That means that many of the virtual goods in social games are still earned through the completion of offers and surveys rather than purchased upfront with real money. A full quarter of social gamers say they've been "misled" by an ad or offer in a game, a nod to the prevalence of companies that let players earn points toward virtual goods by completing offers or surveys. These third-party outlets became the subject of major scrutiny last fall when allegations surfaced that they were scamming users into actually spending more money--one of the leading companies in the space, Offerpal Media, ended up changing its terms of service and replacing its CEO amid the mess.

But the bad press didn't do much to alter the trajectory of the social games industry: right around the same time, Electronic Arts announced that it had acquired successful social gaming company Playfish for US$275 million.

More than 74,000 PCs at nearly 2,500 organizations around the globe were compromised over the past year and a half in a botnet infestation designed to steal login credentials to bank sites, social networks, and e-mail systems, a security firm said Wednesday.

The systems were infected with the Zeus Trojan and the botnet was dubbed "Kneber" after a username that linked the infected PCs on corporate and government systems, according to NetWitness.

The Wall Street Journal reported that Merck, Cardinal Health, Paramount Pictures, and Juniper Networks were among the targets in the attack. NetWitness speculated that criminals in Eastern Europe using a command-and-control server in Germany sent attachments containing the malware in e-mails or links to the malware on Web sites that employees within the companies clicked on.

NetWitness said it discovered more than 75 gigabytes worth of stolen data during routine analytic tasks as part of an evaluation of a client network on January 26. The cache of stolen data included 68,000 corporate login credentials, access to e-mail systems, online banking sites, Facebook, Yahoo, Hotmail, 2,000 SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) certificate files and data on individuals, NetWitness said in a statement and in a whitepaper available for download from its Web site.

In addition to stealing specific data, Zeus can be used to search for and steal any file on the computer, download and execute programs and allow someone to remotely control the computer.

More than half of the compromised machines were also infected with peer-to-peer bot malware called Waledac, the company said. Nearly 200 countries were affected, with most of the infections found in Egypt, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and the United States.

The news comes after Google announced an attack targeting it and what is believed to be more than 30 other companies and which was linked back to China. McAfee dubbed that attack "Operation Aurora."

"While Operation Aurora shed light on advanced threats from sponsored adversaries, the number of compromised companies and organizations pales in comparison to this single botnet," said Amit Yoran, chief executive of NetWitness and former Director of the National Cyber Security Division. "These large-scale compromises of enterprise networks have reached epidemic levels."

In a move to marry its old-school Office product with the newer trends of the Net, Microsoft issued beta software Wednesday that brings social-network information into Outlook.

The product, called Outlook Social Connector, has been available in the Office 2010 beta. According to the Outlook Social Connector download site, the new version works with Outlook 2003 and 2007 and connects with social-network partners, which wasn't the case with the earlier version.

Outlook Social Connector will let people see updates from a person's social-network contacts. LinkedIn announced in November that it would become the first actual partner in the Microsoft program. The LinkedIn connector is now available from LinkedIn's Web site.

Microsoft said connectors for Facebook and MySpace will be available in the first half of 2010.

"Starting today you can download the new Outlook 2010 Social Connector to see what your contacts are up to on LinkedIn from right within the Outlook 2010 beta. When Office 2010 ships, you'll also be able to see your contacts' Facebook and MySpace actions in the same place," Microsoft's Doug Thomas said in a blog posting Wednesday.

The Associated Press reported earlier Wednesday about the new software.

Social networking is a hot area of Internet activity, made hotter by the recent >arrival of the Google Buzz service built into Gmail. But it can be tough for people to stay on top of information feeds at multiple social-networking sites; even if you can set up one service to republish updates from another service, conversation about those updates often takes place separately.

Providing a more central communication service is a challenge, though. There are differing communication protocols for different services--if those protocols are available at all--and most social-networking players are vying with each other to be the primary service that people frequent. And there are blurry boundaries between social-networking status updates, e-mails, and instant messages.

