Open Web Developer News Desk

Yahoo Open Sources Traffic Server Code

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 17:00:00 EST

It says Traffic Server enables the session management, authentication, configuration management, load balancing and routing of an entire cloud computing stack. It’s supposed to offer fast, reliable and scalable access to cached online content and speed responses to requests for stored web objects, such as files, news articles or images, reducing bandwidth usage and costs.

Economy Beginning To Accelerate: Cisco CEO

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 15:45:00 EST

Cisco CEO John Chambers, who has turned into something of an economic oracle probably because he is more in command of his catbird seat than most big-time CEOs, said Wednesday when Cisco reported its quarterly results that the economy hit a “clear tipping point” before mid-summer and is now accelerating worldwide, enough for Cisco itself to start cautiously spending again. He’s planning targeted hiring.

Likewise Simplifies Upgrade Path for Open Source Authentication Software

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 17:00:00 EST

Likewise announced that it is offering three starter packs that combine its Likewise Enterprise software with support and training services. The starter packs are designed to help customers move from its open source software to Likewise Enterprise. Likewise Enterprise makes it easy for IT managers to authenticate users, control access to applications and data, centrally manage settings with group policies and create reports for regulatory audits. Likewise Enterprise is also the only solution to provide 100 percent native support for Apple’s Workgroup Manager application.

Google Open Sources its JavaScript Tools

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 16:00:00 EST

Google Thursday open sourced its Closure JavaScript tools – a compiler, a cross-browser, server-agnostic library and a bunch of precompiled templates – in the name of making web apps easier to build. Recall that Gmail, Google Docs and Google Maps are JavaScript-intensive applications. Well, Google says the Closure widgetry is a key part of the JavaScript infrastructure behind its web apps. And the more web apps, the more of a headache for Microsoft and its ilk.

IBM Betas Test & Dev Cloud

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 15:30:00 EST

It’s called plainly enough IBM Smart Business Development and Test on the IBM Cloud and will provide compute and storage as a service with Rational Software Delivery Services, WebSphere middleware and Information Management database thrown in.

4th International Cloud Computing Conference & Expo Starts Today

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 08:10:00 EST

A round-up of the wide range of important issues and timely topics due to be discussed by over 130 industry experts at SYS-CON's 4th International Cloud Computing Conference & Expo, opening today at the Santa Clara Convention Center, November 2-4, 2009. From Building Scalable and Extensible RIAs in the Cloud to Yahoo! Cloud @ Internet Scale.

LA to Go with Google Apps on Condition . . .

Sat, 31 Oct 2009 23:45:00 EDT

The city of Los Angeles has okayed a $7.2 million deal with CSC to rip out a lot of its existing Novell GroupWise e-mail systems and whatnot and replace it with Google Apps provided CSC agrees to pay a pre-set penalty if there’s a security breach. They still need to dicker about that according to the AP.

Zeus to Manage the Cloud

Sat, 31 Oct 2009 09:00:00 EDT

Zeus Technology, the Anglo-American concern whose web server ran 3% of the world’s web sites back before the dot.com bubble burst, third in the race behind Apache and Microsoft, was asking around among CIOs, IT director and senior IT managers at large organizations and came to find out that although 75% of them, give or take, are either in the cloud or soon will be, only 27% have a solution in place to manage it and so are basically flying without a net.

Chrome Sued for Patent Infringement

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 13:45:00 EDT

An Israeli company called Red Bend has sued Google’s Chrome browser for patent infringement in the district court in Massachusetts. It says Chrome’s Courgette differential compression algorithm treads on its widgetry. Courgette, which launched in July, sends just partial application updates to the browser to save on bandwidth and reduce vulnerabilities.

Oracle+MySQL Opponents Take to the Barricades

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 05:45:00 EDT

Monty Widenius, the creator of the MySQL open source database – which is apparently all that stands between Oracle and its acquisition of Sun – thinks that Oracle shouldn’t have his baby and that the European Commission – whose investigation into MySQL has put the Oracle-Sun merger in limbo – should force Oracle to spit it out to another company.

