A Melbourne recruitment firm has paid $11,190 to settle a lawsuit alleging it had been using Microsoft's Office 2007 without a valid licence. [ + ]

Flinders University and Cisco have signed an agreement that lays the foundations for Flinders to lead Australia in some of the most innovative parts of the internet. [ + ]

Hewlett-Packard (HP) will cut between 11,000 and 16,000 more jobs as part of changes to its ongoing restructure. [ + ]

Dutch regulators have declared Google's practice of aggregating user data to be a breach of local law, in a case which could have wider implications for the firm in the EU and elsewhere. [ + ]

Computer scientists have developed a technique to automatically allow one computer in a virtual network to monitor another for intrusions, viruses or anything else that could cause a computer to malfunction. [ + ]

Up to 50 new jobs will be created in Western Sydney over the next three years following the announcement yesterday by cloud computing company Rackspace of its investment in a new multimillion dollar data centre in Erskine Park. [ + ]

The success or failure of a recent agreement between NSW Trade & Investment and SAP, which will see the government department deploy SAP’s Business ByDesign SaaS (software as a service) ERP solution, will be an indicator of the future of cloud services in Australia, according to Ovum. [ + ]

The Chinese contact centre market positioned itself in third place in the Asia Pacific region in terms of revenue in 2010 and will overtake Australia as the second largest market by 2017, according to Frost & Sullivan. [ + ]

Sixty per cent of corporations are expected to implement formal programs for monitoring external social media for security breaches and incidents by 2015, according to Gartner. Many organisations already engage in monitoring as part of brand management and marketing, but Gartner believes less than 10% currently use these same techniques as part of their security monitoring program. [ + ]

Metronode, a subsidiary of Leighton Contractors, today opened what it terms a “large-scale, energy-efficient data centre” in Derrimut, Victoria. The facility uses direct free air cooling and modular plant systems to help increase power utilisation efficiency. [ + ]

Optus has expanded the availability of 4G business services to Sydney and Perth. From today, customers will be able to utilise USB mobile broadband and mobile Wi-Fi hotspots in the two cities. [ + ]

Australian company Barbador has joined the Google Cloud Platform Partner Program as a services partner. The move will allow the company to help clients develop solutions based on Google’s cloud platform. [ + ]

A new report by professional services firm Deloitte explores how conventional payments infrastructure is changing with the emergence of a new generation of payments solutions using technology to interact and transact with people. [ + ]

The number of outsourced home agents will double by 2015 thanks to innovations around security, vertical market expansion and forays beyond the traditional US market, according to analyst firm Ovum. [ + ]

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) is seeking comment on a proposed access determination for the declared local bistream access service (LBAS). [ + ]