In the Outlook Social Connector case, Microsoft has some incumbent advantage because millions of people use Outlook. The Outlook Social Connector will let them read status updates in software they're already accustomed to using, often continuously throughout the day.

However, Microsoft has some challenges. For one thing, the software doesn't let people write status updates of their own, only read what others have written. For another, a lot of social activity takes place on the Web in a personal rather than professional context, and in that domain, Microsoft's Hotmail service is arguably a better fit than Outlook.

One traditional Microsoft rival, Mozilla, is angling for a place at the center of people's online social lives, too. The Mozilla Raindrop project is designed to create software for an online service for unified communications.

A quarter of senior business and technology executives worldwide believe their company's profits and ability to innovate suffered as a result of reduced IT budgets last year, according to new survey.

Commissioned by BT Global Services, the survey also revealed that Asian business heads, particularly in China, India and Singapore, were most affected by the impact of the budget cuts. In fact, 63 percent of Singapore respondents said they felt the effects of the reduced IT spend since the start of the recession.

The online survey was conducted by Datamonitor and received responses from 274 CIOs and other senior corporate executives in 12 countries including Australia, Singapore, Spain, China, the United Kingdom and United States. A further 2,476 employees who use enterprise IT systems also participated in the poll.

According to the respondents, their companies cut IT budget cuts for the first time in 10 years, as a result of the 2009 global financial crisis.

"This research provides a snapshot into the current mindset of global CIOs and senior executives, and it will hopefully act as a spur to action on key issues such as the role IT plays in driving global business success," Jeff Kelly, CEO of BT Global Services, said in the report.

Data management top priority
CIOs also felt swamped by the sheer amount of business data being churned daily, and unable to utilize the information effectively.

According to the survey, 27 percent of senior executives said the inability to retrieve relevant information in time to meet deadlines had resulted in loss of business during the recession. This number increased to 33 percent among CIOs, who typically had a clearer understanding of the impact of data mismanagement, the BT report stated.

Overall, nearly 25 percent of CIOs acknowledged they had more information than they could handle and make sense of. This sentiment was echoed by senior business executives, 18 percent of whom said they struggled with the deluge of data, while 15 percent of IT users shared similar sentiments.

In Singapore, which accounted for 222 respondents, 17 percent indicated they had too much information to deal with.

Some 34 percent of CIOs worldwide said they had only just enough, or nowhere near enough, market data on hand to analyze and make the informed decisions.

Of the data management issues CIOs face today, Chin Hu Lim, CEO of BT Frontline, said in the report: "[IT heads need to] embrace the challenges and opportunities to impact the relationship between information and business success of their organizations."

The report also stated that 90 percent of all respondents agreed information management was "critical" or "important" to the future of their organizations. Some 92 percent of Singaporean respondents shared this view.

CIOs resisting cloud move
Looking at the potential of cloud computing, the BT survey showed that business leaders lost the message about the basic premise for the platform: cost reduction. More than half, or 53 percent, of CIOs globally failed to see how cloud computing could save them money, even though the cloud model was designed to reduce capital expenditure by cutting out the need to purchase additional servers or software applications to refresh IT architecture, the report stated.

They also had reservations about hosting critical enterprise data and applications on servers that were located outside their domestic market, citing for security and compliance reasons. Some 57 percent of CIOs and 53 percent of senior business executives indicated resistance to hosting their corporate data in the cloud.

In fact, 30 percent of global respondents said they would be uncomfortable with servers based in Southeast Asia, preferring Europe instead as the destination of choice. Some 25 percent favored the U.K. as their preferred server location.

"Although we are already delivering enterprise-level cloud services such as hosted Internet Protocol telephony, for many organizations [cloud computing is] still in its infancy," Kelly said. However, he added that the lack of clarity on the benefits of cloud was "understandable" and highlighted the work vendors and aggregators still to do to address this issue.

