New guidelines for the design of wider data center racks are available for discussion, according to the Open Compute Project. In theory, racks designed using the Open Rack 1.0 specification will allow more flexible, energy-efficient design of data center resources. Read more »
Facebook is testing out the ability for advertisers to buy mobile ads through Facebook on mobile apps and websites. It could be part of a larger play to build an offsite ad network. Read more »
News-filtering service Prismatic has just launched a new “friend following” feature. Although this may look like a social-networking copycat move, founder Brad Cross says it is all about increasing the amount of data the service has about its users so that it can make relevant recommendations. Read more »
Listening platforms — or social media monitoring, analysis, and engagement tools — are bringing massive amounts of new information to businesses’ marketing departments. These tools are also leading the way in the growth of social media information and access throughout organizations so that customers’ wants and needs can be better understood and, presumably, satisfied. This report analyzes how the adoption of listening platforms is transforming marketing departments, their relationships with central IT, and the core systems that run the enterprise. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Will Microsoft be the latest Internet company to buy fuel cells from Bloom Energy to provide power for its data centers? Microsoft says it is looking for backup power sources that could use natural gas and could replace its diesel generators. Read more »
If you think fake online reviews are bad now, just wait a few years. Gartner predicts that in two to three years, 10 to 15 percent of all online reviews will be bought and paid for by businesses. Read more »
In the five years since the iPhone hit the market, Apple and Google have delivered more than 40 billion cumulative downloads of apps. Other sources predict the app marketplace will swell to surpass 66 billion downloads in 2016, a growth fueled by tablet, entertainment, and enterprise apps. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Researchers are taking a nod from Internet leaders and using big data mining techniques to quickly calculate the carbon footprints of products. New software like this can enable companies to calculate the carbon footprints of products using non-expert employees and for less cost. Read more »
A patent troll, working with the University of California, gained infamy by filing patent suits claiming to own the world wide web. Even though Amazon and Google knee-capped it earlier this year, the troll marches onward. Read more »
Kids have always said bad things about teachers and gotten into trouble with their classmates. But today, it’s much easier for schools to overhear them by accessing a student’s Facebook account. One judge has put the brakes on this. Read more »
Friendster founder Jonathan Abrams has launched a news-filtering service called Nuzzel that is powered by social-networking activity. But while his previous ventures have been early to the market, his new offering suffers from the opposite problem — the market is already saturated with similar services. Read more »
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg says the social network is already handling a billion search queries per day, and that it is interested in launching a social search engine powered by the activity of its users — something that could turn out to be Google’s worst nightmare. Read more »
Twitter is fighting a major privacy case that will help determine who has rights in social media. Unfortunately, the case is before a judge who has been disciplined for misusing Facebook. His track record suggests that he is the very last person who should be deciding these issues. Read more »
The growing data center clusters in Oregon and Washington could suck up 10 percent of the regions power by 2030, if the facilities and infrastructure don’t become more efficient, according to a report. Read more »
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s appearance Tuesday at Techcrunch Disrupt was hotly anticipated. What did he have to say? Facebook’s stock plunge is “disappointing” and it bet too much too fast on HTML5, but is still positioned to make “big bets.” Read more »
Facebook’s Chinese ambitions, the falling price of flash storage, a chat with Web daddy Sir Tim Berners-Lee, rise of the swarm robots and why do people continue to reject science are some of the topics in this bonus back-to-work installment of Om Says reading list. Read more »
Patent troll suits — in which shell companies that don’t make anything sue those that do — are proliferating. The latest example may include a shell firm suing Facebook and others for using banner ads. Read more »
Facebook and Instagram finally closed the deal on their acquisition today, as Instagram noted the popular photo sharing app hit 5 billion photos uploaded so far, a huge number and testament to growth as it prepares to merge with the social media giant. Read more »
British arch-satirist Armando Iannucci – best known for his documentary-style dissections of the political classes — is getting ready to take on his next project: a black comedy based on Silicon Valley’s worst moments of excess. Fish, meet barrel. Read more »
