- Red Hat (RHT) just got into the S&P 500 stock index! This is yet another indicator pointing to the growing importance that open source is gaining across industries.

- On July 29th Yahoo! and Microsoft inked a 10-year deal and joined hands in the ongoing search engine battle with a revenue sharing deal. Under the agreement, Microsoft, with Bing, will provide the search technology for Yahoo! search, while Yahoo! will focus on search engine advertising. Yahoo! also gets guaranteed revenues for the first 5 years of the deal. The move enables MS-Yahoo! to garner a greater search engine market share and slightly narrow the gap between them and rival (and market leader) Google.

- Google is releasing a preview build of a new Web-based communication and collaboration tool by late September. Called Google Wave, the open-source tool will initially be offered to about 100,000 people who have volunteered to provide feedback. Google Wave — based on the new HTML 5 markup language for building Web pages — is already available to developers via a “sandbox” version of the tool’s enabling APIs. The tool will let individuals communicate and work together on “waves” — collaborative communications containing richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, gadgets and other elements. Each wave is formulated as a “tree structure of messages” within which conventional e-mail and instant-messaging capabilities are combined and delivered in almost real time on a keystroke-by-keystroke basis.