Windows systems that crashed during the latest Microsoft security update last week did so because they were infected with a rootkit program that made changes to the operating system kernel, Microsoft said late on Wednesday.

"The restarts are the result of modifications the Alureon rootkit makes to Windows Kernel binaries, which places these systems in an unstable state," Mike Reavey, director of the Microsoft Security Response Center, wrote in a blog post. "In every investigated incident, we have not found quality issues with security update MS10-015."

The patch addresses a vulnerability in the 32-bit Windows kernel that could allow elevation of privilege that was disclosed last month.

The Win32/Alureon family of malware can modify DNS settings, hijack searches, and fraudulently click on ads, Microsoft said in a post on its Malware Protection Center Blog. Last year, versions appeared that infect the miniport driver associated with the hard disk of the operating system, the post says.

Microsoft will not offer the patch through Automatic Update for 32-bit Windows systems until a solution is available, but 64-bit versions will be offered.

Anyone believed to have been affected by the Alureon rootkit can visit https://consumersecuritysupport.microsoft.com. Those in the United States can contact Customer Service and Support at no charge using the PC Safety hotline at 1-866-727-2338 (PCSAFETY). Those outside the United States can find local contact numbers at http://support.microsoft.com/international.

Customers who choose not to install the update can implement the workaround or install the update manually as outlined in the MS10-015 bulletin.

"A malware compromise of this type is serious, and if customers cannot confirm removal of the Alureon rootkit using their chosen anti-virus/anti-malware software, the most secure recommendation is for the owner of the system to back up important files and completely restore the system from a cleanly formatted disk," Microsoft said.

For instructions on how to back up your files in Windows, visit this page. For instructions on how to reinstall Windows, visit this page.

Here's another one of Facebook's gradual moves into the e-commerce world: The company announced Thursday a "strategic relationship" with eBay-owned payment system PayPal to make its technology available for the purchase of self-service ads as well as the Facebook Credits currency.

"We want to give the people who use Facebook, as well as advertisers and developers, a fast and trusted way to pay across our service," Dan Levy, director of payment operations at Facebook, said in a release. "As our business has grown, offering local methods of payment has become increasingly important for advertisers who want to buy Facebook Ads. Teaming with PayPal, a global leader in online payments, makes this possible."

PayPal, which operates in 190 markets with 24 currencies, is often used as an alternative for customers who don't have credit cards, something that will be useful in international markets where it may be more difficult for small businesses to purchase ad space on Facebook.

A few years ago, Facebook's e-commerce plans were rumored to be a competitor to PayPal, code-named "Facebook Wallet". The project was far enough along that Facebook was demonstrating prototypes to potential customers in the industry, sources say. But the "Wallet" never made it to market, and Facebook's e-commerce plans have shifted to the "credits" system and its focus on micropayments and virtual goods. Right now they're used in Facebook's "gift shop" as well as with a few beta-test partners in the social gaming and nonprofit space.

In addition to PayPal, credits can be purchased with credit cards or a mobile phone number--the social network has partnered with Zong, one of a handful of companies in the pay-by-mobile niche, to power that.

PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, an early investor in Facebook, sits on the social network's board of directors.

Nokia's decision to limit app publishers on its Ovi Store to registered companies is a "necessary evil", but its app store strategy still needs to be ironed out, says an industry analyst.

In a recent interview, the Finnish phone giant said to ensure mobile Ovi Store carries clean apps, part of its screening process encompasses permitting only registered companies to submit apps to its store.

This requirement, however, sets up a barrier for individuals interested in developing apps for the app store, as well as aspiring startups and entrepreneurs that may not have registered business licenses.

Marc Einstein, ICT industry manager at Frost & Sullivan, said in an interview with ZDNet Asia that the move is an effort to avoid some of the controversies seen at competing stores, such as offensive content that had ended up on Apple's App Store in the past.

As such, Nokia's move to limit app contribution is a "necessary evil", said Einstein.

