The Mozilla Foundation is putting its weight behind an effort to create an open video format on the Web. It is doing this by giving $100,000 in grant money, to be administered by the Wikimedia Foundation, towards the development and support of Theora, an open-source video codec. More importantly, it is also building support into the Firefox Web browser for both Theora and Vorbis, an open source audio codec.

Many other video codecs and encoders require licensing fees or come with restrictions. Mozilla hopes to change this over time. Although I suspect the Theora video codec is inferior to other technologies, as long as it can improve over time, it could eventually become a serious contender to MPEG-4 or Windows Media Video (WMV).

Google Apps is a suite of online applications like gmail, Google calendar, Google Docs, etc. that are packaged and tailored for business use.

When Google Apps first launched in August 2006 it was free and described as “a service available at no cost to organizations of all shapes and sizes.”

Free for everyone lasted until February 2007, when Google announced a premier edition of the service with more storage and an uptime guarantee. The cost was (and is) $50 per user per year.

When Google Apps first launched up to 200 user accounts could be created for each business under the free version. But that limit was quietly reduced to just 100 user accounts. And then when the reseller program was announced earlier this month, the limit was cut in half again, to just 50 accounts.

The Eclipse Foundation announced a major upgrade to the Eclipse PHP Development Tools project, PDT 2.0.

As a leading contributor to the PDT effort, PHP specialist Zend Technologies is pushing PHP as a key element of the Eclipse platform and as a language used for more mainstream development.

“Release 2.0 demonstrates our continued commitment to the Eclipse community,” said Andi Gutmans, co-founder and senior vice president of R&D and alliances at Zend Technologies. “PDT is not only the premier open-source PHP development tool, but is also the basis for Zend’s commercial IDE [integrated development environment] for PHP, Zend Studio for Eclipse. Additionally, in order to further align with Eclipse, PDT will become part of the Eclipse Galileo simultaneous release.”

Eclipse Foundation officials said the focus of the PDT 2.0 release is to add support for the object-oriented programming features of PHP and to improve the overall user experience of the PDT environment. PDT provides all the basic code editing capabilities developers need to get started developing PHP applications.

If you think the biggest problem with a camera phone is the poor quality of the photos, a member of Congress might make you think again. Earlier this month, Rep. Pete King (R-N.Y.) introduced a bill in the House of Representatives that would ban camera phones from having a silent mode when taking a picture.

The Camera Phone Predator Alert Act (H.R. 414) would “require any mobile phone containing a digital camera to sound a tone whenever a photograph is taken.” What’s more, the bill would prohibit such handsets from being equipped with a means of disabling or silencing the tone. Enforcement would be through the Consumer Product Safety Commission.

A New Zealand man who bought a used MP3 player from an Oklahoma thrift store found names, cell phone numbers, and Social Security numbers of American soldiers on the device, according to news site TVNZ.

Chris Ogle, who paid $18 for the device, also found lists of soldiers based in Afghanistan, personnel who fought in Iraq, and equipment deployments, as well as private information about soldiers, including which ones are pregnant

Apple has been awarded a patent that appears to cover much of the iPhone’s multitouch user interface.

World of Apple spotted the patent, which was awarded last Tuesday to several Apple executives, including Steve Jobs, iPhone software chief Scott Forstall, and Wayne Westerman, one of the founders of a company called Fingerworks that Apple acquired in 2005.

The patent is extremely long, and covers many of the methods used by the iPhone to display data, such as pinch-to-zoom Web browsing and swipe-to-scroll.