LA Council Insists On Added Security Breach Penalty As It Oks Move to Google’s ‘Cloud’

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 19:00:00 EDT

The Los Angeles City Council voted today to move the city's 30,000 email users to a system provided by Google, but only after a provision that the city be compensated if there is security breach in the data held on Google's servers. Consumer Watchdog had said that the security provisions for the Google "cloud computing" system for email and other applications remained untested and opposed the $7.25 million contract. However, the nonpartisan, nonpartisan consumer group had argued that if the contact were approved, it should contain a provision requiring "liquidated damages" or a payment in the event of a security breach. Council voted to add the penalty provision 9-3.

Google Apps: Not as Cheap as They Look

Sun, 25 Oct 2009 06:00:00 EDT

The city of Los Angeles can’t make up its mind whether to trash its clunky Novell system and go with Google Apps for e-mail and office applications, citing costs and necessity. It was supposed to be a showcase account for Google. The decision will now move from LA’s budget and finance committee to the full city council for a vote next week, according to the LA Times.

SproutCore Release Candidate 1 Hits the Streets

Sun, 25 Oct 2009 03:00:00 EDT

Last night I merged the final set of changes for the first release candidate of SproutCore 1.0. I also published a new gem (build 1.0.1008) so you can get the official release quite easily. Just open your terminal [on Mac or Linux] and type:

sudo gem install sproutcore

Then enjoy!

If you just want a taste of what the release candidate can do, check out the demos at:

http://demo.sproutcore.com

Especially try the SampleControls app, where you can see an example of over 300 views rendered on a single page (in the Controls tab).

What’s In the Box?

In case you haven’t heard, SproutCore 1.0 is a major revision of the entire SproutCore platform. New build tools, new data store, new view layer, massively upgraded bindings and property observing and more. Our primary goals for this release were performance and stability. I’m happy to report we achieved both in spades.

Fast, Fast, Fast! Make it fast!

I created SproutCore in the first place was because I wanted to build fast applications on the web. I believe the web is the ultimate application platform, but it will only be so when we can build apps that are just as fast and fluid as their native cousins.

While the 0.9 code I think proved this concept; we hadn’t really achieved parity yet. Our goal with 1.0 was to make sure SproutCore apps could load on any desktop browser in under 3 seconds, even if the app is big and complex and has a large data set.

We passed this goal actually; by 50%. Most SproutCore apps can load in under 1.5 second with the proper deployment. You results may vary; but if they do it is unlikely SproutCore will be the bottleneck.

Here are just a few of the big enhancements we added to make this possible:

The build tools can now automatically combine your JavaScript and CSS to minimize the number of assets you have to download. Usually, you’ll only need to get 2 scripts and 2 stylesheets that’s it.
Output apps are also designed for caching. If you follow our deployment guide, your app will be able to essentially “live” in your user’s browser cache; eliminating network latency issues for the SproutCore part entirely [after first load].
We also made it possible to break your application into loadable bundles that can be deferred until you actually need them. This means if you have a large app you an write portions of it so they only load when they are actually needed; keeping your initial page weight down to a minimum.
On the framework level, our view layer was rewritten specifically around the major performance bottlenecks in IE. Our new layer can render 300 views client side in IE in about 100msec (on my Mac Book Air). It’s even faster in the other browsers.
Once rendered, all views on the page are now displayed using absolute positioning. This not only virtually eliminates cross browser issues for display - it also makes the browser actually render your content faster.
We also rewrote the datastore layer to “lazy evaluate” queries and data changes. This means you can easily shove a large number of records into the data store - some people have been using 50,000 or more records each time their app loads - and we’ll handle it just fine. You can load those records often in just a few hundred msec.
Finally, the code property observing and bindings layer that underpins all of SproutCore was massively optimized. Notifications are sent less often, use less memory, and they are generally 3x faster than the 0.9 code.