He noted that while this might seem counterintuitive to Nokia's efforts over the past year to court developers, it is unlikely the reason developers are flocking to competitors such as Apple. Rather, he attributed it to the app store's popularity among users.

"Because you have to rewrite apps for different stores, developers want to maximize their time with [high-traffic] stores. I don't think the reason people aren't writing apps for Ovi is because they can't get in the door.

"The iPhone has had amazing traffic statistics where people are downloading the most [apps], so developers want to get on that platform more," Einstein explained.

Nelson Wee, Nokia's Asia-Pacific senior services marketing manager, explained in an e-mail to ZDNet Asia that the company established the policy "due to international tax complexities". It is also aimed at ensuring content on the Ovi Store is legal and authentic, he said.

"We are looking beyond just the quantity game and rather, focusing on the consumer experience [to] work with developers to surface the right content for each consumer, across more than 100 Nokia models," Wee said.

He pointed to a self-service facility at publish.ovi.com, which supports various content platforms such as Symbian, Java and Flash Lite.

Nokia should iron out app store strategy
Over the past year, various mobile phone industry players have come up with their own app stores, in efforts to replicate Apple's success with its own app store. Microsoft, for example, last year opened its Windows Mobile marketplace, while Research in Motion also announced its BlackBerry App World.

However, these "me-too" stores have so far fallen short of achieving the same gleam as Apple's App Store, said Einstein, adding that Nokia needs to work out its strategy regarding its various moving parts.

He pointed to Nokia's joint announcement with Intel at this week's Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, to come up with a new Linux-based platform called MeeGo.

This was an attempt to revamp its mobile app ecosystem, he said. The analyst noted that so far, there has been "a degree of confusion with Nokia's app store strategy" that the phone maker must iron out to attract developers.

Nokia has lost smartphone market share over the past year. The company in December 2009 announced plans to consolidate its handset lineup and focus on smartphones. It is also pushing its Maemo OS to developers, while continuing to support the Symbian OS.

Einstein said: "While Nokia has lost market share, it's still number one. It makes sense for them to try something in this space."

The alliance with Intel also helps to offer a broader concept of converging apps for PCs and mobiles, and allowing these to run on both platforms. This, he said, reframes the possible development scenarios for app makers.

Nokia, however, should synchronize its efforts across its different arms to make a concerted push into the apps space, said Einstein.

"You might expect confusion from a vendor so big, but it must find one strategy," he said.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs has reportedly continued his campaign against Adobe's Flash video technology, this time at a meeting with The Wall Street Journal, according to a report in Valleywag.

People who were at a recent meeting Jobs had with some of the paper's executives told the Gawker-owned site that Jobs dismissed Flash as "a CPU hog", full of "security holes", and "old technology" and would therefore not be including the technology on the iPad, or presumably, the iPhone. (Adobe did recently promise to make the Mac version of its browser plug-in faster.)

It's not the first time we've heard this. At an Apple shareholder meeting two years ago Jobs explained why Flash wouldn't be on the iPhone any time soon. He told those present that the full-blown PC Flash version "performs too slow to be useful" on the iPhone, and that the mobile version--Flash Lite--" is not capable of being used with the Web".

More recently, word leaked out from Apple's employee-only meeting after the iPad introduction that Jobs had slammed Flash. According to a report on Wired, he responded to an employee question that "whenever a Mac crashes, more often than not, it's because of Flash", and that "no one will be using Flash. The world is moving to HTML5."

The lack of support in the iPad and the iPhone for the software that's essentially the Web standard for displaying online videos has drawn complaints, but mostly from a more technically inclined crowd. The likely reason Jobs is discussing Flash behind closed doors with employees and potential partners and not publicly? The vast majority of people he wants to buy his devices don't know what Flash is, and if they do, they don't care. They just want a device that works.

Continuing its effort to expand the e-book business beyond its own hardware, Amazon.com on Thursday released a Kindle application for BlackBerry phones.

