The ownCloud project is adding features fast and furiously. The open-source file synchronization and sharing project announced the Milestone 4 release earlier this week, taking ownCloud in an interesting direction for corporate users. Forget Dropbox killer – ownCloud could be something even better, someday.
A Utility That Makes You Master of the Twitterverse
You can do a lot more with Twitter than the official Web, mobile and desktop clients allow. To do it, though, you’ll need to access Twitter’s API — or use a tool that digs deeper into the API than the usual clients. If you’re comfortable with a command line interface, or willing to learn how to use one, t gives you simple, fine-grained control…
Amazon Streamlines Mechanical Turk With Automatic Categorization App
The idea behind Amazon’s Mechanical Turk is pretty simple – break programming work down into bite-sized chunks, and put it in front of a large workforce that can do the work quickly and cheaply. Part of the challenge of that is making it easy for requesters to create the bites that workers are chewing on. The new categorization app from Amazon…
Oracle’s Itanium Document Drop Catches HP With Its Pants Down
HP’s Itanium debacle provides plenty of lessons for anyone who is willing to pay attention. For the past decade, HP has been making a valiant, if extremely misguided, attempt to support the high-end Itanium chip architecture and the HP-UX Unix implementation that runs on it. Oracle’s open letter and drop of documents as part of the…
Loomio: Making Better Decisions Remotely Possible
Email, instant messaging, forums, code forges and other collaboration tools make it possible for distributed teams to get work done – but they’re not great tools for making decisions. The team behind Loomio wants to solve that with a new Web-based tool for focused, concise discussions that allow all team members to be heard.
S3 Storage for WordPress Blogs
Looking to tap Amazon S3 storage for your WordPress blog? The WP2Cloud plugin lets you store all your WordPress data – not just media files – in S3.
Google Prices its Cloud SQL Offering, Solidifies Cloud Database Market
The cloud database market continues to solidify as Google puts a price tag on its Cloud SQL offering. With actual charges to begin on June 12th, the move finally gives developers a way to see what they’ll be spending on Cloud SQL, but comparing Google’s offering to Amazon, Microsoft and others might still be a bit tricky.
Easel.ly Makes Infographics Easy… But Should It?
Infographics are still a thing with a lot of companies, if my inbox is any indication. Easel.ly, a service that recently debuted in beta, is making it easy to create infographics online. Whether it should is another question.
Google Easy Dashboard Library Makes Using Analytics API Easier
Google has long provided an API for automating Google Analytics, but it required developers to jump through a few more hoops than many would like. Yesterday, the company announced its Easy Dashboard Library, which should let developers speed up custom-tailored dashboards and reports.
Why Is Microsoft Trying to Hobble Firefox on Windows 8 Tablets – and Why Does It Matter?
As Windows 8 approaches, Mozilla developers have been working hard on a Metro version. If you’re using Windows 8 on the desktop, no problem. Tablet users, however, are going to be denied a fully functional Firefox – and will face restrictions on many other third-party applications. In the name of security, Microsoft is forcing them into a “sandbox…
Amazon Courts Windows Developers by Adding .Net to its Elastic Beanstalk
Microsoft’s Azure just got a little more competition from Amazon. The cloud giant announced yesterday that it was adding support for SQL Server to its Relational Database Service (RDS) and added .Net support to the Elastic Beanstalk cloud app deployment and management service.
Good News for Solving Bufferbloat: CoDel Provides “No Knobs” Solution
Data transfer speeds have been getting faster and faster, but that doesn’t mean that we’re actually reaping the full benefits. A few years ago, Jim Gettys put his finger on the “criminal mastermind” behind poor networking performance. Dubbed Bufferbloat, the problem was not a simple one to solve. Not simple, but Controlled Delay (CoDel) active…
Improvements in New York Times’ Fech Makes It Easier to Follow the Money
Having data available electronically is not the same thing as the data being useful. Campaign finance disclosures provided electronically by the Federal Elections Commission (FEC), are a good example of that. The New York Times’s Fech (not “fetch”) is a RubyGem – a packaged application – designed to help journalists and public interest…
What “Data Gravity” Means to Your Data
If you’ve wondered why so many companies are eager to control data storage, the answer can be summed up in a simple term: data gravity. Ultimately, where data is determines where the money is. Services and applications are nothing without it.
Inktank Joins the Cloud Storage Fray With Ceph Support
IDC says that spending for cloud storage will triple by 2015. It had better, because the roster of companies with their hands out for some of those storage dollars keeps growing. The latest contender is Inktank, a service and support company formed by the creators of the Ceph open source storage project.
Amazon’s Kindle Fire Sales Fizzle in 2012, Market Share Slips to Third
That Apple remains in first place in the tablet market comes as no surprise. IDC’s latest research shows that in the first quarter of 2012, Amazon’s once-hot Kindle Fire is struggling. According to IDC, Amazon’s share dropped from nearly 17% of the tablet market to 4%, with fewer than 700,000 units sold compared to Apple’s 11.8 million.
The 7 Best Open Government Sites
We’ve already established that members of Congress are pretty bad at informing the public via their websites. The good news is that you can find a number of excellent sites for keeping an eye on the U.S. government. Not surprisingly, most of these are provided by third parties, rather than the government itself. To help ReadWriteWeb readers as…
What Everyone Needs to Learn from the Data Journalism Handbook
It’s hard to pay attention to the business of journalism without hearing about data journalism or data-driven journalism. But despite all the discussion of the topic, there’s precious little documentation to guide practicing and future journalists in becoming proficient in it. The Data Journalism Handbook aims to fix that, albeit at a high level.
Web Server Report: Site Growth Slows, and SPDY Is a Drop in the Bucket
Last month, Netcraft recorded nearly 677 million websites in its April Web Server Survey. May is a different story, though. This time, Netcraft found a drop of 14 million hostnames, the first decline in nearly two years. Despite the decline, things are still looking very good for the Nginx web server and its continued foothold in the Web’s…
Google’s New BigQuery Commoditizes Big Data Analytics
Google is moving the goalpost significantly in the market for big data tools, at least for organizations that can work with its canned tools and are willing to trust the search giant with their data. After some time in a limited preview, Google has unveiled Google BigQuery for public consumption. Google is giving developers the ability to query…