Open-source software is an important part of many web workers’ toolkits. Whether you just use an open-source browser like Firefox or you’re a die-hard Linux fan who actively contributes to open-source projects, we cover the most important open-source news and most useful apps here.
Psion, Mesaplexx and Nujira live in the guts of the phone and on the fringes of the network. While filters, amplifiers and ruggedized devices may not sound like exciting stuff, all three of these U.K. companies are innovating in mobile in ways you should know about. Read More »
Mozilla has a new beta version of its mobile Firefox browser for Android. The software is still a work in progress, but shows promise with a redesigned user interface, faster startup and support for Flash. In a JavaScript test, it’s as fast as Chrome for Android! Read More »
As the world once again starts analyzing Yahoo’s myriad woes after Sunday morning’s ouster of embattled CEO Scott Thompson, I’m left wondering if its investment in Hadoop didn’t aid in the company’s demise, even if it’s a way down the long list of Yahoo’s mistakes. Read More »
With its Project Sputnik laptop, Dell hopes to lure Linux-loving developers back into its camp and perhaps even get some who defected to Mac OSX to return to the open source fold. The laptop bundles Ubuntu, tools and an on-ramp to github repositories. Read More »
The lead developers behind open-source storage system Ceph have launched a company, called Inktank, to commercialize the software. The company describes Ceph as a “fully open source, distributed object store, network block device, and POSIX-compatible distributed file system designed for reliability, performance, and scalability.” Read More »
A new Portable Consent Form could make it easier — and more palatable — for individuals to donate their anonymized genetic data to science at large. The goal of the Consent to Research project is nothing less than the open-sourcing of the genetic data pool. Read More »
The marketplace concept does a good job of bringing the simplicity of the Apple App Store model to server applications. It has the potential to revolutionize IT consumption. And if no one else steps up, Amazon is going to own this part of the cloud, too. Read More »
Already a heavy user of Apache Software Foundation projects, Twitter is now giving back to the organization financially as a sponsor. It’s difficult to think of a situation where Apache sponsorship wouldn’t be the right move and, it’s definitely the right thing for Twitter to do. Read More »
This quarter saw Amazon Web Services finally relaxing its public-cloud-only stance and launching services to support hybrid-cloud deployments. Meanwhile, Hadoop players moved to make their platforms more accessible to mainstream BI analysts and database administrators. A new quarterly report analyzes these trends and provides a near-term …
Customers can now get early access to Rackspace’s OpenStack-based public cloud, slated to come online May 1. The news comes as the OpenStack Spring Conference kicks off in San Francisco. The company also unveiled OpenStack-based Cloud Block Storage and MySQL-based database services. Read More »
The recruiting ecosystem is changing, led by professional social networks like LinkedIn and Viadeo and companies like Jobvite and BranchOut, which are building Facebook apps for hiring and career development. The bottom line is that technology enables the recruiting process to be more streamlined, scientific and …
Updated: Twitter has shared numerous aspects of its infrastructure over the past few years, and its decision to open source its work on MySQL might be the social media platform’s most useful contribution yet. Sure, open source big data tools are valuable, but they’re not … Read More »
Two major tech players — IBM and Red Hat — are ready to sign on the dotted line to join OpenStack, sources said. That should go a long way to ease the pain of Citrix’s decision to set up CloudStack as an OpenStack rival. Read More »
It looks like OpenStack won’t have the open-source cloud spotlight to itself anymore. Citrix has released the CloudStack software it acquired along with Cloud.com to the Apache Software Foundation, creating a competitive option to the OpenStack project of which Citrix was an early member. Read More »
OwnCloud 2012 service lets IT pros move and manage corporate data in their cloud of choice while giving end users a “Dropbox-like” experience, according to OwnCloud CEO Markus Rex. The software supports WIndows, Linux and Mac desktops and iOS and Android mobile devices. Read More »
Cloud computing, mobile computing and the consumerization of IT combine to create another force that overwhelms IT departments: complexity, including complexity of devices and applications, physical and virtual computing environments, and related challenges for IT staff.
EMC’s acquisition of Pivotal Labs proves the company really understands the big data market. Namely, that big data won’t go anywhere without great applications, and EMC isn’t the company to help customers figure out how to build theirs. Read More »
Could a smartphone run solely on web code instead of native software? Mozilla thinks so and recently demonstrated such a device on video, replacing the Google Android operating system on a Samsung Galaxy S II phone with its Boot 2 Gecko (B2G) technology. Read More »
A new flock of vendors is offering capabilities that would enable private-to-public cloud bursting, or federation between clouds, to meet data privacy mandates, offer high availability to customers, and provide geographic reach.