All of these improvements essentially mean you can make just about any SproutCore app load and run in just a few seconds. The only piece of your infrastructure we can’t control is the part of your server that delivers actual data. If you can make that component blazing fast as well, your web app will knock the socks off of a native app any day.

If you want an example of this performance, just visit the Tasks app (running 1.0 Beta code on top of Google App Engine) and login as “guest”. You can also checkout the new SproutCore demos linked below.

No More Changes!

SproutCore is a large framework. It has over 25,000 lines of code. We wanted to make SproutCore stable - meaning both the API we published would not change underneath you (or at least it would change in a controlled way) and that features we added would continue to work; even as we introduced new code.

We started on this goal by adding nearly 5,500 unit tests across the entire platform. It’s a lot of unit tests. Currently, on Safari 4 and Firefox at least, every single one of these unit tests pass green. IE7 and IE8 each file 18 tests due to issues with the tests themselves rather than the code they test; we aim to have these tests fixed by the time 1.0 is final as well.

We also massively reworked the entire API, scrubbing it for consistency and cleaning up areas that were confusing or made it too easy to do things wrong or too hard to do things right.

This API review led to a lot of church and instability, ironically, during development which was an endless source of frustration for those few brave souls who were building on 1.0 before it was finished. It was worth the pain, however. The new API is easy to use and generally works well.

We will always want to polish bits of the API here and there, but I’m convinced that we have a clear path to evolve our code now without breaking your existing code in major ways again.

What’s Next?

The release candidate is out. This means we are “done” with the development of SproutCore 1.0. Please test it out if you can and send us feedback. If you find a bug or want a change in, please still submit it. We can take changes up till just before we release thanks to our unit tests.

The core team will be working on finishing documentation on the wiki, validating example applications, and updating the website for our final release. We would also like to have a party in San Francisco for the release.

When these things are ready, SproutCore 1.0 will be fast, stable, and easy to learn (thanks to the new docs and tutorials). Then, finally - after a year of effort - we will be done.

Thanks!

Finally, I want to say a word of thanks to all of those who have contributed to the development of SproutCore over the last year. I went back through the commit logs and its actually a pretty big list. I can name 30 contributors and that doesn’t include the folks who send me patches now and then via email.

But I just want to call out those I can. If I missed you, please forgive me. But your contribution is really appreciated:

Billy Kakes
Brian Cully
Charles Jolley
Chris Hyle
Colin Campbell
Cortlan Klien
Erich Ocean
Evin Grano
Geoffrey Donaldson
James Austin
Jason Ketterman
Jonathan Lewis
Joshua Dickens
Juan Pinzon
Majd Taby
Martin Ottenwaelter
Maurits Lamers
Mike Ball
Mike Subelsky
Mohammed Ashik
Onar Vikingstad
Peter Bergstrom
Peter Wagenet
Ray Bodenhorn
Santosh Shanboque
Sudarshan Bhat
Tanner Donovan
Teresa Tsui
Thomas Langemann
Tom Dale
Trek Glowacki

Most of us get into the software industry to try to build something that is really, truly, great. Like-magic kind of great. It turns out it is really hard to do this. We can turn out good software, but the really great stuff doesn’t come easy or often.

SproutCore 1.0 is really truly great. It’s the best piece of code I’ve never been involved with and it’s thanks to the contributions of the folks above, as well as those who’ve been testing, providing feedback, and brave enough to try to build actual products on our code while it was still in development.

So thank you! I can’t say it enough.

What’s Next Next?

Finally, I can’t leave this post on 1.0 without pointing you who are interested to some of the cool things we are already starting work on for SproutCore 1.1 (code named Quilmes). Now that 1.0 is looking really solid, we get to spend some time on really fun things including:

An awesome new animation layer (already working in alpha form).
A FormView that can automatically generate an editor or browser UI from model objects
A UI builder - like Interface Builder or Atlas. The engine is already finished; we’re just putting together the editor UI.
A new JS loader based on CommonJS SecurableModules. This will make SproutCore usable in server-side code as well as making it easier to suck in external libraries for your own use.

