First came Tunisia's "Jasmine Revolution" and now we have the "#Jan25 Uprising" - the world's first revolution named for a Twitter hash tag. Calling it the "Twitter Revolution" misses the beauty of the hash tag itself, and besides what would one then call the upcoming social unrest in ...

On the day when the Dow Jones Industrial Average topped 12,000 for the first time since June 2008, it was impossible not to correlate the eloquence and optimism of President Obama's "State of the Union" speech on Tuesday night with the restoration of a sense of perspective and hope in ...

Cloud Computing has been flexing its muscles over the past week, much to the discomfiture of the American government and numerous other diplomats worldwide. The ability for Julian Assange and his acolytes to keep the information flowing on the one hand, and to paralyze websites of ...

[This post originally appeared on Joseph Galarneau's blog and is republished here in Cloud Computing Journal by kind permission of the author.] When you visit Newsweek.com, the words you read started their journey milliseconds earlier from an Amazon.com datacenter somewhere in norther...

The signatories of the Open Letter reproduced below hold divergent views about WikiLeaks and its operations. But they are united in a determination to see WikiLeaks' Julian Assange treated fairly. It was published Tuesday and is addressed to the Prime Minister of Australia, the country...

WikiLeaks has lost its PayPal account. The eBay unit stopped handling contributions to the renegade site late Friday night citing unacceptable use. Meanwhile, Sweden has issued a new arrest warrant for WikiLeaks leader Julian Assange on allegations of rape, sexual assault and u...

Open source software is perfectly positioned to facilitate the massive overhaul that will be necessary to open up government data to the public. As consumers, this technology is already changing the way in which we go about our day-to-day lives. It powers maps on our phones and provide...

I am glad that I switched over to Chrome. Otherwise it would have taken me lot more effort to go through the site created by Marcin Wichary and modified by Ernest Delgado. If you want to get a feel of what is possible with HTML5 this is a good place to look at. Here is the link. (Yo...

It is often said that becoming an entrepreneur is the modern-day equivalent of choosing to be a pioneer on the old frontier. Only people with certain strength of fiber decide to found companies. They tend to be forward thinkers by nature, natural born pathfinders. But in age that lo...

Cloud computing is a big economic, green and scalable gift to organizations around the globe. The New Year offers a great opportunity to re-think your IT strategy and see how the cloud can benefit your organization. The day when IT leaders no longer have to worry about expensive int...

Open source companies live or die by the health of their communities. WaveMaker's proudest achievement last year was creating a passio...

Information services businesses are grappling with an increasingly common problem that is all the more critical to them. The very business that they’re in – information delivery – has become harder and more expensive while the demand for it is growing on an exponential basis. TransUnio...

I was again reading and reviewing Lawrence Lessig's work tonight. The man is so very articulate and his observations so compelling. If you haven't become a student of his work, please take my advice and give it a try here.

At the 200...

Yesterday, 23 November 2009, an Atlas V rocket from the United Launch Alliance successfully launched the Intelsat 14 satellite (IS-14).  Liftoff of the Atlas V occurred at 1:55am ET.  The satellite separated successfully two hours later.   Today we received word that the satellite̵...

If you search Google Images for "Michelle Obama" (no quotes), the first image you'll see is a poorly photoshopped picture of her as an ape. You'll also see a Google Ad on that page that links to Google's explanation of why such a blatantly racist photo is the top-ranked one at ...

One of the benefits of cloud computing is supposed to be efficiency, particularly in the utilization of compute resources. Over-provisioning of compute resources has long been one way in which IT combats the need for scalability and availability of applications but this often leaves a ...

In Apache Tuscany, we have been experimenting with Google Android Platform to build Mobile SOA Applications, and we now have couple Android based samples that demonstrate a Android mobile application consuming SCA services available on the cloud. Store-android: A front end to our "S...

The mobile web's momentum continues unabated with Google's acquisition of AdMob and Apple's Shocking Numbers for iPhone app usage. The whole thing is reminiscent of the introduction of the IBM PC back in 1981(?). Brief memory lane diversion: I sold my first PC system in 1982 and it ran...