Legal scholars are always searching for ways to improve the patent system, sometimes via sweeping changes, but big data — especially techniques such as machine learning and natural-language processing — could help provide a technological fix to a big part of the problem. Read More »
Twitter has been on a tear lately when it comes to open sourcing big-data tools. The latest two are Cassie, a client for managing Cassandra clusters, and Scalding, a MapReduce framework for simplifying the creation of Hadoop jobs. Big data won’t be black magic forever. Read More »
Look under the covers of almost any data-focused web application — including Klout — and you’ll find Hadoop. It helps Klout accurately measure and score its users’ social media influence. But Klout also has another important, and very not-open-source, weapon in its arsenal — Microsoft SQL … Read More »
Zynga is in a tricky position technologically thanks to its new frenemy status with Facebook. Zynga claims 240 million active users, and it wants a lot more, but scaling to those heights might require one heck of a computing infrastructure. Read More »
Matt Howard of Norwest Venture Partners predicts that 2012 and 2013 will be Hadoop’s breakout years. Howard gives us insight into the five factors that will accelerate Hadoop’s mainstream adoption over the next 18 months. Read More »
When Microsoft and VMware latch onto a technology, you know it’s for real. VMware is now pushing a project called Spring Hadoop that lets developers use the popular Spring Java framework to write big data applications atop Apache Hadoop. Read More »
The big hosting provider that, along with NASA, launched the open-source cloud infrastructure project two years ago, will start beta testing the software, running tens of thousands of computing instances as opposed to the hundreds under test now, said John Engates, Rackspace’s CTO. Read More »
Microsoft, which looked as if it might be the odd man out on Hadoop, might actually play a big role in taking the platform into the mainstream. On Tuesday, it exposed its plans to make Hadoop data analyzable via both a JavaScript framework and Microsoft Excel. Read More »
Rob Bearden, CEO of Hortonworks, the Hadoop startup that spun out of Yahoo in June 2011, knows a thing or two about making open source software profitable. And he thinks Hadoop has an opportunity to be bigger than the markets for JBoss, SpringSource and MySQL combined. Read More »
Searching for a new lease of life, Mozilla is joining forces with Spanish operator Telefónica to build handsets that have web technologies at their heart. But can Mozilla succeed where Palm failed? And is there room in a difficult market for more players? Read More »
Infochimps, a startup best known for its data marketplace, is now offering a cloud-based service that takes the pain out of managing Hadoop and scale-out database environments. The company hopes its new cloud-based service can do for big data applications what PaaS did for web applications. Read More »
Tablets represent the next evolution in the advancement of mobile computing, and by 2015 or 2016, the tablet will begin to replace the laptop and the desktop operating systems market will begin to level off or perhaps decline. Our latest forecast examines these trends in detail.
Mozilla is getting ready to make a big push around HTML5 mobile apps in 2012, starting with a plan to unveil a mobile Web app store next week at Mobile World Congress. The maker of the Firefox browser is hoping developers are ready to submit apps. Read More »
Canonical will turn Android phones into Ubuntu desktops, which could eliminate the need to carry a laptop. The idea of using a docked phone as a full-fledged desktop computer isn’t new — remember Motorola’s lapdock? — but Canonical is better suited to make the concept work. Read More »
Hadoop features front and center in the discussion of how to implement a big data strategy, one of the biggest trends in IT. There’s just one problem that keeps cropping up: many people don’t seem to know exactly what it means when somebody says “Hadoop.” Read More »
This year’s CES was the biggest in the show’s 44-year history. It boasted 15 miles of exhibit hall aisles, 3,100 booths and 153,000 attendees. It is easy to be jaded by the endlessly repetitive products, but the thousands of innovations point toward a future of connectivity.
The most striking thing about Amazon’s Q4 filing was that head count was up a whopping 67 percent to 56,200 full- and part-time employees, compared with 33,700 from a year ago, according to Amazon’s 8-K filing; 67 percent is a very big number — even for … Read More »
If you’re like many of us, you’re already thinking over some New Year’s resolutions that will make you a better “you” in 2012. But how are the tech industries’ thought leaders approaching the new year? We asked 12 of them for their resolutions.
Was Bill Gates, chairman and co-founder of Microsoft, the power behind the proprietary Windows-and-Office juggernaut, really an open source champion? A new Wired article lays Microsoft’s wider embrace of open source technologies — including Node.js and Hadoop — squarely at Gates’ feet. Read More »
Developers concerned about confining their apps to a single cloud need worry no more. If they’re willing to utilize Cloud Foundry, the open-source PaaS project, developers can now run apps that move seamlessly between any infrastructure already running a Cloud Foundry-based service. Read More »
Amazon’s Kindle Fire is the latest example of a growing trend to move traditional computer activities to tablets and smartphones. AlwaysOnPC, a $25 mobile app, connects the Kindle Fire to a cloud instance of Fedora Linux with Open Office, Firefox, Chrome and integrated Dropbox support. Read More »
Although the first couple years of commercial Hadoop attention have been characterized by an attitude of “Hadoop is great, but …”, the tone is changing as Hadoop vendors increase the platform’s palatableness with each new iteration. No longer is Hadoop necessarily an epic undertaking rife … Read More »
For anyone thinking the big data trend is a flash in the pan, there’s some new evidence to the contrary. A hefty 75 percent of IT pros and developers responding to a new Linux Foundation survey have their eyes firmly on this big data phenomenon. Read More »
Big Switch Networks, a startup using the OpenFlow protocol to help companies build software-defined networks, has open-sourced its controller software, dubbed Floodlight. With this move, it will attempt to unseat networking giant Cisco by creating an ecosystem of startups building tools for SDNs. Read More »
The coming wave of open-source hardware, 3-D printing and other breakthroughs will open the floodgates to tech innovation, just as open-source software sparked the last tech boom by fueling the Google, Facebook software empires, said Joi Ito, director of MIT’s Media Lab. Read More »
The open-source Dreadnot tool, built by Rackspace for its own internal use, could now give outside developers an open window into their software deployments in process, bolstering the devops school of application development. Read More »
{"source":"http:\/\/gigaom.com\/wijax\/f2cd712c7f181132307494ee413bcf0b","varname":"wijax_45cd41c389672683bcd153f2324c819b","title_element":"div","title_class":"widget-title-wrap clearfix","title_before":"%3Cdiv%20class%3D%22widget-title-wrap%20clearfix%22%3E%3Cdiv%20class%3D%22widget-title%22%3E","title_after":"%3C%2Fdiv%3E%3C%2Fdiv%3E"}