Development is being tracked on the wiki so head on over to take a look.

The Tasks app I linked to earlier is also coming along nicely. The team there has a few more changes lined up, but we will soon be able to use it as our default bug tracker and planning tool for SproutCore.

Last of all, I want to give a shout out to the team at Kiva.org who has been working with us on a new Kiva Loan Browser. Kiva, you might know, is a non-profit that makes microloans to entrepreneurs in developing countries. Microloans are one of the most effective ways to address poverty and Kiva is one of the best.

SproutCore needs a good end-to-end example application and so we’ve partnered with them to build a new Loan Browser - and perhaps more in the long run. I hope that once SproutCore 1.0, you will help us build this app into a really great way for Kiva to find and share loans.

Help others while you learn!

—

So this post has turned into a minor book. Sorry for the length. 1.0 is a big milestone. I can’t wait to see what you build with it.

-Charles

Carl Icahn Resigns From the Board of Yahoo!

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 19:00:00 EDT

Carl Icahn announced today that he had informed the Board of Directors of Yahoo! Inc. that he was resigning as a director of Yahoo!. Mr. Icahn told the Board that in his view there was not a need at this time for an activist director at Yahoo! Mr. Icahn indicated that there are a number of other companies on which he is currently focused and therefore would not have the time to give to the business and affairs of Yahoo! required of a Board member properly fulfilling his duties. Mr. Icahn stated that he commended Yahoo! CEO Carol Bartz on the job she is doing. Mr. Icahn thanked everyone on the Board for acting so responsibly, especially in connection with the search transaction with Microsoft which he strongly advocated and participated in bringing about. Finally, Mr. Icahn indicated that he hoped to continue his relationship with Carol Bartz and the other members of the Yahoo! Board.

Sun To Cut 3,000 Jobs, Blames EC

Wed, 21 Oct 2009 07:00:00 EDT

Sun said late Tuesday that it will be forced to cut 3,000 jobs worldwide over the next 12 months because of “the delay in the closing of the acquisition of the company,” laying the blame squarely at the doorstep of the European Commission and its prolonged investigation into whether Oracle should be allowed to acquire the Sun-owned MySQL open source database.

Google's Data Liberation Front

Tue, 20 Oct 2009 08:45:00 EDT

In what can be seen as a major win for users of Google's various cloud services, the company has announced a new website called "The Data Liberation Front" dedicated to be the central location for information on how to move your data in and out of Google products.

According to the site, The Data Liberation Front is an engineering team at Google whose singular goal is to make it easier for users to move their data in and out of Google products. We do this because we believe that you should be able to export any data that you create in (or import into) a product. We help and consult other engineering teams within Google on how to "liberate" their products.

Their mission statement: Users should be able to control the data they store in any of Google's products. Our team's goal is to make it easier for them to move data in and out.

The site's creators point out that project was started as an internal engineering team back in 2007. When the team couldn't agree on the name, they came up with "Data Liberation Front" as a homage to The Judean People's Front, the splinter group in Monty Python's Life of Brian that spends most of its time bickering. In addition, the team indicated that they see themselves as being somewhat subversive, not so much within Google, but insofar as it's unusual for a big company to work to make it easier for their customers to leave them.

The site also points out that there shouldn't be an additional charge to export your data. Beyond that, if it takes you many hours to get your data out, it's almost as bad as not being able to get your data out at all. I would also add if your data isn't usable. For example a 1tb text file is (almost) just as bad as not getting your data at all.

The FAQ answers some interesting questions including that of Data Standards saying "We're working to use existing open standards formats wherever possible, and to document how we use those formats in a clear simple manner."

Personally, I applaud this move by Google, lets hope others in the cloud space follow Google's lead.

