The job market in the IT industry will remain challenging because corporations plan only marginal hikes in their budgets and plan to reduce budgets for contractors, according to a survey of the US industry by Gartner.

The survey serves as a signal for Bermuda companies and IT workers about what could happen next year on the Island. US companies plan to hike their spending on technology by 5.5 per cent in 2006, according to the Gartner survey.

Most of the investments will be directed towards application development and integration. While spending on security and storage segments will level off in 2006, mobile devices will become a major purchasing priority. Development tools and middleware will also attract investment. The findings are based on a survey of 1,500 IT managers? plans for next year.

Small and midsize businesses ? those with 20 to 99 employees ? plan to increase IT budgets by seven per cent in 2006, while larger companies plan smaller increases of 2.4 per cent. ?Despite the spending increase, the message to IT managers is clear: You must continue to improve the efficiency of established IT investment areas if you want to fund substantial growth in IT or add IT professionals to the work force,? Gartner stated.

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Do you like to be on the cutting edge of software? Microsoft has released version 1.0 of its experimental VirtualWiFi software. The free software allows Windows XP users to use a single wireless card to connect to multiple wireless networks at the same time. The current release does not support WEP or WPA encryption methods, so take care.

VirtualWiFi is software for wireless LAN (WLAN) cards.

It allows a single WLAN card to appear as multiple virtual WLAN cards to the user. The user can then configure each virtual card to connect to a different wireless network. The new software would allow you to make a number of actions not possible using a single WLAN card. For example, you will be able to connect to a guest?s machine or play games over an ad hoc network, while surfing the web via the company?s network. You would also be able to use VirtualWiFi to connect your ad hoc network, which may contain many nodes, to the Internet using only one node. Get it at MicrosoftResearch

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A reader wrote me to ask about a previous column on RSS readers to ask if this referred to the same software as used for podcasting.

?My brother-in-law was trying to explain that you can pick up news reports and download to your portable player ie. iPod or any other compatible media. He had showed me a video he was watching on his hand held device,? the reader said in her e-mail. ?I went to a the website podcastalley.com but did not quite understand everything.?

Now that is one techie brother-in-law! RSS and podcasting are the same principle for different formats. RSS is used for online text feeds, while podcast readers are used for audio and video files. To make it more confusing most RSS programs support podcasting.

With podcasting listeners can receive regular updates of audio files sent to them by providers. For example you can receive a news feed as text from a news site with your RSS reader and an audio file using your podcatching program. To receive both types of files you have to subscribe to either a free or paid content provider on the Internet.

If you go to Fox 99.3 radio on the Internet (Fox99.3) you will see that the station allows you to get concert listings sent directly to your RSS Reader. You can also add the station?s podcasts to your podcasting program.

For more information try (as the reader suggested) PodcastAlley. There you can download podcast readers and get more information on technology that?s making us more mobile.