Links for September 8th

• Leaked Google docs out top search ad spenders • The Register
  "AT&T Mobility tops the chart with $8.08m in spending – part of its effort to promote Apple's iPhone 4. Apollo Group, the outfit responsible for those ubiquitous University of Phoenix online-course ads, spent $6.67m. Online travel firm Expedia hit $5.9m. Amazon reached $5.8m, and eBay spent $4.2m."
• Justin Bieber Has Dedicated Servers at Twitter (Gizmodo)
• 5 Companies Thriving on the Rise of Shadow IT
  All SaaSes, right? That's a good way to get viral spread.
• VMware Customers Virtualize Windows Apps with Hyper-V
• “Thank You” Email Causes Angry Mob To Descend On AT&T Facebook Page
  Really, you can't ever get enough AT&T hatin'. "Haters gon' hate!"
• Oracle bolsters former Sun Unix platform
• ManageEngine Launches Freemium Managed Services Platform
  "MSP Center Lite is free for MSPs that want to manage up to 25 devices. Beyond that, the software starts at $545 per year for 50 managed devices."
• Editors Note: For RIAs in the Enterprise, It’s All about the Data
  Check out the Microsoft TechNet folks getting all enterprisey with Silverlight.
• NoSQL CouchDB founder turns to phone and cloud services
• http://tinyurl.com/284hdfj
• Google Apps rollout on track in Los Angeles | ZDNet
• Analyst Raises Smartphone Growth Predictions To 55.4 Percent In 2010
• What does the Hurd mentality bring to Oracle?
  Loving the succession angle people are hitting on: "Which Hurd might also do himself years hence, having already run a $125bn IT behemoth that is strong everywhere Oracle is not, and that is nearly five times as large as Oracle in terms of revenues. So you have to figure that the plan to bring Hurd onboard is a very long-term one, perhaps with Hurd taking some work off Ellison's plate so he can devote more time to boats, planes, playing guitar, and philanthropy." Also: speculation about Oracle buying a services firm, TPM likes CSC.
• Re-thinking JDK 7
  "Our present best estimate is that we could complete, test, and stabilize the planned work in time for a release around the middle of 2012."
• Google Now Serving 1 Billion Users Each Week
• Soon, We’ll Have Downloaded More Apps From iTunes Than Songs (Chart)
• Rhomobile upgrades development-as-service platform
  "RhoHub 2.0 lets developers create apps for iPhone, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, and Android within their Web browser from anywhere, making the build process faster and more affordable," said Adam Blum, CEO of Rhomobile, in a statement released by the company. "And with the addition of our easily implemented RhoSync 2.0, offered hosted on RhoHub, developers can quickly create and maintain powerful enterprise-class native smartphone apps with the ability to work and sync with offline data."
• Apple iPad ascendant in business computing
  Always like @timanderson – envious of his ability to pick pithy, dev-related topics to write on, & trendy ones, e.g.:
• Startup Sees Enterprise Apps as Telco Opportunity
  (a.) more mobile middleware, and, (b.) tapping "dark data" in enterprise systems and trying to give a mobile app layer to it – "Leapfactor would expose the data from a company's backend system through Excel and store it in the cloud, where it is accessed on an on-demand basis. 'This is part of the innovation: Instead of asking the app developer of SAP to build a cool app, which he won't be able to do, instead of asking the young guy to embrace the enterprise complexity, we are allowing the enterprise side to expose business functions and allow any developer to very quickly build the app, the same way they build consumer apps,' says Carrasco." Not sure about "through Excel": what's that mean?
• The Salesforce.com platform: what’s new, what’s coming
  "I asked what is new and what is coming in the Force.com platform. Chatter is one element; one of its key features is that applications can 'chat' as well as individuals. Another theme is workflow tools, and integrating the technology acquired with Informavores, which is being rebuilt on the Salesforce.com platform as Visual Process Manager. In tune with the remarks from Nimbus, there is also an effort to reduce the need for Apex code and to offer guided steps that business users can apply without the need of a development specialist"
• Oracle offers student coders free access to JavaOne
  "'Oracle certainly likes developers, no doubt,' he said. "[But] Oracle's core business model is cemented in enterprise product lines and milking revenue from them — Siebel, PeopleSoft, Oracle databases and now Java,' he said. Most large companies are already sizable users of those technologies, Coté said. Therefore, Oracle has no need to court developers like an open-source company would in order to generate 'viral, bottom-up sales,' he said."
• Digg Not Likely to Give Up on Cassandra
  One of those "does it scale" stories from The New Middleware.
• Cisco, Citrix team on desktop virtualization package
• Rackspace fills out its Windows cloud story | ZDNet
  "The new tookit, known as the Rackspace Cloud Plug-In for Visual Studio 2010, was developed by Microsoft Gold partner Neudesic. Rackspace is touting the toolkit as reducing deployment and provisioning time for its hosted Windows servers, as well as providing users of those Windows servers with a single cloud-management portal."

Disclosure: see the RedMonk client list for clients mentioned.