Nearly 5 million consumers have downloaded a Skype Web telephony application that launched Sunday, allowing users of Apple Inc’s iPhone to use privately held Skype’s service over the cellular network for the first time, Skype said on Wednesday.

Before the launch of the application for use on high-speed third generation (3G) networks on May 30, consumers could only use Skype on their iPhone when they had access to Wi-Fi

Microsoft Corp launched an updated version of its Office software on Wednesday, aiming to keep its grip on the hugely profitable business application market while countering the challenge of free online alternatives from Google Inc.

The world’s largest software company is upgrading its popular Word, Excel, Outlook and PowerPoint applications and rolling out its own online versions to keep up with the new class of mobile, Web-connected users that has emerged since the last upgrade in 2006.

Microsoft announced several improvements on Wednesday, such as editing photos in Word, using video in PowerPoint, collaborating on documents and connecting email contacts to Facebook information.

But the biggest change is Microsoft’s move into the “cloud” — allowing users to manipulate documents stored on remote servers from anywhere — where Google has been setting the pace.

Adobe is no longer investing in iPhone-based Flash development, Adobe principal product manager Mike Chambers wrote in a Tuesday blog post.

The move comes after Apple put out new draft of its iPhone developer program license, which banned private APIs and required apps to be written in Objective-C, C, C , or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine.

“Essentially, this has the effect of restricting applications built with a number of technologies, including Unity, Titanium, MonoTouch, and Flash CS5,” Chamber wrote. “While it appears that Apple may selectively enforce the terms, it is our belief that Apple will enforce those terms as they apply to content created with Flash CS5.”

Adobe will still provide the ability to target the iPhone and iPad in Flash CS5, but the company is “not currently planning any additional investments in that feature,” he said.

Computers in companies, hospitals and schools around the world got stuck repeatedly rebooting themselves Wednesday after an antivirus program identified a normal Windows file as a virus.

McAfee Inc. confirmed that a software update it posted at 9 a.m. Eastern time caused its antivirus program for corporate customers to misidentify a harmless file. It has posted a replacement update for download.

McAfee could not say how many computers were affected, but judging by online postings, the number was at least in the thousands and possibly in the hundreds of thousands.

Opera Software’s Internet browser for Apple’s iPhone was downloaded more than one million times during the first day when it was available to consumers, the Norwegian firm said on Thursday.

On April 13 Apple accepted distribution of Opera’s browser for its iPhone after a long review, opening a new and potentially lucrative market it has so far closely guarded.

Opera’s browser promises up to six times faster download speeds than Apple’s own browser, and to cut data traffic by up to 90 percent.

Amazon.com Inc said on Thursday it released an application to allow its Kindle e-books to be read on Apple Inc Mac computers.

Amazon, maker of the popular Kindle e-reader, is trying to cement its leading position as the top maker of e-readers — and distributor of e-books — by making content available on other devices.

The move comes just two weeks ahead of the launch of Apple’s new iPad tablet, a device with broader functionality than the Kindle, but which includes an e-reader application. The iPad is seen as a strong challenge to Amazon.

Even if you’re careful about cookies or even if you use your browser’s private surfing feature, sites can still track you through cookies stored by Flash. However, soon enough the next version of Flash, 10.1, will support private browsing and will integrate with browsers to turn it on when the browser itself is in private browsing mode. Browsers still store data during a private browser session, but they will delete it all at the end of the session. The same will be true of Flash private browsing.

Another Flash news: Finally, a little bit of respect from Adobe with this alpha release of the Adobe Flash Player 10 that was made available for all Linux 64-bit enthusiasts! As noted, ‘this is a prerelease version,’ so handle with care. Just remove any existing Flash player and extract the new .so file in /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins (or /usr/lib/opera/plugins).

Mozilla has officially released the first mobile Firefox, a condensed version of the popular open-source browser that runs on Nokia’s Maemo platform.

Codenamed ‘Fennec,’ Firefox 1.0 for Maemo was previously available only as a beta. Mozilla calls this the first mobile web browser to accomodate add-ons - long a staple of the Firefox desktop browser. More than 40 add-ons are already available for the new mobile platform, including AdBlock Plus, the most famous of Firefox extensions.

For those small business owners who choose to do their own taxes this year, there are more software choices than ever to help them file. Indeed, tax prep software companies, like banks and credit card companies before them, are now increasingly targeting small businesses. And recognizing that many small business owners seamlessly blend their personal and professional lives, some software companies are now bundling their individual and small business tax return products together to save you time and money as well.

But sorting through the many different product tiers, price structures, and claims can be confusing, so here’s a quick rundown of what three popular tax prep software companies are offering this year.

Makers of the multinetwork chat application Trillian threw open doors to the company’s latest beta, previously available onto to private beta testers, allowing any Windows user to test Trillian 4.1 beta before the code becomes final.

Chief among the changes in the beta are new social networking features and tight integration with Windows 7 for users of Microsoft’s most recent operating system. Trillian 4.1 beta supports story links and avatar pictures in more locations on the interface, as well as Twitter hash tags and direct (@) replies. You can now also tweet from the contact list, follow and unfollow users, and edit a message before you retweet. Here’s the full list of changes for Twitter and Facebook users.

Although the current stable version, Trillian Astra 4.0, works fine in Windows 7, the beta brings on optimizations, like support for jump lists, and an animated progress bar that displays during file transfers

Lavasoft has updated its popular malware and spyware detection and removal tool Ad-Aware. Rather than a dramatic redo, version 8.1 builds on the improvements made in the previous version. The new version is faster, has better removal abilities, and introduces a behavioral detection engine.

Called Genotype, Ad-Aware’s heuristic-based behavioral detection engine isn’t explicitly called out in the interface. However, I noticed that files that had been flagged falsely as threats in earlier versions were no longer called out as such, and the Quick Scan was able to complete in about three minutes, as opposed to 10 minutes in the previous version. These are empirical observations, of course, but this version’s improvements should be easy to see for longtime users of Ad-Aware.

Removal techniques have also been improved. Lavasoft is calling the new system Neutralizer, although it’s not called out as such in the program interface. What users will see is a “family” of grouped similar threats, such as cookies, the category of the threat, and the action taken. The program defaults to the Recommended action, which means you need to click on the drop-down menu to the right of the listing to see what action will be taken on a per-threat basis. The big action buttons introduced in version 8 still reside at the bottom of the window, which feels further than necessary–it’d be better to have the action button closer to where the mouse already is, at the top of the window.

The upcoming version 3.6 of Firefox will be able to tell if you’re listing to starboard–and pass that information along to applications running in the browser.

That’s because the browser will be able to detect the orientation of laptops and mobile devices equipped with accelerometers that can tell which way is down. The reason for the work: Web applications running in the browser will be able to use the information, useful for labyrinth-type games with virtual marbles rolling around boards, and any number of other gaming situations.