There’s no question the kind of data collection Google has to do in the background to power its Google Now service can be a little intrusive — perhaps too intrusive for some. But it also makes the results extremely useful. Read more »
Critics of Apple’s social features have argued that it should buy Twitter, but former Apple engineer Patrick Gibson says the real value in such a deal would be that Twitter might be able to help Apple build web services that actually work. Read more »
For most people scaling out a web service is a matter of thinking about hardware and software. But the recent Surge conference taught me that most devops folk need to look down to the physical infrastructure as well as the economic tradeoffs of building a service. Read more »
In 2011, I predicted Microsoft and Google were poised to own the cloud computing market in the next decade. Eighteen months later, Amazon Web Services and Salesforce.com seem like the ones that really have what it takes to dominate over the long haul. Read more »
The lightweight mobile or web application is the computing product of our time: users demand access to key resources while on the move. But the intense pressure on mobile developers requires solid tools to get the job done, and that’s what OneOps hopes to deploy. Read more »
UK web publishers and marketers may be grumbling about the E-Privacy Directive coming into force, but they can count themselves lucky that they’re not dealing with stricter interpretations of the law that are happening elsewhere across Europe. Read more »
The OpenStack army marches on. On Thursday, Hewlett-Packard put its public cloud to public beta. The services had been available to a limited number of customers up till now. The news comes a week after Rackspace launched its own OpenStack cloud. Read more »
A British parliamentary committee is asking Google, Twitter and Facebook to filter their services and protect individuals’ privacy. But as the web services start to push back, they may have already sealed their own fate. Read more »
Amazon isn’t the only cloud power slicing storage prices. On Tuesday Google cut the price on Google Cloud Storage by up to 15 percent in some cases. With this move and new front-end storage partners, Google appears to be making a serious play for enterprise storage. Read more »
Charlie Oppenheimer may be a fan of Amazon Web Services. But, as he explains here, he’s long felt that the economics of the choice between self-hosted and cloud provider had more texture to it than the patently attractive sounding “10 cents an hour.” Read more »
Amazon will let customers run micro-instances of Microsoft Windows 2008 R2 for free on its EC2 service starting now, according to a new post to the Amazon Web Services (AWS) blog. Such try-before-you-buy tactics have helped Amazon win converts to its cloud platform. Read more »
Foursquare today introduced its Explore recommendation and search function to its desktop website. The company, which began as a mobile app, is finding new opportunity in beefing up its web presence and leveraging all of its check-in data, recommendations and tips. Read more »
Amazon is hiring techies for a new digital media services push. The company seeks senior development managers and developers for a “brand new team,” although their work will grow out of an existing AWS digital media offering, according to a job post. Read more »
When the smoke clears, Dropbox’s newfound focus on transparency could turn out to be a great thing. Especially if it triggers an avalanche of other web-service providers following in its footsteps, making life easier for consumers and getting the federal government off their backs. Read more »
Apple does indeed appear to be planning big changes to its cloud services package, according to references found in the latest developer preview of Mac OS X Lion. French blog Consomac discovered code referring to something codenamed “Castle,” described as an upgrade to MobileMe. Read more »
Subscription-billing startup Zuora has closed a $20 million round, bringing its total to $41.5 million. The new money, combined with Vindicia’s $20 million last week, suggests that we’ve just seen the tip of the on-demand billing iceberg as organizations attempt to monetize their various web services. Read more »
No single strategy guarantees social media success. Twitter’s recent relaunch mirrors some of Digg’s tactics, but social services from the likes of Google and Apple take entirely different approaches. Which is all to say that with multiple strategies, there’s more than one way to win the ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Upstream bandwidth use is on the rise, with some vendors reporting a 24 percent increase in traffic from 2007 to 2008. But does that increase mean more people are contributing content to the web, or that the few who do contribute use a disproportionate amount of ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Cisco today announced its Unified Service Delivery (USD) strategy, which connects the data center with IP Next-Generations Networks (NGNs) to help service providers meet the increasing demand for high-bandwidth and time-dependent services ranging from consumer video to enterprise applications. Essentially a unification of existing components with […] Read more »
Last weekend, the blogosphere was abuzz with news about GrandCentral, a service we’ve covered before, experienced an outage. For a few hours on Sunday morning, calls to GrandCentral were not getting relayed to their users and GrandCentral’s website was down as well. This event should encourage […] Read more »
