Cisco has launched an initiative to help cities use technology to cultivate sustainable, intelligent industries as well as citizen services and overall economic growth. The initiative is called "Intelligent Urbanization."

Spammers are now taking their cue from search engines and advertisers by making their emails more personalized in attempts to steal users information, according to a new security report from Cisco.

The report found there was a 90 percent growth in threats coming from legitimate domains, nearly double what was seen in 2007. While targeted spear-phishing represents about 1 percent of all phishing attacks it is on track to become more widespread as savvy criminals personalize spam and make messages appear more credible.

Cisco has released a new survey conducted by Compete about the influence of online video and social media applications on American’s political engagement.

The Internet was cited by 62 percent of respondents as a regularly used source for 2008 presidential election information and coverage, which was surpassed only by television (82%).

Traffic to popular online video sites increased fivefold in 2008 compared to 2004. About 30 percent of registered voters said they used online video to follow 2008 presidential election coverage.

Cisco aims to bolster its strategy of building internal software innovations. The company announced that it is acquiring presence and messaging software provider Jabber.This is just Cisco’s latest venture into new markets following purchases of WebEx, IronPort, Securent and PostPath.

It’s time for our periodic We-Suck-At-Internet rant, which entails comparing and despairing (thanks, Stewart Smalley) over how slow the Internet is in the US. Once again, Japan has us beat and is ready for next-generation applications like high-quality video streaming. But Slovenia? Lithuania? Latvia? They’re faster than us, too?

The Internet is going to be a busy, busy place by the time 2012 rolls around.  A new report from Cisco suggests that global IP traffic will have sextupled by then, with – depending on how you look at it – online video being mostly to thank or blame.

Cisco Systems Inc. defended itself against a human rights group’s claims that the company aided Chinese officials in building a "great firewall" to block Internet user’s access to anti-government content.

IBM and Cisco did their part to make it easier to care for the big cats and several other species residing at North Carolina’s Carnivore Preservation Trust.

Last week, Google partnered with the United Nations in an effort to end global poverty.  It was truly startling to see the two entities together, and all the better since they had such a laudable goal.  The partnership may not have been too effective, though, and Google’s done something about that.

Lead by Sue Bohle – a few friends on the panel, including Brian Solis and John Earnhardt of Cisco. Eastman Kodak, SAP, PRWeb and BlogAds were also part of the panel.

Google has partnered with many companies and organizations, but a new development is far larger, and should have much more of a real-world impact, than anything we expected to see: the search giant is now working with Cisco and the United Nations to decrease global poverty.

Have a seat; your hypocrisy detectors are about to blow. First the good news: The House of Representatives Committee on Foreign Affairs passed the Global Online Freedom Act, which would penalize companies like Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, and Cisco for aiding countries like China spy on political dissidents.

This week I am attending my very first Salesforce conference (DreamForce) and must admit it’s one of the largest conferences I have ever been to. Apparently there are over 7,000 people attending this conference and the Moscone Conference Center is a perfect venue to accommodate that many attendees.

First HP did it, now Cisco Systems has issued a Social Media Press Release. Not only is the release on the News@Cisco site, but it’s been distributed as a MarketWire press release (shown here picked up by CNN/Money—interestingly without the videos, but links to them instead).