GigaOM

My gut reaction to the news that AOL’s Platform A would offer a guaranteed CPM (cost per thousand) for applications developers building widgets for Facebook and Bebo was that it’s a subsidy and subsidies are an unnatural and bad thing for business. Then I found out the guaranteed payment was only 40 cents, which [...]

Get your satire meters cranked up: AT&T has come up with an advertising effort designed to shame you into paying your bills online (thanks, Consumerist). The telecommunications company that got into hot water with warrantless wiretapping is pushing its online bill payments with a series of characters who are members of the Online Liberation Movement. [...]

One of the questions that I really wanted to get answered at Structure 08 was what the chances of survival are for the myriad of startups out there building their businesses around Amazon’s Web Services. Companies such as RightScale, Hyperic and Soasta depend on both the success of AWS and its shortcomings — the solutions [...]

After today’s launch of Microsoft’s server virtualization hypervisor, Citrix, which bought virtualization company XenSource last year, may be asking itself some hard questions. Microsoft’s Hyper-V will compete directly with Citrix’s XenSource products for the data center as well as with products from VMware and startup Virtual Iron.
But Citrix and Microsoft have close enough ties that [...]

Cloud computing isn’t as nebulous as its name implies. Thanks to virtualization, one can separate the storage from the servers and the servers from the software—but it’s also about bandwidth. The primary value will be more about moving data from the hardware to the end user. To that end, Google has automated its network and [...]

Vlingo’s new software for BlackBerrys (the link goes live at 5 a.m. PT), which gives me the ability to navigate my phone entirely by voice, has me feeling like a kid on Christmas morning. I press a button on my Pearl, wait for a chime, simply say, “Web search, weather San Francisco,” and the browser [...]