Amazon got its start as an online book seller, expanded to electronics and other retail categories, then returned to its roots with its own Kindle reader devices. More recently, though, it expanded with Kindle applications that let people read books on the iPhone and iPod Touch and on Windows computers. After purchasing rights to read a book, a customer may read it on any of those devices.

That device list now includes BlackBerry phones, and according to Amazon, soon also will include Apple's Macs and iPads. Amazon didn't mention Android phone support in the announcement.

"Since the launch of our popular Kindle for iPhone app last year, customers have been asking us to bring a similar experience to the BlackBerry, and we are thrilled to make it available today," said Ian Freed, Amazon's vice president for Kindle work.

The electronic book market is burgeoning after years of obscurity, catalyzed in part by the Kindle. However, Kindle doesn't have the market to itself anymore, with dedicated e-book readers arriving from Barnes & Noble and others and with Apple's forthcoming iPad sporting e-book reading as only one of several abilities.

The BlackBerry devices compatible with the Amazon application are the Bold 9000 and 9700, the Curve 8520 and 8900, the Storm 9530 and 9550, and the Tour 9630, according to the Amazon's Kindle for BlackBerry site.

The free application lets people browse Amazon's catalog, read a book's beginning before purchasing, bookmark locations in books, synchronize the reading location among different devices, and read books in full color. Although books can be annotated on Kindle devices and with the iPhone and iPod Touch application, the BlackBerry application doesn't permit new annotations.

U.S. Federal Judge Denny Chin kicked off the much-anticipated Google Books hearing Thursday morning by making one thing clear: there will be no quick ruling in the case.

"I'm going to say right off, I'm not going to rule today," Chin said, highlighting the droves of written submissions that have come in from passionate parties on all sides of the case. "I'm going to listen to opinions carefully and I'm going to ask a few questions."

And that he's already done in morning testimony, which has been going on for more than three hours before a crowded courtroom and overflow room. For example, he interrupted an attorney testifying for Microsoft by pressing him on why Sony, a competitor, is all right with the proposed settlement, but Microsoft isn't.

Some of the other groups and businesses that have testified so far include the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Amazon, the National Federation of the Blind, and the Center for Democracy and Technology.

The proposed settlement being debated in the case--reached between Google and the Authors Guild and Association of American Publishers--would allow Google to partially display in-copyright but out-of-print books alongside books authorized by publishers and public domain works in Google Books.

The deal would make Google the only organization in the U.S. explicitly authorized to make digital copies of out-of-print yet copyright-protected books, much to the dismay of many authors and privacy advocates.

Potential competitors, however, object to the unique rights that Google has been granted based on the class action status of the lawsuit, with authors upset over Google's decision to scan their works without asking permission. Privacy advocates fear corporate oversight of what books people are reading. And the U.S. Department of Justice has twice expressed "antitrust" concerns over the proposed settlement.

Stay tuned for more coverage from the hearing.

Dell reported a better-than-expected fourth quarter as enterprise sales rebounded. The company said that it was "cautiously optimistic” that commercial IT spending will improve throughout the year ahead amid “ongoing signs of stabilization".

Dell reported fiscal fourth quarter net income of US$334 million, or 17 cents a share, on revenue of US$14.9 billion, up 11 percent from a year ago. That sales tally was US$1 billion more than Wall Street expected. Non-GAAP earnings were US$544 million, or 28 cents a share, a penny ahead of Wall Street estimates.

For fiscal 2010, Dell reported net income of US$1.43 billion, or 73 cents a share, on revenue of US$52.9 billion, down 13 percent from a year ago (statement).

Read more of "Dell earnings: Enterprise spending rebounds" at ZDNet.

Both the US Department of Justice and the European Commission have said there are no issues to prevent Microsoft and Yahoo going ahead with their search deal.

The 10-year deal makes Yahoo the salesforce and Microsoft the search platform for their combined search. The deal was announced in July 2009 and is expected to start being implemented in the next few days. All global customers and partners are expected to have been moved to the combined system by early 2012.

The deal is aimed at taking market share and revenues from Google, which currently has around 75 percent of the market worldwide.