Google Goes on Offense against Office

Mon, 19 Oct 2009 16:30:00 EDT

Google is doing something very un-Google. It's stooping to advertise. What started a few months ago with "Go Google" billboards on 101 in Silicon Valley, the West Side Highway in New York, the Mass Pike in Boston and the Ike in Chicago touting Google Apps went international Monday in France, Japan, the UK, Canada, Australia and Singapore at train stations and airports as well as print ads in the Economist, the New York Time, Forbes and the Daily Telegraph and web sites like FT.com and Times Online. Google's trolling for frustrated, cash-strapped Microsoft and IBM business users and claims to have converted two million businesses - up from 1.75 million in June - and 20 million people - up from 15 million - in over 100 countries and over 40 languages to its cloud-based applications.

Ryan Greives Launches The Social Media Guide on Ulitzer

Fri, 16 Oct 2009 08:45:00 EDT

Ryan Greives, Media Relations Specialist for Indianapolis-based BLASTmedia, has launched The Social Media Guide on Ulitzer. His industry knowledge and experience covers everything from consumer Internet companies and gadgets to highly complex enterprise software and hardware technologies. He believes a “revolutionary” new product or service can be launched, but unless the right people know, it may become the world’s best kept secret - hence his interest in social media. Having forged solid editorial relationships over the years and perfecting the art of positioning a company to generate the press coverage it deserves, Greives has emerged as an expert in the enterprise media relations space.

Google Voice and Parlay-X

Fri, 16 Oct 2009 07:10:00 EDT

Google Voice has a useful feature whereby it will call your phone and another number, then link the calls. This is free within the US, and very cheap for international calls (certainly cheaper than dialing out directly from my mobile phone).

read more

Google Apps Lands its Biggest Fish Yet

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 05:00:00 EDT

Rentokil Initial, an odd combination of a modern-day charwoman who in her off-hours is a courier service, exterminator, insurance adjuster, heating and air conditioning installer and water and electrical tester, has gone with Google Apps, expecting to be the largest deployment of its paid Premier Edition yet. The cloud widgetry will replace Rentokil’s 180 e-mail domains and 40 mail systems – everything from open source to Microsoft – as it rolls out to 35,000 employees in 50 countries and six operating divisions by the end of next year.

Software Should Be Creative

Mon, 12 Oct 2009 18:00:00 EDT

We spend a lot of time talking to business managers about how their operations run. The perspective that we commonly face is one of "this is how we do it; we are looking for software to do it better." But from a business perspective, that is the wrong approach.

Eric Schmidt: Born to Pay Retail

Fri, 09 Oct 2009 17:00:00 EDT

Google CEO Eric Schmidt hails from a culture born to pay retail. Remember Sun paid $2 billion for Cobalt Networks and might as well have lit cigars with the money, a billion for MySQL and $4.1 billion for StorageTek. So it’s no surprise to read on CNET that he thinks he paid a billion dollars too much for YouTube. CNET knows this because Eric said in a sworn deposition in May that he told his board the 18-month-old revenue-free video site was worth between $600 million and $700 million on a gut hunch yet – spooked that Microsoft or Yahoo would pluck it off the vine – paid $1.65 billion in stock for the thing.

And for Its Next Trick, IBM Targets Amazon’s S3, Others

Tue, 06 Oct 2009 19:00:00 EDT

Having just gone into competition with Google’s Gmail Monday, IBM said Tuesday that it’s going to take on Amazon’s S3 storage cloud and anybody else in the storage cloud business by launching its own Smart Business Storage Cloud along with a so-called Information Archive. As with its day-old iNotes e-mail solution, which also targets Microsoft, IBM is sticking to its knitting. It’s not trolling for the great unwashed with this particular venture.

IBM Goes After Gmail

Mon, 05 Oct 2009 19:45:00 EDT

In a fit of Google-envy, IBM Monday went into competition with Gmail, pitching businesses big and small on LotusLive iNotes, a new cloud-based hybrid e-mail service that starts at three buck a head a month. It claims its cloud-mail is secure and reliable – Gmail has had some problems lately staying up. Even the free version of Gmail, it suggests, ain’t worth the “service outages, distracting advertisements or security and privacy concerns that can impact employee productivity and confidence.”

