Technology News: Web 2.0

Droid Lurches to Life
November 06, 2009

Today is the day of the Droid. The Motorola smartphone touches down today in what's shaping up to be one of the biggest handset launches in recent memory. Of course Verizon is going all-in as far as advertising is concerned, but there's more to the Droid's story than a marketing campaign.

Study: Internet Doesn't Cause Introversion
November 05, 2009

A new study confirms what your 130 Facebook friends and scores of Twitter followers may have already told you: The Internet and mobile phones are not linked to social isolation. Online activities such as e-mail, blogging and frequenting Internet hangouts can even lead to larger, more diverse social networks, according to the study released Wednesday by the Pew Internet and American Life Project.

Chorus Should Sound Great Once More Singers Join In
November 05, 2009

The iTunes App Store became 100,000 applications strong this week, and it took less than a year and a half to get there. Would it surprise you to know that not every last one of those apps is a perfect work of art? Yes, believe it or not, many of the apps that compete for your attention in the App Store are pretty worthless.

Does Wine Make Linux Too Loose?
November 05, 2009

Following the Karmic Koala's joyful reception last week, sentiments toward the FOSSy marsupial have become distinctly less enthusiastic in recent days -- at least for some. "Early adopters bloodied by Ubuntu's Karmic Koala" was the headline on a piece that ran in The Register on Tuesday, which chronicled multiple cases of frustration among some users upgrading to the new version.

Microsoft Scrapes Years of Mold Off MSN Portal
November 04, 2009

White space replaces the sky-blue color scheme in MSN.com's new redesign, which Microsoft began previewing Wednesday before it becomes an official re-launch sometime in early 2010. Content sections are streamlined down to five top-of-page links: news, entertainment, sports, money, lifestyle and "more."

Ancestry.com to Take IPO Plunge
November 04, 2009

Genealogy Web site Ancestry.com hopes to raise about $100 million when it goes public this week. With more than a million paying subscribers, little competition, a small debt load and a record of increasing revenues, it may fare better than other IPOs that have recently priced below their filing ranges.

Social CRM: Size Matters
November 03, 2009

There's no longer any debate about whether social media's going to have a huge impact on CRM. Social media's a little different than the usual emerging business technology, mostly because it didn't begin as a business technology. It started with consumers -- and how they use it varies dramatically.

Can the Karmic Koala Take on Win 7?
November 02, 2009

Well the Karmic Koala finally climbed down from its eucalyptus tree last week, and the general result was feverish excitement across the Linux blogs. Reviews of the new release seem highly favorable, on the whole, as does the download process via release mirrors and torrents. However, not everyone is convinced Linux is ready for the mainstream.

For Web Search, the Time Is Now
November 01, 2009

We all contribute to the news cycle when we post timely content online, even if it's 140 characters or fewer, and recently we learned that our little bits of information have substantive value when search giants Google and Microsoft announced that they will index our tweets and status updates. But the sheer volume of content that we produce could be a problem.

Where SOA Meets the Cloud
November 01, 2009

Dave Linthicum's new book, Cloud Computing and SOA Convergence in Your Enterprise: A Step-by-Step Guide, has just arrived and digs into the conflation of SOA and cloud computing. We're here with Dave, and just Dave this time, to dig into the conflation of SOA and cloud computing. "SOA is the way to do cloud," he said.

Print Pubs, Meet Moving Pictures
October 31, 2009

Hold Esquire's December issue in front of a webcam, and an on-screen image of the magazine pops to life, letters flying off the cover. Shift and tilt the magazine, and the animation on the screen moves accordingly. Robert Downey Jr. emerges out of the on-screen page in 3-D, offering half-improvised shtick on Esquire's latest high-tech experiment for keeping print magazines relevant.

Is Facebook's $711M Spam Award Just Monopoly Money?
October 30, 2009

Social networking site Facebook has been awarded US$711 million in damages from prolific spammer and social network scammer Sanford Wallace for bombarding its users with spam, Facebook attorney Sam O'Rourke reported in a blog post. Judge Jeremy Fogel of the U.S. District Court in Northern California also banned Wallace from accessing Facebook.

Epix Launches One-Two Punch With TV-Web Movie Channel
October 30, 2009

It's enough of a challenge to launch a new subscription movie channel in an industry segment dominated by the likes of HBO and Showtime. However, Epix, which begins life Friday, starts its adventure with a double feature of sorts: It will also offer a Web streaming version of its channel.

The Audacity of Droid
October 30, 2009

The Android mobile operating system is graduating soon to 2.0 status, and Google gave it a pretty nice present to celebrate: a free turn-by-turn navigation app called "Google Maps Navigation." It'll run on Android 2.0 phones with GPS, and it'll use the phone's cellular Internet connection to get live map information.

Facebook: Too Big to Care?
October 30, 2009

A tweet and a status update tell Facebook's story after a week of very unsociable social media slip-ups for Mark Zuckerberg's company. The tweet: "Dear Facebook: Stop sucking, you're making Twitter look reliable." The status update: "[Name withheld] knows FB has its downside, but I just got friended by somebody that, to me, makes Facebook totally worthy [sic] it!!!" And there you have it.

FOSS Goes to Washington, and Nvidia Keeps Its Driver Code to Itself
October 29, 2009

You know it's going to be a good week when it kicks off with news that the Obama administration has officially embraced the open source content management system Drupal. Just a few days later, the Department of Defense issued an almost glowingly positive memo on open source software.