Read more of "Yahoo and Microsoft get search deal OK" at ZDNet.

Analysts do not see 3D TV being adopted en masse for the living room any time soon, projecting the new technology to follow the same path as HDTV (high-definition TV) adoption.

According to Frost & Sullivan's industry manager of digital media, information and communication technologies, Vidya S Nath, HDTV was talked about for 10 years but embraced only in the last two years when prices fell to a point where mass consumer adoption was possible.

In a phone interview with ZDNet Asia, Nath said 3D TV market cannot be described as nascent and is still in the incubation stage, as the workflow and production of such televisions have either just begun or yet to be rolled out.

While a BBC article cited a survey that forecast 3.4 million 3D TV sets will be sold in the United States alone this year, analyst James McQuivey disputes those figures. The vice president and principal analyst at Forrester Research, in his blog post, wrote that "not even a million US homes will [have 3D TV] in 2010".

When contacted by ZDNet Asia, McQuivey e-mailed that the success of 3D movies, especially recent blockbuster Avatar, may have prompted some manufacturers to decide that consumers want 3D in their homes. But, he feels this will not be the case.

Pricing too premium
McQuivey explained: "Although when surveyed, consumers say 3D in the home would be nice, when they actually have to pay for it, we believe their interest will disappear as these TVs and the required glasses will likely cost thousands more than a comparable TV would."

ZDNet Asia conducted a quick poll of 10, where eight respondents said they did not plan to buy a 3D TV any time soon. Reason cited ranged from "can't afford" to "marketing doesn't target persons with glasses".

To compound matters, McQuivey blogged that consumers only recently bought new TV sets following the emergence of HDTV, with over 40 million such units sold in the United States over the past two years. TV sets 40 inch and below were the bestsellers in 2009.

This means potential 3D TV customers may already have HDTV sets in their living rooms. McQuivey said: "Now, we're going to ask those same people to spend between US$2,000 and US$4,000 to get a good 3D TV set, with just two sets of active shutter glasses? Sorry, the credit card is going to stay in the wallet for this one."

He added, however, that manufacturers are still moving forward.

"They don't want to wake up one day and find that consumers finally want 3D TV and they aren't ready to give it to them," he said.

Hefty investments
Frost & Sullivan's Nath noted that 3D content is currently limited for television viewers. "Keep in mind that you have a US$3,000 television, but with very little content," he said.

In his blog, McQuivey posted that the push for 3D TV will require "a huge investment from the industry".

More 3D content has to be created, which means new and expensive cameras, new satellite uplink infrastructures for live sporting events, and an entirely new cable infrastructure with greater bandwidth to stream full-high definition 3D content.

He added that the 3D experience is only good for some viewing experiences as it requires focused attention that only a few people can do at a time, as they need to have a "fairly direct view of the TV".

In this aspect, McQuivey noted that games will lead the 3D market as gamers can "stare straight at the screen in immersive gameplay for hours".

3D stays in cinema
While mass adoption of 3D TV is not expected to happen any time soon, Frost & Sullivan's Nath believes 3D films will grow "as there is an aggressive push worldwide in 3D film scriptwriting and post-production.

Advocates of 3D film development include Singapore's Media Development Authority (MDA). In an e-mail interview, Yeo Chun Cheng, director of broadcast and music at the MDA, said the government agency's strategy encompasses boosting the development of 3D content, as well as building an industry capable of offering 3D production expertise to meet future demand.

According to Yeo, the MDA has established a S$10 million (US$7 million) 3D development fund to support the industry's capabilities across the 3D production cycle, from content creation to post-production.

A grant was awarded to local production firm Widescreen Media, to acquire 3D cameras and rigs that were used in the production of Amphibious, which the company dubbed as Southeast Asia's first feature-length stereoscopic 3D production.

The MDA fund also enabled Singapore post-production company Blackmagic Design to upgrade to a 3D-ready post production facility, Yeo said.