Daily news beat for July 14, 2008

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Jul 14, 20082 mins

Enterprises become the battleground for social networking. While multibillion-dollar social networking companies cover the consumer, collegiate, and professional realms, they have yet to reach the corporate world, and it remains unclear which category of vendors will deliver more value to the enterprise.

Big Blue researchers tout Highlight, a software extension to Firefox that lets users create their own versions of Web sites that are easier to navigate on a small screen. IBM slims down the Web for your phone.

Borland issues three new tools to leverage the company’s Open Application Lifecycle Management bus to save users from the pitfalls of software development projects failing, going over budget, or missing milestones, the company claims.

Sun and Fujitsu, meanwhile, give Sparc servers a speed bump by injecting a quad-core chip into the line of Sparc Enterprise Servers, delivering what one analyst described as “a decent incremental improvement in performance.”

And Robert X. Cringely reports that iPhone’s second coming is in need of salvation. Since somebody at Apple thought it was a great idea to pick the same day to activate iPhones, launch the iPhone AppStore, and make the iPhone 2.0 firmware upgrade available for downloading, all via iTunes, new iPhone 3G’s were turned into bricks for a day, right along with some of the iPhone 1.0 models. Other users, meanwhile, were angered to learn that locating 3G coverage was like looking for Waldo. Related: Apple’s special sauce.