Those disappointed by the lack of a 3G announcement at MacWorld can take heart. According to UBS analysts, iPhone chip supplier Infineon Technologies is ramping up production for the next generation iPhone. This time around, it will include a high-speed 3G data radio.

Keep in mind this is just some guidance from analysts. Analysts are people, too, and prone to make mistakes now and again. That said, the note published to investors by UBS yesterday seems more credible than other reports that have been scattered across the Internet.

The unnamed analyst who wrote the report said that “3G-enabled iPhones will be released by mid-year, and that the current EDGE iPhone platform is being ramped down earlier than expected to ‘clean’ inventories.” In addition, German chipmaker Infineon Technologies will be the one to manufacture the necessary chips to give the iPhone its 3G-ness.

As you all remember, the iPhone has been derided from the beginning for its lack of 3G capabilities. Apple’s response was that it wanted to provide the most consistent experience to the widest range of possible customers. That meant using AT&T’s EDGE network, which covers practically every square inch of the U.S. Even though the iPhone includes speedier Wi-Fi, the lack of 3G prevented many from purchasing the device.

The Mac faithful were largely expecting word of a 3G iPhone at last month’s MacWorld. It didn’t happen. No new versions of the iPhone were introduced, save for the 16GB version that was bowed in late January.

What’s interesting is that Apple is hosting an event next week to detail the iPhone SDK. Apple could use this event to make other iPhone-related announcements. Will Steve Jobs actually break the news of a 3G iPhone? Who is to say.

For now, we have to take the UBS analyst’s comments with a grain of salt.

When it comes to creative logo design, you can always count on Google to come up with something cool and funky for various holidays and special days of the year.

Check out the Google tribute logo for Leap Year 2008:

So what is leap year some people might be wondering… well thanks to a little research here is a semi official explanation:

A leap year (or intercalary year) is a year containing one or more extra days (or, in case of lunisolar calendars, an extra month) in order to keep the calendar year synchronized with the astronomical or seasonal year.

For example, February would have 29 days in a leap year instead of the usual 28.

Seasons and astronomical events do not repeat at an exact number of full days, so a calendar which had the same number of days in each year would over time drift with respect to the event it was supposed to track.

By occasionally inserting (or intercalating) an additional day or month into the year, the drift can be corrected. A year which is not a leap year is called a common year.

Leap year has always boggled my mind. What happens if you were born on a leap year? You would technically only have a birthday every 4 years… or do you celebrate it the day before or after?

Side note, I’ll be updating Planet Sean on a more regular basis again. I’ve had a few major projects keeping me buried for a little bit but things are calming down now.

Let’s say you’re a Google shop. You run Google everything, including Mail, Chat, Apps, Calendar, and so on.

You recently caught wind of unified communications services and how they consolidate a lot of your, well, communications, into one place. Cool, right?

A new offering from Voice Mobility lets you integrate those unified communications telephony services into your existing Google Apps set up.

This is a great little deal. First, you get your enterprise communication and productivity apps from Google for free or nearly free. Then along comes Voice Mobility and ramps up the usability by offering a ton of integrated communication services.

Microsoft Exchange server? Don’t need it. Active Directory? Skip it. Office Communications server? Not necessary.

Voice Mobility’s UCN Vmerge is integrated with the Google Apps solution suite–including:

• Gmail
• Google Talk
• Google Calendar
• Google Docs
• Contacts
• Mobile apps

All using the workplace or campus domain. It brings unified communications to complete messaging, collaboration, calendaring and presence functionality.

Enterprise clients want the ability to enable their enterprise voice and fax communications to work seamlessly with Gmail.

UCN Vmerge allows full on-premise or hosted enterprise PBX integration with a hosted personalized Gmail service.

“By integrating UCN Vmerge with Google Apps, workplace and campus customers have price-effective options for collaboration functionality. No longer are customers forced to utilize expensive on-premise solutions from providers like Microsoft for collaboration functionality.”

– Mike Seeley, Voice Mobility’s VP of Global Sales

Well said, Mike.

Here’s a run down of some of the functions offered:

• Send and receive voice and fax messages from Gmail
• Record and deposit voice conversations in Gmail
• Manage live calls from the desktop
• Click-to-dial internal and external numbers from any Google application
• Import Google Contacts into UCN Vmerge for remote access
• Utilize least-cost routing available from the enterprise PBX

Not a bad list of features. Granted, it isn’t as robust and complete as other offerings on the market. But it’s not a bad start.

People are still looking to Google to roll out its own services that cover this ground now that Grand Central is part of its offering.

Listening to a radio show tonight they mentioned a new Indiana Jones movie coming out on May 22.

The trailer sounds pretty exciting, so I went searching for it and thanks to YouTube, here is the trailer:

I’m really looking forward to seeing this movie. Watching this trailer makes me want to break out my Indiana Jones trilogy DVD box set and get back up to speed on all things Indiana Jones.

It’s time to salute MAME’s 11th birthday with a nice new release.

That’s right, not only has MAME been around for 11 years, there’s also a new release:

MAME version 0.123 which supports over 6,960+ ROM sets and 3,705+ unique games.

This is great news for classic arcade gamers like myself. Be sure to grab the latest releases from my MAME download page. Enjoy!

PCI regulations require companies to protect credit card numbers. But first you have to know where they are.

Here’s what I’ve learned from retailers and PCI auditors about step one of PCI compliance.

It’s simple to track credit card data from the point of sale to your databases and the bank that processes the transaction.

More challenging is uncovering the nooks and crannies it falls into throughout the organization.

Depending on your business processes, credit card data could be stored on customer service PCs, inside spreadsheets in the marketing department, or on backup tapes being shipped off-premises.

As I research an upcoming feature on PCI, I’ve been speaking with a number of retailers and PCI auditors. Here are a few tips you might find useful.

1. Self assessments. CIOs are conducting internal audits of their IT teams and business units to find out who touches credit card data and where they keep it.

It’s important to get this information from all the stakeholders, particularly business units that take customer orders or use card data to analyze buying trends.

2. 3rd-party audits. It’s often instructive to bring in outside experts to help you ferret out credit card data. One auditor told me about a major grocery chain that had made significant efforts to purge card data from systems that didn’t specifically need it.

However, when he bought a pack of gum with his credit card and then reviewed the logs of the point of sale system, he found it was recording the full card number and expiration date.

Of course, third-party audits are expensive, so you have to weigh the cost against the potential fines of PCI violation—along with the risk of a malicious party getting access to that data source.

3. Use tools. One retailer bought a data leak prevention product to make sure intellectual property and other sensitive data didn’t leave the network.

He also used its discovery feature to crawl his headquarters network and remote offices for repositories of card numbers. He used the findings to approach the business units holding the data to ensure they were following IT policies for encryption.

He also crawls the network regularly for rogue data or non-compliant business units. Which brings us to…

4. Get your processes in order. 99 percent of PCI compliance revolves around having IT and business processes in place to secure card data. You have to ensure that business units understand IT policies—and that they are following them.

You may also want to tweak business processes to minimize (or eliminate) the use of credit card data wherever possible. For instance, credit card numbers can be replaced with unique identifiers to analyze customer purchases.