If you have spent any time online using social networks like LinkedIn or Facebook, you know they can be difficult to grow your network and add contacts. But even harder is the ability to extract your contacts once you have built up a reasonably sized network. None of the social network...

There are reports that Yahoo has put Zimbra on the block. Honestly, this came as no surprise at all to us at Zoho. I remember scratching my head when the acquisition was made; I didn't see how an enterprise/business focused open source offering like Zimbra fit with Yahoo, as a technolo...

Back in June, we released the very first security hardened virtual machine images for the Amazon Web Services Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) environment. These original images were based upon the OpenSolaris 2008.11 release and were configured in accordance with the guidelines published b...

On Thursday, September 10th, 2009, I moderated a panel at the 1105 Group’s Enterprise Architecture Conference in Washington, DC entitled, “SOA Goes Mainstream – An Industry and Government Roadmap.” On the panel we had two Federal government agency representatives and two industry repr...

First, there are reasons to think that the raw exposure of sins and self-embarrassments at Facebook and other such sites won’t have a directly proportional effect on the quotient of nastiness. It will certainly provide a greater trove for those who are intent in wreaking havoc on peopl...

According to a new report by Forrester Research, despite a long-term future marked by commoditization, enterprise spending on Web 2.0 technologies will surge over the next five years, growing 43 percent each year to reach $4.6 billion globally by 2013. The 5-year enterprise Web 2.0 for...

Another storm?  Didn't we just have one in the financial and credit markets you say? Well, yes, and no.  Yes, we did have a storm, though it wasn't one of innovation, unless we count the complex and innovative derivative instruments created by Wall St. in which banks, investment firms...

As more and more data become available as a matter of course, the examples set by organisations such as MySociety become increasingly attainable for us all. Other than ensuring that it is ‘open,’ do we need to be asking for more from those making data available? And once it’s there, wi...

The search engines such as Google and Yahoo! provide millions of potential customers every year for most industries. Taking advantage of this is a must for any budding online business. But what if you just service a small local area? Can the search engines be of advantage to you? Of co...

YouTube's Health channel has several flaws from a user experience perspective. These flaws are contributing to the bleeding of cash at YouTube and fixing it can be one of the ways to turn around its profit picture.

Responding to an article accusing Joel Spolsky that since his business has only 25 employees, Joel is not a successful businessman.

My seven-year-old daughter thinks that there is a knowledge genie that her teacher 'Googles' for answers. While cute, the anecdote also exemplifies how much Google's obsession with simplicity has helped build brand awareness, making their name literally synonymous with search. I can fo...

One of the Google folks working on OpenSocial sent me a message via Facebook asking what I thought about the technical details of the recent announcements. Since my day job is working on social networking platforms for Web properties at Microsoft and I'm deeply interested in RESTful pr...

There are 50 million Facebook users who don't know what OpenSocial APIs are...and don't care. There are about 5,000 tech bloggers and developers who think it is a revolution that will 'Checkmate' Facebook and leave them with no moves. TechMeme has over 100 stories saying that OpenSocia...

The year 2006 in which YouTube became culturally ubiquitous, Flash video became the de facto Internet video standard of the Web, Microsoft beta-launched Vista, and the Wii entered our lives - was also memorable for one or two other real-world events such as the hanging of Saddam Hussei...

As I write this, the stock price of Google, Inc. just exceeded $500 for the first time in the company's still-brief (two-year) history as a public company. That gives the search colossus a market cap of $150 billion, many times in excess of its physical assets - currently valued at $10...

Does the arrival of 'Google Apps for your Domain' sound the death-knell for Redmond's world domination? That is the question sweeping the industry this week as the owner of the world's most-used search engine released a set of hosted applications 'for organizations that want to provide...

What comes after Google? Where will the Web, the Internet, the whole nexus of telecommunications, i-Technology, and the quest for a better world, take us? My strong sense is as follows: if Web 2.0, as the joke goes, is about how we can make money out of Web 1.0, then Web 3.0 is going t...

Like so many of the ideas that tumble out of the Googleplex into the public domain, Google Trends is irresistible. Jeremy Geelan puts the application, newly taken out of beta and now available to all cyberspace from the Google main page, through its paces by taking it out for a giddy s...