In today's IT business world, the big fish seems to always end up with the smaller one in its belly, no matter how long the process takes. The last example is BEA's acquisition by Oracle, after an unsuccessful attempt that took place back in October. Let's find out more about this story, shall we?

Back in October, BEA turned down Oracle's offer of about $6.7 million, claiming the bid was too low. It took almost 3 months for Oracle to come with a better offer, but this time, BEA accepted the price put by Oracle on the table - no less than $8.5 million!

According to Trip Chowdhry, analyst at Global Equities Research, "It's a fair price. It's a good deal for Oracle. It's a good deal for BEA.", so everyone should be happy, including shareholders, since BEA's shares rose 19 percent on the Nasdaq, while Oracle's also took a slight rise in value, up to $21.43.

While Oracle also was producing "middleware" computer systems, BEA's Weblogic and International Business Machines Corp's WebSphere application servers are known as standards among this type of integration software, so now Oracle would have a lot to gain, but we should also take into account that, being given the global economical tendency, "Companies are more reluctant to buy from smaller companies in a recession because you have uncertainty.", according to Jefferies & Co's Katherine Egbert.

If you want to create your own icons for Vista, XP, or the Mac, there are plenty of programs that can help you get the job done, but most of them only have basic functionality. Today, I just found out about the updates got by one of the higher-class icon editing program (in fact, it's a small family), IconCool, and so I have to draw your attention to this topic for a while...

The IconCool family has 3 members - IconCool Editor, IconCool Studio, and IconCool Studio Pro. All of them got updated to the same version number, exactly 5.26 Build 80108. Now, let me tell you a few words about each one of these programs...

IconCool Editor, priced at $29.95, is the smallest member of the family. This program is an easy to use yet powerful icon editor that allows you to create from scratch or edit existing icons, cursors, and web graphics.

IconCool Studio and Studio Pro, available for purchase at $39.95, or $59.95, are both complete solutions for editing and creating 32 bit XP icons, as well as Vista ones. Featuring powerful marquee tools and one for creating lighting effects with ease, IconCool Studio also supports Photoshop plugins and is able to load or export PSD files.

Trial versions of these programs can be downloaded from here, and you'll be able to use them for 30 days. Since there are no special system requirements for any IconCool product, a decent computer able to run Windows XP, at least, should be more than enough.

Windows Live Toolbar is a small application that's part of the wide Windows Live range of services coming from Microsoft, as an alternative to Google's suite dedicated especially to handle desktop search tasks, but not limited to that. A successor to MSN Search Toolbar, Windows Live Toolbar includes Windows Desktop Search, a direct competitor to Google Desktop Search, a software which runs in the background, indexing all files and email on the computer for faster retrieval. Windows Live Toolbar also comes with a form filler and an interface to Windows Live and MSN services, and - I was just about to forget - yesterday, it got a new version!

With this new release, the current version number of the software climbed up to 03.01.0146 (rather strange, don't you think?), but there's nothing special to be said about this new release. According to Microsoft, there are 6 big things to accomplish with this program - start a search from anywhere, as I just said above, chart a course with Windows Live local (this one sounds really cool, remains to be seen how well it works for some areas of the world), protect yourself from phishing and viruses with Windows Live OneCare Advisor, customize your Web experience, stay informed with the Live.com RSS news service, as well as obtaining instant information from every web page with smart menus.

System requirements are not really high, since if you have at least Windows XP SP2 and a computer capable of running it, as well as IE 6 or later, everything should be fine. To download this program, simply click here, and be sure to keep your eyes open while installing it, because you may end up installing some bundled applications that you don't need...

If you have an iPhone and you're not using its video player capabilities, then you shouldn't have got it in first place, but I don't want to think about that - let's suppose you have an iPhone, and you need to convert your favorite media clips to the format used by Apple's gadget. Apex iPhone Video Converter is a program coming from Apexsoft, and having exactly this purpose. Recently, it was updated to version 6.69, but since I never heard of it, let's check it out...

First of all, I should mention that Apex iPhone Video Converter is only available for the Widows platform, being fully compatible with Windows 98, Me, 2000, NT and XP, but I wasn't able to find any information on the producer's site about Vista compatibility. Unfortunately, a Mac OS X version is not available...

Having a user friendly interface and being extremey easy to use, Apex iPhone Video Converter features batch conversion and supports large video files, up to over 2GB in size, and is able to convert a long list of media files, including MPEG, DIVX, AVI, MOV or RM, to iPhone media format. The only problem is that you'll also need a bunch of external applications/codecs to take full advantage of these features.

Priced at $23, this program can be downloaded from here, as a trial version.

Microsoft's Paint application didn't get any significant improvement in Vista either, but there are plenty of good alternatives available, and some of them, like Paint.net, are light-years away from Ms Paint. Well, since Paint.net just got an update, bringing the current version up to 3.22, I thought this is a good occasion to tell you a few things about it...

I don't know if you are crazy about "Best Products of the Year xxxx", but if I tell you that PC World placed Paint.net on the 19th place in its "Top 100 Products of 2007", this should say a lot about the program we have here. Unfortunately, it's only available for computers running Windows, but other than that, it's a really impressive piece of code (I use it in Windows Vista for most image editing tasks, while having Gimp for this in Windows XP).

If you want to experience all the great filters and learn how to work with layers, it's obvious that you should download the program and play with it, and since this is not a software review, I will tell you only about the changes in the last two versions, 3.20 and 3.22.

Released about a month ago, on the 12th of December, Paint.net 3.20 came with a lot of enhancements and tweaks to the built-in filters, a new Effects menu, a better system for plugin management, as well as the ability to draw Fixed Ratio and Fixed Size selections using the Rectangle Select Tool.

Paint.net 3.22, less than two days old, is basically an update that comes with a few fixes, but it also has a new Reduce Noise effect, which is great for those using this program to retouch their photos. Other than that...just get the program, as I was saying earlier, and don't forget to share your experience with us!

Oh! One more thing - system requirements are not outrageous, but most important of them is the fact that you need to have .NET Framework 2.0, and Windows XP SP2, Vista or Windows Server 2003 SP1 or later. The recommended CPU should have at least 800Mhz, and the computer should also have at least 512MB of memory to run Paint.net smoothly. That should be everything...