We have some exciting things going on in (mt) Labs this summer. Following the beta release of the (mt) AccountCenter for iPhone we’re now preparing our new (mt) Community Forums! The new forums will help you connect with other (mt) customers for tech, business and much more. If you’re interested in participating in the beta program for (mt) Community Forums or just want to see what we’re working on please visit (mt) Labs for details.

It’s finally here and waiting to tame any demanding app, site or dev team! With its 15,000 RPM SAS drives (one of the fastest I/O in the industry), 300GB RAID 1 drives, 4GB of RAM, a 4-Core Xeon processor, and stackable, you’ll have your hardware needs covered.

But what sets this server apart, besides the price and no set-up fees, is that it’s a single-tenant virtual server that’s easily configured any way you see fit. If your current (dv) needs room to grow, you now have a portable OS that can be rapidly moved with virtually no downtime. Need to develop or deploy several servers, now you can with unlimited Plesk licenses. All of this and more is our goal for the (dpv) Nitro: Powerful, yet easy to operate. Diesel, Mashable and Plasq (MySkitch) agree and we think you will too.

Our engineering team has upgraded @Mail to version 5.0.4.  This webmail upgrade for the Grid comes with many exciting new features outlined below.

New Features:

• faster performance
• enhanced email searching
• improved spell check support
• improved address book importing & management
• better html email viewing & editing
• hundreds of minor bug fixes
• now powered by PHP

All Grid-Service customers may immediately begin using this upgraded version by visiting yourdomain.com/webmail, webmail.yourdomain.com or by clicking through the AccountCenter. If you’ve been using the previous version of @Mail many clients have reported the need to clear their browsers cache for an optimal experience. We hope you enjoy the new enhancements, and look forward to your feedback!

Our new GPU (Grid Performance Unit) analysis tool is live inside the AccountCenter. This extraordinary new tool will help you track GPU usage of scripts, software, and files on your Grid account. The tool will also offer suggestions to reduce usage.

There are two report types, a basic mode which will provide the number of GPU’s used each day and an advanced mode which will show hourly or daily GPU usage for individual pages. The highlights are a powerful interactive graph, a handy FAQ, and some helpful tool tips via small alert icons.

IMPORTANT NOTICE: GPU’s are now activated but billable GPUs will not begin to accumulate until after July 15th. To get more details regarding when your account will be affected please visit our KnowledgeBase article.

In February, (mt) started giving back to the world by creating our World Community Grid team. The World Community Grid’s goal is to create the largest public computing grid benefiting humanity by collectively contributing idle computer time to nonprofit research. Over 304,000 members and 16,000 teams comprised of universities, corporations and organizations have joined with IBM to contribute to these causes for humanity. (mt) shot up to #113, Surpassing Spain in total points and we’re now beating Russia in daily points. We’ve contributed to the fight against Cancer, AIDS, Muscular Distrophy and more and we’re inviting you today to join our team (it’s free) and make a difference in the world.

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We’d like to take a moment on JFK’s birthday–the creator of the Peace Corps–to shine a light on one of our clients; kiva.org. If you haven’t heard about them yet, they are the only non-profit micropayment organization who’s helping the world’s working poor through your loans. You contribute and interact with members requesting business loans, and they pay the loans back and build a future for themselves in their developing nation.

Amazing as the Peace Corps is, we think kiva.org is equally remarkable as a technological high-water mark in the challenge to better our world.

Our engineering team is now 30% complete with implementing the enhanced SmartPool v.2 system for Grid-Service clients. We will continue providing updates as additional progress is made.

Today we added a feature to the standard Plesk license that comes with all new (dv) Dedicated-Virtual Servers which allows for the use of one additional language pack for free! In addition to English the list of available language packs for Plesk 8.1.1 is as follows:

• German
• Spanish
• Japanese

To install one of these additional language packs please register with SWsoft and download the appropriate packages. This new feature is available immediately on all newly purchased (dv) Dedicated-Virtual Servers and will be added to existing (dv) 3.0 servers in 2-3 weeks.

Updated: Django GridContainer Beta now accepting applications.

Due to increasing popularity and customer demand, our engineering team is working hard on getting a container infrastructure in place on the (gs) Grid-Service platform that will support Django. For those of you who haven’t heard of it, Django is a web application framework implemented in Python that simplifies development and promotes the use of good, clean design principles.

The implementation will be technically similar to our existing RoR containers when completed. There is a fair amount of engineering yet to be done before we are ready for a production release, but we are working as quickly as resources will allow. Stay tuned to this blog for more information on the project as it progresses.

We’re big fans of cool eye candy here at (mt), and one of the best toolkits out there for adding some snazzy effects to your site is Mootools. And we’re not just saying that because they host with us. Mootools is compact, easy to use, extensible and lightweight. They’ve just released version 1.1 for general consumption. You can see what’s new, check out the demos, or go directly to the downloads. Enjoy!