5 Sites That Want Your Janky Gadgets: Amidst the flurry of carbon credits, lead-free electronics and green everything, the truth of the matter is that folks who are truly green don’t buy a lot of stuff. At least the tech industry’s providing online communities and services aimed at keeping consumption down and recycling activities up. Check out Earth2Tech’s handy guide to five web sites devoted to electronic reuse and recycling. Continue »
Archive for March, 2008
Web 2.0 Expo Ticket Giveaway
Web 2.0 Expo returns to San Francisco April 22-25, at Moscone West. Now in its second year, the Expo will feature nine tracks, over 100 sessions, more than 150 exhibitors, Web2Open — an “unconference” — and more. Recent additions to the lineup include keynotes from Mitchell Baker, chairman of the Mozilla Foundation and Mozilla Corp., and Aristotle “Ari” Balogh, chief technology officer at Yahoo. Continue »
Elastra Takes On-Demand Computing One Step Further
On-demand computing promises two things. One, the ability to grow or shrink capacity based on need. And two, the ability to drag and drop virtual machines instead of racking and stacking physical ones. Continue »
The Birth of the OpenSocial Foundation
There go the social networking neighborhoods! Google, Yahoo and MySpace are taking a page from the Mozilla Foundation by creating a nonprofit foundation to control and maintain the OpenSocial code, which allows developers to build applications that work on a variety of social networks. The core companies will still contribute to the code, but as of July 1, it will become a community effort. This move legitimizes the idea of a social network as a platform, as it offers the ability to develop for a variety of social networks in one go; it also signals that social networks are becoming a commodity. Continue »
Why the GPS Party Is About to End
SiRF Technology (SIRF), a San Jose, Calif.-based maker of GPS chips, this morning said it was cutting jobs and trying to restructure its business due to softening consumer demand. Already the worst performing tech stock for the year, shares of SiRF nosedived in early trading this morning. Continue »
Facebook and Microsoft Open Up Contacts
Microsoft has teamed up with Facebook, Tagged, Hi5, Bebo and LinkedIn to allow people to transfer their contacts between the five networks and Microsoft’s Windows Live Service. It’s a start in being able to access some of the data locked into a social profile, but it’s by no means as wide-ranging as Google’s efforts to push the Social Graph. Continue »
Supercomputers, Hadoop, MapReduce and the Return to a Few Big Computers
Yahoo announced yesterday it would collaborate with CRL to make supercomputing resources available to researchers in India. The announcement comes on the heels of Yahoo’s Feb. 19 claim to have the world’s largest Hadoop-based application now that it’s moved the search webmap to the Hadoop framework. Continue »
SiRF Cuts Jobs, Wipes Out Mobile TV
GPS chip maker SiRF Technology has reduced first-quarter sales estimates and implemented a cost-savings plan that will cost about 50 people their jobs and result in the closure of SiRF’s offices in Stockholm and South San Francisco. Aside from general economic malaise softening demand for personal navigation systems, the other whammy for SiRF was a lousy mobile-TV market. According to the release, it’s getting out of the market altogether. Continue »
Breaking: Widget Maker Slide banned in Turkey
Updated: Slide, the San Francisco-based widget company has joined a very special list of web companies that have been banned by the Republic of Turkey for (according to Slide blog) what the local government calls “harboring pictures and articles that are considered to be insulting to Ataturk,” founder of the republic. It is not clear what are those articles and photos that are insulting Continue »