Is it fair to blame Facebook’s CFO for the failure of the company’s IPO, and the subsequent decline in the share price? Not really. The wildly inflated hopes and dreams of an overheated technology sector were also to blame, and he had no control over that. Read more »
Tech companies have become increasingly adept at manufacturing desire, but to what end? Behavior designer Jason Hreha argues that the industry needs to seriously consider the impact of its products. Are we helping our users lead better lives, or are we making them compulsive, impatient and distractible? Read more »
With so many different photo and social networks out there, our digital memories are usually all over the place and out of sync on a variety of different services. Irrive gathers these things into a single product that makes it easy to share single events across the web. Read more »
Ever since Facebook stumbled with its IPO, there has been a constant drumbeat of criticism saying Mark Zuckerberg should step down as CEO — but Silicon Valley is devoted to the idea of strong founders retaining control of their companies. Will that be Facebook’s undoing? Read more »
In a move to boost sales through social recommendations, online shoe and clothing retailer Zappos, which is owned by Amazon, has added a new feature called “PinPointing” that offers recommendations based on Pinterest accounts. Unfortunately, the feature doesn’t work very well yet. Read more »
Although the ad-driven business model behind Facebook looks similar to that of a newspaper, the crucial difference is that the social network knows a lot more about its users. The more focus that newspapers put on doing the same, the better off they will be. Read more »
Facebook says the app has been rewritten so it’ll not only open and scroll faster, but news feeds and notifications will load right away. To do that, Facebook rewrote it as a native iOS app, doing away with HTML5. Read more »
Facebook is now free to move ahead with its purchase of Instagram now that the FTC has given its blessing. The deal, however, is not as lucrative for Instagram, which took a lot of Facebook stock as compensation. Read more »
How much of your data is Facebook collecting every day? Some new stats from the company reveal just how large its user base is, and what big data means to a company with 950 million users. Read more »
Schools like the University of Kentucky are forcing athletes to install software that monitors their social media accounts for words like “panties” or “fight.” Some states are proposing laws to put a stop this. Read more »
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Is it the end of an era for the former rock star venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins and did greentech play a large part in that fall from grace? Read more »
After a summer that has seen increased activity in social media marketing, media giant Gannett Co. today announced that it has purchased BLiNQ Media, which helps companies execute and manage ad campaigns on Facebook and other social networks. Read more »
Twitter seems to be at a crossroads, and according to a recent GigaOM survey, its prospects for the next five years are promising. Key challenges in the near future will be establishing a revenue model and survive the backlash from developers. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Groupon’s precipitous stock decline since its public offering in November 2011 has turned the local commerce company from a web hero to a piñata. The problem is that of false expectations and lofty valuations from a company that was never really a tech-company. Read more »
Data centers consume around 1.5 percent of total electricity demand, a figure that’s expected to increase significantly. To cut power and costs tech titans like Google, Apple, and Facebook are cutting electricity use by greening their data centers. But do energy-efficiency gains justify huge capital outlays? Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Follow along our tour as we take you on a rare journey through Facebook’s first data center in Prineville Oregon, which houses its Open Compute servers. We’ll bring you along the air flow route, and down into the secret server room: Read more »
Facebook is building a deep storage facility at its data center in Oregon. Read more »
The market is tough for photo apps outside the realm of Facebook and Instagram, as shown by layoffs at the photo-sharing app Hipstamatic on Thursday. Read more »
No mobile browser has passed through the first two hurdles in the Ringmark test, a tool created by Facebook that checks for a wide range of HTML5 support. That is, no mobile browser until now. The most recent beta of Dolphin Browser for Android just did. Read more »
As we consume more and more content via real-time streams that come to us through Twitter and Facebook and newer platforms, how does that affect advertising? Everyone wants their ads to look like just another form of content, but that’s a lot harder than it sounds. Read more »
Insiders can now sell Facebook stock and the reaction so far hasn’t been pretty. Here’s a quick look at what the financial press is saying. Read more »