Google Wave Hits Wider Beta

Sun, 04 Oct 2009 10:00:00 EDT

Google Wave, the amorphous open source widgetry that Google has trouble explaining but contends – silly Google – will replace e-mail, the most viral application ever, started moving into a wider test group of some 100,000 users Wednesday ahead of a still wider release in December. It’s akin to a limited launch. Wave reportedly got a million requests for early access.

Cloud Computing Expo: Exclusive Q&A with Yahoo! SVP Cloud Computing

Sat, 03 Oct 2009 19:00:00 EDT

"Ultimately, we believe that advancement in cloud computing technology will be driven by open source initiatives where large communities of engineers can collaborate and develop new code for the new applications and demands posed by the cloud model," says Shelton Shugar, SVP Cloud Computing at Yahoo!, in this Exclusive Q&A with Jeremy Geelan in the run-up to the 4th International Cloud Computing Conference & Expo, being held November 2-4 at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.

Microsoft Open Source Chief Goes to the Cloud

Thu, 01 Oct 2009 21:30:00 EDT

Sam Ramji, Microsoft’s open source defector, whose imminent departure from the company became widely known when Microsoft set up its own CodePlex open source foundation a few weeks ago, has turned up at five-year-old cloud start-up Sonoa Systems, where he will head product strategy and business development. Sonoa, which has little open source exposure so far, does something called ServiceNet, which is supposed to set security and scaling policies for cloud-based services, acting as a proxy server between the service provider and the consumer.

Deputy CIO of the CIA to Keynote 1st Annual GovIT Expo

Mon, 28 Sep 2009 08:00:00 EDT

SYS-CON Events announces that Jill Tummler Singer, Deputy Chief Information Officer at the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), will be delivering the opening keynote at the 1st Annual Government Conference & Expo (www.GovITExpo.com) on October 6th in Washington DC. Ms Singer was appointed in November 2006 and is responsible for ensuring CIA has the information, technology, and infrastructure necessary to effectively execute its missions. Prior to her appointment as Deputy CIO, Ms. Singer served as the Director of the Diplomatic Telecommunications Service (DTS), United States Department of State, and was responsible for global network services to US foreign missions.

Brad Windecker Launches "Open Source for Small Business" Topic on Ulitzer

Sat, 26 Sep 2009 15:00:00 EDT

Brad Windecker launched today "Open Source for Small Business" topic on Ulitzer. A topic for open source software specific to the small business marketplace. Small and midsize companies can today take advantage of the maturity in open source applications. This topic will collect stories that relate to both the open source community and small business.

Google’s Out Shopping

Fri, 25 Sep 2009 20:45:00 EDT

With the worst of the economic downturn abating, Google, which stopped buying up small companies a few months ago ostensibly because prices were too high, is back scouting deals again. Google CEO Eric Schmidt told Reuters TV that he expects to close a small acquisition a month. He described the purchase as “in lieu of hiring.”

Cloudy Weather Report

Thu, 24 Sep 2009 19:00:00 EDT

Google News went down middle of the day Tuesday for a couple of hours. Google never explained why but said many were affected. Three weeks ago, Gmail went down big time because of a poorly executed server upgrade and now on Thursday users were complaining on Twitter that they couldn’t access their contacts. Google didn’t say anything about contacts. It said a small subset of users couldn’t access Google Mail period and it would take a workaround to fix. About two-and-a-half hours later it said the problem should be resolved. No explanation.

Apps Store Intel-Style

Wed, 23 Sep 2009 12:45:00 EDT

Intel is pushing Atom out of netbooks and into embedded applications like Daimler and BMW infotainment systems, cell phones and other devices in search of what it calls a $15 billion opportunity. It wants its OEMs and other friends to take a page out of Apple's book and create app stores for downloadable programs starting with netbook-ware. Dell, Acer and Asustek are in.

IBM, Microsoft, Others in Lock-Picking Cloud API Push

Wed, 23 Sep 2009 07:15:00 EDT

Half the apps on the Internet are written in PHP. That gives Zend Technologies, the PHP house, a stake in the cloud. So it’s rounded up cloud merchants Microsoft, IBM, Rackspace, GoGrid and Nirvanix and has gotten them to support its new open source drive to create a so-called Simple API for Cloud Application Services that developers can write to – or, Zend thinks as likely, rewrite to – to get native cloud apps.

Chrome Polish

Fri, 18 Sep 2009 17:15:00 EDT

Google’s Chrome browser claims a bit under 3% of the market right now, but Chrome engineering director Linus Upson told Reuters that it expects to be at 5% at least in a year and if it’s not at 10% at least in two years, it’ll be “exceptionally disappointed.” It just released Chrome v3 and expects to support the Mac before the end of the year.

Live Demo of Yahoo! Query Language to be Given at 4th Cloud Computing Expo

Fri, 18 Sep 2009 14:00:00 EDT

What every developer wants is access and the ability to shape any data across the Internet through one simple language, with out need to learn different APIs. Yahoo! Query Language (YQL) provides just that and its effectiveness will be demonstrated live at SYS-CON's 4th International Cloud Computing Conference & Expo, being held November 2-4 at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA. The demo will take place at a breakout session being given by Technical Yahoo! Jonathan Trevor.

Data Liberation Front Promises Escape from Google

Fri, 18 Sep 2009 12:30:00 EDT

For the last two years Google, which hasn’t exactly been in a position to lecture anybody about the evils of lock-in, has been harboring a small team of counterculture engineers in Chicago that style themselves the Data Liberation Front quietly working to cut the shackles that condemn captive users to remaining customers of Google services because their data is held hostage.

Cloud Computing Company Unveils New Dashboard

Wed, 16 Sep 2009 09:15:00 EDT

The new file manager features pop-up menus and an easier and faster navigation structure to make the user experience more intuitive. In addition, Nomadesk's appraised TheftGuard service, which allows users to remotely shred important docs on the Nomadesk drive in the event of theft or lost hardware while keeping the data neatly tucked-away in the Cloud, now features more advanced tracking and allows users to spot their stolen or misplaced device on Google Maps.

Adobe To Spend $1.8 Billion on Omniture

Wed, 16 Sep 2009 08:45:00 EDT

Adobe said Tuesday during its earnings call that it’s buying publicly held Utah-based Omniture for ~$1.8 billion cash. It’s not your most instantly intuitive acquisition ever and it’s costing a pretty penny at that. Adobe didn’t explain to its own people where the web researcher fit. Omniture, whose 5,000 clients include Disney, Apple, GM, Wal-Mart and Time Warner, is a web traffic analysis ISV and will apparently let the media folk and designers who use, say, Adobe’s Flash widgetry and its all-important but poorly selling, recession-hit Creative Suite see how effective their work is. It expects its addressable market to expand to marketing types

Internet Enabled Industrial Controller: Orchid Technologies

Mon, 14 Sep 2009 16:06:29 EDT

Hundreds of on-campus laundry facilities nationwide were waiting. Internet-enabled laundry control and monitoring services to thousands of college students might have to wait yet another semester. Orchid was called in to design, build, and test a new controller—in record time! Laundromat control requires the application of low cost, industrial quality electronics with high reliability. Multiple machines in variable configurations and conditions require high pin-count digital and analog interface electronics.

Challenger Mobile Joins the Google Android Movement

Wed, 09 Sep 2009 15:30:00 EDT

Challenger Mobile, the white label mobile VoIP technology company, has announced the launch during the fall of its ground-breaking platform for Google's Android mobile operating system. Challenger Mobile will allow mobile operators, wireless ISPs and related service providers to now deliver mVoIP services to customers switching to Android-based mobile phones, which utilize the innovative operating system developed by one of the tech world's biggest companies -- Google.