Internet marketers have been selling ebooks for years, but now ebooks – particularly those published by major publishing houses and designed for Amazon’s Kindle and other e-reader hardware devices – are really taking off, with mainstream ebook sales estimated at just under $170 million in 2009.

According to the Association of American Publishers (AAP), ebook sales have steadily grown over the past decade, but have soared in recent years. The AAP estimates that U.S. net sales to its 85 member publishers totaled a record $169.5 million in 2009, up 176.5 percent from the 2008 figure of $61.3 million.

Six out of ten (65 percent) teachers and school administrators from across the U.S. believe that interactive and e-learning tools will soon replace the printed textbook.

Based on a survey of teachers and school administrators conducted at the ASCD Critical Transformation Show & Conference in early March, the findings echo those from a recent report by the Gates Foundation and Scholastic in which only 12 percent of teachers see improved academic achievement through traditional textbooks.

While the worldwide market for smartphone applications is expected to grow from 102 million consumers in 2009 to 974 million in 2013, a report from research2guidance indicates that only 10 percent of Fortune 2000 companies are targeting their customers with a smartphone application.

Of those corporations that have published applications, the vast majority (91 percent) have created applications to give access to their core products or for promotional purposes. Only 9 percent have created applications as stand-alone products.

Jimdo has traditionally provided an online toolset for setting up a website, including a free version which lets you set up a ‘.jimdo’ website. Now Jimdo is offering a store option, Store, which you can use to set up an online store on your site.

In the same vein as its website builder, Jimdo Store looks intuitive and easy to use. You can provide a comprehensive catalog which customers can search or browse by popularity, product type, or any other criterion. You can display products in a variety of ways – high resolution, detailed, and from all angles and even via a detail-zoom feature. You can also include additional product information via videos, PDFs, widgets and other multimedia objects.

IT managers at small and medium-sized organizations believe that malicious software (malware) spread through social networks, Web 2.0 applications and other web-based vectors will pose the greatest threat to information security in 2010.

Based on Webroot’s survey of 803 information technology (IT) professionals at companies with 100 to 5,000 employees in the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia, a massive 80 percent of IT managers expect Web 2.0-based malware to be a problem in 2010.

The launch of Apple’s iPad, along with more companies releasing ebook readers, will see Amazon’s share of ebook sales drop from 90 percent to 35 percent in the next five years.

That’s according to Credit Suisse analyst Spencer Wang, who reckons the release of the iPad and the new ebook agency pricing model – which will force Amazon to raise its retail prices in line with Apple’s pricing – will impinge on sales of both the Kindle ebook reading device and Kindle ebook sales. Thereafter, Wang expects Apple, Amazon and Google to split the ebooks market.

AOL owned Surphace is a tool that lets bloggers and other online publishers add related content links to their articles and posts. These typically appear below or alongside an article or blog post as a list of links to other articles that relate to the given article or post.

To date, Surphace has provided large blogs and publishers – from TMZ to Engadget to The Wall Street Journal – with the ability to tailor the list and types of related content links offered by Surphace, whilst smaller sites were restricted to a standard format.

Global IP Solutions’ and Research Now’s recent survey of more than 1,200 business professionals in the United States, Japan, South Korea and China reveals that more companies are using video chat/conferencing.

Among the findings of the survey were that:

Microsoft Corp’s global SMB IT and Hosted IT Index 2010 indicates that small and mid-size businesses (SMBs) across multiple segments tend to make more money, the more advanced is their use of technology.

Despite the global recession, 52 percent of SMBs reported an increase in revenue in 2009, up from 39 percent in 2008.

Whilst a recent survey of small and medium sized businesses (SMBs) indicates greater use of cloud technologies and hosted solutions, most SMBs still host their own websites, email and ecommerce software.

Based on Microsoft’s SMB IT and Hosted IT Index 2010 – the result of surveying 3,192 SMBs in 15 countries – Michael Korbacher, director of EMEA Software plus Services in the Communications Sector at Microsoft said: