CircleUp, provider of social communication services for online and offline communities, announced the availability of a free downloadable toolbar for Microsoft Office Outlook. By integrating the free CircleUp service with Outlook, used by close to 18 million people worldwide, CircleUp extends its current consumer service to small business, home office and professional users to deliver significant productivity gains in email and group communications.

With up to 90 percent of collaboration occurring through email and up to 75 percent of an organization’s knowledge assets stored in email messages, the need for more streamlined and functional group communication is apparent. Instead of blasting an email to tens, hundreds or thousands of contacts, only to be inundated by a flood of answers, CircleUp enables office managers, event planners and administrators to send a question, announcement or information request to any size group and get back a single, organized result containing facts, decisions, links, photos and feedback that can be acted on immediately.

Working late again and wondering where the day went? Are you stressed and frustrated and can’t seem to get a handle on your time? Oh, look: You’ve got mail!

Admit it. Did you just drop everything you were doing to check an email that was, in all likelihood, some variety of spam or irrelevant snippets? If so, you are not alone. British researchers at Glasgow and Paisley Universities have found that the pressures from handling a constant influx of email throughout the workday takes an exasperating toll on workers. Worse yet, heavy email communication causes anxiety.

Just when it appeared tech firms had the upper hand against spam, spammers have unleashed new forms of the meddlesome email to trick filters.

Spam in the form of popular PDF email attachments and electronic greeting cards is confounding email security systems and annoying consumers. The recent Storm email virus and several pump-and-dump stock scams are clogging inboxes and snookering consumers into downloading malicious software. And it could get worse as the holidays approach, anti-spam experts say.

StudyLamp Software has announced the release of Get ’em Done, a to-do list manager for Windows XP and Vista. Unlike other to-do list software that takes hours or even weeks to learn, Get ’em Done takes less than five minutes to master and makes organizing your tasks fast and simple.

Get ’em Done is designed with minimalism in mind. New items are added to the to-do list with a simple title. Optionally, the user can also add categories, deadlines, details, and set a priority for a task. Get ’em Done ensures users will never forget a task again. The task list can be sorted or grouped in various ways, allowing the user to quickly determine which tasks should be worked on. When a task is complete, one click marks it done and moves it to a separate list for completed tasks, in case it needs to be reviewed again later.

Accountants and senior management at Dell cooked the books for more than three years, moving funds between accounts so the company could show it was meeting its quarterly targets, the company admitted in a filing this week with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

That’s the conclusion of a year-long independent investigation into financial shenanigans at the company from 2003 through the first quarter of 2007.

A group of reporters and their family members whose private telephone records were secretly obtained as part of Hewlett-Packard Co.’s boardroom surveillance scheme sued the technology giant and two former executives.

Five separate lawsuits claiming "illegal and reprehensible conduct" were filed in San Francisco Superior Court on Wednesday against Palo Alto-based Hewlett-Packard, former Chairwoman Patricia Dunn and Kevin Hunsaker, the company’s former ethics chief.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and Cisco Systems Chairman and CEO John Chambers will discuss the future of the technology industry and their shared vision for addressing today’s customer requirements. The live Webcast will take place Monday, Aug. 20, 2007 from 7-8:30 a.m. PDT.

A word of caution about editing entries "anonymously" in Wikipedia: a tool has been developed that can show who made the changes.

Virgil Griffith, who will be a graduate student at the California Institute of Technology starting in September, has developed Wikipedia Scanner, a search tool that traces the IP address of people who make edits to the online encyclopedia.

While Wikipedia allows anyone to make edits, it keeps detailed logs of the changes made. And although people can make changes without identifying themselves, the changes often create digital fingerprints that provide information about the user, such as the location of the computer used to make the edit.

Developers need look no farther than the newly released 9Rays.Net CryptoSharp security software in their ongoing efforts to thwart hackers. Security tools, hash functions, and ciphers have been developed and bundled in a single library. With this security software, platform-independent code provides data compression and encryption functionality to enhance the security of 32 and 64 bit environments.

When using the 9Rays.Net CryptoSharp Security Library, file based data is protected using powerful encryption. Data compression is another function which is prominent in the new release, ensuring the best in data security. Standard .NET framework classes are used throughout the CryptoSharp Security Library, which simplifies the encrypted storage of existing programs, enhancing their security. Newly created security enabled applications are protected from their inception with the latest encryption.

According to the National Center for Women & Information Technology, the percentage of female Computer Science undergraduates at major research universities in the United States has declined from 37 percent in 1985 to 14 percent in 2006.

This is a problem for technology companies, not only because of the shortage of talent trickling through the pipeline, but also because the diversity of this talent is a key element to designing the products that customers want to use.

To address this issue, Microsoft has been taking action since 2000 to help strengthen the pipeline and get more women excited to explore technology careers. As part of that effort, this week Microsoft kicks off its annual Redmond DigiGirlz camp, a week-long technology camp for girls.