58900321
submission
redletterdave writes:
Pinterest isn't going to replace Google anytime soon—or ever. But with one billion 'Place Pins' on Pinterest, as the company announced Monday, the visual social network is poised to become a true search engine alternative to Google. You might be thinking, 'So what? Google has a visual search engine.' But what makes Pinterest unique is that it's not just a visual search engine; it’s a user-curated one. And with one billion Rich Pins packed with location metadata, Pinterest is pioneering a different kind of search engine for its user base, which is tailor-made for the Visual Web.
58693391
submission
redletterdave writes:
The stodgy old enterprise company whose former CEO once called open source Linux a "cancer" is gone. So is its notorious tendency to keep developers and consumers within its walled gardens. The "One Microsoft" goal that looked like more gaseous corporate rhetoric upon its debut last summer now is instead much closer to actual reality. No longer are there different kernels for Windows 8, Windows Phone or Windows RT it's now all just One Windows. As goes the Windows kernel, so goes the entire company. Microsoft finally appears to have aimed all its guns outside the company rather than at internal rivals. Now it needs to rebuild its empire upon this new reality.
58691673
submission
redletterdave writes:
Amazon on Thursday announced it will acquire digital comics agency ComiXology for an undisclosed sum. But why does the world's biggest online retailer care so much about comic books? Well, that's because the deal—and ComiXology, as a whole—isn't just about comics. ComiXology is pioneering the art of digital storytelling, and attempting to bring these tools to the masses. With Amazon, ComiXology gets a big boost towards its goal of adding a third dimension to the two-dimensional world of books, comics and graphic novels.
58611403
submission
redletterdave writes:
Eben Upton, cofounder of the Raspberry Pi Foundation, is generally credited as the magician behind this incredible machine. While working on his doctorate in philosophy at the University of Cambridge's computer laboratory, Upton painstakingly put together Raspberry Pi prototypes by hand. Today, Upton is CEO of the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s trading company, where he oversees production and sales of the Raspberry Pi. In a lengthy interview with ReadWrite, Upton shares how he invented Raspberry Pi, and what's coming next for the $35 microcomputer.
58611171
submission
redletterdave writes:
Red Hat and Google announced this week that Red Hat Enterprise Linux customers can migrate their operating system subscriptions to Google's cloud platform. That makes Google only the second cloud vendor Red Hat has partnered with in this fashion; Amazon's cloud service was the first, back in 2010. It's the latest sign that Google's big step into the cloud, which it announced less than a year ago, is gaining traction. But it's also an indication that Red Hat, which has struggled in this area, is getting more serious about making its big-business customers comfortable with the cloud.
58520011
submission
redletterdave writes:
Years ago, Google figured out that users prize speed above almost everything when it comes to surfing the Web. They’re now applying that insight to courting developers, too, through a tool named Andromeda.
58391305
submission
redletterdave writes:
At the Fire TV unveiling, Amazon officials sounded like they perfectly understood how frustrating TV streaming devices are for their owners. Amazon focused on three main problems: Search is hard, especially for anything not on a bestseller list; streaming devices often provide slow or laggy performance; and TV set-top boxes tend to be closed ecosystems. The Fire TV is Amazon’s attempt to solve these three problems—the key word here being “attempt.” Perhaps Amazon’s homegrown solution was a bit premature and its ambitions too lofty, because while Fire TV can do almost everything, little of it is done right.
58356039
submission
redletterdave writes:
Facebook owns virtually all the aspects of the social experience—photos (Instagram), status updates (Facebook), location services (Places)—but now, Facebook is transitioning from a simple social network to a full-fledged technology company that rivals Google, moonshot for moonshot. Yet, it's Facebook's corporate control of traffic that leads many to distrust the company. In a sense, people are stuck. When the time comes for someone to abandon Facebook, whether over privacy concerns or frustration with the company, Facebook intentionally makes it hard to leave. Even if you delete your account, your ghost remains—even when you die, Facebook can still make money off you. And that’s not behavior fit for a company that’s poised to take over the future.
58297071
submission
redletterdave writes:
The current leader in smart lights is Philips Hue Wi-Fi-enabled bulbs. But the competition just heated up last week, with both LG and Samsung unveiling new smart bulbs. Not that Philips is sitting idly by—the boss of intelligent bulbs also unveiled two new products: the Hue Lux LED bulb, a cheaper, stripped-down version of its pricey original, and the Philips Hue Tap, an add-on that lets you trigger lights by touch. But which company will win the battle to illuminate the connected home?
58296847
submission
redletterdave writes:
In the last five years, MySQL's user community has actively sought increased control of MySQL, mainly through forks of the project like Percona or MariaDB. With this week's announcement of WebScaleSQL—a collaboration from Facebook, Google, Twitter and LinkedIn to branch and improve MySQL's ability to scale—Oracle's leadership of MySQL could be in serious jeopardy. But so long as the focus remains on doing anything possible to improve MySQL's underlying code, Oracle signing up to embrace WebScaleSQL should be a no-brainer.
58266985
submission
redletterdave writes:
Cloudera just raised an insane amount of money—$900 million, to be exact. But Cloudera’s biggest news in the past week isn't about money. It’s about going to war against legacy data center vendors, which is all made possible thanks to a new partnership with Intel that will make Cloudera's Hadoop distribution the heart of the Big Data uprising.
58241083
submission
redletterdave writes:
Many believe Apple's iWatch will marry the looks of a luxury wristwatch with the powerful sensors found in today's fitness wristbands, and, of course, familiar elements from the iPhone and iPad shrunken down and reconfigured to work from your wrist. Apple is undoubtedly full of its own ideas. But it would also benefit from looking at the progenitor of the modern smartwatch—or rather, its steely successor—both as inspiration and as a model to surpass.
58126909
submission
redletterdave writes:
Less than a week after the Turkish government banned Twitter over failing to remove allegations of government corruption from the social network, a Turkish court on Wednesday suspended the ban, calling it 'illegal.' Users in Turkey are expected to have their access to Twitter restored—as soon as the court's stay of execution reaches Turkey's telecommunication authority.
57851849
submission
redletterdave writes:
Sony's gaming subsidiary on Tuesday evening unveiled a virtual reality prototype that works with the PlayStation 4, called 'Project Morpheus.' The VR device is still a prototype at this point, but the current model of Project Morpheus features a head-mounted display with 1080p resolution and a 90 degree field of view that can track users’ head movements and orientation shifts — thanks to a built-in accelerometer, gyroscope and connectivity with PlayStation Camera — to change the virtual landscape based off your motions in real-time. The headset also comes with built-in 3D audio technology from Sony, which also reacts dynamically in real-time to the user’s head movements for a realistic stereoscopic effect. The company offered no price or release date details as the company's president insists Project Morpheus is "still a prototype."
57379807
submission
redletterdave writes:
Zite is going to die—and soon. According to the parameters of the acquisition, the Zite technology team, led by cofounder Mike Klaas, will go to Flipboard, while a couple of people not really involved in the building of Zite’s recommendation engine won't make the jump. One of those individuals is Zite CEO Mark Johnson, who called ReadWrite after the announcement of the acquisition to discuss his thoughts on the future of Zite, its value to Flipboard and his plans for what’s next.
